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Devil May Cry 5  ▪  8/?

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omg so these were the divorce papers

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The shoulder rig is the male equivalent of a corset. In this essay, I will…

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“The devil may cry Turn down a serpent Worship no mortal life Pull back the curtain” [King of the Damned - Barren Gates, Alter.] Maybe 2020 will be the year we get Vergil’s DLC, let’s not lose hope. 🙃

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“I dream of a love that even time will lie down and be still for” - Sally Owens, Practical Magic (1998)

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What Godzilla sees:

What Kong sees:

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LUCA MARINELLI as NEIL Death Stranding 2 (2025) Dev. Kojima Productions

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The glowing eyes just add to his handsomeness imo ❤️❤️

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Millie Bobby Brown as Madison Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) 

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SO...I'm playing as Saga in Alan Wake 2. I'm running through the woods on my way back from the Valhalla Nursing Home after grabbing some things I missed and I come across a Taken. I don't want to deal with it, so I duck into the woodland Break Room instead to save.

RIGHT AS I SAVE, ALAN'S DISEMBODIED VOICE SAYS: "Gets in your head, doesn't it?"

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Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

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I wish... I wish we'd never gone to Gitara's study that day. What, just stolen a couple of horses and galloped away to Tear for a life on the river? Yes.

SIUAN & MOIRAINE | THE WHEEL OF TIME (2021— )

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All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that. NORMAL PEOPLE (2020) dir. Lenny Abrahamson, Hettie Macdonald

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Mark Johnson being a hater of his own cast minus Sam Reid for 2 and a half seconds.

It's interesting to note MJ was referring to the past when he said the success of S1 and 2 was largely credited to Sam Reid. Not S3. 1 and 2. Largely due to Sam Reid. Sam Reid looked understandably embarrassed by the neglect of his other cast members and being put on the spot and tried to assuage the situation but putting him in that position? Even after SR protested MJ ended his racist spiel with "it's all you". It's all Sam according to MJ and RJ. I never want to hear the "fans are overreacting" from any racist blog again. Fuck off from my blog and fuck off from reblogging my gifs. Naysayers don't respond to this post I don't want to hear it.

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"The Old Guard 2 (2025)", or When Purgatory (Finally) Hits the Road

[Tumblr wouldn't let me update my original post <_< so here's an expanded version for your troubles lmao]

The Old Guard is nothing if not consistent as a franchise. Decent build-up and story ideas that teases at interesting aspects that are merely glimpsed at, and lands flat on its face. But this time there's a cliffhanger ending.

To The Old Guard 2's credit, it's no longer pretending that Kiki Layne is the lead of the franchise. (Which was the central selling point of the first film. A selling point that ultimately felt disingenuous compared to films like Fast Color.) She instead becomes part of an exposition-y plot device while the film dedicates most of the runtime to Charlize Theron's Andromache (Andy) as the driving force of the story.

The introduction of Uma Thurman as an antagonistic immortal tastes like a story beat that could elevate the film somewhere into Highlander (1986) territory. Provide dimension to Theron's Andy, and the life of an immortal.

What kind of person do you become after living thousands of years? Can you, in Andy's case, truly live a just life if you can stop searching for someone trapped, knowing you've condemned them to an eternal cycle of death?

That's an interesting story beat to work with, regarding Layne's Nile, who is still informed by the boundaries of her lifespan's morality. There doesn't have to be a right or wrong answer. The Old Guard is the kind of story that lends itself well to ambiguity, especially when considering the immortals are all State-sponsored mercenaries for hire.

I love Highlander, so I was ready for that kind of schlock and angst.

But the moment the film starts to make you question Andromache as someone with potentially questionable ideologies, as argued by Uma's ill-named Discord, the climax of the film reveals it was all a farce. Instead, Discord is your atypical self-serving villain, and I don't think I would've had a problem with that beat if the film was honest about that.

To bring up 1986's Highlander again, The Kurgan (Clancy Brown) was a violent killer who wanted to be the strongest immortal among immortals. He enjoyed The Game, the kill. No meat to his potatoes, just fluff. It's a nice (if not fun) contrast to the brooding self-isolation of Connor McLeod (Christopher Lambert), who goes through the motions of life, but doesn't necessarily desire to be immortal (or alive) any longer.

