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grigori77 · 3 years

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2020 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 2)

20. ONWARD – Disney and Pixar’s best digitally animated family feature of 2020 (beating the admittedly impressive Soul to the punch) clearly has a love of fantasy roleplay games like Dungeons & Dragons, its quirky modern-day AU take populated by fantastical races and creatures seemingly tailor-made for the geek crowd … needless to say, me and many of my friends absolutely loved it. That doesn’t mean that the classic Disney ideals of love, family and believing in yourself have been side-lined in favour of fan-service – this is as heartfelt, affecting and tearful as their previous standouts, albeit with plenty of literal magic added to the metaphorical kind. The central premise is a clever one – once upon a time, magic was commonplace, but over the years technology came along to make life easier, so that in the present day the various races (elves, centaurs, fauns, pixies, goblins and trolls among others) get along fine without it. Then timid elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) receives a wizard’s staff for his sixteenth birthday, a bequeathed gift from his father, who died before he was born, with instructions for a spell that could bring him back to life for one whole day. Encouraged by his brash, over-confident wannabe adventurer elder brother Barley (Chris Pratt), Ian tries it out, only for the spell to backfire, leaving them with the animated bottom half of their father and just 24 hours to find a means to restore the rest of him before time runs out. Cue an “epic quest” … needless to say, this is another top-notch offering from the original masters of the craft, a fun, affecting and thoroughly infectious family-friendly romp with a winning sense of humour and inspired, flawless world-building. Holland and Pratt are both fantastic, their instantly believable, ill-at-ease little/big brother chemistry effortlessly driving the story through its ingenious paces, and the ensuing emotional fireworks are hilarious and heart-breaking in equal measure, while there’s typically excellent support from Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine from Seinfeld) as Ian and Barley’s put-upon but supportive mum, Laurel, Octavia Spencer as once-mighty adventurer-turned-restaurateur “Corey” the Manticore and Mel Rodriguez (Getting On, The Last Man On Earth) as overbearing centaur cop (and Laurel’s new boyfriend) Colt Bronco. The film marks the sophomore feature gig for Dan Scanlon, who debuted with 2013’s sequel Monsters University, and while that was enjoyable enough I ultimately found it non-essential – no such verdict can be levelled against THIS film, the writer-director delivering magnificently in all categories, while the animation team have outdone themselves in every scene, from the exquisite environments and character/creature designs to some fantastic (and frequently delightfully bonkers) set-pieces, while there’s a veritable riot of brilliant RPG in-jokes to delight geekier viewers (gelatinous cube! XD). Massive, unadulterated fun, frequently hilarious and absolutely BURSTING with Disney’s trademark heart, this was ALMOST my animated feature of the year. More on that later …

19. THE GENTLEMEN – Guy Ritchie’s been having a rough time with his last few movies (The Man From UNCLE didn’t do too bad but it wasn’t exactly a hit and was largely overlooked or simply ignored, while intended franchise-starter King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was largely derided and suffered badly on release, dying a quick death financially – it’s a shame on both counts, because I really liked them), so it’s nice to see him having some proper success with his latest, even if he has basically reverted to type to do it. Still, when his newest London gangster flick is THIS GOOD it seems churlish to quibble – this really is what he does best, bringing together a collection of colourful geezers and shaking up their status quo, then standing back and letting us enjoy the bloody, expletive-riddled results. This particularly motley crew is another winning selection, led by Matthew McConaughey as ruthlessly successful cannabis baron Mickey Pearson, who’s looking to retire from the game by selling off his massive and highly lucrative enterprise for a most tidy sum (some $400,000,000 to be precise) to up-and-coming fellow American ex-pat Matthew Berger (Succession’s Jeremy Strong, oozing sleazy charm), only for local Chinese triad Dry Eye (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding, chewing the scenery with enthusiasm) to start throwing spanners into the works with the intention of nabbing the deal for himself for a significant discount. Needless to say Mickey’s not about to let that happen … McConaughey is ON FIRE here, the best he’s been since Dallas Buyers Club in my opinion, clearly having great fun sinking his teeth into this rich character and Ritchie’s typically sparkling, razor-witted dialogue, and he’s ably supported by a quality ensemble cast, particularly co-star Charlie Hunnam as Mickey’s ice-cold, steel-nerved right-hand-man Raymond Smith, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as his classy, strong-willed wife Rosalind, Colin Farrell as a wise-cracking, quietly exasperated MMA trainer and small-time hood simply known as the Coach (who gets many of the film’s best lines), and, most notably, Hugh Grant as the film’s nominal narrator, thoroughly morally bankrupt private investigator Fletcher, who consistently steals the film. This is Guy Ritchie at his very best – a twisty rug-puller of a plot that constantly leaves you guessing, brilliantly observed and richly drawn characters you can’t help loving in spite of the fact there’s not a single hero among them, a deliciously unapologetic, politically incorrect sense of humour and a killer soundtrack. Getting the cinematic year off to a phenomenal start, it’s EASILY Ritchie’s best film since Sherlock Holmes, and a strong call-back to the heady days of Snatch (STILL my favourite) and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. Here’s hoping he’s on a roll again, eh?

18. SPONTANEOUS – one of the year’s biggest under-the-radar surprise hits for me was one which I actually might not have caught if things had been a little more normal and ordered. Thankfully with all the lockdown and cinematic shutdown bollocks going on, this fantastically subversive and deeply satirical indie teen comedy horror came along at the perfect time, and I completely flipped out over it. Now those who know me know I don’t tend to gravitate towards teen cinema, but like all those other exceptions I’ve loved over the years, this one had a brilliantly compulsive hook I just couldn’t turn down – small-town high-schooler Mara (Knives Out and Netflix’ Cursed’s Katherine Langford) is your typical cool outsider kid, smart, snarky and just putting up with the scene until she can graduate and get as far away as possible … until one day in her senior year one of her classmates just inexplicably explodes. Like her peers, she’s shocked and she mourns, then starts to move on … until it happens again. As the death toll among the senior class begins to mount, it becomes clear something weird is going on, but Mara has other things on her mind because the crisis has, for her, had an unexpected benefit – without it she wouldn’t have fallen in love with like-minded oddball new kid Dylan (Lean On Pete and Words On Bathroom Walls’ Charlie Plummer). The future’s looking bright, but only if they can both live to see it … this is a wickedly intelligent film, powered by a skilfully executed script and a wonderfully likeable young cast who consistently steer their characters around the potential cliched pitfalls of this kind of cinema, while debuting writer-director Brian Duffield (already a rising star thanks to scripts for Underwater, The Babysitter and blacklist darling Jane Got a Gun among others) show he’s got as much talent and flair for crafting truly inspired cinema as he has for thinking it up in the first place, delivering some impressively offbeat set-pieces and several neat twists you frequently don’t see coming ahead of time. Langford and Plummer as a sassy, spicy pair who are easy to root for without ever getting cloying or sweet, while there’s glowing support from the likes of Hayley Law (Rioverdale, Altered Carbon, The New Romantic) as Mara’s best friend Tess, Piper Perabo and Transparent’s Rob Huebel as her increasingly concerned parents, and Insecure’s Yvonne Orji as Agent Rosetti, the beleaguered government employee sent to spearhead the investigation into exactly what’s happening to these kids. Quirky, offbeat and endlessly inventive, this is one of those interesting instances where I’m glad they pushed the horror elements into the background so we could concentrate on the comedy, but more importantly these wonderfully well-realised and vital characters – there are some skilfully executed shocks, but far more deep belly laughs, and there’s bucketloads of heart to eclipse the gore. Another winning debut from a talent I intend to watch with great interest in the future.

17. HAMILTON – arriving just as Black Lives Matter reached fever-pitch levels, this feature presentation of the runaway Broadway musical smash-hit could not have been better timed. Shot over three nights during the show’s 2016 run with the original cast and cut together with specially created “setup shots”, it’s an immersive experience that at once puts you right in amongst the audience (at times almost a character themselves, never seen but DEFINITELY heard) but also lets you experience the action up close. And what action – it’s an incredible show, a thoroughly fascinating piece of work that reads like something very staid and proper on paper (an all-encompassing biographical account of the life and times of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton) but, in execution, becomes something very different and EXTREMELY vital. The execution certainly couldn’t be further from the usual period biopic fare this kind of historical subject matter usually gets (although in the face of recent high quality revisionist takes like Marie Antoinette, The Great and Tesla it’s not SO surprising), while the cast is not at all what you’d expect – with very few notable exceptions the cast is almost entirely people of colour, despite the fact that the real life individuals they’re playing were all very white indeed. Every single one of them is also an absolute revelation – the show’s writer-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (already riding high on the success of In the Heights) carries the central role of Hamilton with effortless charm and raw star power, Leslie Odom Jr. (Smash, Murder On the Orient Express) is duplicitously complex as his constant nemesis Aaron Burr, Christopher Jackson (In the Heights, Moana, Bull) oozes integrity and nobility as his mentor and friend George Washington, Phillipa Soo is sweet and classy as his wife Eliza while Renée Elise Goldsberry (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Jacks, Altered Carbon) is fiery and statuesque as her sister Angelica Schuyler (the one who got away), and Jonathan Groff (Mindhunter) consistently steals every scene he’s in as fiendish yet childish fan favourite King George III, but the show (and the film) ultimately belongs to veritable powerhouse Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting, The Good Lord Bird) in a spectacular duel role, starting subtly but gaining scene-stealing momentum as French Revolutionary Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, before EXPLODING onto the stage in the second half as indomitable third American President Thomas Jefferson. Not having seen the stage show, I was taken completely by surprise by this, revelling in its revisionist genius and offbeat, quirky hip-hop charm, spellbound by the skilful ease with which is takes the sometimes quite dull historical fact and skews it into something consistently entertaining and absorbing, transported by the catchy earworm musical numbers and thoroughly tickled by the delightfully cheeky sense of humour strung throughout (at least when I wasn’t having my heart broken by moments of raw dramatic power). Altogether it’s a pretty unique cinematic experience I wish I could have actually gotten to see on the big screen, and one I’ve consistently recommended to all my friends, even the ones who don’t usually like musicals. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t need a proper Les Misérables style screen adaptation – this is about as perfect a presentation as the show could possibly hope for.

16. SPUTNIK – summer’s horror highlight (despite SERIOUSLY tough competition) was a guaranteed sleeper hit that I almost missed entirely, stumbling across the trailer one day on YouTube and getting bowled over by its potential, prompting me to hunt it down by any means necessary. The feature debut of Russian director Egor Abramenko, this first contact sci-fi chiller is about as far from E.T. as it’s possible to get, sharing some of the same DNA as Carpenter’s The Thing but proudly carving its own path with consummate skill and definitely signalling great things to come from its brand new helmer and relative unknown screenwriters Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev. Oksana Akinshina (probably best known in the West for her powerful climactic cameo in The Bourne Supremacy) is the beating heart of the film as neurophysiologist Tatyana Yuryevna Klimova, brought in to aid in the investigation in the Russian wilderness circa 1983 after an orbital research mission goes horribly wrong. One of the cosmonauts dies horribly, while the other, Konstantin (The Duelist’s Pyotr Fyodorov) seems unharmed, but it quickly becomes clear that he’s now the host for something decidedly extraterrestrial and potentially terrifying, and as Tatyana becomes more deeply embroiled in her assignment she comes to realise that her superiors, particularly mysterious Red Army project leader Colonel Semiradov (The PyraMMMid’s Fyodor Bondarchuk), have far more insidious plans for Konstantin and his new “friend” than she could ever imagine. This is about as dark, intense and nightmarish as this particular sub-genre gets, a magnificently icky body horror that slowly builds its tension as we’re gradually exposed to the various truths and the awful gravity of the situation slowly reveals itself, punctuated by skilfully executed shocks and some particularly horrifying moments when the evils inflicted by the humans in charge prove far worse than anything the alien can do, while the ridiculously talented writers have a field day pulling the rug out from under us again and again, never going for the obvious twist and keeping us guessing right to the devastating ending, while the beautifully crafted digital creature effects are nothing short of astonishing and thoroughly creepy. Akinshina dominates the film with her unbridled grace, vulnerability and integrity, the relationship that develops between Tatyana and Konstantin (Fyodorov delivering a beautifully understated turn belying deep inner turmoil) feeling realistically earned as it goes from tentatively wary to tragically bittersweet, while Bondarchuk invests the Colonel with a nuanced air of tarnished authority and restrained brutality that made him one of my top screen villains for the year. One of 2020’s great sleeper hits, I can’t speak of this film highly enough – it’s a genuine revelation, an instant classic for whom I’ll sing its praises for years to come, and I wish enormous future success to all the creative talents involved.

