#vfx for awe movie

[mortalityplays]

Hi! I really liked and agreed with your post on purple prose, and I was curious what books if any you'd describe as having purple prose. Not even necessarily as shorthand for calling it bad! just examples of it, especially from non-classic literature. Unless the term is entirely subjective lol. Feel free to reply to this ask publicly or privately; I don't mind either way

Have some Conan the Barbarian (sorry about! the racism):

TORCHES flared murkily on the revels in the Maul, where the thieves of the east held carnival by night. In the Maul they could carouse and roar as they liked, for honest people shunned the quarters, and watchmen, well paid with stained coins, did not interfere with their sport. Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring. Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings. Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face. In one of these dens merriment thundered to the low smoke- stained roof, where rascals gathered in every stage of rags and tatters—furtive cut-purses, leering kidnappers, quick- fingered thieves, swaggering bravoes with their wenches, strident-voiced women clad in tawdry finery. Native rogues were the dominant element—dark-skinned, dark-eyed Zamorians, with daggers at their girdles and guile in their hearts. But there were wolves of half a dozen outland nations there as well. There was a giant Hyperborean renegade, taciturn, dangerous, with a broadsword strapped to his great gaunt frame—for men wore steel openly in the Maul. There was a Shemitish counterfeiter, with his hook nose and curled blue-black beard. There was a bold- eyed Brythunian wench, sitting on the knee of a tawny-haired Gunderman—a wandering mercenary soldier, a deserter from some defeated army. And the fat gross rogue whose bawdy jests were causing all the shouts of mirth was a professional kidnapper come up from distant Koth to teach woman-stealing to Zamorians who were born with more knowledge of the art than he could ever attain.

Conan is an interesting example imo because it displays a lot of the highs and lows of pulp. Robert E. Howard could also write very punchy, straightforward action, and often did - but part of the selling point for the emerging genre fiction of the era was that it was lurid and lascivious. While the extract above is. Well. Bad. It is worth recognising that within its context it was also kind of experimental.

Howard wrote these drooling, sort of bewildering, sensory passages for the same reason Marvel movies punch you in the face with saturated colours and rapid cuts and a billion VFX. You see it in the work of H.P. Lovecraft too, and I will grudgingly acknowledge that that's something worth recognising about his literary impact. I also think Lovecraft was a pretty bad technical writer, personally, but that's a whole other soapbox.

My point is that a lot of truly purple prose today (in the sense that it is extraneous, distracting, undermines its own function) traces its legacy to this era of pulp where there was a distinct secondary purpose to overwhelming the reader with ornamentation. It was self-consciously indulgent, and strikingly distinct from the more genteel floridity of equally bad literary novelists. For instance, compare the above with the even purpler prose of the famously awful Irene Iddesleigh:

On being introduced to all those outside his present circle of acquaintance on this evening, and viewing the dazzling glow of splendour which shone, through spectacles of wonder, in all its glory, Sir John felt his past life but a dismal dream, brightened here and there with a crystal speck of sunshine that had partly hidden its gladdening rays of bright futurity until compelled to glitter with the daring effect they soon should produce. But there awaited his view another beam of life’s bright rays, who, on entering, last of all, commanded the minute attention of every one present—this was the beautiful Irene Iddesleigh. How the look of jealousy, combined with sarcasm, substituted those of love and bashfulness! How the titter of tainted mockery rang throughout the entire apartment, and could hardly fail to catch the ear of her whose queenly appearance occasioned it! These looks and taunts serving to convince Sir John of Nature’s fragile cloak which covers too often the image of indignation and false show, and seals within the breasts of honour and equality resolutions of an iron mould. On being introduced to Irene, Sir John concluded instantly, without instituting further inquiry, that this must be the original of the portrait so warmly admired by him. There she stood, an image of perfection and divine beauty, attired in a robe of richest snowy tint, relieved here and there by a few tiny sprigs of the most dainty maidenhair fern, without any ornaments whatever, save a diamond necklet of famous sparkling lustre and priceless value.

Christ. Hopefully you can see the depth of the scale here - the Conan extract is muddy and difficult to read, but this is near incomprehensible. Part of the reason this passage is so much worse is that there is even less intent behind the author's use of language. Here, she is working overtime to evoke a kind of dramatic-intellectual style borrowed from writers like the Brontë sisters (imo at least - not an expert, that's just the sense I get as a reader). The further these flourishes get from lending purpose to the meaning of the prose, the harder they are to parse.

BUT my other point is: far fewer writers these days set out to emulate Irene Iddesleigh's arch, roundabout, society conscious voice than they do the hallmarks of classic pulp. We're inured to sex and violence, sin and debauchery in fiction today, so extracts like the Conan example feel even more bloated than they did in their time. And that creates a real pitfall for amateur genre writers: the instinct to pay homage to the stylistic choices of the classics can lead them right into Irene Iddesleigh territory.

Too often, the purpose of these overwrought, leering descriptions isn't calculated to thrill the audience, but to establish a piece in the company of older works the writer admires. And that's what leads to truly purple prose in contemporary genre writing, which makes readers scoff and laugh, which makes authors self-conscious and timid, which leads us here to a point where wordy description is inaccurately identified as the problem. It's not. The problem is excess - and when something has purpose, by definition, it's not excessive.

[intuitive-revelations]

One pretty funny thing about deeply overanalysing Doctor Who's CGI for mapping projects is starting to see the gaps where the VFX artists took shortcuts.

For example, I've previously pointed out that in the TV Movie intro, Skaro's surface is actually half a texture that's been mirrored (which was a bit irritating when trying to use that as a source):

However turns out New Who isn't above it either!

I've been reviewing my mapping of the Lungbarrow barn/Drylands area, stiching together the surroundings from the Hell Bent location filming to try and reconcile it with the DotD version, plus some new info I discovered in the novelisation. Check out these two shots stitched together:

Notice the clouds? When the VFX artists did the sky replacement, they clearly just used the same texture/rendering and flipped it for these two shots!

