#about THIS MOVIE

[i-am-winterborn]

"what if shes right what if i am someone else, someone beautiful and powerful, someone burried alive and suffocated to death burried somewhere far away on the other side of a television screen"

[trackaghostthroughthefog]

listen yes jacob elordi was fucking hot in saltburn but that was his job. we are ignoring how good barry looked while being a bizarre little freak and it should be acknowledged every day

[dragonduckyquack]

Pretend the boat is better drawn 🫡

[sauntervaguelydown]

Sorry I have to talk about Mamo again.

Fujiko compels me in this movie more than in any other part of the franchise. it’s the particular tension she has with Lupin that does it. Not just the fact that she ultimately is trying to give him the gift of immortality; not even the fact that she doesn’t want that if he doesn’t also take it. It’s more. It’s weirder.

The Lupin/Fujiko thing is so CRUNCHY. It’s like…. What they have going on is something he won’t explain to the boys and doesn’t want them to know about. He obfuscates when they ask in the car. “Women and work don’t mix”, he says, which means nothing and isn’t even true. “You don’t want to hurt her”, they accuse him. He refuses to engage.

When he chooses her over them, in the desert, he spends the next hour or whatever alone with Fujiko pissed as fuck at her and giving her the cold shoulder. It’s so interesting! He’s “dissolving the partnership” and talking about business when he tells the boys to fuck off. Putting them at the maximum distance. Saying “we’re not friends, you can leave me any time, but right now I’m leaving YOU.” Because Fujiko is asking him for help. He KNOWS that she’s been lying to him. And his response to having to choose between his friends and Fujiko is to actively drive his friends AWAY, to be a total dickhead, when he could probably have managed to keep Jigen with him at least.

And then instead of cosying up to Fujiko, he sits there sulking about how she’s messed everything up. But he still chose her. Not even to get anything from her, at least not in the immediate sense, because he’s just! Sulking! In the window!! And he’d probably go on doing that all night if she didn’t start talking about making it up to him.

And I’m not sure about the original Japanese but in the dub, there is also an interesting moment of addressing the elephant in the room when he points out that she seems to want him to adore her but not to be attracted to her. In a lot of sexist media, the mysterious-ness of women is taken for granted—obviously you can’t understand women, so why bother trying. I find this interesting because it pulls that into the text, and does make you wonder what Fujiko actually wants, and whether it’s something that might actually make sense from her perspective. It’s not like no media has ever done this before, it’s just… when his weird relationship with her is SO front and center to this movie, and when it’s contrasted directly before with him choosing her and being MAD about it, and then later with her role in the immortality stuff…

She’s not using him, at least not entirely—she’s not JUST stringing him along to get him to get immortality out of it. She wants to live in the same world as him forever. She obviously loves him.

“How long has it been since we were alone together like this”, she says

“Long time”, he says.

They were alone together at the beginning of the movie, when he tried to give her flowers, so that’s not what she means. “Very long,” she agrees. What does she mean?

There’s this big strange untold space in their shared backstory that is being gestures at, and you know there’s SOMETHING there, but you don’t know what.

[asentienthaze]

Into The Woods: Why the movie was shit

I'm not the first person to talk about this, nor will I be the last. It's pretty widely accepted among theatre fans that Disney bungled up this fantastic show. But it's important nevertheless to talk about how it went wrong, 'cause adaptations are delicate things, and the core of a good adaptation is an understanding of the themes and messages that constitute the story, and not just the story itself. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine together wove a fairly meticulous fabric that is this musical, and it's fascinating to see how Disney's adaptation reduced it to rags.

For a summary of this show's plot, I recommend watching the first few minutes of Sideways' video on the themes in this show, mainly because it's a fairly complex plot and he explains it well. This is especially important, since the plot of the movie is……definitely not the same.(The whole video is definitely worth a watch too, and it brings up points that I might talk about here too.) Done that? Good, let's keep going.

