#this could actually be a workable movie premise

[tobiasdrake]

Sarcastic Jest: Live-action Dragon Ball movie but it's in the style of the first Sonic film. Ostensibly about Goku, the plot is really about this non-superpowered everyman figure whose life Goku crashes into. I dunno, let's call him Bob.

Bob and Goku go off together in search of the Dragon Balls while also trying to solve Bob's relatable everyman problems. Bob has to teach Goku how to be civilized and Goku drags Bob into wacky adventures all the while the two are gradually learning to appreciate and care about--

Brain: Wait, aren't you just describing Bulma?

Me: ..............................................................oh my god.

[ultraericthered]

Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey, AKA The Bear Of Absolutely No Brain. “Movies I will avoid watching like the plague for my entire life” is a rare, relatively small category for only a select few movies, and this piece of shit is one of them, as I sort of already knew it would be.

I read the Wikipedia synopsis of the entire movie and some reviews, and could feel a sick-to-my-stomach “this never needed to exist, why is this a thing we allowed to come into existence, truly we are a failed species” sensation come over me. But the crazy thing is it’s not just due to the “pissing all over the inherent innocence, purity, charm and whimsy of Winnie The Pooh by turning it into exploitative pseudo-horror slasher film shlock” factor - that was always something where, much as the idea of it rubbed me the wrong way, I could’ve dealt with it if the premise as presented was workable and it leaned into the inherent black comedy of it a la The Banana Splits Movie. Instead, the film ended up doing ZILCH to actually work with the fictional property it was supposed to be deriving from. It’s literally, LITERALLY Winnie The Pooh In Name Only. The Christopher character comes so secondary to the boring Final Girl and her boring designated victim friends that you’d forget he had any connection to Pooh and Piglet so strong as to motivate them into becoming deranged, spiteful killers of humans. Were that entire “backstory” part excised from the film altogether, you’re left with two woodland hillbillies dressed up like a bear and a pig who use a severed donkey tail as a whip at one point as the entirety of the “Pooh” connection. In fact, the backstory being in there at all creates a huge disconnect between it and the actual film’s events, since it tells you that after killing and eating Eeyore, the Hundred Acre Woods residents took a vow of silence and to become more like feral wild animals...but aside from the silence part, what you’re shown is two anthrobominations who act more like human serial killers than feral wild animals, to the point where Pooh knows how to drive a fucking car! The Telling and Showing don’t match up!

That, above all else, is what makes this movie a no-go. It couldn’t even give me any reason to muster even the slightest TWINGE of respect for its vision and what it was doing because it copped the fuck out from fulfilling its alleged premise. It’s not a “Winnie the Pooh horror movie” at all, it’s just another generic, run-off-the-mill, one-dimensional slasher flick that offers cheap shocks and gore with no mind, no heart, no soul, no imagination, originality, or creativity. A film made by psychopathic hacks for psychopathic hacks.

Give this film a hard pass and go watch the “Sorry, Wrong Slusher” episode of The New Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh instead.

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

2022 MOVIE OF THE WEEK #15

love guaranteed. okay so i added this one to my list to watch with my best friend, because i’m a fan of both the leads. 

i’m sorry to say that they could not elevate the movie’s writing and supporting cast enough to make it good--their chemistry wasn’t bad, but the plot was. the most impressive thing about this film was rachel leigh cook’s wardrobe (very nice). 

the basic premise seemed good, actually! lawyer helps a guy sue a dating company and they fall in love along the way. very workable romcom setup. 

the problem, or one of them anyway, is that once that premise is established...the plot is basically over. there’s no huge conflict that can keep the two of them apart, just a clock counting down until their working relationship ends and they’ll be free to date. i spent at least half the movie wondering what the point was now since they were going to end up together and that made the rest of the story feel irrelevant.

and then a very predictable courtroom confession led to an ending that made the whole story retroactively pointless.

now, i’m not saying i expected the love interests not to get together, when that’s the point of a romcom. (though if this movie had decided to swerve that hard, i would have been impressed a little.) but i do expect a romance to introduce understandable obstacles, which keep me engaged until the end, and to resolve them believably. (grading on a curve.)

in this case, the obstacle was ‘these two kind of maybe don’t want to risk it? or do they? *winks*’ and the resolution was ‘actually the moral principles that made them like each other in the first place don’t matter i guess because love?’ it was very confusing, really, if i thought about it too hard. 

and also the plot was propelled heavily along by rachel leigh cook’s employees/friends, who were literally the most annoying side characters who seemed like we were supposed to not find them annoying at all. 

it’s rare for romcom side characters to be really great; their function is usually more to just be there, helping keep the spotlight on the stars. so i’m happy to accept forgettable supporting roles like ‘best friend of nina dobrev who got catfished’ and to appreciate the rare icon like ‘jennifer coolidge draping herself across every scene in a gay christmas movie’...i don’t understand why this movie decided that they needed to aim for maximum pushiness and snark and 'bitchy bffs’ here. whatever they thought they were doing, it didn’t work.

i wish i could recommend this one because again, i love the leads. also heather graham is here, doing her best gwyneth paltrow of goop, and that’s a kick. but i spent so much time wondering (sometimes aloud) if there was any point in continuing to watch this movie, while watching it, that i can’t wish that on anybody else.

[deltaengineering]

Winter Anime 2019 Part 3: High on Concept

If you wait long enough, you’ll find something good to say.

Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue / My Roommate is a Cat

What: Misanthropic mystery author picks up tough stray cat, both get healed.

✅ The cat acts like a cat, the misanthrope acts like a misanthrope.

✅ The approach of telling the same simple story from the perspective of two characters that can’t really communicate effectively is interesting.

✅ This is very basic, but it works. I like both characters, and it's generally inoffensive. Pretty much Barakamon with less of a focus on telling you exactly what to feel. Might watch more of this.

