#unlike the critics always complaining about the writing I actually love the writing bc i AM a writer and know what I’m talking about 🥰

[awek-s]

watching the new season of the crown and my lorddd this show always leaves me so angryyy

[redrobin-detective]

So about that reversed apotoxin au, since they'd have some idea of what Shinichi's actual age is how differently do you think characters in the know woild treat him? Also how would people like Vermouth, Amura, or Kid treat him?

(Hi I still love this dumb AU where junior detective 7 year Conan Edogawa was the original who was then turned into a 17 year old Kudo Shinichi when he was poisoned)

I’ll go through all the people who canonically know Kudo=Conan

Yuusaku and Yukiko are, obviously, very unhappy about the situation. Conan was only supposed to with Agasa with a short period and then they come home and find he’s been targeted by a secret organization and turned into a teen?? Yukiko damn near forces Conan to leave with them but the boy refuses, saying he needs to see this through. They don’t leave him in Japan but instead stick around in disguise to watch out for their wayward 7 year old son now pretending to be 17.

Heiji went from ‘what is up with this weird teen detective’ to ‘holy fuck this is an ACTUAL CHILD’ so fast. He used to quietly complain about Shinichi but once he became in the know fell into the overprotective big brother role so fast. Conan gets annoyed by it, one of the better things about being Kudo is that people finally take his ideas/opinions seriously and here’s Heiji kind of holding him back. It takes a few cases before Heiji backs off and finds he genuinely likes Conan’s childish charm. Heiji is calmer and friendly with Kudo than he is others but truly likes and respects his junior by ten years. 

Vermouth would be a bitch, blatantly manipulating little Conan and using him to her benefit but at the same time so help ANYONE who tries to hurt him. Not only does she try and shield him from BO dealings but any time ‘Kudo Shinichi’ gets injured on a case the perp gets an welcome vistor in their hospital room (cause you know Ran has already fucking destroyed anyone who hurts sweet Kudo-kun). Initially planned to bring him in the BO, now wants him as far away as possible.

Ai went from big to small and is fascinated that Conan’s physical age caused the opposite reaction the apotoxin than it did her. She studies him a lot in order to remake the apotoxin and find a cure. Conan isn’t in as much of a rush to return to his original body but doesn’t plan on being Kudo forever. She’s pretty much his main ‘voice of reason’ in the know and her, Heiji and Agasa his main support on how to act like a normal teen. 

Akai figures it out pretty quickly, this so called high school detective is clearly just a mere child. Unlike Heiji, Akai didn’t write off Conan for his youth but saw all the potential the boy has. Actively tries to challenge and improve Conan’s critical thinking/detective skills with clear intentions to train him for the FBI. For this reason, the Edogawas and Heiji *really do not* like Akai (even when he’s Subaru) and try to keep them separate as much as possible.

Kaito switches violently between ‘aw just bc you gained a few meters you think can can challenge me’ to ‘dear GOD who lets you out of the house? there is a literal body over there please go home small child.’ So he’s either a smarmy dick to Kudo or is internally panicking over preserving the boy’s innocence. Still is always careful on heists when he shows up to make sure everything goes smoothly and the little detective can have fun chasing him around

[cookinguptales]

I saw two films yesterday at the film festival! One I loved and one was... well, imo, a lot of wasted potential.

I went to go see Koreeda’s new film first, Shoplifters. I’ve always loved his films (though admittedly I just don’t have the heart to watch Nobody Knows) and I’ve always gone to see them during the festival. Usually they are… not packed. This time, though, I was shocked to show up and find a rush line around the block?? I didn’t even realize that it’d won the Palm d’Or. Really, really glad I preordered my ticket, especially bc I loved the film.

Later that evening, I went to go see Widows, which was Steve McQueen’s new film. It was fine? I’ll admit I was just expecting something other than what I got and I didn’t find what I got particularly engrossing. That was likely more an issue of taste than quality, though. Well. Some of it was probably quality.

(Note: I mentioned graphic depictions of sex work under the content warnings not because I want to be anti-sex work but like. I can definitely see how depictions of it could be triggering.)

Some more thoughts:

As I was walking out of Shoplifters, I heard a lady complaining about how slow the film had been and how long it had taken to establish what the relationships between the characters were and the mean little voice inside me was like You don’t deserve a Koreeda film!!

If you’ve seen many of his films, the movie is pretty much what you’d expect. It’s a very quiet film about family and how messy it can be. Apparently, this particular film was pretty controversial in Japan amongst their more nationalist groups (and Abe, which… as I said, among their more nationalist groups) because of its depiction of Japan’s underbelly and its criticisms of some of Japan’s social issues. Personally, I loved it.

It’s a film about this motley crew of thieves and con men that make up a messed up little family. The film begins with them “adopting” a new little girl. “Adopting” is a euphemistic word. It’s more like they realized a little girl was being terribly abused by her family and they kidnapped her. That’s sort of the crux of the film, you know? These are not moral people. They do awful things. They teach small children to shoplift instead of letting them go to school — but where did they find those kids to start with? There’s an uneasy question of morality in this film at all times, especially when hints start to arise that shoplifting might be the least of some of these folks’ crimes.

