#the source material was RIGHT THERE and instead the writers decided to bullshit their way through her story in favor of P*ggy and N*tasha…

[zea9love]

I made a tweet about how I don’t want MCU Sharon to be a villain and a B*ckyZ*mo shipper was like “Sharon being a villain is an improvement to her boring character tbh”

Sharon-haters love to say they stan her now that she’s a villain, but I know damn well they’d turn on her the moment she does something villain-like. It happened during the Power Broker reveal in FATWS and it’ll certainly happen again if the MCU takes this stupid villain-Sharon storyline any further.

Also that person has the nerve to talk shit about Sharon when they stan Z*mo, who is a whole ass N*zi?! HELLO???!!!

[iamanartichoke]

I am posting this mostly to get it off my chest, and I'll probably regret it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the biggest problem I have with Fandom Wank(tm) in regards to positivity or negativity, is what bothers me has literally nothing to do with whether one's positivity/negativity will turn out to be right.

last night I followed a couple of posts and went down a rabbit hole of "series negativity" bashers' posts, bc apparently I hate myself and do not wish to be in a good mental space right now, and the common thread I noticed is that those who are overwhelmingly positive and take issue with criticism seem to be doing so bc they see their own versions of Loki being portrayed on-screen, either as how they've interpreted him as a character in generral or as how they've written him in fics. And not only are they fiercely protective of those versions but they also get validation from the confirmation that their Loki is The Right Loki(tm). Criticism takes the on-screen portrayal (and, subsequently, their own personal versions of The Right Loki(tm)) and says, uh, I can't actually see Loki doing this? I think this is ooc? I think Loki as portrayed here is not consistent with previous portrayals? -

- and suddenly you've got this rabid backlash on your hands where it becomes 'omg stop being toxic,' 'your headcanon is not canon' (look in the mirror), 'this is tom's loki so it's accurate,' 'i see no difference whatsoever in characterization y'all're just deluded and have invented a loki that never existed' (tf????), etc.

And I can't help but conclude that the backlash against criticism/negativity has nothing to do with the criticism itself; it's more to do with the undermining of someone else's validation in how they view this character.

This is purely speculation. There's some mental gymnastics here, admittedly. I could be way off base and I realize that I risk my post being shared and misconstrued and mocked by even posting it publicly. But the only reason I'm writing this - and thus getting it off my chest after my spiral down the rabbit hole - is bc from my point of view, I didn't feel like my experience in enjoying this tv show was being threatened until the discourse backlash over the negativity started spilling onto my dash. Not the negativity itself; the actual discourse. (And, look, there's a lot of negativity that's been posted that I don't agree with whatsoever, and there's other negativity that I may agree with but don't agree that it's an issue, or - my point is, this isn't bc I don't have conflict with the actual arguments themselves.)

Full disclosure: for the first three weeks, I was more positive than not regarding the show. (I think I still am.) I posted about what I liked but I also posted about what I felt was ooc and about the elements I liked less. A lot of my mutuals are not thrilled (to say the least) with the show, so there was already a ton of negativity on my dash and I personally went through a few minor meltdowns on whether or not I was on the right page with my enjoyment when so many others (whose opinions I trust and whose versions of Loki [that I've read] in fic ring true to me) were not sharing that enjoyment.

I did/have been talking it out with friends who feel similarly and I've more or less come to terms with being in the middle. And in the meantime, when I felt like the negativity was not something I wanted to be cognizant of, I skipped those posts entirely. Doing these things allowed me to come to terms with where I was standing regarding my overall feelings on the series, and overall enjoyment with my fandom experience.

And then, mostly after episode 3 (which seems to be the most divisive so far), discourse started popping up on my dash more and more. I'm defining discourse, in this context, as 'wank regarding whether or not Loki is actually ooc, wank over people who enjoy the show not wanting to see the negativity, wanky posts asking people who are critical to reserve judgement until the show has finished airing (but praise is fine)' -

- and suddenly, I feel much more self-conscious about posting my takes. Suddenly I feel much more anxiety about hitting the "post" button when said post is more critical than not. Suddenly I am worried about who, exactly and actually, is reading my posts? Who is going to decide to paraphrase my takes and include them in a 'guess what they're complaining about NOW' post? Who is going to decide to pass around a post I've made only to mock it, as has happened to some of my friends already?

Over the past three days, I have gotten 30+ new followers, and instead of feeling good about it - hey, some of these may be porn bots but still, people are interested in my blog?! - I feel just increasing anxiety about it bc, I mean, I don't know who anyone is or what they're here for.

I do not feel secure in the current fandom environment, is what I'm saying, and the reason I do not feel secure is not because of the negativity; it's because of the wank coming from the people who post about the negativity and mock the negativity and call other fans deluded stans who have a shitty grasp on characterization, story telling, and Loki in general. It's Ragnarok bullshit all over again, only worse.

And this circles me back to my original point, which is that the anxiety and the wank/discourse and whatever else really has nothing to do with the on-screen portrayal of Loki.

For me, personally? It took me awhile to realize it, admittedly, but I did realize that I do not care if what I perceive as ooc actually isn't. I do not care if the final product of Loki - once the entire series has aired - is a different Loki than what I've written and perceived as "my" Loki all this time. It's not going to make me feel like less of a fan or less valid; it's just going to make me feel like I have a perception of Loki that may differ in some ways with "canon Loki" but is still similar enough that I will continue to enjoy engaging with him and writing meta about him and writing fic about him and sharing those things with people who view Loki similarly. Likewise, I am not going to feel less valid as a writer and a critical thinker; it doesn't make me feel like I have anything to prove.

So if the root of the wank is coming down to the negativity making you feel less valid or less vindicated bc "your" Loki matches the show but is being called ooc by a lot of other fans, like, maybe take a step back and consider not taking it personally? Maybe really think about why the fact that negativity exists bothers you so much? Bc I mean, at the end of the day, it's not like Tom Hiddleston himself is going to descend from the clouds with a choir of angels singing and acknowledge any one of us as The One True Fan Who Has The Best Interpretation Ever of Loki. So what actual difference does it make if (we agree or disagree that) he's ooc or not?

Ultimately I'm just saying, there is definitely wank that is ruining the fandom atmosphere and the show in general, and it's not coming from those who are posting their negativity and criticism of the source material.

*Disclaimer that this is how I am perceiving and interpreting things today and possibly in general, but I'm not necessarily saying that my perception is factual to what is actually happening. I don't know what is happening. This is the guess that I've come up with in order to reconcile the fandom discomfort I feel, discomfort which is ruining the show for me, and where it's all coming from.

** Second disclaimer that I have unfollowed those who were participating in the wank, if I was following them in the first place, to the point that it made me uncomfortable, and obviously this post doesn't apply to everyone bc there is a certain amount of just being tired of it that I understand, so if we're mutuals, this doesn't apply to you regardless of where you stand on the wank.

*** Third disclaimer that said fandom environment is what makes me feel like I have to add disclaimers on every fucking thing I say, partly bc people read what they want to read and partly bc I have very debilitating anxiety regarding being misunderstood.

[mst3kproject]

Mars Needs Women

This is one of the B-movies that a lot of people have heard of, although I’m not sure how many have actually seen it.  It was written, produced, and directed by Larry “They Just Didn’t Care” Buchanan and stars Tommy Kirk from Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants.  Happy belated birthday to Mr. Kirk, who just turned seventy-nine in December of 2020.  That’s not a bad score for a guy who’s done as many drugs as he has.

The planet Mars is suffering from a genetic problem – their chromosomes are so degraded that one hundred males are born for every one female!  Clearly this is not conducive to the survival of the species, so a group of Martians have come to Earth seeking another solution: they want five female volunteers to return to Mars with them and find out if our genes are compatible!  The army brass (all male, obviously) dismiss the idea out of hand, but the Martians cannot afford to fail.  They will have their way with the Earth Women, with or without the Earth Men’s permission.

We all know that Larry Buchanan couldn’t come up with an idea of his own, so naturally this is a remake of sorts.  Mars Needs Women was inspired by Tommy Kirk’s previous movie Pajama Party, which doesn’t sound like an alien invasion flick, but is.  In it, Kirk plays a Martian named Gogo (yes, really), who comes to Earth as an invasion scout but decides not to take over the planet because he falls in love with Annette Funicello.  Mars Needs Women dispenses with the teen hijinks angle in an attempt to be a straight-up sci-fi thriller, and fails miserably.

We get the normal Larry Buchanan types of suck, such as crummy lighting, appallingly awful day-for-night, a washed-out, colourless print, and copious stock footage.  There’s a long bit where the air force tries to attack the Martian ship and fails, which is entirely stock footage intercut with men in uniforms staring at something next to the camera.  We don’t see the flying saucer itself even once during this sequence, although they do have a model of it that shows up elsewhere and is almost definitely the best effect in the whole movie.  Not a high bar, of course, but seeing as they actually appear to have spent money on this miniature, you’d think it’d get more screen time.

The Martians themselves dress like a sort of noir version of the Chicken Men of Krankor.  Their costumes are black wetsuits decorated with duct tape and silver paint, with stupid antennae on the sides of their heads.  It amuses me that the first thing they do after acquiring some ‘Earth apparel’ is complain about how dumb neckties are.  There’s a mention about how they’ve been trained in ‘Earth slang’, which seems to have happened just so the movie would have no possible sources of humour.  When I think about Attack of the The Eye Creatures, I’m kind of grateful that Mars Needs Women never tries to be funny, but it leaves the whole film relentlessly monotone.

The acting is pretty crummy, even from the main characters.  Yvonne Craig (Batgirl – no, not one of them, the actual Batgirl) does her best with the material but the lines she’s given are such technobabble bullshit there are very few people who could deliver them with any conviction.  Almost everybody else is bland at best.  The women scream and faint, and the military guys tense their jaws and glare.  The only decent acting moment actually goes to Tommy Kirk as he describes the conditions on Mars, the dying planet.  His tone barely changes, and yet you can sense his nostalgia and regret.

Do I even need to ask if this movie objectifies women?  Well, yes, actually, I do, and you’ll see why in a minute.  The answer is a resounding yes and a good bit of run time is spent doing exactly that.  Before the opening credits we see three blondes abducted in broad daylight, dematerialized by the simple means of stopping the camera, removing the actress, and starting it up again. One of these hapless victims is taken from the shower.  We later learn that the beam-ups failed somehow, which I assume means the women died, but that’s apparently not worth more than a throwaway line.

Once the five Martians arrive on Earth, they disperse to go hunting for suitable subjects.  The first one goes directly to a strip bar, perhaps on the assumption that the employees will not be married (he’d be amazed).  We then watch the stripper dance at great length, cutting back to it repeatedly in between other threads of the storyline, which suggests that the Martian sat there for hours staring at her before making his move.  He seems to have been the least choosy of the five, simply taking the first woman he gets a boner for.  The others are a bit more discerning.

None more so than the leader, Fellow One (the Martians are Fellows One through Five, which did save the writers from having to come up with ‘alien names’ that sound like synthetic fabrics).  He decides on Craig’s character, Dr. Marjorie Bolen, an expert in ‘space medicine’ and ‘space genetics’ (this may be 60’s for astrobiology).  Her skills seem to be just what the Martians need.  This character is treated terribly by the movie and almost everybody in it. A news reporter commenting on Dr. Bolen’s arrival describes her as a stunning brunette who found it hard to hide her charm behind her horn-rimmed spectacles, and only then moves on to her qualifications.  She gives a news conference titled Sex and Outer Space, and the reporters who are supposed to be interviewing her have a laugh about the good time the kidnapped women will supposedly be having on Mars.  The prop department can’t even bother to spell her name right – it’s written as ‘Majorie’ on a sign even though the r is clearly audible when people say it out loud.

In contrast to this, Fellow One treats her with some degree of respect.  Their conversations about science are mostly nonsense, but you can tell what the script is going for.  They go on a couple of quick dates, one to a planetarium and one to a museum exhibit on human reproduction (yes, this is weird and icky), and while it is rushed, their little love story is actually important to the plot in ways besides Fellow One deciding to abandon the mission so he can bone her.  The movie considers Dr. Bolen a sex object, but from the beginning Fellow One sees her as more than that.

This brings us, in a sideways kind of way, to the thing I find weirdly fascinating about Mars Needs Women: the alien invaders are curiously considerate.  They steal a car, but they take one from airport parking on the assumption that the owner won’t need it for a while.  They request unattached women, not wanting to break up any happy partnerships. And most of all, they ask for volunteers for abduction!  This makes me wonder what would have happened if they’d broadcast their message to the entire world instead of one group of soldiers.  Humans being the way we are, I’m sure there’re lots of people out there who’d fuck a couple of aliens if it meant a free trip to Mars (or move to Mars if it meant they got to fuck some aliens).

The female characters even seem designed to want a trip to space.  Dr. Bolen might well have helped them willingly in exchange for this unparalleled chance to expand her research, and she does find it very sexy that Fellow One speaks to her as an equal.  Yet somehow, the idea never even comes up.  At the last minute, she becomes the helpless princess who must be saved from peril, and Fellow One simply tells her he loves her and asks her to flee.  Why not invite her along as a guest instead of a captive? It’s got to be worth a try.

The others can be made to fit this pattern, too. The stripper?  Maybe she’s sick of being gawked at like meat and would welcome the chance to be among people who will treat her like a queen.  The flight attendant?  She might feel like she’s been everywhere and seen everything – on Earth, at least.  The artist? A whole new planet to inspire her! The homecoming queen?  She’s a journalism major.  What a scoop if she can report back to Earth about the culture and history of Mars!  I want to see a remake of this movie in which the ladies really are volunteers, who must help the Martians outwit the military so they can start their new lives on another planet.

Sadly, this is not that movie, and its exploitative aspects stand rather awkwardly alongside the embryonic feminism embodied in Dr. Bolen, overwhelming it more often than not.  I do want to give it maybe half a kudo, though, for at least acknowledging that women can have interests and ambitions.  I guess the point of the ending is that Fellow One has realized they need to be allowed to pursue those instead of being forced to breed.

Mars Needs Women is probably Larry Buchanan’s best movie, which is a statement on the same level as saying that The Beast of Yucca Flats is Coleman Francis’ – by any reasonable standard it still really sucks.  While it has many problems, I would say that the one that kills any entertainment value is how the narrative totally lacks the urgency the title implies.  The ending should be a race to stop the Martians taking off with their prisoners, but no, it saunters instead.  If there were only some tension in the film, it could have been the guilty pleasure you’d want from a movie called Mars Needs Women.