❌ I see we’re now at the point where shows get localized titles that sound like lazy translations of bland Japanese names even when the Japanese title is not that bland to begin with. Lovely.

Dimension High School

What: A bunch of kids press XXX and YYY and are sucked. Wooow.

✅✅ The wraparound segments look extremely realistic. If there was more lensflares and shots of feet I’d almost say someone has finally beaten KyoAni in making anime look like a cheap, egregiously overacted J-Drama.

❌❌ Sadly, the puzzle dimension they end up in just looks like homemade MMD animation, because it is. I mean, at least it’s mocapped, but apparently with a Kinect.

❌❌ E.g., they make jokes about clipping and they kinda have to because everything clips into everything else all the time.

❌❌ Did I mention that all they actually do is solve lame puzzles and fail to be funny about it? It’s really getting to the levels of the dreaded “barely animated voice actor improv podcast” at these points.

♎ Suwabe’s in it, and that’s never an outright bad thing. He’s voicing the quizmaster, in the process proving he’d do anything for a paycheck. I wonder if he has a fiverr acocunt.

Domestic na Kanojo

What: Highschooler loses virginity to one night stand, finds out that it was the sister of the teacher he has a crush on. Incidentally, the mother of both also just married his father. Zany!

✅ This is presented like a low-key, slow drama, and it’s not even bad at that. Some good directing going on here, at least in the beginning.

❌❌ Really just too bad that it’s impossible to take seriously with a setup as contrived as this, not to mention taking it as seriously as it apparently wants to be taken. It’s also not exactly original.

❌ I’m not gonna say that sketchy relationships can’t work (it worked fine for KoiAme, for example), but embedding your suddenly also incestuous pupil-teacher affair in the setting of a harem comedy, complete with other sister walking in on attempted drunk blackout kiss, is not giving me confidence that this has the chops to pull it off.

❌❌ The show this reminds me the most of is Love and Lies, and that’s a real bad calling card to have.

Girly Air Force

What: Girl-shaped fighter jets fall in love with a dude.

❌❌ It’s just another military-hardware-is-cute-girls-actually show in the vein of Strike Witches, the kind where they think that having a few plane CG models is already thrilling content.

❌❌ But then it doesn’t even turn out to be that in practice, because most of the episode is taken up by lame “worldbuilding” (i.e., coming up with excuses for why your fanservice show has to be the way it is) and trying to make your bland harem lead interesting, which is a futile endeavour.

❌ The most interesting part is still the CG dogfighting, such as it is. It’s not great either. Also, girly planes are pink.

♎ Honestly got a laugh out of them randomly picking a Gripen as heroine unit  in addition to actual JSADF hardware, because that’s a sleek-looking plane. The biggest prank the JSADF ever pulled on the otaku industry is buying the chubby F-35, which is nowhere to be seen here.

Go-toubun no Hanayome / The Quintessential Quintuplets

What: Empoverished highschooler is hired as a tutor for some rich quintuplets with large breasts.

❌ This is a blatant harem setup that would make a 2003 bishoujo VN blush.

✅ However, in practice it’s much better than it sounds. It knows it’s a wacky romcom with a dumb premise and it does not pretend otherwise.

✅ So it’s lighthearted, but it’s also surprisingly classy. In fact, it’s classier than Domestic no Kanojo, which is a show that’s actually trying to look respectable and failing.

✅ The relationships are also very feisty, with an energy that a comedy needs. There’s a lot of sass to go around here. Probably the best of these I’ve seen in a while, so I’ll give it three eps.

Kemurikusa

What: After getting pulled off the sequel, the Kemono Friends crew made their own version. Presumably there are blackjack and hookers in this show’s future.

❌ If you are a fan of KF’s “charms”, fear not, you would not be able to tell these people made another anime before. It's still total amateur hour.

❌❌ It’s not even the “looks”, though those certainly are not a highlight. The design is okay and the animation is bad, but I’m not incapable of enjoying shows with bad animation. What really kills it is the editing. I usually don’t comment on editing because that’s almost always competent and only very rarely great, but Kemurikusa has uniquely lazy and badly timed editing. Every shot being seconds longer than it needs to be is already an annoyance in low-key dialog scenes, but the alleged action is laughable and allows you a long, unblinking stare at every frame of bad animation. I really do wonder why they even bother with it when it’s so terrible.

✅ The setting seems alright, even though it’s just a reskinned Kemono Friends. At least it’s not gijinka nonsense this time (which makes one wonder where the gimmick characters are supposed to come from, but I digress), and it’s more upfront about what it actually is too. I’d call it mildly intriguing.

❌ I don’t mind mystery and certainly prefer it to exposition bombs, but instead of that this episode quickly establishes the most basic facts... and then repeats them over and over and over some more. Combined with non-editing, this makes for horrible pacing. 

♎ I had no opinion on KF’s longer-term qualities, because the first episode was so boring I never got any further. I won’t have an opinion on this show’s long-term qualities for the same reason.

Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

What: Magical girls are tragic, shoot gun’s.

❌❌ Yo bro, what if magical girls but dark? Surely such a thing has never been attempted.

❌ The particular source of grim here is that these girls are war vets and fight with semi-realistic weaponry, so there’s a fair bit of the ol’ milwank in this one as well.

❌ The best part of the entire show is that the enemies they originally fought looked like cute teddy bears. Of course, this is dropped in favor of just slicing and dicing some random terrorists in the main narrative. I guess “dark magical girl” is still too outlandish a concept, gotta go with ripping off The Punisher again.

❌ The characters so far are nothing special, you got your PTSD Rambo and the generically cute tomodachis she swears to protect. Such contrast!

❌❌ If you must make these 80s action movies with some otaku gimmick pasted on top, would you mind making the action look good at least? Because I don’t care how many gallons of blood you paint in your dramatic but conspicuously non-moving pans.

