#...that might be slightly problematic even though here it genuinely is a lot of subtext you have to understand that there is subtext to get

[minakoaiinos]

Animating this season like you can't have the slightest bit of jest and god forbid jesting about yaoi

[jonsa101]

Do you think when Max double back and said “we never talked about it” do you think Helen took it as yes finally he’s opening up and that’s why she hug him and laugh that relieved laugh? And then she asked him that question and she realize he still doesn’t get it??

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!!! This is a great question and such a hard one to answer as well! I’ve honestly considered a lot of scenarios in my mind about where Helen’s mind was at before and after the hug. I have gone back and forth about it but after analyzing it for awhile these are my final thoughts on it.

In my last ask I got from @abriaashley, I had mentioned that there was a very brief moment in that rooftop scene that reminded of me their rooftop scene in 1.17. Before I answered this ask, I took a couple days to really make sure that I knew what I was talking about but after analyzing it I know without a shadow of doubt this is the exact same expression. To me, this brief moment below is the most important key in understanding everything that happened during and after their hug.

But in order to understand why Helen has this expression on her face, we need to first examine the scene where we saw this expression first. In episode 1.17, Max and Helen are having a conversation within a conversation about their relationship. Everything is subtext but essentially Helen tells Max that she needs to “triage,” she can’t be his “all of the above” and that she’s removing herself as his doctor. Of course Max is upset by this and with his wonderful Freudian slip he reveals his true heart’s desire when he says...

But what if I want you?

After this declaration, we get this expression on her face and then Helen STICKS TO HER RESOLVE!

In the context of this scene, Helen’s expression here tells me two things:

Max telling her “what if I want want you” is exactly what she wants to hear. She clearly has feelings for him and hearing that is supposed to tempt and sway her resolve. But based on their current circumstances the idea of them is simply not possible and it’s heart aching.

She clearly doesn’t want to do what she’s about to do in this moment but she’s BUILDING UP THE WILL POWER to do what she feels she has to do!

This is my interpretation of why Helen has that expression on her face. When I look at episode 3.10 where Helen has that same look before she hugs Max, I think the same reasons apply for this moment as well. As an avid Sharpwin shipper it’s easy to fan girl about these intimate moments and get carried away but when you logically look at their scene and the scene that took place right before, hopefully what I explain will make perfect sense to you.

Before Max and Helen’s moment on the roof, Helen had a GUT-WRENCHING scene with her niece. Mina is still heavily grieving her father and this explains so much of why she’s also had a lot of behavioral issues. She’s suffering emotionally and is desperately trying to find some semblance of peace and healing. Shanthi Sekaran, the writer for this episode, said the inspiration for this scene was Micaheanglo’s Pieta and how fitting it was for this moment between them.

“Pieta” which translates to pity or compassion, shows the the Virgin Mary compassionately holding on to the dead body of Jesus as she sorrowfully contemplates the death of her beloved son.

Like this sculpture, Helen compassionately holds Mina and comforts her as Mina is overcome with her grief and as Helen is trying to empathize with the depths of Mina’s sorrow! It’s just such a beautiful thing to witness and why I’m hoping Mina sticks around for the long haul. There’s so much emotional investment already and in this moment of their lives, they desperately NEED EACH OTHER! So when you look at everything from a wholistic perspective and you look at the chain of events that led Helen to be on that rooftop in the first place, does it LOGICALLY make sense that Helen would be in the headspace to address her relationship with Max or even kiss him? Nooooooooo!!!!

It doesn’t make sense!

If anything, her actions in this scene is a reflection of what she did earlier with Cassian when she broke up with him. As she made her niece first priority with Cassian, she is essentially making her niece first priority again with Max, despite being in love with him!

Let’s breakdown 3.10’s rooftop scene so y’all can know where I’m coming from.

Part 1 of this scene is Max and Helen discussing parenting and him emotionally supporting her when she feels like she had a parenting fail. This should have been the first clue for us to understand how this moment between them would play out because this issue with Mina was the main thing that was clearly plaguing her mind!

In part 2 of this scene, Max turns to leave and then after briefly hesitating, he turns around says

“I’m sorry about Cassian.”

As soon as he says this we see this same expression we saw in 1.17. Then Max continues and says.

I don’t know what to...say. I mean, we never talk about it.”

Y’all I said this in my last ask but this is a really big deal! This is Max’s first attempt to bring up the elephant in the room between them and it’s something that he’s never attempted to address before. Helen knows this is a big deal too and she knows where this conversation was headed. Hence why before the conversation could even go anywhere, Helen cut him off with a hug!

Like I said at the beginning of this post, the expression Helen makes before the hug is the key to understanding this scene in it’s entirety! Similar to 1.17 I believe the same reasons apply for her expression in 3.10 but vary slightly.