I suspect they did so elsewhere too (which can be justifiable if the camera is pointing approx. the same way and the sky is unmirrored), but it was most obvious here, with these two mirrored shots right next to each other. Obviously it's nothing awful, just a funny discovery.

By the way, if you're wondering what the full analysis looks like at the moment, since I'm probably not going to post it seperately:

[tossawary]

Live action svsss? Lmao

Oh, that is genuinely funny to me as an idea. Full-on blue-screened me for a second.

See, I'm not AGAINST the concept of live-action feature film adaptations or live-action television adaptations of other forms of media, especially not books. I personally adore the translation work and studying the translation work involved when transforming a story from one medium to another. Basically as soon as we had film, people started filming plays and adapting novels! There have been many, many TERRIBLE screen adaptations of other media, but there have also been many wonderful screen adaptations, which have sometimes been closely faithful and sometimes only used the original story as an inspirational springboard. (I personally see both Ghibli's "Howl's Moving Castle" and DreamWorks' "How to Train Your Dragon" as more of examples of the latter.)

MXTX's works have gotten live-action adaptations before. "The Untamed" is generally held to be a pretty good and relatively faithful adaptation of MDZS. And TGCF is also getting a live-action drama under the name "Eternal Faith". If it was announced that SVSSS was getting a similar drama, I would be a little baffled but fine with it, and also genuinely interested to see how they intended on expanding SVSSS into 50 episodes or something (definitely possible), and also how they intended to cover certain parts of the story without making it explicitly gay. I wouldn't even care if it was bad; I still have the original books to enjoy. Show me your live-action drama Moshang. I'm ready for some awful wigs.

(The main nightmare scenario is getting a bad or good but unfaithful adaptation that you hate but gets super popular, overrunning your book fandom with alternate characterization and pairings and worldbuilding that you can't stand. I'm sure there are book MDZS fans who absolutely loathe "The Untamed".)

The main issue with a USAmerican studio making a "Naruto" movie in my eyes (I don't even care about "Naruto" that much, I never finished it) is that 1) Hollywood is always extremely weird about anime and also Japan in general, so there's a high chance that the people at the top try to make story-breaking changes, and also try to cast white people. They do not have a good record. If this was a Japanese studio making this film, I would not blink at it. 2) "Naruto" is a very long story that doesn't lend itself easily to a stand-alone film. Either they only tackle a fraction of the story or squish way too much together. And either way, on the off-chance that the film is successful, we will be cursed to have sequels until they become unprofitable. I personally liked the live-action "One Piece" show fine, but it was a 7-hour show, not a 2-3-hour film.

I'm not even against the concept of modern remakes, personally, or even completely against the concept of live-action versions of animated films. I would give the Disney remakes something of a pass if they did interesting new stuff that took advantage of their medium or actually indicated they cared about creative quality, instead of rehashing the cartoons almost exactly but worse. The saddest part about things like "The Lion King" (2019) is that even if you kept the story exactly the same, beat for beat, shot for shot, it could have potentially been a vibrant celebration of the advancements in realistic VFX and the skill of the animators and artists involved (and there are some INCREDIBLY talented people being unfairly crunched and underpaid in these industries), but they instead chose to make everything about it visually as dull as dishwater. And I personally expect that the "How to Train Your Dragon" remake, instead of incorporating anything new or interesting, or really showing off some spectacular, well-crafted visuals, will be the same.

Anyway, this ask gave me the idea of a USAmerican studio making a live-action SVSSS film, which is what blue-screened my brain. I cannot fathom how any USAmerican studio would agree to that (it's foreign, it's gay, it's historical fantasy, it's fucking weird, it's everything that scares boring execs who crave maximum profits) and I'm sure they would fuck it up magnificently, such that I almost kind of want them to do it.

[iloveschiaparelli]

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: My Love Letter Part 1

Okay okay okay SO Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes longpost time just my whole opinion/analysis/love letter for the whole film beginning with my Wes Ball backstory so skip to the Ruin screencap if you want to skim past all that.

I haven't talked about it on tumblr yet but I'm actually like a huge fat fan of the Maze Runner cinematic series directed by Wes Ball. Really I'm just a fan of Wes Ball. It not only singlehandedly got me through my first year of high school but also became the reason I ended up entering the film industry. I've watched all 3 movies at least 4-5 times each. Probably like 20-30 for Scorch Trials at this point because it's my favorite. I can quote probably at least half of it from memory. I've watched all of the BTS content that was on the DVDs + the bloopers on youtube like i was obsessed ok.

2019 was like the second worst year of my life so imagine my distress in january 2019 when I found out about Wes Ball's next movie, Mouse Guard, got Super Hyped Up for the multimillion dollar mice-with-swords movie (I eventually read some of the comics btw it's insanely good) And then within the same week found out Disney pulled the plug on the project after acquiring 20th Century Fox. TWO weeks before production was scheduled to begin. I was livid. I'm still bitter about it. Wes Ball then released the demo reel for the film to the public which iirc also had temp music.

So anyway yeah that was awful but then! I think it was later in 2020 that it was announced that Wes Ball was going to be directing the 4th POTA movie. This kicked off me seeing the original 1968 film and then the trilogy and wow did doing so increase my excitement. In my opinion Rupert Wyatt/Matt Reeves' directing styles and Wes Ball's were/are very compatible. I also took the time to get caught up on as much of Wes Ball's old projects as I could get my hands on at the time, including his animated short Ruin (screencap below). Which is fantastic BTW and apparently was purchased by Fox for a feature film that was never made (???) I swear, filmmakers have their past works splattered all over the internet like body parts after a landmine explosion: Good luck finding everything.