Koreeda is honestly one of my favorite directors ever when it comes to depicting difficult families. His characterization is so gradual and realistic that you almost forget that these are not real people. These characters aren’t related by blood, but they take care of each other. They kidnapped a child, but the kid’s real parents were horrifically abusive. So at a certain point, where do they stop playacting at family and where do they start becoming real family? And once they become a found family, what secrets are dark enough to make the members realize that this is perhaps not the found family they wish to be a part of? It is essentially a film that questions the bonds and boundaries of family, both biological and adoptive, and it’s beautifully done.

Koreeda’s always been a director who asks difficult questions about adoption vs. biological kin, and this film is probably most pointed in that regard. His films are littered with poor parents and children just trying to make the best of things, to the point where it’s pretty clear that he’s resentful towards Japan’s attitudes towards family. The wrenching ending of this film makes that especially clear. As always in his films, there are no neat answers to these difficult questions.

The film is, as expected, beautifully shot and acted. It’ll also make your heart absolutely ache. It’s not as viscerally upsetting as Nobody Knows, but damn if it isn’t close. Definitely sadder than Like Father Like Son, one of my favorites of his, and that movie is pretty upsetting. The ache feels worth it, though. It’s just this grimy and lovely story all at once and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

(CW: brutal (if not graphic) child abuse, child injury, death (adult), graphic depictions of sex work. Definitely NSFW in spots, so I guess maybe don’t watch it with your parents.)

And then later I went to go see Widows. It wasn’t entirely the film I was expecting, and honestly, I don’t know that I liked what it was. The film was really billed as a feminist heist movie and uh. I guess a heist happened and there were some vague gestures towards Strong Female Protagonists. It was still a surprisingly dude-centric movie, though, with a depressingly predictable plot. It’s certainly not a fun movie, I’ll tell you that. It’s pretty brutal in spots and most of the characters range from boring to unlikable. Part of the problem is that the film vacillated wildly between an organized crime film to a heist film to a political film to a film about a romance to a generic action film to a film that occasionally flirted with actually important issues. But because it hopped around so much, I didn’t really feel satisfied with any one part.

It was basically a story about these women who’d been married to Crime Folks and when a Crime that the Crime Folks went bad, they all became widows. One particular widow (Viola Davis) got saddled with her Supreme Crime Husband’s shit, so she had to pull off his last heist with the other widows so they’d be out of debt to the people he’d fucked over. The other widows actually had very little to do with this bc they only had Minor Crime Husbands, but she dragged them into it anyway because I guess that’s just the kind of person she was. A lot of the film was pretty much Viola Davis bullying the other women into doing things and then feeling sorry for herself because she married a crime guy and that turned out to be a bad thing. There were also side plots about political machinations I didn’t care about and some organized crime which seemed to basically amount to David Kaluuya graphically torturing and murdering people to, idk, make the film brutal? Those scenes often felt fairly pointless and took up way too much time. He’s bad, I get it, what’s your point?

All the twists were pretty obvious. There was a scene about police brutality that I guess they could have bothered to do something interesting with, but it never went anywhere. (Nor did any of the political questions about social issues.) Honestly, the whole subplot about the dead son felt extraneous. I could sort of see what they were maybe aiming for? That she felt like he didn’t want their family because he was white and they weren’t and he didn’t want to deal with their lived reality and that made all the betrayals worse? But it never really came together, which was a pity. Like many aspects of the movie, it could have been something really interesting if they’d just given it some real thought and focus. Honestly, almost any of the plot lines could have been really good if they’d had their own movie. But uh. They didn’t. So it was kind of a mess. Maybe that’s what annoys me most. There was potential there but it went unrealized. So tons of things just felt extraneous and/or absolutely useless.

To be fair, the acting was obviously superb. It was pretty much carried by Viola Davis. Just wish the writing had been there. Like Viola Davis could act as hard as she wanted, that didn’t make her character particularly interesting or sympathetic. Every time she’d cry about her horrible dead husband and the predicament she was in, I was just like. Cool I mean I guess this is what happens when you marry a guy you know is a shit. None of the betrayals felt particularly shocking considering, like, it was established from scene one that he was a shitty guy. She just felt naive to the point of stupidity sometimes. Or maybe just self-involvement. And like. It’s hard to feel bad for a person who didn’t care if her husband hurt people as long as none of it affected her. Like I’m sorry that you’re reaping what you sowed, I guess? I’m not rooting for you, lady, nor do I even find you interesting as an antihero. (None of them were interesting. None of them. Most of them were stereotypes or otherwise shallowly-written characters.) Like I legit did not care who won the election or who got the money by the end of it.

On the upside, tho, there was a lot of Cynthia Erivo in the last third of the movie and boy am I here for her!! The character had barely anything as far as real characterization but I mean. Cynthia Erivo. By the end of the movie I was just kind of zoned out and watching Erivo do stuff. So that part was fun, at least. Everything else… not so much.

(CW: some fairly gory violence, graphic depiction of sex work (that was somewhat coerced), abusive parent-child relationships, mobility devices being taken from a disabled person in a fairly traumatic fashion, torture, death, racial slurs, extremely graphic police brutality, racism, sexism, animal abuse, implied child endangerment, graphically NSFW, etc.)