[pochapal]

You don't gotta answer this publicly, but what on earth happened/is happening RE: Dogpiling?

this is long but there’s a lot to cover and i don’t know how much information is pre-known going into this.

basically breadtuber sarah z made a 2 hour fandom postmortem video on homestuck. instead of being a genuine look into what made the comic and the fandom so massive and so relevant for so long, she kind of glosses over all that in the first thirty minutes, then spends the rest of the video discussing homestuck’s two major controversies in the least tactful way imaginable. 

the first one she talks about is the hiveswap development hell fiasco, which on paper is an interesting thing to bring up in relation to a lack of content contributing to fandom decline, but sarah’s primary source for all this is a pseudo-anonymous blog run by giovan_h, someone who is notorious for treating dangerous and baseless accusation as fact and for obsessively stalking current and former whatpumpkin staff members to obtain information for said blog. she supposedly tries to bring a balanced argument on what exactly happened in the three year dark period between hiveswap’s supposed release date and when act 1 actually came out by pitting ipgd’s tumblr post (the one that made the odd gentlemen embezzlement claims vis a vis king’s quest) against giovan’s blog (claiming through anonymous and unverified sources that hussie deliberately dicked around and failed to meet a single deadline, then broke contract terms by using the kickstarter money to commission the odd gentlemen to animate act 7 instead of working on hiveswap. there are a lot of other unsavoury claims about hussie and certain other wp members among these blog posts, but that’s the primary relevant gist). 

neither account can actually be verified (ipgd’s post claims their information is spotty because they’re talking around a pretty strict settlement nda and giovan’s sources and accounts are deliberately vague and unverifiable to “protect various parties from retaliation from hussie/wp”) but sarah ultimately comes down and says that she’s inclined to take giovan’s blog as more truthful for. reasons. this is obviously bad because within minutes of the video dropping several wp team members reveal sarah never once tried to get in contact with them, which has led to attacks on the team members because a lot of zealous people looking for an excuse to keep being mad at homestuck in the wake of hs^2′s semi-permanent hiatus were emboldened by a video essayist treating the ugliest speculation as hard fact. as of right now, the hiveswap kickstarter has released a statement clarifying the development situation as best they can (from what i’ve read it does point to them legally being unable to point to/discuss certain things) which has had all the impact of dropping a match onto an oil spill. the anti homestuck zealots firmly believe every word of that post to be bullshit and are accusing the wp team of covering for hussie and his super heinous evil crimes (keep in mind we are still not privy to the internal workings of wp because why the fuck would we be) so the wp team in turn are putting these people on blast for this dangerous harassment (it doesn’t need to be said that as a professional being publicly accused of covering up fraud is a very bad thing) and then as a counter counter response the angry fans are now accusing the wp staff of abusing their power to direct mass harassment towards specific individuals (this amounting to people getting into wp members’ private discord servers and publicly posting mean things they have said about giovan et al which imo only serves to bolster the stalking claims) and the whole thing went very ugly very fast.

the second controversy that sarah brings up is everything involved in post canon homestuck (epilogues, pesterquest, hs^2). here she reverts to more of a passively pro-fandom stance, asserting time and time again how horrible and evil the epilogues and everything else were because of how they took the characters and stories everyone knows and loves and warped them into something unrecognisably terrible, that post-canon homestuck was universally reviled. in a very bad and awkward placement of information she then segues into a kind of hand-wavey discussion of the intense backlash towards certain post-canon trans interpretations (of vriska, june, and roxy) in a very I Am A Cis Woman So I’m Not Qualified To Make Any Statements Here Other Than Transphobes Fuck Off <3 But Also This Is Indicative Of A Growing Fandom Resentment way, which honestly begs the question of why she needed to include this at all. another bad thing here is how she super glosses over the “controversies” surrounding “the advocates for june egbert” and “the writer for vriska’s pesterquest route” - she is obviously referring to former creative director kate here (she kind of confirms this on twitter by saying she didn’t want to mention kate by name in order to not stir up further drama which uh... yeah) and the inexcusably terrible chain of events which led to every single out trans woman working on homestuck to resign to protect themselves from further mass harassment and dogpiling from the fandom.

she instead, for some reason decides to focus on how post-canon homestuck has been a total commercial and creative failure, that homestuck^2 basically shouldn’t have even happened after the fandom’s distaste for the epilogues and that it was not only controversial but also was a low quality mess everyone agreed sucked. she then goes on to compare the hs^2 team to the wp hiveswap dev team, and passively applies the same giovan-esque assertions to the internal workings of hs^2, kind of but not really implying the reasons given for the shutting down of hs^2 were bullshit. this is super bad for the fact that the post canon homestuck team is the most openly marginalised group of people working for hs is in an official capacity, and we have seen time and time again what drawing undue, speculative negative attention towards these people has done. again, reminder sarah did not reach out to a single person who worked/is working on homestuck for what is essentially a drama video disguised as a fandom postmortem. the upshot here is that her post-canon section served to embolden yet another wp-hostile section of the fanbase - those who adamantly believe that only the fandom itself can create worthwhile homestuck projects, and that all writers are evil people who want their queer fans dead (only a partial exaggeration) and produce spite projects which are driven by the steadfast belief that their work is inherently superior to official content by virtue of their fan status. among this group were a lot of people who latched onto any accusation against a team member as fuel to push them out of “ruining” such a beloved franchise so sarah’s video serves as proof that all the hs^2 writers were morally corrupt monsters ruining a fandom space that was meant for minors and queer people (this is all very anti/anti-anti carousel of bullshit nonsense that i have no time for) and thus they’re confident to once again tear down the remaining public facing staff members, ignoring how all this crusade has done so far is drive a handful of trans women and people of colour off of official homestuck projects for their own safety.

then she ends the video with a “oh btw this video is proudly sponsored by audible <3″ bit and it’s just. beyond unbelievably awfully stupid that she deliberately reignited this aggression which has caused untold material harm on marginalised people (that happened less than a year ago!!!) just for the sake of quick clicks and ad revenue. she consolidated the most dogshit takes as fact within the general fandom consensus, sided with some of the worst people to engage with homestuck, potentially detonated the last shreds of stability of this independent marginalised media project, and wrapped it all up with a sponsorship from an amazon subsidiary company of all fucking things. this is obviously a case of an incredibly short sighted decision to cash in on a very complicated and unwieldy fandom history but still the potential consequences here are unfathomable.

[ilikecowsnstuff]

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13436459/1/HATE-WITH-MOMENTS-OF-BLIND-AFFECTION

Hi there! 

Novice writer, long time reader. I decided to give the fandom some love and write some trash Shigadabi fiction. Because why not, right? The first chapter is up, with a whole lot of to be continued… Rated M. Angst/Hurt/Comfort. 


Thanks for reading! 


=============== 

CHAPTER ONE - ACCIDENTAL ATTRACTION

 Shigaraki Tomura tugged anxiously at the high collar of his UA gym uniform, scratching frantically at the skin below, but no matter how hard he clawed at himself, the oppressive material continued to bother him. He was uncomfortable, covered in a thick layer of grime and wanted nothing more than to strip down and wash away the remnants of what turned out to be a disaster period of partnered combat training at UA.

 He sighed and shifted his gaze to the clock mounted on the wall in front of him, immediately one of his eyes began to twitch in unison with the steady ticking second hand. Usually the sound would not have irritated him, however, in the eerie silence of the empty infirmary that persistent click was amplified until it was the only thing he could focus on.

 Tick. Tick. Tick. 

 “How annoying.” Shigaraki thought, and with indignation folded his arms roughly over his chest. A hiss of pain followed the movement causing him to lower his arms back down. He groaned as he swept the palm of his hand tenderly over his rib cage, trying to locate the source of the distress and growing angrier, and more frustrated in the process. 

 He shouldn’t have been there. 

Sitting alone, battered and bruised with a possible broken rib and waiting on someone to come and heal him was not how the morning was supposed to go. Right about now, he was supposed to be basking in the afterglow of a victory! Instead, he had failed his very first exam at UA. And now his head hurt courtesy of the bump he had received from falling hard into the ground, making it difficult for him to concentrate on anything other than being batshit mad.

Where was Recovery Girl?

Just as Shigaraki was about to get up and go in search of some help, because sitting around doing nothing was driving him up the wall, the door to the infirmary swung open hard, with much more force than required. It bounced against the wall, creating a loud bang and worsening the already constant pounding in his temples.

A pair of vibrant blue eyes met Shigaraki’s petulant gaze.

Dabi.

“YOU!” Shigaraki growled, gritting his teeth.

That fucking zombie! It was all his fault that Shiagaraki had been injured in the first place, and why they had failed the test. Paired up in what was to be a graded teamwork challenge, Dabi, the egotistical jerk, had deviated from their pre-planned attack, and at the most critical point in the battle, leaving Shigaraki to clean up the mess.

He didn’t remember all the events leading up to the combat robot��s final demise as he was one-hundred percent certain that he had been knocked unconscious for a second or two when one of the damned monstrosities had knocked him aside using one of its powerful metal legs - like he was nothing more than an empty tin can. What he did remember was the pain. But regardless of the agony he felt when the robot’s heavy foot clamped down on him, Shigaraki had managed to secure his hand on the mechanical giant. One hand was all he needed. The metal foot disintegrated first, offering him some relief from the heavy pressure bearing down on his torso, and then the rest of the metal body crumbled away, raining down on Shigaraki’s battered body like a dusting of fresh snow.

Dabi remained on the outskirts of this event, standing and unscathed. So much for teamwork.

“GET OUT!” Shigaraki fumed, scratching wildly at his irritated neck.

“So belligerent,” Ignoring Shigaraki’s fumes, the taller boy offered his partner an impish grin as he casually crossed the room. He idled right up to the cot Shigaraki was sitting on until he was standing in his classmate’s personal space, looming, “Just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

That conceited asshole! Was Dabi taunting him? Shigaraki scowled but couldn’t help his face from lighting up with heat. Dabi’s presence was exceptionally commanding, and unavoidable, standing so close with his thighs pressed against Shiagraki’s bent legs.

“Bullshit,” Shigaraki spat back, livid. He abruptly turned his cheek to his so-called friend.

Dabi laughed, low and deep. “Okay. You got me,” He admitted, “I was sent to check up on you.” He pressed closer into Shigaraki, pushing his knees apart so he could get a better look at the injuries he had sustained. “Let me see your face, Mop Head.”

A sardonic chuckle left Shigaraki’s tightly closed lips, “I don’t think you understand the sheer amount of willpower it is taking for me to not punch you in the face right now. Go away before the thread holding my sanity together snaps. With just one touch, I will reduce you to a pile of ash!”

“Feisty,” Dabi returned, seemingly unphased by the other boy’s callous intent. His dominant personality wouldn’t allow him to withdraw so easily. Perilous or not, he liked things to go his way. He lifted his arm, and wrapped his fingers over Shigaraki’s chin, thumb brushing his jawline as he turned the other boys face slowly back towards him.

He narrowed his eyes.

Shigaraki’s bottom lip was busted open and bleeding, looking purple in the very centre were all the blood vessels were damaged. There was a darkening bruise on his cheek, and another along his jawline, and his left eye was starting to swell. He probably had other injuries too, things that Dabi couldn’t make out beneath Shigaraki’s clothes, even if the UA sports uniform was very fitted to his body. It was also flecked with blood.

“You look like shit.” Dabi proclaimed, still holding Shigaraki’s face in place, “More than usual.”

Shigaraki’s face grew warmer as his anger level shot up from 100 to 1000. It was almost if Dabi was baiting him to react. Violently. And to his own chagrin, it was working. Gritting his teeth again, Shigaraki lifted his own hand and reached towards his classmate’s neck with the intent to harm.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“Yes.”

Quickly, Dabi lowered his head until he felt the hot breath issuing from between Shiagaraki’s parted lips, “Not yet.” He whispered, and without any ounce of hesitation closed the remaining distance between them to press his mouth firmly down against his rivals. A kiss that had been a long time in the making, a kiss that he had been desiring.

Shigaraki gasped but those warm, soft lips didn't quell his anger. He slowly wrapped his hand around the smooth column of Dabi’s neck. One finger, two, three, and then four. His pinky lingered just above the surface of the skin, threatening to touch down at any moment.

A muffled, strangulated groan left Dabi’s mouth, like he enjoyed being on the edge of death, one finger away from the end of his existence. He tilted his head, delving deeper into the depths of Shigaraki’s mouth, seeking more contact.

Fuck! The power Shigaraki ultimately held over his classmate in that moment was thrilling! He would never admit to it, but the ultimate surrender of life which had Dabi leaving his fate hanging delicately in Shigaraki’s hand, turned him on.

But on the other hand, Shigaraki also absolutely hated how his body reacted to Dabi. It seemed so involuntary. The ultimate betrayal of himself. He couldn’t control the heat, nor the skipping beat of his heart, or that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. And he didn’t understand why. By all accounts, he and Dabi did not get along, they were rivals, and were always butting heads or fighting with each other. Shigaraki would even go as far as saying that he did not really like that arrogant asshole and yet he couldn’t deny being attracted to him.

Of course, Dabi was not oblivious. He liked to toy with Shigaraki, and he was always the one to initiate their fragile and often violent encounters. It had been that way since they had both joined the Hero Course. Hate, with brief moments of blind affection.

That relationship did not seem like it was going to end any time soon.

Dabi pulled away from the kiss, but allowed his tongue to gently sweep Shigaraki’s lower, busted lip, the bleeding cut a reminder of the earlier incident. “Fucking disgusting,” He mumbled, licking over his own lips as the metallic tang of blood overwhelmed his sense of taste. But he went back in for more, stroking his tongue over Shigaraki’s lip once again with a slower, more tantalizing caress, clearing away the bloody red evidence.

Shigaraki curled his fingers against Dabi’s neck, blunt nails biting into the skin, “Try that again and I will really kill you.”

Dabi smirked and pulled his face away a fraction, “I should have stuck to the plan,” He admitted. And it sounded sincere too which threw Shigaraki for a loop. It wasn’t often that Dabi admitted that he had been the one to screw up.

It wasn’t much of an apology, but it was more than Shigaraki could expect.

“You think?” Shigaraki grumbled, agitated, and batted at the hand that still held firmly onto his face. The movement caused another hiss of pain to pass his pursed lips.

Dabi obliged to that small smack, carefully releasing Shigaraki’s chin, but remained in close proximity. “Break something?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

The corner of Dabi’s mouth kicked up into an audacious grin, “Want me to kiss it better?”

“Fuck off.”

Dabi chuckled, “Well, maybe you’ll be happy to know that I got chewed out by Mr. Aizawa.”

“Why would that make me happy?” Shigaraki returned, hugging his waist carefully.

“You want to hurt me?”

“That would make me happy.”

“Mmm,” Dabi leaned in a little closer once again, and Shigaraki immediately turned his head away, keeping his mouth out of kissing range. He wasn’t going to let himself get trapped by Dabi’s devilish lips once again.

“I want to tell you something.” Dabi confessed, warm breath tickling Shigaraki’s cheek.

Shigaraki tensed, squeezing his eyes shut so he would not be tempted by Dabi’s smooth, low toned voice. He could get through whatever the damn zombie boy had to say without another make out session and leave it at that.

“I just wanted you to know how much…”

Shigaraki wouldn’t get to find out what Dabi wanted him to know. A nurse had finally arrived, interrupting their exchange and swooping in on Shigaraki with an ice pack in one hand, a cup of water and two aspirin in the other.

He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed by the disruption.

[charlie-minion]

The biggest bad to ever bad

Supernatural 14x20 is going to be marked in my head as one of the best season finales of television ever! It’s not because of the quality of the production, though; it’s because of the potential it opened for a fantastic final season of such a long-lasting show. There are so many things I want to talk about (God & the Winchesters, Castiel and Destiel), but I think I will have to write separate posts for each because I don’t want this to get extremely long.

Let’s talk about God and the Winchesters first, shall we?

After 14x20, everything seems to indicate that God is the big bad for season 15, right? In fact, we might even say that God has been the big bad ALL ALONG. Right? RIGHT? Yeah, well… about that…

NO, my dear friends, God is not the big bad on Supernatural, and I’m gonna tell you why that is my opinion.

Disclaimer: This post will include a lot of life philosophies that may or may not resonate with what you believe in. If you think I’m talking bullshit, that’s fine! Just please don’t waste time attacking me or my post in any way because I won’t engage in any type of hateful behavior.  

With that being said, I need to emphasize the beauty orchestrated by Andrew Dabb (showrunner and writer of the finale). He turned the Supernatural universe into a huge metaphor for our own very real world (nothing new if you really think about it). BUT, he also made Chuck the manifestation of the God many people believe exists IRL.

“None of this would have happened without you”, Dean tells John Winchester at the start of the recap. Those words feel ominous now, considering Dean said them to his father but they could as easily be directed to the father of all creation, God himself (or Chuck, as he prefers to be called).  

None of what has happened in 14 years of Supernatural would have happened without Chuck. That’s an undeniable truth, but that doesn’t mean everything has been entirely his fault.

He’s a writer, and writers lie. We were told that in 14x20, but I think Chuck was telling the truth about something in particular:

“You guys know me. I’m hands-off. I built the sandbox… you play in it. You want to fight Leviathans? Cool. You got that. You want to go up against the… What was it? The ‘British Men of Letters’? Okay. Little weak, but okay.”

Chuck created this world with everything in it, and then he “left”. Although, he never truly left. From the beginning he’s been “everywhere and nowhere, to the edge of the universe and beyond”. The thing is that he’s most of the times HANDS-OFF.

He didn’t create other beings to be inferior. “Existence is all about balance”, he said when trying to explain why the Equalizer didn’t have any bullets.

“This doesn’t so much fire bullets as it sends a wave of multi-dimensional energy across a perfectly balanced quantum link between whoever’s shooting it and whoever they’re shooting at.”

Why is that line relevant? Ohhhh because if we read a little about quantum physics, we’ll know that we humans are energy. We all are. Actually, everything that exists in this world is energy. There are some philosophies where the concept of God goes beyond what religion offers. Some people don’t use the word “God”, but they prefer to use the word “Source” because there is a source of energy, and we all are interconnected through that energy that we all share. In a way, we are extensions of Source Energy, and that’s why we all can be considered divine.

If we dig a little into that philosophy, we find out that the human journey in a lifetime is to ascend in consciousness. We have a conscious and subconscious mind, and there’s science to back up that our subconscious runs the show most of the time. (Watch this video if you’re at all interested). It’s thanks to it that we make quick decisions during times of crisis and emergency, and it’s thanks to both our conscious and subconscious mind that we create our own reality. Unfortunately, we are EXTREMELY UNAWARE OF THE PROGRAMMING IN OUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND, so the reality that we observe is not exactly pretty, because we tend to create that which we fear the most. We keep repeating patterns over and over until we become aware of what’s going on (or we die and never become aware, too bad).   

In real life, the God that many people believe in certainly built the sandbox and left us to play in it and do whatever we want. That God or Source is HANDS-OFF for real, because we are made of the same energy, so we have creative power, too, whether we understand/believe it or not. The less aware we are, the more likely we are to believe THINGS HAPPEN TO US.