Once again, what Max is saying is exactly what Helen wants to hear but also what she’s been waiting for him to do! Unlike in season 1, Max and Helen are in completely different circumstances than they were back then. Subconsciously, they had feelings back then but now they are both fully aware that they’re in love with each other. The massive elephant in the room exists between them because they don’t talk about their feelings and they’re to afraid to voice that they’re in love with each other. There is no doubt in my mind that Max finally being able to at least broach the topic is something that she has always wanted Max to do. They seemingly don’t have anything that’s holding them back from being together but based by how I see it, the heart aching look on Helen’s face tells me that in Helen’s mind it’s essential she puts her sole focus into Mina, even if this is something she’s always wanted. (This Is KEY!)

Like 1.17, I think Helen was building up that will power to tell him that she’s happy that their friends even though she’s in love with him. That hug between them was a lot of things. It was deeply loving and heartfelt. It was cathartic with pent-up angst and longing semi-released but most of all, it was desperate and supportive. Despite this, I also believe that this hug was used to avoid a conversation that Helen didn’t want to have. If she allowed that conversation to go any further she would have 100% been swayed and would have probably given into her feelings. But Helen didn’t want to be swayed. She wanted to stick to her resolve that Mina is her first priority! Is this a problematic mindset? Yes! But after that emotionally charged moment with Mina I can see how Helen might think she’s making the right decision.

Also, I’m convinced that if Mina’s breakdown didn’t happen before Max and Helen’s moment on the rooftop, they would have probably had that conversation. But since it did happen, it totally plays a role in what transpires between Helen and Max.

For the moments after they hug this is how I interpret those interactions:

When Helen says to Max “what you said earlier” initially I thought she was referring to something he said earlier in the day. Now that I’ve taken a couple of days to really think about it, I just don’t think that makes sense. Again, after Helen’s moment with Mina, I don’t think she was in the headspace at all to talk about her feelings for him. This scene was more so about Max stepping up and being emotionally supportive of her and I think what’s she’s actually referring to is Max saying “But it helps not to be alone.” In that moment Helen recognized that Max will unequivocally support her and I think that’s something she’s incredibly grateful for. When Max responds with “what did I say?,” I genuinely believe he’s not thinking straight because he so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Helen in his arms. Also, I think naturally he asks that question because he wants to know for future reference what he needs to keep saying to keep her in his arms 🥰.That look that she gives Max before she tells him that she’s really glad that they’re friends isn’t necessarily a look of disappointment because of Max. After I watched it again, that look to me is more so of a look of “I hate that I’m doing this but I have to do this.” As she is gazing into his eyes, it’s her final push to stick to her resolve! Her mind was already made up and she was going to see that decision through.

Y’all I’m going to wrap this up here because this ask wasn’t supposed to be a meta but ended up that way! Lol! Though these are my opinions on what transpired in 3.10 that doesn’t change my opinion of how I see things unfolding for Sharpwin this season. I just think it’s important to put scenes in proper context. Though Helen might have said that they’re friends, it is so evident that she is clearly in love with him. Like Max, she can’t pretend or neglect her personal wants and needs forever! The great sleeping bear of her desire stirred and is wide awake! Sooner rather than later that bear needs to be fed!

Feel free to reach out to me through my Dms on Tumblr or on Twitter! @oyindaodewale. Also my ask box is always open! 🥰

None of the Gifs in this post are mine!

[bored-arachnid]

Vanilla Sky is the Weirdest Remake I’ve Ever Seen

All things considered, I hold a lot of respect for remakes. Sure, it might seem like a waste of creative potential to throw a bunch of money and artists on a project that’s a copy of a previous one, but remakes can “reinvent” the film that came before it. Updating the special effects, correcting problematic stereotypes, retelling an important theme, yadda yadda, you get the idea. You may notice that all those excuses for a remake I listed were based on the remake being made a long time after the original. But Vanilla Sky was released just four years after Open Your Eyes, the film it was based on. It even shares a main cast member playing the same role. So...what’s the point in remaking it? According to director Cameron Crowe, it was to bring the story to an American audience while weaving it into a new story. According to me, a viewer of both films, it was to make the same film but slightly worse in every way. And wouldn’t you know it, when everything’s a “little worse”, the quality of the film as a whole drops a lot. First and foremost, the central theme, plot elements, characters, and even most sets are near-identical to Alejandro Amenábar’s original film. So any changes are mostly in things like dialogue, shot composition, and editing. And honestly, the only thing I’m thankful to Vanilla Sky for is birthing the very memorable movie quote “In another life, when we are both cats”, but even that is far less interesting in context. I’d like to clarify that I’m certainly biased by having watched the original film first, but I’ve done my best to focus my analysis on the formal elements specifically.