Meiji Tokyo Renka

What: Spiritually sensitive lonelygirl gets kitsuned to the Meiji era, which is full of delicious beef and some handsome men too I guess.

✅ This isn’t an outright comedy, but it goes all in on everyone’s fabulosity level to a degree that it’s really already three quarters to Dame x Prince.

✅ Similarly, the lead is not quite as unimpressed with these hams as Ani was, but she certainly has a lot more interest in roast beef than in these guys always trying to pull her into sparkly chin-holding poses &c.

✅ Meiji Tokyo Renka doesn’t seem to be anything special, but it gets the tone right and is expressive enough to not become boring.

♎ While certainly watchable right now, with these there’s always the chance that it decides to launch into real drama in the long run, which in turn almost always goes wrong.

Yakusoku no Neverland / The Promised Neverland

What: An orphanage’s happy daily life gets upended by the realisation that they’re just pizza rolls for some demonic entities.

✅ I watched this right after Kemurikusa and let me tell you, it sure helps if you’ve got professionals on the team. This is a highly competent show as far as cinematography and editing is concerned. While there isn’t any reason to go all out on the action sakuga, this show looks real good.

❌ I’m not feeling the character design, to be specific I think everyone’s chin is too big. This sounds like a real assholy nitpick, but be aware that this will impact around 90% of the time you watch this. 

✅ The premise is workable for a shounen manga, even if hardly original (remember Owari no Seraph?) At least it’s not kids with superpowers spamming beams at each other while discussing the nature of heroism, and seems to be going for a more mindgames-based approach in the vein of Death Note. The characters are just barely good enough so far. In the end it’s not so much the premise, but how well the production values are able to sell it. And that’s what Neverland is good at.

❌ It’s specifically a Weekly Shounen Jump manga, and that is huge red flag. Sure enough, while the visuals and mood deliver, the dialog writing justifiably assumes the reader is a moron. Almost every line in this is either straight universe exposition or someone reading someone else’s character sheet back to them. It’s insane and not even necessary because their actions establish all of this just fine, but hey, WSJ readers amirite?

❌ Also, since it’s a successful WSJ property, don’t expect an ending or be prepared to watch this show for years. Most likely both.

♎ This seems like it could be entertaining once the exposition is out of the way and the real meat of the narrative starts. Then again, at that point pacing would come into play, which is yet another achilles heel of WSJ-style shounen manga. Against my better judgement, I’ll probably have a look how this develops, but I don’t expect much.

[mst3kproject]

814: Riding With Death

Oh, goody, another compilation movie.  Who thought these were a good idea?

The super-duper high-tech Backstory-O-Matic introduces us to our hero, Special Federal Agent Sam Casey.  He’s not very interesting but he does have one superpower, the ability to become invisible.  Rather than make any use of this, however, the spy organization Intersect assigns him to drive a truck transporting a sample of Tripolodine, a new fuel additive that could revolutionize the transportation industry.  What nobody’s told him is that Tripolodine is dangerously explosive!

Having survived that, Casey’s next assignment takes him to a racetrack in Ontario, to seek the ultra-elusive saboteur Robert Denby.  Denby also has something that blows up – an unstable metal called dutrium that goes critical when it hears a certain radio frequency.  He has smuggled this stuff into the USA by having it built into a racecar, which is exactly where you want to hide an explosive. Once again, Casey finds himself having to get out of a vehicle before an experimental substance on board blows it up. Apparently the writers could only think of one plot.

All those shots of the super-duper high-tech Backstory-O-Matic are actually from Colossus: the Forbin Project, which Joel said in Master Ninja II was his favourite movie.  I wonder what he would have said about their appearance in Riding With Death.

If you’ve ever encountered The Gemini Man outside of this MST3K episode, it was probably on a list of the fastest-cancelled tv shows in history – only five episodes made it to the air, and it most definitely did not leave legions of disappointed fans clamoring for plot threads to be tied up in a movie.  Unfortunately, they gave us a movie anyway.  Rather than film a proper one, however, they made Riding With Death out of one episode that was on TV (called Smithereens) and one that never made it (Buffalo Bill Rides Again).  The result is… well, you can kinda see why they cancelled this.

I like to say at least something nice about these movies, so I’ll start by noting that direction and photography actually aren’t bad.  The Smithereens half is quite competently shot and while dialogue scenes get a little long, the more actiony sequences are nicely edited.  Despite what Mike and the bots have to say, the part where the truck has no brakes and Agent Lawrence is desperately trying to keep the Tripolodine from exploding is tense and holds the attention.  I quite like Lawrence’s resourcefulness, using the torn-up laundry bag to suspend the Tripolodine bottle.  The Buffalo Bill Rides Again half is not as well-made – the stock footage does not blend well with the stuff shot for the actual show, and there’s a distinct lack of tension in both the race and the scene of Casey and his friend Buffalo Bill trying to get the car away from people before it explodes.

The special effects are very limited, but not awful. Besides extensive pyrotechnics, the only effect they need is Casey vanishing and reappearing when he activates his invisibility watch.  There’s nothing special to the effect they use but it works well enough. In terms of just getting stuff onto the TV screen, the people who worked on The Gemini Man were good enough at their jobs.  That’s really, really faint praise, but I’ve seen so much worse doing this blog that I feel I do want to mention it.

On to the bad stuff.  The biggest problem with Riding with Death is that the characters just aren’t engaging.  I suspect part of this is because we never get to meet them properly. Instead, we arrive with the plot already getting underway, and the movie is much more interested in making sure we know why Tripolodine is important than telling us who Sam Casey or Abby Lawrence are.  There are a couple of flashbacks, but they just repeat stuff from the Backstory-O-Matic. About the only personality trait given to either of them is that they’re competent and committed to their jobs, remaining calm under pressure and finding workable solutions to the problems presented to them.  This is a good characteristic for secret agents to have, but it’s all we get.  It doesn’t help that Ben Murphy and Katherine Crawford, not among the world’s more charismatic actors to begin with, don’t seem to care very much about the project.  They turn in just barely enough of a performance to get a paycheque.