15. THE INVISIBLE MAN – looks like third time’s a charm for Leigh Whannell, writer-director of my ALMOST horror movie of the year (more on that later) – while he’s had immense success as a horror writer over the years (co-creator of both the Saw and Insidious franchises), as a director his first two features haven’t exactly set the world alight, with debut Insidious: Chapter III garnering similar takes to the rest of the series but ultimately turning out to be a bit of a damp squib quality-wise, while his second feature Upgrade was a stone-cold masterpiece that was (rightly) EXTREMELY well received critically, but ultimately snuck in under the radar and has remained a stubbornly hidden gem since. No such problems with his third feature, though – his latest collaboration with producer Jason Blum and the insanely lucrative Blumhouse Pictures has proven a massive hit both financially AND with reviewers, and deservedly so. Having given up on trying to create a shared cinematic universe inhabited by their classic monsters, Universal resolved to concentrate on standalones to showcase their elite properties, and their first try is a rousing success, Whannell bringing HG Wells’ dark and devious human monster smack into the 21st Century as only he can. The result is a surprisingly subtle piece of work, much more a lethally precise exercise in cinematic sleight of hand and extraordinary acting than flashy visual effects, strictly adhering to the Blumhouse credo of maximum returns for minimum bucks as the story is stripped down to its bare essentials and allowed to play out without any unnecessary weight. The Handmaid’s Tale’s Elizabeth Moss once again confirms what a masterful actress she is as she brings all her performing weapons to bear in the role of Cecelia “Cee” Kass, the cloistered wife of affluent but monstrously abusive optics pioneer Aidan Griffin (Netflix’ The Haunting of Hill House’s Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who escapes his clutches in the furiously tense opening sequence and goes to ground with the help of her closest childhood friend, San Francisco cop James Lanier (Leverage’s Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (A Wrinkle in Time’s Storm Reid). Two weeks later, Aidan commits suicide, leaving Cee with a fortune to start her life over (with the proviso that she’s never ruled mentally incompetent), but as she tries to find her way in the world again little things start going wrong for her, and she begins to question if there might be something insidious going on. As her nerves start to unravel, she begins to suspect that Aidan is still alive, still very much in her life, fiendishly toying with her and her friends, but no-one can see him. Whannell plays her paranoia up for all it’s worth, skilfully teasing out the scares so that, just like her friends, we begin to wonder if it might all be in her head after all, before a spectacular mid-movie reveal throws the switch into high gear and the true threat becomes clear. The lion’s share of the film’s immense success must of course go to Moss – her performance is BEYOND a revelation, a blistering career best that totally powers the whole enterprise, and it goes without saying that she’s the best thing in this. Even so, she has sterling support from Hodge and Reid, as well as Love Child’s Harriet Dyer as Cee’s estranged big sister Emily and Wonderland’s Michael Dorman as Adrian’s slimy, spineless lawyer brother Tom, and, while he doesn’t have much actual (ahem) “screen time”, Jackson-Cohen delivers a fantastically icy, subtly malevolent turn which casts a large “shadow” over the film. This is one of my very favourite Blumhouse films, a pitch-perfect psychological chiller that keeps the tension cranked up unbearably tight and never lets go, Whannell once again displaying uncanny skill with expert jump-scares, knuckle-whitening chills and a truly astounding standout set-piece that easily goes down as one of the top action sequences of 2020. Undoubtedly the best version of Wells’ story to date, this goes a long way in repairing the damage of Universal’s abortive “Dark Universe” efforts, as well as showcasing a filmmaking master at the very height of his talents.

14. EXTRACTION – the Coronavirus certainly has threw a massive spanner in the works of the year’s cinematic calendar – among many other casualties to the blockbuster shunt, the latest (and most long-awaited) MCU movie, Black Widow, should have opened to further record-breaking box office success at the end of spring, but instead the theatres were all closed and virtually all the heavyweights were pushed back or shelved indefinitely. Thank God, then, for the streaming services, particularly Hulu, Amazon and Netflix, the latter of which provided a perfect movie for us to see through the key transition into the summer blockbuster season, an explosively flashy big budget action thriller ushered in by MCU alumni the Russo Brothers (who produced and co-wrote this adaptation of Ciudad, a graphic novel that Joe Russo co-created with Ande Parks and Fernando Leon Gonzalez) and barely able to contain the sheer star-power wattage of its lead, Thor himself. Chris Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a former Australian SAS operative who hires out his services to an extraction operation under the command of mercenary Nik Khan (The Patience Stone’s Golshifteh Farahani), brought in to liberate Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal in his first major role), the pre-teen son of incarcerated Indian crime lord Ovi Sr. (Pankaj Tripathi), who has been abducted by Bangladeshi rival Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli). The rescue itself goes perfectly, but when the time comes for the hand-off the team is double-crossed and Tyler is left stranded in the middle of Dhaka with no choice but to keep Ovi alive as every corrupt cop and street gang in the city closes in around them. This is the feature debut of Sam Hargrave, the latest stuntman to try his hand at directing, so he certainly knows his way around an action set-piece, and the result is a thoroughly breathless adrenaline rush of a film, bursting at the seams with spectacular fights, gun battles and car chases, dominated by a stunning sustained sequence that plays out in one long shot, guaranteed to leave jaws lying on the floor. Not that there should be any surprise – Hargrave cut his teeth as a stunt coordinator for the Russos on Captain America: Civil War and their Avengers films. That said, he displays strong talent for the quieter disciplines of filmmaking too, delivering quality character development and drawing out consistently noteworthy performances from his cast. Of course, Hemsworth can do the action stuff in his sleep, but there’s a lot more to Tyler than just his muscle, the MCU veteran investing him with real wounded vulnerability and a tragic fatalism which colours every scene, while Jaiswal is exceptional throughout, showing plenty of promise for the future, and there’s strong support from Farahani and Painyuli, as well as Stranger Things’ David Harbour as world-weary retired merc Gaspard, and a particularly impressive, muscular turn from Randeep Hooda (Once Upon a Time in Mumbai) as Saju, a former Para and Ovi’s bodyguard, who’s determined to take possession of the boy himself, even if he has to go through Tyler to get him. This is action cinema that really deserves to be seen on the big screen – I watched it twice in a week and would happily have paid for two trips to the cinema for it if I could have. As we looked down the barrel of a summer season largely devoid of blockbuster fare, I couldn’t recommend this enough. Thank the gods for Netflix …

13. THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 – although it’s definitely a film that really benefitted enormously from releasing on Netflix during the various lockdowns, this was one of the blessed few I actually got to see during one of the UK’s frustratingly rare lulls when cinemas were actually OPEN. Rather perversely it therefore became one of my favourite cinematic experiences of 2020, but then I’m just as much a fan of well-made cerebral films as I am of the big, immersive blockbuster EXPERIENCES, so this probably still would have been a standout in a normal year. Certainly if this was a purely CRITICAL list for the year this probably would have placed high in the Top Ten … Aaron Sorkin is a writer whose work I have ardently admired ever since he went from esteemed playwright to in-demand talent for both the big screen AND the small with A Few Good Men, and TTOTC7 is just another in a long line of consistently impressive, flawlessly written works rife with addictive quickfire dialogue, beautifully observed characters and rewardingly propulsive narrative storytelling (therefore resting comfortably amongst the well-respected likes of The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War, Moneyball and The Social Network). It also marks his second feature as a director (after fascinating and incendiary debut Molly’s Game), and once again he’s gone for true story over fiction, tackling the still controversial subject of the infamous 1968 trial of the “ringleaders” of the infamous riots which marred Chicago’s Diplomatic National Convention five months earlier, in which thousands of hippies and college students protesting the Vietnam War clashed with police. Spurred on by the newly-instated Presidential Administration of Richard Nixon to make some examples, hungry up-and-coming prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confident in his case, while the Seven – who include respected and astute student activist Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and confrontational counterculture firebrands Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) – are the clear underdogs. They’re a divided bunch (particularly Hayden and Hoffman, who never mince their words about what little regard they hold for each other), and they’re up against the combined might of the U.S. Government, while all they have on their side is pro-bono lawyer and civil rights activist William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), who’s sharp, driven and thoroughly committed to the cause but clearly massively outmatched … not to mention the fact that the judge presiding over the case is Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), a fierce and uncompromising conservative who’s clearly 100% on the Administration’s side, and who might in fact be stark raving mad (he also frequently goes to great lengths to make it clear to all concerned that he is NOT related to Abbie). Much as we’ve come to expect from Sorkin, this is cinema of grand ideals and strong characters, not big spectacle and hard action, and all the better for it – he’s proved time and again that he’s one of the very best creative minds in Hollywood when it comes to intelligent, thought-provoking and engrossing thinking-man’s entertainment, and this is pure par for the course, keeping us glued to the screen from the skilfully-executed whirlwind introductory montage to the powerfully cathartic climax, and every varied and brilliant scene in-between. This is heady stuff, focusing on what’s still an extremely thorny issue made all the more urgently relevant and timely given what was (and still is) going on in American politics at the time, and everyone involved here was clearly fully committed to making the film as palpable, powerful and resonant as possible for the viewer, no matter their nationality or political inclination. Also typical for a Sorkin film, the cast are exceptional, everyone clearly having the wildest time getting their teeth into their finely-drawn characters and that magnificent dialogue – Redmayne and Baron Cohen are compellingly complimentary intellectual antagonists given their radically different approaches and their roles’ polar opposite energies, while Rylance delivers another pitch-perfect, simply ASTOUNDING performance that once again marks him as one of the very best actors of his generation, and there are particularly meaty turns from Strong, Langella, Aquaman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (as besieged Black Panther Bobby Seale) and a potent late appearance from Michael Keaton that sear themselves into the memory long after viewing. Altogether then, this is a phenomenal film which deserves to be seen no matter the format, a thought-provoking and undeniably IMPORTANT masterwork from a master cinematic storyteller that says as much about the world we live in now as the decidedly turbulent times it portrays …

12. GREYHOUND – when the cinemas closed back in March, the fate of many of the major summer blockbusters we’d been looking forward to was thrown into terrible doubt. Some were pushed back to more amenable dates in the autumn or winter (which even then ultimately proved frustratingly ambitious), others knocked back a whole year to fill summer slots for 2021, but more than a few simply dropped off the radar entirely with the terrible words “postponed until further notice” stamped on them, and I lamented them all, this one in particular. It hung in there longer than some, stubbornly holding onto its June release slot for as long as possible, but eventually it gave up the ghost too … but thanks to Apple TV+, not for long, ultimately releasing less than a month later than intended. Thankfully the film itself was worth the fuss, a taut World War II suspense thriller that’s all killer, no filler – set during the infamous Battle of the Atlantic, it portrays the constant life-or-death struggle faced by the Allied warships assigned to escort the transport convoys as they crossed the ocean, defending their charges from German U-boats. Adapted from C.S. Forester’s famous 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider (Get Low), the narrative focuses on the crew of the escort leader, American destroyer USS Fletcher, codenamed “Greyhound”, and in particular its captain, Commander Ernest Krause (Hanks), a career sailor serving his first command. As they cross “the Pit”, the most dangerous middle stretch of the journey where they spend days without air-cover, they find themselves shadowed by “the Wolf Pack”, a particularly cunning group of German submarines that begin to pick away at the convoy’s stragglers. Faced with daunting odds, a dwindling supply of vital depth-charges and a ruthless, persistent enemy, Krause must make hard choices to bring his ships home safe … jumping into the thick of the action within the first ten minutes and maintaining its tension for the remainder of the trim 90-minute run, this is screen suspense par excellence, a sleek textbook example of how to craft a compelling big screen knuckle-whitener with zero fat and maximum reward, delivering a series of desperate naval scraps packed with hide-and-seek intensity, heart-in-mouth near-misses and fist-in-air cathartic payoffs by the bucket-load. Hanks is subtly magnificent, the calm centre of the narrative storm as a supposed newcomer to this battle arena who could have been BORN for it, bringing to mind his similarly unflappable in Captain Phillips and certainly not suffering by comparison; by and large he’s the focus point, but other crew members make strong (if sometimes quite brief) impressions, particularly Stephen Graham as Krause’s reliably seasoned XO, Lt. Commander Charlie Cole, The Magnificent Seven’s Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Just Mercy’s Rob Morgan, while Elisabeth Shue does a lot with a very small part in brief flashbacks as Krause’s fiancée Evelyn. Relentless, exhilarating and thoroughly unforgettable, this was one of the true action highlights of the summer, and one hell of a war flick. I’m so glad it made the cut for the summer …

