#this one was uncanny valley not good enough to be a good film not bad enough to be a good bad film

[mauricemylittlemeowmeow]

back in the city. watched It Ends With Us with my roommate.

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[weclassybouquetfun]

With the release of AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM, the DCEU has officially ended.

You could never make me hate you.

AQUAMAN AND THE LOST KINGDOM THOUGHTS. MORE SPOILERS THAN FISH IN THE SEA.

THE GOOD

-Loved the humour of it. The DCEU has been so serious and I find myself loving the lighter ones like WONDER WOMAN 2, the SHAZAM films and THE FLASH. Plus, Jason Momoa is better equipped for comedy/action, than drama. Meanwhile, Patrick Wilson excels at both! How great is he in this?!

Wilson was just so game. The cockroach scenes (scenes because there is a mid-credit call-back) would have been downright dumb if it was played by someone less committed than Wilson.

And the humour in their interactions weren't clunky because this is Arthur having the brother experience that he never had. It ties back to his father Tom (Temuera Morrison) saying Junior should have a sibling and how he wished Arthur had one. Now we see it played out, complete with the older sibling bullying (convincing Orm to eat a cockroach by saying it's the shrimp of the land. Which is priceless because people call shrimp the cockroaches of the seas).

-As soon as Kordax said his darkest night had ended, I knew what was going on.

Blackest Night!!!!!

Yes, the core story was vastly different but this was the their nod to it.

-People living under the sea should stoke the imagination so I'm happy they finally made the civilization under the sea so lively instead of us just watching Atlantean council meetings. Give us the nightlife!

THE BAD

-I don't think we got enough time with Black Manta.

It honestly felt like Randall Park's Stephen Shin had more screen-time.

Stephen who is obviously Jimmy Woo's identical twin cousin.

I think the film should have gone deeper into David Kane's slip into madness due to the trident with more of his "Gollum" scenes where we can see how Kordax is spurring him on.

But at least they gave Black Manta a great death. I was just waiting for Arthur to grab him and Black Manta still fall to his death. But it's so fitting that David wouldn't dare let the man who killed his father (a man who doesn't even feel bad about it) save him. True standing on business! Or falling... Falling on business.

-The water effects are horrible. I think it likely looks better in 3D but in standard - hazy, uncanny valley.

THE REST

-Pilou Asbaek plays Kordax and I find it fitting that my wretched sh!tty despot uncle of the Iron Islands plays a power hungry Atlantean.

-I was the only person to laugh at the Topo line spoken by Atlanna (Nicole Kidman).

Return of the King.

And Storm!

-Though in the SnyderCut we get Martian Manhunter, thus fulfilling the motto of Unite the Seven

in this film we get another united seven - the seven kingdoms of Atlantis which includes the titular lost kingdom.

-Felt like James Wan did a fair bit of nods. We get Orn living above ground at an outdoor restaurant a'la Bruce's retired life in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Arthur and Orn's team-up is like Thor and Loki's in THOR: RAGNAROK. Arthur even calls Orn Loki before making a Harry Potter reference.

There's a shot of Black Manta sat in the navigation chair in his Black Manta gear casting the same type of demeanor as T'Challa in BLACK PANTHER. The ending with Arthur deciding to tell the world about Atlantis is straight cribbed from BLACK PANTHER and IRON MAN. Is this the cinematic version of someone losing a match and shaking the hand of their opponent?

[everything-magic-sparkles]

The State with the Black Stain

—————————————

A horror-mystery fic

~Warnings~

Mentions of violence, scopophobia, uncanny valley, true crime, sexual content

—————————————

Your alarm goes off at 6:30am. You really don’t want to go to work, though it’s all you have to look forward to for the day. That is, if you want to keep food on the table. Your job, a 9-5 at a VHS store in Milwaukee Wisconsin. You had been working there for a couple of years now. It didn’t pay much, but that doesn’t matter when you live alone.

It wasn’t that difficult of a job, either; Restock the shelves, work the register, know the genres of movies, and where to find them. Check in on time and clock out appropriately. There wasn’t much to hate about it, but you did hate how late you’d get out sometimes. You didn’t live too far away, but you didn’t live in the nicest part of your neighborhood, so being out late at night made you nervous.

A lot of times you wouldn’t be doing any work at all, so you’d read the newspaper. What else were you supposed to do? After a while of reading, you started to notice that the headlines all had the same focus: disappearances.

Was there any explanation for all of the disappearances? No. All that law enforcement knew was that 17 had gone missing so far without any indication of where they could’ve gone. You wondered how that could happen in such a small town. But, it can happen anywhere, right?

It was slightly disturbing to hear about all those disappearances and made your nightly trips back home even worse than they were before. Eventually, though, your mind wandered elsewhere and was able to forget about it.

That was, until a particular customer gave rise to the notion all over again. In the worst way possible.

“will that be all, sir? Just this film right here?”

“Yeah that’s it. I have a coupon for it Lemme get it.”

The man dug through his pockets as he looked for the coupon, “Oh, by the way, have you heard about the disappearances lately?”

Oh boy. Here we go.

“Y-yes I have. Why?”

“Well you remember that guy that died all those years ago? I can’t remember his name. All I know is that…” he leaned in closer to you, “People think he’s still alive. You know, the Milwaukee Monster.”

The name sounded familiar to you.

“Oh yeah- uh… W-wasn’t he a cannibal, too?”

“Mhm.” The man said, “He killed a bunch of black men around here… They took down the apartment building, but I don’t trust it. Mm-Mm. Not for a second. This state has a bad mark on it…”

You shut your eyes tightly remembering what happened 30 years ago. His face was still plastered in your memory. “Have a good day, sir…”

That memory was enough to set your paranoia into full swing. That man was one of the worst serial killers in American History. Sure, he was dead, but that didn’t mean that Milwaukee was over the tragedy.

Instead of trying to forget about everything, you decided to do some digging to jog your memory. You remembered having an old box full of old newspapers and magazines in your house. Eventually you found what you were looking for; an old newspaper with the headline: Cannibal-killer: Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to 17 murders.

The name made your stomach churn. Amidst your nausea, however, you made the shocking connection that the number of disappearances lately had directly matched up with the number of the monster’s victims;

17.

Just as you made the horrible realization that something wasn’t right, your radio began to play on its own.

‘Babe, I love you so.’

The radio sang as you stormed over to shut it off,

‘I want you to know, that I am gonna miss your love, the minute you walk out that door.’

“This isn’t fucking funny…”

‘So please don’t go-‘

You shut the radio off. The song name showed on the display, ‘Please don’t go, by: KC & The Sunshine Band.’

“Goddammit. How am I supposed to get any sleep now?” You thought, heading to bed. Surprisingly, you were able to fall asleep. Not without conflict from your mind, of course.

No one could’ve been playing tricks on you. You lived alone. And why would they? You were a young man that worked at a VHS store who wasted half their money on buying cigarettes. That’s about as generic as you can get. Hiding in plain sight.

Your last customer of the night walked up to the register.

“Just this, please.”

The man handed you a copy of the movie ‘The Exorcist III.’ You cocked a brow at the title as you scanned it, knowing how gruesome it was.

“That’ll be ten…”

Something caught your eye.

“T-ten ninety nine…”

Your eyes were glued to what appeared to be a man’s face, staring at you from behind one of the shelves. A white face.

“Is something wrong?” The customer asked.

“N-no I just… it’s nothing.”

When you were done scanning the movie’s barcode, you slipped it into a bag and handed it to the man, to which he left.

Something told you that you needed to get the hell out of that store. So, you did. You went straight home and didn’t look back.

‘What the hell even was that?’ You thought, ‘Maybe that bastard’s ghost is running around here still. I know what I saw wasn’t a fucking person.’

You lock your doors and windows out of paranoia and try to head to bed. That is, until your radio plays again. The same damn song as the night before.

Now you really know something is fucking with you. You get up to go shut the radio off,

“Alright, where are you, shithead? Get the fuck out of my house! You’re not welcome here!”

The radio plays again and you continue to shut it off every time it turns back on. At this point you were completely defeated and terrified, but you didn’t want to leave. Inside there was better than out on the street. You slid down the wall of your living room and covered your face, about to cry.

Between your fingers and your tear-blurred vision, you see him. The white face you saw earlier, standing in the doorway, his eyes peering down at you.

“Fuck!” You yell and cover your face, shutting your eyes quickly.

As you do so, you hear footsteps getting closer to you.

‘I’m so dead I’m so dead I’m so dead’ your thoughts ran amuck. After a while there wasn’t any response. So you uncovered your eyes.

Big mistake.

There he was, standing right in front of you. Jeffrey Dahmer. His ghost, rather. You wondered how he could look so real, despite being dead.

“Wh-what the fuck do you want?” You squeaked out.

The man grinned, a sharp-toothed smile stretching across his face, “You.”

To be continued…

[stitching-in-time]

Voyager rewatch s3 ep 26: Scorpion pt 1

AKA, the beginning of All The Borg Crap. I do not love the Borg- I don't really like any of Voyager's continuing villains, but I've had issues with the Borg as a concept since Next Gen, and I feel like all the additional spotlight on them in Voyager just shone an even more glaring light on their flaws, but this particular episode was actually pretty decent, and better than I remembered.

For one thing, there wasn't a lot of actual Borg in it, just a lot of the crew preparing to face them, which has enough dramatic tension in and of itself. In any given episode, you know the crew is going to face a life and death scenario at some point, that's just how Star Trek, and most sci-fi, works, and you accept it as the status quo of the genre and don't think about it a lot. With the Borg, however, they're facing a fate much worse than death, and it's actually just really stressful to watch characters you love have to deal with the gnawing, existstential dread of that. Like, hmm, do I really want to think about my beloved space family facing the prospect of being turning into mindless zombie slaves? No! I do not! And the fact that Starfleet could literally have stopped the Borg forever, and didn't, because they felt sorry for them, makes it all ten times worse- but my burning hatred of the ending of 'I, Borg' is the subject for another post someday, when I do another full rewatch of TNG.

I liked the little scenes of Janeway on the holodeck in DaVinci's studio; the set is very detailed, and pretty, and they have a cozy, meditative atmosphere that acts as a nice counterbalance to the existential Borg dread and frenetic activity of basically arming themselves for war.

Having a new villain that could take down the Borg was actually a nice change- as evil as species 8472 is, it's actually a relief to have regular baddies who just want to kill everyone. It's kind of hard to judge the cgi fairly now, since it was the best they could do with the tech and budget they had at the time, but it doesn't hold up super well. (One thing I think is absolutely hilarious though is watching the DVD special features, and finding out that the pile of dead Borg was actually just action figures that they sawed apart and glued together and filmed from different angles. I thought it looked a little uncanny valley, and that's because yeah, it's literally a pile of miniature dolls. Actual mass produced merch, for children, used as an actual prop, in the actual show! Too wild!)