Not only do we get no idea of who the characters are, the relationships between them are also left more or less mysterious.  Is Lawrence supposed to be Casey’s love interest? One tends to suspect she is, since he thinks fondly of her in his flashbacks and even today female characters in action movies are primarily love interests.  They never have a ‘moment’, though, and Murphy and Crawford have no romantic chemistry.  The scientist in Buffalo Bill Rides Again who berates the head of Intersect, Driscoll, for harassing Denby obviously feels he has a right to lecture his boss, but if it’s because they’re old friends we’re given no clue.  There is apparently a long history between Driscoll and Denby, but this is narrated at us by the angry scientist guy rather than shown.  All this stuff would be fine on TV, where backstory has to be filled in quickly to stay in the time slot and not every episode can follow something like the romantic arc. In what’s supposed to be a movie, it just leaves us with a lot of unresolved threads and stuff we’re not sure why we ought to care about.

When I watched Cosmic Princess I noted that the attempts to marry up the two disparate episodes into one story actually worked surprisingly well.  In Riding with Death, they… don’t.  The halves are connected as both feature a guest appearance by comedian Jim Stafford as Buffalo Bill, a man whose many non-talents include trucking, country and western songwriting, and racecar driving, but neither Wild West showmanship (sadly) nor tailoring human skin (fortunately).  Buffalo Bill comes across as not too bright and somebody you’d probably find annoying if you knew him in real life, but his eclectic interests and the enthusiasm with which he tackles them does give him a lot more character than Casey.  The friendship between Casey and Buffalo Bill is also the only relationship in the story that feels even halfway real, because we see it develop rather than just being told about it.

Choosing two episodes with a character in common seems like a pretty good start – that was how Cosmic Princess did it, picking two that both featured Maya!  Like Cosmic Princess, Riding With Death also does some editing and ADR to help connect the halves, but in this case it is disastrous.  Take, for example, everybody’s favourite line – you’re as elusive as Robert Denby.  If they wanted to establish the existence of Denby in the half taken from Smithereens, they should have suggested that villain Dr. Hale was talking to him on the radio or something.  That would have implied that he was also behind Hale’s scheme, making him the overall big bad of the entire movie.  In fact, this seems to be what they’re trying to get across when they have Casey’s boss tell Denby he’s going to prison with Hale.  Throwing that 'elusive' line in the way they did is jarring and mostly just emphasizes that Denby has nothing to do with what we’ve seen so far.

Even worse is what they did with the fact that Agent Lawrence wasn’t in Buffalo Bill Rides Again. The obvious thing to do with that would have been to make an excuse for her absence.  Say she’s on vacation, on another case, on maternity leave… anything would do. Instead, the editors put in random scenes of her somehow watching what’s happening via surveillance footage at Intersect.  Why did they bother?  It only draws attention to her absence, which is the very thing they were trying to paint over!  I don’t think this could have been less competent if they’d tried.

One place where Riding with Death does manage to resemble Cosmic Princess is an unfortunate one – they have one cool idea and they don’t do anything with it.  Sam Casey has the ability to become invisible for fifteen minutes a day.  Maybe in some of the episodes that did not become part of Riding with Death, this was more useful, but in this movie he doesn’t do much with it that he couldn’t have done without it.  Any half-decent secret agent in a movie can take a couple of guys with handguns or sneak into a car unseen.  James Bond or Black Widow wouldn’t have broken a sweat. Hell, even Super Dragon could probably have pulled it off, but Sam Casey relies on his invisible wristwatch.

This is especially annoying when the opening credits claim that this story was inspired by H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man.  That was a novel that explored the corrupting influence of power, and even the worst film adaptations of it generally try to do something with that theme.  Riding With Death never even touches it, or indeed any other theme besides a brush with the 70’s energy crisis.  Again, maybe other episodes did something with this, but in Riding With Death Sam Casey is never troubled by his ability to become invisible, never examines the implications of it, never feels any temptation to use it for personal gain. It’s a big part of what makes him so outstandingly dull.

The main impression I get from Riding With Death is just that nobody really put any effort into it.  The writers didn’t bother to come up with an interesting way to use their ‘invisible guy’ premise, and stuck to mindless, often action-less plots that end in something blowing up.  The actors didn’t bother trying to infuse their characters with any personality. The bad guys’ goals are never quite clear.  It’s all very lazy and dumb, but at least it makes for good MST3K.

[thessalian]

Thess vs Organisation

Didn’t get to sleep until really really late, and woke up way earlier than I meant to. But fuck it; today is the day I get shit DONE. I have ideas, but to make them a reality, I need to start making workable action plans. I think I know myself well enough to understand that while I can get things done by the seat of my pants, it’s probably better for my sanity if I look at it as a series of bite-sized chunks.

The Dodecronomicon

This was fun, but I wasn’t as organised about it as I should have been. That’s going to change, because I have things to share. So I’m going to look at it as if I was writing a sourcebooks ... or maybe more a series of smaller sourcebooks. ‘Chapters’ as follows.

The Drowning Deep: All my water-based homebrew tweaks - both things I have already used to the dismay of my players or things they still have yet to face. (Yes, you get to meet the Ur-Draug.)

The Screaming Sands: Desert-based creatures. For when you’re maybe tromping through corrupted war zones. (*waves at her players and griiiiiiiins*)

Eroded Into Nightmare: Corrupted versions of good-aligned creatures. This is largely a home for my corrupted pixie idea (man, I look forward to using those) but I have a few other ideas not only of stuff that’s already in the sourcebooks but other creatures of myth.