There’s always a villain outside of ourselves: our parents, our partners, our friends, our coworkers or classmates, our neighbors, that random person who stole from us or who said nasty things about us. We all have our own Leviathans, Michaels, Lucifers, and some villains in our life just as pathetic as Asmodeus or the British Men of Letters. The point is that when we are NOT aware of OUR OWN POWER OF CREATION, we are at the mercy of our subconscious, thinking that terrible things will continue to happen, over and over.

So, going back to Supernatural, Chuck came back in 14x20 with a special gun, and one of the names he gave to it was EQUALIZER. Seriously??!! Later in the ep, when Sam shot God with that gun, he shot himself. THAT’S SO SYMBOLIC I CAN’T EVEN! Don’t you see this? If we keep talking about Source of energy (instead of “god”) and understand that all beings are made of energy even if we have a material body, we get to understand the metaphor found in the Bible that states we should love God and we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. WE ARE ALL ONE. I mean, I can plug two or three appliances into one same outlet and even though each appliance serves a different purpose, the energy that keeps them “alive” is the same.

We build an ego to create a false sense of self, but we’re all one. While we’re unaware of this, we think of God as that powerful being, outside of ourselves, who controls everything and we think that we’re at his mercy. We pray and we think that when things go well, God is blessing us, but when things go wrong, he’s punishing us or he has abandoned us. When truth be told, we have been creating our own reality ALL ALONG thanks to our stupid programming.

The Winchesters have been repeating the same mistakes over and over. Their programming is filled with “GOOD THINGS NEVER HAPPEN. I DON’T DESERVE GOOD THINGS”. That’s been the case for all of them. They have claimed that everything they’ve done has been out of love, to protect their family, but that’s just crap. The love they have felt has NEVER been healthy; it’s been rooted in the fear of loss. Mary made a deal because she couldn’t bear to lose John. John made a deal because he couldn’t lose Dean. Dean made a deal because he couldn’t lose Sam. And their codependent love brought all sorts of fucked-up consequences. Don’t even get me started on the way John raised his children as a result of not being able to accept the loss of his wife. Or don’t get me started on the programming running in Mary’s head as a result of the way she was raised in the hunting life. I mean, we could spend hours and hours discussing why Mary was desperate for a “normal life”, but probably thought that she didn’t deserve it; that she was being selfish for wanting happiness when the world needed saving. How ironic that her two sons inherited the same fears, the same subconscious programming!

So, NO… God is NOT the villain. THE VILLAIN HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE WINCHESTERS THEMSELVES. (Just as in our life, we are the main character and the villain in our own story). Thinking that God is the villain is the easy way out. That’s putting responsibility for the good and the bad outside of ourselves, and that’s bullshit. The toxicity has been part of Dean and Sam’s lives since forever and they need to be aware of it. They have always had a choice, but they were unable to make the healthiest one at the time. ‘Shoot first, ask questions later’, ‘Kill all the monsters’, ‘We do what we always do, we fight to bring our loved ones back’.

That’s not love. That’s not growth. And in writing, that’s not character development.

Next season, the Winchesters will try to fight God, of course. They will most likely try to kill him. But I can tell you now, one day after the season 14 finale, that they won’t be able to. What they will understand at the end of season 15 is that they always had a choice; that the Earth will never be completely saved because it doesn’t want to be saved (each person creates their own reality, so how can they save people who are unconsciously sabotaging/destroying themselves?). It’s NOT THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO SAVE EVERYONE. IT NEVER HAS BEEN. That’s something they have taken upon themselves and it’s insane, unrealistic, and extremely arrogant of them.

Chuck himself had to show up to push the Winchesters enough to realize that they have been repeating patterns for a long time and that it’ll end when they decide it’s time to end. When they become aware of the toxic beliefs that took them to where they are now. When they realize that the only thing they need to get their happy ending is to admit they want that (not a blaze of glory style ending) and to stop being afraid of it or guilty about wanting it.

Good things do happen. What’s the matter? You don’t think you deserve to be saved?

Chuck is just a mirror for the Winchesters. If our boys think that Chuck is the villain, then sooner or later they will realize how responsible they have been, too. I’ll be looking forward to season 15 and, most of all, to the series finale. For now, I’m gonna be in my corner, feeling confident that our boys will have the ending they deserve –the one they’ll get once they allow themselves to follow their heart.  

[hellpug]

Too much Note, not enough Death

SPOILERS (If you give a shit)

Death Note review: Overall rating: 3 Dafoes out 10 

Movie cliche count: 15 ( I am sure I am missing some, there was a lot)

People you recognize from other things : 4

TL;DR: Too much Note, not enough Death

Overall, it isn't boring. I will give it that. Some ambient music choices were good. However, much like the main character, this movie didn't have a fucking plan. Someone gave the source material to someone who said fuck it and skimmed through. This results in a lot of shit unexplained. I tried watching this from the point of view of someone who hadn't read the manga. I'm not a fan of the anime either due to the fact Death Note is a story that really is best as written fiction/a comic. Because it's initially a suspense/thriller that involves a smart ass high school student internal monologuing. There's also so much to explain that one movie cannot. So to I will give that the movie decided to remedy that by putting actual action in it, rather than action packed eating of snacks. But of course, because there is so much and not a good plan on to how to summarize this story, there's a lot of dumb cherry picking. Ryuk eats a lot of apples, they spend a lot of time on the apple motif. Perhaps they're relying on Western audience's familiarity with Eden/original sin and will make an apple connection with that. But otherwise it's a quirk and one that is emphasized for no reason. Death Note rules could have been shortened to the extension of the movie itself for the sake of clarity and consistency. The writers clearly tripped themselves up over the rules and even put that frustration into the writing by having Light Turner occasionally spit out "SO MANY RULES." If they had kept it to 5-10 and followed the movies plot using those 10, you would've gotten a much better movie. So instead, it feels like the movie is making up shit as it goes along. Which it is essentially. The movie's world doesn't feel consistent, even with real world rules. Kenny Doyle, the first "so deserves it" victim, is such a strawman it's ridiculous. He's a student held back so long that he's apparently of adult age, which in real world rules, would make it that he would be in continuing education, NOT STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL. This point is important Light threatens him with this fact. This of course, changes nothing. Light, despite supposed to be brilliant,  is a goddamn moron who carries all the homework he got paid to do in his bag, so instead of addressing the assault when he wakes up, he's getting detention (not suspended or expelled) and nothing is done about the 15 students they have evidence on. He's placed in detention in a generic classroom that is also part candy and toy store it seems. I'm not kidding. Ryuk makes his appearance by knocking over some marbles and eating Light's apple. Light does the most hilarious spaz out, which makes it clear why these random ass shelves of whatever are in this classroom in the first place. So he can spasm all over the place in a comical fashion. Also not joking. The place is not even more of a mess and looks like the fucking Kool-Aid man tore through it. After Light is done freaking out, slapping himself to assure that he is not in a dream, the Green Goblin gets right to it. Kill Kenny. Kill 'em. Look, he's beating up a chick with his buddy. Kill 'em dude. So he casually writes decapitation, resulting in some final destination bullshit. Kenny gets decapitated with a ladder, it's gorey and hilarious. It's after it's first three deaths, the movie decided it's not going to be a Final Destination rip off it shifts into romance, with killing. After sharing the secret of the notebook with Misa Mi-I mean Mia, the cheerleader who's allowed to smoke on school grounds with anyone giving a shit, they of course fall in love. They roll around and giggle as they off more people. Cliche "gonna love you" type music plays. It's a bizarre teen love and death montage. Also MisaMis-Mia looks like Kirsten Stuart but isn't Kirsten Stuart. Oh, and Light picks the name Kira (In the manga, this name is given to him by the public). It's not something the masses comes up. Despite acting like he's oh so innocent and moral, dude has a fucking ego. He goes over with Kirsten Misa Misa over the name he has chosen. Kira means other shit in Russian and other languages, but it's also "sort of means" killer in Japanese!!! SO SUGOI! So part of the rules of the Death Note is that you can partially control PEOPLE for up to two days until their death. That capitalization is important for later. So prisoners that he's murdered have written his name in perfect Japanese, despite never have spoken the language. People start cults and shit. At some point, Light's dad is brought on the case, Light has another tantrum. Light has a lot of those. I should include a tantrum counter on this review as well. This also brings me to another point. It seems there are two ways of writing suspense with intelligent characters. One, you write in depth characters with clear motivations (in that not confusing or dumb) and with actual fucking brain cells. The other is to simply write stupid as fuck characters, with the genius being the one who has a couple more brain cells than the rest. Guess which one this movie was. Holy fucking shit, I could've figured out who Kira was. Anyone could have. Light was a subtle as someone wearing a purple sequin nightgown, shaking maracas at 3 am through a field of tin garbage cans. Dad says he can tell when he's sitting across a guy who's apparently murdered like 400 people. You can tell a killer just by looking. This is supposed to give us the impression that Light Turner is some sort of mastermind, as he shifts around uncomfortably in the guiltiest fashion possible. So we meet L, who is black, because you can't be accused of whitewashing is you make one of the characters black. Watari is the only remaining Japanese character, necessary to dispense ancient Asian wisdom to L. Watari is apparently his entire fucking name and NOONE THOUGHT TO TELL HIM NOT GIVE OUT HIS BUSINESS CARD WITH HIS NAME IN ALL CAPS. Or even hide his face. Even though L does this. Watari gets owned and is controlled long enough to get the location and name of the super secret detective school which tortures children but not long enough to get the name. A plot foil of excessive records is what foils him. The super secret school, which is abandoned, just left all that shit there. Oh, and Light Turner never attempts at it again. I guess that avenue is completely exhausted. L goes fucking nuts, eats candy, reveals his face like whatever. Yells at Light Turner everytime he eats (once before Watari dies at a restaurant and then at Light Turner's house.). L begins throwing tantrums and has the house raided. Don't worry though, Misa Stuart is somehow completely forgotten about by the ace detective and she sneaks the Death Note out in her Calculus book. It's also prom, because yeah. They go to prom, L is getting CLOSER! (Not really) There is this feeling of tension and then really kind of nothing. It seems like they were gonna do bait and switch at prom but Mia Mia took the page out of the book that Light Turner was gonna burn so Watari wouldn't die but you only get one, so Misa Mia ripped it out, kept it. GUESS WHY? CUZ SHE WROTE LIGHT TURNER'S NAME IN THERE. GENIUS. She wants the book to continue what they started because she's not gonna punk out. I feel like they swapped the personalities of Misa Misa and Light Yagami in this movie. Kirsten Stuart doesn't give a fuck. Kirsten Stuart will bang you for your killer notebook. Also, Ryuk even likes her better. She gets 10/10 green goblins. Light Turner panics, runs away from prom, goes to the computer room. He goes to the Kira worship site which he earlier said was a bad idea to take names from cuz "rumours" and uses it for his ELABORATE PLAN. L, like Batman, does not like killing people or using weapons they are bad. Like Batman in Dark Knight, L resolves to using a fancy ass gun. During Light Turner's night on the town to do things and stuff, he is cornered in an alley. Light is all like "You can't stop it if you don't know man!" L doesn't shoot, stupidly tells the cook from the restaurant who has come out into the alley that this is Kira. Cook knocks out L with a convenient 4x4 and lets Light Turner escape. Light Turner and Mia Mia meet at the ferris wheel. This is where CONTROL OF PEOPLE clause becomes important. He issues an ultimatum. If she really loves him, she won't take the Death Note. Otherwise, she will never see him again. She's all like "Yeah I love you babe" then when he's looking out the ferris wheel, she snatches it. He's all like NNNNNOOOOOOOO. Turns out he wrote "When Mia accepts the Death Note, ferris wheel will start to lose its shit, she will fall to her death. Light will fall into the water. A rapist doctor will give him cpr (Retrieved from that website). A pedo (website) will find the Death Note, use it in order to keep up appearances that Kira is active while Light Turner is in the hospital. Oh, and the page with Light Turner's death on it? IT WILL BURN. I wasn't aware the Death Note page was a person. See, I could've bought that it accidentally got burned, but they had to add that, because it makes Light Turner look smart. But that's not what the Death Note does. Sure, objects will fail in order to ensure an individual's death but I doubt to prevent them as well. Given that they are saying Ryuk is actually executing the deaths (but they have to write the names what?) I GUESS HE BURNED IT MAYBE. Except he didn't. So Light Turner lives, BUT HE FORGOT ONE THING. MISA STUART'S PAGE! L, who has been disgraced forgetting owned by a 4x4 and seemingly attempting to kill a minor, realizes that he forgot about Misa Mia. He breaks into her house, gets the calculus book and we are left on the cliffhanger ending of will he kill Light Turner or not. Also, his dad figures out it was him all along because a stupid newspaper clipping was missing. Not anything else obvious.

[katiewattsart]

SEMINAR SERIES : ‘UTOPIA. DYSPOPIA.’ : 26/11/19

OPENING OF OUR SEMINAR:

To reassure you..

Our next seminar before the Christmas break will be on Tuesday 10th December. We will be suggesting helpful ways to engage in critical writing/reflection and essay structuring.

Some suggestions if you are stuck…

A highly illustrated, accessible guide to political art in the twenty-first century, including some of the most daring and ambitious artworks of recent times. 

Why have so many artists turned to political subject matter in the last decade? Can art not only question but also reinvigorate the social, civic, and political imagination? Art and Politics Now offers a brilliant survey of artists engaged with "the political," whether in providing commentary, questioning social structures, or actively responding to the world around them.

Many high-profile artists are featured, including Chantal Ackerman, Ai Weiwei, Francis Alys, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, Subodh Gupta, Teresa Margolles, Walid Raad, Raqs Media Collective, Doris Salcedo, Bruno Serralongue, and Santiago Sierra.

"Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students." --Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere.

The use of alternate realities in cinema has been brought to new heights by such recent films as��"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "Donnie Darko". "Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema" is the first book to analyze these imaginary realms, tracing their construction and development across periods, genres, and history. Through an analysis of such landmark films as "The Wizard of Oz", "The Others" and "Groundhog Day", James Walters reveals how unconventional worlds are crucial to each film's dramatic agenda and narrative structure. This groundbreaking volume unifies decades of divergent work by film scholars and points the way towards a new theoretical framework for understanding fantasy in the context of popular film. "Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema" will be an essential resource for film studies scholars and movie buffs alike.

The Tate

Explore artworks from Tate's collection that respond to their social and political context

This wing is concerned with the ways in which artists engage with social ideals and historical realities. Though some artists associated modernism with a utopian vision, art has also provided a mirror to contemporary society, sometimes raising awareness about urgent issues or arguing for change. Whether through traditional media or moving images, abstraction or figuration, militancy or detached observation, all the artworks in this wing highlight aspects of the social reality in which they were made, and try to generate a reaction and convey a more or less explicit message to their publics.

By the end of today you will...

- A2 Identify and demonstrate an understanding of key theories and discourses that affect the practice, consumption and production of photography. - A3 Evidence an understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, and interpret, analyse and evaluate critical approaches to creative practice. - B2 Apply appropriate theoretical approaches to the study and interpretation of ........and associated media practices, building awareness of the ethical, social and cultural consequences of creative practice. - C5 Competently utilise a range of appropriate research methods and academic conventions. - D3 Demonstrate communication skills, which evidence knowledge and understanding of critical debates around creative production.

DISCUSSION:

At this part of the session we were able to discuss about our task that we were set the week prior. It was insightful to view everyones different approach to the ‘Dystopian’ and ‘Utopian’ theme that stemmed from last weeks lecture and it made me think alternatively abut this broad topic. 

TURNER PRIZE

Starting in 1984, the Turner Prize is an award that recognised new developments in contemporary art. The prize is awarded each year to ‘a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve moths preceding.’  

Founders decided to name the prize after J.M.W Turner - a radical painter in his day. Critics took this decision as a signal of their intention to award controversial art. There were conflicts as to whether or not Turner would have approved. However, the name was chosen because not only did Turner want to establish a prize for young artists, but Turner in his day, was considered to be controversial. Over the years ‘the Turner Prize has played a significant role in provoking debate about visual art and the growing public interest in contemporary British art...and has become widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.’ 

AGAINST

The Evening Standard critic Brian Sewell wrote “The annual farce of the Turner Prize is now as inevitable in November as is the pantomime at Christmas.” 

Critic Matthew Collings wrote, “Turner Prize art is based on a formula where something looks startling at first and thens turns out to be expressing some kind of banal idea, which somebody will be sure to tell you about. The ideas are never important or even really ideas, more notions, like the notions in advertising. Nobody pursues them anyway, because theres nothing there to pursue.” 

In 2002, Culture Minister (and former art student) Kim Howells pinned the following statement to a board in a room designated for visitors comments: “If this is there best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit.”

Stuckism

Founded by Billy Childish and Charles Thompson in 1999. Anti- conceptual, instead promoting figurative painting. Confrontational, frequently holding demonstrations against Turner Prize. 