Now, Finally Finally FINALLY!!!!!!!! Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is out. I meant to see it on the premier night but my boyfriend broke up with me 2 days before so I forgot. I saw it tonight instead! So now with the backstory out of the way I can finally talk about the actual movie.

First of all, the beginning of the film absolutely WOWed me!!!! It honestly feels like a callback to Ruin, the way that the buildings are overgrown and the post-apocalyptic setting is super evident and feels so delightfully reclaimed by nature. It's also really neat to see how far VFX has come since Ruin was released if you compare the opening shots of the movie with the wide shots in Ruin. Wes Ball himself is also a VFX artist, so it's really neat to see how that affects his work especially since Planet of the Apes is by nature a very vfx-heavy franchise. This movie absoutely popped off in that area but we'll get to that.

Secondly, I forgot how much I missed Ball's directing! Oh my goodness, the performances he gets out of the actors are always so authentic. I still have yet to see a performance by Dylan O'Brien that was as raw and believable as in the Maze Runner movies, and I'm like halfway through Teen Wolf already. In the action scenes especially, I love how characters in Ball's movies, you can really feel their pain. Since pain and physical discomfort aren't communicated directly through film, we often forget just how hard it is to get back up again after getting kicked down, but with Wes Ball you never forget. Ugh, when Noa was getting beat up on top of the bunker at the end of the movie, I caught myself catching my own breath when he coughed up blood. Like, yeowch!

Additionally, everything this man makes is just, like, a masterpiece? On a technical level at least. That's really the mark of a good director, whose job is not only to evoke a performance from the actors, but also to tie together the whole crew. And KOTPOTA really showed off how well the team worked together. Just the establishing shots alone in a lot of these scenes! Oh. My. Word. You can clearly see the fruits of labor of not only the concept artists, but also the VFX artists and production designers, and how they worked with the DP and actors to get the shot. Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

There are more that I'm thinking of, but unfortunately without a digital release available yet there's a limit to the screencaps that I'm able to obtain. The shot where Noa is walking up the escalator following Raka and you see the plane in the background indicating that Raka lives in an airport is one of them. There's also one or two establishing shots in nature that just show off the setting. The opening shots, of course. And then the shot where it pans up and you see Eagle Village for the first time. There's also an aerial of Proximus Caesar's camp, but I'm unable to find that one as well. The main one I want to look at is the telescope.

Just, like, Hello???? It looks like an art piece. This screencap is a little closer in than I'd like, but in the full frame you can see the absolute mastery of composition that it is, you can totally imagine it as a painting. Which in my experiences usually means there's a painting behind it somewhere in the process, lol. Let's go concept artists!!! But then you see how the colors are just, perfectly balanced, the plant growth is realistic and accentuating the set, and so on and so forth. It was just absolutely breathtaking to see for the first time. I'm pretty sure I audibly gasped. I did a lot of stimming during this movie just to stay quiet and not start babbling about the film pipeline to my father in theater auditorium.

Even more magic happens when Noa steps onto the set, and starts messing with the telescope. Suddenly it's real, it's tangible, it's touchable. Transforming what was likely a matte painting at one point into a set that the actors can interact with, and then into a shot where almost everything is overlaid with VFX, and having it look so real like that is truly magic.

The ship also had me dumbstruck, but slightly less so because we saw a similar setting in The Maze Runner: The Death Cure in 2018. Although it was slightly different for sure. What had me going even more in this movie was how much the characters interacted with the ship, moving in and around it, and trading glances with one another from on the ground and up inside. In TMR:DTC, you really only see the decrepit ships in the background, and one is referenced as a plot point but the characters never actually physically interact with any of them. So it's much easier for our brains to categorize the ships as gimmicks to help us believe the scene.

It's when props like these are woven into the scene as tangible objects that our brains start to shut up about the CGI and really start to believe what's happening onscreen! and KOTPOTA did an amazing job at this. Please bear in mind like, I literally have zero specialization in VFX, it's not my field and although I draw, I've never done concept art for film. I honestly believe that I'm simply in an appropriate level of awe for what this film accomplished.

The other thing that amazed me was how stylized the setting was. The greenery was so green, the ocean felt like a painting, the ship was red, the telescope shot is very, very blue. Several of the shapes used in the ape's costume design are simplified. And yet, despite the stylization, it never feels cartoony or polygonal, it still feels completely grounded in reality, and I could really believe I'd see it in real life. I think this owes partly to the fact that we rarely inspect any of these simplified items at a close distance, aside from Raka's necklace which appears to be made of either bone or whittled wood. It also owes to absolute geniuses in color grading that kept the stylized colors realistic enough for our brains to believe. Overall I'd take the visual style of the film to be Impressionist. I love impressionism.

My main interest in filmmaking is writing/directing. However, most of my experience lies in costume design (Student films rarely need costume "design" so its usually coordination) and production design. As a result I spent a good deal of my time watching KOTPOTA zeroed in on the production design.

I love post-apocalyptic science-fiction/fantasy worlds like this partly precisely because of how much you can learn from the production design alone. When Mae enters Trevathan's room for the first time I swear I was eating it up. Every single prop in this movie was carefully thought out by the PD, which is why his room absolutely stood out from the rest of the setting that we had seen up to that point. It was distinctly "human-centric" as opposed to the rest of the movie. I remember seeing it in the theater earlier today, laying eyes first on the bed by the door, thinking that it must be something they set up for Mae, but then wondering why or how the apes would know or want to set up a human-style bed for Mae when we're so many generations removed from human-dominated society.

Next it was on many miscellaneous table objects, thinking to myself "That looks like how a human would treat a space. Apes are generally too big to decorate at that scale." and then my eyes roved on to the furniture, seeing a human-sized table, human-sized chair, human-sized junk everywhere! Slowly, by observing the room, I gained a stronger and stronger sense of "there is another human here," which upon observing the rows and rows of books became "a smart human like Mae, who unlike her can read" (Remember at this point we still believed that Mae and her mother were the only smart humans that Mae had known growing up, and that she had been pursuing the opportunity to meet other smart humans and join them).