11. PROJECT POWER – with Marvel and DC pushing their tent-pole titles back in the face of COVID, the usual superhero antics we’ve come to expect for the summer were pretty thin on the ground in 2020, leading us to find our geeky fan thrills elsewhere. Unfortunately, pickings were frustratingly slim – Korean comic book actioner Gundala was entertaining but workmanlike, while Thor AU Mortal was underwhelming despite strong direction from Troll Hunter’s André Øvredal, and The New Mutants just got shat on by the studio and its distributors and no mistake – thank the Gods, then, for Netflix, once again riding to the rescue with this enjoyably offbeat super-thriller, which takes an intriguing central premise and really runs with it. New designer drug Power has hit the streets of New Orleans, able to give anyone who takes it a superpower for five minutes … the only problem is, until you try it, you don’t know what your own unique talent is – for some, it could mean five minutes of invisibility, or insane levels of super-strength, but other powers can be potentially lethal, the really unlucky buggers just blowing up on the spot. Robin (The Hate U Give’s Dominique Fishback) is a teenage Power-pusher with dreams of becoming a rap star, dealing the pills so she can help her diabetic mum; Frank Shaver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one of her customers, a police detective who uses his power of near invulnerability to even the playing field when supercharged crims cause a disturbance. Their lives are turned upside down when Art (Jamie Foxx) arrives in town – he’s a seriously badass ex-soldier determined to hunt down the source of Power by any means necessary, and he’s not above tearing the Big Easy apart to do it. This is a fun, gleefully infectious rollercoaster that doesn’t take itself too seriously, revelling in the anarchic potential of its premise and crafting some suitably OTT effects-driven chaos brought to pleasingly visceral fruition by its skilfully inventive director, Ariel Schulman (Catfish, Nerve, Viral), while Mattson Tomlin (the screenwriter of the DCEU’s oft-delayed, incendiary headline act The Batman) takes the story in some very interesting directions and poses fascinating questions about what Power’s TRULY capable of. Gordon-Levitt and Fishback are both brilliant, the latter particularly impressing in what’s sure to be a major breakthrough role for her, and the friendship their characters share is pretty adorable, while Foxx really is a force to be reckoned with, pretty chill even when he’s in deep shit but fully capable of turning into a bona fide killing machine at the flip of a switch, and there’s strong support from Westworld’s Rodrigo Santoro as Biggie, Power’s delightfully oily kingpin, Courtney B. Vance as Frank’s by-the-book superior, Captain Crane, Amy Landecker as Gardner, the morally bankrupt CIA spook responsible for the drug’s production, and Machine Gun Kelly as Newt, a Power dealer whose pyrotechnic “gift” really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Exciting, inventive, frequently amusing and infectiously likeable, this was some of the most uncomplicated cinematic fun I had all summer. Not bad for something which I’m sure was originally destined to become one of the season’s B-list features …

#onward #onward movie #The Gentlemen #spontaneous #spontaneous movie #hamilton #hamilton movie #sputnik #sputnik movie #The Invisible Man #Extraction #extraction movie #the trial of the chicago 7 #greyhound #greyhound movie #project power #2020 in movies

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pinkyshy101 · 4 years

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So I got bored and decided to type out a list of the cartoons/tv shows I’ve watched, cause why not! I think this is all I’ve watched, or at least recent enough (I’m thinking like…. 2014/15 onward, when I actively started to watch more cartoons)

It’s kinda long, and I’m kinda rambley, so I’ll put it under a keep reading thing (if I can) so you don’t have to scroll through that if you don’t want to. Idk who will actually read this, but hey maybe it’s an idea of what kind of things I might reblog on here! I’m always taking any suggestions for shows to watch, I love learning about and watching more and more cartoons! So if there’s something I didn’t list as something I watched and you think of be interested, feel free to please recommend it! I may update this with a reblog or an edit or something at some point in the future, idk though. For now, its September 19, 2020, and here’s what I got for ya

This ended up way more rambley than I meant for it to be but I started writing it at maybe 12:30ish am and now its almost 2am when I’m getting ready to post it so oops 👀 I’m not really expecting anyone to read this but hey, it’s something! Read if you wanna know what shows and other stuff I watched lol idc

Cartoons I’ve watched in their entirety (or what’s all aired as of today 9/19/20):

(updated 12/2/20 as starting with ATLA)

Gravity Falls - watched since late 2014

Steven Universe (including the movie and Future) - watched since mid June 2015, right before the second stevenbomb/sworn to the sword (early season 2)

Over The Garden Wall - watched back around when it first came out, can’t remember exactly when but sometime in 2015

Star vs The Forces of Evil - watched the first 2 seasons as they aired, then stopped watching for a while and rewatched the whole show in June 2019

Hilda - watched for the first time in I think October 2018, rewatched in May quarantine

She-ra and the Princesses of Power - watched all 5 seasons about/not even a week after season 5 came out, idk why I waited so long to watch it

The Owl House - started watching it after the grom episode aired, idk why I waited so long to watch it but molly and noelle and everyone was screaming about grom on twitter, so of course I had to watch it then

Kipo and The Age of Wonderbeasts - watched it all in early August, right before I watched The Owl House

Infinity Train - watched the pilot back in 2016, then the first season when it came out, but then I started college and didn’t get the chance to watch the 2nd/3rd season until I decided to watch the whole series (s1 again, 2/3 for the first time) this past week

Ouran High School Host Club - ok I know it’s anime not a cartoon and I can’t see myself reblogging anything from it but it’s literally the only anime I’ve watched more than like 1 or 2 episodes of/the only one I’ve seen in its entirety so I figured eh I’ll mention it

Camp Camp - I almost forgot to mention this one! I started watching it when there was I think only 3 episodes of season 1, so back in 2016, and I’ve loved it since then! I guess this summer’s season couldn’t happen cause of covid.... But I’m still excited for when/if it does eventually come out!

Avatar the Last Airbender

Shows that I’ve partially watched but not completely:

We Bare Bears - I’ve seen the first 2 seasons, maybe some of the third I can’t remember, I watched it when it first came out but I haven’t watched it in a while, so I would probably need to rewatch a bunch of it (I did rewatch I think the first season sometime this year? But it was while working on school projects so I wasn’t giving it my full attention), apparently there’s also a movie now???

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic - I was huge into the brony fandom from roughly 2013ish-2017ish, I’ve seen up to season 8 and a few episodes of season 9, and the 4 equestria girls movies, and the mlp movie; I probably know seasons 1 - 4 the most, maybe a little of 5, 6 and 7 are kinda fuzzy but I’ve seen them, 8 I watched over quarantine (since it’d been a few years since I had watched any of it, I also rewatched bits of 5-7) as well as I think the first episode or so of season 9, but I don’t remember them too well. I watched the movie (the pony one, not eqg) when it came out in theaters, and not too long after that I drifted away from the mlp fandom (tbh I was drifting a little bit before it came out, but I knew I had to stick in there at least until it came out since I had been waiting for so long for it). The equestria girls movies, I saw them all when they first came out (I even saw rainbow rocks in the theater). I think there’s like, half hour shorts or episodes or something?? That’s in the eqg universe?? But I don’t think I’ve seen any of them, and if I have it was probably a really early one a long time ago because I haven’t really kept up with anything after Legend of Everfree came out

Animaniacs reboot - I’ve seen the first 5 episodes and it’s nice!

Shows that I’ve only seen an episode or few of that I (probably) intend on continuing to watch:

Glitch Techs - I saw the first episode! Definitely want to continue it

Rick and Morty - I watched a few episodes of the first season in like March/April quarantine, but I was still dealing with online school at home finishing out last semester then. I think I want to watch this eventually, but I have other shows that I want to catch up on/watch before I’d get to this one

Tangled the Series - idk if that’s the name I’ve seen multiple names but I hope you know what I’m talking about, I saw a handful of episodes from the first season I think sometime around fall 2019, but I’d probably have to rewatch the whole thing

Adventure Time - I’ve never had cable/cartoon network so I didn’t watch this growing up, but I’ve heard really good things about it and seen a bunch of stuff from it (I’d have to be living under a rock to have not seen anything lol) but it’s so long and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet! Well I’ve seen maybe a dozen or so episodes of the first season but it was a while ago so I’d have/want to start over probably

Shows I haven’t started

Amphibia - I’ve heard it’s good! I just haven’t gotten around to it yet

Avatar the Last Airbender - probably next on my list to watch, I’ve been meaning to watch it for years but I haven’t yet, its on Netflix now so that should make it easier to watch and a friend from school made me promise that this would be the next one I’d watch so that’s what I’m doing (I did watch the last 2 seasons of infinity train that night though, since I was really wanting to finish it first… But atla is next) watched it! (updated 12/2/20)

The Legend of Korra - obviously I’m waiting to watch it until after alta, and I’m probably going to watch it right after I finish atla

The Dragon Prince - idk really anything about it other than I think it’s on netflix? and apparently it’s good and maybe gay idk but I’ve heard it’s good thus why it’s on here lol

Black Horseman - idk too too much about this other than apparently it’s good but also kinda depressing. Similarly to rick and morty I want to watch it eventually but its not insanely high on my list

OK KO - don’t know a ton about it other than it’s decent, a step up from r+m/bojack on where I want to watch it but not urgently

Ducktales Reboot - similarly to OK KO, don’t know much about it other than it’s decent, same level of want to watch

Milo Murphy’s Law - saw a couple episodes when it came out, haven’t watched it in forever so if I ever do want to rewatch it I’d have to restart it, not super high on my priority list though

Bee and Puppycat - another one I almost forgot! I don’t know a ton about this but I’ve heard its nice! Plus from what I’ve seen I like the artstyle so 👀 maybe someday

Animaniacs (original) - I started to watch the reboot and I think I want to watch the original eventually! Just haven’t gotten around to it yet

Clone High - listen it’s not that I desperately WANT to watch this, I just have friends who are like, hey, watch this lol it’s apparently not super long so why not

Other non cartoon shows I’ve watched:

Brooklyn 99 - idk when I started watching it, maybe around season 4/5ish? I think sometime in 2018 so idk the season, idk, most of the episodes I’ve only seen once so I couldn’t tell you exactly what happens in every episode but I still like it

Rise - ugh I miss this show, I started watching it after/around when the 3rd episode came out (end of March 2018?), and I don’t think I’ve watched any of it since it ended (mid may 2018) cause its not on any streaming services anymore :/ at least not that I know of but I loved it and would love to rewatch it

Andi Mack - I’d heard it was good but hadn’t watched it after it ended (early august 2019 I think I watched it), haven’t rewatched it since then but it was decent, I mainly watched it cause I had seen clips of gay but yknow it was alright

Sex Education - watched 1st season sometime in 2019, when rewatched it/watched season 2 when it came out January 2020, this is like WAY more mature than like anything on this list but like it has an interesting story

Love Victor - watched first/currently only season when it came out mid june 2017 (how was June so long ago what)

Queer Eye - I’ve seen a couple seasons of it idk I figured why not add it lol

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist - I think I watched this around when there were maybe a few episodes of season 1 left (well there’s only one season now but still), idk I liked it cause like musicals and stuff idk

Idk what else to add to this section but if I think of anything (to any category on this list) I’ll probably update it later maybe idk (again I’m not necessarily going to be reblogging stuff from all/any of these but like, I figured I’d mention it cause idk)

Musicals:

Another thing I love is musicals, like I’m a design/tech major in college rn so yeah I like theatre lol so I’m going to list some I’ve seen (mostly watched bootlegs of, but I’ll list some professional/tour ones I’ve seen in person)(but if it doesn’t say anything special I probably just watched a bootleg, 2017 was a big year for me and my google drive being filled with bootlegs…) This might not be all of them and I won’t go into as much detail (I hope, I haven’t typed it yet) but we’ll see:

Broadway tours I’ve seen: (I swear this isn’t bragging they were cheap seats way up high lol)

Dear Evan Hansen (May 2019)

Wicked (first professional show I saw, October 2017, haven’t watched a bootleg or anything of it since then and I went in completely blind)

Mean Girls (November 2019, last professional show I saw before quarantine)

Come From Away (September 2019)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (November 2018)

The Book of Mormon (August 2018, was hoping to again this August but quarantine :( )

Non professional/high school/college/other shows I’ve seen in person/been on crew for (not all of them, but some) (assume I’ve also seen bootlegs/proshots if there are any)

Newsies

Spring Awakening (spot op)

Shrek (props)

Legally Blonde

I’ve seen done way more but I don’t feel like listing them or that they’re anything I’d want go reblog/actively look at fandom content for (that’s not saying it reblog stuff from shrek the musical but still lol)

Other shows I’ve seen only in proshot/bootleg form:

Basically every Starkid show

Spies are Forever

The Solve it Squad

Hamilton

Heathers

Be More Chill (yes I was in that big amalgamation of musical fandom stuff with these and deh in 2017 aaaa)

Falsettos

Beetlejuice

Spongebob

21 Chump Street

Les Mis

Phantom

(Again maybe not necessarily all but some there’s a slight chance I might reblog things about)

Musicals I still need/want to watch/listen to:

The Prom

Six

The Great Comet (not typing it all out)

Hadestown

Waitress

Bonnie and Clyde

Something Rotten

Tuck Everlasting

Again there’s more I want to see I’m sure but I haven’t really watched bootlegs in a while…. Idk feel free to suggest shows tho

Movies I’ve seen/like: obviously I’m not gonna just every single movie I’ve seen but heres a few I like:

The Sound of Music

The Wizard of Oz - these 2 have actually always been my favorite movies since I was little, I can’t dee myself reblogging much of anything about them but figured I’d mention them cause why not

Love Simon

Some but not all Disney movies (I grew up with no cable/mostly just pbs)

Most pixar movies?