I appreciated the dilemma of deciding whether they should go through Borg space or not, and the disagreement between Janeway and Chakotay was well played, and pretty devastating, tbh. Chakotay always seems more ready to give up and be willing to settle for a new home, whereas Janeway never is, and considering that her stance on that has never wavered, it hurts when Chakotay disagrees with her. It hurts more when he won't concede she's right, even knowing that in her mind, she doesn't even consider not going home as an option. Chakotay must know that for her, the choice has always been get home or die trying, no third option, and that the crew would all follow her to it if she asked it of them, so it hurts when he won't back her when she takes the best option in a bad situation. On the one hand, I get where he's coming from- it would be safer to give up and go live on some planet, they could probably have had good lives- but they're Starfleet, and they'd choose Starfleet every time, and they'll chose it even when it the odds are against them. Janeway is the most Starfleet any person could ever be- and he had to know that, but when it comes down to the wire, he lets her know she's on her own when she makes that decision. At the end of the day, the hard decisions all fall to her, with no one to ask for help or intervention, and no one else to bear the weight of those decisions with, except maybe for supportive words from her crew, especially Chakotay and Tuvok. The only people she can rely on are her crew, and ultimately, Chakotay does let her down in that moment. Maybe he's too angry to be Starfleet when staring down the possible loss of everything they have on Voyager, but it still hurts that he won't even pay lip service to believing in her, for her sake, since he's going to follow her orders anyway. A heartbreaking scene, but very real. Sometimes no matter how much you love someone, you're going to end up disagreeing, and when it's something as fundamental as right or wrong, life and death, it's going to hurt worse. But still they do their jobs as though it didn't tear their hearts out. Ugh. This show sometimes!!!

Anyway, it ends on a very nailbiting cliffhanger, and I remember being pretty excited to find out what happened back in the day. Of course back then we didn't know about the cast change of doom looming ahead of us, and I'm not especially looking forward to it, but I'm hoping that maybe now, with hindsight and the perspective of a few decades, I might hate it less, or at least find things I didn't appreciate back then when it was all happening the first time. We'll see!

Tl;dr: A surprisingly suspenseful and tense episode that managed to bring a heap of character driven drama without bringing nearly any Borg directly in to it at all.

[radiantlyrey]

Doctor Who Review: S1/S14E01 - Space Babies

After a quartet of specials last year to ring in Russell T Davies' second term as showrunner, Doctor Who has returned for a regular season at last! With Ncuti Gatwa helming the TARDIS as the Fifteenth Doctor and Millie Gibson joining him as companion Ruby Sunday, Season 1 (or as I like to think of it, Series 14) got started last weekend with a double premiere, the first episode of which was "Space Babies."

BE YE WARNED: SPOILERS BEYOND THE CUT

"Space Babies" finds the Doctor and Ruby landing on an abandoned space station, with a mysterious monster in the basement and a bunch of babies--space babies--manning the controls on the upper floors. But not everything is as it seems, as our heroes soon find out.

To be honest, I only had a couple of real problems with this episode, one of which is down to my personal taste, and the other of which is due to the editorial choices made for the episode.

The issue of personal taste is this: I have never liked talking babies (or talking animals, for that matter) as characters in live-action films. I remember seeing ads for the 1999 film "Baby Geniuses" as a child and being freaked out by them. Something about the digital effects used on these characters just twigs my Uncanny Valley sense a little too hard. I won't deny that the effects used on the babies in this episode were pretty good--that's RTD putting Disney's money to good use again--but as a matter of my personal taste? I couldn't really stand to watch the babies talking. And I know that this is the digital effect that drives the whole conceit of the episode, but… I personally didn't like it.

On the other side of things, there's the fact that the episode really transparently is missing scenes. The most obvious sign of this occurs about three-quarters of the way through the episode, when Ruby mentions that a computer told them that "babies need fiction", among other things. There is no such scene in the final cut of the episode. We also don't see why, exactly, the babies are concerned for the Bogeyman monster at the end of the episode, when they seemed terrified of it earlier on. From my perspective, it seems that RTD and Bad Wolf/BBC Studios were aiming for a 60-minute premiere, but then had to cut things when someone higher up or someone on the distribution end of things nixed an hour-long episode. (My inclination is that it was maybe the BBC? Given that they had to fit Doctor Who into a television timeslot on Eurovision weekend, whereas Disney+ is a streaming outfit that doesn't have a schedule that things have to fit into perfectly. But that's just speculation on my part.) At any rate, the episode still made sense, but I feel like it might have made more sense had we been able to get the context of those missing scenes.

As far as the main plot of the episode goes, I mostly don't have any issues with it! I'm adoring the Doctor and Ruby's chemistry so far; they play off each other really well, and it's entertaining to watch. The various twists and turns of the story were interesting and amusing, particularly the pun concerning the Bogeyman. There were a few heartfelt moments in there too! The Doctor's conversation with Captain Poppy was a standout for me, a scene where the Doctor felt perfectly in character. (Something about the Doctor interacting with kids is just catnip to me; I always love it and it's always so good.) The resolution of the episode's main problem with an enormous fart was, to my mind, extremely amusing. (Fart jokes work best, I feel, when they don't come at the expense of somebody else. "Aliens of London", I'm looking at you.) And yes, the snot jokes and the fart joke are kind of juvenile, but! Doctor Who isn't just a show for sci-fi fans, it's meant (by and large) to be a family show. Ever since the revival started in 2005, there have been occasional juvenile jokes, and no doubt there will be more.

All in all, it's a perfectly cromulent episode! I enjoyed it enough that I've watched it 4 times already! But I've got something else to talk about, because there are some season plot threads that come up as well, and I've got to speculate about them.

Ruby's story and, to be honest, her whole existence intrigues me. Like, a lot. Millie Gibson's performance is wonderful so far, and she brings a lot of spunk and heart to the character, but Ruby herself is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Her memories seem to be warping reality, what with the snow appearing when the Doctor invokes the church on Ruby Road. She keeps blinking out of existence in butterfly paradoxes (both the one seen here, and the climactic one at the end of last year's Christmas special). Even the Doctor seems extremely discomfited by almost everything about her--look at his face when he hugs her after the snow appears. ("Never trust a hug. It's just a way to hide your face," the Twelfth Doctor said. But that may be why Fifteen hugged her in the first place.) The fact that he runs a DNA scan on her at the end of the episode, the fact that he soft bans her from finding out who her birth mother is (at least on Christmas 2004); he knows something is going on, and he seems intent on finding out what it is. It's strange, because in some ways Ruby doesn't seem real--she's yet to take charge and save the day, when most modern companions would have by this point in the season. And given how much RTD is a character writer, it's really odd that Ruby doesn't seem all that fleshed out yet.

Obviously I've got my theories about what's going on, but I will leave them out of this review for now. Nevertheless, "Space Babies" is a good piece of fun, and while it's not a total standout for a Doctor Who episode, or even a Doctor Who season premiere, it's still delightful in a lot of ways. It's not perfect, obviously, but it's still enjoyable, which is all that matters to me.

[adrenaline-whump]

AI art, and a couple of thoughts

Awhile back, an artist/author I follow started playing around with digital art assistants.  They made it sound interesting enough that I tried Midjourney...and got a little hooked. (Examples below the cut.)

As a person who’s never had the patience or skill to Do Art, I find it overwhelmingly joyful to just...enter some words, and be given art in return?  It’s most likely not what I pictured, but that often makes it more fun.  I had fun in the beginning putting in abstract concepts, just to see what came back.  Two of my favorites were generated by simply putting in “evil hunger” and “icy rage”. 

Evil Hunger:

Icy Rage:

At that time, Midjourney was...not good at rendering humans. You see, it works by taking all the art it has access to online, attempting to match keywords to prompts, putting that subset of the art in its little AI blender, and spitting out the result. It doesn’t know, for example, that humans typically have two eyes that look in the same direction. Early experiments gave me a lot of figures facing away from the camera in silhouette, which was good because the clearer ones usually came straight from the Uncanny Valley. I got human figures with one leg, and horses with six.

That was Midjourney version 3.  They’ve since come out with a version 4, which is much better at getting the proper number of physical features sorted. It still has a hard time with hands...but that’s a problem for all artists, from what I understand.

As you can read in the Discourse, if you’re so inclined, AI art can be Problematic. Is it stealing? Maybe. It’s a little ludicrous for me to input “icy rage” into a text box and claim the result is “my art.” There are thousands of real artists, living and dead, whose skill the AI is borrowing. That said, can we defend it as creative derivation? Artists (and writers, and most creatives) borrow from each other all the time. We use each others’ work as inspiration and let it drive our own creation. Isn’t that what’s happening here?

The question is, how much of the result is transforming others’ works, and how much is straight up copying? Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell.

For myself, I’ve got two rules. One is, I don’t use artists’ names in my prompts. A lot of people do, but to me, that’s where it crosses the line into plagiarism.  The other is...well, I’ll illustrate with something it gave me awhile back:

I asked it for a “fire opal talisman” and it gave me this set of four. Look at the one in the lower right corner. It looks like the AI has picked up a signature from whatever art it was using as a reference. That makes me profoundly uncomfortable. So my second rule is, no matter how much I like a result, anything with a ghost signature/watermark is out.

Now, this is a whump blog, so of course I was curious about how it might do for that. The answer is...meh? Even though the current version is better at rendering people, it’s still not great. Many human figures end up looking cartoony. Also, Midjourney has a list of words that cannot be used as prompts, in order to prevent misuse. That’s definitely a good thing, but it means I can’t use “bruised” for example.

I did get a couple of interesting whumpy results, like when I asked it for a film-noir-ish wounded man in a trenchcoat:

That’s not bad. I could use that as story inspo or illustration. It’s just that ultimately, I find that the more specific the result I want, the more difficult it is to wring that image out of the AI.

And one more thing

Since I’m posting this on Tumblr in November 2022, I’m contractually obligated to add this masterpiece I generated five minutes ago:

(IYKYK and all that. The weirdness of the 3 and 4 are an AI artifact, but it amuses me to think that this might be the start of a dream sequence or hallucination where our MC imagines the clock’s numbers moving and changing.)

[all-about-the-tea-parties]

House of the Dragon Episode One thoughts as I watch:

I really like the two young girls so far they’ve been captivating and Matt Smith is promising as a creepy grooming uncle

Not sure I enjoy the… visuals?? It’s kind of uncanny valley. It both feels too real (because I can tell it’s a set) and not real enough (because I can tell it’s a set). Nothing wrong with the sets in question, just… disappointingly obvious. GoT had sets too (alongside a plethora of locations which gave it a valuable realism) but all the sets in Game of Thrones weren’t overly noticeable which meant they felt beautifully rich in terms of world building.

Also don’t like the editing style. Early GoT was frugal w/ editing. The dialogue took centre stage and actors were allowed to command a scene from beginning until end (unless there was a poignant reaction). So far the editing feels sporadic and unintentional. And certain camera shots feel a tad ambitious for no particular reason, which makes it seem indulgent. It’s all a little distracting.

The dialogue is actually good! Not word play levels that I expect, but contextually there isn’t much need yet. Not much politicking happening because there’s no real “enemy” whereas in GoT the enemy was everyone, so much politicking all the time. The dialogue, though clever, is very upfront (because the targs are unquestionable in their power). So it’s good. No need to distract ppl with so many cuts and weird shots.

Maybe they’re trying to distract from the sets?

It just feels a bit… modern? Staged?

A quick question: idk if it’s my tv or not, but like is the frame sped up? On my tv it all feels s little too fast in movement (sometimes tv offers a “hyper realism” thing and that might be messing w/ my experience)

There’s def a lack of proper intrigue. But I know that’s to come, so it’s fine.

Really it’s the visual part that bothers me.

Not sure I enjoy seeing Matt smith in a sex scene but alright

The girls are the best part for sure, and I know they’re the point of it all, so I do hope the writers aren’t sacrificing the intrigue of other characters for them.

Like imagine game of thrones if D&D framed Jon Snow as the main character from the beginning. It’d be boring af

I like seeing my guy from outlander here tho. Not enough variety in accents in fantasy and I appreciate it here.

NOT THE HORSE

I HATE JOUSTS

NO MORE HORSE ABUSE

Is it ok? It’s ok?

