#i have been set free from a drama that started out extremely promising but petered out into a series of bad tropes & nonsensical metaphors

[driftbending]

i keep writing and rewriting my reaction to vincenzo because there are a lot but also i'm not certain i articulate everything i hated about the ending.

i will say that i knew no matter what that i wouldn't like the ending because murdering a character as punishment for their misdeeds is not something that appeals to me. i grew up watching kirikou et la sorcière, avatar: the last airbender, lilo and stitch, and (more recently) moana. all of these are stories that say "here is an evil character that we'll stop in a way that doesn't involve jail/murder," and the only exception i make for this is light yagami's death in death note and that's because ryuk killed him as a way to end their relationship, not as a punishment for his crimes. (and gothic lit is exempt bc they have to be resolved with murder.) so, whatever happened, regardless of how much violence the babel four did, none of their deaths would have held any emotional satisfaction for me. yet i prepared myself to be unimpressed by the finale since this is what the set up has always been: vincenzo will kill hanseok, and maybe myunghee, seunghyeok, and hanseo.

i knew this from the beginning. the narrative repeated it so often i got annoyed. there were so many close calls with vincenzo pulling a gun on hanseok that that got boring. by the time ep. 20 rolled around i was just fed up and wanted someone to die because this show had already failed me so many other times with their set ups that i wanted at least one good payoff.

lo and behold, they did end up killing the four characters i thought would die. hanseo died, and though he was my favorite character, and though i felt sad he didn't get any funeral scene or help while he was fending off his brother and that his death served as a sacrifice for vincenzo instead of literally anything else, i didn't cry or even get mad about it. he died and i felt free to stop caring about the rest of the story. yay me! i do understand the fans who hated that he was killed and that he should've survived bc abuse victims don't deserve the storyline hanseo got, but this is not a show i expected to actually care about victims. despite what it says, i knew i wouldn't get this for hanseo waaaaay back in ep 8 when they brought up the victims of that gay banker and just used it as a way for us to root against the banker. they didn't treat those victims with any respect at all and so i was already prepared for them to do it all over again. and they did and it sucks, but again for me i couldn’t get as angry as i normally would about this bc i always knew that the deaths from this show would never mean anything to me bc there was just so much of it it became meaningless.

another thing i knew that was going to let me down about this show is that it didn’t have a single “good” character for me to root for. mr. hong existed, but he was murdered early on. every other character on the show is too corrupt to be the ones i would want handling a reconstruction project for a more ethical world. yes, they made hanseo go through a redemption arc, but they didn’t let him stay did they? they focused so much on deconstruction they never cared about reconstruction. so when they got to the ending where vincenzo just leaves, chayoung and the tenants are thrown into a familiar cycle of court cases and defending their plaza from it being redeveloped, vincenzo just goes on to be a mafia boss again, and the guillotine file is back in the hands of the corrupt intelligence agency that created it on the orders of their president. the only thing that changed was babel group was destroyed bc their two ceos were murdered and the lawyers of their legal rep. were also murdered.

and yet, despite my expectations being so low they were basically non-existent, i was still disappointed. they didn't let chayoung do anything (which i knew would happen because i knew something about her characterization never felt fully fledged to me the way it did to fandom, so i wasn't surprised when they delegated her as a damsel-in-distress/love interest.), they killed myunghee the way we used to burn witches (which how fitting for a female character that is cunning and cruel), and the way they killed hanseok literally made me feel faint and nauseous (i wish this was an exaggeration; the second i saw the drill pointed at him i started feeling this way and i couldn't listen/watch his death scene because it was so brutal).

so, the ending satisfied nothing for me. if people who shipped the main characters were satisfied, whatever. i was never interested in them as a ship (i tend to ship vincenzo and chayoung with other characters), so the ending was even more disappointing bc it really held nothing that mattered to me.

i was also not a person that liked the way each character idolized vincenzo because i preferred his relationships with other characters to be filled with more tension* and the narrative just told me that the writers didn't, that vincenzo's word was what mattered, that the other character's conflicting needs were meant to be eclipsed by vincenzo's needs. so when the characters were all looking into the horizon hoping that vincenzo would some day come back (for what, i ask you?) i was just like :|

(*what do i mean by tension? i mean my favorite version of chayoung/vincenzo was the early eps when she hated him for being liked so much by her father that her flaws as a daughter were highlighted more and chayoung's own hesitancy with murder bumping up against vincenzo’s lack of hesitancy. mr. cho/vincenzo were most interesting when mr. cho wanted the guillotine file to use for his own purposes. the tenants/vincenzo were the most interesting when the tenants wanted to take the gold and vincenzo was trying to stop them. even hanseo/vincenzo was the most interesting when they had the "will you kill me? will you betray me?" tension as they worked together to get rid of hanseok. these dynamics added layers to the characters and reminded us they had their own motivations that were as equally important as vincenzo’s, but not enough of these tensions lasted past a few episodes and almost always would vincenzo's needs prevail with most of the other characters going along with his plans in the end.)

and this is all without mentioning how fandom sort of ruined a lot of the show for me, too. they took the characteristics that made the myunghee/hanseok dynamic one of my favorites and gave it to chayoung/vincenzo to the point where i was always left baffled and feeling like i was watching a different show. (a good point about the end for me is that i feel vindicated watching the scene where chayoung was basically like "i don't like your methods, vincenzo, but i needed to use them as the lesser of two evils to destroy hanseok," bc it did sort of reinforce for me my own reading of chayoung which was that she doesn't mind being corrupt and blackmailing people or scaring them into compliance, but that she was not going to get her hands covered in blood or dance over the corpses of her enemy. those traits belong to myunghee who accepts her role as a villain in a way that is as cool and collected as vincenzo. and lord, imagine what a show it would've been if the writers had made the kings chayoung/hanseok, the last ones that should ever be taken, while the queens were vincenzo/myunghee who would be the ones that would make all the moves, kill all their enemies pieces, and try to destroy one another first as the two most powerful players in the game? imagine if fandom had been able to read chayoung and myunghee accurately enough that i wouldn’t have to read post after post talking about how they needed to see myunghee brutally murdered/tortured by chayoung because they would understand chayoung’s character isn’t going to do that, posts which i hated seeing bc, as i said before, violence for violence’s sake means nothing to me? imagine if the writers cared enough about chayoung/myunghee to develop them more fully? sigh.)

i feel like i'm going nowhere with this and that i'm repeating myself a lot or not making much sense. but i'll end with this: i knew the last two episodes were going to be garbage when they all gathered at toto's restaurant post-fight in ep 19 and all they were talking about was vincenzo this and vincenzo that instead of worrying after the ones that were momentarily kidnapped/injured. like thanks show, for instead of pushing the narrative along we get a vincenzo fan club meeting and another round of "i never had anything to fight for until you came along" which is a convo we've had plenty of times before.

(footnote: i edited this on may 6, 2021 for clarity.)

#anyway i'm glad i don't have to worry about the nonsense idea of a season two #and if there is one i won't have to subject myself to it bc they killed not only my favorite character #but also the 3 others that made the show interesting #so anything of value a potential season 2 would have is already nixed #i have been set free from a drama that started out extremely promising but petered out into a series of bad tropes & nonsensical metaphors #and bc there is nothing in the final eps that interests me i don't have to scroll through the tag and subject myself #to scenes of myunghee's or hanseok's deaths which were extremely upsetting to me #now time to think about writing that one chayoung character study fic that has been swirling around in my head for a bit #and those hanseo aus i've been playing around with that make me happy just thinking about #e.e.c. watches vincenzo

[brakken-spideyverse]

This review feels like a long time coming:

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

I’m finding it difficult to know where to start with this one. I loved it when I first saw it, even though it’s not free of problems, and I’ve been on the defensive about it for quite some time. Part of me wants to leap in and bite at all the specific criticisms I’ve heard and explain why they’re mistaken, part of me wants to simply shower it with overly biased praise to try and achieve some kind of balance… but I’ll do my best to break it all down.

I know the plot with Peter’s parents isn’t for everyone, but I appreciate the efforts to make it more engaging, and not slide it under the mat because it was unpopular. The opening is effective in giving us some misleading clues about the backstory, and also serves as an interval between TASM1’s final swing and when we pick up with Spidey again in this one. And they don’t hold back on the foreshadowing moments - the plane, Mary’s death… I mean the movie starts inside of a clock ticking away.

Now, our opening image of Spidey. Oh, dang. I love it – I love the symbol fading in as we’re brought to present day, with the theme music coming in triumphant and exciting and fun. The way the camera follows Spidey in this opening makes me want to jump up in my seat every time. How he pulls himself around buildings, and twists through the air. When he reaches the peak of his swing, and our viewpoint spins around to frame him against nothing but a clear blue sky as he enters a death-defying dive. The film itself feels so excited about throwing Spidey onto the screen - truly, amazing. This was, and continues to be, the absolute pinnacle of web-swinging scenes.

And the movie has now set up its extremes – from the dark and tragic prologue with Peter’s parents, to this light-hearted and thrilling pursuit, we already have the gamut of what the movie will ask of its audience. As someone who doesn’t like to be ‘tricked’ by a story suddenly shifting tone, this has great value to me. Especially given that this opening also has some stuff that can be considered… off.

Specifically, the car pile-ups caused by Rhino’s hijacked truck feel too extreme – it’s an easy detail to blur out when caught up in the action, but it’s not fully sold that the innocent bystander Max Dillon requires saving at the cost of a taxi cab tumbling and scraping its way across the street. I think there’s something to be said about the lens we’re viewing this under, which is why I brought up the tone being so firmly established. In TASM1, there is a scene where it is acknowledged that someone dangling in a car off a bridge is in need of rescue – so when Spidey swings away after that singular save, and leaves Dr. Ratha unconscious and still hanging there, it creates cause for concern. But not to the same extent here in TASM2 – when the cars get tossed and turned, we’re allowed to experience this in Spidey’s POV, and since he’s not concerned, we don’t need to be, either. However, on repeat watches I do still find it goes a bit too far.

As someone who was substantially disappointed by how TASM1 handled its Peter/Gwen wrap-up, I was really glad to see it addressed as a primary plot thread in the sequel. It’s already a fine line to expand on a story, but to specifically address a problem-moment takes guts and craft. It would be so easy just to ignore it, or retcon it with a mere hand-wave. It could have been: “Who cares about the entire plot of the first movie, it’s fine!” or: “Actually, they broke up again, oops!”. But TASM2 hones in on the promise he made, and on Peter’s indecisiveness. We get to see him wrestling with responsibility and guilt, still struggling with understanding who he wants to be.

On the flip-side, how I wish Gwen and Peter were just happily dating in this movie. They are just too cute together to have so much time invested in relationship drama, even when I think it’s handled fairly well. I’ve heard a number of people call Peter out for following Gwen post-breakup. They are correct - this is a thing he shouldn’t be doing! Without forgiving that, I'd also like to emphasize that neither the movie nor the characters act like it's a romantically blanketed action on his part. Gwen confronts him about it, and Peter deflects before guiltily admitting. To expand further, they both know that their relationship isn't so simple. They each state at points in the movie that things are complicated. Gwen cares about Peter, and knows him well enough to understand why he's acting the way he is, but still demands to hear his explanation. I don’t think it’s flawlessly done, but contrasting it to TASM1 - where him discreetly taking pictures of her goes mostly unaddressed and at one point almost rewarded - I think there is a meaningful distinction.