It was only upon the instant of realizing that this was a smart human that Trevathan spoke and appeared on the stairs. It was absolutely perfect timing. THIS, guys, is exceptional production design. It was honestly my absolute favorite piece of production design in the entire film, especially because of how much it contrasted what we've become used to seeing in the series as humans have diminished in population and apes and nature have taken over the space instead.

That exact sense of change or "otherness", that noticeability of contrast upon seeing what is honestly a pretty "normal" human space if you look at it in the context of our existing society, is only present because of how well PD treats the rest of the movie. In order to make a completely normal space feel strange, you have to change literally every other space to something alien but consistent with itself. And KOTPOTA does just that. The job was begun in the original trilogy, with the decline of humanity depicted across decades, nature taking over the gas station and the dam and even the city. But this movie had the biggest challenge because of simply how many years had passed before the story even began. Society as we know it today is completely and totally obliviated in KOTPOTA's setting. In every set that the characters interacted with in any way, PD had to fabricate a space where humans had been but the virus, decades of decay and post-apocalyptic living, and ape encroachment had transformed it.

This also brings me into the subject of the rich culture we see emerging in the world of the apes through this movie. The original trilogy, especially the first and second film, was all about the ape's identity. In the first film Caesar wonders whether he is human or ape, and whether apes are pets or equals to humans. He eventually comes to the realization that humans are never going to look out for apes the way that apes will and decides to become that person. In the second film, Caesar and the other characters involved have to figure out what being an ape means. Does it mean strength is power? That humans are always an enemy to defeated? Or a similar species to live alongside? It's about establishing what the ape race's relationship is to the human race. The third film I didn't get to rewatch before seeing KOTPOTA, but iirc it was about whether humans and apes could ever coexist, which is a theme we see continued in this movie, albeit in a slightly different way. Either that or more likely it was about whether apes will repeat the same mistakes as humans.

Anyway, I digress. In the script we already see a rich culture emerging in hints, right from the start of the movie. It's in the hunt for the eagle eggs at the beginning with mentions of some kind of coming-of-age ceremony, followed by Noa reminding Anaya and Soona that they must "leave one egg always. It is the law." Already in the first five minutes we've established that this particular ape civilization not only has cultural traditions surrounding youth and coming-of-age, but also rituals and laws surrounding their relationship with and the conservation of nature. And through dialogue we extrapolate that these apes have bonded animals (eagles). It honestly felt like a crossover between Native American Indian hunting practices and How To Train Your Dragon, which is wild I know. (Also can we talk about how the eagles in this movie actually made eagle sounds???? And not falcon sounds! Finally we're breaking the bad habit of making up animal noises to sound cooler when the original already sounded super cool by itself.)

So in just a few minutes guys!! We already have so much. Then the trio heads back to the village and has their first encounter with the Echoes (Ekos? If anyone could get spelling on that for me that would be fantastic) but are too afraid (or law-bound) to get too close to or cross through the tunnel "into the valley below". So through these we establish that there is a taboo around not just humans but also around leaving the village. The clan has taken an isolationist approach wherein they not only forbid their young clan members from leaving but also withhold information about the outsiders from them until they've come of age. Guys the cultural system arising here is absolutely wild. Like sorry not sorry but I eat this stuff up. (Screenwriters-- this is prime example material of "show don't tell")

There's also all of the ape social communication rules that we've already gotten used to, mainly a variation of the palm-up/palm-down gesture as a means of showing respect (submission) and asking for permission/approval.

In this movie however the hands are mostly closed and the palms are down for the sub as well as the ape they're seeking approval from, as opposed to the trilogy in which the submitting ape always had their palm up. At first I chalked this up to cultural differences among clans since we learned that this clan is not the clan descended from Caesar's apes in the trilogy, but then Caesar's descendants were doing it this way too? So I don't really know what to make of it but I'm going to decide that it's just global cultural evolution (at least, as global as the real-world evolution of Old English into modern English).

Through the production design of the beginning sequence in Eagle Village, we see that the eagles catch fish and then the vast quantities of fish and the smokehouse indicate that fish caught by the eagles are the main source of food for the Eagle Clan. We also see feathers as a motif throughout, worn especially by the parents and the elders as a sign of social status (we know it's social status bc Sylva rips it off of one of the elders as an intimidation tactic and everyone audibly gasps, indicating it worked). That last bit is honestly more costume design, they popped off too but one thing at a time or I'm going to become incomprehensible. I will repeat myself. It is inevitable.

Then throughout the film we learn that not only do they adhere strictly to the "law", but that that law is set by the elders alone. We also learn that they primarily relate to their eagles by singing to them which!!! is just!!!! so!!! metal!!! I love it. The way it plays into the end scene with Proximus just AGHRGHJHRHGR GROWL BARK BARK FERAL NOISES>

ahem

Also we see them building nests at home for their eagles and they've figured out falconry tools for the aerie and everything on their own like??

Then in contrast we see what's left of Caesar's clan, it's descendants. Proximus Caesar, we learn later from Trevathan, has gone completely fangirl over the ancient roman empire and decided to emulate it because "he likes it" and it makes him "feel good" (yeah he's probably the most textbook tyrant I've ever seen in media), choosing to morph Caesar's teachings into his own new worldview rather than adhering to them properly.

So the culture of Caesar's clan is very heavily roman-influenced, often copying practices outright such as the insitution of slavery, a lot of the fashion choices and even the way that banners are put up around the camp and the way that Proximus dines at a low-set table filled with an overabundance of food. And he has a throne and crown, and there are roman numerals inscribed on both his and Sylva's necklaces. But we still see influences of Caesar's original society, most noticeably the persistence of the window symbol and the architecture of the dam. The architecture wouldn't be significant at all, instead being noted as a stylistic choice for the whole series, if it weren't for the fact that it's different from Eagle Clan's architecture.