The Wicked & the Divine: Given the premise that clerics don’t have to gain their power from a God, exactly, and also given that warlocks can have celestial servants of the gods as their patrons, the line between warlock and cleric has become increasingly blurred. So why can’t someone like the Traveller have the equivalent of Devas and Solars ... or demon servants? Basically expanding the range of angels and demons available to the average player. Because I need way more servants of the Great Old Ones. Hee. Hee. Heeheehee.

Spell variants (title in progress): This is where things like Hedge Maze will go. Basically the spells are great? Especially given some of the stuff in Xanathar’s? But duuuuuuuude I have ideas.

Maps (title in progress): I have a good collection of maps now, and a much better handle on how to use my Dungeon Painter Studio software (I cannot call it DPS. I don’t care if that’s the abbreviation Steam uses - I have played too many MMOs to see DPS as meaning anything but Damage Per Second). This segment is going to have subdivisions, obviously - inns, caverns, temples, woodland, Other... You get the idea.

Other stuff as I think of it, but the basic principle is that I see a wide vista of campaign spreading out before me and the books aren’t giving me what I need. Or at least not the variety I’d like in what I need. If I’m going to remedy that for myself, I may as well share.

(I need more creatures suited to the cold. Because Reasons.)

FML Gaming

As previously stated, I’m looking at Let’s Plays. This is going to be some time in the making, obviously, since I need to actually pick a game and then play it (I’m thinking Bioshock? Mostly because I also want to show that there’s nothing wrong with being behind the curve in terms of title releases, and that a good story is sometimes a better reward than New Shiny Graphics, but then there’s the issue where I have problems with first-person perspective at the best of times so maybe I’ll start with something easier on my head. Maybe I could make “pick my game for me!” a patron reward, I dunno; I’ve seen it done), but I’ve gone over the premise there.

Single-Point Perspective

Reviews and essays. This time I am going to write a whole bunch way in advance, and ponder ideas beforehand. There are probably going to be some unpopular opinions in there, but I guess people can guess what those are. But there are also going to be book recommendations from all over the genre spectrum, movie reviews, and probably ‘evolving reviews’ of the games I’m playing in FML.

HIPPIE

I am committed to doing the audiobook thing. A lot of people find listening to audiobooks on the commute easier than reading the damn thing on whatever method they use for the whole reading thing, so why not? I had a lot of fun recording Chaos Magic the first time around, and actually have some ideas for improvement on what I did the last time, so while that is, again, going to take some time, I’m better with that kind of editing software than I was, like, nine years ago, so hey. Besides, this should hopefully give me the impetus I need to finish Access Mundi. (I owe a few sample chapters from that anyway.)

I am determined to have ‘teaser content’ and at least one major update for each section (except maybe FML, but I want to at least pick a damn game) before I relaunch my Patreon. I want to get ahead of the curve while I’m out of work, so that I’m not scrambling too hard when I have a day job again. I just need to work on some voice recording and some writing. At least I already have something more or less ready for the Dodecronomicon - The Drowning Deep has an addition. (*waves at her party again and griiiiiiiiiiins*)

[kuuderekun]

Magical Girl Site, Transgender Representation and The Batman Question.

Magical Girl Site, Transgender Representation and The Batman Question. 