Banksy - ‘Mind the Crap’

Banksy once painted a warning on the steps of Tate Britain - "mind the crap". It's the kind of cheeky subversive comment his fans love him for, and in this case the target was the pretentious, institutionalised contemporary "art world".

FOR

Critic Richard Cork said:

“There will never be a substitute for approaching new art with an open mind, unencumbered by rancid clichés. As long as the Turner Prize facilitates such engagement, the buzz surrounding it will remain a minor distraction.”

In 2006, newspaper columnist Janet Street-Porter said “The Turner Prize and Becks Futures both entice though sand of young people into art galleries for the first time every year. The fulfil a valuable role.”

Dan Fox, associate editor of Frieze, said that the Turner Prize should be considered a barometer for the mood of the nation. 

Nominees:

Lawrences Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and audio investigator, whose work explores ‘the politics of listening’ and the role of sound and voice within the law and human rights. He creates audiovisual installations, lecture performances, audio archives, photography and text, translating in-depth research and investigative work into affective, spatial experiences. Abu Hamdan works with human rights organisations, such as Amnesty International and Defense for Children International, and with international prosecutors to help obtain aural testimonies for legal and historical investigations. He received his PhD in 2017 from Goldsmiths London and is a practitioner affiliated with Forensic Architecture.

Helen Cammock

Helen Cammock works across film, photography, print, text and performance. She produces works stemming from a deeply involved research process that explore the complexities of social histories. Central to her practice is the voice: the uncovering of marginalised voices within history, the question of who speaks on behalf of whom and on what terms, as well as how her own voice reflects in different ways on the stories explored in her work.

Oscar Murillo 

Oscar Murillo’s multifaceted practice incorporates live events, drawing, sculptural installation, video, painting, bookmaking and collaborative projects with different communities. In his work, Murillo particularly explores materials, process and labour; as well as issues of migration, community, exchange and trade in today’s globalised world. These concerns are deeply embedded in Murillo’s personal history and creative process. The artist pushes the boundaries of materials in his work particularly in the creation of his collaged-together, unstretched canvases often made with recycled fragments from the studio. Emigrating to London from Colombia aged 11, Murillo draws on his own biography and that of his family and friends, who are often involved in his performances. References to life, culture and labour conditions in the factory town of La Paila where he grew up, reappear throughout his work.

Tai Shani

Tai Shani’s practice encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations, frequently structured around experimental texts. Taking inspiration from disparate histories, narratives and characters mined from forgotten sources, Shani creates dark, fantastical worlds, brimming with utopian potential. These deeply affective works often combine rich and complex monologues with arresting, saturated installations, manifesting equally disturbing and divine images in the mind of the viewer.

The Judges

The members of the Turner Prize 2019 jury are Alessio Antoniolli, Director, Gasworks & Triangle Network; Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of The Showroom Gallery and Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths; Victoria Pomery, Director, Turner Contemporary, Margate and Charlie Porter, writer. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain.

3 December 2019 #TURNERPRIZE The winner will be announced on 3 December 2019 at an award ceremony live on the BBC, the broadcast partner for the Turner Prize.

Discuss - who would you vote for?

Get into teams

● Go and research more about the artist you would vote for ● You need reasons why you think they should win ● You need to look at the artists past work ● Make badges for all your team members ● Then write 100 word rationale/argument/critical appraisal of why they should    win ● You need to be constructively critical

VOTE FOR TAI SHANI

‘Tai Shani takes us even further, to a voluptuous imaginary city whose fantastical architecture, all pink and laid out with ziggurats and cylindrical columns, resinous puddles and spheres, lies at our feet. Overhead dangle bejewelled udders and fleshy asteroids. A huge arm and outstretched green hand comes to rest in the middle of the spotlit metaphysical architecture. I am reminded of Giacometti’s surrealist 1932 sculpture The Palace at 4am, rejigged for a sci-fi space opera.

Shani’s tableau cries out for living, breathing, moving bodies. For now, we have a stage, filled with sculptural elements, an ambient soundscape by Let’s Eat Grandma, a video of a speaking head, whose words can be heard on headphones. There will be live performances of Shani’s long, 12-part DC: Semiramis at Turner Contemporary over three evenings in November.

Shani’s feminist science fiction takes as its starting point Christine de Pizan’s 1405 work The Book of the City of Ladies. The book describes a city as sanctuary, an allegorical space for real, imaginary and mythical women from the past, present and future. Were it not for all the sex and violence, Shani’s is an almost childlike invention. Her cast of self-replicating characters impregnate themselves, slide lubriciously between genders, between life and death. Hugely disarmed by performances I saw at the last Glasgow International at Tramway, I couldn’t make sense of what I saw and heard, yet it stayed with me. Shani’s city sprawls, psychologically as well as physically. Without live performers, it is a bit arcane and lifeless.’

What does the Turner Prize do? 

- For an artist, winner or nominee?

- For the Tate?

- For art in this country? 

- What purpose/function could/should the Turner Prize have?

- Does the Turner Prize of the judges have an agenda?

Turner Prize Sponsorship

The Turner Prize has been sponsored since 1987. Originally sponsored by Drexel Burnham Lamber a major Wall Street Investment bank that went bankrupt in 1990 due to illegal activities. In 1990 there was no sponsorship and thus no prize. In 1991, Channel 4 took over and raised the prize fund to £20,000. Since 2004 sponsored by Gardens Gin, i.e. Diageo (the worlds largest brewer and distiller until 2017) NET income 2011 was just over £2,000,000,000*. 

References:

https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/artist-and-society 

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/turner-contemporary/exhibition/turner-prize-2019  

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/turner-prize 

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/s/stuckism 

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2007/mar/13/whyallthefussoverbanksy 

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/turner-contemporary/exhibition/turner-prize-2019/oscar-murillo

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/turner-contemporary/exhibition/turner-prize-2019/lawrence-abu-hamdan

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/turner-contemporary/exhibition/turner-prize-2019/helen-cammock

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/sep/26/turner-prize-2019-review-outrages-of-our-age-in-sound-vision-and-papiermache 

[babypunter3000]

The only good things about Netflix’s Death Note Movie

1. Willem DaFoe Green Goblining it up as Ryuk. 2. L for the first half before Watari got Death Noted. 3. The rockin’ soundtrack. 4. The time that-Okay, you know what? No, I can’t even leave just one fully positive post about this you know how much goddamn BULLSHIT it was that Mia/Misa and L were adapted as waaaay more in the wrong than Light was? In the manga and anime, Light was CLEARLY the main bad guy, careening himself farther away from “well-intentioned” and “maybe he has a point” and into “irredeemable soulless fascist dictator” with every chapter and episode. Hell, in the FIRST BOOK AND EPISODE, he clearly states that he will be “the God of this new world,” and his general “I don’t give a general fuck about other people” attitude could already start to be seen. In this adaptation, Light’s all just love and an old soul wise beyond his years who wants to HELP the world out of the goodness of his heart and sense of justice. And at first, it’s not to bad, you think to yourself, “hey, this could be alright. A narrative about how absolute power corrupts absolutely with a kid who only wants to kill the really bad guys, and even then is super freaked out about it. sure, whatever” But no. NO. It NEVER turns that way! Light ALWAYS only kills for “the greater good” and is constantly portrayed throughout this movie as this well-meaning kid who’s just in so much over his head you gu-uys! 

Meanwhile, Misa has been taken from her canon form as a devout Kira worshiper who was used and abused by Light to his own ends without a shred of emotion for her and has been turned into the love of Light’s life and THE REAL VILLAIN OF THE STORY! You see, Light didn’t really want to kill all those people and usher in a new era of Kira rule! It was all MIA’S influence and hen-pecking that drove Light to kill all willy-nilly! I mean, there’s this scene in the movie where Mia is showing Light a pro-Kira website where people are suggesting new people for Kira to kill, and Light brings up a point where some of the criminals could just be regular innocent people that have a beef with the poster. Mia basically tells him “Who cares? Any kind of petty crime or personal slight is good enough of a reason to kill for me! Let’s make out!” and they both go on their merry ways writing in the book. Like, fuck the writers for tossing out Light’s original characterization and motives to turn it all into a sexist, lazy, “It was all the EVIL WOMAN’S fault for tempting that poor boy!” narrative. And then Mia is killed off by Light on screen right after they have a fight where she is portrayed in the most clingy, shrewish way possible. She even says that she only killed all those people to get closer to Light. She had no justice-dog in this fight like the original Misa had. She was just in it so that Light would date her, and she somehow turned out to be the most murder-happy one after Light introduced her to the whole thing. And I’m sure that the neanderthal who wrote this drivel is patting himself on the back for writing such a great fucking script. And you’re supposed to feel bad because of course she dies by falling into a giant flower display and of course she has to be pretty when she dies. Fuck you. And while we’re on the subject of this movie going out of it’s way to justify and excuse A MASS MURDERER, let’s talk about how the movie treats L. For the first few minutes of his screen time, I honestly thought they did a good job. True, all he was doing was copying L’s mannerisms from the show and being deductive, but it was nice to see something from the books being portrayed accurately in this tire fire of a movie. But you know how everyone loved the original manga and anime for Light and L’s high stakes game of cat and mouse and how they would constantly one-up the other using their wits and intelligence and plenty of insanely thought out plans? Yeah, that’s also tossed right out the goddamn window in this one. Instead, we get an hour of L and Light basically shouting “Come at me, bro!” and emotionally lashing out at one another until one of them finally does something stupid enough to lose. It’s a race to the goddamn bottom, like the mental version of watching a drunken fistfight in a back alley. There’s no finesse, there’s no skill, just watching two guys shouting, “I KNOW YOU’RE KIRA!” and, “YEAH, WELL, FUCK YOU, KIRA’S THE GOOD GUY AND WHAT DO YOU KNOW ANYWAY?!” at each other for an hour. And L gets such a raw deal in this movie. I think he technically lives at the stupid non-ending (you don’t see Light die in the film, btw. You see Mia die, of course, because she’s an EVIL WOMAN!1! who DESERVED IT!!1, but of course not fucking Light), but even then he has even less dignity than in the manga and anime where he dies halfway through. L, in the manga, anime, and this trainwreck of a film, is the eccentric big-time elusive detective who picks up the task of finding out the identity of Kira to stop him. The only difference is that the manga and anime didn’t go out of their way to fucking destroy him. And I’m not just talking about the plot point in this failure of a motion picture that has Light easily put Watari’s name in the Death Note (yes, Watari is his real name in this and they just parade his name and face around without a worry in the world, I mean, what did you expect to happen?) that puts L into a tailspin. I’m talking about how the narrative treats L, the guy who’s trying to stop A MASS MURDERER from killing, as another bad guy, clearly in the wrong, because Light’s just trying to make the world a better place, yannow? First, he falls apart because Watari is missing and is in the hands of Kira, which okay, I don’t blame him, but he never gets past that. For the rest of the movie, he’s on the verge of tears, he can’t think straight, he’s blinded by emotion. He only manages to figure out a key point at the very end, and this was after Light openly confesses to what it is. Secondly, L is never able to officially out Kira. In light of this, his higher-ups unceremoniously fire him, leaving him an even bigger wreck. This happens around the exact same time Light is explaining to his dad what his master plan in the climax was, which is the only kind of smart thing that ever happens in this movie and is almost reminiscent of it’s source material. Point being, the narrative wants you to believe that Light is competent, L is incompetent. But you know what scene was the ultimate “fuck you” to L’s character as well as containing a horrible implication and clearly demonstrating a crucial flaw in the movie? Near the end of the movie, L has a gun pointed to Light’s head in a back alley. He’s desperate, and Light is shouting about the page of the death note stuck in Mia’s textbook that’s the key to saving Watari (because he’s such a GOOD GUY, you guys!) Since L has no goddamn idea what Light is talking about, and just knows that he’s the guy who killed 400 people and possibly his only friend, he ignores him, and turns to a man who just walked out of his shop, begging him to help and shouts, “He’s Kira!” The man stops and gets clarification that yes, Light is Kira, and then proceeds to knock L unconscious with a wooden plank to the head because he’s a fan of Kira as Light runs off to safety. Did I mention yet that L is black in this movie while Light is white? A black detective who’s implied to be the best of the best and is completely in the right is struck down because the bystander was a fan of the white mass murderer he was trying to stop. It doesn’t matter that “Oh, but Kira was only killing bad guys!” because fuck you, the movie itself established that Light and Mia were killing people on a whim and not bothering to check sources for libel. I will repeat, THE MOVIE POINT BLANK HAD A BLACK PROFESSIONAL STRUCK DOWN TO PROTECT THE WHITE MASS MURDERER THAT THE NARRATIVE TRIES TO PLAY OFF AS INNOCENT. Seriously, this whole movie exists around the premise that a greasy white boy who murders people needs to be cared about and protected from a woman and a black man who somehow convince him to commit more murder against his will because boobies or want him to stop committing murder at all costs. Ryuk, the death god that patiently walks Light through how to kill someone, doesn’t even get as many “DANGER! THREAT TO LIGHT’S SAFETY!” vibes as Mia and L do. The narrative is like, “Yeah, he’s a death god, what do you expect? BUT THIS WOMAN AND BLACK GUY ARE GONNA BE THE DEATH OF THAT POOR NAIVE BOY!” This kind of shit belongs in a trump rally, not in my movie based on a story where the main, privileged, young man was portrayed as an honest to God mass-murdering dictator who yes, must be fucking stopped. And you wanna know the dumbest thing about this movie? There are no stakes. None. The narrative wants you to care about the lives of a couple of murderers because they make a cute couple and are a pair of “good kids” who have glitter on their tongues (yeah) and are white (or at least, that’s what I’m guessing, since the only black character in the movie is treated as a hindrance and a joke even though he was in the right the entire time). Everyone in the movie’s world that isn’t a cop LOVES Kira. The movie is forever showing you pictures of people at Kira shrines, or holding, “I Love You, Kira!” or spraypaint on the walls that says “Kira Lives!” We never see the dystopian hellscape that ultimately was Kira’s world, where everyone was scared fucking shitless because Light was killing anyone who so much as looked at another guy funny. And don’t tell me that there was no crime ever in that world, there was just unreported crime. And we never see any followup to the scene where they just decide to kill people because anonymous sources online told them to. We never see any distraught partners breaking down on the news because their husband died of a heart attack for a crime he didn’t commit. We never see any innocent people die, or at least innocent people who are quickly brushed off as “cannon fodder” and are never mentioned again after they are killed (ie, the twelve FBI agents). Kira is just worshiped by EVERYONE to the point where if he just came out as Kira, nobody would be able to touch him because they’d be coming out of the woodwork to protect him (as demonstrated in the paragraph above). The only reason he DID possibly die in the end is because Light gave L the means to. If he never mentioned the Death Note, he would basically be unstoppable, because everyone in this movie is either SO DUMB or SO IN LOVE WITH KIRA. And while this movie is so bad it’s hilarious to watch and deserves a good MST3K-ing, it’s also so fucking infuriating with it’s fucking worship and embracing of this fucking white boy mass murderer to the point where they had to make characters from the original work into worse versions of themselves to prop him up while decrying anyone who opposes him as “the real bad guys.” These writers are the kind of people who pass a gang of white kids vandalizing a car to call the cops on a black kid sleeping in one. These writers are the kind of people who would say, “Well, of course she got raped, she constantly teased boys with her short skirts!” The writers are the kind of writers who would describe a white male shooter as, “teen genius suddenly snaps! Unfortunate incident for former varsity football player. His friends talk about what a great guy he was on page six.” Seriously, the next time someone scoffs at you for suggesting that white male privilege exists, show them this goddamn movie a bunch of grown ass adults made and went, “Yep, this’ll do!”

[honeybadgerradio]

Scaring Sons Into Suicide – Polecat Cast 115

Mattress Girl returns! Urban Dictionary! Wonder Woman! All this and more on this week’s Polecat Cast!

Show Notes:

Urban Warfare By Mike J.

Founded in 1999, the website Urban Dictionary has served as little more than a fun way to waste. The site allows users to add and define words or phrases, some of which more contemporary dictionaries wouldn’t dare touch. Other users then vote up or vote down these newly defined words with the highest voted ones winning the honor of being displayed more prominently than it’s rivals. Since it’s launch Urban Dictionary has become a good source for picking up cutting edge internet slang. At one point, IBM decided to upload the entire Urban Dictionary to their supercomputer Watson, but after the machine began swearing incessantly, the new lexicon was promptly removed. The Urban Dictionary has also become an unlikely battleground of sorts recently in the battle for men’s right’s. Several of the more controversial definitions such as misogynist, rape, feminism, and MRA have received popular definitions that many feminists do not approve of. It seems that not being content with ruining the Oxford English Dictionary, feminists have now set their sights on doing the same to the Urban Dictionary. But where it was much easier to make the Oxford English Dictionary kowtow with pressure from feminist in academia, the fight against Urban Dictionary won’t be that easily won.