I don’t think John Mulaney shows count as movies but eh whatever I’ve seen them on netflix

Idk what else lol I know I’ve seen more movies than this but eh

If anyone actually read all of this... Wow I’m surprised honestly lol have a free cookie or something for your struggles or smth, idk, thanks for reading this though lol I appreciate you (but also slightly worry, this was a lot of words and a lot of rambling)

#long post #me #personal #really long post

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raymondbeck · 3 years

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Vintage Furniture: High Antique Furniture Standards

Practical, classy as well as typically incredibly cost effective, classic furniture remains a preferred location both for enthusiasts as well as also for purchasers wanting to outfit their homes. The reality that antique household furniture likewise works with a 'environment-friendly' possibility contrasted to purchasing contemporary flatpack part has additionally carried added interest to the area. Clicking here to find out more about furnishings right now.

An essential aspect of auctions and also supplier's purchases backwards and forwards the country, the market varies from products like Windsor benches to Yorkshire preferred Mouseman.

Item by renowned manufacturers such as Chippendale and also Gillows normally command higher prices but modern-day vintage home furniture has additionally come to the fore much more lately.

The phrase 'brown furnishings' describes typical parts created from dark lumbers like mahogany, while parts made from native lumbers like oak and pine are actually at times pertained to as 'vernacular furnishings'.

English official household furniture

Central to the outstanding long life of what is often referred to the English lodge style is the home furniture produced in Britain coming from the late 17th to the very early 20th century.

These two-and-a-half centuries gave rise to several of the favorite and most long-lasting of all cabinetmaking designs-- with the Georgian time in particular the resource of some of the finest furnishings ever produced.

The subject matter features a deep picking up history-- and its personal vocabulary.

Customarily British furniture is actually catalogued depending on to time period as well as especially with the label of a sovereign. Not only does this provide a relative day for manufacture however the epithets William & Mary, Queen Anne, Victorian and georgian additionally suggest distinct aesthetic designs that show modifications in community, style, components, cabinetmaking strategies as well as worldwide exchange.

Several items are courted on these premises. There is, for instance, a basic accolade to become attracted in between furniture produced from greatly native woods (mostly maple and pine) and also the age of mahogany that arrives in the 1740s complying with patronize the West Indies.

Dominating types

Several of the dominating styles-- alonged with language referencing whatever from lower leg designs to marquetry inlays-- delighted in wonderful longevity. Various other manners overlapped or were occasionally revived through later productions.

The preferred furniture styles of the 18th century alone consist of Baroque, Palladian, Rococo, Chinoiserie, Gothic and Neoclassicism (a lot of all of them replicated in the 19th and also 20th centuries).

The main determining feature of the great melting pot of the Victorian period is eclecticism.

Some preferred styles are carefully related to prosperous creators as well as designers, coming from George Hepplewhite to William Morris. By doing this a lot of parts are catalogued as 'Chippendale' certainly not because they were made at Thomas Chippendale's London sessions yet given that they comply with a style that showed up in his massively influential pattern book The Gentleman & Cabinet-Maker's Director.

Even pieces known to have actually come from essential cabinetmakers were usually made by journeymen as well as pupils. Chippendale, like his contemporaries in the home furniture trade, was what today might be phoned a 'company': a movie director of organization and also manager of customers as opposed to an employee at the bench.

Most parts are actually probably to stay confidential. Unlike in France, where 'ébénistes' were actually encouraged to stamp their products, marked or even labelled parts of British vintage furniture are limited. The Lancaster and London company of Gillows was actually basically distinct in its propensity to signify most of the items that left its own workshops from c. 1785 onwards.

Extra commonly, acknowledgments to famous 18th and 19th century cabinetmaking outlets are actually based upon connoisseurship and also projections based on the close study of a handful of pieces that survive with a documentary provenance.

Levels of complexity

Actually, the furniture created the country levels and also London homes of the fashionable Georgian elite-- right stuff of showpiece sales in Mayfair or even Street James's-- represent the tip of the vintage home furniture iceberg.

Coming from the Tudor to the Edwardian periods, several grades of refinement exist. The huge large number of antique furnishings in the market was made for a rapidly developing urban populace as well as the 'second-class type' that accompanied changes in horticulture and also field.

Some was actually the 'popular furnishings' created by leading shops for a price-conscious clientele, others made by 'second-tier' regional and cosmopolitan shops, however a lot more by the jobbing sphere cabinetmakers that were part of the country economic situation into the 20th century.

The introduction of industrialisation and assembly-line production-- as well as specifically the arrival of the technical round saw and also machine-cut laminates-- additionally helped to satisfy the stylish ambitions of customers with disproportionate profits.

The marketplace

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For more than a century, 'fine' English furniture has been at the commercial as well as academic heart of the British antiquities trade.

Efforts to lay out the record of the medium from its medieval starting points to its apogee in the Georgian time generated a number of the first books on British 'vintages'. Most likely even more has been actually written on the subject than every other aspect of the British attractive arts.

This is a market that increased in the 1970s-80s at a rate that produced antique home furniture a better investment than shares and home yet one that has transformed in the past two decades.

The additional recent decline in costs has been especially marked amongst some categories of 'brown' home furniture-- the unlovely term made use of to describe the fine-quality Georgian and also Victorian mahogany effects loved and also marvelled at through eras of English-speaking households.

The Antique Furniture Index observed the rates of a 'container' of typical pieces of 18th and 19th century home furniture Starting in 1968, it hit a high in 2002, but fell forty five% from its peak by the opportunity its compiler John Andrews determined to finish his yearly audit of the stock 2016.

Affordable household furniture.

Certainly, no cool review of costs can easily think about the substantial satisfaction British vintage home furniture-- surely the absolute most useful of all antiquities-- offers to its proprietors over times.

And also along with rates bad a year or two ago, couple of will disagree that right now is an outstanding opportunity to get. There are actually fewer designated furniture purchases in London than was the rule a generation ago but in the regional salerooms, huge quantities of product on all price index are actually frequently offered.

Deals are plentiful amongst a lot of forms coming from breakfront bookracks to davenports as well as Pembroke tables that have actually dropped from favour as tastes and way of lives modification.

Plenty is on promotion for reasonable three-figure totals. A lot of shoppers today seek just 2 or 3 signature antique parts as opposed to yearning to create the time period room.

Value of problem

A premium will be spent for the item that has gotten away from the incidents of reconstruction and refinishing popular to the majority of centuries' aged pieces. A great surface aging substantially enriches the character, credibility as well as market value of all vintage home furniture and also every acceptable step ought to be actually taken to protect it.

This awaits for all time periods yet is actually possibly very most noticeable on the market for period oak as well as walnut where the cost of the unblemished heir can be 10-fold that of an externally identical 'decorating' piece.

A lot more recently, the wider individual market is actually awakening to the dark-green references inherent in antique home furniture.

Scientific evaluation has shown that the carbon footprint of Georgian chest of compartments is a tiny portion (one-fifteenth) of that made through its brand new flatpack option. It is simply one more main reason those championing the marketplace feel prices will rebound quickly sufficient.

#Vintage Furniture #Antique Furniture #Furniture

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cadervoe772-blog · 4 years

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How Much Do You Fee For Showbox Apk

Exactly how to develop a successful mobile application? 15 helpful suggestions

Trending Applications.

Several utilized the application on streaming devices such as the Amazon Firestick and also Fire TELEVISION gadgets. The list below will certainly supply you with other streaming APK options that work just as great if not much better than ShowBox. On the ShowBox APK Download and install website, there is a caution on top right of the screen that customers require to make sure to check out.

best legal cost-free film applications as well as complimentary TV show applications!

The term "app" is a shortening of the term "software application". A hybrid mobile phone can hold up to four SIM cards, with a phone having an IMEI per SIM Card. SIM as well as R-UIM cards may be blended with each other to permit both GSM as well as CDMA networks to be accessed. From 2010 onwards, such phones became preferred in emerging markets, as well as this was credited to the wish to acquire the most affordable on-net calling rate.

Is fortnite shutting down in 2020?

If you have the patience to get through the modes after waiting and collecting everything in course of time, it is not pay-to-win. If you are that one who likes to drive the best car in the first race, yes, it is pay-to-win, and that money is huge. So, as I said, it depends on how you play the game.

Application is a typical term for an application, especially for simple applications that can be downloaded and install cheaply or even for free. Several apps are likewise offered for smart phones and also some TVs. To recap, a mobile application is a piece of software that operates on tablet computers as well as mobile phones. Opera Mobile Store is a system independent app store for iphone, Java, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, iOS, and also Windows Mobile, as well as Android based cellphones.

You just click the title that you intend to begin and enjoy streaming on your computer system or internet-connected gadget. To put it merely, 123Movies is a video clip streaming site that permits customers to stream pirated flicks. More individuals are ditching cord as well as resorting to streaming internet sites. 123Movies (brand-new name now is GoMovies and also GoStream) is among one of the most popular sites, because of its vast choice of titles. You most likely generally understand this network as the house to Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, butCrackle is in fact a terrific source for film and TELEVISION past that.

The app is remarkably flexible, automatically adjusting routes based upon the most recent traffic info, as well as shifting paths on the fly should you miss a turn. In addition, Waze can display crowd-sourced event reports, the most inexpensive filling station along your route and also other additionals. In addition to being a top-notch operating as well as biking tracker, Strava Running as well as Cyclingadds gamified attributes to give the common run-tracking dish an one-upmanship. The application documents your running speed, range took a trip, time and course taken, however also incorporates it with obstacles, leaderboards and success.

They're only offered online for a limited time (typically around 1 month). It currently likewise offers a decent selection of box collections, however frustratingly does not always include every collection of each show. It is essential to keep in mind that you might need to pay an added subscription to access these services.

Songs gamers.

China has suggested utilizing this innovation to track the travelling patterns of Beijing city locals. In the UK and also United States, police and also knowledge solutions use smart phones to do surveillance procedures. They possess technology that enables them to activate the microphones in mobile phones remotely in order to listen to discussions which happen near the phone.

So, without more ado, below are the very best free movie applications readily available. As you can see, there isn't a straightforward method to run ShowBox application on your computer. You will certainly require to seek the support of a 3rd party emulator. Manymo Emulator is also popular like Bluestacks as well as you can likewise download it from the Web free of charge. You can believe regarding making use of Manymo if you do not favor to run Bluestacks on your PC.

What to Expect From Free Flick Streaming Sites.

Each additional choice, each personalisation, each integration will make it harder for your users to comprehend the worth you give. Developers globally generally choose to monetize their applications by using various advertising-based company models.

Which apps are harmful for Android?

Fortnite Is Dead. During a live event (ominously entitled “The End”) concluding Fortnite's tenth season on Sunday, the universe of the game was obliterated, its entire map sucked into a black hole. (You can see video of the destruction here courtesy of IGN.)