I wanna be grossed out by siblings being in love but like considering the family they’re in, it’s probably at warped attempt at normalcy. Like at least they were married to each other and not an aunt/uncle (or PARENT)

Ugh the “impossible choice” fucking starting to see this trend in film where men are shown to have to decide women’s lives during childbirth (obviously at sn attempt to humanise them and make them good “but in a bad position”) like honestly it’s the new “turning your wife’s death/trauma into your own for a plot point” like spareeee me the angst most men HISTORICALLY had no issue killing their wives

Oh fuck me he’s gonna kill her

Never mind he’s a bad person

Never mind it was gruesome

They didn’t frame it as a difficult choice or like “he didn’t have any other option” or “he’s still good actually because we cut away from it all”

Holy shit MAJOR trigger warning for a torture scene

Like sure yeah maybe they were both gonna die but the doctor clearly didn’t give af about the queen so I doubt there’s was much investigation for a better option (that saves her)

Wait so he has a son now

Oh the baby’s gone

I LOVE how Valyrian sounds 200 years before Dany

The rolllls

Small touch I really enjoy? The fires give off so much smoke and I’ve never seen it before in a show. Do they normally cgi it away?

Not sure I’m hooked, again, intrigue is missing, character across the board that are all thoroughly interesting, but I DO like our main contenders.

They did NOT just throw the Game of Thrones ending shade like that

They. Did. Not. Just say DANY was meant to get the throne (even if for a short while because I feel she’s only meant to have it to unite the realm for the battle and likely leaves/dies after, as an end to an age of magic).

Like the point of GoT was obvs that the politicking WASNT the point but it’s suchhhh vindication that Daenerys was magically destined to ascend the throne

I don’t care if you think Jon is an option - she was the mother of dragons not him

Doesn’t mean Jon doesn’t do important things during the war to come, or even become a king after Dany, as this show said a Targ w/ dragons is needed to protect the world from a position of monarchy - doesn’t mean that monarchy exists for very much longer after the war ends.

So TECHNICALLY she both WINS the game of thrones AND breaks the wheel

Coupled w/ the fact that they HIGHLIGHTED Dany’s name at the beginning

G RR Martin is practically shouting who becomes the head of Westeros during the winter war. (Again, not necessarily the PTWP, because this is a separate Targ dreaming, not the prophecy that Rhaegar became obsessed w/ but now I see why he became obsessed w/ it if he was given this info by his dad before hearing it).

Ahhhhhhh

V I N D I C A T I O N

[diesoonandsuffer]

my thoughts on the voyage home AND the final frontier

again i’m just going to paste both of my letterboxd reviews here because why would i retype the same thoughts.

the voyage home

i'm giving this a 3.5/5 because it still falls a bit below search for spock for me personally. i think after having seen more of these i might bump the first two movies down a bit in rating.

now i'm a fan of anytime star trek goes goofy and wacky. the trouble with tribbles and a piece of the action are some of my favorite original series episodes, and even just the silly moments in an otherwise normal episode will usually stand out to me. so i don't want it to sound like i didn't appreciate the goofiness of this movie; i did! i love putting the enterprise crew in situations. i love chekov running through an army naval base. i love spock vulcan neck-pinching a punk guy on a bus. i love bones and scotty pretending they work for this random engineering company. those things were great. however, the whiplash tonal shift of this movie is noticeable. i did a double feature of this and final frontier, which i will review separately, but seeing now 5/6 of the original series movies it is striking how different this is. i guess in a way its the tribbles of the star trek movies. and i guess it makes sense to have at least one -- it keeps it true to form in a way -- but something about the long term storytelling between the movies makes the random tone switch of this one just feel a bit off. again, i loved the goofiness, but it was just a lot to process.

there's other minor things about the movie i don't like; some of kirk's characterization felt a little off, for one. spock also did at times which i know is part of him recovering from being fucking brought back to life but it was almost like i was watching original pilot spock again. "irritation? ah, yes, one of your earth emotions!" like that level of spock. his arc in this being that he just goes back to the evolved spock we came to know over 3 seasons of television and 2 movies was...a choice, but whatever. it led to some funny moments between him and kirk but again, it had this almost uncanny valley feeling to it where it just felt a little bit wrong. also saavik being removed is disappointing but not surprising. apparently there was one script draft where she was pregnant with spock's child and if that stayed in i would have started biting glass.

overall this movie is definitely an enjoyable watch; the premise is goofy enough that it's easy watching, the ending is optimistic in the traditional star trek way, and the characters are put in fun little situations. it just feels a little off to me with some minor problems but i wouldn't call this a bad film by any stretch.

the final frontier

i did a double feature of this and the voyage home and wow holy shit. what a tonal shift.

before i start i'm not gonna straight up blame shatner for what this movie is. other reviews on here have explored him and that in more depth and i'm not even gonna try. i think it's not so black and white as "nimoy did this and it was good, shatner did this and it was bad" and i think its reductive to reduce it as such.

i can see why shatner would want to write this story. spock was fucking brought back to life. he has an eternal soul. once you write something like that into your script, the concept of God or the source of all life doesn't seem that out of the picture. and it's not like star trek hasn't dealt with gods or god-like entities before. who mourns for adonais explores the greek god apollo and other episodes have advanced sentient life forms who, in a way, act like god figures. so i can see why shatner would want to take that idea and expand it into a scale beyond what a tv show, or the original series at the time, could handle. do i think it was executed well? not particularly. i both saw the reveal coming and was surprised by it all at once.

some parts of this movie i enjoyed. another review mentioned that the shore leave scenes are such a delight that you wish shatner had permission to make a shore leave only movie, and i agree with that. i'm sort of biased since i'm a fan of that kind of story already, but the point stands. what this movie and the previous two have in common is that it got back what the first two movies were missing; the fact that the enterprise is a found family. in search for spock they were such a found family that they abandoned their careers to save spock. voyage home has them on a goofy adventure together that lets their characters and dynamics shine. this movie centers that dynamic more on the main trio of kirk, spock, and bones. i'm glad bones actually got to be part of this time as he has been unfortunately sidelined many other times. i really enjoyed all of their scenes together even after shore leave ends.

two more things i have to complain about and then i think im done. they both involve lore inconsistency. other people might see these as minor but they bother me, and i'm not usually a stickler for these things but they're both, like, obvious facts that are overridden. the first i'm not sure of the validity of because the origin is from the animated series. i don't know if this is considered canon BUT the best episode from that series (and arguably a better episode than many of the original series ones) is the one that explores spock's backstory where he has to go back in time to save himself from dying in a vulcan coming of age ritual. this explores his relationship to the other kids that tease him, his love for animals and his pet, him and sarek's strained relationship, and so on. he explicitly does not have a half-brother here and to add a half-brother here would make the episode not make sense. i think in general having a half-brother makes his whole backstory not make sense. what, sarek managed to bear TWO children that were batshit insane by vulcan standards? if sybok was the other kid i would think spock is an angel by comparison. but whatever.

the second lore thing is at the end; spock mentions he lost sybok, a brother. kirk goes "i lost a brother once." now maybe i'm just a fool but i legitimately thought they were referencing Sam. you know. his brother. the brother that they killed off in the original series. like his for real brother, that he had, who died. but no he was just talking about spock. (the man who he was definitely about to kiss in front of the klingons but i won't get into that here.) and then they say that they do have families, meaning each other. ignoring bones' daughter they mention in the animated series, spock has at this point mostly reconciled with sarek (even if his flashback tries to make us forget that?) and as far as i can tell has always cared for his mother. kirk and bones both had relatives even if they died. i don't know. it just seemed clunky.

TLDR; weird movie. elements of it are good, some parts are just bad. definitely not the Worst thing i've ever seen.

[themsource]

I just finished the Chip N' Dale movie and I have so manyyyy things to say!! Fair warning it's both good and bad 😅

(Slight spoilers below cut)

First off I loved the bits of actural animation we had in the film! But that also left me dissappinted cuz while the animation was bueatiful it was so wasted potential with shortcutting the Main cast the way they did.

From what I could see there was clear distinction between the CGI characters and the hand drawn, so noticing that Chip and the others were merely CG drawn over? It really left me in that sence of Uncanny Valley (yep when that area showed up in the movie I was like "I thought we were already here!?").

Aside from that I adored the Cameos, me and the hubby had a blast going nuts recognising people and references 😂 I mean they even had south park in it! AND ROGER SHOWED UP FDUDHDUDJ

I did notice this feels very seperate from Roger Rabbit (what with a lack of Toontown and clear human/Cartoon division), which is fine, but it did come across like they were trying to do a spiritual successor in a sence by having the film take on a crime/mystery type role and then the lead cop Ellie mentioning becoming a detective.

I'm trying not to compare it honestly, but the fact that the ratings and success of this movie could open the way to a Roger Rabbit sequel or even more Live Action incorporating animation movies, I'm finding it a tad bit difficult 💀

Things I didn't like would include how easily the characters could be changed. Easily erasable? I'm not to into that idea. I did like seeing how an editing machine worked and I do find that more believeable working with the cartoon physics of chracters!

Also didn't like the remix of the old theme, felt too slowed down and legit like they tried to give it a hip-hop/RnB style twist. I'm hardcore into rock and punk so the OG version kinda scratched my itch in a way this one just didn't.

I liked how easily voices could change and I thoroughly enjoyed the mature-eque situations and jokes in it 🤣 (Paw patrol just why? Omg) Like Monty having a legit cheese addiction, and a secret cheese dealer, that felt very kid friendly nod to dark real life.

Plot overall? Eh, it was okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it wasn't bad and there were scenes that really showed attention to detail in the writing, but this honestly was more of a nostalgia trip then a remarkable new experience with old beloved characters. I don't think it'll go over well with younger audiences that can't catch a good chunck of the jokes.

In conclusion I liked the movie, but it didn't really give me as big of an inspirational boost as I hoped it might. Still rec this to watch and enjoy for others though 💯 and while I don't think this gave too positive an outlook to future Live Action/Animated movies it's enough to have me crossing my fingers ^^

[vegalocity]

10/18 spicynoodles plis

Prompt meme || @deborahsworld

10.A Shy Kiss/18. Holding Hands

Hell yeah time for fluff

--

Okay... first date....Going pretty well so far. The Movie was okay—MK wasn't very big on horror movies even ones as old as this one was, but Red Son was really excited when he saw it was being played for a ‘foreign movies’ night at the movie theater and what, could have have argued against such enthusiasm?—if a bit slow going and atmospheric.

Though after the heroes found the monster frozen and seemingly dead in the abandoned Norwegian outpost, all twisted and malformed, he really hoped his appetite wouldn't be killed by the end of this with even worse when the monsters started actually moving.

And then the monsters actually started moving.

The dog turning into a monster and killing the other dogs hurt the animal lover inside him, and he felt a bit of his latent arachnophobia begin to rear its head when the hairy legs sprouted from its back, and then the actual form the monster, halfway through killing the remaining trapped dogs had sent a chill up his spine and then-

“See how they were able to make the monster look goopy? It's not really very goopy except during the close up shots, because it's an animatronic so it had to be dry most of the time, they got the shine effect by piling liquid latex ontop of the finished paintjob until it started drying while it trailed off of the frame. And that right there? When it took the hurt dog? That was actually filmed in reverse, having the tentacles start out around the dog puppet and then rapidly pull away so when they reversed it it looked like they actually moved and had torque behind the action.”

“Really?”

“Yeah it's really fascinating how they went about effects before computer graphics were refined, everything had to be practical so even if it doesn't look the best, it doesn't hit that uncanny valley that bad CGI makes because even if it doesn't look real it looks real enough.”

It didn't feel quite as disturbing with that rattling around in his head, focusing on how much work must have been done to make the monster move as realistically as possible, how many times they'd practiced and trained in a controlled sound stage and adapting it to the set...