I want to talk about the evolution of Spidey’s quipping. In the first movie, his witty persona emerges as a bully, since he’s seeing the world in a fairly black-and-white way. He gets harassed by Flash, so he pushes back. When he’s out seeking justice for Uncle Ben, he has no qualms about humiliating the car thief or getting cocky with the cops. But after further run-ins with Flash, and realizing Doctor Connors is the Lizard, this makes him begin to realize that not all villains are just clear-cut evil-doers. There are people there, with past trauma or misplaced anger. And maybe there’s a chance to help them, before hurting them. In TASM2, every time he swings in to intervene with a baddie, he always begins by attempting to defuse the situation, or to resolve it by talking before swinging fists. We see it in both scenes with Rhino, with Max in Times Square, and even with Harry where he simply pleads with him.

Now, let’s talk about the villains.

Electro is a bit of a grey area for me. I love his powers and his music, and I dig his design for the most part. His awakening in the morgue is wonderfully terrifying. However, I flip back and forth on how much I like his story. On one end, I see his descent into villainy as this exaggerated version of a hyperfan – so eager for his idol’s approval, and so quick to feel snubbed when faced with certain realities. This is mostly effective, even with its caricatured tone, and serves its purpose for the big, explosive fights with low personal stake. But the film also clues us in to the lonelier side of Max Dillon - where the world is unjustly against someone who wishes no harm… there is more tragedy than villainy in that. And when that aspect of his character goes unaddressed, with no final attempt by Spidey to redeem him, his demise doesn’t feel earned by the story.

I love this movie’s take on Harry. In a reflection of Peter getting left behind by his parents, here it’s the son who was sent away. His introduction comes naturally off the premise that Norman is dying, and his chemistry with Peter quickly blends him into the history of this series as we watch them reconnect, and watch Harry struggle with the ‘Osborn curse’. Critics have said it’s unreasonable that Peter doesn’t give Harry his blood, but I disagree – one look at him and you can see the obsession and desperation that’s eating him alive. It’s all too similar to Connors, and Peter isn’t so ready to trust again. And the Goblin is more than a surprise villain at the end. He is the culmination of Harry's journey – all his pain and abandonment manifested, as his plight to not become his father turns him into something worse. His design reflects this too – a state of absolute agony as his disease clashes with the spider venom, and he’s kept lucid only with the help of the combat armor. He wasn’t meant to look like a perfected design for Green Goblin – he’s meant to look like his own worst nightmare.

Concerning Rhino… he’s great! And Paul Giamatti is great as Rhino! No further comments!

Well, a little elaboration on one point: Rhino is not sequel bait. Would he have appeared in TASM3? In all likelihood, yes. But his purpose is fulfilled in this film. He is the bookend – our reminder of Gwen’s speech, of Spidey at his peak, and showcases that all things will evolve and escalate, with or without Spidey there. More on this later.

With Aunt May, her scene in Peter’s room is just so beautiful and heart-breaking. We understand how she’s struggling with her situation as much as Peter is, and feels like she’s losing him to the idea of who his parents were. Carrying over from the first film I really get the sense that in their small family unit, Peter had the strongest connection with Ben - and with him gone, all the weight of the secrets and loss is all on her. “You are my boy”. It’s so honest and unrefined, and vulnerable.

I have some issues with the culmination of the storyline with Peter’s father. I think it’s strange that the actual flashbacks place an amount of importance on his mom, but there’s no meaningful follow-up for her in present day. And I wish there’d been any amount of exoneration for either of them beyond Peter’s discovery – be it a Bugle headline, or even just letting May find out the truth. It would go a long way to casting off the shadow of the past.

But most notably, it is rather heavy-handed that Richard used his own DNA to create the spiders. When the spider bite is classically this… complete happenstance, it does feel against the ‘nature’ of a Spidey story to have it tied so much to a feeling of destiny. And yet… with how other Spidey comics and stories have evolved, is it really such a deviation? When there is a whole tangled web of Peter Parkers out there, all bitten by spiders, can we really stand firm on this notion that it has to be accidental, in every timeline, in every universe? I’m not always sure, myself. I hold Into the Spider-Verse in the highest esteem, which very much evokes the idea that anyone can be Spider-Man. Even so, I really think this version of Peter in TASM needs that connection to his father. It’s a physical embodiment of choosing to do something good with the abilities given to you, which both Richard and Peter attempted. What’s most interesting in this scene for me, is that Peter’s final unanswered question gets resolved here – he finds out his father didn’t abandon him, that he was loved. In another story, this could’ve led to Peter deciding to let Gwen go, much like his father left him. But here, he does the opposite. He knows the pain of being disconnected from a person you love, and he chooses to forgo that.

But… it’s too late. While Peter has untangled his legacy, Harry has gotten wrapped up in his own. And his revenge is killing Gwen – and all hope for Peter’s future. It’s sickening, and tragic. The entire scene is heartbreakingly beautiful. Yet, it’s difficult for me to pin down whether I think it was wholly the right choice for the story, when I liked the character so much and didn’t want to see her go.

But I am certainly thankful that we’re not left there, in absolute despair.

We continue into the epilogue… the ending.

It harkens back to Peter tossing stones with Harry, remarking that Spider-Man brings people hope. “Maybe eventually everything's gonna be alright.” This idea is shattered for Peter, now – his own hope is gone. But Aunt May’s words, and Gwen’s speech, help him push past his grief, and remember that Spider-Man means that to everyone else, too. And they need that. They need to believe it, even if he can't. This movie ends on the highest of highs. The hero swings in to save the city from a huge, bombastic villain. Spidey is charismatic and quippy. He is met with cheers, and his theme music carries us beyond the cut to black, as his symbol flies in to complete the story – telling us that he will keep fighting.

But it’s all for us. Peter Parker is utterly broken, and only Spider-Man remains, for our sake. We win, but Peter loses.

So much I could still talk about, but I’ll leave it at that, for now. This movie is so very full - full of beautiful moments, of thrilling events, and plenty of problems… and altogether remains very important to me.

-

-

Rating:

#max talks about spidey #long post #nonmakeover

[pretoriuspictures]

https://www.talkhouse.com/on-the-virtues-of-cinematic-failure/

///

Most journalists who have spoken to me about my new erotic drama PVT Chat (starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox and streaming now on most VOD platforms) assume it’s my first feature film. Actually, it’s my third. My first two features never played a single film festival and haven’t been seen by more than a few hundred people (mostly friends and/or curious followers of my rock band, Bodega). They were financial failures (even though they were made extremely cheaply), but you couldn’t call them critical failures because nobody has ever reviewed them. I spent the last decade working on these films and yet their cultural footprint is practically nonexistent.

Despite that, I still believe in them and hope one day I’ll make a movie (or record) that inspires people to seek them out. My early cinematic attempts certainly failed at behaving like normal movies, but to me it is precisely this failure that makes them interesting.

Godard said of Pierrot le Fou (1965), “It’s not really a film. It’s an attempt at a film.” This is a purposefully cryptic statement, but I think I understand what he meant. There is a sketch-like quality to his films from that period. He was less interested in following a particular plot through to its conclusion than suggesting narrative ideas and moving on. He enjoyed employing classical narrative tropes but didn’t want to waste screen time on the proper pacing required to sell those tropes to an audience. Instead he filled his screen time with spontaneous personal, poetic, and political ruminations that occurred to him literally on the day of filming. Many found – and still find – this approach infuriating, but for a select number of Godard disciples, like me, this type of filmmaking is still revolutionary. I remember seeing Weekend during my sophomore year of college at the University of South Carolina and having my mind completely ripped open. Suddenly the world wasn’t a small, mediocre, predictable place – it was full of music and color and philosophy and eroticism. There were people out there genuinely disgusted with the status quo and boldly proclaiming it with style.

Godard’s work is a fulfillment of the dream of the caméra-stylo – a term coined in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc that argued it was theoretically possible for someone to compose a film with as much direct personal expression as exists in prose. In order to achieve this level of expression, one often needs to move beyond the realm of mere plot and narrative naturalism, the principle that what you are seeing on screen is real. (On most movie sets, the filmmakers and actors work overtime to sell this illusion.) Films that focus solely on plot, character psychology, and one literary theme have to direct the majority of their screen time toward plotting mechanics and emotional manipulation of the audience. What you gain in dramatic catharsis you often lose in intellectual honesty. There’s always a tradeoff. I am invested in a cinema of the future that veers toward self-expression, but doesn’t need to avoid dramatic catharsis as Godard’s films did. Certainly many filmmakers my age are working to achieve such a synthesis of intellectual directness and narrative pleasure. Experimentation is required and many “bad” films need to be made to pave the way for future successes.

I graduated college in 2010 high on this dream of the caméra-stylo and philosophy (my field of study) and in 2011 started filming my first feature, Annunciation, with experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. Annunciation is an “adaptation” of the Mérode Altarpiece, an early Northern Renaissance oil painting triptych by Robert Campin. The film features three short separate narratives, one for each panel of the famous 15th-century painting. I wanted the performances in Annunciation to be controlled and somewhat surreal, as if the whole film existed in a heightened but slowed-down hypnotic state; I was thinking about Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni and, of course, Godard (particularly his work from the ’80s). There is some plot, but the main goal of the movie was to reveal the miracle of existence in the everyday. And because the Mérode Altarpiece depicts the scene in Christianity where the Virgin Mary was impregnated by light alone, the film had to be shot on 16mm film.

Now picture this: a 22-year-old walks into a conference room in Midtown Manhattan and gives this pitch to a producer who was then investing in thriller movies: “Every time light strikes a piece of celluloid, a miracle similar to the Annunciation scene occurs: an image appears in the likeness of man that redeems our fallen world and reveals it to be the beautiful place that we take for granted in our normal day-to-day.” This wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. “Don’t you see,” I said, “this is a film about the ecstatic of the quotidian! This is a film that audiences will flock to! It could do for Williamsburg and Bushwick what Breathless did for Paris!” Looking back, I am both shocked and charmed by my youthful naiveté, courage and idiocy.

I was laughed out of the room, but the producer was kind enough to wish me good luck and welcomed any future pitches, should I come up with something any “normal” person would want to watch. I never thought of films in the tradition of the caméra-stylo as being elite works only for the gallery or the Academy. I, like Godard before me, have always assumed that audiences are intelligent and long for thoughtful, challenging movies. That belief I carry to this day and thankfully it sometimes seems to be true. How else could you explain the recent success of heady films by Josephine Decker or Miranda July?

Thanks to small donations from family members (and credit cards), I was able to shoot Annunciation without any official backing. I cast the film with a mixture of non-actor friends and some undiscovered Backstage.com talent and dove head first into the production. Right as our principal photography began, Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, so Simon and I spent time at Zuccotti Park filming our actors experiencing the movement. The hopeful promise of OWS seemed to reflect the yearning desire of our film’s protagonists as well as our own idealist cinema experiment.