Exactly How to Download and install Motion Pictures from the Application Above?

Several of these categories require to be taken with a grain of salt. The Apple Application Store application accessibility numbers are climbing annually, yet the download growth rate is a lower percentage compared to the Google Play Store. Based upon this info, I think it's secure to conclude that the number of apps offered on each shop isn't linked to rising app downloads overall. Mobile Apps For Occasions Produce mobile experiences your guests will enjoy. Nowadays, the social media sites advertising and also connectivity do aid application makers to make their mobile Get More Info applications popular.

As there were even more mobile users in 2016 then desktop computer individuals across the glove. All points consisting of solutions, products, and also also supplies will require to suit to hand-held devices like phablets, tablets and mobiles.

What is the most downloaded mobile game?

It doesn't matter PC or Mobile. Later, now a days trend, PUBG is no more amazing. And now these mobile games started copying it again like they do from PUBG in 2017. In Free Fire Battlegrounds, you parachute onto a remote island with 49 different players.

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elliottsvza484-blog · 4 years

Text

Showbox Techniques Disclosed

Just how to create an effective mobile application? 15 helpful pointers

A Peaceful Place Component II: Everything we know concerning the film so far.

Several used the application on streaming gadgets such as the Amazon.com Firestick and also Fire TV gadgets. The listed here will certainly give you with various other streaming APK choices that function just as good if not much better than ShowBox. On the ShowBox APK Download and install website, there is a caution at the top right of the screen that individuals need to be sure to check out.

The 100 Ideal Android Apps.

The term "application" is a reducing of the term "software application". A crossbreed mobile phone can stand up to four SIM cards, with a phone having an IMEI per SIM Card. SIM as well as R-UIM cards may be blended together to allow both GSM and also CDMA networks to be accessed. From 2010 onwards, such phones came to be popular in arising markets, and also this was attributed to the wish to get the lowest on-net calling rate.

App is a typical term for an application, specifically for simple applications that can be downloaded and install reasonably and even absolutely free. Several applications are also offered for mobile devices as well as also some TVs. To wrap up, a mobile application is an item of software application that works on mobile phones as well as tablet computers. Opera Mobile Shop is a platform independent app store for iOS, Java, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, iOS, this website and Windows Mobile, and Android based cellphones.

Ideal Games/Apps Bargains.

You just click on the title that you wish to start and see streaming on your computer system or internet-connected device. To put it just, 123Movies is a video clip streaming website that permits customers to stream pirated flicks. Even more individuals are dumping wire and also turning to streaming web sites. 123Movies (brand-new name currently is GoMovies and also GoStream) is one of one of the most preferred websites, as a result of its huge option of titles. You probably mostly understand this network as the house to Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Obtaining Coffee, butCrackle is actually a fantastic resource for movie and also TELEVISION beyond that.

The application is remarkably flexible, instantly readjusting routes based upon the latest web traffic information, along with changing courses on the fly should you miss a turn. Furthermore, Waze can present crowd-sourced occurrence records, the most affordable filling station along your course as well as other additionals. In addition to being an excellent running and cycling tracker, Strava Running and Cyclingadds gamified functions to give the usual run-tracking dish a competitive edge. The app records your running speed, range took a trip, time and program taken, yet likewise integrates it with accomplishments, obstacles and leaderboards.

They're only readily available online for a limited time (normally around 1 month). It currently likewise provides a respectable selection of box sets, but frustratingly doesn't constantly consist of every series of each show. It is essential to keep in mind that you might have to pay an added subscription to accessibility these services.

best superior apps and paid applications for Android!

China has recommended utilizing this innovation to track the travelling patterns of Beijing city homeowners. In the UK and also United States, law enforcement as well as knowledge services make use of smart phones to do security operations. They have innovation that allows them to activate the microphones in smart phones remotely in order to listen to conversations which occur near the phone.

So, without more trouble, right here are the best complimentary film applications offered. As you can see, there isn't a simple approach to run ShowBox application on your computer. You will need to look for the help of a 3rd party emulator. Manymo Emulator is additionally preferred like Bluestacks and you can additionally download it from the Internet completely free. You can believe about making use of Manymo if you don't choose to run Bluestacks on your PC.

What to Expect From Free Movie Streaming Sites.

Each additional choice, each personalisation, each combination will certainly make it harder for your users to understand the value you give. Developers worldwide mainly select to monetize their applications by using various advertising-based organisation designs.

Which apps are harmful for Android?

Several of these categories need to be taken with a grain of salt. The Apple App Shop application availability numbers are climbing each year, yet the download growth price is a lower portion compared to the Google Play Store. Based upon this info, I think it's safe to conclude that the variety of apps offered on each store isn't linked to rising application downloads in general. Mobile Application For Events Develop mobile experiences your participants will like. Nowadays, the social media sites advertising and marketing and connection do help app manufacturers to make their mobile applications preferred.

As there were more mobile users in 2016 after that desktop users across the handwear cover. All things consisting of services, items, and also also products will certainly require to fit to hand-held gadgets like phablets, mobiles as well as tablets.

What is the most downloaded mobile game?

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

Text

The Weekend Warrior March 6, 2020 – ONWARD, THE WAY BACK, EMMA and MUCH More!

Thankfully, February ended pretty well as The Invisible Man fell just shy of my abridged $30 million opening prediction, but still, $29 million is pretty damn good, and the movie’s “B+” CinemaScore makes me think that it will do pretty well going into March even with another Blumhouse genre film opening next week. Oh, yeah, and A Quiet Place Part 2. Anyway, next week is next week. Let’s get to this week…

March kicks off with ONWARD, the latest animated movie from Disney’s Pixar Animation division, which his coming off its 10th Oscar in the Animated Feature category last month, as it launches its 23rd movie over the course of 25 years. It’s pretty amazing how far Pixar has come since it was launched with John Lasseter’s Toy Story way back in 1995, the company having amassed $6 billion in North America alone and $14.4 billion worldwide.

Onward is the new movie from Monsters University director Dan Scanlon, a fantasy involving two elf brothers, voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt, who go on a quest to find magic that will help them bring back their dead father. The movie also features the voices of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Tracey Ullman, Lena Waithe, Octavia Spencer, Ali Wong and Mel Rodriguez.

This is Pixar’s first original movie since Coco in 2017, but it’s also the first movie released by the studio outside of the profitable summer and holiday box office seasons. It’s certainly a departure, but this will also be the third time where there are two Pixar movies in the same year. The last time this happened was in 2015 when the summer release Inside Out was another $350 million hit but it led to the November release of The Good Dinosaur, which to date is still Pixar’s lowest grosser even compared to 1998’s A Bug’s Life. Good Dinosaur opened with just $39 million over the normally-lucrative Thanksgiving weekend and only grossed $123 million domestic. The March release might make some wonder if Onward isn’t one of Pixar’s stronger offerings. (Pete Docter’s Soulis getting the studio’s higher profile summer release, but that’s what comes when you turn original movies like Up and Inside Out into blockbuster hits without the benefits of being a sequel.)

Having big stars like Pratt and Holland providing the main voices might normally help, especially in terms of getting publicity for the movie, although Holland just provided his voice for Fox’s animated Spies in Disguise with an equally big star like Will Smith and that only grossed $66 million after opening last Christmas.

A last-minute boost for Onward might come from the fact that it’s preceded by a brand new “The Simpsons” short, another benefit from the massive purchase of Fox and its properties by Disney last year. That and the Pixar brand should drive business opening weekend, which should be good for roughly $50 million even with stronger family films like Call of the Wild and Sonic the Hedgehog, which will step aside to give Onward the required berth. I’m not sure Onwardwill achieve the $200 million benchmark of other non-Pixar sequels but it should be good for around $160 to 170 million with a bump from schools having spring break in March. (I’m not going to start presuming that the current corona scare might impact moviegoing, at least not just yet, although it’s something that needs to be kept in mind.)

Having not seen Onward yet, I don’t have that much more to say, but I have good news, and it’s that I’ve been invited to see Disney’s Mulan, so a.) I’ll have a review for you, and b.) I’ll hopefully have more insightful thoughts on that movie’s box office since I’ll have seen it.

The other wide release this weekend is the second team-up between Ben Affleck and director Gavin O’Connor, following their 2016 hit The Accountant. Unlike that thriller, THE WAY BACK (Warner Bros.) is more of an inspirational drama about a man trying to overcome addiction to find redemption. Affleck plays Jack Cunningham, a former high school basketball star struck down by alcoholism, who is given another chance to coach his old high school basketball team. The drama comes from whether he can overcome his demons to find redemption. It wouldn’t be a particularly inspirational movie if he doesn’t.

Oddly,The Way Back is a far more common type of March release than Onward but it is also Affleck’s second attempt at a comeback, having recovered from the bombs of the mid-00s to find favor as a director with the Oscar Best Picture winner Argo, which followed a decent-sized hit with 2010’s The Town. Unfortunately, Affleck’s 2016 movie Live By Night bombed really badly, countering the success he had as Batman in Zack Snyder’s Batman v Supermanand in 2016’s The Accountant, which grossed $86.3 million. The fact that Justice League made $100 million less than Batman v Superman got Affleck replaced by Robert Pattinson in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, due out next year, so Affleck definitely has something to prove with this movie.

Besides reuniting Affleck and O’Connor, The Way Back also has a chance to draw in older males by being set in the world of basketball, as we’ve seen movies like Coach Carter, starring Samuel L. Jackson, open big with $24.8 million over the MLK Jr. weekend in 2005. On the other hand, Disney opened the basketball drama Glory Road, starring Josh Lucas, on the same weekend and that opened with half that amount. O’Connor is no stranger to inspirational feel-good sports movies having directed Disney’s Miracle about the 1980 US hockey team, which ended up grossing $64 million after a $19 million opening in 2004. Obviously, these are all movies that are nearly 15 years old, and it’s harder to find more recent sports hits unless you look to the world of faith-based dramas, and maybe Warner Bros. hopes that crowd will be out for this story of redemption.

I wish I had more confidence in this film, although I generally have never been a very big Affleck fan, and I’m not sure if this is the kind of movie that will entice older males in the same way as The Accountant (which I didn’t like, mind you). I’d like to think that the movie can do somewhere in the range of Thunder Road’s $13 million opening, but I have a feeling that this will end up closer to $10 to 11 million this weekend and will have to rely on word-of-mouth if it wants to maintain business through a month with a lot of strong offerings to come.

Mini-Review: On paper, The Way Back would seem like a very obvious movie, both for Ben Affleck and also for director Gavin O’Connor, who has dealt with inspirational sports movies and those seeking redemption. (Warrior is still one of my favorite films he’s made to date.)

We meet Affleck’s Jack Cunningham as he’s still on a low after splitting from his wife (Janina Gavankar) with a beer can always in hand, although we won’t find out what happened until much later. Out of the blue, Jack is called by the pastor of Bishop Hayes Catholic high school where Jack was the big star destined for greatness decades earlier. Even though he hasn’t touched a ball since then, Jack takes on the challenge of trying to turn things around for the worst team in the league. At the same time, he tries to help a few individual players and not get on the bad side of the chaplin with his constant swearing.

This is a great vehicle for Affleck and O’Connor, working from a script by Brad Ingelsby, whose screenplay for last year’s American Woman was another nice surprise. Affleck really has never been better in a role that allows him to pull from his own addiction and marital issues to create a fully-rounded character. The way O’Connor shoots the basketball games and the progress of the team keeps things exciting.

The only significant problem with the movie is that the first 2/3rds of it seems like two separate movies, one involving Jack trying to bring Bishop Hayes back from being the worst team in the league and the other being Jack’s alcohol problems. The two sides of the movie rarely intersect for a good chunk of the movie.

The real surprises come in the film’s last act where we think everything is going great and can’t imagine things could get bad again for Jack… and of course, they do. I won’t say about how and what happens, but when you’ve spent the whole movie watching him do something so inspiring, it’s a little deflating to be brought back down to reality.

Sure, The Way Back may be predictable (to a point) but it’s a damn good version of the movie that you’re expecting, offering a big-time tug on the heart strings. Rating: 8/10

Hitting theaters nationwide this weekend – roughly 1,500 theaters -- is the new Jane Austen adaptation EMMA. (Focus Features), starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Bill Nighy. The movie has done pretty well platforming, but it will be a tougher sell as it expands into regions outside major cities, so the per-theater average will fall quite a lot since last weekend. I think it should be good for $2 to 3 million which will allow it to place in the top 10 but we’ll have to see how it fares before expecting much more of an expansion.