Source: http://www.bodyforwife.com/mens-rights-activists-have-taken-over-urban-dictionary/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/26/dictionarygate-twitter-feminists-force-dictionary-to-review-sexist-definitions-of-nag-and-bossy/

Rape Victims Shouldn’t Like to Relive Their Rapes By Max Derrat

More famously known as Mattress Girl, Sulkowicz is back in the news, topping her past maniacal exploits. Originally, Sulkowicz proclaimed she was raped to her University, and when they decided that the evidence was against her (not that there was a lack of evidence, but that the available evidence was AGAINST HER) she proceeded to carry around a mattress for her senior year as a form of art and a form of protest. Then she did a video re-enactment of her rape online, titled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (French for “this is not a rape).

Now, she’s doing BDSM as performance art. At the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, she presented a piece called “The Ship is Sinking”. She describes her piece in her own words: “[I chose] to have a white man tie me up while wearing a business suit with a Whitney necktie, while I wear a Whitney ISP thong bikini.” “We’re acting out this sadistic-masochistic relationship between the institution with all of its financial power, and this program that wants to be political but can be really because it’s being tied up by this institution.”

As her performance started, the aforementioned white man, named Master Avery (who happened to be a professional dominatrix), started to insult Sulkowicz by saying things like, “Your boobs are too small”, and “You can’t even stand up straight.” He tied knots around several parts of her body for 45 minutes until she was completely tied up to a large wooden beam. Using a pulley system attached to the ceiling, she was lifted from the ground, purposefully trying to resemble the woman often seen at the front of a ship.

Then Master Avery started hitting her with a belt. Avery at one point asked if anybody wanted to participate, and one man from the audience volunteered. He proceeded to slap her across the face.

In respect to the purpose of her performance art, Sulkowicz said the following: “Historically, performance art has been a very important medium for women of color and queer people. There’s an accessibility to it, it’s the only art form that doesn’t cost money. Then there’s also that women, people of color, queer people, we live embodied history.” “My body already carries material in it just because of the way I look, it’s embedded in my skin. White men have the privilege of entire institutions built for their paintings… these paintings are very often abstract. You have people like Pollock splattering a bunch of shit and then saying it’s art. It doesn’t say anything political and in fact, that actual political statement it does say is: ‘I’m a white man and I can do whatever the fuck I want and make a ton of money off of it.”

Source: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mattress-girl-emma-sulkowicz-is-backand-channeling-her-rage-through-bdsm

ENOUGH With This Wonder Woman Bullshit By Max Derrat

You know that really innocuous, unimportant women-only Wonder Woman screening thing? People are apparently still talking about it for some reason, and it’s mostly because people are making so much out of it, on both sides.

One of the people fanning the flames of this intense reaction is Heat Street writer Stephen Miller. He bought a ticket to this “women-only” screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, New York, and posted a picture of his receipt on Twitter. He expressed a desire to not cause a scene, and replied the following to anybody expressing anger at his choice: “I’ll be enjoying the film with the ticket I purchased.” He also pointed out that kicking him out specifically on the grounds of sex or gender identity would be illegal. It doesn’t seem like Miller is doing this to make any positive statement. After all, in his Twitter feed, he constantly refers to the Wonder Woman movie as the “Chris Pine superhero movie.” To conclude, one Twitter user named @Bro_Pair wrote the following in response to this: “Some men lay down their lives battling white supremacists on the streets. Others demand admittance to the women-only Wonder Woman screening.” This is clearly in reference to last Friday’s Portland murders. The Daily Mail classified the murderer in this case as a self-avowed Nazi supporter, when minimal research concludes that any supposed ties to Nazi’s were disproven as false flags by the murderer to discredit Trump voters. Anybody else tired of this yet? Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4549842/Man-provokes-fury-ticket-women-WW-screening.html

Anti-Stealthing Law is Anti-Men By Mike J.

On May 16th, California assembly women Christina Garcia introduced a new rape law that would seek to punish the ill-defined and nearly unprovable act of “stealthing”. Stealthing, for those not in the know, is the act of intentionally removing or tampering with a condom during sexual intercourse. Stealthing, Christina Garcia argues, is just another form of rape. The problem with adding such a clearly flawed and biased addendum to the currently existing rape laws would be many. It would be very hard if not impossible to prove such a case as condoms can break due to improper usage or age. It creates the possibility for false allegations against men by women who have become pregnant by accident. It also says nothing on the topic of women who would tamper with contraceptives to become pregnant, despite a male sexual partners wishes. Assembly women Garcia is no stranger to pushing these ill-conceived amendments to current rape laws. In August of last year she helped pass an amendment that would make any form of an alleged non-consensual act be defined as rape. Sadly, this new law, like those before it, seems likely to pass given Governor Jerry Brown history with approving every new rape law amendment put through by congress.

Source: http://menslaws.com/index.php/2017/05/28/california-amend-rape-laws-target-men-stealthing/ https://a58.asmdc.org/press-releases/rape-definition-ca-include-stealthing http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB701

Scaring Sons Into Suicide By L Kemlo

An Illinois family is claiming a school discipline meeting scared their son into suicide. Corey Walgren, 16, jumped to his death in January, less than three hours after meeting with school officials and police at Naperville North High School.

The meeting was about an alleged cellphone recording of a consensual sexual encounter with a female classmate. Corey had no criminal history and had never been in serious trouble at school. Corey’s parents claim the school officials questioned him about “child pornography” and threatened to have him registered as a sex offender. According to the Chicago Tribune, Corey’s mother thinks the school wanted to scare him straight, “instead, they scared him to death.”

According to the Tribune it does not appear any pornographic images were found on the teen’s phone, but it did contain a file with audio of the sexual encounter. Apparently, the female classmate in the recording alleged that he may have played it for his friends. Records of the meeting show police did not intend to pursue charges, but wanted to handle the matter in a way that ensured Corey understood the seriousness of his actions and how it affected his classmate, who was described as “mortified” in the police report.

After the meeting, the school had contacted his mother but Corey left school grounds and walked to a nearby parking garage, where he jumped to his death. His parents plan to sue the school district and the police department.

Sources: http://nypost.com/2017/05/23/family-says-school-discipline-meeting-scared-son-into-committing-suicide/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-naperville-north-suicide-20170522-story.html

Check out the latest Honeybadgers episode.

[the-desolated-quill]

Iron Whitey, Doctor Yellowface And The Two Faced Critics Of Downtown Bollocksville - Quill's Scribbles

So... Didn’t see that one coming.

The upcoming Marvel Netflix TV show Iron Fist has received quite a pummelling from critics in early reviews. Most of the criticism centres around how slow and boring it apparently is, but others focus on the show’s controversial casting of Finn Jones in the title role and the ripple effects caused by it.

The Verge says that the show fails in a number of ways in regards to diversity, representation and appropriation, saying it’s hard to decouple the character’s whiteness from his elevated position.

Filmink.com says that the casting of an Asian American actor in the role would have helped to give the show its own identity. 

Uproxx describes Finn Jones as being miscast, coming across as ‘a befuddled surfer who wandered into the middle of a kung fu movie’.

Nerdist.com describes Iron Fist as illuminating where the industry still flounders regarding racial stereotypes and representation in media.

Variety questions why Marvel didn’t cast an actor of Asian descent in the role and accuses the show of cultural appropriation.

IGN.com remarks upon the controversy of the rich white guy finding enlightenment in the mysterious Far East trope.

At the moment I’m typing this, Iron Fist has a rating on Rotten Tomatoes (and this is true) of 0%.

Yep. Iron Fist looks set to be the worst thing ever to come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But on the plus side, it means the DCEU fandom can finally drop the Marvel Bias bullshit. See guys! The critics do say mean shit about Marvel! Are we finally ready to face reality and accept the fact that the critics talk shit about DC because they just don’t like your movies?

Now look. I’m not here to gloat. In fact kind of the opposite. A few people have been wondering why I haven’t been giving Iron Fist a hard time like I have been with Doctor Strange (which I’ve described numerous times as being objectively more racist than its source material). Well the reason is because Iron Fist hasn’t actually done anything wrong as far as I can see at this moment in time. 

With Doctor Strange, Marvel whitewashed a prominent Asian character and stripped the story of its Asian culture and influences before blatantly lying to our faces to justify their shitty behaviour, painting themselves as the unfortunate victims of political correctness in a pathetic attempt to cover their own arses. They essentially took an already racist comic book, made it even more racist and then effectively told us to eat shit and deal with it. What have Iron Fist done that we know of? They’ve cast a white actor as a white character. Now yes it would have been great if they cast an Asian actor in the role and I was very disappointed like everyone else, but at the end of the day, it’s their choice. They’re not in any way obliged to racebend a character. If they want to cast a white actor as a white character, they have every right to do that. The burden is now on them to make sure the show doesn't fall into the same traps as the comics did (the mighty whitey trope and Asian stereotyping). These reviews aren’t exactly filling me with confidence, but as ever I will reserve judgement until I’ve seen it for myself.

I’m not here to comment on whether Iron Fist deserves the negative reception its received. It could be a racist piece of shit for all I know. What I am here to talk about is the hypocrisy of the people criticising it. See if Iron Fist does turn out to be racist, it would be more down to ignorance rather than malice. The show has at least made an effort to cast Asian actors as Asian characters and has retained some of its Asian influences. The showrunner has also stated on the record that he’s aware of the problems with the comics and will do his best to correct them in the show. They’re clearly making a conscious effort not to offend people. What these reviews merely demonstrate is that pride cometh before a fall. The writers and showrunner thought they could do an Iron Fist TV series with a white lead that wasn’t racist and they apparently failed in spectacular fashion. The response should be less moral outrage and more of an indignant ‘I told you so’.

Basically what I’m saying is if you’re morally outraged by Iron Fist, you should be doubly outraged by Doctor Strange, whose crimes are demonstrably worse. At least the makers of Iron Fist were upfront about their intentions. At least they tried to respect the Asian community with their promises of avoiding the white saviour trope (whether they succeeded or not is another matter altogether). At least they didn’t whitewash any Asian characters or homogenise the culture they’re representing. In the MCU setup, Iron Fist is merely the problem child. Doctor Strange is the true villain that deserves our bile and hatred. The people who made Doctor Strange knew what they were doing was wrong, and yet they did it anyway.

So, based on a hunch, I decided to look into what those websites I listed above said about Doctor Strange. Because if they’re fuming about Iron Fist so much and thought that was racially insensitive, they should be set to explode by what Doctor Strange did, right? Well...

The Verge remains consistent, describing the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One as cultural whitewashing. The criticism for Iron Fist seems far harsher however.

Filmink.com doesn’t even mention the whitewashing and describes the film as exciting, entertaining, goofy and fun.

The Doctor Strange review on Uproxx doesn’t mention the whitewashing neither (nor even anything of substance), but there is another article talking about how dislikable Doctor Strange is as a character and that gives a passing mention to the whitewashing of the Ancient One and the mighty whitey trope.

Nerdist.com mentions the whitewashing, but doesn’t in any way condemn it. Instead praising Tilda Swinton for her performance and giving the filmmakers a figurative slap on the wrist for being naughty boys.

Variety heavily praises Tilda Swinton’s performance, dismissing the whitewashing controversy saying that they wish Swinton was the lead character.

IGN.com also dismisses the controversy saying that Swinton has a unique and ethereal presence, playing a serene and oh so powerful character.

Funny how they’re willing to label Iron Fist as racially insensitive as one of the reasons why they don’t like it, but with something like Doctor Strange, a film they either loved or were mildly indifferent to, they’re suddenly willing to turn a blind eye to its undeniable racism as though that suddenly isn’t relevant to the discussion. Talk about inconsistent.

I guess what I’m building up to is this. If you’re one of those critics who’s bashing Iron Fist for being racist and appropriating another culture and yet described the casting of a white woman as the Ancient One as being ‘subversive’ and ‘a massive step forward for female representation in films’, you can officially go and fuck yourselves. Same goes to all those people saying they’re going to boycott Iron Fist and yet for some reason had no problem paying money to watch Doctor Yellowface. Yeah, you can go fuck yourselves too. Who would have thought visual effects were all that’s needed to buy your loyalty (because that’s all I ever see praised about Doctor Strange. The visual effects. Not the story or the characters. Just the visual effects. It’s basically the cinematic equivalent of dangling your keys in front of a toddler’s face). I’m surprised you can even show your face here. If you’re mouthing off about Iron Fist (which could very well be deserved from what I’ve heard) and yet remained silent when Doctor Strange came along with its racism so obvious it might as well have had a big neon sign over it saying ‘Fuck You Asians’, go sit in the corner and don’t come back until you’ve grown some backbone, you hypocritical arsewipe.

...

Yeah. I don’t know how to end this, so... Go away.

[believermag]

Who Will Think of the Children?

Jim Knipfel on Satire and Children’s Books

This past September, the Abrams’ imprint Image, which specializes in illustrated and reference works, published a novelty book entitled Bad Little Children’s Books by the pseudonymous Arthur Gackley. The small hardcover, which itself quite deliberately resembled a little golden book, featured carefully-rendered and patently offensive parodies of classic children's book covers. Instead of happy, apple-cheeked tykes doing pleasant wholesome things, Gackley’s covers featured kids farting, puking, and using drugs. Others included children with dildoes and racially inflammatory portrayals of Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American youngsters. The book was clearly labeled a work of satire aimed at adults, and adults with a certain tolerance for bad taste and crass jokes.

Upon its initial release it received positive reviews and sold fairly well. Then in early December, a former librarian named Kelly Jensen posted an entry on Bookriot entitled “It’s Not Funny. It’s Racist.”  

“This kind of 'humor' is never acceptable,” Ms. Jensen wrote. “It’s deadly.”

Jensen’s rant circulated quickly across social media, and Abrams suddenly found itself besieged by attacks from the outraged and offended, who assailed Gackley for creating the book in the first place, and the Abrams editorial board for agreeing to publish it.

“There is a difference between ‘hate speech’ and free speech,” one outraged member of the kidlit comunity wrote on Facebook. “In the same way, you cannot yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater just because you feel like it. This book was in very bad, insulting, racist taste, and designed to look like a children's book. How is that a good idea? Children are too young to understand this as parody. If it's for adults, why is that even funny? Oh, I guess if you are a racist you would think it's funny.”

Another tweeted, “Sounds like something that should've been completely ignored and removed before it hit the shelves. Just because we have the freedom of speech, it can be taken way too far.”

Still another confused and enervated soul wrote, “Argue all that you want, but this particular book was for children yes? Or no? If it was, does that mean we should allow and subject young children to gratuitous violence, gore and pornography? And what age is it acceptable? Does this mean we have to start putting PG-14 on printed material and make it mandatory because certain writers can't conduct themselves with a moral scale?”

Another angry reader summed it up quite simply by posting, “Freedom is bullshit, literally.”

[Note: As much as possible, the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors which peppered the above posts have been corrected here for the sake of simple comprehensibility.]

Although Abrams initially stood by Gackley and the First Amendment right to offend, and had received the public support of several anti-censorship organizations, by December tenth the noise had simply grown too shrill. Mr. Gackley, maintaining to the end his intentions had been grossly misinterpreted, admitted there was no way to salvage things, and asked that Abrams not reprint the book. In a statement, Abrams announced they would be complying with his wishes. Although Bad Little Children’s Books was not banned in any official capacity, it had all but completely vanished from online booksellers within a few days after the announcement. Used copies, while available, are now selling for outrageous prices.

At the same time that this was happening, there were also calls to ban the (real) children’s books When We Was Fierce and A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The invented slang used in the former was interpreted as racist by some parent groups, and the latter was attacked for its historically inaccurate portrayal of the daily lives of slaves on Washington’s estate. Meanwhile, a mother in Tennessee led the call to pull Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from the local school system. The New York Times bestselling biography, which concerned a Baltimore woman whose massive cervical tumor had become the invaluable source of several generations worth of cell lines used by cancer researchers, was being taught in local high schools as a means of educating students both about cancer and about racial issues within the medical community. The Tennessee mother calling for its removal, however, found the book pornographic.

Point being, I guess, that certain sectors of the population harbor an insatiable, even desperate desire to be shocked and offended by something they’ve read, seen, or even heard about, and the drive to ban these things (made much easier with the advent of social media) will likely always be with us. But back to the Gackley for a moment. Reading through the enraged postings aimed at Abrams, a number of the offended make the point that they are not attempting to censor, but are merely exercising their own First Amendment right to criticize. That’s fine and understandable. But the crux of the matter is that these people would be much happier if the book never existed in the first place, and considered Abrams’ decision a glorious victory for their cause.

