#that's what this is missing a big fucking campy swing

[witchern]

just got done seeing the re-release of sam raimi's spider-man on the big screen and now y'all are gonna hear my thoughts whether you like it or not:

the danny elfman music kicked on during the opening credits and i had full-body goosebumps before the marvel logo even came up on screen because i'm a fucking loser.

speaking of opening credits, remember when movies used to have those? i miss it. bring them back.

the upside-down kiss remains the greatest cinematic kiss of all time. don't argue with me when i'm right.

the setup and repetition of "don't tell harry." fantastique.

the cinematographyyyy. bitch. the way the camera follows spider-man swinging through traffic, up and around buildings, across the city…..i just don't get the same feeling of movement in either of the reboots. they're too clean. they're like iphone commercials. they're gross.

speaking of iphones, during the festival scene in times square there was a billboard ad for cingular and i thought about how i used to have a cingular phone and i almost committed suicide in the theater. i'm so old.

everyone calls her "aunt may" – including norman osborn, a grown-ass man. 'twas adorable.

"and i know i'm not your father—" "then stop pretending to be!" maybe i WILL kill myself in this alamo drafthouse.

watching this made me miss having regular-degular goons and scumbags in comic book movies. i'm tired of the "i want to rule the world, i want all the power" schtick. rob a bank. hijack a train. kidnap the mayor. have fun with it. you're in a comic book movie, for fuck's sake.

the balance between campy fun superhero stuff and earnest, genuine emotion was better than i remembered – and one never came at the expense of the other.

jk simmons. nothing else to add here – i just wanna remind people that he fucking crushed this role and burned it down and nobody has been able to touch it since.

on a similar note: willem dafoe. he didn't just chew the scenery – he had a fucking feast. fuck, man. he's great.

unrelated to the film-making itself, but....what exactly is the military purpose of a glider where the pilot is completely exposed? and why did it already look like a halloween machine before osborn becomes the goblin? questions i ask.

anyway, i realize you could hand-wave a lot of this as me falling for the nostalgia of it all (which i absolutely am), but also...i dunno. there's an undercurrent of sincerity to this movie that i just don't really feel in comic book movies anymore. that's probably because the current spate of comic book movies aren't even really movies anymore – they're products. they're vacuum-sealed, rubber-stamped, climate-controlled products to sell you a disney+ subscription or whatever the fuck the warner bros equivalent is (is it max? i think it's max). and every movie has an ending setup that tries to sell you on the next product, and the next, and the next...

anyway. with this first spider-man, yes it's silly at times, but this movie embraces it, warts and all. there's a well-balanced mix of goofy dialogue ("are you in or are you out?" "it's you who's out, gobbie – out of your mind!") and heartfelt moments (i mean, do i even need to say it? "with great power comes great responsibility"). i know it's a hack thing to say "they don't make movies like they used to" but.....man, they REALLY don't make movies like they used to.

#*t #part review; part rant #i'm INCREDIBLY bummed i won't be around to see the spider-man 2 re-release #and uhh. i think i'll be skipping the re-release of the third one lmao. #but i'm glad i made it to at least the first one. what a movie.

[myassbrokethefall]

xf rewatch: jersey devil & shadows

Two early-series stinkers (affectionate) that, at least in the case of Jersey Devil, have achieved cult status or at least meme status for generally being enjoyable as hell. I imagine Fox executives side-eyeing a little, like, what is this, bring back those Squeeze guys or that Chris Carter who wrote the first couple… Really? Uh oh.

I have a deep and abiding love for Shadows partly because I once wrote a recap of it for a fan project, and being me I watched it like 85 times while taking copious notes and turned in a probably 10,000-word analysis, so I know it very well. I DO feel my love for it is justified, partly in its campiness and general silliness (GHOST BOSS. BLOOD BATHTUB. MURDER… AT THE ATM [MACHINE]) but also because Mulder and Scully are great in it, really Detectiving the hell out of the case, interviewing a hilariously mannered and conveniently expositional cemetery groundskeeper, doing a face-to-face with the medical examiner (Howard Graves… Is Very Dead) (she is my favorite, I say this every time, RIP Lorena Gale), and really using their combined powers of Believing and Skeptical in convincing Lauren to cooperate. Yes, there are TWO entire scenes where Scully misses the paranormal thing by seconds; yes, Mr. Dorlund is transparently evil to a ridiculous degree; yes, Lauren wears A LOT of Laura Ashley-ish florals (and this is the episode of Scully's glorious Halloween outfit of black suit, orange blouse, white tights; ah I love it). But, look, at the end, the case is over, and Mulder is like, well, case is over. Should we maybe go see the Liberty Bell? How often do we get to see scenes like that?? For that bit alone I love it, and that's without the Mulder slo-mo (in all of our hearts) jacket swing, Scully's Poltergeist impression and general horror-movie knowledge at the ready, Mulder with his feet on the chair, once again Dr. Ellen Bledsoe being the greatest, Mr. Dorlund getting his uh, wrist squeezed very threateningly with his uh, gold bracelet, by a ghost, Mulder's UNNECESSARILY flirty move of swinging his arm around Scully and breathing on his glasses to show her he snagged a fingerprint… ah it's great. Forget those Squeeze guys, hire these dudes! …They what? OUTSTANDING news.