Why don’t we start with the respective protagonists? The story opens with the introduction of Cesar in Open Your Eyes, and Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, although I’ll probably call him “David” for the rest of the review. Both are fundamentally the same character; they have the same nightmares, sleep around without much care for the women in question, were born rich, and are paranoid about other shareholders trying to steal his company. There’s a few key differences between them though, and it mostly comes down to acting. Cesar is portrayed as a complete douche. He brags about lay he gets, talks rudely to them, values his vanity above everything else, and is just generally...rude, if such a word isn’t too crass. Tom Cruise is unmistakably Tom Cruise, and despite also being a player, he’s also more, well, playful. He seems to form at least some kind of emotional attachment to the women he sleeps with, tries to keep their identities secret from his friends, he doesn’t come off as exceptionally rude, and there are even a few scenes of him being sentimental to friends to teach us “he’s not that bad a guy”. This is the change I most expected, but it’s still one I wasn’t happy to see. The repeated attempts to make the protagonist “relatable” only made him seem two dimensional. Instead of being an enigma, a character with clear flaws, he’s a character who has his depth plainly told to us. The side characters are all pretty much the same, with one notable change to Sofia, the main love interest (who shares a name and actress between the movies). Sofia is a reluctant love interest, who seems to see Cesar as her date’s annoying friend, although some flirtatious subtext can be picked up. Vanilla Sky’s interpretation has her completely fixated on him quite literally from the second they meet. I assume it’s done to make the relationship more “believable” or “charming”, but it really just makes Sofia static, and reinforces tired tropes about “true love”. It comes off as especially cheap at the end of the film, actually undercutting the theme of the story as a whole. All of these changes, while relatively minor, lead to massive overhauls in tone and dramatic tension.

Why do I care so much about that? Because Open Your Eyes is a brilliant psychological thriller, which induced a lot of genuine stress and discomfort in me while watching it, more so than any horror film I’ve ever seen. Suspense is constant even throughout the calmest or happiest of scenes. With long shots, a lack of music, and occasional discontinuous cuts in time, the film conditions you to never trust what’s coming next. Once a shot begins to linger, you start to worry about what’s going to go wrong: Sometimes there’s an abrupt cut, a shocking image, maybe even a tragic twist, but often, it’s nothing at all. You start to question your own sanity just as you do Cesar’s. The cost of Cameron Crowe wanting to make you like Tom Cruise (which is kind of easy because he happens to have Tom Cruise’s face) is that you no longer question him or his sanity. And the editing changes to match this change: cuts don’t waste time, and there’s always something happening. Sometimes there’s legal mumbo-jumbo, or banter, or a musical sequence, but you aren’t given any time to savor these moments. You don’t get to think about how happy Tom must be in a moment of levity or character development, because we’re already watching him have another conversation, or having pop music blasted at us. Open Your Eyes generates a sense of tension and unease that’s able to penetrate even the most mundane or harmless of scenes, while Vanilla Sky creates an aura of, well, ease, that it betrays any dramatic tension. 

Just so you don’t think I’m talking out of my ass, I’ll break down how two versions of the same scene demonstrate this change: the prison portrait scene. In a flashforward to Cesar in a prison cell being visited by a psychologist, we see him repeatedly drawing a portrait of a young woman. The psychologist questions him on the matter, but Cesar doesn’t share much, lamenting about it being a happy memory. Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to the subject of the portrait, Sofia, and see the game the two of them play, drawing caricatures of each other, giving new context to the prior scene. In Vanilla Sky, the two characters sketch each other before we see Tom redoing the portrait in prison. And in that prison scene, a somewhat glowing, superimposed Sofia is shown inside the jail cell, interacting with Tom and serving as the model for his drawing. That change does two things to the viewer’s impression of the character: it makes Tom’s state of mind explicitly clear to the viewer, and it directs our attention to the obvious hallucination, instead of the bond between Tom and his psychologist. When Cesar was questioned on him compulsive drawing, we’re put into the psychologist’s shoes, wanting to learn about him, which helps us get invested in wanting to see the two characters come to understand each other. Vanilla Sky’s version of the scene brings focus to the cheap trick and breaking of reality, making the dialogue a backdrop rather than an investing subplot. And that’s just one of many scenes to do changes like that.

I guess my conclusion here is that Vanilla Sky is overrated, and Open Your Eyes is amazing.. So, uh, don’t let me spoil it for you, go watch Open Your Eyes sometime, it’s fantastic. Maybe we’ll all be able to appreciate the underrated gem, one day, when we’re all cats (See? It really is just too damn quotable)