Let’s try to put it in some sort of semi-comprehensible historical context. Dark and occasionally tasteless adult-oriented satires of children’s books, television and toys have been with us about as long as media aimed specifically at the innocent set. We just can’t help ourselves. Present us with the doe-eyed lukewarm treacle of the Smurfs or Care Bears, and some of us will instinctively reach for a baseball bat. In the case of Bad Little Children’s Books, the outrage in many instances seems to be sparked less by the content than form, and the fear that the book might actually be mistaken for legitimate kidlit. So here are a handful of similar cases from the last half-century. While reactions and results differ wildly, a certain historical pattern does seem to emerge.

Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated feature Fritz the Cat, based on the R. Crumb character, became notorious overnight for being the first theatrically-released cartoon to receive an X rating from the MPAA. What people tend to forget is that the film received the distinction not on account of its sexual content, nor because it included characters who were overtly racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot. The real problem was the film featured cute and fuzzy animals who were racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot, and had sex. The MPAA board was afraid people would see the cartoon poster and stroll into the theater, family in tow, expecting the latest Disney opus. By modern standards the film should have received nothing more than an R rating, but the damning “adults only” designation was an effort to avoid any confusion. It didn’t matter. People saw the X rating and immediately concluded Bakshi had made a hardcore cartoon in a diabolical effort to corrupt the nation’s youth. Although the publicity attracted large audiences and earned the film an undeniable bit of underground cred, that same publicity did irreparable damage to Bakshi’s career. For decades afterward, even while trying to redeem himself with the family-friendly Mighty Mouse cartoon series for TV, he found himself labeled a racist, sexist pornographer determined to get America’s young people hooked on heroin—charges leveled at him mostly by people who had never seen Fritz the Cat.

Long before he won a Pulitzer for Maus and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, cartoonist Art Spiegelman spent twenty years working for the Topps trading card company. Among other things, he was one of the primary creative forces behind Topps' wildly popular and wickedly subversive Wacky Packages series, which satirized American consumer products. In 1985, Topps attempted to arrange a licensing deal to release a series of trading cards based on Cabbage Patch Dolls, which were all the rage at the time. Finding licensing fees had already gone through the roof, they decided instead to release a Wacky Packages-style parody. As it happened, an unreleased Wacky Packages design called Garbage Pail Kids was already on the boards, so they ran with it.

Spiegelman and the involved artists took the basic design of the cuddly and adorable plush dolls beloved by all the world and twisted them into deranged monstrosities covered in snot, vomit, oozing sores and bugs. From the moment they hit convenience store checkout counters, the GPK stickers were outrageously popular. Although some school systems banned them as an unwelcome distraction and more than a few parents were mortified and disgusted that any sick individual would do such a horrible thing to something so innocent and cuddly, there was no organized grassroots effort to censor the stickers on moral grounds. Topps' only real trouble came in the form of a copyright infringement suit filed by the Cabbage Patch Dolls’ creators, Original Appalachian Artworks, Inc.

Topps’ argument that what they were doing was clear and obvious parody (and therefore protected under the First Amendment) didn’t quite cut it. The suit was settled out of court, with Topps agreeing to alter the Garbage Pail Kids logo and basic character design so as to avoid any possible confusion with the original dolls. The stickers continued to come out, and went on to inspire an animated television series, a feature film, a book and an unholy array of merchandise ranging from trash cans to sunglasses. In the end, it could easily be argued that over time the Garbage Pail Kids had more of a lasting impact on the culture than their inspiration.

Struwwelpeter was first published in Germany in 1845. The cautionary and terrifying collection of nursery rhymes (with graphic accompanying illustrations to drive the point home) warned children that if they sucked their thumnbs, didn’t eat their dinner, didn’t clean themselves up properly, mistreated their pets or threw tantrums, a horrible fate awaited them. The book became a standard instructional volume in most German households with young children. In 1898, a similar but decidedly British version was released in England under the title Shockheaded Peter, and was nearly as popular. Nobody it seemed thought much about presenting naughty children with images of potential disfigurement or death. The book helped keep the little buggers in line.

In 1999, American indie publisher Feral House released a gorgeous new edition of Struwwelpeter, complete with new illustrations, interpretive and historical essays, and assorted bowdlerized and satirical versions of the nursery rhymes which had appeared over the years. Feral House, which had always prided itself on publishing dangerous and controversial works, soon found this simple history and analysis of a once popular if disturbing children’s book could be just as troublesome as their books by notorious British serial killer Ian Brady or the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey.

“Yes, we had minor trouble with Struwwelpeter,” says Feral House founder and publisher Adam Parfrey.  “But most of that was put to rest when bookstores simply refused to carry the book. I guess 21st century Americans are more touchy than the Germans of yore. For a while, a couple chains and many independent bookstores stopped carrying the Anton LaVey books we published after Geraldo Rivera put on those sensationalist programs about Satanism... I credit Marilyn Manson for putting an end to that crap. After he spoke out about it, so many people went into bookstores to order them that the stores saw best to get them back into their shops. Time passed, and the crazy ideas receded.”

Parfrey also sees a potential connection between the backlash Abrams suffered over Bad Little Children’s Books and the present brouhaha over what has been termed “fake news.”

“Right now there’s a good bit of madness going on with Trump-loving crazies, including Alex Jones and Infowars building up this idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are torturing and killing children…and they’re pointing at Marina Abramović, too. That’s a big deal on Facebook at this instant. And anyone who poo-poos this story is being accused of covering up kiddie killing. I can see how this sort of madness can amplify into the book trade, a situation where parodies are mistaken for outright kiddie torture. Sad, isn’t it?”

As a final example, in 2010 Simon and Schuster published my book These Children Who Come at You With Knives, a collection of darkly comic fairy tales aimed at adults. Across roughly a dozen stories written in traditional fairy tale formats (though with more cursing, gratuitous gore, and uncontrolled bodily functions), assorted anthropomorphized animals, magical creatures, human children, the elderly and the dull-witted come to various terrible ends. The book received decent reviews and publicity, but there was no outcry, no controversy, and no one insisted the book be banned in order to protect the innocent. Meaning, of course, that I didn’t sell millions as a result of the hoo-hah.  Christ, I’ve even heard from people who use them as bedtime stories for their own kids. Dammit! What the hell did I do wrong?

I think I made two deadly mistakes. First, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my publisher decided to release the book without illustrations, meaning it could never possibly be confused with an actual children’s book. More devastating still, I was cursed with bad timing. These Children Who Come at You With Knives was released halfway through President Obama’s first term, and while there was certainly a good deal of rancor in the air, satire was still a viable form and accepted as such, at least among the literate. 

In different eras and in different ways, all the above examples were damned by a public inflicting its own preconceived notions upon works of obvious satire, insisting they be what the public believed them to be instead of what they actually were. 

By the time Bad little Children’s Books was released, the world had become too ridiculous, too absurd, and as a result we lost our sense of humor. There was simply no longer any way to lampoon our chosen leaders or our own insecurities, with the world itself poised and ready to top us at every turn. In short, the book’s publication coincided with the precise moment satire breathed its last, meaning readers had no choice but to take Gackley’s work, as Parfrey points out, at face value. Lucky bastard.

Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.

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6 Ways Movies Fool You Into Ignoring Bad Reviews

Terrible movies will always exist. They’re one of those unavoidable annoyances, like stubbing your toe or getting picked last during an orgy. Unfortunately, even when knowingly faced with a dud, studios still have to pretend they’re sitting on the Holy Grail of eye-blasting family entertainment — at least for the duration of the marketing.

So how does one polish a brawny turd in an age when resources like Rotten Tomatoes have made the average moviegoer hyper-aware of mediocrity? It’s not easy. And in a way, the ability to spin a piece of terrible entertainment as the next big Star War is an art in itself. Only instead of ink and light, these modern-day Rembrandts (had Rembrandt gone to Emerson and was nicknamed “The Donk”) are painting with beautiful lies.

6

Shitty Films Have Used “Joke” Reviews In Their Ads

Film studios want nothing more than the power to write their own reviews … something Sony actually got caught doing back in 2001, when it was revealed that fake quotes from a nonexistent critic named David Manning were used to praise masterpieces like The Animal and Hollow Man — the latter film featuring invisible gorillas and Kevin Bacon’s CGI dick muscles.

It was a ruse that would end up costing the studio over a million dollars in lawsuits, and so no other studio attempted such a blatant teabagging of the public’s trust. Instead, they did find a way to more gently dab our foreheads with technically-legal jest: They use fake critics under the excuse of “humor.”

Take the recent Lynchian abomination that was Nine Lives, a film about a rich and powerful Kevin Spacey being turned into a cat via Christopher Walken voodoo. The movie features all the things we’ve come to expect from a children’s film, such as existential torture, a cat getting drunk, and a fucking suicide fakeout. Needless to say, critics weren’t on board with it. And so TV spots opted to sprinkle the feline romp with hilarious joke reviews from places like “Vanity Fur,” “Meowsweek,” and the “Catfington Post.”

It’s exactly the kind of incredible wordplay you’d expect from this film about cat possession. And while there’s nothing wrong with including bullshit pun reviews as a joke, when you watch the ad in real time, it becomes apparent that chucklefuckery wasn’t the only motivation.

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That’s right, each “review” flashed on screen for a nano-second while the voiceover quoted the fake praise without any context. Meaning that unless you paused your television, most people watching had no idea it wasn’t really a quote from Vanity Fair. But if anyone calls them out on their colossal horseshit (like right now), the producers are able to shrug and say it was all in good fun. It must be a coincidence that the only other film to use this technique was the exhausting Vampire’s Suck — a spoof “comedy” which, according to ads, were given standing ovations by such critics as “Hugh Jass” and “Oliver Klozoffe.” Jesus, you guys, could you at least think of bad vampire puns for your terrible film, like David Edelstake or Gene Siskill? It would have only taken a minute.

5

Studios Use (Misquoted) Reviews From Total Randos On The Internet

If incredulously scrolling Rotten Tomatoes fan reviews have taught me anything, it’s that audiences tend to be way more forgiving of shitty movies than critics. You could argue that critics are heartless pedants soured by their own career failures, or maybe accept that it’s possible to enjoy a film that also happens to be garbage. There are no villains here, but the important takeaway is that critics are hired and respected because most of them are able to judge a film from an objective perspective. This is why studios put their quotes on posters and trailers instead of those of some random jerk on Twitter, right?

Oh no. Turns out that’s no longer the case. It seems anyone can be a prestigious movie critic now, even @zoidberg95 talking about the unbridled joy King Arthur brings him. This isn’t an isolated incident by a long shot, as evidenced by the recent pullquote in the trailer for Broken City, a Mark Wahlberg film with a 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sure, we can all agree that Mark Wahlberg is “bad ass” in the sense that assaulting a middle-aged Vietnamese man is both “bad” and an “ass” thing to do. And sure, there’s nothing technically wrong with giving the man on the street a voice of support. But here’s the thing: According to the source of that quote, he hadn’t seen the film. The studio used a tweet made about an entirely different Mark Wahlberg performance and used it in their ad. And they are somehow allowed to do this as long as they ask the author of the tweet beforehand. That’s it. There are no qualifications or confirmations beyond a polite message and digital contract.

Thanks to the crowdsourcing power of the internet, you can literally find anyone who is into any crazy thing. Studios know this, and are able to make a film seem like it has word-of-mouth appeal by scraping the bottom of the Twitter barrel to find faceless folks saying the right things. Or failing that, they find faceless folks saying the wrong thing and simply make it seem like they said the right thing.

After Batman v. Superman‘s Twitter account told us about the high praises of @raniaresh, someone pointed out that the now-banned account was only an egg icon with the profile: “I did NOT enjoy Batman v Superman.” The tweet was then pulled and replaced with yet another rando with the same basic praise.

Notice how it’s the same reworded “whoa my mind = blown” quote, only now attributed to someone else? Warner Bros. didn’t care where they were getting the quote; they just wanted some vague sentence calling their disjointed film “mind-blowing.” Chances are they tasked some hungover intern to scour social media for any kind of evidence of exploding brains and slap that shit on a promo shot, regardless of who said those words or what context they were said in.

But if you think this dirty process is safe from critics, you are not correct …

4

Advertising Perpetually Cherry-Picks Critic Quotes To Make Them Seem Positive

Writers write a lot of words, and it’s pretty easy to change what those words mean if you only take a few of them. For example, I earlier described the plot of Nine Lives as “rich and powerful,” if you ignore everything around those two adjectives. In the way Rock Bottom can turn Homer Simpson into a pervert, so too can studios make terrible reviews seem complimentary. For example, this glowing phrase about Rock Of Ages from a Guardian reporter …

… was in truth pulled from a one-star review quote: “It’s a very peculiar show indeed, with an unvarying and unpleasant tone of careless sexualisation. Rock’n’roll debauchery is presented as the pure and innocent way of dreamers.”

Seriously, they fucking did that. And the reviewer in question wasn’t too happy about it at all. And amazingly, this isn’t the only time The Guardian‘s deep disdain was twisted into cheerful praise, like a laughing clown puppet made from a child’s corpse. Check out this poster for Legend and its collection of four-star reviews:

Except that Guardian review in the middle? It’s a two-star review they made to look like four stars that had been obstructed. That’s honestly hilarious and brilliant and hard to be mad at, but the act of taking someone’s out-of-context words and slapping them on your poster or DVD case can go from cute trolling to downright infuriating very fast.

For example, the movie Accidental Love (which has a flatlining 6 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) underwent a horrendous production which resulted in a cobbled-together shitcircus disowned by its director. When reviewing it, The AV Club noted that the original version probably wasn’t all that great either, saying “there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.”

And then this:

Yeah, that’s the back of Accidental Love‘s DVD case using The AV Club’s unfavorable description of a (still better) hypothetical movie as their review quote. You can imagine how that kind of insidious tangle of bull angered the original writer … or you can read his response here.

It comes down to this: Never trust a review quoted on a movie’s promotional material. Ever. The only information you’re getting is that those combination of words were somewhere in the writing, but in no way were they necessarily meant to describe the movie being advertised. Which puts a whole new light on posters like this:

3

TV Networks Will Misspell Their Shows’ Names To Avoid Bad Ratings

In the age of streaming, being a TV executive has the life expectancy of a docile classroom hamster. Their entire job can be summed up by a picture of a stargazing dinosaur on a suspiciously bright night. It’s totally understandable that networks would claw and gouge their way to profit in these uncertain times, and yet their sleazy resourcefulness still manages to surprise even me, an undercover diamond thief working the long con as a internet writer who broadcasts his diabolical intent all across the land.

To quickly set this up, you have to understand the Nielsen ratings. Every show undergoes the same measurement using a sample audience being monitored for what TV shows they watch. That data is calculated into a rating for each show, and the ratings are averaged into monthly or quarterly reports. Advertisers then look at these reports and decide what time slots to buy for their sexy burger or cartoon shitting bear commercials. Therefore, a show with a better average will get more money for advertising. With me still? It’s all a big wet fart of intrigue for your average consumer, which means few people pay attention to Nielsen ratings. But once you start to read daily reports on TV industry sites, you’ll start to notice something bizarre in the footnotes:

That’s right, in what seems like playground-level cheating, television networks can deliberately change or misspell their own shows if they anticipate bad ratings for that night. By doing this, that episode won’t be calculated into the shows’ overall averages, and their quarterly ratings won’t go down. And so shows like NBC Nightly News become “NBC Nitely News,” so that marketers don’t pull that sweet, sweet commercial dough.

How could such obvious semantic trickery go unchallenged? Well, it turns out you can do all sorts of amazing hogwash with human language. Ever heard of the show Bull? It’s a CBS courtroom drama co-created by, and inspired by, the life of Dr. Phil which exists for some unimaginable reason. It also airs something called “encore” episodes every now and then.

That’s not just the wording of the article, but the official CBS classification of a repeat episode of Bull. You see, a show’s ratings are calculated based not only on their first run, but also on (typically lower) rerun ratings. But if you call your rerun an “encore” episode, then it doesn’t get categorized with the original episode, thus avoiding a lower score. Yep, apparently you can change the words of things to completely redefine their importance, like calling bags of Funyuns under a co-worker’s desk “diamonds” and then telling everyone you’re a “jewel thief.”

2

When In Doubt, Simply Block Critics From Reviewing It Ahead Of Time

It’s the perfect crime. Critics can’t say your game or movie sucks if they can’t see it. So studios will simply prevent critics from seeing their work before it comes out. It’s like throwing bleach in your date’s eyes so they won’t know how ugly you are. And while sounding excruciatingly transparent, this technique works way more often than you think. It’s called an embargo, and it’s what Ubisoft did before Assassin’s Creed Unity, which ultimately received lukewarm reviews for being breathtakingly glitch-filled. Like, so glitchy it was a work of sinister art — like something the Joker would conjure up.

Ubisoft “How am I supposed to enjoy a carefree romp of clandestine murder after THIS?!”