Also, Sony Pictures Classics is planning to expand Michael Winterbottom’s Greed, starring Steve Coogan, into a nationwide release, but who knows if that’s 400 theaters, 500 theaters or more? (UPDATE: Theater count is confirmed at 596 so I’m sticking with my earlier prediction of $1.2 million.) I’m not sure they should go very wide with a $7,124 per-theater average this past weekend (worse than Searchlight’s Wendy), so I don’t think it will make enough to crack the top 10 this weekend even with a fairly low entry point.

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Onward (Disney-Pixar) - $51 million N/A

2. The Invisible Man (Universal) - $16.3 million -44%

3. The Way Back (Warner Bros.) - $10.5 million N/A

4. Sonic the Hedgehog (Paramount) - $8.5 million

5. The Call of the Wild (20thCentury) - $6.8 million

6. Emma. (Focus Features) - $3 million +71% (up .8 million)*

7. My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising (FUNimation) - $2.7 million

8. Bad Boys for Life (Sony) - $2.4 million

9. Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey (Warner Bros) - $2.3 million

10. The Impractical Jokers Movie (TruTV) - $1.6 million -55%

-- Greed (Sony Pictures Classics) - $1.2 million

*UPDATE: Keeping most of my predictions the same except that I’m giving a little bump to Focus’ Emma, since it should act as decent counter-programming to the other new movies.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

The big festival kicking off in New York this week is the annual “Rendezvous with French Cinema” up at Film at Lincoln Center, which runs from this Thursday through March 15. It kicks off on Thursday with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first French language film The Truth as the opener with stars Juliette Binoche and Ethan Hawke introducing the film at 6:30pm after doing a separate conversation earlier (only standby available for the conversation and early screening but tickets available for the 9:15pm screening sans introduction). I’ll probably write more about this next week when it gets its limited release, but the two actors play a couple who come to France to spend time with her actress mother Fabienne (played by the amazing Catherine Deneuve) who is publishing her contentious memoirs. The other movie I’ve seen which I liked a little more is Quentin Dupieux’s quirky Deerskin, starring Jean Dujardin (The Artist), which also opens theatrically this month. I wasn’t able to catch Alice Winocour’s Proxima, starring Eva Green and Matt Dillon, but hopefully that will be one of the films that finds distribution, as many of the “Rendezvous” offerings, this festival might be the only time to see them. Other returning filmmakers include Cédric Klapisch, Bruno Dumont, as well as Christophe Honoré’s On a Magical Night with Cannes winner Chiara Mastoianni in attendance, plus more. Click on the link above for the full rundown.

LIMITED RELEASES

This is a pretty decent for limited release, so if you’re in New York or L.A. and have already seen some of the expanding movies or aren’t interested in the new wide releases, you have a LOT of other options… and that’s even before we get to the repertory stuff below. There are just way too many limited releases coming out the next couple weekends.

I’m gonna do something a little different this week. Instead of picking just one “Featured Movie,” I’m gonna go with a “Featured Theater” since two decent movies are opening at New York’s Film Forum this coming week. (Plus it begins a new Hitchcock series, which you can read about in the repertory section below.)

We’ll begin with SORRY WE MISSED YOU (Zeitgeist/Kino Lorber) – opening at Film Forum Weds. and in L.A. at the Landmark Nuart on Friday. It’s the new film from director Ken Loach, who has an amazing filmography of British “kitchen sink” dramas but also great historical films like The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Loach’s last film I, Daniel Blake was in my top 5 a few years back and Sorry I Missed You is very much a follow-up, once again dealing with Brits struggling with the system to make a living. In this case, it’s Kris Hitchen’s Ricky Turner and his wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) as he signs on for a “zero-hour” job delivering packages, a system that requires working longer hours. Meanwhile, Abbie is working just as hard as a home care worker. As they struggle to make a living, their teenage son is skipping school and getting into trouble.

Although as a freelance writer, I could definitely relate to the idea of having to work extra-hard in order to earn enough money to survive, especially in the jobs I was doing getting paid by piece which was never helpful in making ends meet. Seeing how the package delivery industry in northern England is used to take advantage of individuals is partially what keeps things interesting. Like The Way Back, you sort of expect things to get bad for Ricky, especially in regards to his son, but there’s a certain point where you think he’s gonna crash his van cause he’s so exhausted. It doesn’t happen but what happens next is almost worse than that. Either way, it’s another decent movie from Loach (and regular writer Paul Laverty), maybe not as good as I, Daniel Blake but still worthwhile.

From China comes THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (Film Movement), the new film from Daio Yinan (Black Coal, Thin Ice), which is quite a different film for Mr. Yinan, starring Hu Ge as mob leader Zhou Zenong, who gets into a feud with another local gang leader, ends up killing a police officer in the ensuing mayhem and ends up hiding out in the area of Wuhan known as Wild Goose Lake, becoming entangled with Gwei Lun-Mei’s Liu. This is another interesting take on the crime noir genre from Zenong, one that maybe gets a little more artsy-fartsy than Black Coal but one that also veers further into genre territory, particularly with some of the violence and bloodshed involved. It offers further proof that Yinan is a true master of cinematic storytelling since it’s so unlike the many other Chinese crime films that have come from both Hong Kong and the mainland. This one is quite the film, although I still recommend seeking out Black Coal if you ever have the chance. This one will open at the Film Forum on Friday. (While you’re going to the Film Forum, check out Corneliu Porumbiou’s crime-thriller The Whistlers, which I watched over the weekend, and it’s quite different from many other Romanian films I’ve seen, not only because it’s under 2 hours.)

Next up is THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY (Sony Pictures Classics), Giuseppe Capotondi’s adaptation of Charles Willeford’s book, starring Claes Bang from The Square and The Girl in the Spider’s Web as art critic James Figueras, who is giving lectures in Italy when he meets Elizabeth Debicki’s Berenice. It’s a meeting that turns into a fast relationship that has them both in bed, and when James is called to the mansion of a rich Italian art lover named Cassidy (played by Mick Jagger), he brings Berenice along with him. Once there, James learns that Cassidy has become the benefactor for reclusive artist Jerome Debney, played by Donald Sutherland, whose entire body of work was destroyed in a fire. Cassidy has gotten James an exclusive interview with Debney with the condition that he gets one of Debney’s in-demand paintings out of the deal. I’m not really a fine art fanatic nor have I read Willeford’s book, but I found this to be an interesting dramatic thriller in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley as you watch this cat-and-mouse game being played between the characters. Sutherland is pretty awesome as Debney, who flirts with Berenice while playing mind games with James, and the way these dynamics play out is what makes this film better than other art-driven films. As you watch this movie, you’ll probably realize that Claes Bang really should be playing a James Bond villain and then Mick Jagger appears on screen with him and you REALLY think that Jagger should have played a Bond villain anytime in the last few decades as he’s great at playing devious. This is another great release from Sony Classics in a year where they seem to be turning things around from the last couple years. So far, besides this, I’ve also liked Greed, The Traitor and The Climb, which will be released later this month.

Having been delayed from its intended December release due to many controversies, George (The Adjustment Bureau) Nolfi’s THE BANKER (Apple+) will finally hit select theaters for a few weeks before launching on Apple+ on March 20. It stars Anthony Mackie as Bernard Garrett, a young genius growing up black pre-Civil Rights and dealing with the Jim Crow racism in his hometown of Texas, so he moves to Los Angeles and becomes heavily involved in the real estate business. Eventually, he finds a partner in Samuel L. Jackson’s Joe Morris, a club owner with money and a good amount of real estate experience himself. Slowly, they begin buying up buildings in downtown L.A. using the ambitious white Max Steiner (Nicholas Hoult) as their frontman, while letting affluent black people in to build a community and Bernard decides it’s time to buy the bank in his old Texas hometown. That’s where things start going wrong, but I won’t get too deep into the story. This is a decent film from Nolfi with particularly strong performances from Mackie and Jackson, as well as Nia Long as Garrett’s wife. It’s very reminiscent of Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman with a similar level of humor despite being about a serious subject. It does hit a bit of a lull when the story moves back to Texas and the trio’s dealings with the banks, and it gets a little bogged down in all the numbers, but it does end up delivering a decent true-life story that will be of interest.

Kelly Reichardt’s latest period piece is FIRST COW (A24), set in the Pacific Northwest during the time of the Gold Rush as a cook (John Magaro) encounters a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee) in the Oregon Territory and the two of them hatch a money-making scheme to sell biscuits using stolen milk from a local landowner’s prized cow. Although I have not really been a fan of Reichardt’s work, even her historic film Meek’s Cutoff, I think with this movie she really finds her footing with two great actors/characters and a story that’s fairly intriguing in its own right. I wasn’t too crazy with how the film ended (foreshadowed by the film’s opening framing device) but it’s one of Reichardt’s few films where I didn’t get bored or lose interest, so that’s certainly sayin’ something. What’s even more impressive is that two local theaters (BAM, MOMI) held repertory series in conjunction with the release of First Cow and apparently, other cities are doing the same.

From Brazil comes BACURAU (Kino Lorber), Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s odd genre film that’s based around a small village in the Brazilian equivalent of the Outback, a remote place whose matriarch Carmelita has just passed away at the age of 94. There are forces at work trying to drive the villagers out of their homes, including putting a dam to cut off their water supply, but things get stranger when a nearby farmer and his family end up dead, which leads to a twist that takes the film directly into genre territory. I don’t want to say too much about what happens but it involves Udo Kier and a lot of weapons… Bacurau opens at the IFC Center downtown and Film at Lincoln Center uptown (with QnAs at the latter, which is also holding a “Mapping Bacurau” series starting March 13.)

Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ SWALLOW (IFC Films) stars Haley Bennett as a newly-pregnant housewife married to her perfect husband Richie (Austin Stowell, who recently appeared in Fantasy Island), but as she tries to please him and his parents, she starts developing a dangerous habit in the form of a disorder called pica that has her compulsively swallowing inedible objects. Okay, then. It will open at the IFC Center, the Laemmle Monica Film Center and as well as On Demand and digital. Bennett won an award for her acting at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, but I somehow missed it.

Next, we have a trio of films opening at New York’s Village East Cinema and a few other theaters both in New York and select cities:

I really wanted to like Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s Irish horror-comedy EXTRA ORDINARY (GDE) more, since the trailer really made it seem like something I might enjoy. In the movie, Maeve Higgins plays Rose, a smalltown driving instructor who has supernatural talents who is called upon by Barry Ward’s Martin Martin, whose daughter is being used by a former rock star (played by Will Forge) who needs a virgin to commit a Satanic pact to regain his fame. The movie just seemed rather silly and not nearly as funny as the trailer makes it seem, but maybe it would be better seing it with an audience.

Another movie that looks good (and I hope to watch soon) is Ricky Tollman’s directorial debut, the political thriller Run This Town (Oscilloscope), which stars Ben Platt (from Pitch Perfect), Mena Massoud, Nina Dobrev, Scott Speedman, Jennifer Ehle and Damian Lewis, quite an impressive cast. Platt plays Bram, a young journalist who becomes entangled in a political scandal with his political aide friend Kamal (Massoud) after catching the latter’s city hall boss doing something bad that can help the former’s career.

Also opening this weekend at the Village East and other cities, Anna Akana stars in Emily Ting’s semi-autobiographical Go Back to China (Gravitas Ventures) playing a spoiled rich girl named Sasha Li, who is forced by her father to return to China after blowing through her trust fund. Once there, Sasha finds herself by reconnecting with her estranged family and getting into toy designing. I haven’t watched this yet but the trailer looks cute, and I might have to make an effort to watch this.

Sadly, I had to refrain mentioning Daniel Radcliffe’s previous movie released last week, but he stars in another one this weekend, Francis Annan’s Escape from Pretoria (Momentum) based on Tim Jenkins’ autobiography “Inside Out: Escape from Pretoria Prison,” a thriller about the attempt by two political captives to break out of prison during apartheid South Africa. It also stars Daniel Webber, Ian Hart, Mark Leonard Winter and Nathan Page.

A few other films I haven’t had a chance to watch include William Nicholson’s Hope Gap (Roadside Attractions), starring Annette Bening and Bill Nighy with Bening playing Grace, a woman who learns her husband (Nighy) is leaving her after 29 years and how that break-up affects their grown son (Josh O’Connor).