If Eagle Village resembles those spaghetti bridges that engineers build for class, with thatched roofs, then the dam at Caesar Clan's camp is much more brutalist by comparison. Eagle Clan was very spindly and focused on height and lightness of building materials: many of the logs were thinner and longer, more spaced out, and sometimes rounded at the ends. By contrast, Caesar Clan's dam is built with stumpier logs, closer together, and spiked at the top. The dam is also shored up with soil and other materials. Which yeah, is typical of beaver dams but is also typical of the structures in the original Caesar's village in the trilogy.

Unfortunately, there's only one image currently available of Eagle Village and it's after it was burned down. But you can still see how it differs from Caesar's village, instead of being chaotic it's more organized, allowing for a more lightweight structure.

This (below) is the closest I could get to having a picture of the dam's architecture, but you can still tell how it's more similar to OG Caesar's architecture than it is to Eagle Clan's, even though it's using a completely different building material (scrap metal instead of hewn trees).

Eagle Clan's architecture is also a further effect of how their society revolves around making a life bond with eagles, which are flying creatures. So of course they would be inclined to taller structures, especially ones that are more lightweight and have structural patterns, imitating the way that birds are built (see above).

I'll continue in part 2 as a reblog because it's 1 am and I'm running out of steam but YALL I need you to understand: It's been 6 years since the last time I had a Wes Ball film to overanalyze and rave about. I have SO MUCH to say about this film.

[addelaidesupreme]

SOME FOLKS ID LIKE TO GET TO KNOW BETTER

Tagged by @lefttitnonebeef

Last Song: Does a podcast count? I've been listening to God Awful Movies a lot lately. They released a new episode earlier this week and ive been listening in little five-minute chunks.

Fave Color: I look GOOD in a dark green

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Last Movie: Raiders of the Lost Arc babeyyyy! So funny to look at all those old vfx and realize that they dont scare the shit out of me anymore like they did as a kid.

Last Tv Show: My live-in partner and i binged about two and a half seasons of eric andre last night. highly recommend if you dont remember what its like for your face to hurt from smiling.

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[oktobearfest]

full thoughts on the borderlands movie

yeah the reviews weren't exaggerating this movie is fucking awful. probably one of the worst video game movies in recent memory. pretty much everything about it is horrible. don't know where to begin so i'll just list off my random thoughts about the movie

the visual effects are terrible. this movie visually looks like the VFX team didn't have a budget or didn't have any time to make this movie look even remotely competent. like some of the things in this movie look like a PS2 cutscene. i will say as a positive that claptrap consistently looked great and was thing i thought looked good. that positive is automatically retracted when i learned that the people that worked on claptrap specifically were not credited for their work

i know everyone is saying it but everyone in this is hilariously miscast. kevin hart as roland was ridiculous but honestly he didn't bother me that much in the actual movie. cate blanchett as lilith and jamie lee curtis as tannis were WAY worse. they're both too old for these roles especially given that in the movie tannis is supposed to be like, 30 ish years older than lilith. bitch these two characters don't look that far apart in age??? jack black as claptrap was annoying as fuck. just sounded like he was doing a bad impression of the original VA. another positive is that i thought the guy playing marcus was pretty good. he looked and sounded like the character but he's in like. 2 scenes and then you forget he exists. also i dont see a lot of people talking about this so it may just be me but moxy looked really old for the role as well. she's literally in 1 scene and thats it so it doesn't matter that much but it did stand out to me.

movie is insanely unfunny. nothing else to say. the attempts at "jokes" here were embarrassing

very confused as to who this movie was made for as it doesn't respect the source material in any way but also has a ton of references to the games that non fans would not understand.

not sure if this is true but this movie felt like it was originally rated R but it was trimmed down to be a PG-13 rating. why is a movie based off of a franchise with rated M games PG-13??????

every scene felt super rushed and you never get to know any of these characters or care about them. the writing and character development were very hollow and superficial. i know the borderlands games are not peak fiction when it comes to writing but you still come to like and care about these characters. in this movie, im like damn i dislike all of you lol

this entire movie has "was in development hell for almost 10 years" vibes all over it. it permeates throughout the entire thing. i couldn't stop thinking about how it took almost a decade for this movie to be shit out onto the big screen

w. w. why did they change tiny tina's backstory and why is it 100000000000% pointless.

WHERE ARE MORDECAI AND BRICK. WHERE ARE THEY

[callmearcturus]

Stunt Facts: Rogue Nation Edition

as requested (thank you for indulging me) lets fucking talk about the three big stunts of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, aka my favorite movie of the McQuarrie Trilogy

The Batshit Plane Stunt

This is literally the cold open of the movie and doesn't spoil anything about the plot, enjoy.

This stunt came about from McQuarrie looking at a model of the plane and joking that they should have Ethan hang off the side of it. Unfortunately, Cruise took him seriously.

When Cruise and McQuarrie asked Airbus if the stunt was humanly possible, they were told it absolutely fucking wasn't. As usual, the two idiots did not listen.

Cruise was attached to a very secure harness that fed into the door. Honestly, that part, the actual attaching of Cruise to the plane was probably the safest part of the stunt.

Where the danger came in: the plane had to fly at a very careful speed. The Airbus is Fucking Enormous, as you can see from the clip, so it has to reach a certain speed just to become airborne. However, if it went too fast, there was a legitimate concern that Cruise would be maimed as he's torn bodily off the side from the windshear. Yeah.

Another issue was the chance that something would fly through the engine and hit Cruise. For this reason, the runway was vigorously cleaned of all debris. Even so, a fucking pebble managed to his Cruise and it nearly cracked his fucking ribs, and if it had hit higher, it would have fucking killed him.