They weren't the only ones in the theater, but it was a mostly empty showing, as was usually the case with foreign films as old as this one. So it wasn't like they were disturbing anyone with Red Son leaning over to whisper interesting details MK would have never even thought to look up to make the overall experience less scary. Red Son seemed aware that he wasn't the biggest horror fan, and was trying to soften the blows the more intense moments would bring by talking through them and bringing back  the reality that it was just a movie they were watching.

“I was alive in this era and I can state with general expertise that computers were certainly not that advanced yet. Computer AI wasn't past that of your average graphing calculator until at least the mid 1990's.”

“They got that sound effect by putting a microphone in a tin trash can and recording the sound of a racecar zooming by and put it in a reverb chamber until it sounded completely unrecognizable”

“Blair is already a Thing at this point, you remember when he was dissecting the Norwegian base's monster? He was using a pencil eraser to point out that era in its chest and then he'd touched the eraser to his lip! And since it started by probably just a small contingent of shed cells it probably took him longer to assimilate than the others.”

“This is actually really cool! The stunt double for Copper that they got for the scene actually was a double amputee! They made fake hands for him out of latex, filled them with fake blood, and styled the chest jaw like a bear trap for that disgusting pulling shot.”

Though... That one didn't work as well... When the long tendril shot from the Thing's stomach and sprouted slider legs and a second head, the extending neck hissing and glaring down at the heroes, he felt his gut turn, even as the heroes took the flamethrower to the monster.

The monster's first head ripped from its body and grew spider legs. And Oh GOD that was disgusting, without thinking he reached for the edge of the armrest to grip as the heroes had to play cat and mouse with a severed, spider head. He'd missed, and his hand clapped down atop of Red Son's and squeezed.

Red Son jolted beside him and MK saw him turn in his direction in his periphery.

“You know if this is freaking you out too much we can leave.”

“No! No, it's okay. You like this movie! You wouldn't know so much about it if you didn't like it!” Besides, he shouldn't be getting so spooked about some kinda gross kinda spidery horror movie from the 1980s, what kind of hero got freaked out at a little practical effects?

He couldn't see Red Son's face very well with only the light of the movie itself to see by, but he made a strange sort of humming noise and slipped his hand out of MK's, moving his arm to put the arm rest up and then slide his hand back into his own.

“Here, that should be more comfortable then.”

And it was. Red Son's factoids and chatter alongside the movie were doing well at cutting the edge off of it again, and it was aided by not just their connected hands, but now by his physical closeness as well.

“I've heard the director had this stylistic rule about after the Things start invading, the idea is that if a character has light reflecting off their eyes they're human, if not they're a Thing.”

“Most people think Palmers was the shadow the dog assimilated back earlier but I think it was Norris, Palmers didn't get turned into a thing until after they go and talk to Blair again I don't think.”

“Actually...I don't think I like that translation very much. Like yeah it's more polite and Gary's a gentleman, but 'I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch' emphasizes the stress of the situation better.”

And then came the time of the final confrontation, MK braced himself, squeezed Red Son's hand in his own. It was indeed gross, and frightful, and the puppetry alone was REALLY good. All those moving parts and there's no way that THAT was an animatronic so it HAD to be a puppet. And wow that was a REALLY good explosion.

...huh...Apparently he could do it too.

The movie ended with what MK felt like was a tentatively optimistic note. The remaining two heroes sharing a drink as the research facility and the monsters it housed burned around them. And you maybe get the feeling the two of them won't survive the cold, but they stopped the monsters and that’s what matters.

Though MK was right to worry over the movie killing his apatite because by the time the lights went up and the credits rolled he found he wasn't very hungry. Which felt ridiculous since he was always in need of quick carbs for Monkie Kid things. But Red Son had lost his own apatite as well apparently and the two of them could do nothing but laugh a bit awkwardly at their date being derailed by a movie being a bit too gross.

So MK pulled him into a nearby park and they went for a walk instead of the restaurant they'd planned for.

“Most people think that Childs is a Thing and I'm tempted to agree, He doesn't have the eye shine but neither does MacReady and we know he's not a Thing, but MacReady's breath is steaming and Childs' doesn't until the very end there, and MacReady wasn't drinking, those were Molotov Cocktails, that was gasoline and Childs just downed it without a thought to taste or smell.”

“So you think the Thing won at the end?”

“I don't know, but they do have one flamethrower left and Childs whether he's a Thing or not just drank gasoline. So MacReady as a person is probably as good as dead.”

“I Dunno, I like the idea that he wasn't a Thing in the end, gives it something not dissimilar to a happy ending, but like, it's not like they hadn't been wrong about who was a Thing before. The dog handler wasn't a Thing but he got shot anyway.”

“That's very true.”

It was about there that MK realized he'd yet to let go of Red Son's hand.

Well... he hadn't pulled away... MK squeezed Red Son's hand in his own, and Red Son—on a tangent about how in the time before CGI they'd made the stylistic title card with use of a fishtank, garbage bag, flash paper and a lot of smoke—squeezed him back.

A few hours and a plate or two of street vendor food when either of their appetites returned later and Red Son had insisted on walking him home. He was staying in a penthouse that his family technically owned but he was the only one who actually knew about it, and he wanted to be a gentleman before he headed back there.

“Well,  I hope you enjoyed yourself a bit. I feel as though I should apologize for choosing such a niche film, mother always said I was the only one who cared about foreign horror movies and just because I find movie effects fascinating especially in a time before technology was as advanced as it is now doesn't mean I should subject others to my incessant yammering.”

he didn't really think Red Son could pull off shy, but he'd folded his arms tightly and was very pointedly NOT looking at him now. And Sure, this felt like a big step, but that playfully self deprecating tone wasn’t gonna fly here. He moved slowly, giving Red Son time to pull away if desired. Placing one hand on Red Son's shoulder, the other on the side of his face to turn his head. He had to get on his tiptoes to make it to his level, but he leaned in-

It was nice. Soft, and Red Son of course ran hotter than an average person so it was warm too. He pulled away just as he felt Red Son start to press back against him. When MK opened his eyes, he noticed Red Son's were still closed for a moment longer before fluttering open.

“I like your incessant yammering.” He had such a cute blush. “it means you're passionate about something.” 

“You... wanna come in? Monkey King gave me this new tea blend I've been meaning to try out.”

--

Prompt meme (I’ll stop when y’all stop sending stuff)

[hopevalley]

Season 8, Episode 7: Before My Very Eyes

This episode sure was a rollercoaster, wasn’t it?

Let’s dive right on in. :)

Plotlines:

The Love Triangle & Allie’s Adoption

Ned & The Canfields

Christopher’s Performance

Clara and Jesse

I guess you could say the plotlines were better written together/integrated in this episode than in previous ones. There’s a lot going on but most of the filming and plots just...rolled together?

For example, the saloon as the “gathering place” where multiple plot points take place simultaneously was really cool IMO. It helps the town feel livelier. 

The Love Triangle & Allie’s Adoption

The love triangle is...an enigma. I’m probably in the minority of not really being that invested in who Elizabeth ends up with, but I doubt I’m in the minority regarding my general feelings on the love triangle: I want it to end.

I think we’re at a point where it’s just super frustrating for everyone involved, and we’re stretching the limits of suspension of disbelief when it comes to the audience. 

I don’t think we’d be as harsh on the triangle if we had double the episodes a season. We get a whopping 12 this season, more than we’ve gotten in a long time, so space is limited, and time is limited, and we know she’ll reach a decision toward the end of this season, so there’s that...I don’t know...pressure I guess, on the characters and the episodes to showcase things in a manner that feels natural and moves well.

For what it’s worth I’m fine with Elizabeth’s turtle-pace, but with only 6 episodes left (5 after this episode aired), knowing she’ll pick someone soon (and it will probably be Nathan)... It makes it really difficult to stomach the Lucas scenes—not because I don’t want to see her with Lucas if she won’t end up with him, but because I feel really bad for Lucas!

Especially with the intense fourth-wall-breaking level of awareness Lucas seems to have regarding the situation. Yes, I’m talking about the line he quoted.

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not.” 

That’s only half the quote. This is the full quote:

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sure, it’s applied to Henry, but it seems almost...too knowledgeable to me? 

So, the quote is from the novel Hyperion: A Romance, published in 1839. Longfellow’s wife Mary died in 1836 after a miscarriage. Overwhelmed by grief Longfellow took trips to Europe and spent seven years trying to woo Frances Appleton. She eventually agreed to marry him.

Hyperion was inspired by this. Paul is the main character. He travels through Germany after the death of a friend, and falls in love with an Englishwoman named Mary Ashburton. She rejects him.

To say this was a thinly-veiled autobiography of sorts is, uh, an understatement. To have Lucas quoting it in When Calls the Heart feels...odd. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was an omen of sorts, but...we can’t forget Lucas’s parents’ history: his mother refused to marry his father for years, just like Frances refused to marry Longfellow.

It’s not a bad quote or anything...it’s just...frustratingly on the nose.

I did appreciate Elizabeth’s admission of not wanting to be one of Lucas’s “secret sorrows.” They’re courting publicly anyway, everyone knows it. It’s time for them to be a little more open about it, at least in little ways. Him squeezing her hand on the saloon table shouldn’t be a big deal at this point.

If this was the storyline we were getting for Elizabeth (her slowly working her way toward something with Lucas) I’d be happy with it. I’m still Team Nathan but I like Lucas a lot this season and would be content with a storyline for him.

THE THING IS...I don’t think that is going to happen, and it makes me feel terrible to see him getting strung along like this. Elizabeth doesn’t come off as “has feelings for Lucas and is just nervous about showcasing it” for multiple reasons. First, she was very PDA-like with Jack, and secondly, that’s just...not how the scenes seem to be written. You can assume her reasoning but she never once is the one initiating and then backing off. He always initiates. She always backs off. It’s unbalanced and makes me feel bad for Lucas.

I really hope we get to sit inside his head a bit longer/more seriously at some point. Maybe he’s aware of her feelings for Nathan and is willing to try anyway because he believes that to some extent love is a choice? That would be really interesting tbh.

As it is, I just feel sorry for Lucas. Not that I think Elizabeth wouldn’t have hangups with Nathan, too, but I just feel like Elizabeth’s hangups with Nathan are more fear of what she is feeling/fear of what could happen to him in the future/fear of her heart being broken again, whereas with Lucas it’s almost like she’s not feeling it and trying to force that kind of affection with him makes her feel weird/gross/bad. 

I definitely think she has a good friendship base with Lucas, but if the feelings aren’t there, they aren’t there. 

Sorry, my thoughts are muddled. There wasn’t a lot going on with the triangle in this episode in terms of...triangley things. I just wish Elizabeth would choose so that the plotline could go away. I’m tired of seeing people strung along.

Nathan was pretty good in this episode. I appreciated his talk with Allie a lot; choosing to be kind and want good things for someone you like is a good example to set. I feel like in the café Allie’s dialogue about Elizabeth smiling at him was off; she probably should have said something more like, “If she doesn’t like you like that, then why does she smile at you that way?” might have sounded better. (He could have said “what way?” and she could have batted her eyes at him lmao.) Allie already knows Elizabeth is courting Lucas...and if we’re to believe the smile directed at Nathan is what tips Allie’s invite consideration to her adoption ceremony, then that would have been a better way to approach it (instead of “Did you see the way she smiled at you?!”).

I really loved that Lucas got Nathan and Allie a little gift. Honestly I just want Lucas and Nathan to be friends or something because the actors have good chemistry together and there’s a shortage of good male friendships in the show that feel Good. I wonder if we’ll find out what the gift was at any point?