Freida Pinto and Leslie Odom Jr. star in Takashi Doscher’s Only(Vertical Entertainment) in which a comet releases a deadly virus that attacks all the women in the world forcing the two of them into hiding in their apartment from the savages hunting the surviving women. That’s a pretty strange premise that sounds like the opposite of the comic book series “Y the Last Man.” If only there was enough time to watch half the movies opening this weekend.

I accidentally included D.W. Young’s doc The Booksellers (Greenwich) in last week’s column, but it actually opens at the Quad in New York and other cities this Friday. It takes a look behind the scenes at the world of rare books with appearances by Parker Posey, Fran Lebowitz and Gay Talese.

From Bollywood comes BAAGHI 3 (FIP), Ahmed Khan’s martial arts action movie, starring series regular Tiger Shroff (who is filming a Bollywood remake of Rambo!) and Ritesih Deshmukh as brothers Ronnie and Vikram, the latter being kidnapped and beaten while abroad for work and Ronnie seeking revenge. Shraddha Kapoor returns after starring in the first movie of this action series.

Other movies, mostly hitting On Demand (with limited theatrical) include Transference (Epic Pictures), which opens in L.A. on Friday and hits On Demand next Tuesday, Final Kill (Cinedigm), Beneath Us (Vital Pictures) and Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss (MarVista Entertainment).

STREAMING AND CABLE

Some big stuff hitting the streaming…um… streams this weekend, including director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg’s latest collaboration, the action-thriller SPENSER CONFIDENTIAL on Netflix. I have really enjoyed this duo’s collaborations in the past, including Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon and Lone Survivor. (Mile 22 was a bit of a disappointment, considering how great those other three were.) This one has Wahlberg playing the title character Spenser, an ex-cop who teams with his roommate Hawk (Winston Duke from Usand Black Panther) to take down criminals responsible for killing two Boston police officers.

Equally exciting is the launch of Alex Garland’s new sci-fi series Devs, which will launch on FX on Hulu on Thursday. This is a really terrific premise from the director of Ex Machina and Annihilation with a fantastic cast that includes an amazing cast that includes Nick Offerman, Alison Pill, Jin Ha, Cailea Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson and more.

Also launching this week on Hulu is Nanette Burstein’s documentary Hillary (Hulu), which followed former Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton over the course of her 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The movie just premiered at Sundance in January to raves.

Steven Spielberg’s revival of his popular ‘80s anthology series Amazing Stories will debut on Apple TV+ this Friday with the first episode, “The Cellar.”

REPERTORY

Before we get to the regular repertory stuff, I want to mention that Satoshi Kon’s classic 2003 anime Tokyo Godfathers will get a nationwide theatrical release via Fathom Events with Monday night, March 9, being the original subtitled version while Weds. the 11th, there will be a dubbed version.

METROGRAPH (NYC):

The big debut this week is the Metrograph Pictures release of the restored version of Fruit Chan’s 1997 classic Made in Hong Kong, which has never been released in the United States! Apparently it was also the first movie released in Hong Kong after it received independence in 1997. It’s an interesting crime tale that deals with the relationship between three young people, hoodlum August Moon, who collects debts for a local loan shark, his dim-witted friend Sylvester and Ping, an attractive but troubled young girl who begins a relationship with August. It also deals with the death of a young girl who seemingly jumped off a roof and the three of them trying to solve the case and get a few letters she left behind to those they were meant for. If you can imagine a cross between River’s Edge, Me and Earl and the Dying Girland the recent Peanut Butter Falcon, all set in the gritty street crime culture of 1997 Hong Kong, then you can only begin to imagine what you’re in for, but it’s an amazing film and nothing you would ever see made or released in the U.S., so good on Metrograph for picking up the distribution rights and getting it out to the world.

On Sunday, Metrograph regular Alex Ross Perry will be showing Peter Hyams’ 1974 film Busting, but on Saturday, actor Chiara Mastroianni, who will be in town for “Rendezvous with French Cinema” (see above) will show her “Dream Double Feature” of Dino Risi’s 1962 film Il Sorpasso and Charles Laughton’s psychological horror classic The Night of the Hunter (1955).

This weekend’s Late Nites at Metrograph is Fassbinder’s 1972 film The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and apparently, the “Playtime: Family Matinees” has been replaced with “Metrograph Matinees” on Saturday and Sunday, which includes some less kid-friendly fare. For instance, this weekend, they’re showing Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967), which I’m assuming isn’t for the kiddies.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC)

Tonight’s “Weird Wednesday” is Robocop 2, while next week’s “Terror Tuesday” is the 1989 giallo Paganinni Horror, starring Donald Pleasance, and “Weird Wednesday” is the 1985 action film Sword of Heaven.

Over on the West Coast, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Downtown Los Angeles will screen 1968’s Wild in the Streetsas it’s “Weird Wednesday.” Saturday’s “Kids Camp” is The Shaun the Sheep Movie and then Sunday is a Brunch screening of The Brady Brunch. Marc Bernarndin’s Monday “The Minority Report” screening is Joss Whedon’s 2005 film Serenity. Next week’s “Terror Tuesday” is Kathryn Bigelo’s Near Dark and then the “Weird Wednesday” is Bobcat Goldthwait’s 2011 dark comedy God Bless America

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Weds’ afternoon matinee is Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973), while the Weds/Thursday night double feature is The Man Who Would Be King (1975) with Zulu Dawn (1979). The “Freaky Fridays” matinee is Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Trooper (1997) and then we’re into the weekend with Friday/Saturday double features of Blake Edwards’ The Return of the Pink Panthe r(1975) and The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1975), both starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau. The weekend’s “Kiddee Matinee” is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Princeand the Saturday midnight screening is Hal Ashby’s fantastic Harold and Maude. Sunday and Monday will continue the Blake Edwards love with 1965’s The Great Race with one of the greatest all-star casts of the decade. On Monday afternoon you can see the classic House Partyfrom 1990 and then Tuesday’s Grindhouse is David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) with Scalpel (1977).

FILM FORUM (NYC):

The big rep series beginning this week on Wednesday and running through March 19 is “The Women Behind Hitchcock,” mostly focusing on Hitchcock’s relationship with wife and editor Alma Reville and secretary Joan Harrison. The series includes Hitchcock classics like Rebecca (1940) and The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as Robert Siodmak’s 1944 film Phantom Lady (produced by Harrison) as well lots more. This weekend’s “Film Forum Jr.” is Jim Henson’s Muppet Treasure Island (1996) and Friday is a screening of Claude Lelouch’s Oscar-winning 1966 film A Man and a Woman with Lelouch in person. (That’s already sold out online but will have a standby line.)

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

Thursday offers an encore screening of the Russian film Come and Seeand then Friday begins “Noir City Hollywood: the 22ndAnnual Los Angeles Festival of Film Noir” with a double feature of The Beast Must Die (1952) with Gilda (1946) and then Saturday offers a TRIPLE FEATURE of Fritz Lang’s 1931 M, Joseph Losey’s 1951 remake M and El Vampiro Negro, the 1953 Spanish Language. That’s a LOT of “M”s. Saturday night in the Spielberg Theater, “Joe Dante’s 16mm Spotlight” will screen Brian De Palma’s 1968 film Murder À La Mod. Sunday offers two Film Noir double features, two from Robert Siodmak: The Devil Strikes at Night (1957) and Fly-by-Night (1942) and then the Korean noir The Housemaid (1960) with My Name is Julia Ross (1945). Meanwhile, the AERO will mainly be doing the West Coast version of “Canada Now 2020,” and then on Monday, David Mamet will be on hand to show his film House of Gamesas part of “Noir City: Hollywood.”

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

Horace B. Jenkins’ 1982 film Cane River continues through the weekend, as does Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto’s Donna Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976) plays Saturday night and then again a couple times next week.

MOMA (NYC):

Lots of new series this week including Modern Matinees: CicelyTyson, which will focus on the Tony, Emmy, honorary Oscar and Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree and her body of work with matinee screenings on Weds through Thursdays. It kicks off Weds with 1954’s Carib Gold, followed on Thursday by Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and Friday’s screening of Rob Cohen’s 2012 movie Alex Cross. The latter might seem like a strange movie to screen at MOMA, but this week also begins In Character: Daniel Craig, which will cover the roughly two decade career of the British actor best known for playing James Bond. The latter begins on Tuesday night with a screening of his Bond debut, 2006’s Casino Royale, but then it will take a week off and be back next Weds for a repeat. SThe latter is delayed for a retrospective on Israeli journalist Efratia Gitai and her filmmaking son Amos Gitai’s work called “In Times Like These.”The weekend series includes 2009’s Carmel, 1986’s Esther, 1989’s Berlin-Jerusalem and 2002’s Kedma, as well as a staged reading of his mother’s letters.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES (NYC):

A new series begins Thursday called “1995: The Year the Internet Broke” with a mix of sci-fi films like Hackers, the anime Ghost in the Shell, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, The Net, Johnny Mnemonic, Virtuosity and more. It looks like a pretty solid series, while the more obscure Dusan Makavjev, Cinema Unbound through Sunday. Next Tuesday begins “The Cinema of Gender Transgression” begins with Neil Jordan’s 2005 film Breakfast on Pluto.

NITEHAWK CINEMA (NYC):

Williamsburg will show the Julia Roberts Oscar-winning Erin Brockovich and then the Friday night midnight offerings are Dan Bush’s newish The Dark Redand Ben Wheatley’s underrated 2012 movie Sightseers. Saturday morning screening is Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve from 1950 but your other option is the ubiquitous Nicolas Cage in 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas. Monday night is a special screening of Anna Rose Holmer’s 2016 film The Fits as part of “Women’s Month.” (Next Tuesday night screening of Cage’s Gone in 60 Secondsis already sold out unfortunately.)

Over in Prospect Park, the Saturday brunch offering is Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 adaptation of The Secret Garden and then on Tuesday night is a screening of Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) as part of “Woman’s Month.”

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

“See it Big! Outer Space” continues this weekend with screenings of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity on Friday and Sunday and Star Trek: The Motion Picture on Saturday, plus 2001: A Space Odyssey screens on Saturday afternoon, per usual.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

Kelly Reichardt Selects: First Cow In Context ends on Wednesday with Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Weekend Classics: Luis Buñuel takes a couple more weekends off, while Waverly Midnights: Hindsight is 2020s is showing James McTeigue’s 2005 adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. Late Night Favorites: Winter 2020 will show Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

ROXY CINEMA (NYC)

The Cage run continues with Paul Schrader’s 2016 movie Dog Eat Dog, co-starring Willem Dafoe,on Weds and 2011’s Drive Angry Thursday.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART (LA):

Uh oh, this Friday’s midnight is…the 2019 disaster Cats!

Next week is a busy one with four new wide release ranging from Sony’s Bloodshot, starring Vin Diesel as the Valiant Comics hero, to Blumhouse’s The Hunt, the faith-based Lionsgate film I Still Believe and David Batista’s family comedy My Spy (STXfilms).

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or send me a note on Twitter. I love hearing from readers!

#TheWeekendWarrior Onward TheWayBack Emma Movies Reviews LimitedReleases Streaming Repertory SorryWeMissedYou TheWildGooseLake

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machinevisionineverydaylife · 4 years

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Pre-histories and futures of Machine Vision

Part 2: Last Friday Linn Heidi Stokkedal went to the Pre-histories and the Futures of Machine Vision symposium as the Victoria and Albert Museum. The symposium explored early moment in the development of computer art and machine vision, from the mid-1960`s onwards. Artist, designers and curators discussed aesthetic and political impact that contemporary computer vision and machine vision technologies have today. The symposium was divided into two sessions. The morning session looked towards the past, and early computer vision and art. The afternoon session was with practicing artists and what they are currently working on and looking into.

The Afternoon session started with artist Anna Ridler: Automated Dreaming: Using AI in a Creative Practise.

Ridler talked about machine learning and what it is. She finds that most people are more fascinated with the algorithm behind it, but it should be more focus on the training sets that feeds the algorithm. Ridler works mainly with GAN`s (Generative Adversial Networks) and it is a form of unsupervised machine learning. We don`t really understand how it works, but we know it loves bright colors! The way it works is that one part of it is the Detective and the other is the Art Forger. Back and forward these two try to process imagery by confirming (The Detective) and producing another image (Art Forger) until it resembles the images its been fed.

Ridler is a big fan of how these images turn out. They have a meandering dream quality and many imperfections. She also thinks they inspire a different way of looking at photographs. We are no longer briefly glancing, like we normally do with images. With generative images we look closer, because we want to find the counterfeit, or study the deepfake.