Unfortunately for gamers, those reviews only came in after the midnight release — as ordered by Ubisoft when they first sent their early copies out. But it could be worse. You could go a step further, like Wild Games Studios did when they trolled through YouTube sticking copyright violations on any video which spoke badly of their new release. Or Sega, which used the same tactic to shut down bad YouTube reviews that didn’t even contain footage from their games.

In the end, this technique usually causes a huge and understandable backlash, on account of YouTubers being wicked blabbermouths about such injustices. But critic embargoes are so common that they’re considered normal. And most often, this isn’t nefarious at all, but rather a measure against premature spoilers or judgments before a film is locked down in post. Only every once in a while is this tool used to cover up true garbage. Pungent, salty garbage — the kind you can taste through your nose. Like, I’m talking alien-chasing-a-school-bus-driven-by-Judd-Hirsch level of garbage here.

Independence Day: Resurgence is a film I happen to enjoy that is also objectively terrible. And 20th Century Fox knew it was terrible, hence their American critic embargo lasted up until the day it was released — causing most audiences to buy a ticket without knowing its quality. Similar measures, which include completely skipping press screenings altogether, have happened for similarly bad work like Alien Vs. Predator and the G.I. Joe films.

Yes, you could argue that these films “weren’t meant for critics,” as a lot of executives often say. But that’s kind of like saying an apartment complex “isn’t meant for safety inspectors” or that your basement “isn’t meant for homicide detectives.” People deserve to know in advance if something sucks. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still enjoy it or flock to see it. And if all else fails, you can always do what China does and completely circumvent the pesky audience altogether …

1

China Will Hold “Ghost Screenings” To Make Films Look More Popular

As previously mentioned, China is quickly becoming the dominating money-maker for blockbusters. So it stands to reason that the country would also become the industry leader for blatantly fudging a movie’s popularity. But instead of relying on embargoes or misleading ads, Chinese studios have taken a much more direct approach: just buying tickets to the movie they made.

The Wall Street Journal “‘Best thing to ever happen to movies!’ raved one translucent women in a bloodstained Victorian wedding dress.”

It’s as brilliant as it is illegal. Instead of pouring money into television spots and bus stop posters, simply use that marketing money to buy out theater showings, and watch the popularity snowball. And to ensure profit, those purchased tickets can then be resold online to discount ticket retailers. It’s like stealing your own car for the insurance, and then selling that stolen car for a second profit.

Unfortunately for those cheating marketers, I wouldn’t be writing about this if people didn’t figure out it was happening. Ghost screenings were recently brought to light thanks to the film Ip Man 3, a martial arts biopic which bafflingly includes Mike Tyson playing an evil property developer who ends up fighting the hero in an epic battle of kung-fu vs. boxing vs. child endangerment.

Pegasus Motion Pictures Why this movie felt the need to artificially inflate its popularity is beyond me.

After the film’s release, a local news site posted screenshots of theater websites claiming to have sold-out screenings for showings that started within ten minutes of each other … in the same auditorium. Meaning that, save for some kind of multiple-dimension scenario caused by Mike Tyson punching time itself, someone was brazenly cheating in the laziest way possible.

When The Wall Street Journal dug deeper, they found it to be a regular (albeit short-term) strategy for film distributors to buy out fake screenings in the hope that sold-out shows would encourage audiences to assume the film is popular and therefore go see it themselves. It’s not very imaginative, but if studios were more creative, they wouldn’t need to do all the bullshit on this list to begin with.

David is a writer and editor for this very website that you currently read. You can follow him on Twitter.

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[breakingtheglasses]

Scaring Sons Into Suicide – Polecat Cast 115

Mattress Girl returns! Urban Dictionary! Wonder Woman! All this and more on this week’s Polecat Cast!

Show Notes:

Urban Warfare By Mike J.

Founded in 1999, the website Urban Dictionary has served as little more than a fun way to waste. The site allows users to add and define words or phrases, some of which more contemporary dictionaries wouldn’t dare touch. Other users then vote up or vote down these newly defined words with the highest voted ones winning the honor of being displayed more prominently than it’s rivals. Since it’s launch Urban Dictionary has become a good source for picking up cutting edge internet slang. At one point, IBM decided to upload the entire Urban Dictionary to their supercomputer Watson, but after the machine began swearing incessantly, the new lexicon was promptly removed. The Urban Dictionary has also become an unlikely battleground of sorts recently in the battle for men’s right’s. Several of the more controversial definitions such as misogynist, rape, feminism, and MRA have received popular definitions that many feminists do not approve of. It seems that not being content with ruining the Oxford English Dictionary, feminists have now set their sights on doing the same to the Urban Dictionary. But where it was much easier to make the Oxford English Dictionary kowtow with pressure from feminist in academia, the fight against Urban Dictionary won’t be that easily won.

Source: http://www.bodyforwife.com/mens-rights-activists-have-taken-over-urban-dictionary/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/ http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/26/dictionarygate-twitter-feminists-force-dictionary-to-review-sexist-definitions-of-nag-and-bossy/

Rape Victims Shouldn’t Like to Relive Their Rapes By Max Derrat

More famously known as Mattress Girl, Sulkowicz is back in the news, topping her past maniacal exploits. Originally, Sulkowicz proclaimed she was raped to her University, and when they decided that the evidence was against her (not that there was a lack of evidence, but that the available evidence was AGAINST HER) she proceeded to carry around a mattress for her senior year as a form of art and a form of protest. Then she did a video re-enactment of her rape online, titled Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol (French for “this is not a rape).

Now, she’s doing BDSM as performance art. At the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, she presented a piece called “The Ship is Sinking”. She describes her piece in her own words: “[I chose] to have a white man tie me up while wearing a business suit with a Whitney necktie, while I wear a Whitney ISP thong bikini.” “We’re acting out this sadistic-masochistic relationship between the institution with all of its financial power, and this program that wants to be political but can be really because it’s being tied up by this institution.”

As her performance started, the aforementioned white man, named Master Avery (who happened to be a professional dominatrix), started to insult Sulkowicz by saying things like, “Your boobs are too small”, and “You can’t even stand up straight.” He tied knots around several parts of her body for 45 minutes until she was completely tied up to a large wooden beam. Using a pulley system attached to the ceiling, she was lifted from the ground, purposefully trying to resemble the woman often seen at the front of a ship.

Then Master Avery started hitting her with a belt. Avery at one point asked if anybody wanted to participate, and one man from the audience volunteered. He proceeded to slap her across the face.

In respect to the purpose of her performance art, Sulkowicz said the following: “Historically, performance art has been a very important medium for women of color and queer people. There’s an accessibility to it, it’s the only art form that doesn’t cost money. Then there’s also that women, people of color, queer people, we live embodied history.” “My body already carries material in it just because of the way I look, it’s embedded in my skin. White men have the privilege of entire institutions built for their paintings… these paintings are very often abstract. You have people like Pollock splattering a bunch of shit and then saying it’s art. It doesn’t say anything political and in fact, that actual political statement it does say is: ‘I’m a white man and I can do whatever the fuck I want and make a ton of money off of it.”

Source: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/mattress-girl-emma-sulkowicz-is-backand-channeling-her-rage-through-bdsm

ENOUGH With This Wonder Woman Bullshit By Max Derrat

You know that really innocuous, unimportant women-only Wonder Woman screening thing? People are apparently still talking about it for some reason, and it’s mostly because people are making so much out of it, on both sides.

One of the people fanning the flames of this intense reaction is Heat Street writer Stephen Miller. He bought a ticket to this “women-only” screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, New York, and posted a picture of his receipt on Twitter. He expressed a desire to not cause a scene, and replied the following to anybody expressing anger at his choice: “I’ll be enjoying the film with the ticket I purchased.” He also pointed out that kicking him out specifically on the grounds of sex or gender identity would be illegal. It doesn’t seem like Miller is doing this to make any positive statement. After all, in his Twitter feed, he constantly refers to the Wonder Woman movie as the “Chris Pine superhero movie.” To conclude, one Twitter user named @Bro_Pair wrote the following in response to this: “Some men lay down their lives battling white supremacists on the streets. Others demand admittance to the women-only Wonder Woman screening.” This is clearly in reference to last Friday’s Portland murders. The Daily Mail classified the murderer in this case as a self-avowed Nazi supporter, when minimal research concludes that any supposed ties to Nazi’s were disproven as false flags by the murderer to discredit Trump voters. Anybody else tired of this yet? Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4549842/Man-provokes-fury-ticket-women-WW-screening.html

Anti-Stealthing Law is Anti-Men By Mike J.

On May 16th, California assembly women Christina Garcia introduced a new rape law that would seek to punish the ill-defined and nearly unprovable act of “stealthing”. Stealthing, for those not in the know, is the act of intentionally removing or tampering with a condom during sexual intercourse. Stealthing, Christina Garcia argues, is just another form of rape. The problem with adding such a clearly flawed and biased addendum to the currently existing rape laws would be many. It would be very hard if not impossible to prove such a case as condoms can break due to improper usage or age. It creates the possibility for false allegations against men by women who have become pregnant by accident. It also says nothing on the topic of women who would tamper with contraceptives to become pregnant, despite a male sexual partners wishes. Assembly women Garcia is no stranger to pushing these ill-conceived amendments to current rape laws. In August of last year she helped pass an amendment that would make any form of an alleged non-consensual act be defined as rape. Sadly, this new law, like those before it, seems likely to pass given Governor Jerry Brown history with approving every new rape law amendment put through by congress.

Source: http://menslaws.com/index.php/2017/05/28/california-amend-rape-laws-target-men-stealthing/ https://a58.asmdc.org/press-releases/rape-definition-ca-include-stealthing http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB701

Scaring Sons Into Suicide By L Kemlo

An Illinois family is claiming a school discipline meeting scared their son into suicide. Corey Walgren, 16, jumped to his death in January, less than three hours after meeting with school officials and police at Naperville North High School.

The meeting was about an alleged cellphone recording of a consensual sexual encounter with a female classmate. Corey had no criminal history and had never been in serious trouble at school. Corey’s parents claim the school officials questioned him about “child pornography” and threatened to have him registered as a sex offender. According to the Chicago Tribune, Corey’s mother thinks the school wanted to scare him straight, “instead, they scared him to death.”

According to the Tribune it does not appear any pornographic images were found on the teen’s phone, but it did contain a file with audio of the sexual encounter. Apparently, the female classmate in the recording alleged that he may have played it for his friends. Records of the meeting show police did not intend to pursue charges, but wanted to handle the matter in a way that ensured Corey understood the seriousness of his actions and how it affected his classmate, who was described as “mortified” in the police report.

After the meeting, the school had contacted his mother but Corey left school grounds and walked to a nearby parking garage, where he jumped to his death. His parents plan to sue the school district and the police department.

Sources: http://nypost.com/2017/05/23/family-says-school-discipline-meeting-scared-son-into-committing-suicide/ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-naperville-north-suicide-20170522-story.html

New Honey Badger stuff

[the-desolated-quill]

Oh Finn - Quill’s Scribbles

Believe it or not, I really don’t want to keep talking about Iron Fist. I honestly don’t give two shits either way at the moment. I wasn’t all that interested when I first heard about the show and when I heard about all the criticism it was getting, I just went ‘oh that’s a shame’ and just carried on with my day.

In fact, to my own surprise, I’ve kind of been acting like the voice of reason, trying to tell everybody to step back and get some perspective. I’ve already ranted about how hypocritical the critics are for saying how racist Iron Fist is whilst still pledging their support for Doctor Strange, a movie that’s committed far more heinous acts in its production than Iron Fist has. And I can’t help but give a disapproving stare to those Tumblr users out there who are using the same stick they used to beat Doctor Strange with to beat Iron Fist even though the circumstances for both are drastically different.

Let’s just go over the facts again. Unlike Doctor Strange, Iron Fist hasn’t whitewashed any Asian characters, the writers are attempting to depict Asian culture and they have also expressed an awareness of the many problems with the source material and have vowed to fix it. While yes, it’s disappointing that they didn’t pick an Asian actor for the role, as I seem to have to keep reminding people again and again, they’re not in any way obliged to do so. Iron Fist is canonically white. They could racebend the character if they wanted to, (and to their credit they did audition Asian actors for the role, so they were clearly open minded to the possibility), but if they want to go with the white guy, that’s their prerogative. Now the pressure is on them to make sure the character and the show doesn’t fall into the same traps as the comics. 

The only crime Iron Fist has committed is that the writers thought they could have their cake and eat it too. They thought they had the skill and talent to make a show with a white Iron Fist that wasn’t racist and they apparently fucked it up. Would an Asian Iron Fist have solved all the problems? Not necessarily as some of the criticisms include rubbish fight scenes and a dull, plodding storyline. But other criticisms, such as the mighty whitey trope and the show’s lack of a unique identity, would have been addressed simply by racebending the lead.

That was my stance regarding the show. That could very well change if the show’s star, Finn Jones, doesn’t put a sock in it at some point over the next couple of days.

There are two ways to handle criticism. Quietly absorb everything that’s been said and consider bearing them in mind for future projects, or dismiss it all and angrily scream and shout into the void about how nobody can understand your genius. Finn Jones is very much in the latter. He’s been very vocal in his defence of the show, which is understandable to a certain extent. It’s never easy to hear criticism about something you’ve put a lot of hard work and effort into, especially when that criticism is overwhelmingly negative, but Finn Jones’ ‘defence’ displays an ignorant and borderline offensive attitude that I find quite appalling.

He started off with the usual trite defence (usually reserved as the DCEU’s go-to excuse) of that the show was made ‘for the fans.’ One teeny, tiny problem with that. The hardcore fans only represent a tiny portion of the viewership. It’s the casual viewers you have to pull in and if the show is as racially insensitive as some are suggesting, the casual viewers will twig it straight away. Also that’s a bit insulting to the fans, isn’t it? He’s basically implying that the fans should hold it to a lower standard than everyone else and should just be grateful for what they’ve got. David Ayer didn’t get away with that bullshit with Suicide Squad and we’re not falling for it now.

In an interview with the Metro UK, Finn Jones also said that the show wasn’t made for critics, saying that:

“…some of the reviews we saw were seeing the show through a very specific lens, and I think when the fans of the Marvel Netflix world and fans of the comic books view the show through the lens of just wanting to enjoy a superhero show, then they will really enjoy what they see”.

Okay first of all, what the fuck is he talking about? No show is made specifically for critics and of course they’re watching it through a particular lens. They’re critics. That’s what they do. They criticise. He’s basically angry because the critics have done what their job requires them to do. Second, that argument is total bullshit because if the problem is that the critics can’t sit back and enjoy a superhero show, how come they had no problem enjoying Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage? What’s so special about Iron Fist that the critics don’t seem to get it? In fact the main criticism of the show is that it’s not special at all. That it’s actually derivative of a lot of better superhero properties out there at the moment. Which seems more likely Finn Jones? That critics can’t seem to wrap their head around a TV show that’s apparently so dull and uninspired that it seems to have borrowed a lot of its ideas from TV Tropes, or that your show is total rubbish?

Then of course there’s been the much publicised Twitter debate between Finn Jones and creative director Asyiqin Haron from Geeks Of Colour. He said that representation was important and that Iron Fist is socially progressive and celebratory of different cultures whilst remaining true to the source material. Haron responded by saying that an Asian Iron Fist would have made an even greater impact, and asked whether Finn Jones was even aware of how problematic a white Iron Fist potentially is. He responded by saying that the show explores those problematic elements and, when pressed further, he did the sensible and mature thing of deleting his Twitter account. Cue an onslaught of online hate accusing Haron of bullying even though all she did was ask some very blunt and pointed questions. She did not resort to foul language or personal attacks and by questioning him actually revealed how ignorant and hypocritical his thoughts on diversity were.

Jones eventually returned to Twitter and released the following statement:

“There is a huge benefit to engage and help shape conversations on social media, especially when it comes to giving a voice to social matters. My original intention was to amplify a speech made by Riz Ahmed at the House of Commons. It was a very articulate and important speech on representation that I wholly agreed with. After posting I was inundated by people accusing me of not being allowed to share his voice based on an assumption that our show is going to play into the problems of racial inequality on screen.  I engaged politely, diplomatically and attempted to bridge the divide. I’m currently in the middle of filming and I need to stay focused on bringing to life this character without judgment, so I decided to remove myself from twitter for the time being.

I am very proud of the work everyone has done on this series and I’m excited for people to see how we’ve adapted the story. We have gone to great lengths to represent a diverse cast with an intelligent, socially progressive storyline. I hope people can watch the show before making judgments. In times, as divisive as these, we need to stay unified, compassionate and understanding in our differences.”

Yes. He just wanted to engage and help shape conversations on social media and was attempting to bridge the divide… only to then cut the conversation off entirely and thus strengthen the divide further because he couldn’t handle somebody questioning his progressive brilliance.