According to Simon Pegg, this was the stunt Cruise was the most nervous about doing, which honestly? Makes sense. With the Burj and the underwater stunt and even the HALO jump, Cruise had control of his body and we all have to admit that he clearly knows his precise physical limitations. With the airplane stunt, he was strapped to the side with nothing he could do but survive the ordeal.

Cruise was wearing special glass contacts to protect his eyes and let him actually open them. As a side effect, he could barely see shit.

Cruise, to McQuarrie: "If it looks like I'm scared, I'm acting! Do not cut." McQuarrie knew to cut the take when Cruise started laughing manaically. (Which tbh sounds hilarious)

Oh and it was 27F so literally below zero when they did this and because Cruise wanted his outfit to be a reference to North by Northwest, he had no protection against the cold.

Tangential fun fact: Benji's ghillie suit outfit for this scene. When they got the suit in, McQuarrie and Cruise both modeled it first, sending Pegg pictures of it.

The Torus of Aw Shit Ethan Fucking Drowned

This wasn't in the original plan for the movie. Cruise spotted the pre-vis people looking at the model of the Torus and went, "Oh, cool, we're going to do an underwater scene!" The scene wasn't intended to be underwater. Moral of the story: Don't let this fucking man look at any goddamn models.

Cruise trained until he could hold his breath for six minutes to do this sequence. He even, a few times, purposefully stayed under too long and passed out so he would know what his limits felt like.

The underwater DP for the sequence found it unnerving to do because he said when you spend a lot of time underwater, you can get to a very peaceful calm place mentally and just lose track of time. Once, he pulled Cruise up bc he was scared that was happening.

Cruise: "What are you doing, I was in the moment, I was acting."

DP: "I know you were but it just got a little too real for me."

Cruise: "I get that but you need to trust me. I know my limits and I do not want to die."

The scene is more practical than it looks. Any surface Cruise touches is real. VFX were added to enhance the feel of the scene.

The scene actually exists as a continuous 3.5 minute long sequence but McQuarrie thought it dragged on too long so chose to intercut it with Benji's progress to the Gait Analysis. I personally wish they kept the full uncut sequence just to go "ha fuck you."

oh my god the stunt driving

For the car sequence: Cruise and Pegg were genuinely in the car and Cruise really was the stunt driver for the sequence. Pegg reportedly was perfectly fine being the passenger bc he trusts Cruise's driving acumen at this point.

The bit where the car does a hard turn to hit the motorcycles was for real. The car was mounted on a rig to let it spin like that and the walls of the alleyway were actually a soft foam to make it safer for the stunt cyclists to hit the sides.

For the motorcycle sequence: oooooh my fucking godddddd okay

Cruise was driving 100mph with no helmet and no protective gear. The whole thing is fully practical, though VFX was used to add even more cars into the sequence afterward.

this crazy motherfucker really did the bit where Ethan puts his knee down and scrapes it during the hard turn. he did it three fucking times. again: no protective gear.

this one is so stressful to watch but is fucking tame compared to the one in Fallout which is Actively Fucking Batshit.

this man wants to die in the name of preserving cinema, i'm telling you

[normalaboutmedia]

chopping mall (1986) review

continuing my obsession with 80's horror with a famously Good Bad movie, Chopping Mall has everything i could want and more: at times it's hilariously poorly acted and ridiculously written, but its competently shot and an absolute joy to watch! clearly made by people who know how to make a movie and also really know how to have fun.

sometimes with Good Bad movies i find that the really silly parts are fun, but the rest of the movie drags. but with Chopping Mall, i was enjoying myself thoroughly from start to finish. whether it was genuinely cool camera shots and sequences, or extremely cheesy lines and awful vfx, this movie was so incredibly endearing and fun for me and it's definitely one i'll be revisiting (and definitely own on dvd soon)

i'm gonna post some "spoilers" for the movie below so if u wanna go in a bit more blind here's my generic pitch: teens getting frisky after hours in the mall start getting killed by paul blart robo cops in increasingly ridiculous ways. there is a lot of Mall but interestingly, absolutely zero Chopping

(mind altering substances not necessary but highly encouraged for this viewing)

overall rating: 10/10 literally whats not to like

some of my favorite moments under the cut (i'm leaving out the most iconic death and the ending because i think it is WELL worth the watch and if you havent already seen it then i think u desereve to see it in context)

extremely cheesy animated Skeleton Shock effect (and all the animated effects in general):

the killbots Signature Post-Kill Catchphrase:

and of course, the line that pretty much sums it all up:

if you've read this far wowww thanks for reading im kissing u kissing u kissing u

and if you watch Chopping Mall, let me know what u think! my ask box and dms are open <3333

thank you, have a nice day!

[marissaofunderground]

tbh looking at every media ever someone behind the scenes has hurt ppl no matter what…..so….while I get not wanting to support a certain show because there is proof the creator has hurt a couple people, I also wanna point out…….

Pixar Animation Studios: Sexist history full of perverts in charge with no respect for women and treating female artists and employees like sex toys. Testimony:

How do you feel about Pixar classics now? As much as I still enjoy Toy Story I can’t deny I feel a little bad taste in the back of my throat knowing the creator is a pig. Makes it just a little more difficult watching those movies now….same with any other films, Pixar or Disney, that he was involved in….

Stuff Joss Whedon worked on, from Buffy to the first two Avengers movies. There’s lots of reports on this. Needless to say, I’m glad Marvel fired him.

She Who Must Not Be Named, the creator of the biggest franchise of a generation and the very destructor of said franchise. Like many, I’ve cut that book franchise out of my life entirely and refuse to ever engage with it again.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller pixel-fucked Sony Pictures Animation over the making of Across the Spider-Verse. You’d think they’d have a better understanding of how animated films are made, but their actions behind the scenes of this movie say otherwise.

Related to that, almost all animation studios screw over their workers, (including indie studios, yes, Spindlehorse is sadly one of them), who are overworked and underpaid. When the Animation Guild’s contract runs out next year, expect an animator’s strike that’s been long overdue.