When the film was finished and edited, I naively assumed that we were well on our way towards global cinematic notoriety. Surely, I thought, this important film that manages to blend fiction with actual footage of OWS would premiere at Cannes or Berlin and the Criterion Collection would issue the DVD shortly after. In actuality, it was rejected from every single film festival we submitted to.

Undeterred, I conceded that maybe there were a few minor structural flaws in the edit. It was probably a little too long and perhaps the three separate narratives would work better if they were crosscut more. A year later, this new edit was again rejected from almost 100 festivals. Stubbornly, I thought that perhaps what could really bring the movie together was a comic voiceover by my then cinematic muse Nick Alden (who is a lead in both Annunciation and my second film, The Lion’s Den). Audiences seemed to ignore the comic tone underlying Annunciation. If only I could unearth it, they wouldn’t be put off by the pretensions to greatness the movie wore on its sleeve. There is nothing so offensive to American audiences as pretentiousness.

I didn’t send the overcooked voiceover version to festivals. I knew it was forced and worked against the core concept of the film. But it was then that I started for the first time to have doubts about Annunciation. Maybe my film wasn’t as emotional or clever as I imagined. Maybe it was bad? “No,” I decided. The film, whatever its flaws may be, has value. Herculean delusions of grandeur come in handy when you are trying to become an artist.

I opted to edit the film back to its original state, but without some of the weaker, obviously didactic moments, then hosted a few local screenings in NYC (most of them at DIY venues where my rock band would play) and put the film up for free on Vimeo. Around this time, it occurred to me that editing Annunciation had been my film school. Failure is a wonderful learning tool. Editing the same raw material in a myriad of different ways taught me about pacing and tone. Still to this day, when I find myself in a certain state of mind, I open up the Final Cut sessions and do a new edit of the footage just for fun, like some sort of DIY George Lucas tinkering with the past. Last year during quarantine, I did a new edit of Annunciation and uploaded it to Vimeo without telling a single person. It has become my own little cinematic sandbox to play in.

When people did chance upon one of my myriad edits, they often commented that they enjoyed its style but found the acting too unnatural. My response to this was to make my next film, The Lion’s Den, a cheaper HDV feature that doubled as a political farce and an essay about naturalism in cinema. The film is about a group of ding-dong radicals who kidnap a Wall Street banker and plan to donate his ransom money to UNICEF so salt pills can be provided for dehydrated children. The UNICEF plot was drawn from Living High and Letting Die, a 1996 work of moral philosophy by Peter K. Unger. It was both a serious attempt at political philosophy and a total slapstick farce; I was imagining the comedy of errors in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game mixed with the Marxist agitprop of Godard’s La Chinoise.

The acting style in The Lion’s Den was purposefully cartoonish; at no point in the film could an audience member believe that what they were seeing was real. I like to think that The Lion’s Den was an attempt at theatre for the camera, part Shakespeare and part Brecht. This was my own personal response to our epoch’s hyperrealism fetish. At the time, I believed that the current obsession with neo-neorealism, mumblecore and reality TV was worth combating. Art with a realistic aesthetic, I thought then, was inherently conservative and accepting of the political status quo (whether the artists were aware of this or not). Art with an imaginative anti-realistic aesthetic, so I thought, was utopian. It opened new vistas and ways of thinking and being. It dared to believe in a more beautiful world than the one we are living in.

The making of The Lion’s Den was extremely difficult. It was by far the hardest thing I have physically done in my life. At the time, I was malnourished and broke, not unlike the character of Jack in PVT Chat; my diet for that month we made the film consisted mostly of coffee, rice and beans, ramen, light beer, and the occasional waffle or fruit smoothie from the vegan frozen yogurt stall I worked at. Unlike Jack, my addiction wasn’t cam girls or internet gambling, but independent filmmaking. I begged, borrowed and scrimped $10,000 to make a film I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell. Despite having some key collaborators near the beginning of the shoot, most of the film was made with just me, the actors and a loyal boom operator, all living together in a house in Staten Island. This meant that I had to assemble all of the cumbersome lights for every setup, handle the art for every scene (which involved a lot of painting), block the scene and direct the actors, throw the camera on my shoulder and film, and then at the end of the day transfer the footage while logging the Screen Actors Guild reports and creating the call sheets for the next day’s scenes. Exhausted both mentally and physically, I often couldn’t stand up at the end of the day’s filming.

Once we’d wrapped and everyone had gone home, I stood in the middle of our set and played Beethoven on my headphones. Within seconds, I began bawling my eyes out, partly from exhaustion but also from the melancholy that all my friends had left and I was now alone for the first time in a month. I collapsed and slept for hours. When I woke up, it was my 26th birthday. I celebrated by watching Citizen Kane alone and then started the process of painting the walls back to a neutral white. The actor Kevin Moccia (who has been in all three of my films and actually works as a house painter) heroically came back to set and helped me. I told him that despite all of the agony of the past weeks (my bank account was now in the red, with overdraft fees piling up), I was happier than I had ever been. Working passionately on something that has great value to you is, without a doubt, the key to happiness.

Shortly after returning to the real world and my job at the vegan yogurt shop, I passed out while on the clock and was taken to a hospital by my very supportive girlfriend. Turns out, all I needed was an IV and some nutrients to get back on my feet, but unfortunately the trouble with The Lion’s Den had just begun. At some point, I formatted the production audio memory card and, in one instant, accidentally deleted everything on it. For the next two years, my friend Brian Goodheart and I worked with all of the actors to dub all of the dialogue and sound effects in the movie. Each actor had to completely re-do their verbal performance. It felt like remaking the entire movie. The result made the film especially un-naturalistic (which pleased me at the time) and it turned out far better than I think Brian and I expected.

By then, I had some hopes that The Lion’s Den could reach a small audience. It is aggressively philosophical but also features a love triangle, a car chase and a final shootout. Its comic style, I was hoping, would attract people who were put off by the purposeful flatness of Annunciation. Nevertheless, the movie was also rejected from every conceivable festival. I now realized that submitting an aggressively experimental narrative film without a single famous person in it to festivals is basically like flushing your money down the toilet. Yet I continued submitting, like an addict at a casino putting all of their savings on the roulette table. You never know, right?

In hindsight, I now see The Lion’s Den as a very angry film that perhaps uses comedy to soften the blow of some of its hotheaded fervor, and suspect some of its critique of capitalism and naturalism came from hurt and jealousy. “You think my work isn’t natural enough, eh? I’ll show you motherfuckers naturalism!”

Sometime in 2017, to my surprise I became smitten with certain neo-neorealist filmmakers (Joe Swanberg, in particular) and decided I wanted in on the mumblecore party, albeit from my own outsider perspective. I began to see how I could work symbolically with naturalistic performances, which led me to my latest film. PVT Chat is by no means a work of strict realism, but nevertheless focuses on believable dramatic performances. The film’s cast blends some actors from my past work (Kevin Moccia, Nikki Belfiglio, David White) with some heroes of the modern neo-neorealist indie cinema (Peter Vack, Julia Fox, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson).

I want to end with a bit of advice to other filmmakers: Don’t put your self-worth into the hands of festival reviewers or distributors. The future of the moving image will belong to the films that are willing to risk cinematic failure. If you make an earnest film that doesn’t behave like a normal movie, I want to see it, even if it is full of technical or narrative mistakes (which it most likely will be). There’s no right way to make a movie. Follow the dream of the caméra-stylo and make a film that if nobody else made, wouldn’t exist.

[beautymercurydragon]

Fun facts about my ML next-gen/plot changes

Originally, it was supposed to be a story where Alya’s son and Marinette’s daughter were Chat Noir and Ladybug, and they fell in love with each other over time, while Kagami’s daughter Kimiko tried to set them up

Maddie never existed in my original concept. Originally, Adrien and Marinette were supposed to have fraternal twins named Emma and Danielle, the latter of the two being Ladybug. They had another two children; twenty-three year old Hugo, and their twelve-year-old Louis.

Kara didn’t exist either. Originally, she would have been a boy named Peter, but that got changed around as I wanted to go for a more unique next-generation plotline. Kailie was going to have been named Caitlin.

Vivienne was going to be Chloe and Nathaniel’s daughter, and she was going through a hard time with her parents’ divorce because Chloe cheated with Kim.

Luka would have been with Lila, and their daughter would be named Anna. Kagami’s husband was a Japanese suitor chosen by her mother who died, leaving her to raise her daughter alone. Anna and Emma were school bullies, and joined Lila as supervillains, them becoming Bluebird and Farfalla.

There was a plot where Lila would have taken the Fox Miraculous and became Scarlet Fox, head villain of Paris, but as you may have guessed from the actual story concept that I went through with, the name was changed slightly to Scarlett Fox and made a superhero identity.

Kimiko went through a hard time due to Kagami turning into her own mother, feeling trapped in and stressed from her mother’s orders. She soon enough runs away, and lives on the streets for a little while until Peter’s older sister Mars finds her and takes her in.

Rose and Juleka’s daughter Daisy, helping her cousin Anna out, steals the Miracle Box from Master Fu and assembles a team of villains with the remaining Miraculouses.

Now, onto the current concept in the fic itself:

Maddie (Adrienette child), Kara (DJWifi), and Lilli were the final group of three, as opposed to Peter, Danielle and Kimiko, whom along with the original darker concept were scrapped as a whole, obviously.

Emma, instead of being Danielle’s sixteen-year-old twin, is thirteen years old. She’s much kinder and well-reasoned, along with more friendly and sociable as she helps her BFF, Kara’s thirteen-year-old sister Kailie in her journey of showing she isn’t all of the rough ‘n tough tomboy act she seems. When Kayla (Max and Alix’s 13yo) moves to Paris and joins the school and Harmony (Myvan 13yo) gets away from her private school, she helps them gain more friends than expected and makes them part of her ‘pack’. She’s also much more ambitious and energetic, and participates in much more than original!Emma did.

Rebecca, Chloe and Kim’s fifteen-year-old, has been through a lot: Experiencing extreme biphobia from her ‘friend’ and more-so enemy Brooke Anciel, Lila’s younger daughter with Marc, facing scrutiny from her soccer team, and her reputation in theater, fashion and drama clubs along with being constantly humiliated in the hotel’s restaurant has really lowered her self-esteem. But with her friends Vivienne and Jade by her side, along with Jade’s cousin Viveka, she slowly finds her way back to earth. Putting her not-so nice past behind her, she doesn’t try to fix her mistakes, but live with them and strive to be better for everyone: Her family, her friends, and most importantly, the entire city of Paris.

Viveka and Maddie used to be attached at the hip, but ever since Viveka started showing her care and appreciation for Rebecca in her hard time, Maddie’s started considering her as a traitor more than an older-sister figure. Viveka explains to Lilli that she still cares for both her sister and Maddie, but that Rebecca very well needs someone like her as a source of comfort in the time being. Viveka’s main struggles in life center around two things: The media refusing to believe she’s bisexual after stating her crush on Aurore and Mireille’s oldest child Andrew, and her going away to college in England soon once her final school year comes to a close. Considering they both have their own trials over their sexualities, Rebecca and Viveka find each other bonding over the subject in question.