Discord, as one of the "first immortals" (how does she know that? I don't want an answer), could've been that kind of contrast to the lead and supporting cast. Especially since so much of her narrative was centered around pushing Quynh's (Veronica Ngo) personal vendetta against Andy (on top of messing with Nile's perspective of her allies).

So much of the film dawdles on the pointless question of "why do immortals exist? Why do they become mortal?" and erases the ambiguity of their otherwise fantastic lives. The reintroduction of Ngo's Quynh as a vengeful, anti-human immortal presented an opportunity for a strong interpersonal story. Instead, Ngo's character is little more than a henchman who face-turns at the end of the film for a lack of anything really driving her narrative.

Adding to the problems of the storytelling, the rest of the cast, who you could argue weren't much beyond band backup to begin with, feel less present in the film than they were in the original.

Chiwetel Ejiofor's Copley feels the most superfluous of the supporting cast (I completely forgot this nigga starred in the original film lmao), hanging on just to represent Netflix's relationship with the US's EPW (Entertainment Propaganda Wing).

Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts) is grandfathered into the film because of how the first ended, but the sequel doesn't seem to know how to use his betrayal in the original movie to make him mesh with the sequel's narrative.

Like other elements, there's merit in a suicidal immortal who can't die forced to reckon with his choices, especially considering how they introduced Discord as an immortal questioning the mortality of her kin. But in the end, he just becomes a means to push the lynchpin of the film's choice in plot, and is discarded just as quickly.

And because so much of Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky's (Luca Martinelli) emotional tiff is focused on the return of Booker (specifically how Joe does a face-turn on Booker's exile off-screen wtf), the two characters are crowded out by Andy and Quhyn's pseudo lovers-to-adversaries fallout (which also goes nowhere).

I'm not terribly concerned by the lack of physical intimacy between the two so much as understanding they're not present for much else beyond action sequences. And when they're not being action-y, like everyone else, they just sit around and have face-journeys.

I think it's a given that media being flagrantly "queer" is probably no longer politically viable for neoliberal optics (I mean, the uniparty is selling us down the river right now, so...). My own personal political journey makes me apathetic about it. The media we consume, primarily, is a pressure valve-releasing distraction meant to halt real-world change. That's the price of engaging with stuff like Netflix. What people want to see will not actually be a lasting/genuine thing (as opposed to a cash grab) until our current system is done away with. I'll stop there before I get any angrier.

Henry Golding (please keep the beard, sir) gets the unfortunate fate of being cast in a sequel whose primary focus is veteran actors Theron and Thurman. The best that his unfortunately named Tuah gets to do is exposition dump and launder the choice of plot that the sequel's story hinges on.

It's unfortunate because, as someone who was cast as Discord's companion, Golding's Tuah could've lent weight to questioning the morality of immortals. What kind of dualities does an archivist get to see, keeping track of the undying?

Ultimately, a lot of The Old Guard 2's shortcomings rest on whatever production hell it was churned through to even get out of purgatory. It loses the vision of Gina Prince-Bythewood (who balanced Greg Rucka's shortcomings as a writer). So to that extent, Kiki Layne lost the person who made sure her character was elevated out of the background. There's definitely a significant shift of focus to elevate Theron's Andy from mentor to full-fledged lead (without hiding it behind the trappings of "Black Girl Magic"), and Thurman's presence as her opposite compounds that.

Despite Victoria Mahoney's experience as second unit director and her work with the likes of Ava DuVernay, she clearly appears to have been chosen for budgetary reasons (if she wasn't recommended by Gina Prince-Bythewood). To that extent, this isn't her best showing as director.

Everything about the end result of this film, despite the five-year wait (I wasn't holding my breath even then), feels like shoving someone off the shelf just to do away with their presence. It's all set up, but there's no payoff. And given Netflix's and the entertainment industry's proclivities for cancelling and axing things before they see the light of day, that's fucking dangerous for a "film franchise" that (imho) struggled to build an audience from the word "go".

Will The Old Guard 3 happen on account of this film's massive cliffhanger? I fucking doubt it, but I'm willing to be proven wrong in this case.

[original review featured on letterboxd]

UPDATE: You can now read this on my website.

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Black Widow (2021), dir. Cate Shortland