"The narrator comes on stage, and he starts, 'Once upon a time.' Now once he says that, the audience starts to relax inside. Now what I wanted to do was to wake them up immediately, so before [the narrator] gets to the fifth word, I wanted a loud sound from the orchestra, or the piano"

That was Stephen Sondheim talking about the very beginning of the show. The choices he made in the songs were almost all deliberate, they were for a reason.

Now what does the movie do? They say the entire first line of the song before playing the musical sting. They knew that they had to have that there, since it was part of the prologue song, but they didn't understand at all why the song was structured the way it was.

Let this be an omen as to how the movie will adapt this musical.

Another important part of the first song is the constant quarter note motion the piano makes throughout. It's what keeps the energy of the first song going, and is the song's connective tissue. Guess what the movie didn't do? As a result, it makes the prologue feel like five different disconnected small songs.

The main problem that the adaptation suffered, was the removal of seemingly small things, but which ultimately led to the plot of the movie collapsing in on itself.

The first major one is the removal of the narrator and the baker's father. Yes, the movie technically had a narrating voice, and the father got….like one scene, both played much more prominent roles in the original musical. The baker's father, initially a mysterious old man, pulled many of the threads that made the various characters really interact, and he's an outside force helping move the story along. As for the narrator…well it's important to note that the narrator is a character. A major feature of the show is that it's a story with characters, and the show knows that. The narrator dictated how the story would go, and when the witch sacrifices him to the giant, the characters are left to fend for themselves, and that is how most of the destruction in the second act really happens.

The second one is Rapunzel's death. In the musical Rapunzel is crushed by the giant, and it leads to Witch's Lament:

"This is the world I meant. / Couldn't you listen? / Couldn't you stay content, safe behind walls / As I could not?"

An important thing to note is while yes her relationship with Rapunzel is definitely toxic, there's a complexity that arises out of her over sheltering Rapunzel to protect her, and then as a result she comes to despise that "shelter", and is then ultimately killed. The fact that she is grieving the loss of her daughter plays largely into her character in the second act, something that is entirely lacking in the movie. SO MANY OF HER LINES get undermined by this one detail, that Rapunzel never died, and that she was wrong the whole time.

Lastly, songs that were cut. There are four main ones that are important to talk about.

First, Maybe They're Magic. It's sung right after the Baker and his wife sell the beans to get the cow. It's the first time the question of whether or not they'll really have to lie and possibly steal to obtain the items, and what the ethics of it really are, arises. It also exemplifies the character of the Baker's Wife, and her more clever side, which we further see when she obtains her items mostly through either deceit or persuasion. This glimpse into her character helps set her up for 'Moments in the Woods', a song much later which also expresses her inner thoughts.

Two: Ever After/Prologue: So Happy. This is how the show ends its first act and begins the second. In the movie the events in the second act occur immediately after the wedding, while in the musical there is a time gap between the acts. The music is referenced in the instrumental track, but it's never actually sung. Although the songs are definitely very much suited for a theatrical performance, cutting both the songs means that the resulting events that occur within them have to be shuffled and rearranged. The way that the characters make their way into the woods changes, and the prince and Rapunzel run off together much later, which doesn't allow for their later scenes to ever happen in the movie. It's where the cracks in the movie start to show, and ultimately the way the decisions made for earlier parts snowballs into the later parts of the movie.

Three: Agony Reprise. Agony as a song is famous from both the movie and the show. However the reprise happens in the second act, when it turns out the two princes are not focused on the giant, but in fact on another maiden somewhere else, much like how they were in the first act. Except now they're married. Removing this song is basically like telling a joke without the punchline. Yes, Agony by itself is funny, but it's the perfect setup for its reprise. As the plot stood in the movie, it's clear why it couldn't be put in, but,,,like that's the problem. That's the whole problem

Finally: No More. This song is the one I'm most mad that they cut out. It's the final interaction the Baker has with his father, just after he runs away leaving his baby son with Cinderella. The movie,,,,badly paraphrases it, and then cuts to the Baker,,,,,crying? There's no actual emotional development, no actual introspection, and it removes one of the best written scenes in the show.