Jade, out of all the children in the Couffaine family, has several things on her name: Being the smartest kid in her entire school, a prodigy in the violin, and a regional champion in archery, gymnastics, and karate. But as her dream as a child to go to the Tsukiryu Boarding High School for girls in Japan changes from an old fantasy into a sudden possibility, she learns that sometimes, sacrifices make or break a person. But thankfully enough, her cousin’s crush’s sister/her longtime best friend/wingwoman’s presence alongside her is just enough to break through her trials and errors that come her way in high school. Not to mention, despite her straightforward and strong-willed exterior, it would shatter her heart into a billion pieces if it meant leaving her seven-year-old sister Violet, who’s also one of her best friends in the universe behind.

Vivienne has a whirlwind coming her way too: Just as she’s began growing closer to her mother Sabrina’s new partner Wayhem, they suddenly split without her knowing a single piece of information on what happens. Not to mention, her father Nathaniel’s soon-to-be marriage to his boyfriend of seven-plus years Marc is just around the corner, and she doesn’t have many positive experiences with him and Lila’s daughter Brooke much, as well her BFF Rebecca. But thankfully, Brooke’s seventeen-year-old sister Victoria completely understands her almost stepsister’s struggle, and begins to assist her as her superheroine alter-ego: Dragon Queen, ruler of elements.

The supervillain Red Robe, a vampire-obsessed malice to the Parisians is rising, along with their ruthless partner Seigneur Guepe. But as the new team of superheroes prove themselves to be even greater than any other Team Miraculous to come before them, they join forces with the cruel and insane Brooke and hand over the Raven Miraculous to her, resulting in the fifteen-year-old’s promise to help them out as Shadowetta - when the time calls, that is.

While in England, his hometown of almost thirty years now, Master Fu mysteriously regains his old memories of being the Guardian, prompting him to take Marianne back to Paris as he senses an evil force; one like never before. Taking back the Box from Marinette one night, the duo assigns a whole new team of heroes: Maddie as Ladybug, Emma as Kitty Noire, Kara as Scarlett Fox, Kailie as Shellie, Rebecca as Queen Bee, Vivienne as Wingwoman, and last but not least, Jade as Tropica. But just in case they’re needed, he also prompts Victoria and a boy born of a rich family, Hugo DuValle to become Dragon Queen and King Cobra.

Kara’s dream after so long is to become a famous TV star, and a contest starting at the second week of school gives her a perfect opportunity to launch the new kids’ hit of Paris: Codename: Scarlet Fox. But along with some opportunities to flee to the West End and become a theatrical star with her friend-rival Viveka, Kara discovers how much being Scarlett Fox really means to her, as well the presences of her friends, family, and boyfriend.

Maddie’s dreams of ballet lead to many things, one being the welcoming a new ally, the seventeen-year-old friend to Viveka and Victoria, Maisie Bruel aka Sourisine to Team Miraculous and the other a way to be recognized for not just her parents’ status and her looks.

Vivienne also gains an opportunity after her group and Maddie’s group make up for everything and become friendly with one another: Working as a mentor for Ladybug Style, Marinette’s multi-million fashion company. There, she learns how to gain the confidence she needs and learns important lessons from the older woman, growing into the butterfly she saves the day as.

Hugo and Maddie build a deep and caring bond, soon enough sneaking out to meet each other on Friday and Saturday nights and going on dates with each other and starting a romantic relationship. But as she discovers the shocking identities of Seigneur Guepe and Red Robe, will she put the safety of the ones she cares about and her home first, or her feelings for her handsome partner in a snake suit?

Emma, confused and frustrated with her fruitless and overwhelming civilian life, develops a crush on Rebecca around Christmastime, the person she’d least have expected to fall for. In a forced attempt to hide her sexuality from those around her, she begins a fake relationship with her childhood rival Simon, but soon enough realizes that it’s even more toxic for her as opposed to revealing herself as a lesbian.

Kailie meets her parents’ old friend since forever, Alix, and shares her sky-high dreams of becoming an all-star roller-skater much like she is. And when Alix says that she ‘has her ways of helping dreams come true’, she really does mean it well.

Brooke’s ways of wrongdoing step up to another level, resulting in an absolute pandemonium of hell for those that know her. And soon enough, that results in the terrorizing villain counterparts of all the heroes but Ladybug: Featherbird, Monarque, Honeybee, Tortureoise, Fireheart, Wolfie Noire, Ryusenshi, Hydre and more.

As the chaotic demeanor[s] or Red Robe and Seigneur Guepe level up and make Paris head into insanity, Maddie runs to Masters Fu and Marianne in need of one of the most helpful Miraculouses for a trail such as this: The Rabbit, letting the spunky and helpful Kayla Kante become Timekeeper. But will her ability to see the future from the present show a successful or drastic outcome for Team Miraculous?

@extremely-pearlmethirsty since you need name inspo for your own next-gen (not for this fandom lmao), here’s some fun facts from my original concept that you can feel free to use! For those interested, character bios are coming out tomorrow.

And @ultranimallover33 it isn’t character bios, but here’s some of what happens! I’m not even done with chapter three lmao, but I have so much in store for it already tbh XD.

Ask me questions about my next gen and more!

#fun facts #original concept #next generation #next gen concept #miraculous #miraculous ladybug #miraculous: tales of ladybug and chat noir #maddie agreste #emma agreste #kara lahiffe #kailie lahiffe #rebecca kim #vivienne kurtzberg #jade couffaine #viveka couffaine-lavillant #lilli couffaine-lavillant #maisie bruel #harmony bruel #kayla kante #birdie beaureal-caquet #callie beaureal-caquet #andrew beaureal-caquet #victoria anciel #brooke anciel #next gen au #next-gen #hugo duvalle

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: March 2019

We are 25% through the year!

……….FILM……….

Us (2019) I don’t do well with scary movies; It’s the one genre where I have to know as much as possible before seeing it. With this (and Get Out) I found it thoroughly enjoyable knowing the full plot and so I guess I’m suggesting you see this movie twice? It’s layered and weird and demands suspension of disbelief but that in no way lessens the impact of what’s on screen.  

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part  (2019) I wasn’t sure what to expect going into this. I loved the first one, but reviews and theatre attendance seemed to imply that it just wasn’t that good. With that in mind, I think I went into the movie with the same hesitation as the first film and was equally surprised! It would be impossible to surprise you with a twist as big as the first movie, while still being a sequel, and for that I give it some leeway. The jokes were just as funny, the plot was just as sincere and commenting on the nature of play, and the animation was stellar. It’s hard when a sequel is just as good cause I think that feels like a letdown to some, but I was thoroughly satisfied and would highly recommend.

Captain Marvel (2019) Really good! Culturally important and a couple great messages tucked away in there. Carol Danvers seems like a super interesting character and I’m excited for her to shine in future films, but I suppose I’m spoiled by the weirdness of Spider-Verse and Ragnarok now and want all my superhero movies to be over-the-top.

Sorry to Bother You (2018) To say too much is to possibly spoil this movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I will say that I wish I knew the genre of the film before going into the movie, as I think it would’ve mentally prepared me a little more for some of the bigger plot points. With that said, those same points hit harder BECAUSE I was so unprepared. Did it overwhelm the metaphor with its surprise? Yes. Is it worth a second viewing so I can better appreciate what the movie is trying to do? 100%.

……….TELEVISION……….

The Bachelor (Episode 23.08 to 23.12) Oofadoof. Credit where credit is due: that wall-jump was as good as the season-long tease and rarely does the show deliver like that. With that said, I really think this season was a good example of why the show should integrate therapy a little more. Or simply allow the show to be less extreme. Bachelorette Canada is still one of my favourite seasons of the franchise and it was just a nice person meeting nice people and the natural drama from that environment. Maybe it’s too different of a culture (there weren’t any content creators vying for the Canadian lead’s heart) but I believe it could work. Also Hannah B is bonkers.

Brooklyn Nine Nine (Episode 6.04 to 6.07) It’s sad to see Gina go but her send off was perfect. I just...I just love this show so much.

Umbrella Academy (Episode 1.03 to 1.10) The first few episodes were rocky for me. Not because it’s a bad show, but because the tone was so different from the comic book that it took me a while to adjust. I suppose an adaptation like this couldn’t fully capture the spirit of the source material without breaking the bank, but it does a good job at what it wants to do. While I won’t say one or the other is better (they really are too different to truly compare), I’ll admit that the book has an energy and zaniness that I love and that’s just not what the show is going for.

Queer Eye (Episode 1.01 to 1.03) Finally starting this and it’s been great! The guys are a little...mean...that first episode, but everyone seems to be finding their groove and the overall tone is really settling in to one of positivity and growth.

……….READING……….

The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities by James Lovegrove (Complete) A combination of two of my favourite corners of literature? Sign. Me. Up. It delivers on the promise as well; there’s lots of investigating and Holmesness to the novel (even structured in two parts like the original stories) and the added layer of Lovecraftian horror ratchets everything up a notch! This appears to be book 2 in a trilogy but I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (Complete) One of my faves and this is a little research for a D&D setting I’m working up that will be set in a version of Neverland!

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 4 by Ryoko Kui (Complete) While I say this after reading each volume, this series continues to impress. It has a great balance of straying from form while never feeling inconsistent. The characters continue to grow and the danger feels real and ever-present. Such a good read.

Alien: The Illustrated Story by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson (Complete) This is a beautiful adaptation of the film! Simonson does a great job at capturing each character’s spirit (not exclusively relying on the actors’ likenesses or stills from the film) and the pacing is strong. The chestburster scene wasn’t what I was expecting, but maybe I’d just built it up too much.

Last Man: The Stranger by Bastien Vivès, Balak, Michaël Sanlaville (Complete) There’s something so refreshing about the art style and I think it’s maybe just that I don’t read enough French comics? It was light and simple is some panels, yet communicates so much and has so much nuance in the characters. The story so far is fun (always love a good fighting competition as a framework for character drama) but I was a little bummed that the collection didn’t really offer a satisfying arch. Maybe it’s meant to be one long read and couldn’t really be naturally broken up into chunks, but it still left me feeling shortchanged.

……….GAMING……….

Katamari Damacy Reroll (Bandai Namco) Loved this the first time around and it’s just as great on Switch. It took a while to get back into the wonky controls but I just love how insane this game is. I know some of the later games weren’t as well-reviewed by I’d love to try them out (for the first time) on this console.

A Red & Pleasant Land (Lamentations of the Flame Princess) The party continues to explore this strange land while waiting to crash the Hatter’s party. They saved a fish priest despite receiving ominous origami telling to beware the fish’s fingers and they even risked death by giant twin babies to do so!

Maze of the Blue Medusa (Satyr Press) The group continues to explore the gardens and have defeated a toad demon, a priest made of mulch, and made a friend of a shambling puppeteer!