And even more related to that, VFX artists are also screwed over by EVERYONE. They’re even the coiners of the term “pixel-fucking” that I used describing the treatment of the artists behind Spider-Verse. Marvel Studios is one of the worst offenders of this, especially when directors do not understand how to do VFX. And because VFX artists aren’t unionized (which they should be), they are often underpaid and overworked, and it is one of the most thankless jobs in Hollywood. I could write a whole essay on how the VFX industry is treated alone. It’s BAD.

And of course, anything under big corporations, who don’t give two shits about their workers and have no qualms replacing them with AI. Why do you think the SAG-AFTRA strike is going on right now? And none of them will budge.

Independent or not….no media is free from abuse or bad behavior. Almost seems like you gotta be awful to be successful. That’s sad, really…

But of course, many of these examples are related to either capitalism and executive meddling, the sexist culture we live in, and the abusive culture we live in.

[gamora-borealis]

okay, something I actually really enjoy about all the GotG movies is that they definitely have a more balanced practical to digital effects ratio that really helps ground them.

I used to hate the practical vs digital effects debate because it mainly used to be annoying people unjustly hating on the star wars prequels (and JJ Abrams later capitalized on that sentiment, despite the prequels using plenty of practical effects/models alongside ground-breaking CGI for the time), but the Marvel movies have really gotten awful with their overuse of CGI. It often looks especially bad too because of the exploitation/over-working of the artists in the digital vfx and animation industry who don't have unions.

But Guardians has wayyy more actual sets and full makeup and prosthetics and cool costumes and it just creates a better environment that you can tell took a lot of work and attention to detail that wasn't rushed. and it feels more like something tangible that you can step into and interact with, vs. "well I guess it's sorta realistic but it's still clearly CGI." and like, these are movies that take place in space and have a main character who is literally a 100% CGI raccoon. marvel, you can do better with your other movies.

[thekobaltpossum]

Live action Zelda Movie

As many are well aware, Nintendo has announced a live action Legend of Zelda Movie. LIVE ACTION! Let me tell you that I am... concerned for a few reasons.

First off, you HAVE to get the lore right with Zelda.

Second, we havent heard anything of Eiji Aonuma's involvement. While Miyamoto started the series, Aonuma is the heart and soul of the Zelda team, he NEEDS to be involved with the movie.

Thirdly, and i think this is my biggest fear, the visual affects. Dear god. This is produced by the same guy who made Morbius apparently. You NEED TO NAIL the visual affects in this movie. I don't want an awful hyper realistic CG Ganon or Goron or Zora. You need to give the vfx artists all of the time they need. DO NOT FUCKING RUSH THIS.

Fourth, the cast matters. ESPECIALLY Ganondorf. Don't you fucking dare put someone like Dwayne Johnson in the Role. I have 3 pics for Ganondorf: Idris Elba, Keith David, or Giancarlo Esposito. Please don't mess this up.

I've been a fan of this series for over a decade. Half of my life i have been obsessed with this franchise. PLEASE don't mess it up.

[mylifeincinema]

My Week(s) in Reviews: March 9, 2024

My brain is already on the Oscars, so these may be even quicker than usual...

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve, 2024)

I too would immediately forget Zendaya exists the second Florence Pugh walked in the room. Aside from some issues with the pacing that are probably rather nit-picky (some scenes felt rushed while others seemed to draaaaaag), this was a technical beast. Once again, the casting is just stellar, and the cinematography and VFX are straight-up stunning. Crazy cult-leader-villain Rebecca Ferguson is always the best Rebecca Ferguson. (I'd follow Rose the Hat to the depths of hell.) This is a much more action-heavy piece compared to the first, and it's significantly better for it. The chosen-one stuff is interesting, but not as interesting as the struggle for control over Arrakis. Really, the only things I really didn't love were those pacing issues and the fact that Florence Pugh & Christopher Walken didn't have more screen-time. Yeah, not much else to say, specifically. - 9/10

Nimona (Nick Bruno & Troy Quane, 2023)

Had a bunch of fun with it, but the changes made from the graphic novel really weren't for the better, and the movie Nimona is significantly more annoying. - 7/10

Hypnotic (Robert Rodriguez, 2023)

Awful. Terrible. Truly embarrassing on every single level. What's even worse, is that the entire cast seems to know this, and watching them try to make sense of their garbage decisions and dialogue is so, so painful. - 1/10

Wonka (Paul King, 2023)

I had a few minor issues with some of the songs and several decisions Chalamet made, but overall this was pretty damn delightful. In general, the cast is having a blast in the most entertaining and interesting way possible, and King knows how to deliver a visually exciting family film. I really wish we didn't lose him for Paddington 3. - 8/10

I also revisited some other Villeneuve films. Dune: Part One in prep for the second one... which I enjoyed significantly more this time around. Then the night after seeing Part Two, I did a double feature of Sicario and Blade Runner 2049. Sicario is every bit as good as it was the several previous times I'd seen it. It's truly a masterful piece of cinema. Blade Runny 2049 wasn't quite as good. It's still pretty damn amazing, but there were some pacing issues that were significantly more apparent this time around. I also revisited David Fincher's Se7en as a palate cleanser after Hypnotic. So damn good, every single time. Then I followed Wonka with the masterpiece that is Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Thankfully, this decision didn't make me enjoy Wonka less like I'd worried it might.

Also, I'll be posting my Official Academy Award Predictions either sometime later tonight or tomorrow afternoon. Stay Tuned!

Enjoy!

-Timothy Patrick Boyer.