The end with Allie only inviting Elizabeth to the ceremony was hilarious. I wanted to actually see the ceremony (because Nathan promising not to leave her was SUCH a good line, I almost got emotional over that and I wanted to see it put into play again) but the imagery it left us with (it looks like a wedding...) was clear enough haha.

Poor Bill, stuck in the middle of that.

Speaking of Bill, the adoption being “on him” was really sweet. And then of course Bill can’t keep the moment tender because he’s always so Uncomfortable with Feelings, but it’s still very sweet.

--

Ned & The Canfields

I don’t have a whole lot to say here, but I really appreciated this storyline. It wasn’t the best-written surgery-medical-wise, but it felt heartfelt and that’s what matters. 

Florence running around trying to do everything herself while also stressing out about Ned really felt...real. And then of course Rosemary getting appointed to the phones and gossiping forever...hahah.

I’m glad I saw the writing on the wall with Joseph; of course he’s a former pastor! I really am intrigued by what his “plans” are that are not church-related. I like that they tried not to make him exactly like Frank, but boy what I wouldn’t give to see them both pastoring in Hope Valley. Then Joseph could pursue his dream while also pastoring a bit, and so could Frank. It’d be nice, and they’d probably get along swell.

Seeing more faith/prayer in the show has been great. Also, Joseph and Minnie are so cute together... I adore them.

--

Christopher’s Performance

And here we are, talking about the man of the hour... Christopher. Henry’s “secret sorrow” or the product of Henry’s secret sorrow? It almost makes me think he got over Nora with Christopher’s mother and she cut off ties with him and married Jerry the banker.

Henry’s opinion of Jerry is obviously not great, but he’s respectful enough to not talk badly about him. It makes me wonder if Jerry is a worse man than Henry is, though. Maybe so? I wonder if we’ll get more information about it.

They really did a good casting job with Christopher; he manages to look similar enough to Henry and kind of...mimic his way of smiling and movement that’s almost uncanny. 

Of course...as Rosemary says, she knows a performance when she sees one.

I’m wondering if Bill feels similarly...

But boy do we know how Lucas feels! Lee tells Lucas that his pocketwatch has been missing “about a week now.”

Lucas confronts Christopher and instead of Christopher being like, “Oh no! I’ll keep my eyes open in case he dropped it somewhere or maybe the chain broke!” he’s really sarcastic about it?

He then tries for the second time to control Lucas (treats him like...he can order him around/bully him) by asking if Lucas found him a bigger room yet. This dude has a serious ego. The sound of Lucas intentionally shutting the door after this was delicious, though.

“If I find that you’re picking pockets, I don’t care who you are or why you’re here. You’ll be on the next stage out of town.”

Christopher just...almost smiles and stands up. “I didn’t steal any watch.”

Lucas says, “And I should believe you?”

Christopher responds with, “That’s your choice.” 

Lucas leaves, and then Christopher pulls the watch out of his pocket.

He seems to feel a little guilty when he reads the inscription...but still. He’s so skeevy. 

And then he takes the flowers Jesse drops off the ground...to give to...Rachel... Honey, you got a big storm comin’... She knows he’s bad news but I guess she’s into it. Yikes.

And then we have the scene where Mike comes to Henry with a great idea he has, and is interrupted by the arrival of Christopher. Henry tells him he wants him to teach Christopher everything he knows. Mike’s enthusiasm dries up right away.

I think Mike also realizes Christopher is bad news.

And Henry’s just so excited to be “looked up to” and “seen as a father of sorts” that he can’t see what’s right in front of him. Normally he’d be attuned to bullshit just as clearly as Bill and Rosemary and the rest, but...his bias is in the way. He wants to fix his past so bad he doesn’t realize it might not be worth it...

I hope Mike keeps his idea to himself but I have a super bad awful feeling he’ll admit it to Christopher and then Christopher will pitch it to Henry as his own idea. I feel sick just thinking of it!

--

Clara and Jesse

Clara and Jesse were starting to repair things juuust every so slightly and then he gets mad that she’s shortening her skirt and...it all goes to hell.

It’s not that I don’t love a little drama but this is just...I don’t know. Maybe too much? I liked Clara’s discussion with Joseph because he tells her the honest truth (and he’s full of advice, for better or worse, just like me HAHA): you can’t repair your marriage if you’re not around one another to even begin to heal the wounds/talk about things.

I’m not very invested in these two as characters these days, and I’m not sure what would fix it, but this spat being dragged out for ages ain’t it right now. I’m keeping an open mind, though; it could go somewhere interesting...and at least it didn’t get resolved in one episode.

Also, I appreciated Clara venting to Bill in that “I still care about him very much way” while Bill tries (somewhat awkwardly) to support her choice(s). He’s in a bit of a tough spot; he can’t offer advice freely because not many people are going to take marriage advice from a divorced man who didn’t marry for love in the first place anyway. It’s just good to see him trying to act supportive for Clara.

--

Other thoughts:

I see we’re getting more of the plotline where Bill has to give up his uniform, but he actually made a really good point in this episode about that. He did earn it! And then insult to injury...trying to make him give up his horse, too? 

It’s cute that his horse’s name is Hero; I feel like that was stated much earlier in the show (maybe S3 or S4?) but I’d forgotten it, tbh. How wholesome.

“Am I being prideful?” I think this was a good question for Bill to ask, and honestly it probably took a bit of courage for him to even ask Lee about it/admit that maybe he was being a bit prideful. But like, it’s okay to take pride in your work/the work you’ve done. He did earn all of it and it’s not really fair to ask for him to give it all up. The jacket is one thing (it’s a physical item; yes it shows all the hard work he put in but it’s just an object), but the horse? That’s an emotional bond and it’s rather cruel to break it.

Lee excited to try on the jacket was literally the cutest thing, and I loved that Bill folded and let him try it on. Honestly? Lee looked pretty good in it!

That scene was the definition of BOYS WILL BE BOYS, hahaha.

Also, Elizabeth’s line: “Haven’t you ever lost someone so close to your heart that it tears you apart?” was SO CRINGEY. I don’t know how that made it into the finished episode. Please, writers... read this shit aloud before you film the show. READ ALL YOUR WRITING ALOUD TO HEAR THE CADANCE. I’m literally begging you. 

But also, the whole concept is still cringe. You don’t know Dylan, Elizabeth. You didn’t know Colleen. You don’t know if he loved Colleen or not. You don’t know why he ran out on Allie. You’re projecting? Maybe? But even if he did fall to pieces over Colleen’s death, that was no reason to hurt poor Allie who had nothing to do with it and did nothing wrong.

They should have edited the line to say something slightly different. “Tears you to pieces” would have sufficed. And not rhymed on accident.

Last thing for now...the lack of Carson and Faith in this episode was amazing. I know the surgery with Ned will push Carson to either take the fellowship and return to Hope Valley to be of more use there and/or push him to just stay where he is because there’s no one else in the area with his skill level.

I think I’ll be happy with it if he becomes an area surgeon more than a regular doctor... it would help him and Faith both feel necessary for different reasons. And also, he was a surgeon when he arrived in Hope Valley in S4, so it’s clearly his strongest point (and best training/experience).

--

So uh, how ‘bout that preview for next episode, though? WHOA.

Hopefully this isn’t too scattered; work has gotten a lot busier since the weather got nicer, so I have less time to write without interruption lmao. 

[dafukdidiwatch]

FoodFight (2012)

The origin story of Sausage Party and The Emoji Movie

I honestly don’t really know where to start with this film. Like I’ve heard of it, I’ve seen reviews of it, I was so sure I wouldn’t ever see this trainwreck because it looked and sounded so bad.

But honestly? This was an amazing film to watch. I don’t even know where to begin because I genuinely enjoyed this movie. This was a fun shitty trainwreck of a movie.

Let’s start with the obvious: The animation sucks. Like the designs are bad, the world building is bad, the animation is bad. Body movement? What body movement? The only body movement we need is arm waving and twirling and nothing else. And those are for characters they were trying for. The Humans, if there are any, are the literal worse with either being amusement park mascots at best or mountain troll monsters at worse. Yeesh they were bad to look at. In fact, a lot of characters in this movie are just, very ugly all the way around.

Celebrities: I feel so sorry for these people. Apparently it took 12 years to make this (like, wtf first off), so a lot of the “big names” they got in the day sort of faded away out of the public light. Not that I actually give a shit about it they got paid either way. I just think out of all of them, Wayne Brady was done dirty. He didn’t deserve to be in this movie, he deserves better than having his name listed in FoodFight. Tim Curry is a riot no matter where he goes, still bringing in his Dr. Frank-n-furter Vibes all the way around. And Christopher Lloyd wasn’t in for long, but by god does he leave an impression. A terrifying impression.

Why are actual food brands in this movie? Ms. Butterworth, what are you doing in here? Charlie Tuna, The Pickle Stork, Mr. Clean? I can’t tell if they did them dirty or not because they are barely in the movie anyway. The most screen-time of them went to Mr. Clean just for the bald clean jokes. It’s like playing Where’s Waldo in finding out where the notable brand icons are.

It’s also fun to play “Who the Fuck is that guy?” because there are a lot of brands being parodied here. Captain Crunch turned into Shitty Admiral Chip Peg. Chocola is a disco gay vampire bat. Some weird disturbing french cheese men....no idea who he is for but hey! That’s what the game is for! Trying to see what their ugly abominations were supposed to be in the light of day.

The only “decent” animated characters are the main one: Dex Dog-tective who speaks nothing but puns, every sentence. All the time. You want to start a counter on all the food puns he makes, but you also don’t because I’m sure it’s in the Hundreds. It also doesn’t help that he is like...furry bait? That’s the best way to describe him since he is like the Better animated characters they tried to make him handsome so...furry bait. Then we have Sunshine Goodness who is a terrifying uncanny valley creature which is just an anime catgirl that the animators decide to give up half way and hope her dead eyes give out the allure she has. But uh oh, watch out Sunshine, Lady X of Brand Ex is coming in with her twig-ass Dominatrix Barbie outfit trying to seduce your man...a talking golden retriever. Her dead glass eyes have its sights on seduction and world domination one fetish at a time.

I’m not kidding about the fetishes either, this movie is just throbbing with sexual tension. In the worst way. Like you think the food puns are a lot? Well the sex innuendos are giving them a run for their money. There is so many sex jokes. So many tension of the “oh the bad guy good guy flirt? Hwot” This is supposed to be a kids film and yet you are having jokes of raisins = nipples, chocolate = dicks, "I'll have you roll over and begging for mercy" is too sexually charged for this movie like.....AHHHHH. I fear for the children who learn their kinks through this movie. And that’s just the verbal! The visual is sexy dominatrix. Sexy plaid school girl. Sexy villain nazi-stand-in dominatrix. Sexy Tango. Sexy...sniffing?? God they were trying So so so hard and it pissed me off to no end: 50% in-credulousness because who the hell thought this was a good idea to have kids watching this, 50% anger because I’m somewhat pissed that some unfortunate lines had the gall to be actually good for romantic tension....if it WASN’T TIED TO A BAD FETISH FILM! Like, you can have sexual chemistry, but when sky planes fly out of someone’s vagina you know it’s a fetish film.

But hey, enough stalling, let’s actually talk about the plot of this movie.

It’s Casablanca.

Like dead ass Casablanca.

After losing the love of his life a grizzled detective man ends up running a club where he has to face off against nazis. This is deadass Casablanca where Rick had a dark romantic fling with a nazi at a grocery market. The decisions they went with like the bad rendition of the French National Anthem to be food themed that I could barely hear. Brand X having a nazi-like salute if someone misspelled YMCA with one letter. The...actual weird torture murder scenes? This movie was wild enough, you didn’t need to add in death to the mix. They even had the side characters from Casablanca being in here like the Moose guy being the piano player, and the weasel looking dude being the....weird ass dick weasel in this movie.