Curse of Strahd (Wizards of the Coast) We had our first knockout! To a swarm of beetles! Who knew a bunch of bugs were more lethal that ghasts and cultists. The party is still exploring the mysterious basement to the haunted house and everyone is having a great time!

And that’s it! As always, feel free to send recommendations and happy Sunday!

#Monthly Media #Rambles #Kolbisneat #Andrew Kolb

[ricardotomasz]

Such is life! Behold, a new Post published on Greater And Grander about Interview With Filmmaker Willow Polson

See into my soul, as a new Post has been published on http://greaterandgrander.com/2019/10/interview-with-filmmaker-willow-polson/

Interview With Filmmaker Willow Polson

Willow Polson is an award-winning writer-producer with decades of experience who creates entertainment that educates, inspires, and makes the world a better place. When not working she enjoys growing African violets and doing crafts like embroidery and beadwork. She lives in Northern California near Yosemite with her husband, son, a few cats, a variety of wild animals, and an infinite number of pine trees.

Why did you get into the entertainment industry?

It was a combination of two things happening at once. I was reading Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, which got the idea 50% through my head that you should write what you love, because there's always a market for passionate and well-told stories. The other half of the equation was that the TV show Heroes came out, and I was in awe. “People write this, and it actually gets made, and other people can watch it?” It was incredibly inspirational to me. I've been a writer for nearly 30 years, but primarily in non-fiction “how-to” books and projects, so 2007 was the year I let myself shift focus into storytelling on a professional level.

How old were you when you made the decision?

The decision-making process for the entertainment business overall was more of a series of small decisions and experiments to see what made sense to do. The writing came first, including comics, novels, and scripts. Actual on-set production experience came in 2013, and directing after that. There actually is “the moment” when I decided that I wanted to work in TV/film for the rest of my life. I had become friends with Tim Kring, creator and showrunner of Heroes and had met up with him at an event in August of 2012 (making me 46 at the time). As I was walking him back to his car, he said “Hey, we're shooting at the beach tomorrow, do you want to come?” Obviously YES, so the next morning I found myself at Santa Monica Pier, sitting in video village next to Tim, watching them film episode 2.01 of Touch. I was there all day, and one of the last shots was where Jake draws a spiral in the sand at the beach. The sun was getting lower in the sky, and I'd just spent all day watching this incredible process, talking to everyone I could, and I'm sitting there in a director chair next to the showrunner. That was “the moment.” I turned to him and said “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.” Tim, being the charming smartass that he is, replied, “What, sit on the beach?” “Haha... no... I want to do this,” I said, gesturing around at the crew. “I want to make TV shows.”

What was the first project you worked on?

In terms of production, actually being a producer for the first time on a working set, it was Vintage America with Ginger.

We made it ourselves. I had met Ginger Pauley through Heroes, she played Peter and Nathan's grandmother in a 1960s flashback episode. She was musing how she wanted her own vintage show, and I said “why can't you?” So we pooled resources and a few months later we were shooting footage at the Oviatt Building in downtown LA. 

What are your future goals?

To make my own stories on my own terms, to be showrunner on my own shows outside the old studio system. The old model is a dinosaur that's still deeply entrenched in a rigid gatekeeper framework. It's not designed for creativity or innovation or fairness. It is not the meritocracy a lot of people think it is.

Did you go to film school?

I did not. Everything I've learned has been through direct experience on sets, including Tim letting me observe the process as much as he could, making our own shows like Vintage America with Ginger, and working on other productions.

What did you do for a day job while looking for showbiz work?

I worked at the front desk of a boutique hotel near Yosemite, then moved into Marketing Manager which also meant running the hotel's live event slate. A lot of those skills direct translate into filmmaking, because when it's 8:00 pm and the show lights go on, everything has to be ready to go at that moment. It's the same with film. Pre-production is key to making sure everything is where it needs to be when the director says “action.”

When did you decide to stop working for free?

That's still sort of a moving target. It's very difficult to get paid work in my area, and for a woman over 50 at all anywhere. I'm also rather done with the experiences of getting bitched out on set over things I had no control over, and being set up to fail, so at this point I am also extremely selective about taking paid work from people I don't know well.

What are you currently working on, and how did you arrive here?

I currently have it narrowed down to a slate of four things: Vintage America with Ginger (22-minute lifestyle non-fiction series), Hidden Gems (11-minute travel/history web series), Manos: The Debbie Chronicles (11-minute supernatural dramedy web series), and Triune, my passion project (1-hour supernatural/sci-fi drama series). Each of them has a Facebook page and Hidden Gems has a Patreon. We're doing a PBS “viewers like you” funding model for Hidden Gems, giving individuals the opportunity to support the show for as little as $2/month because they love the concept and the content. https://www.patreon.com/hiddengemstv 

What are the biggest mistakes a person can make when they first start working in the industry?

Thinking you know everything and/or specializing in one department to the point that you don't know what other people on your set do exactly. Talk to each other, especially between departments. Watch and listen. If you don't know something, ask. Every set is different, every group has their own lingo and methods. Every shoot is an opportunity to learn something new. Stick your ego in a coffee can and bury it in the yard, nobody is impressed by namedropping some person you met once when you have another setup to get through ten minutes before lunch is called.

Did you ever come across a project or a person that looked promising, and then the whole thing blew up in your face?

Not “blew up in my face” levels of failure, no, but I've definitely come across people who turn into nightmares to work for. At first they seem fine and reasonable, so I think what happens is they either crack under the pressure of production, or get comfortable in their position of authority over you, or probably both. I've had people demand that I be available 24/7 so they can message/text/call me at all hours, gaslight me, interrupt constantly and become extremely condescending, literally get right up in my face about things that weren't my fault, not give me the information I needed to do my job, and take tasks away because they didn't trust me to do the job they had just hired me for. Life's too short for this level of crap, and I deserve better. I have walked from a few jobs as a result. 

Were you ever put in a position that you were asked to compromise your artistic integrity?  What did you do?

This has really only happened when pitching shows to production companies. For example, with Vintage America with Ginger, one company said “Can you trash it up a little? Maybe we follow Ginger to her house and she gets in a fight with her husband...?” We said NO. I will compromise on a few things on some projects if it makes sense for the market, but something like that? Gross. And no, I will not make one of the three Mason brothers randomly a girl just so there's a girl sibling in Triune. Both of these examples fall under the heading of “they absolutely do not get what this project is.”

Were you ever put in a position where you were asked to compromise your moral integrity?  What did you do?

Yes, there was one shoot where I felt there was a very real danger that someone was going to get killed on set. I walked away early on from that one because I wasn't being listened to about safety, and I did not want to be there when it happened (fortunately everyone made it out alive).

What’s been the highest point of your career so far?

Probably being on the Television Academy ballot for the Emmys. There are a lot of great moments that make me smile which aren't “the highest point of my career,” but honestly those moments are just as important for different reasons. We have to always remember why we got into this business in the first place. 

#California, #Film, #Screenwriting, #ScriptWriting, #Television, #Writing

#california #film #screenwriting #script writing #television #writing

[pridge]

A bit behind...but catching up!

So, I’ve been rather remiss with my writing recently for a ton of different reasons!! But mainly just didn’t get round to it….so here are a ton of reviews all in one go. Hopefully all spoiler free. 

The Lego Batman Movie

So, I came into this off the back of loving the Lego Movie, and also as a huge comic book fan. Already, perhaps it is clear what direction this movie is going. I certainly didn’t hate the movie, I actually quite enjoyed it. But….and there was always a but coming….far too many of the good jokes were in the trailers, the characters just didn’t click for me the same way they did in the Lego Movie and whilst it was an enjoyable couple of hours I still felt disappointed.

I think this was more to do with my expectations, which were high. I just didn’t think this lived up to the warmth of character I got from the original Lego Movie, which had real heart. The Lego Batman Movie was trying to be too smart for its own good, and think it forgot to have any meaningful warmth. What warmth of character there was got quickly destroyed by some obvious humour.

This film had me smiling at the jokes, but rarely got close to making me actually laugh.

 Dunkirk

Well. What can I say about this film that hasn’t been said already. For me this was a masterpiece.

The score and soundtrack matched perfectly with the pacing of the film, and the drama unfolding on the screen in front of me. The lack of dialogue added to the weight of the tension that built up throughout the film. Whilst I was, I admit, a bit confused by the three different acts going at different timescales, they all came together beautifully towards the end.

There were no outstanding performances from the cast, as they were not needed. They just had to go with the flow of the film. The action was mesmerizing. And often, the lack of action was even more engrossing.

Having watched it in 4DX….yes 4DX….the seats move, you get sprayed with water, there is wind in your hair….this is the first film that actually benefitted from it! Although have to admit I did feel rather sea sick at stages.

The cinematography is basic in a way, but the film benefits from that. They keep it simple so you can focus on the action and the drama that keeps exploding, literally, all around you.

If I did scoring I would give this film 10/10….I came away exhausted, emotional and enthralled by what I had just seen. There are a couple of moments that jarred with me a little, but that is only compared to the brilliance of the rest of the film. In most normal films this would have been just part of it.

Oh, and as a lover of history, the slight historical inaccuracies bug me….but I just have to bury that pedantic side of me quite deep.

Dr Strange

This couldn’t be more different to Dunkirk. The latest character to come out of the Marvel machine ready for the big climax of the current phase of the cinematic universe. I have to admit as well that the Dr Strange character is one of my favourite comic book characters. Benedict Cumberbatch for me was perfectly cast for the arrogant surgeon who ends up as earth’s Sorcerer Supreme. So if any of that put your teeth on edge….frankly I am not sure you are going to enjoy this film.

It is even more full of comic book nonsense (which I love) than the other Marvel films. A lot of it makes little or no sense, as you are taken through a special effects led tale, full of action and random made up hocus pocus.

I enjoyed it well enough. Although I felt some of it was a bit one dimensional. Once you’ve stepped over the line of sanity into total weirdness, why stop and then try and make any of it make sense!!

A distinctly average addition, sadly, to the current universe. But was great to see Dr Strange finally hit the big screen.

 Guardians of the Galaxy 2

How do you follow the surprise hit of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The original Guardian’s film was a surprise hit, and brought a ton of new fans into the comic book world. The delightful mix of characters that make up the dysfunctional Guardian’s superhero team, where you are often not even sure what their superpowers are!

The film is full again of the nod and a wink humour, as well as some more childish humour.

Dave Bautista is great again playing one of the roles he was made to play – the basic but heartfelt – Drax.

Vin Diesel reprises his role as Groot, this time regrowing from a baby.

Chris Pratt also plays the long suffering leader of the group trying to keep them together in a manner reminiscent of a sitcom.

This film kicks off with a typically entertaining and musically supported entrance that sets a high bar for the movie. Which sadly it cannot quite live up to. There are some moments where it has some moments that border on genuinely moving, but they don’t quite fit with the overall tone of the movie.

It is an amusing, and at times very funny, movie. But like the soundtrack, the movie does not live up to the promise of the first one. Like many others, I came away having really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t point to much now that was outstanding about it.