"Where are we to go?

Where are we ever to go?

Running away—we'll do it

Why sit around, resigned?

Trouble is, son

The farther you run

The more you feel undefined.

For what you left undone,

And more, what you left behind"

I implore you, watch this scene, if nothing else. It's a work of art, and the fact that it's completely cut out is a crime.

Pretty much every character in the movie became a duller and flatter version of their original, but the most egregious examples are Jack and his mother. Jack is older in the show, significantly so. He's basically in his late teens, and is sweet and naive, but not particularly bright. In the movie, however, he's,,,,a child. Like just straight up a child, and now his personality is no longer "too ungrounded for his age" but instead it's exactly how a child his age might act. Conversely, Jack's mother is overbearing, but ultimately 'stern but sweet', and is much more gentle with Jack than in the movie. In the movie though, she's mean and almost callous towards Jack, in a way that doesn't make her an enjoyable character.

I won't blame the actors for most of this. Yes, a point can be made that some of the acting itself may have been bad, but most of the fault in what I've talked about goes to the directors and script writers.

In every adaptation, choices need to be made. Since this was no longer a theatrical performance, liberties had to be taken to fit it into a film format. But each choice has a consequence, and their choices to change parts of the story snowballed into the climax of the movie, making it almost entirely different from the musical.

We talk about Into The Woods as a Sondheim show, but it is just as much a show by Lapine as it is by Sondheim. Lapine's ability to craft a story with strong and clear themes, no matter how complex or abstract the plot is, is one of the show's greatest assets. The movie was a disservice to original stage musical, but most of all it was a disservice to Lapine, taking his carefully crafted story and muddling and twisting it, until the end product had killed the central spirit of the original.

[blueguyorgirl]

I always wondered why RRR didn't have an item song despite being such a large scale movie with a big budget and mass popularity. Then I realised...

Naatu Naatu is the item song.

[alltheardy]

“You are no bounty hunter. You are...”

“Death. And I don't mean it metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically, or theoretically, or any other fancy way. I'M DEATH. STRAIGHT. UP. And I've come for you, Puss in Boots.”

[also-fours]

i'm not apologizing about the consistent nimona reblogs it's one of my favorite movies now and gets bonus points by basically being about one of my OCs--

i mean like not really my character is different from nimona in a lot of ways but i saw this movie and was like "SHE ACTS JUST LIKE HER" so--

anyway i really love this movie so i wont apologize for how much of it shows up on this blog

[tr-shb-g]

"never too late to be who you might have been" by sara yukiko mon | still from i saw the tv glow, "there is still time"

[unluckyprime]

four trans people walk into a movie theater …

[cosmiiqueer]

can we like, have adaptations made by people who care about the thing they're adapting

[hatchetfield-scarecrow]

I hope Barbie is so good and successful it makes every executive that’s turned everything bright and fun made for young girls into edgy boring teen dramas for the last ten years spontaneously combust into flames

[r0semultiverse]

Like music to my ears

[cassianandfenrysaremyboyos]

Goncharov coming third in tumblr's top 100 movies of 2023 is so damn funny. Imagine being a film studio exec who spent millions making some of the other 97 movies listed below it only to be beaten by a film that cost exactly zero dollars to make and doesn't exist

[kendyroy]

“They gave me runway in this film. There’s one monologue in there. I can’t tell you the details of it. I say more words in that monologue than I said in an entire movie once as Wolverine. But there are sides of the character that I’ve been scratching at for 24 years […] There is stuff in this movie where I was like, ‘This is the thing I’ve been trying to get out’ and I feel so excited about it.”

— Hugh Jackman talking about Logan in Deadpool & Wolverine (x)

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

secrets of farming (1863) - john w. large

"yeowch augh taking damage ough eurgh"