And now, some random lines that I liked:

"I just want to be loved"

"Whats the point if having luxurious hair if you can't look yourself in the mirror"

"Oh Yeah, sure, no prob, except I don't have a death wish"

"But you were recalled?! And butt ugly!?"

Overall: I honestly swear to god believe this could and should be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. This is that level of just...badshit craziness where everything is wrong and beautiful that we can laugh at it all. This needs to have like, it’s own riff track, audience participation, SOMETHING because there is too many golden moments to let it fly by.

If you can get your friends and tell them NOTHING about this movie and see their reactions. Because that is what I’M going to do with mine.

[sroloc--elbisivni]

*sits down* *pours a glass of water* *pours one for scott westerfeld* *sips*

so here’s my pitch for an adaptation of Uglies specifically and the Uglies quartet* more generally. vague spoilers. i can’t figure out how to make the readmore work anymore so hit J or start scrolling fast.

*theoretically it’s a trilogy with a bonus novel, but I fuckin love Extras.

First, it’s a webseries, because Hollywood refuses to  option a series brutally dissecting the culture of cosmetic surgery and brainwashing through a dystopian lens (gee I wonder why).

The first few videos are amateur vlogging, taking us through the first part of Uglies, aka “Tally and Shay fuck around and find out.” it’s their shared dark web youtube channel, maybe it’s uploaded to the Crims’ private server or something and as bonus content sometimes we see videos that Shay made with Zane before the Crims cut out. either way we have to be convinced, as an audiences, that the girls are sure this is secure. The scene with Paris is never in-video, or if it is it’s just audio of Tally recording herself breaking into the party, so we don’t see the Pretties.

anyway. Tally’s hoverboarding saga, the hypothetical makeover side, sneaking out to the ruins, the good shit. it’s a webseries from the PoV of two kids who don’t know too much about making videos so shots are limited and we can really lean into the suggestions of this world instead of trying to build whole sets.

use of CGI, but only for detail work, leaning into the uncanny valley, making the world of Tally’s city very clean and polished, too clean, and putting skeletons in the Rusty Ruins.

the hoverboarding-down-a-roller-coaster has to be in there, preferably filmed on a GoPro equivalent, but if there isn’t enough budget we cut away from a painted shot of the ruins where Tally’s at the top into static bc the camera went too fast and then it’s Tally and Shay losing their minds with the adrenaline comedown and they kiss nope where was i

Shay’s letter--i can’t remember if it being on paper was a plot point in the books but I’m really feeling video message, ideally uploaded to the same channel, and then when Special Circumstances drop the bomb on Tally we as the audience go oh shit. they’ve seen everything.

this is where the mode of the story changes--no more amateur vlogging, now it’s Tally recording reports for SC. They’re not transmitted, so we just get this video diary of Tally’s trip, a little camera running the whole time, and then....I'm not sure whether it’s Tally talking to herself to vent her feelings, or the footage is cut together as a summary and the video is prefaced with a Very Official Special Circumstances report, so it’s like a debriefing.

The Smoke. That whole thing. the very last part is chaos and confusion and found footage. >:)

PART 3, which is Tally’s video diary of the whole next part of the trip with David. This part is more edited, more condensed, than the earlier parts, and the connecting throughline isn’t always clear. some of it is just the two of them talking, some of it is long epic scenery shots, some of it is after everything goes down and they get Shay back and they’re having these Very Serious Discussions, and those are shot like...the camera is being the record. except for where it isn’t.

SPEAKING OF SHAY. if it’s at all possible to pull this off, Shay is cast with two different actors, one for the first two thirds and one for the last third (and most of Pretties). The first Shay is an actual teenager, zits and all, not a beauty by any means. The second Shay is classic Hollywood cast-a-20-something-as-a-teen, rounded out with makeup to be just inside the uncanny valley. surrounded by everyone else, who’s been living in the woods. This should be the most jarring thing.

The last video is a discussion of informed consent, and the making the plan happens largely offscreen so then there’s a long sequence of Tally hoverboarding back to the city (shot by drone) where she’s just narrating, and the leadup to the ‘make me pretty’ penny dropping that oh. This is Tally leaving a message for herself and she’s not sure who she’s going to be when she watches it.

PRETTIES. Less of an outline on this one, but it works from the same framework of three parts, three storytelling styles--the first part is total Instagram Influencer, professional vlogging, glitz and party culture. The camera is floating now so Tally’s always in frame. Same trick pulled with Tally’s actor so you’re looking at actual different people. Tally and Shay are dating but the conflict is them both refusing to talk about whether this is a casual thing or an actual relationship so when the thing with zane happens it’s a mess.

when tally and zane start looking for the pills, that’s when it flips back to a narration style similar to Uglies, where Tally’s carrying the camera and they’re documenting their crazy adventures, thumbing their noses at SC. maybe it’s also intercut with like, news stories, because trying to film the ice rink scene would be bananas. unreliable narration as they try to pretend they’re completely law abiding.

 from the balloon and onwards, it’s all found footage. maybe anthropological stuff of the village, official reports, and then those end with the camera falling to the floor as the anthropologist is like ‘you’re not supposed to be--’ but we do make it all the way to the camp and the Specials showing up, and this is where the CGI comes in again to get just that over the edge of weird badwrong.

Specials is a mix of surveillance footage, recorded reports, and callbacks to the Crims’ channel in Uglies--at least one shot-for-shot remake but way more dangerous. sometimes the camera is just left running on a log in their campsite and no one even notices, and this is the tragedy, they’ve grown so used to their lives being recorded that they don’t even bother to care.

From Tally going down in Deigo until her message at the end, she doesn’t appear on screen, but she does carry the camera in to her saying goodbye to zane.

HEY REMEMBER HOW I LOVE EXTRAS? EXTRAS IS A MOVIE.

by this point there’s enough following and enough buildup that you might actually get a movie out of this, especially since it’s tackling things that are less explicitly ‘societally expected body modification is bad.’

it’s also dissecting the meta narrative that’s been set up throughout the webseries--it starts with Aya recording herself talking to Moggle, and then we zoom out, getting Moggle in the shot, and from there it’s just leaning into the wild fucking scope of this book. mag lev train? hell yeah. mountain?? hell yeah. the flaws in a society obsessed with reputation and vlogging which cannot be successfully explored within that medium??? hell YEAH. I FUCKING LOVE EXTRAS.

I personally think it would be very cool and narratively sexy if the entire thing was subtitled in English and the characters spoke in Japanese except where they switch into English, like in the book, but I also get like....familiarity and the danger of exoticizing. but driving home that this is the whole world that lives like this.

footage from the webseries is recut and narrated over into something more professional, and interspersed with the movie to catch up people who haven’t watched the webseries, and also to show how the narrative of history gets cleaned up. but if it’s done right, three things should happen:

We barely see anything of Tally’s Ugly days and the Smoke. There are shots of her chatting with her friends and laughing, way back from the Ugly days or the Pretty ones, but we never hear her voice except for the final letter

Shay and the rest of the Crims get important footing in the narrative but Zane is nowhere to be seen.

everyone in the audience, including people who haven’t read the books or watched the webseries, should LOSE THEIR MINDS when she shows up

There’s a post-credits scene of everyone covered in cake after it exploded.

*pauses to drink water* in conclusion give me licensing rights and a good director.

[omgthatdress]

How to make Cats a good movie.

I watched Cats, and once I got over the initial horror, I was actually pretty entertained and found myself enjoying the shit out of it. Like god bless it, for as nightmare-inducing as much as it was, Tom Hooper was clearly *committed* to his vision and you gotta give him credit for that. The scenery was actually really beautiful and the cinematography was frequently breathtaking. Like it really did have a lot of elements that really worked for it. But for every bit of genius, there was something terrible that the movie just couldn’t overcome. So let’s dive in.

First of all, you kind of have to understand Cats: the musical. It’s an adaptation of poems that T.S. Elliott of nihilistic lost generation fame wrote for his godchildren about cats. And the poetry is charming af and totally captures the nature of cats and why they’re so lovable. In the in the 1970s, Andrew Lloyd Webber did a shit ton of cocaine and decided to make a musical out of these poems. As a result, Cats has no plot. It’s a bunch of cats singing their songs about who they are and doing a lot of dancing. The thinnest of narrative devices is created with the “jellicle” ball and the deciding of which cat gets to ascend to heaven or some shit. So yeah. Cats is actually pretty controversial among theater nerds, it’s very much a you either love it or hate it thing. Is it stupid? Yes.  Is it going to make everyone happy? No. Does it lend itself well to film adaptation? fuck no. I get the feeling that Tom Hooper was really going for deep, meaningful poetic cinema here and trying to make another Les Mis (which was way overly long and ultimately sank under its own sheer weight as a movie and probably is better viewed as a play). I’m operating under the assumption that Hooper was going for ground-breaking cinema that would have made millions and swept up during awards season and cemented him as a legendary director and gone down in movie history, because every little detail of Cats is clearly meant for maximum impact. You kind of need to drop all expectations going into Cats, so once you’re there, you can have fun with it. So how do you make it a good film?

1. The HORRIBLE hyper-realistic cgi human-cat hybrids. YES, it’s a technical marvel, and the CGI artists who made it all deserve a ton of credit for the work they did. And I understand why the actors were kept in their human shapes: live dance is a huge part of what makes Cats work. One of the smart decisions made was hiring theater veterans for the filler roles in the cat chorus, so when you have the choreographed numbers, it’s really spectacular. It’s just the end result was way too uncanny valley and bizarre for any of the film’s good parts to ever rise above it. I think a minimalist approach would have actually worked best. Cat ears and simple costumes with clean lines that show off the dancer’s bodies. Go for the suggestion of cats, and kind of let the viewer’s imagination take over, and showcase the cat’s personality. A huge part of what I enjoyed was hearing the poetry and imagining these cats and how they all relate to cats I’ve known. The dance and the music helped heighten this experience, but hybrids kept reminding me of the joke: what do you get when you cross a human and a cat? An immediate cessation of funding and a stern rebuke from the ethics committee.

2. The schlocky, honestly amateurish attempts at slapstick humor. I’m gonna come out and say it and say that Hooper is pretty deeply entrenched in *dRaMa* and has no sense of how comedy works. There was a lot of added in comedic bits from Rebel Wilson and James Corden, and it was honestly terrible. I mean really, a crotch hit? That kind of lowbrow comedy is so crude and base that it’s actually really hard to pull it off well. Slapstick comedy actually lends itself to the whimsical tone, and slapstick done well can be utterly sublime, but Cats seemed satisfied that fat people falling over is the height of comedy and should be left at that. And a second note on the comedy? Weirdly fat-shame-y. A saw a post about how odd it is to see James Corden, who has been very frank about how he’s struggled with dieting and come to accept that his body is fat and can’t be made not fat, playing this role where fat is added to his body, his CGI vest strains at the buttons, and he’s literally stuffing his face with garbage. The theme of fat people as lazy, stupid, and slovenly carried over from Rebel Wilson’s role, in which she also plays a fat lazy cat who is leaned on heavily for comic relief. I know the role is about a fat cat, and gently laughing at a fat lazy cat who loves to eat is fine, but, speaking as a fat person myself, this felt like a gleeful exploitation of a nasty and cruel stereotype. James Corden and Rebel Wilson are both extraordinarily funny people who happen to be fat, and their comedic gifts were tremendously mis-used here, reducing them to simply two fat bodies to be laughed at.