Moonlight

So the Oscar winner that nearly wasn’t thanks to some drunk PwC staff….we’ve all been there right….night out….few drinks…make a bit of a scene…..nearly ruin the Oscars and break a ton of hearts…..ok….so just me. Alright then.

This movie was a great movie. It was made to win Oscars and awards. How could it not. It is beautifully shot. Deals with some genuinely extremely important issues in a tender and emotional manner. The cast act their hearts out in it. The 3 acts that make up the film chart some heart-wrenching moments and work well despite the distance in time between each of them as we follow the main protagonist.

I found it boring though. I didn’t want to. I wanted to be drawn in and love the film from start to finish. I just wasn’t. Maybe it was whatever mood I may have been in at the time. But it felt like a movie made for critics. Not a movie made to be watched and loved. I guess that is fine. It is just a shame that such a critically acclaimed film had me playing Clash Royal during in on my phone, and not pausing to get water from the fridge!!

You should still give it a try. It may work better for you. Just didn’t work for me.

 Hell or High Water

Having seen Moonlight I decided to watch one of its Oscar competitors. This modern day retelling of a western, set in West Texas, was much more my thing. There, I said it off the bat.

It had the mix of anti-hero and hero – where the bad guys are clearly bad, but you also can’t help but root for them and want things to work out. The hero is….well….a bit obnoxious (played brilliantly by Jeff Bridges). This is essentially a bank heist western, with the sheriff chasing down the robbers across the desolate west Texan landscape. This ochre wasteland full of distant ranches, and populated by a rough and tumble background cast that seems so believable to an outside like me. They could be awful stereotypes for all I know!! But they work for this film. The dilapidated towns the story progresses through are the perfect backdrop to win your sympathy for the two main protagonists trying to make good, but in a bad and illegal way, before their time runs out.

This is a bit of a road trip movie, tinged with violence and a lot of non-PC discussion. It feels authentic and tragic. There are elements of a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid vibe at times. You can’t quite decide who you are rooting for, and this adds to the tension in what is a relatively short film, or at least feels it. As the pace throughout is great.

I really enjoyed this film. But I am a bit of a sucker for a good western….and whilst not part of the traditional genre, it takes a look at the characters you’d see in one through a modern day lens full of diners rather than saloons, cars rather than horses, and high powered rifles rather than pistols.

A sadly overlooked film by many. Full of surprising emotion and left me astounded I’d not heard more about this film.

Spiderman – Homecoming

He’s back. The web-slinger is back for this 3rd reboot!! Probably the most recognisable Marvel comic book character is finally working with Marvel again, and after the sneak peak in Civil War, now gets his own movie. Sony still own him, but they have decided not to butcher him quite so much and get some people who know what they are doing involved.

This movie has been talked about a lot, at least in the social media and media I tend to read….but I think this is fair to say is the most thought through of the Spidey movies so far. No more origin stories with poor old Uncle Ben getting shot, and “with great power comes great responsibility” – we get it alright!! When I get superpowers, I have to do good things. Ok Uncle Ben’s spirit I promise!!

Instead we get something subtly but significantly different. We get a movie that focuses much more on Peter Parker as a teenage boy struggling as a geek at high school, struggling with his new found powers, struggling to work out where he fits in. So basically a normal teenager, except the middle one!! I mean teenagers think they have new powers….like drinking cider at the park and wearing too much aftershave…but that doesn’t allow them to lift cars or do back-flips or walk on the ceiling.

By fitting it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well they manage to also fast-track the origin story of The Vulture, a little known Spiderman villain in the comics (little known outside of well….us geeks).

Tom Holland is excellent at Peter Parker/Spiderman (if that is a spoiler for you….then I’m sorry but everyone knows that!!), who hits the mark as a teenager. I’ve never been to an American High School, so I can only base this on my imagination and all the many films that are based in them. But this one rings true. He wants to fit in at high school. He wants to do more with the Avengers. He is busy fighting low level crime in New York at night. All a lot for a teenage boy. And I found myself really feeling for him.

Michael Keaton is excellent as the villain of the piece. He has an emotional resonance that is set-up very early on. His motivations for what he does are actually very understandable to most of us. It may be illegal, but he is sticking it to “the man” and doing right by his family. He is also a well balanced power vs Spiderman – no giant pillars of light in the sky here or alien invasions!! So it seems well balanced and a bit fresh. More in common with some of the Marvel and DC villains on Netflix and other streaming, than the main Marvel Universe. Plus, Michael Keaton can’t half act.

Robert Downey Jnr reprises his role as Iron Man yet again. As some sort of mentor for Peter Parker. This is the one part of the movie that bugged the hell out of me. Yes Tony Stark is meant to be a huge egotistical playboy….but here his instructions and advice really don’t work for me. He’s literally the worst mentor. Better they’d given him Loki that this occasionally disengaged failed father figure. Don’t get me wrong, they play it light with Iron Man to give Spiderman space to be the core of the film, and there are a few amusing lines. It just didn’t ring true throughout.

Overall though the balance between High School angst movie, bit of crime solving, a load of well done action, and your usual superhero stuff was hugely enjoyable. There were also a number of twists that I didn’t expect, and the supporting cast were great throughout and would like to see more of them.

Welcome back Spidey!!

 Logan

Is this the last time we’ll see the very buff Hugh Jackman as Wolverine? It does seem like the last time we’ll see Patrick Stewart as Professor X…..so how did they do in their swansong?

Well firstly saw this in a nice little cinema, and also dragged my girlfriend along – and so was slightly nervous about her reaction to it.

I think it is fair to say that this was somewhat better than most other X-men related films. Maybe I just like dystopian future type films? This one perhaps isn’t so much dystopian as just all a bit of a mess. Logan, aka Wolverine, is in retirement and seemingly hiding. Just not clear from what. But he appears to have had enough of the world, and is now working as a limo driver whilst also strangely living over the border in Mexico…

This is another film that has touches of the old fashioned western about it, with the scenery of bleak deserts and run down townships, with a fair share of violence.

The interplay between Wolverine and Professor X is actually quite touching. But the outstanding performance sits with the young Dafne Keen as Laura. A young mutant who has been given powers very similar to Wolverine. He flipping between violence and frustration, and the way she brings such an adult performance, reflects brilliantly how you’d expect someone who’d been through what she’s been through to actually be.

At times the film is a bit predictable, and the X rating has enabled them to really let loose with Wolverine’s violence. The ending has genuine emotion, or did for me. Not a great film, but better than I expected!

As for what my girlfriend thought….she enjoyed it as well. But think it may be her choice next time! But that’s only fair.

[stormyrecords-blog]