For the second week in a row Magical Girl Site is the only show I really want to comment on.  But I'm still enjoying all the shows I'm currently watching. I mentioned in my Astolfo post how I don't use the term "Trap" to describe characters who are actually Trasngender.  The only problem with making that hard distinction is Japanese media doesn't always use the same terminology we use in the west, so it's not always clear what the writers are going for.  For example I'm still not sure what we're supposed to think of Ruka in Steins;Gate, I like that in the new series they seem more comfortable with their gender identity, but I'm still unsure what it's supposed to be. Episode 7 of Magical Girl Site introduced the character of Kiyoharu Suirenji.  Going off what we see in this episode alone I would have to conclude she is a Transwoman and not merely a Crossdresser because of her using the girl's bathroom and that being an issue.  I don't think a CisMale Crossdresser would use the girl's bathroom.  However her seemingly not objecting to others calling her a boy complicates the matter, but it could be she's just someone who doesn't want to get confrontational about it.  But I also could have missed something there since I'm watching it Subbed because there is no Dub. In the episode's MAL forum one user who's read the Manga says the character is definitely a Transwoman.  That user is defending using the proper terminology to refer to her.  However there is at least one user there being very blatantly Transphobic. Most of what we see of the character in the episode I like.  However we are given a glimpse of the character having a dark side, with her saying she'll get revenge in the distant future.  Now this is a Dark Magical girl show where most characters have something dark about them.  But I'm still recovering from the disappointment of my favorite Western TV show of all time, Pretty Little Liars blowing it with it's handling of this issue. People sometimes ask whether bad representation is better then no representation.  It is interesting that if this show had never brought the issue up I would probably have never singled it out to criticize for lack of Trans representation.  But as soon as they provide some representation it doesn't take long for me to start being on edge about her being mishandled.  I'd been praising the show for it's unsanitized depiction of Bullying, I should then be thrilled to see that theme expand to showing the bullying Trans Women endure.  But instead I'm worried about the implications of this character either turning evil or dying. But I now realize that, yeah, I should be criticizing Magical Girl shows for failing to include trans representation (and even Sailor Moon fails to include any true Trans representation, the Starlights were simply a gender bending gimmick).  They frequently try to have very diverse casts allowing many different kinds of girls to be magical girls, representing many different forms of the adolescent female experience in Japan.  I think we're long overdue for a Trans Magical Girl and it's unfortunate that the Dark Magical Girl Genre people are back lashing against now was the first to do it. This subject happened to be on my mind already before I saw episode 7.   You may have noticed I posted about a Batman movie that features The Riddler yesterday.  Well Batman and The Riddler being on my mind reminded me that back when I spent a lot of time trying to imagine what kinds of Batman films I'd make I had came up with a concept that re-imagined The Riddler as a Trans Woman.  But then decided that I wasn't comfortable casting a Trans character as a villain in our current climate. Homosexual representation in media has reached the point where you can have Gay villains without it automatically reinforcing the same harmful stereotypes that used to keep Gays only as villains or victims in American fiction.  But Trans representation, especially for Trans Women, has not, as clearly shown by what happened with Pretty Little Liars.  I absolutely believe the writers of that show had the best of intentions, they wanted to say Transphobia is the ultimate cause of the tragedy, but regardless Charlotte being the only Trans representation the show had left the LGBT community who at one point loved the show deeply offended. Ironically this Trans Woman Riddler idea had developed in my mind before season 6 of PLL happened.  And yet my vision for The Riddler was influenced by PLL before the Trans Woman aspect was a part of it.  PLL started airing back when Batfans were still hoping The Riddler would be in the third Nolan Batfilm.  And I from day one immediately felt how -A operated on PLL was a good reference point for how to "Nolanize" The Riddler. So in hindsight Charlotte DiLaurentis kind of resembles the Trans Woman Riddler concept I'd been thinking of.  And how that whole controversy helped shape how I think about this issue is probably a factor in why I dropped the idea.  Still my envisioned backstory for her (which I don't entirely remember) was far from identical.  And of course I also regardless of the character's gender or ethnic identity prefer The Riddler to not be a murderer.  It would be admittedly hard to keep that in tact when making The Riddler the main antagonist of a big budget Hollywood blockbuster, but I do think it's workable. So in that sense my Riddler was closer to Mona then Charlotte. But now I can't help but wonder if outright abandoning it was simply the Cowards way out (Realistically I'll probably never get to make a Batman film anyway, but this is hypothetical).  For example if I have good guys in the movie who are also Trans that could certainly help make it salvageable. Part of what was so harmful about the Charlotte story-line was caused by the need for it to be a twist, that the character who turned out to be "Charles" had been posing as a Cis Woman.  And that's the main problem with my initial concept here.  The starting premise before any Gender issues factored into it was allowing a Batman movie that's actually a Mystery/Detective story by having us not know who The Riddler is.  But I now realize that the concept can be reworked so that whatever name She is using before the reveal she can still be openly Trans.  The thing is I'm kind of killing that mystery aspect for future use by giving it all away publicly now.  Only way it could work for someone who'd read this post is if multiple Trans Women are in it.  Oh wait, that happens to also help fix keep her from being the only representation. The YouTube Channel FilmJoy did a video last year called The Batman Question which I watched today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwzE2J7bo0c&t It was about the idea of allowing more then just CisHet White Men to play Batman and other major Batman characters.  Janelle Monae was a choice brought up a lot, and she responded that she'd rather play The Joker. And that reminded me how members of Batman's Rouges Gallery are Pop Culture Icons and that almost every Actor wants an opportunity to play one.  And I personally would cast an actual Trans Woman to play the role (The Pedantic Romantic could make a good Riddler).  So perhaps we shouldn't exclude the Trans Community from being able to play those roles out of fear of how it can go wrong. The Riddler is often viewed as Batman's smarted nemesis, his greatest intellectual threat. After all Eartha Kitt wasn't counterproductive for Black Women.   KyleKallgrenBHH in his recent video on The Watermelon Woman talks about how for a long time Black Women weren't allowed to be Sex Symbols in America.  So in that context one getting to play the greatest Sex Symbol of American Pop Culture was downright revolutionary.  And so in today's climate maybe Catwoman should be the first Bat Rouge to consider allowing to be a Transwoman? You may ask, why was it that my mind went there for The Riddler first? Another question you may ask is, how would I handle naming this Transwoman reinterpretation of Edward Nygma? Well the answers to those questions are kind of the same. When I starting of thinking about what I'd do for a Nolanesque Riddler story.  I first decided "The Riddler" should be a name given to them.   They would identify themselves in their messages as simply -?  Again influenced by -A on PLL. Then I first started thinking about the character's Gender as I was playing around with the inherent pun of E. Nygma, and the idea entered my head to use the name..... ....... Annie Nygma...................... And from there I thought first just of making The Riddler a woman, an idea which technically had done before at least by Cosplayers.  But I also thought about having her use multiple names and for the sake of Nolan style realism not having any Nygma name be her birth name.  Then I heard of this Edward Nashton name that had emerged as an alternate name for The Riddler, I don't know who used it first but I heard of it via The Riddler Blogs, a fan film project derivative of The Joker Blogs. And then I thought about how Transmen and Transwomen naturally tend to change their names from what they were given at birth.  And so the idea popped in there to have Edward Nashton be the name assigned at birth, and Annie Nygma the name she chose when she accepted her Gender Identity, because she was into Riddles and Puzzles. I'm not Trans, I can't actually relate to these issues.  So I simply don't know what the right answer is.  Perhaps it's a good idea for me to put this experience out there and let someone who is Trans use it for their own Fanwork if they see value in it. Part of the reason I was ashamed of this for awhile is it didn't originate much from a place of caring about representation.  I've always been a believer in Trans rights, but it was in recent years I've become much more sensitive to this and other Social Justice issues. The more recent ideas I've come up with for characters who are Trans have been making them heroes.  Like the idea of the Vordenberg who Carmilla had a romance with being a Transwoman.  Or my desire to tell a story about Lancelot as a Transwoman (using the name Lanzelet), as well as Perceval as a Transman.  And my idea for a fictionalized French Revolution shared cinematic universe innovated using Chevalier d'Éon in the Captain America/Wonder Woman/King Kong role as the one who's origin story film is set in a previous era.  And interpreting d'Eon as a Noble Honorable and Heroic Transwoman, not doing weirder ideas like the Anime about her and Fate Grand Order do.  The only Fantastical aspect will be keeping the character young in the 1790s.