One more thing I find amusing about Shadows is, I recently was reminded of Glen's ancedote that it came out of a note they got that Mulder and Scully needed to help people. Heheh. "This bitch needs help, get in there, you jerks!" I yelled at Mulder and Scully in multiple scenes this time through. I'd say Ghost of Howard Graves ultimately did more helping in the end, with his supernatural powers, but they tried. And they managed to stop saying vaguely flirtatious dialogue while staring intensely into each other's eyes long enough to at least give her a little encouragement I guess.

I skipped right over Jersey Devil, which is also a silly episode but, honestly, I think comes off better of the two of them. On the other hand, would I say that without the legendary appearance of the Bigfoot Titties drawing? Hard to say. I should add that Mulder and Scully are CRIMINALLY adorable in these episodes, still in their rosy-cheeked (or over-blushed), round-faced big-eyed high-voiced toddler days, and it is difficult to imagine that THE UNIVERSE COULD CONTAIN anything cuter than the last scene (Who was that on the phone? A guy. Same guy as the other night? Same guy. What are you doing, Scully? Going with you to the Smithsonian.) Despite them referencing (in BOTH these episodes) the having or not having of a life (side note, I can't express how common the phrase "get a life" or "he has no life" were back then; that was like cool slang man), vestiges of said life-having remain, with Scully having girl talk with Ellen (I remain obsessed with that exchange: "I thought you said he was cute"/"He's a jerk. …He's not a jerk. He's obsessed with his work"), The Date, Scully's old professor (wonder if she fucked that one. ha), and even more subtle things like Mulder saying "Thanks, Fran" after signing out a car. (Other people work at the FBI! And Mulder and Scully know their names!) (I also found endearing the extremely quick shot of the comics that Fran has taped to her desk. Very nice little set detail.) It all feels so ordinary and workplacey, which I am finding really enjoyable; it's like, a normal government office where people work, and Mulder and Scully also work there, and it just enhances it (enhance!!) when they're working a case and suddenly like a ghost causes a car accident. Or when a hot naked lady (I was impressed with how clear her ass was in the iTunes version of this; I suppose they didn't really bother to blur it back in the standard-definition days and I guess now we are all enlightened in the seeing of asses on TV) attacks Mulder in a dramatically lit warehouse. (Hey baby, come up to Vancouver, you can be on my show! Is something I suspect DD said a lot in the early to mid 90s.)

I'm really not trying at all with this post, sorry. I will wrap up with the revelation that, at least according to the procedural forensic efforts of my friend and me, Bill Dow who plays Chuck Burks plays NOT ONE, BUT TWO DADS in this episode — the guy in the 40s, and the guy at the end hiking with his kid. (Same kid too, I think.) Yes? No? Why isn't Chuck Burks on the convention circuit? Is my question.

Anyway, The X-Files rules. Next up, Ghost in the Machine, which I haven't seen in ages so that should be fun. Sorry these posts are so incredibly lame, lmao. Send tweet

#xf rewatch rambling #jersey devil #shadows #i do know how to use paragraph breaks but sometimes i don't want to because that requires me to organize my thoughts #this blog is free ok #i also know how to use parentheses (clearly)

[faorism]

hot take: a lot of things wrong with redemption can be explained with the knowledge that a lot of the team (esp writers) were coming off fresh from the librärians, which is an entirely different genre than leverage. suspension of disbelief is necessary for the librärians because its inherently fantasy that felt geared for a slightly younger audience than we are used to for leverage (which further made that same humor being used for innuendo just weird because some more than others, these characters are implied to have sex or be intimate with others so it's just... discordant).

characters can be goofier in an already over the top setting when you got literal shakespearean prospero coming to life as your big bad greenscreening campy-bad-so-its-good magic for a season. action can be goofier. hijinks happen and characters are Big and Loud and Quirky, and we accept them as much as magic gone wrong or weird or different in fun chekov's Mother Goose Treaty of 1918 ways because all of those things were part of the fundamental worldbuilding of the librärians from day one.

there were some crossovered vibes from leverage to the librärians that i appreciated! but that was okay because it was a new-to-tv property with a mostly new cast. i personally felt the characters were more shallow than leverage but that's because i can connect between with quieter, more serious(ly positioned in a world) characters than the librärians, as lovely as they were for their genre.

but you can't move from the librärians to leverage with the same slippage. or, you can because they did, but they shouldn'tve. because now we don't have, for example, cassandra's brain misfiring for handwave plot reasons for a reason for a character acting bizarrely. magic became coincidences or (worse) incompetence. that's how we get parker fUCKING bumping into a button she didn't notice(?) or dropping a fUCKING balloon because she wanted to gloat(?) or reacting in hyper ways when she... wasn't like that before. or (and this is what got me to start tinhatting the librärians' role in redemption) eliot manages to miss a projectile (because of course he can!) but that somehow hits exactly a rope of the boat hanging over eliot exactly and that then swings down at the perfect angle to smash his shoulder because eliot (who we have been shown to move at metahuman speeds, even twelve years working on the team) didn't have time to either step away or at least mitigate damage.

red haze was a potion. reasons for things going down was given to luck instead of hyper-competence because it couldn't be blamed on magic tomfoolery. a man fuCKING literally puts a team of hired security to sleep because he was so boring.

leverage was always supposed to be a heist show where the magic came, not from a curse or a never ending stash of Convenient Plot Devices, but from the love built around found family. and that got lost so that's how we ended up with *handwaves* That.

#leverage critical #the librärians was cute but Not Leverage #leverage redemption #leverage redemption spoilers #faorism meta #dean devlin #i will come and fight you for this