new releases 6-15-17

in on FRIDAY ORPHAN SWORDSLicense To Desire  LP  $22.99Orphan Swords see the reissue of their License To Desire LP, originally released in 2015. The Belgian duo, formed in 2013, bring a heady, fog-shrouded sonic maelstrom to Aurora Borealis, perfect for the post-truth era. What sort of music is this? What genre do you file it under? Hard to say. There's chaos, there's unhallowed chanting, there's some fierce rhythm and there's undeniably some abuse of electronic equipment. It's best to leave the definitions up to the listener, but with titles referencing demons of Goetia and the world's oldest profession, you should let the good times roll. Their music, described as "a brutal hypnosis" by Ransom Note, has been released on Desire Records, Clan Destine and Idiosyncratics. Idiosyncratic is indeed a description that perfectly fits both their releases and live performances. Recently back from the US, they have shared bills with acts as diverse as Oathbreaker, Andy Stott, and Vatican Shadow. Their new collaborative side project Black Swords, with Stuart Argabright of Black Rain, was released on Vienna's Noiztank label (2017). Black/white label; Comes in full color folder sleeve, in heavy PVC outer sleeve; Includes download code; Edition of 200 (hand-numbered). ORPHAN SWORDSLicense To Desire Remixes  LP  $22.99Aurora Borealis unleash Orphan Swords' License To Desire Remixes LP. The sonic tangle and entheogenic orgy of the demonically inspired "Asmoday" and the tranced-out "Hooker", are given workovers by Helm, Icon Template, Black Rain, Prostitutes, and Svengalisghost. This is remix as rite of destruction, the tracks being disfigured rather than beautified for commodification. Awkward, uncomfortable listening rubs shoulders with pounding bass, post-techno hiss squall prevails. And then there's the superbly dirty fever-dream lope of the Black Rain remix. Formed in 2013, Orphan Swords is a Belgian electronic duo. Their music, described as "a brutal hypnosis" by Ransom Note. Their work has been released on Desire Records, Clan Destine, and Idiosyncratics. Idiosyncratic is indeed a description that perfectly fits both their releases and live performances. Artwork by Lara Gasparotto. Black/white label; Comes in full color folder sleeve, in heavy PVC outer sleeve; Includes download code; Edition of 200 (hand-numbered). Borusiad/Sixteen: Promises 12" $24.99"Cititrax is thrilled to present a split EP by two massive talents, Borusiade and The Sixteen Steps. Borusiade, originally from Bucharest, Romania began as a DJ in the early 2000s and then started producing music in 2005. With a background in classical music, she combined her love of raw electronics, obscure themes and melodic lines to create her own signature sound. She has released on the Cómeme label as well as Correspondant. 'Infatuation' and 'Confutation' are dark, moody and intense tracks that catch you upon first listen. The flip side of the Promises And Infatuation EP features The Sixteen Steps, the brainchild of George Lanham who cut his musical teeth DJing and running events in the south of England. We have been listening to many of his tracks endlessly for a while now. They've also been a highlight of Veronica Vasicka's DJ sets as of late. 'Signals From The South' and 'Promises On The Run' are both immaculately produced, hypnotic, dance floor killers. They are sparse ebm meets smoky warehouse techno, and offer a wonderful contrast to Borusiade's layered emotive tracks that reminisce of an East Village club in the 1980s. Themes of infatuation, appearances, and anonymity appear throughout this EP from the music itself right through to the cover art. Limited edition vinyl pressing of 999 copies." Whitehouse: Dedicated To Peter Kurten LP $32.99Green vinyl version. Gloss laminated thick 350 gsm sleeve; Edition of 250. Dirter Promotions present a reissue of Whitehouse's Dedicated To Peter Kurten, Sadist And Mass Slayer, originally released in 1981. Unavailable on vinyl for 36 years, this iconic and ground-breaking masterpiece of electronic and extreme music is finally back. Superbly re-mastered and cut by Noel Summerville. BACZKOWSKI/CHRIS CORSANO/PAUL FLAHERTY, STEVE The Dull Blade $20.99"More than a decade since their first (and last) trio album, Dim Bulb (2005), 'Buffalo Steve,' Chris Corsano and Paul Flaherty are back on the attack. The three recorded as part of a larger ensemble on the Open Mouth LP, Wrong Number (2014), but they have a certain way of creating focused trio dynamics that makes babies talk in tongues and old men drool. The line-up is a bit unorthodox -- two saxes (one a goddamn baritone) and drums. You might almost be tempted to call the format European. But it'd be a canard to try and place this album in the Euro free music tradition. I mean, yeah, there is some massive outsider brawling here. Buckets of wind and clumps of tubs 'all double twisted up,' as Fred Blassie used to say. But the fire never refrains from flaming as jazz-qua-jazz, which places it a lot more squarely in the American tradition than actual squares would have you believe. These three are clearly savages, which is a far cry from people impersonating savages, if you catch my drift. Beyond that, there is an ineffably jazzoid heft to the music here. Both Steve and Paul are playing in a distinctly post-Ayler jetstream. The freedom of their runs maintains that strangely (perhaps even imaginary or projective) American connection to bar-walking R&B maniacs -- something that seems to lie at the bottom of our country's hornic subconscious. Which is not to say individual moments on this record couldn't have come from the FMP catalog, but there's a red hot holism here that will brand most asses with the stars & stripes. The Dull Blade has a strange undercurrent of swing here as well. Largely provided by Mr. Corsano's driving full kit approach, the most outward-moving passages (often those involving the inner and outer freak registers of the horns) get corralled back into more clearly terrestrial and genuinely moving. It's a great goddamn record. Once again these guys manage to defy odds and expectations, creating music that is as fully-charged and beautiful as it is warped." --Byron Coley, 2017 Edition of 400. New York Contempory Five : Consequences  LP $29.99Modern Silence present a reissue of The New York Contemporary Five's Consequences, originally released in 1966. The New York Contemporary Five barely lasted a year, all told, but they recorded five albums that shaped the jazz to come. They were a super-group after the fact -- the stellar frontline of Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and John Tchicai all being relative newcomers at the time. Cherry had recently left Ornette Coleman and was only starting to stretch into world music. Shepp was fresh off a stint with Cecil Taylor and had just found his voice as a composer and performer. And Tchicai was virtually unknown. Their scorching music -- aided by the supple and hard-hitting rhythm section of Don Moore and J. C. Moses -- is a thrilling mix of adventurous soloing and post-bop structures, memorable heads and go-for-broke improv. Shepp and Tchicai offered two different ways forward for sax players: Shepp privileged texture, density, and fragmentation -- a pointillist take on Ben Webster or Coleman Hawkins, perhaps. Tchicai was a master of melodic invention, teasing out hard and bright phrases that seem unpredictably off-kilter. What's still remarkable about these tunes is their sense of internal tension. They're wound tighter than a magnet coil, without sacrificing any spontaneity. There's little that's strictly free about this jazz, but it's full of reckless and unexpected drama all the same. "Consequences" is the record's barnburner, built on fiery performances and climaxing with a Don Cherry solo that sounds like the aural equivalent of a fifty foot skid mark. Their version of Bill Dixon's "Trio" is contemplative by comparison, offering a loping groove, overlapping textures, and a series of wonderfully sustained solos that show off the stylistic strengths of each player. VA: Pop Makossa 2LP $29.99Double LP version. Gatefold sleeve with 20-page booklet; 140 gram vinyl. The Pop Makossa adventure started in 2009, when Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb first travelled to Cameroon to make an initial assessment of the country's musical situation. He returned with enough tracks for an explosive compilation highlighting the period when funk and disco sounds began to infiltrate the makossa style popular throughout Cameroon. From the very beginning, there were several mysteries hanging over Pop Makossa. It was not until DJ and music producer Déni Shain was dispatched to Cameroon to finalize the project, license the songs, scan photographs, and interview the artists that some of the biggest question marks began to disappear. His journey from the port city of Douala to the capital of Yaoundé brought him in contact with the lives and stories of many of the musicians who had shaped the sound of Cameroon's dance music in its most fertile decade. The beat that holds everything together has its origins in the rhythms of the Sawa people: ambassey, bolobo, assiko and essewé, a traditional funeral dance. But it wasn't until these rhythms arrived in the cities of Cameroon and collided with merengue, high-life, Congolese rumba, and, later, funk and disco, that modern makossa was born. Makossa managed to unify the whole of Cameroon, and it was successful in part because it was so adaptable. Some of the greatest makossa hits incorporated the electrifying guitars and tight grooves of funk, while others were laced with cosmic flourishes made possible by the advent of the synthesizer. However much came down to the bass; and from the rubbery hustle underpinning Mystic Djim's "Yaoundé Girls" to the luminous liquid disco lines which propel Pasteur Lappé's "Sekele Movement", Pop Makossa demonstrates why Cameroonian bass players are some of the most revered in the world. "Pop Makossa Invasion", an obscure tune recorded for Radio Buea makes its debut here and joins the pantheon of extraordinary songs that plugged Cameroon's makossa style into the modern world. Also features: Dream Stars, Mystic Djim & The Spirits, Bill Loko, Eko, Olinga Gaston, Emmanuel Kahe et Jeanette Kemogne, Nkodo Si-Tony, Bernard Ntone, Pat' Ndoye, and Clément Djimogne. Haino, Keiji: Watashi Dake LP $32.99Black Editions present the first vinyl reissue of Keiji Haino's stunning debut album Watashi Dake?, originally released in 1981. This first ever edition released outside of Japan features the artist's originally intended metallic gold and silver jacket artwork. Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances, Haino has staked out a ground all his own, creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. For all this, his 1981 debut album Watashi Dake? has remained enigmatic. Originally released in a small edition by the legendary Pinakotheca label, the album was heard by only a select few in Japan and far fewer overseas. Original vinyl copies became impossibly rare and highly sought after the world over. Watashi Dake? presents a haunting vision -- stark vocals, whispered and screamed, punctuate dark silences. Intricate and sharp guitar figures interweave, repeat, and stretch, trance-like, emerging from dark recesses. Written and composed on the spot -- Haino's vision is one of deep spiritual depths that distantly evokes 1920s blues and medieval music -- yet is unlike anything ever committed to record before or since. Produced in close cooperation with Keiji Haino and legendary photographer Gin Satoh. Coupled with starkly minimal packaging, featuring the now iconic cover photographs by Gin Satoh, the album is a startling and fully realized artistic statement. Housed in custom printed deluxe Stoughton tip-on jackets, including black on black inserts, extras, and hand-colored finishes; Remastered by Elysian Masters and cut by Bernie Grundman Mastering; Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI; Includes download code. Faust: Od Serca Do Duszy 2LP $33.99Od Serca Do Duszy originally appeared as a double CD set, joint-released by Lumberton Trading Company and AudioTONG in 2007 (LUMB 008CD). Long out of print, this album documents a professionally recorded live show at Krakow's Loch Ness Club. As anybody who has seen Faust live, in their countless different yet always wonderful forms, can testify, they are such a musical high, all other stimulants aren't necessary. This remastered reissue once again illuminates the residual experience of a Faust concert in all its expectation-scrunching glory. Comprising the thirteen songs that constituted the original show, this set was produced by founders Jean-Herve Peron and Zappi Diermaier, plus Amaury Cambuzat. Together they dovetail perfectly with one of Peron's mantras during the occasion, "Od Serca Do Duszy". This translates from Polish to, "From heart to soul", which just about covers one of the many facets to Faust's incredible music. Leyland James Kirby, : When We Parted I Wanted To Die  2LP $29.992017 repress. Originally released in 2009. It's a prescient hauntological elegy somewhere between Vangelis' Bladerunner OST (1982), Lynch and Badalamenti's Twin Peaks score, Erik Satie's solo Piano works, William Basinski's gradual tape decompositions, and James Ferraro's washed out visions. Back in 2009, James Leyland Kirby explained: "Here we stand, twenty years on from the first CD, and our optimism has been gradually eroded away collectively. 'Tomorrows World' never came. We are lost and isolated, many of us living our lives through social networks as we try to make sense of it all, becoming voyeurs not active participants. Documenting everything. No Mystery. Everything laid bare for all to see." A decade later, it could hardly have been more prescient. It's with this pessimistic sense of being that Kirby constructed these incredible pieces, creating a sequence of music designed to overwhelm and absorb, affecting our sense of time and place by tracing and retracing musical steps into a blur, re-using the same motifs with incremental differences, trapped in our own feedback loops of lost emotion. On this long double album, James Leyland Kirby once again acts as a spiritual bridge, holding fast against the perceived current of time and culture in order to afford a slow, lingering gaze on its ambiguous, ever-shifting ripples and eddies. Like staring at a body of gently moving water, the effect is strangely soothing and meditative, encouraging immersed reflection and dilated focus... Leyland James Kirby: Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was  double lp  $29.99 2017 repress; Originally released in 2009. The second part of Leyland Kirby's uniquely prescient dark ambient masterstroke, Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was (2009) finds the listener returning to Kirby's draughty corridors of processed 78s and midnight keyboard meditations is a sublime, haunting experience like no other. The listener can read his melancholic diagnosis of capitalist malaise, deferred futurism and thwarted social utopianism as a genuinely uncanny foresight of what has played out in contemporary society, in an age when Facebook and Twitter have become an all-encompassing filter for daily life and effectively assuaged the rich analog ambiguity of collectivism in favor of cold, hard, binary politics and reflexive, unthinking emotional responses. Especially in the wake of Mark Fisher's tragic passing earlier in 2017, Kirby's hauntological sentiments, embedded quite literally in titles such as "When Did Our Dreams And Futures Drift So Far Apart", and figuratively perfused through its stark negative space, now feel to resonate stronger than ever; using shared echoes of the hive mind such as classic film scores from Vangelis and Lynch/Badalmenti -- both quite literally omnipresent in imminent sequels right now -- as cues for sorrowful elegies and meditations which aesthetically resonate as much with Deathprod's liminal scapes, as a sort of mildewed modern classical flocking to Satie's tasteful ambient wallpaper. Yet it's not all doom and gloom. There's a sense of underlying sense of resilience, of resistance to Kirby's hushed, ribboning expressions which flows with a considerate pathos and open-ended emotional curiosity which belies the narcissistic reaffirmations of social media's echo chambers and dialectic cul-de-sacs, quietly striving to wrench something beautiful and affective from the clutches of a manipulative mainstream. VA: Monika Werkstatt 2LP $26.99restocked!!"... Gudrun Gut has a proven track record of successfully connecting with like-minded artists on unusual paths of creativity. She's an outstanding example of someone who refuses to compromise their artistic vision. And now she is ready to present one of her most ambitious projects ever: Monika Werkstatt -- a loose collective of female artists set up to enable each of them to achieve new goals through collaboration. Monika Werkstatt will ensure that their artistic output gains visibility in an art context still too dominated by men. Monika Werkstatt has its origins in collective workshops and in shared interactions. By sharing their own challenges and achievements later on with an audience, this opened a gateway to a further feedback and creative dialogue. . . . History has a weakness for coincidences, and the release of Monika Werkstatt happily falls on the 20th anniversary of Monika Enterprises. A fantastic landmark and a means of celebrating such a tremendously talented collective that Gudrun Gut has orchestrated. So what is this release really about? Gudrun's fellow Monika members -- AGF, Beate Bartel, Lucrecia Dalt, Danielle De Picciotto, Islaja, Barbara Morgenstern, Sonae, Pilocka Krach, Natalie Beridze -- travelled from Berlin and assembled in the creative oasis of Uckermark. The goal was to create and record without any of the usual pressures and distractions that you'd anticipate in a group context. To keep the focus, Mo Loscheider cooked, Manon Pepita assisted with the day-to-day and Lupe was filming. . . . Between recording and jamming, their days were filled with music, eating, short walks in the fields and forests resounding with inspiring talks and discussions. Without any restraint or rules, they opened up new forms of interaction and creative dialogue which found themselves falling into a process without any clear beginnings or ends. . . . Once the recordings were completed, representatives of the group were delegated roles for a finished production -- some sequenced and mixed the recordings into their own tracks, while others built their own from the material recorded. The results succeed in showcasing the community as a group, as well as portraying singular pieces of art derived from a collective process." these chris watson cds are being reissued - please let us know if you'd like a copy - they are scheduled for july release datesWatson, Chris: El Tren Fantasma CD $15.99Watson, Chris: Weather $15.99

[golockhart]

2017: The year ahead in cinema

by Ari Mattes

There have been some good films already released in 2017. Robert Zemeckis’ Allied, for example, is a compelling WWII espionage drama made in Zemeckis’ seamless style starring the equally seamless Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. The Edge of Seventeen and La La Land are far more interesting films. Both are structured around sweetly formulaic narratives – a fish out of water teen drama in the case of The Edge of Seventeen, and a bittersweet romantic musical in the case of La La Land – but the style of both films clashes with their narratives, to create a productively dissonant effect in the viewer.