[dweemeister]

The Happening (2008)

Some of my favorite movies are B-movies. Whenever titles like Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) and The Tingler (1959) air on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) during convenient hours for me, I sit down and usually tune in for at least a few minutes. Neither film is ever challenging to be the Great American Movie, but it is hard to tear myself away from the campiness of ‘60s kids frolicking on a Southern California beach without parental supervision or one of the silliest premises ever seen in a horror movie. Before the release of The Happening, director M. Night Shyamalan said that he wanted to, “mak[e] an excellent B movie.” His intentions – premeditated or otherwise – aside, The Happening will receive no such goodwill from me.

Two years before a crime against art known as The Last Airbender (2010) and five years before the shambolic After Earth (2013), a film like The Happening should have put the director into the cinematic sin bin. If there is anything redeeming about this horror-thriller, it is somehow not terrible enough to be noxious to the senses. Instead, first-time viewers should prepare for laughter – you won’t even need certain recreational substances (depending where you live, perhaps legal substances!) to enjoy the kick this movie provides. Laissez les bons temps rouler!

The Happening opens in Central Park as an inexplicable mass suicide strikes the surrounding area. Initially, an airborne chemical toxin is suggested as the cause. Philadelphia-based high school science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg; whose character comments about a student’s appearance and accepts the most quasi-intellectual answer any student has ever bullshitted) has learned about the supposed bioterrorist attack and decides to leave for Harrisburg with his wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), teacher friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian’s young daughter Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). Julian, hearing that his wife is in trouble in Princeton, New Jersey, leaves Jess to the care of Elliot and Alma – parental figures in Shyamalan’s films are awful. It is up to Elliot, Alma, and Jess to survive the unknown, unpredictable chemical menace stalking the American Northeast.

Other important characters include the reclusive Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley), a plant nursery owner (Frank Collison), the nursery owner’s wife (Victoria Clark), and teenagers Josh (Spencer Breslin) and Jared (Robert Bailey, Jr.).

Usually my synopses do not end that early in a film’s plot, but considering that The Happening reveals the plot twist about a quarter-ways into the runtime and the fact that I am averse to spoiling movies, that will have to do. The trademark Shyamalan twist seems not to be the twist itself, but the timing of the twist. Shyamalan’s screenplay is a disaster of organization, imagination, and characterization. Already packed with sharp turns in mood, some of those tonal shifts are distractingly arbitrary – such as when Elliot teases the vice principal about being a wicked lady before receiving the news of the events (something bound to see any other teacher disciplined), Julian relinquishing Jess to Alma before seething at her intentions (”Don’t take my daughter’s hand unless you mean it.”), and an aside about packing and the deliciousness of hot dogs just after the twist is revealed. Elliot and Alma are dreadful judges of imminent dangers and mystifying behavior that a viewer can draw one or both of the following conclusions: that the leads are socially inept or that everyone in this film – by virtue of being proximate to the titular happening (or perhaps just by being in a Shyamalan movie) – is socially inept.

What happened to all of the characters in Shyamalan movies from here to The Last Airbender to After Earth? No one in any of these three movies – and the only three Shyamalan movies I have seen in their entirety – possesses even a whiff of charisma, good humor, or likability. If surviving a cataclysmic event means that we have to be devoid of all these qualities, almost everyone who is reading this is probably doomed. Did Shyamalan save all of those personalities for a rainy day so that he could use them in Split (2016)? Spare a thought and a silver lining for some, however, as awkward teenagers and nerds looking to exact revenge on jocks should rejoice! Unlike the characters in The Happening, you can take the simplest of hints!

Now, the lead actors; neither of them assisted by the screenplay.

This movie contains the worst performance in Mark Wahlberg’s hot-and-cold career – worse than Planet of the Apes (2001) and the two Transformers movies he has appeared in (admittedly, I haven’t seen the entirety of Age of Extinction or a second of The Last Knight, but I can – by betting the farm, the barn, the silos, and the livestock – almost certainly guarantee you those Wahlberg performances cannot be as bad as this). Wahlberg always looks worried, his face never relaxing, his eyebrows and wrinkles curved downward. Wahlberg’s dialogue delivery is some of the poorest within the last decade. The most infamous example of which happens just before Elliot and Alma sleep over at Mrs. Jones’ house for the night. Any child – not even a child actor – could convince Mrs. Jones about their intentions better than that. Who in their right mind (Wahlberg? Shyamalan? thought those lines were delivered as well as they could be?

Then there is Zooey Deschanel, also providing audiences with the entertainment of a most disastrous, inhuman performance. She has the most nonsensical lines in the movie (”We’re not gonna be one of those assholes on the news who watches the crime happen and not do something! We’re not assholes!”) and is found too often blankly staring at someone or something – her eyes like saucers at a Thanksgiving dinner. Prepare to be hypnotized by her eyes; not romantically, but curiously and eventually devolving into unintended hilarity. She has no chemistry with her co-star, as Elliot and Alma are sniping at each other with the aftermath of an unexplained marital conflict. But, of course, they get back together by the film’s end. Regarding her dialogue delivery, Deschanel’s timing is only slightly better than Wahlberg’s, but not by much.

Instead, it is Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones with the creepiest performance in The Happening, as the tonal inconsistency of the screenplay actually helps her character. There is a lesson to be learned here: whenever a movie sees a plastic plant act better than the top-billed star, it probably sucks. So if Hollywood ever produces a new version of Paint Your Wagon, I fully expect Mark Wahlberg to be cast as Pardner, so he can sing “I Talk to the Trees”. If any other actor is cast as Pardner, I will consider a twenty-year sabbatical from watching any movie.