3. Jennifer Hudson. She’s a talented actress who can sing and emote like a motherfucker. And emote she did. She was clearly GOING for that second Oscar. I really don’t want to call her performance bad. The same level of emotion, tears running and snot flowing, in another movie, would have been devastating (Hello, Viola Davis in Fences). But this isn’t Fences, it’s fucking Cats. You need a level of character depth and development that Cats doesn’t afford to make those tears hit. All the crying and misery was an odd maudlin and over-dramatic break in the fun and whimsy. With a subtler performance and a hint of self-awareness, it could have actually brought in an emotional anchor for this light-as-air film, but Cats doesn’t make any attempt at nuance, and as a result the scenes just hit you out of nowhere like a load of bricks. 

4. Francesca Hayward. Okay, before we go anywhere, I want to say that this girl is not un-talented. She’s the principal ballerina of the Royal Ballet, and has a very long list of ballets that she’s lead in. So it makes sense that she’d be hired for a role that’s primarily ballet. This girl is a really really great DANCER. But Cats was clearly trying to make an A-list actress out of her. They tried to make her into Florence Pugh, who has been acting for a while and is blowing up right now because she’s very talented. Like everything about Francesca’s role in the film said “This is a star-making role.” A new song was written just for her to sing as an addendum to Cats’s show-stopping signature song. But the song was just okay, it didn’t carry nearly the emotional weight or all-around beauty of “Memories,” and all in all felt wedged-in and totally unnecessary and really just felt like a grab at that “best original song” Oscar. Francesca’s voice is high, thin, and child-like. It’s not unpleasant, but next to the richness and depth of Jennifer Hudson’s voice, it crumbles, and it’s not the sort of voice that I want to seek out to listen to over and over again. As for her overall performance, she largely keeps the same look of wide-eyed wonder throughout her numerous close-ups, so much so that I found myself thinking of the the MST3K “dull surprise” sketch. But I don’t know if that’s really entirely her fault. There was an attempted romantic storyline with the magic cat, but again, because of the nature of Cats and its lack of real character development or depth, the chemistry fell flat. There really isn’t much of a chance to show off a lot of dramatic range, so to keep going back to her character, it kept reinforcing the one-notedness of her performance. Really, I just kept wanting to see Francesca dance. Ironically, I think they really blew an opportunity trying to make an A-list actress out of her. All she really need to make people want to see more of her is one spectacular dance number, but for some reason, she never really gets that show-stopping moment. 

5. Dignity? I guess this goes back to the whole CGI cat thing, but there were a lot of moments when I felt this tremendous wave of second-hand embarrassment hit me on behalf of the talented actors in this film. Watching Gandalf lap up milk from a saucer was a wholly uncomfortable experience, like come on, grant the great Ian McKellan some fucking DIGNITY here. Which goes back to whatI said earlier that a suggestion and interpretation of cats would have worked better than all-out just being a cat. Or it could again just be how much Cats just fails its attempts at comedy. But then again there was no fucking reason at all for Idris Elba to be that fucking NAKED. I guess they were trying to make him sexy? But his sexy smolder and just being Idris Elba wasn’t enough they had to make sure that we all saw his chiseled pecs and thick thighs. And then at the end when he’s dangling off of the rope of a hot air balloon and what’s supposed to be a funny scene, I think, I kept thinking “I’m so sorry this is happening to you, Idris.” 

There’s a bunch of other small, nit-picky things that I could go into. Those cockroaches would have worked so much better if they weren’t humans with an extra set of arms. Watching them get eaten was some horror movie shit. Taylor Swift’s Macavity song would have worked a lot better if the cat chorus full of cats we’ve gotten to know had sung it, but instead Taylor Swift is brought in as a new cat we don’t know whose only purpose is to sing the Macavity song? but of course a big oscar-bait movie needs to have that pop star that draws in the people who wouldn’t otherwise see it and making her a part of the cat chorus would have had her performing throughout the whole movie and she would have floundered the way pop stars tend to do when performing musical theater around a bunch of musical theater actors. So I guess I get why she was thrown in.

So.... yeah? Is there anyone else who found themselves enjoying it in spite of everything? I’m glad I have dogs and didn’t have to watch this mess with actual cats around me.

[doomonfilm]

Ranking : Martin Scorsese (1942-present)

Of all the places in the world that seem to be hubs for creative energy, New York stands high on my personal list of favorites, and when it comes to iconic New York filmmakers, there aren’t many that can hold a candle to the prolific career of Martin Scorsese.  His appreciation for films, art and music blasts off the screen with the same energy as his kinetic cinematography and vibrant editing.  Once he established himself as a mainstay in the industry, his list of collaborators evolved into a who’s who of acting legends, both old and new.  His career spans just over 50 years, and even his latest film (his 25th in his catalog) went head to head with other contenders for the top awards of the year.

To put it bluntly, there is Martin Scorsese, and then there is a long list of imitators and those influenced by his genius.  To rank his films is a true test of logic, patience and decision making, but after a few weeks of catching the 7 or so films I had yet to see, I think I can stand behind this list as my definitive ranking (from least to most favorite) of a director I hold in the highest regard. 

25. Gangs of New York (2002) An honest attempt at an epic flick, but at the heart of the matter, I simply don’t care about either side in the battle Scorsese presents us.  Set in New York City in the mid 19th Century during the Civil War, we are thrown into a generational battle where the two key figures have different goals... Bill the Butcher stands as antagonist in his fight to maintain power and control, while Amsterdam is our protagonist charged with a mission of revenge.  In the end, neither side ends up mattering, very much like my personal experience with this all flourish, no foundation exercise in style.

24. Bringing Out the Dead (1999) Nicolas Cage was gearing up for the run that most people know him for now during the release of Bringing Out the Dead : he was coming off of Golden Globe and Academy Award wins for Leaving Las Vegas, but was quickly leaning towards films of a more exploitation-based style.  This film marked a refinement of his wild-man persona, while simultaneously being one of the last high-level actor/director combinations he would be involved in before his mad dash to accept every film and avoid bankruptcy.  New York is captured in a mid-transition point between the darkness of the 1970s and 1980s versus the Disney aesthetic of the new millennium, and while heavy on the entertainment factor (as well as visually striking), there is ultimately not enough on this plate to push it higher up the list.

23. The Color of Money (1986) If you had to do a quick gander at the Scorsese list and pick the film that, on paper, screams Hollywood, it’d be hard to argue against The Color of Money taking that top spot.  A soft sequel to The Hustler, Scorsese picks up the Fast Eddie story in the 1980s (an era that oozes out of each and every frame of this film), and yet, despite this legendary move, the film is ultimately the Tom Cruise show.  Scorsese’s trademark dollying and trucking camera shots work beautifully in the context of this film, but in a story that shines bright, the star of Cruise ultimately outshines all that remains.

22. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) After a few exploitation-based projects, it seemed that Martin Scorsese wanted to provide a slightly different change in perspective, albeit one that still dwells in the darker corners of life.  Rather than deal with the streets of New York or crime, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a study on broken homes, single parenthood and domestic violence that oscillates between the view of the titular Alice and her young son.  Harvey Keitel gives another strong performance as a Scorsese regular, while Ellen Burstyn shines in a transitional role towards more mature performances.  Seeing Scorsese camera movements coopted into a more down to Earth story was refreshing.

21. The Departed (2006) Many people would have assumed that The Departed would be higher on a list of Scorsese films based solely on the cast... pairing Leonardo DiCaprio opposite Matt Damon in a tension-filled triangle with Jack Nicholson is a bold combination in its own right, but surrounding this nucleus with Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Corrigan, Anthony Anderson and supporting actors of that ilk creates a rich showcase of talent.  Stylistically, everything you need is there too, as Scorsese proved time and again that films of this nature were his wheelhouse.  That being said, the story itself, an adaptation of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, takes a few liberties in its adaptation that ultimately are to the detriment of the narrative.  Kudos to Scorsese for putting this one together, and too bad for him that the choices of William Monahan knocked what could have been a mega-classic way down the list.

20. New York, New York (1977) New York, New York is one of the most unique offerings from the Scorsese canon for a number of reasons.  Of all his films, this one is probably the one that can be considered a “style exercise” more than the rest, as it oscillates between obvious sets and real locations before blurring the lines between the two.  Long gaps of time are given to fully executed musical numbers (a must when a talent like Liza Minnelli is involved), and traditional methods of songwriting and performance are given their due respect.  The exercise portion, however, comes in the newer acting styles that are infused into the old school structure... improvisation and aggressive physicality are used to put a deeper, disturbing red tint on an era often presented through a rose-colored lens.  While interesting at times, the nearly three hour run time of the film begins to wear on the limits of the style, which ultimate leaves the film feeling more like a personal indulgence than a statement on changing times.  For the iconic title track alone (and the buildup to its release), this film is worth seeing, but in terms of its placement in the realm of other Scorsese films, it may have to grow on me a while to find a higher placement on the list.

19. Boxcar Bertha (1972) Originally, this film was much lower on the list, largely due to its chronological placement between Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Mean Streets seeming odd to me.  Upon revisitation, however, it stands clear and present that this film served as an exercise in the process of directing and organizing a shoot.  With its period-specific placement, ensemble cast and action sequences, it was bound to be compared to (and ultimately overshadowed by) the formidable Bonnie and Clyde, but Boxcar Bertha has a few key moments in it (including a stellar final action sequence) that places it near the middle of the Scorsese canon, even with it being his second film.

18. Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1967) For all of the refinement that Scorsese found in his second film, his debut film, the stunning Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, stands as testament to the fact that Scorsese brought his many gifts to the table from day one.  What started as a student graduate film grew into a speculative project, only to find 25th hour funding that allowed it a festival run and a proper release.  The film took many years to complete and release, to the point that keen viewers will notice Harvey Keitel’s boyish, soft good looks morph into the sharper, edgier intense profile we came to recognize in Mean Streets and the films that followed.  The energetic cinematography, respect of film as a medium, stellar music choices, defiance of youth, toxic masculinity and realistic look at relationships are all here, making this debut a hidden gem in the Scorsese canon.

17. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) Seeing Scorsese retread old stylistic ground (as opposed to infusing his style into newer projects) is an interesting take, and for what my opinion is worth, The Wolf of Wall Street feels like Goodfellas for white collar criminals.  In theory (and, in some aspects of the film, in reality), the experiment does work, but ultimately, this film finds its placement in the middle realms simply because we are given infinite sizzle off of what amounts to a very thin steak.  Goodfellas works because it is carried by the weight of omerta, but The Wolf of Wall Street focuses on a culture where status comes from self-appointed importance, which ultimately makes for an attempted redemption story for despicable people.  

16. The Irishman (2019) Seeing actors the stature of Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino combine forces for a film is always a major event, but until 2019, those combinations have been limited to duos.  When Netflix announced its intention to release The Irishman in 2019, people were not only intrigued on Scorsese’s take on the Jimmy Hoffa story, but seeing De Niro, Pesci and Pacino in the same film for the first time.  For what it was worth, the trio lived up to all expectations, with the only bittersweet criticism being wishes that the three could have found a way to work together prior to the twilight of their careers.  The historical drama is high quality, with Hoffa’s larger than life persona captured perfectly by Pacino, and bolstered by the dramatic chops brought to the table by De Niro and Pesci.  The film is a tad on the long side, and the de-aging process tips into the realm of the uncanny valley due to the older actors’ physicality, but for a 25th film 52 years into an illustrious career, The Irishman must be recognized for the triumph that it is.