As the criticism continued, Jones started to become more and more vocal to the point where he even started to lose his cool. In an interview with Vulture, Jones claimed that people needed to ‘chill the fuck out’. How he doesn’t understand how people can be frustrated at something when they haven’t seen the product yet (ignoring the fact that the critics have already seen the product, hence the frustration), that Iron Fist is one of the most diverse shows he’s ever worked on and he doesn’t understand why it’s being picked on (again ignoring the fact that if he took the time to actually read the criticism instead of bitching like an infant, he’ll have realised that the critics have actually explained what the problems are on numerous occasions). When the interviewer attempted to move on from the subject, Jones said:

“C'mon, let’s get angry at the real fucking injustices in the world, yeah? The real problems in the world. Not just in television. There’s some real shit happening in the world right now that people need to get angry about. Let’s get angry about that. Not just a TV show that hasn’t even aired yet, you know?”

Ah that old chestnut. Look just because you don’t care about Asian representation in the media doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. For someone who claims to want to give voice to social matters, you certainly seem to spend a lot of time dismissing social matters the moment they’re voiced.

And just when you thought Finn Jones couldn’t sink any lower, in an interview with the RadioTimes, this happened:

“I’m playing a white American billionaire superhero, at a time when the white American billionaire archetype is public enemy number one, especially in the US. We filmed the show way before Trump’s election, and I think it’s very interesting to see how that perception, now that Trump’s in power, how it makes it very difficult to root for someone coming from white privilege, when that archetype is public enemy number one.”

Oh yeah. You’re reading this correctly. Apparently the reason why people don’t like Iron Fist is because of Donald Trump.

Well this is a first. I never thought I’d be defending Donald Trump. As tempting as it is, you can’t blame him for all your problems sweetheart. Aside from the fact that nobody has expressed similar thoughts in response to Batman or Iron Man or even Arrow, and that the cry for an Asian Iron Fist started long before President Drumpf was elected, nobody has said nor has ever said that the white billionaire or even white people in general are ‘public enemy number one’. People are just understandably frustrated because it’s 2017 and they’re still having to fight tooth and nail for representation in the media. Yes Iron Fist is canonically white, but this could have been an opportunity to dispense with the white billionaire archetype altogether and have our first mainstream Asian superhero. That’s an opportunity you’ve robbed them of Finn Jones and it’s something you seem to be medically incapable of wrapping your head around. Regardless of our individual views on Trump, if you’ve gotten so desperate to defend your show that you’re blaming the President of the United States, you need a fucking time out.

Finn Jones is clearly in a state of rather aggressive denial, pointing the finger at everyone but the people responsible for this shitshow, namely the filmmakers. See up until now, I was prepared to extend an olive branch to Iron Fist. They seemed to have honest intentions and all it would have taken to get people back on their side was a simple apology a few months down the line and a promise to take the criticism onboard and fix the issues for Season 2 (assuming Season 2 is even going to happen after all of this). Instead Finn Jones is let off the leash and his delusional ramblings are at serious risk of damaging the show further. I’ve noticed that Marvel and the showrunner have kept deathly quiet about all of this. What am I supposed to read into that? Is Finn Jones’ pathetic excuses just the opinions of one ignorant prick or are they indicative of the entire BTS crew?

The more vocal Finn Jones gets, the more ignorant he’s shown to be and the more it hurts the show he’s trying to defend. He’s basically digging his own grave and pulling Iron Fist down on top of him. People like myself who were prepared to show sympathy are now starting to get turned off because if the lead star is this fucking deluded and clueless about the issues surrounding this show, maybe what the critics are saying have some weight to them after all.

So for your own sake, as well as the sake of Iron Fist and the fans that you claim to respect, do us all a favour Finn Jones.

SHUT THE FUCK UP!

[trendingnewsb]

6 Ways Movies Fool You Into Ignoring Bad Reviews

Terrible movies will always exist. They’re one of those unavoidable annoyances, like stubbing your toe or getting picked last during an orgy. Unfortunately, even when knowingly faced with a dud, studios still have to pretend they’re sitting on the Holy Grail of eye-blasting family entertainment — at least for the duration of the marketing.

So how does one polish a brawny turd in an age when resources like Rotten Tomatoes have made the average moviegoer hyper-aware of mediocrity? It’s not easy. And in a way, the ability to spin a piece of terrible entertainment as the next big Star War is an art in itself. Only instead of ink and light, these modern-day Rembrandts (had Rembrandt gone to Emerson and was nicknamed “The Donk”) are painting with beautiful lies.

6

Shitty Films Have Used “Joke” Reviews In Their Ads

Film studios want nothing more than the power to write their own reviews … something Sony actually got caught doing back in 2001, when it was revealed that fake quotes from a nonexistent critic named David Manning were used to praise masterpieces like The Animal and Hollow Man — the latter film featuring invisible gorillas and Kevin Bacon’s CGI dick muscles.

It was a ruse that would end up costing the studio over a million dollars in lawsuits, and so no other studio attempted such a blatant teabagging of the public’s trust. Instead, they did find a way to more gently dab our foreheads with technically-legal jest: They use fake critics under the excuse of “humor.”

Take the recent Lynchian abomination that was Nine Lives, a film about a rich and powerful Kevin Spacey being turned into a cat via Christopher Walken voodoo. The movie features all the things we’ve come to expect from a children’s film, such as existential torture, a cat getting drunk, and a fucking suicide fakeout. Needless to say, critics weren’t on board with it. And so TV spots opted to sprinkle the feline romp with hilarious joke reviews from places like “Vanity Fur,” “Meowsweek,” and the “Catfington Post.”

It’s exactly the kind of incredible wordplay you’d expect from this film about cat possession. And while there’s nothing wrong with including bullshit pun reviews as a joke, when you watch the ad in real time, it becomes apparent that chucklefuckery wasn’t the only motivation.

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That’s right, each “review” flashed on screen for a nano-second while the voiceover quoted the fake praise without any context. Meaning that unless you paused your television, most people watching had no idea it wasn’t really a quote from Vanity Fair. But if anyone calls them out on their colossal horseshit (like right now), the producers are able to shrug and say it was all in good fun. It must be a coincidence that the only other film to use this technique was the exhausting Vampire’s Suck — a spoof “comedy” which, according to ads, were given standing ovations by such critics as “Hugh Jass” and “Oliver Klozoffe.” Jesus, you guys, could you at least think of bad vampire puns for your terrible film, like David Edelstake or Gene Siskill? It would have only taken a minute.

5

Studios Use (Misquoted) Reviews From Total Randos On The Internet

If incredulously scrolling Rotten Tomatoes fan reviews have taught me anything, it’s that audiences tend to be way more forgiving of shitty movies than critics. You could argue that critics are heartless pedants soured by their own career failures, or maybe accept that it’s possible to enjoy a film that also happens to be garbage. There are no villains here, but the important takeaway is that critics are hired and respected because most of them are able to judge a film from an objective perspective. This is why studios put their quotes on posters and trailers instead of those of some random jerk on Twitter, right?

Oh no. Turns out that’s no longer the case. It seems anyone can be a prestigious movie critic now, even @zoidberg95 talking about the unbridled joy King Arthur brings him. This isn’t an isolated incident by a long shot, as evidenced by the recent pullquote in the trailer for Broken City, a Mark Wahlberg film with a 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sure, we can all agree that Mark Wahlberg is “bad ass” in the sense that assaulting a middle-aged Vietnamese man is both “bad” and an “ass” thing to do. And sure, there’s nothing technically wrong with giving the man on the street a voice of support. But here’s the thing: According to the source of that quote, he hadn’t seen the film. The studio used a tweet made about an entirely different Mark Wahlberg performance and used it in their ad. And they are somehow allowed to do this as long as they ask the author of the tweet beforehand. That’s it. There are no qualifications or confirmations beyond a polite message and digital contract.

Thanks to the crowdsourcing power of the internet, you can literally find anyone who is into any crazy thing. Studios know this, and are able to make a film seem like it has word-of-mouth appeal by scraping the bottom of the Twitter barrel to find faceless folks saying the right things. Or failing that, they find faceless folks saying the wrong thing and simply make it seem like they said the right thing.

After Batman v. Superman‘s Twitter account told us about the high praises of @raniaresh, someone pointed out that the now-banned account was only an egg icon with the profile: “I did NOT enjoy Batman v Superman.” The tweet was then pulled and replaced with yet another rando with the same basic praise.

Notice how it’s the same reworded “whoa my mind = blown” quote, only now attributed to someone else? Warner Bros. didn’t care where they were getting the quote; they just wanted some vague sentence calling their disjointed film “mind-blowing.” Chances are they tasked some hungover intern to scour social media for any kind of evidence of exploding brains and slap that shit on a promo shot, regardless of who said those words or what context they were said in.

But if you think this dirty process is safe from critics, you are not correct …

4

Advertising Perpetually Cherry-Picks Critic Quotes To Make Them Seem Positive

Writers write a lot of words, and it’s pretty easy to change what those words mean if you only take a few of them. For example, I earlier described the plot of Nine Lives as “rich and powerful,” if you ignore everything around those two adjectives. In the way Rock Bottom can turn Homer Simpson into a pervert, so too can studios make terrible reviews seem complimentary. For example, this glowing phrase about Rock Of Ages from a Guardian reporter …

… was in truth pulled from a one-star review quote: “It’s a very peculiar show indeed, with an unvarying and unpleasant tone of careless sexualisation. Rock’n’roll debauchery is presented as the pure and innocent way of dreamers.”

Seriously, they fucking did that. And the reviewer in question wasn’t too happy about it at all. And amazingly, this isn’t the only time The Guardian‘s deep disdain was twisted into cheerful praise, like a laughing clown puppet made from a child’s corpse. Check out this poster for Legend and its collection of four-star reviews:

Except that Guardian review in the middle? It’s a two-star review they made to look like four stars that had been obstructed. That’s honestly hilarious and brilliant and hard to be mad at, but the act of taking someone’s out-of-context words and slapping them on your poster or DVD case can go from cute trolling to downright infuriating very fast.

For example, the movie Accidental Love (which has a flatlining 6 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) underwent a horrendous production which resulted in a cobbled-together shitcircus disowned by its director. When reviewing it, The AV Club noted that the original version probably wasn’t all that great either, saying “there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.”

And then this:

Yeah, that’s the back of Accidental Love‘s DVD case using The AV Club’s unfavorable description of a (still better) hypothetical movie as their review quote. You can imagine how that kind of insidious tangle of bull angered the original writer … or you can read his response here.

It comes down to this: Never trust a review quoted on a movie’s promotional material. Ever. The only information you’re getting is that those combination of words were somewhere in the writing, but in no way were they necessarily meant to describe the movie being advertised. Which puts a whole new light on posters like this:

3

TV Networks Will Misspell Their Shows’ Names To Avoid Bad Ratings

In the age of streaming, being a TV executive has the life expectancy of a docile classroom hamster. Their entire job can be summed up by a picture of a stargazing dinosaur on a suspiciously bright night. It’s totally understandable that networks would claw and gouge their way to profit in these uncertain times, and yet their sleazy resourcefulness still manages to surprise even me, an undercover diamond thief working the long con as a internet writer who broadcasts his diabolical intent all across the land.

To quickly set this up, you have to understand the Nielsen ratings. Every show undergoes the same measurement using a sample audience being monitored for what TV shows they watch. That data is calculated into a rating for each show, and the ratings are averaged into monthly or quarterly reports. Advertisers then look at these reports and decide what time slots to buy for their sexy burger or cartoon shitting bear commercials. Therefore, a show with a better average will get more money for advertising. With me still? It’s all a big wet fart of intrigue for your average consumer, which means few people pay attention to Nielsen ratings. But once you start to read daily reports on TV industry sites, you’ll start to notice something bizarre in the footnotes:

That’s right, in what seems like playground-level cheating, television networks can deliberately change or misspell their own shows if they anticipate bad ratings for that night. By doing this, that episode won’t be calculated into the shows’ overall averages, and their quarterly ratings won’t go down. And so shows like NBC Nightly News become “NBC Nitely News,” so that marketers don’t pull that sweet, sweet commercial dough.

How could such obvious semantic trickery go unchallenged? Well, it turns out you can do all sorts of amazing hogwash with human language. Ever heard of the show Bull? It’s a CBS courtroom drama co-created by, and inspired by, the life of Dr. Phil which exists for some unimaginable reason. It also airs something called “encore” episodes every now and then.

That’s not just the wording of the article, but the official CBS classification of a repeat episode of Bull. You see, a show’s ratings are calculated based not only on their first run, but also on (typically lower) rerun ratings. But if you call your rerun an “encore” episode, then it doesn’t get categorized with the original episode, thus avoiding a lower score. Yep, apparently you can change the words of things to completely redefine their importance, like calling bags of Funyuns under a co-worker’s desk “diamonds” and then telling everyone you’re a “jewel thief.”

2

When In Doubt, Simply Block Critics From Reviewing It Ahead Of Time

It’s the perfect crime. Critics can’t say your game or movie sucks if they can’t see it. So studios will simply prevent critics from seeing their work before it comes out. It’s like throwing bleach in your date’s eyes so they won’t know how ugly you are. And while sounding excruciatingly transparent, this technique works way more often than you think. It’s called an embargo, and it’s what Ubisoft did before Assassin’s Creed Unity, which ultimately received lukewarm reviews for being breathtakingly glitch-filled. Like, so glitchy it was a work of sinister art — like something the Joker would conjure up.

Ubisoft “How am I supposed to enjoy a carefree romp of clandestine murder after THIS?!”

Unfortunately for gamers, those reviews only came in after the midnight release — as ordered by Ubisoft when they first sent their early copies out. But it could be worse. You could go a step further, like Wild Games Studios did when they trolled through YouTube sticking copyright violations on any video which spoke badly of their new release. Or Sega, which used the same tactic to shut down bad YouTube reviews that didn’t even contain footage from their games.

In the end, this technique usually causes a huge and understandable backlash, on account of YouTubers being wicked blabbermouths about such injustices. But critic embargoes are so common that they’re considered normal. And most often, this isn’t nefarious at all, but rather a measure against premature spoilers or judgments before a film is locked down in post. Only every once in a while is this tool used to cover up true garbage. Pungent, salty garbage — the kind you can taste through your nose. Like, I’m talking alien-chasing-a-school-bus-driven-by-Judd-Hirsch level of garbage here.

Independence Day: Resurgence is a film I happen to enjoy that is also objectively terrible. And 20th Century Fox knew it was terrible, hence their American critic embargo lasted up until the day it was released — causing most audiences to buy a ticket without knowing its quality. Similar measures, which include completely skipping press screenings altogether, have happened for similarly bad work like Alien Vs. Predator and the G.I. Joe films.

Yes, you could argue that these films “weren’t meant for critics,” as a lot of executives often say. But that’s kind of like saying an apartment complex “isn’t meant for safety inspectors” or that your basement “isn’t meant for homicide detectives.” People deserve to know in advance if something sucks. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still enjoy it or flock to see it. And if all else fails, you can always do what China does and completely circumvent the pesky audience altogether …

1

China Will Hold “Ghost Screenings” To Make Films Look More Popular

As previously mentioned, China is quickly becoming the dominating money-maker for blockbusters. So it stands to reason that the country would also become the industry leader for blatantly fudging a movie’s popularity. But instead of relying on embargoes or misleading ads, Chinese studios have taken a much more direct approach: just buying tickets to the movie they made.

The Wall Street Journal “‘Best thing to ever happen to movies!’ raved one translucent women in a bloodstained Victorian wedding dress.”

It’s as brilliant as it is illegal. Instead of pouring money into television spots and bus stop posters, simply use that marketing money to buy out theater showings, and watch the popularity snowball. And to ensure profit, those purchased tickets can then be resold online to discount ticket retailers. It’s like stealing your own car for the insurance, and then selling that stolen car for a second profit.

Unfortunately for those cheating marketers, I wouldn’t be writing about this if people didn’t figure out it was happening. Ghost screenings were recently brought to light thanks to the film Ip Man 3, a martial arts biopic which bafflingly includes Mike Tyson playing an evil property developer who ends up fighting the hero in an epic battle of kung-fu vs. boxing vs. child endangerment.

Pegasus Motion Pictures Why this movie felt the need to artificially inflate its popularity is beyond me.

After the film’s release, a local news site posted screenshots of theater websites claiming to have sold-out screenings for showings that started within ten minutes of each other … in the same auditorium. Meaning that, save for some kind of multiple-dimension scenario caused by Mike Tyson punching time itself, someone was brazenly cheating in the laziest way possible.

When The Wall Street Journal dug deeper, they found it to be a regular (albeit short-term) strategy for film distributors to buy out fake screenings in the hope that sold-out shows would encourage audiences to assume the film is popular and therefore go see it themselves. It’s not very imaginative, but if studios were more creative, they wouldn’t need to do all the bullshit on this list to begin with.

David is a writer and editor for this very website that you currently read. You can follow him on Twitter.

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