Is there anything redeeming about The Happening? Barely. Tak Fujimoto’s (1991′s The Silence of the Lambs, 1999′s The Sixth Sense) cinematography, though blandly lit, provides audiences with a handful of harrowing images: the opening scenes in Central Park and the construction site in particular. Again, I must be careful of spoilers by walking on tiptoes in noting that something about the weather proves important to the movie. Some of the greatest director-cinematographer collaborations have made sunlight oppressive, the rain foreboding, the wind terrifying, the snow ominous. Fujimoto and Shyamalan fail to make that terrorizing aspect about the film’s weather a character, though I suspect most of the fault here lies with Shyamalan

Also, is The Happening trying to be a horror-thriller hybrid? Because it barely registers the frights needed for the former, nor the excitement expected for the latter. It inspires enough eye-rolls and laughs for a comedy, but nothing in The Happening suggests the film wants to be interpreted that way. Away from strict genres now, is The Happening a veiled message movie? If so, Shyamalan has never spoken about it in that way. One suspects that this film might be commenting on how people react after a mass catastrophe, like a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. There are references to the bystander effect (a psychological phenomenon where people are less likely to help an individual in distress if there are others around) and social situations that should raise questions about what is the right thing to do – but these depictions do not inspire controversy or personal inquiry.

Movies like The Happening make me wonder how do producers and executives allow calamitous films to be released. Shyamalan’s film has a workable premise left in tatters the moment Wahlberg’s character is introduced. It never recovers the lethal momentum of its introductory scenes’ framing. Thus, The Happening should be a staple of movie marathons where the theme is hilariously bad movies. I guess there are Shyamalan movies worth watching – recall that I’ve only seen this, The Last Airbender, and After Earth in their entireties – and that I will get to them someday. I will let you know when that happens.

My rating: 2/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here. 

[buzzdixonwriter]

Writing Report March 28, 2017

To demonstrate how the creative mind works[1], consider: Last night I was watching an episode of a classic old genre show (hence, Show A). It was a typical standalone, villain-of-the-week episode of the series, nothing spectacular in and of itself. I don’t recall ever seeing this particular episode, but if I did, it must’ve been 50-60 years ago in its initial run.

It struck me that this episode’s particular baddie was in a unique position to help the protagonists with their mission, but only at a terrible cost. They turn him down, of course, opting to struggle on nobly rather than employ the services of such a villain, but it occurred to me…

…if the villain wasn’t so villainous (or at least didn’t appear so villainous), and they did take him up on his offer…

…then the show would have moved in a radically differ (albeit similar) direction from the way it actually did when aired.

That got me thinking about the basic premise of the show. It was far-fetched 60 years ago and completely unviable today…given the backstory of the show.

But if you changed that backstory…

I thought of genre Show B; it had a similar premise but a significantly different backstory. Swap out a few elements of Show A’s backstory with Show B…

…now you have a similar premise / mission but with a different sense of urgency.

So different it makes the original Show A villain’s offer all the more tempting.

Still, I’m not interested in doing straight up fan fic using somebody else’s characters. While their archetypes (to be generous) and stock characters (to be honest) were common to the genre, they’d still require considerable tweaking to make them my own.

Gender and age substitutions were easy enough, but one stock character reminded me of a comedy relief team of similar stock characters in genre Show C, so if I port that team over, play them straight but keep the core essence of their personalities…

Still, it struck me as a little too cut-&-pasty. Sharp-eyed readers might notice what I lifted from Show B and Show C.

Then I remember Genre Movie had used a similar setting to Show B and similar characters to Show C but had been released before either of those two shows aired, so if anybody said, “You ripped off Show B & C” I could say, no, Genre Movie did that, too and vice versa.

Great, so now I have a strong, workable premise, but no place to put it. I suppose I could write it (eventually) as a novel…

Then it struck me to approach the material as I would a TV series, each chapter an episode in a season or a long story arc.[2] Thirteen episodes of three acts, each act with a minimum of three scenes, each scene 500 words long = 58,500 words right there. Easily within striking range of a standard genre novel.

Well, that’s good.

The only real question now is when to find time to write this!

We just got in the cover art for Poor Banished Children Of Eve, my young adult “World War Two Lord Of The Flies with Catholic school girls” novel; I’ll be sharing that with you shortly. That should be hitting the market (well, Amazon) in a matter of weeks.

Completed the second draft on the short story I mentioned last time that’s set in a book store; trimmed it down a little tighter, punched up a few lines. As soon as I have more info on the anthology’s final title and release date Ill let you know.

The modern Western YA novel about four teen girls saving a herd of wild horses is still awaiting the next round of revisions; gotta get that one in the hopper ASAP.

Haven’t forgotten about the female barbarian story, either; it’s still stewing in the back of me widdle brain.

We went to Canada for a wedding last weekend and to amuse myself in the down time I wrote a 1,400 word short story I now have no idea what to do with. It’s not a genre story[3] and it has a nasty little twist that hinges on a sharp change in tone, so markets that might like the first half of the story won’t like the second and vice versa. If anybody has any general fiction markets they know of, bounce ‘em along to me, please.

I’ve also written a short factoid that will eventually find its way into the rotation on this blog. It’s more of a mood piece that an actual story, but I liked the way it turned out and as they say in the song, “Whaddya want for nuthin’? A rubber beeeeescuit?”

Oh, and I’ve got some links to share of a book review of The Most Dangerous Man In The World: The Lost Classic G.I. Joe Episodeand an interview I did recently, so I gotta get those up plus you’ll probably be seeing some format changes on this blog in the very near future as we are shifting from one platform to another.

So brace yourselves, there’s a lot coming!

[1]  Well, howthiscreative mind works.

[2]  But how to hide the episodic nature so that it flows like a real novel instead of a series of adventures? Well, when we were doing the classic Sunbow shows we were forced into a pretty rigid three act structure by the need to run commercials. If each chapter is the equivalent of an episode, just move the chapter break to the cliff hanger at the end of act two, resolve it in the next chapter, then segue on to the next story.

[3]  Unless you want to call it a crime story but while there’s a crime in it, the focus of a genre crime story is the crime itself while the focus of this story is what motivates the crime.