15. The Aviator (2004) Much like The Wolf of Wall Street, I avoided The Aviator for years simply because I have no interest or fascination with Howard Hughes.  I was very much aware of his financial stature, his innovations as an aviator, his rocky love life and his personal demons that plagued him, but for my money’s worth, I was fine without seeing it presented on the big screen.  In an effort to cover all the bases for a director I hold in high esteem, however, I made the decision to finally check out The Aviator, and for every element of the film I previously had no interest in, an element was presented that won me over.  Cate Blanchett and Adam Dunn put on two of the strongest performances in the entire realm of Scorsese films, and the XF-11 crash sequence is possibly one of the grandest and well executed in any Scorsese film.  Leave it to Martin Scorsese to make a powerful film about an individual I care nothing about and nearly crack the top ten with that effort.

14. Hugo (2011)  Up to the point of watching Hugo, I knew nothing about it.  About halfway through Hugo, I had to stop and look up how the film was received, as it was simply stunning, and sure enough, it was a monster in terms of award nominations and wins.  I never would have pegged Scorsese as the type to direct a kid’s film, but in all honesty, that ‘kid’s film’ title is used as a façade for a love letter to film in general, and the groundbreaking work of Georges Méliès specifically.  The look of the film is otherworldly, the energy is light, kinetic and infectious, and even a mostly slapstick performance by Sacha Baron Cohen yields surprising emotional depth when given the opportunity to do so.  While just missing the top ten, Hugo easily stands as the number one surprise on this list in terms of pre-viewing expectations (of which there where none) versus post-viewing thoughts (of which there are many).  Knowing that Hugo exists lets me know that one day, if I have children, and they want to know why I love film so much, I will have a film on the level of Cinema Paradiso to share with them and (hopefully) help foster a love of film they can call their own.

13. Casino (1995) For a time, this film stood as the last work containing the vibrant combination of Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, a trio of high energy creatives known for putting their all into their projects.  Casino felt like a spiritual successor to Goodfellas, focusing on a lavish but secretive lifestyle with high stakes and even higher consequences.  An instantly iconic movie,  Casino felt like the end of an era in regards to gangster fare for Scorsese, opting instead for more challenging projects, adaptations of other books and films, or personal passion projects.  It would be nearly 25 years later before Scorsese would touch similar subject matter or work with these actors again, but had Casino been the last of Scorsese’s so-called “gangster” films, I believe the world would have been happy with that.

12. Kundun (1997) To make one religious-based film in a career is a bold move to some, but I am hard-pressed to think of any director that made films on two different religions who didn’t explicitly make religious films.  With that in mind, it is incredibly impressive that Martin Scorsese was able to make a film as moving and objective as Kundun after making such a bold take on religion as The Last Temptation of Christ.  The film centers around the discovery, growth and eventual escape to India in light of growing aggression from China.  In all honesty, I had my doubts as to whether or not the Scorsese style would work for this story, especially in light of the lack of cooperation from Tibet and China, but somehow, Scorsese’s amazing signature camerawork captures the unique spirit and essence surrounding the Dalai Lama.  I’d heard of this film for years, but never got around to it until it was time to make this list, but I will almost certainly try to find a copy to own in the near future. 

11. The King of Comedy (1982) What an odd left turn in regards of career trajectory for both Scorsese and De Niro.  With three collaborations already under their belt (not to mention The Godfather II already being a well-established classic), it would have been easy to imagine the duo putting another notch on the gangster film genre belt.  What we are given, however, is the yang to the yin of Taxi Driver : our protagonist is a statement on personal conviction and the trappings of instant stardom, our antagonist is a statement on star fascination and the high costs of celebrity, and our satellite characters directly reflect the toxicity certain fandoms can be capable of.  Scorsese sets aside his normal flourish and camera moves for a mixing of film and video mediums, as well as a completely new sense of freedom in regards to the highly improvised nature of the film.  Its influence on recent successful films like Joker is undeniable, but I’d argue that Joker lacks the heart, sincerity and realistic bite present in The King of Comedy.

10. After Hours (1985) Of all the “new to me” Scorsese flicks I finally viewed while preparing this list, After Hours stands as my favorite discovery of the bunch.  I was marginally familiar with the film, both from my younger days in video stores and from friend recommendations, but for some reason, when Scorsese time arrived, After Hours seemed to never be on the docket.  That oversight, however, will now be a thing of the past.  This film feels like a personal challenge to Woody Allen in regards to how one should make a New York-based romantic comedy, and I’d be hard pressed to share any shortcomings or failures present in this comedic masterpiece.  One of the few films that can be both a product of its era and a timeless classic, and one that should be much more recognized in the Scorsese canon.

9. Shutter Island (2010) Me hesitating or not getting around to Scorsese films seems to be a bit of a common theme here, but there was literally no excuse for me to take this long to get around to Shutter Island.  Despite knowing the premise of the story (and even having the ending somewhat spoiled for me), I still found the impact of the final moments just as powerful as I imagine I would have going into this film blind.  Some people will likely argue this statement, but in my opinion, this was the best Leonardo DiCaprio performance captured by Martin Scorsese.  The asylum setting is wonderfully bleak, and the psychological horrors it infers create a vibrant playground for some of the most stunning visual symbolism that Scorsese has ever committed to film.  Don’t be like me if you’ve not gotten around to Shutter Island yet, because it’s a thrill ride more than worth the price of admission, and a rewarding repeat viewer. 

8. Mean Streets (1973) Mean Streets may have been Martin Scorsese’s third film, but for many fans, it was the first true indicator of the brilliance that was to come.  A true New York film through and through, it not only presented fans with a stronger Harvey Keitel performance than Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, but it introduced the world to the palatable tandem of Scorsese and De Niro that would go on to lead to years and years of iconic performances.  The use of altering aspect ratios is something that I wish Scorsese would have continued to use more often, but in all honesty, Mean Streets has style to spare.  This the film that I love to recommend when people start ranting and raving about Goodfellas, and more often than not, it impresses those unfamiliar with it just as much.

7. The Age of Innocence (1993) Martin Scorsese’s love of film is widely known and well documented, but The Age of Innocence goes an additional step further by displaying Scorsese’s love of art.  The film also is one of the most touching displays of unrequited love that Scorsese has committed to film, a slight alteration from his normal infusion of love stories trying to sustain in the surrounding chaos of gangs, crime, religion and so on.  Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder all give standout performances in this masterfully directed film.  If Gangs of New York was meant to be the definitive old school New York film in the Scorsese canon, then The Age of Innocence is the unintended definitive New York film from Scorsese, with some European touches thrown in for good measure.

6. Cape Fear (1991) Of the many, many iconic performances that Robert De Niro has given Martin Scorsese, I’d be hard pressed not to put his characterization of Max Cady at the top by a clear margin.  Cape Fear was already a classic film adaptation of The Executioners when it was first released in 1957, but De Niro pulled two fast ones with his update : in terms of casting, especially with the aforementioned De Niro, Scorsese brought the harrowing story into a much darker, recent world, therefore increasing the tension by upping the ante for violent retribution, while at the same time, paying direct homage to the original by having Elmer Bernstein adapt the original Bernard Herrmann score.  Juliette Lewis also provided a breakout performance in this modern day classic, and possibly the film that provided the most tense debate in terms of placement, as we will get into with the next film.

5. Silence (2016) Despite being one of the most recent Martin Scorsese films, this one’s limited release meant that I missed it during its initial run, and the lack of streaming service placement essentially erased it from my memory.  I was certainly intrigued about watching it for this list, and it ended up being the last film viewed.  Going into it, it felt like a sort of religious take on Saving Private Ryan, but it didn’t take long for the film to start dealing out much heavier cards in terms of faith, belief systems and cross-cultural contamination.  The Last Temptation of Christ showed that Scorsese could find nuance and secular drama from a holy tale, and Kundun showed that he could make a religious icon a relatable human figure struggling to grasp his divine appointment.  Silence is the work of a wise, steady hand, however, like some sort of cinematic parable or testament to faith in the face of crippling doubt and danger.  Scorsese is certainly still moved by the idea of faith, and he uses Andrew Garfield to display this in some of the most powerful moments that he has ever created or captured for his films.  For those who have not seem the film, this placement may feel a bit high, but I would not be surprised if, given time and proper amounts of reflection, it makes its way higher.

4. Raging Bull (1980) The placement of Raging Bull and Cape Fear was the biggest hurdle I was forced to overcome in the creation of this list.  Robert De Niro is powerfully captivating in both films, though I would personally give his performance as Max Cady the nod over his embodiment of Jake LaMotta, but when it comes down to the brass tacks of it all, Raging Bull is ultimately the better of the two films.  The raw, black and white look of LaMotta’s life already provides a gritty, unflattering portrait of a savage and uncouth man looking for beauty in the world, but that beauty he searches for appears in the boxing sequences with no apologies.  The airy look, mainly caught by dynamic slow motion photography, works in tandem with the abrasive first-person views of the combatants, not to mention the direct nature of the combat itself as the viewer is often placed directly in the line of fire.  The involvement of the real LaMotta within the film provides a nice button to the superb acting put on display by De Niro, Joe Pesci, Cathy Moriarty and the numerous actors used to portray the opponents of LaMotta.  

3. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) Call it a trope if you like, but it feels like every great (or aspiring) director has a film in them that is driven by religion in some capacity.  The Last Temptation of Christ is unique in this sense because it takes the story of the accusations, betrayal, trial and eventual crucifixion of Jesus and turns it into a deeply faith-based suspense thriller.  Many of the familiar beats we know from the Bible are re-contextualized as visions, mystic tests of faith, carnal desires driven by lust, and nihilistic views infringing upon deep indoctrination.  Willem Dafoe plays a Jesus that is bitter in his acceptance of his fate, Harvey Keitel plays a wonderfully opportunistic Judas, and Barbara Hershey plays a very modernized version of a woman forced to use her body for survival that is suddenly trapped between necessity and passion.  The film hinges on the verge of becoming a soap opera without falling into the trappings that come with such high drama, and the walkup to the film’s amazing final sequence puts you in the emotional passenger's seat while Jesus takes the wheel and steers directly into his fate.  A dramatically powerful yet brutally sincere take on an iconic, revered and sensitive subject matter.

2. Goodfellas (1990) Is there any original praise left to bestow upon this movie?  To focus on the imperfections of this film is an act of futility, as they are mostly non-existent.  Some of Martin Scorsese’s best examples of his iconic camera movement, editing techniques, still frames, writing gleaned from personal experience, soundtrack use, loose historical connections and dark humor are found within the confines of Goodfellas.  If you’ve seen in actor in any television show or film that had any connection to the mob prior to Goodfellas or since, it is more than likely that that actor was in Goodfellas, even if only briefly.  Using Henry Hill as both an outsider and insider perspective is a brilliant narrative stroke, as he can get close to the top, but can never have it all, making him essentially a fly on the wall bursting with charisma and personality.  They highs are as epic as the lows are tragic, and for most people, it is the first film that comes to mind when the name Martin Scorsese is mentioned.  This could have very easily been the number one film on my list, but anyone who has been visiting this blog with a keen eye for detail probably figured out my favorite Scorsese film the first time they visited the DOOMonFILM blog.  

1. Taxi Driver (1976) Since the day that I started this film blog, there has been one image at the top of the page : Travis Bickle in the porn theater (with his face replaced by my logo) from the iconic Taxi Driver.  There’s not a single element that I can put my finger on for this film, but there are certainly a number of elements that do speak to me : the isolation that Travis faces, the journal-like narration that drives the story forward, the hypnotic nature of both Bernard Herrmann score and the repetitive taxi cab shots and the vivid camera movements are all burnt firmly into my brain.  Everyone that makes up the main cast for this film kills in their performance, and the ending of the film is not only a brutal one, but an ironic one in regards to where Travis lands in the eyes of those who make up the world of the film.  Martin Scorsese has made more amazing films than some directors have made, period (amazing or otherwise), but for my money’s worth, none of them are as powerful or well put together as Taxi Driver.