[baelatargaryen]

☕ + current state of the mcu

this is pretty hard, b/c i'm gonna be honest, i stopped watching sometime after the first seasons of the spin-off disney+ shows.

out of the spinoffs, i liked wandavision the most. felt the most entertaining/intriguing

tfatws was okay-ish, i'm actually in the sam should be cap camp so that worked for me but overall i found myself p bored conceptually with the show, it definitely didn't feel like anything new. i'm so beyond tired of the mcu coming back to the "glitch" and the super-serum

i absolutely hated the loki show i'm sorry. and i say this as a huge loki fan as my edits will kinda speak for but everything i loved about him was basically stripped away and it felt like i was watching a new character. the worldbuilding was awful, the concept somehow managed to be boring, the show felt static, the acting either bland or over-the-top, with the most ham-fisted dialogue i've ever seen.

um. thor 4. i was excited bc i enjoyed ragnarok for the most part. i think it has its flaws, but it was entertaining, i enjoyed hela a lot as a villain, i liked the new direction thor was moving in, but i honestly turned it on and turned it off within the first ten minutes. i was kinda convinced it was a joke. (this says a lot tbh bc im a huge thor lover, to the point of defending some of the p bad writing his franchise gets stuck with)

those last two were kinda the nail in the coffin for me. overall, i feel they've really oversaturated their own market quite badly, and it's putting out show after show (movie after movie for a while there too), often poorly produced, relying heavily on vfx, often re-using same past plot points. with old characters gone, a lot of the nostalgia that kept people tied to it is gone and i don't think many of their new projects have been exciting to get people invested the way they used to, tbh.

in general, this problem is more of disney+ problem i think. i find that when i've watched other disney+ shows (just recently watched percy jackson, but also the star wars spinoffs like the mandalorian and obi wan kenobi) i am struck by how poorly produced many of them are. the plot is paper-thin, there's almost no physicality to any of the sets bc of the overreliance on cgi, costuming/makeup has gone downhill, writing has been stripped down where there's no subplots interweaving at the same time, just point a to point b, then the next episode is point b to point c. even shows i've enjoyed have this issue, and they end up feeling so soulless.

[mostlygibberish]

I liked the part with the Subway product placement.

A pointless remake of Death Wish that manages to completely remove all emotional weight or darkness from the story, replacing it with shitty one liners and gun training montages set to AC/DC. I don't understand why they remade this; Not only does it not say what the original said, it didn't seem to say anything at all.

Bruce Willis was just not convincing as a man driven to revenge by despair, and instead played a run-of-the-mill action hero who didn't seem all that affected by anything. The movie barely even pretended it wasn't glorifying his vigilantism, then removed any doubt by giving him and his daughter a happy ending.

If they wanted to focus on how cool arbitrary violence was, they could have at least made it fun to watch. Every gunshot and all the silly, gorey ultraviolence was ugly, impactless CGI. Everything about this movie was sterile and bland. The performances felt phoned in, the script was not interesting, and the attempts to tie in social commentary in were nebulous and lazy.

There was one especially pointless part where the slide of his glock bit his hand in the first shootout, even though he clearly wasn't holding it wrong enough to do that to himself. Even when they played the footage back it still looked stupid, they made it a thing regardless, and then it didn't even affect the story anyway.

As a general aside: I'm tired of seeing people in modern media "firing" guns that are clearly not firing. You can't just slap muzzle flash VFX and pissweak gunshot foley on to a shot of someone holding a handgun completely still and expect it to look anything less than awful.

A shitty remake nobody wanted. Go watch the original instead, or don't. Definitely don't watch this one.

[skelelexiunderlord]

Im a leftist, and honestly something that tires me about leftist “activism” is that often the consumer of Thing is demonized and dogpiled just cause this week’s version of Creator of Thing does/did awful shit. All the activism that are really meant for Creator of Thing are pushed onto consumer of thing, and only becomes counter productive for the meager reward of feeling morally superior for not engaging with Thing.

Its reactionary. It literally doesnt do anything. Constantly campaigning for people not to eat at chick fil a Will Not Stop people from eating there, nor would it bring more foot traffic to support the movement since the campaigning is scattered and weak at best (and full of people getting mad at random strangers that still choose to eat there). Eating at Chik fil a isnt proof that someone hates gays.

Just imagine if some random stranger came up to you and started harassing and screaming at you for using a car because “that would mean you support big oil, and if you support them then you support the destruction of the environment!! YOU personally are a horrible person for driving a car!” Like no i use it to get to work or to have fun im literally just a dude.

Like im not saying you *cant* take your money to places not Chik fil a, avoid using Amazon, refuse to have anything to do with harry potter, but yall are trying to “personal carbon footprint” activism.

You’re saying that anyone that doesnt buy fair trade groceries supports the underpayment and mistreatment of 3rd world farmers, and should be shunned and ostracized for buying groceries?

You’re saying that everyone who watches Marvel movies means they condone the underpayment of vfx artists and animators?

You’re saying that people who go out to eat fast food condone the horrid working conditions for servers/cooks/dishwashers, etc.?

You’re saying that those who engage with media featuring Jackie Chan are homophobic because of how he treated his gay daughter?

Why dont we just take all this anger and damn energy to instead donate to charities, volunteering for local events, and going out of our way to contact reps and vote and protest? Or actually direct this activism at those in power?? Do something that can actually HELP instead of policing random strangers over their love for hazbin hotel or some shit.

[lady-murderess]

So I saw Shazam Fury of the Gods on Wednesday, and now I've had a couple of days to think about it, I still like it. It was a pretty fun movie and it had heart.

After reading some of the negative reviews I've seen online about it, as much as I understand some of what's been said, in some way or another I still feel like I must have watched a completely different movie from the rest, as I don't see all that much wrong with it? It didn't overdo it on the humour, I liked the development some of the characters had, the cast's performance was good, and the VFX wasn't awful.

I will say, there were some things that could have been done better, I do think at a certain point in the film Dame Hellen Mirren's character could have done a little bit more, but that's all I shall say.

Other than that, yeah. I don't understand the negativity.