The Edge of Seventeen – shot in Canada – is replete with bleak suburban images, shot in a subdued palette under grey light and overcast skies, with the feelgood story often at odds with the tone of the image. The frequent use of wide angle lenses in La La Land – which distort straight lines, creating an effect of disassociation for the viewer through their disruption of conventional perspective – similarly ground against its straightforward nostalgic narrative.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land. imdb

So what other movies are in store for 2017? Here are some of the ones to look forward to – or not.

The smaller films

Let’s start with some of the smaller films. Moonlight, a coming of age film about the life of a young, black man in a tough Miami neighbourhood looks like a searing drama – if a little overly “actorly.” It is a topical film, too, given the explosion of racial tension in the US over the last few years. A Dog’s Purpose, directed by Lasse Hallström – the excellent director behind The Cider House Rules (1999), The Shipping News (2001), and Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009) – follows the reincarnation of the spirit of a dog through various breeds, which is a sufficiently bizarre premise to draw my attention. The Red Turtle is a similarly low-key film about an animal – it follows the story of a shipwrecked man who befriends a giant red turtle.

The Red Turtle. imdb

Other low-key releases that look promising include Detour, the latest film from the British horror-thriller director Christopher Smith; Lost in London, written and directed by Woody Harrelson starring Willie Nelson and Owen Wilson (and, yes, Woody Harrelson); Get Out, a satiric horror film about black-white relations in the US; Table 19, the new comedy from the hit and miss Duplass brothers, featuring a wonderful premise – a table at a wedding for the guests everyone hoped wouldn’t come; Raw, a French-Belgian horror film about a vegetarian college student who becomes a cannibal; My Cousin Rachel, an adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel starring Rachel Weisz; and The Snowman, a crime thriller based on Jo Nesbø’s novel starring Michael Fassbender who, one suspects, will be as watchable as ever.

There are, of course, several big budget films coming out, some of which look good.

Kong: Skull Island, starring woman of the moment Brie Larson and man of the moment Tom Hiddleston – both first-rate actors – looks like the kind of spectacular film worth seeing on the big screen, as does the science fiction thriller Ghost in the Shell, the live action version of the cult anime that generated controversy through its casting of Scarlett Johannson in an Asian role. Guy Ritchie will probably approach the Round Table story in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword with his usual verve, given he is a master of (at least visually) arresting cinema.

Brie Larson and Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island. imdb

The director and star of the razor-sharp thriller Unknown (2011) – Jaume Collet-Sera and Liam Neeson – reunite in The Commuter, another Neeson vehicle about a “regular” guy who becomes embroiled in a world of mystery and violence. Why not retread the same steps? The formula, virtually invented by British novelist John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, makes for pleasurable cinema. I’m likewise excited about The Coldest City, a spy thriller set in Berlin, and Free Fire, an action film from one of the best contemporary directors, Ben Wheatley (Kill List, A Field in England), starring Brie Larson again.

Two films based on Stephen King novels also look good – The Dark Tower with its fantasy-Western story, seems perfect for a large-scale adaptation, and It, about killer monster-clown Pennywise – one of King’s great novels – is finally being made for the big screen after its success as a TV miniseries in 1990.

Bill Skarsgård in It (2017). imdb

Flatliners and Blade Runner 2049 – sequels that have been decades coming – both look like they may have been worth the wait. The follow up to Joel Schumacher’s grim film of 1990, Flatliners, is directed by Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and features an appealing cast, including Nina Dobrev, Diego Luna and Ellen Page. Blade Runner 2049, starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, has generated a lot of hype. We’ll see if it lives up to it.

Harrison Ford will return in Blade Runner 2049. imdb

Comedies that may be of value include Baywatch – weirdly enough, made by critically acclaimed documentarian Seth Gordon. It will be mandatory viewing for everyone who watched (and loved) the 1990s TV show that quickly gained a reputation as the epitome of cheesy Los Angeles trash. Another Adam McKay/Will Ferrell pairing, The House, is based on a suitably absurd premise involving people down on their luck turning their house into a casino. Downsizing, starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig, and directed by Alexander Payne, is likewise based on a solid comedic premise – a husband and wife decide they will have a better life if they shrink themselves, but the wife pulls out after the husband has gone through with it.

The blockbuster franchises

2017 will see the release, as usual, of new entries in several blockbuster franchises. As expected, many of these look (and surely will be) unspeakably dull: is anyone really excited about another Pirates of the Carribean or Transformers film? Will Resident Evil: The Final Chapter really be the final chapter in a series that has only ever been worth watching for the (interesting) disconcerting effect poor film making can have on the viewer?

Spider-Man: Homecoming, Logan, War for the Planet of the Apes, Thor: Ragnarok and Star Wars: Episode VIII similarly promise little. If The Lego Movie (2014), one of the most ideologically repellent mainstream films of recent years, is anything to go by, then I’m not looking forward to the two (!) Lego films scheduled for release in 2017: The Lego Batman Movie and The Lego Ninjago Movie.

Vin Diesel in xXx: Return of Xander Cage. imdb

I am, however, very excited about two sequels coming soon: xXx: Return of Xander Cage, and Fifty Shades Darker.

The original xXx offered a masterclass in staging slick action sequences, perfectly combining visual effects with breathtaking stunts. It is still Vin Diesel’s finest film, with his role as the brawny, extreme sports-loving, buffoon-come-secret agent perfectly in tune with his physique and macho celebrity persona. Diesel was the action man for the Mountain Dew generation. The sequel, xXx 2: The Next Level, saw Ice Cube take the lead and was not nearly as effective.

Fifty Shades of Grey was an uneven film. The first half was Hollywood at its delightful best, with beautiful stars making hackneyed dialogue seem electric, bringing an enchanting quality to material that is hokey in the extreme. The heightened first encounter between the business guru Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), for example, and the suitably absurdly-named college student Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), made for ecstatic viewing.

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades Darker. imdb

Much of the film’s hypnotic effect was due to its location – Seattle – and cinematograoher Seamus McGarvey’s astonishing photography of the city. The score – an uncharacteristic one for Danny Elfman – likewise helped make the film (at least at first) an engrossing experience. Once the hypnotic gloss wore away as the story developed, the film became tedious, its supposedly “risque” material more comic than erotic.

The sequel, however, promises a great deal. It is directed by James Foley, the truly superb filmmaker behind two late 20th century masterpieces At Close Range (1986) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Foley’s detached, clinical style should fit the melodramatic aesthetic of the series perfectly, bringing a rigour and precision to the direction that was absent from the first film.

Other potentially exciting releases in major series include Fast & Furious 8 – the first since the death of Paul Walker, perhaps explaining surprises in the cast like Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren (!); Alien: Covenant, the sequel to Prometheus (2012); and Saw: Legacy, the eighth Saw film which only makes the “will see” list because it is helmed by virtuosic horror film makers, the Spierig Brothers (Undead 2003).

Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant. imdb

Those that don’t inspire confidence

At the same time, there are several films I’m looking forward to missing altogether.

Patriots Day, based on the Boston bombings of 2013, though made by a competent director (Peter Berg), and starring a more than competent actor (Mark Wahlberg) looks like thoroughly repellent, pro-American nationalist rubbish – what one would expect from the pairing behind Lone Survivor.

There is a great deal of excitement surrounding T2 Trainspotting, but, I’m sorry to say, I don’t share this. Danny Boyle has always been an at best ho-hum director – Shallow Grave (1994) was brilliant, Slumdog Millionaire (2008) embarrassingly bad – and I found the original Trainspotting (1996) film, labelled “edgy” by some, alternately pretentious and silly. Boyle has done nothing in the years since Trainspotting to make me think its sequel will be different.

I would similarly suggest avoiding the thriller Unforgettable – it stars Katherine Heigl, who is the top actor in Hollywood at picking bad films.

Demetrius Shipp Jr. in Tupac biopic All Eyez on Me. imdb

CHIPS, another film re-exploiting TV material that wasn’t great to begin with, doesn’t look very good. The Tupac biopic All Eyez on Me might have some enthused, but real life biographies seldom make good films (with some exceptions, for example, Auto-Focus) for the simple fact that “life” is usually not conducive to cinematic formula, with the result that biopics often seem uneven and dissatisfying.

Midnight Sun is another entry in the teenage-lovers-one-of-whom-is-sick genre that has (perversely) become so popular in recent years, though this one, starring Patrick Schwarzenegger, may have some value as a curio.

The new Jumanji, Fist Fight, The Great Wall, Tulip Fever, Wilson, Wonder Woman, The Mummy, Dunkirk, Victoria and Abdul and Justice League are similarly not inspiring much confidence in me.

The eagerly anticipated, regardless …

There are some films promising little that I am nonetheless eagerly anticipating.

Power Rangers will be worth seeing for the sheer weirdness. The toys weren’t very good, neither was the cartoon series, and the film of 1995 was woeful.

The Boss Baby involves an acutely strange premise for an animated film, and features the voices of strong comedic actors Alex Baldwin, Steve Buscemi and Lisa Kudrow. The Emoji Movie, likewise animated, sounds painfully relevant to contemporary media culture.

There’s every chance Sofia Coppola’s latest film, The Beguiled, will be a dud – but it will probably be an interesting dud nonetheless – and the same thing holds for the new film Logan Lucky from the un-retired Steven Soderbergh, who has directed some great films throughout his career, in addition to plenty of shockers.

Geostorm is Jerry Bruckheimer-produced, global warming, adventure-disaster nonsense, and Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Kenneth Branagh, will probably be the usual self-indulgent nonsense that Branagh tends to make, which is, after all, rather enjoyable.

Ari Mattes is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Australia.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

#movies #entertainment #entertainment marketing