Returning to the thoughts on why we should be more concerned about datasets, Ridler says they are the difficult part of making GAN`s. Algorithms are often open sourced and easy to get. Datasets are difficult to make, takes a long time and a lot of natural resources. To avoid bias in datasets, the best thing to do is to make your own. At least then you can be in fully control of the classifications of your data. “Classifying is human” she says, and we have always done it. Like this picture below where the world are divided into fourteen categories. Datasets are contemporary encyclopedias and they are linked to memory.

It is boring and time consuming to make your own set, but it is worth if it avoids bias. In her work Mosaic Virus every still is generated using GAN. When she worked on her Myriad project she entered in 10 000 photographs of tulips and it cost 800 euros. She said that when you are in the process of making your own datasets you become obsessed and sensitive. It seems like Ridler almost becomes a part of the algorithm. She states that the algorithm is often considered as the “art work” while the datasets are similar to crafts. She reminds people that information is PHYSICAL. It comes from a physical space, based on physical things and it is also hard physical labour.

The next speaker was Alan Warburton: RBQFAQ. He is doing his PhD at Birbeck University and is an artist and animator. He talked about post-photographic practise and CGI history. He showed how depth map inside the new cameras works and how images are rendered from from models to looking like photographs.

Machine learning projects synthetic data into the wild and functions as a meditator between the human and machine perspective. Some of the processes he spoke about is similar to Adam Harvey`s V Frame where there is a reversed function of how we normally operate with machine learning. 3D-printing objects for it to be fed into an algoritm, instead of feeding real photos of objects.

The last speakers were Natalie Kane and Tobias Revell: What if Our World is Their Heaven. Kane works as a Curator of Digital Design at V&A and Tobias Revell is an Artist and Designer. Together they form the curatorial project Haunted Machines set up to explore the relationship between myth, magic and monsters in technology. A recent project is focusing on automated technological processes and how they shape notions of futurity and truth. Revell shared so many interesting projects and I will try and refer to many of them below.

An example they shared was a picture by Michael Hahn from 2009 called “Drone” which is not a real photograph but a rendered image based on popular imagination.

Another example is Crystal Bennes project: Development Aesthetics “chronicle the rise and rise of the inane language and visuals used to market new buildings and developments in London”. According to Revell this is foreclosing our arbitrary to imagine our future.

Another example is Liam Young`s Renderlands from 2015 where the artist collected unused 3D rendered landscape and made it into a movie.

A similar project is Hyperlinks or it Didn`t Happen by Cecil B. Evans. According to their website: It is narrated by the failed CGI rendering of a recently deceased actor, PHIL, and follows a group of digital beings—render ghosts, spam bots, holograms—as they search for meaning. Multiple storylines and materials collapse and converge to raise questions about what it means to be materially conscious today and the rights of the personal data we release.

Unreal Estate by Lawrence Lek is another project displaying an alternative world and future.

Revell is concerned about how to use subcultural tropes to change how the future looks. If not, everything imagining the future will look like Minority Report.

Kane talks about internet phenomena and rendered images representing real life. Lil Miquela who is a fictional rendered character on Instagram. Kane found it fascinating when Lil Miquela had an identity crisis when she became aware that she was a constructed person.

Shudu is another fictional character on Instagram, she is a dark skinned model that looks so great, that she actually ends up stealing jobs from real models.

Performance Artist Amalie Ullmann staged a five month perfomance online (Instagram and Facebook) called Excellences and Perfection. During this time she underwent a semi-fictional but quite extreme make-over.

Sondra Perry`s project Graft and Ash from 2016 demonstrates how technology was not good enough at the time to render the tone of her darker skin correctly.

At the last panel there were many good questions, but Joel McKim referred to Flusser answering a question I cannot quite remember but he said Flusser wrote that technical images are not windows, as one might like to think. It is overlaying the reality. Technical images are not revealing or seeing the world a new, but only seeing it through a digital layer.

Another tendency observed by one of the people in the crowd was that the first half of the symposium represented machine vision as playful and creative and a gesture of creation, while the afternoon-session had a more serious tone. McKim answered that it is probably because we are more exhausted by technical images now, because it is everywhere and patterning out everyday life. In the beginning it was more experimental and new. I imagine that in the start we had a different imagination and idea of how machine vision would develop, more akin to what we have read in science fiction novels. Now that we are here it is possibly a bit more dystopic then what we expected back then.

Written by Linn Heidi Stokkedal 04.03.2020

#Pre-histories and futures of Machine Vision #Machine vision in everyday life #symposium #Victoria and Albert Museum

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Awesome Moms of Science Fiction and Fantasy

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Fantasy tends to be a genre of dead mothers and wicked stepmothers. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise since modern stories often draw on generations of fairy tales and retellings with absent moms. Yet when the mothers are part of the story, they frequently function solely in their parental role, without an indication of their own personhood beyond that. So for Mother’s Day, I wanted to create a list of some of science fiction and fantasy’s (SFF) amazing moms. We may not get to see the lives of these moms on screen or on the page, but we’ve got the clues to know that they are their own people—and that makes them realer mothers.

Laurel Lightfoot

I’ve already written about what I loved about Pixar’s Onward as a gamer, but my first response to the film really came as a mother. Laurel Lightfoot, a single mom who has been raising two boys since her husband died 16 years earlier, doesn’t hesitate for a second to charge into danger when she thinks her boys are in trouble. While there’s a classic Mama Bear element that emphasizes her mom-ness, there’s also the fact that she picks up a giant sword and goes head to head with a dragon.

I watched the film thinking “I want to be the kind of mom who does that.” Part of the reason Laurel’s in shape enough to go dragon-slaying is that she does her own workouts in the morning and she’s got a mean ogoshi (hip throw) that she utilizes early on. She obviously still loves the husband she lost, but she’s moved on and is in a long-term relationship. At the end of the movie, she goes out for a girl’s night, wielding a battle ax. As a mom character, she’s got plenty of personhood beyond her role as a mom—and all of that comes together to a high degree of awesome.

Queen Ramonda

Being the mother of the Black Panther can’t be easy. Being the mother of two Black Panthers, as happens to Queen Ramonda in a recent run of comics set in Wakanda (Shuri has taken on the Black Panther mantle twice), has to be even harder.

While there’s never a doubt that Queen Ramonda takes the back seat to her children, she’s clearly got a backbone of steel. In the MCU, when Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) wins in ritualistic combat against T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda, along with her companions, brave Jabari land to gain allies in taking back Wakanda. In the first issue of Nnedi Okorafor’s excellent run on Shuri, Queen Ramonda brings back The Elephant’s Trunk, a group of women who would secretly guide Wakanda from behind the scenes. Queen Ramonda is always there to support her children, but she’s also always there to support her country, and to make sure that Wakanda stays strong.

Molly Weasley

For the majority of the Harry Potter series, Molly Weasley (Julia Waters in the movies) serves as the good-mom vision of what Harry could have had. She dotes on her children. She supports her husband, even when she thinks he’s made the wrong choices (flying car???). But there’s a moment at the end of the series when Molly Weasley unleashes, and we see that, as well as being a maternal presence, she’s also a witch packing a whole lot of heat in her wand. While there was a debate back when the last book came out that her magic was wasted as a housewife, there’s also an element of choice there: Who says that having powerful magic as a mom isn’t important?

Captain Callisto

While Miles from Tomorrowland may not be a television show on a lot of adult radars, it has the rare distinction of having the mom be the captain of a family run ship. Captain Callisto works for the Tomorrowland Transit Authority, and it’s her job that takes Miles and the rest of the family all over the galaxy. She’s the final word when it comes to decisions for any mission—but she’s also mom, and she’s there to help her children navigate their own place in the universe.

Janet van Dyne

The original Wasp has gone through a number of incarnations in the comics, and not all of them were great moms. Michelle Pfeiffer’s recent MCU incarnation, where it’s the hope of seeing her daughter again that allows her to communicate from the Quantum Realm, that works best for me as a character who is both all-mom and all-person.

First, Janet’s work as an agent for SHIELD led her to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the world—not something mom characters are always allowed to do. When she returns from the Quantum Realm, she’s got even more abilities, something I hope she’ll get to explore with the help of her family. But even while she’s a superhero, she still calls her daughter Jellybean with so much love, you can see it radiate from her—even when she’s doing it from inside the body of Scott Lang.

Sally Jackson

One of the guiding beacons of light through the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” middle grade series by Rick Riordan is Percy’s mother, who is the one person who loves him unconditionally. Although for the entire first book, Percy’s motivation is that he thinks his mother is dead, it turns out the gods were just playing havoc with mortals, and by the end of the novel, not only does she return to life, but she also reclaims her own personhood from an abusive relationship.

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By Kayti Burt

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The 10 Worst Movie Dads for Father’s Day

By Hannah Bonner

As the novels progress, Sally only ever appears in the background, but you can tell there’s growth and development for her off stage as she pursues her dream career, and as she becomes romantically involved with a really solid boyfriend. When Percy tries to get them both to safety late in the series, the pair enthusiastically join in the battle to save the world—which shows that parents don’t have to get left at home to do nothing while their hero kids battle against incredible odds.

Joyce Summers

While Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually does stay at home for the most part, she also stepped up to the plate when needed. She and Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) had a tumultuous relationship, and she actually doesn’t take it well at all when Buffy’s Slaying comes out, but eventually, she becomes a supportive figure in Buffy’s life, as well as a center of normalcy in the midst of weirdness.

Joyce serves in a supportive mothering role to other characters in the series—including in one heart to heart with Spike (Jason Marsters)—and loves Buffy’s supernatural sister, Dawn, despite having had her memories rewritten in order to accept her. While in many ways Joyce fits into the category of the mom who only ever gets to be a mom, the series frequently hinted at aspects of her life beyond being mother to the Slayer, and her loss was felt deeply by the characters after her (natural) death.

Muneeba Khan

Unlike Joyce Summers when she discovered Buffy’s secret identity, Muneeba Khan, mother of fan favorite Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, drops another kind of bomb when Kamala fesses up: she already knew. While Kamala has been running around, hiding her superhero activities for months, Muneeba figured out what was going on and quietly supported Kamala’s activities.

While frequently Muneeba’s role in Ms. Marvel has been as a parental figure to avoid, rebel against, or seek out for solace and comfort, there are few moments or parent-child interactions in comics that have hit me as deeply as that reveal in Ms. Marvel Vol. 3 #18. It’s both the ultimate in realizing that your mom always knows what you’re up to—and an ultimate showing of love.

Martha Kent

Moms aren’t defined solely as the person who gives birth to a child. Some of the greatest moms in SFF are adoptive, or found family. One such mom who consistently reassures with her presence is Martha Kent, who raised the orphaned Kal-El as her own. But she’s not one to just sit back and let the world happen around her. On Smallville, not only did Annette O’Toole’s Martha serve on both the Kansas State Senate and the U.S. Senate, but she also took on the mantle of the Red Queen to protect Clark’s secret identity. That’s a lot for any mom to take on!

Granma Ben

In the excellent Bone comic series by Jeff Smith, Granma Ben emerges as one of the coolest grandmothers around—early on, readers find out she’s the reigning champion of the annual cow race, and that’s long before they realize how much of her life she had to hide in order to keep her granddaughter Thorn safe.

She’s the only mother that Thorn ever knows, and she’s continually heroic in the way she stands up to the evils of the world around them, serving as a role model for Thorn—and Fone Bone—as they navigate the evils Granma Ben accidentally helped set into motion.

Alfred Pennyworth

Sometimes, the role of mother falls beyond the neat boxes celebrated on the card-giving holiday, and I think one such character who consistently serves as a mother to a broken superhero who badly needs one is Alfred Pennyworth.

Both as Bruce Wayne and Batman, the hero relies on Alfred to manage things. Alfred also regularly serves as Bruce’s moral compass, particularly in the Christopher Nolan films where he’s played by Sir Michael Caine. Alfred loves Bruce unconditionally, even when he’s making the wrong decisions, and he’s there to help Bruce be a better person—which is one of the best ways to describe the job of a mom.

Who are your favorite mothers in SFF?

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arts-culture-honours-programme · 7 years

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#OscarsSoWhite #WhoisToBlame

A refreshing inside on the continuous issue of minority representation within the academy awards and beyond

What the... Oscar is wrong with the academy awards? From Leonardo DiCaprio who forever seemed to remain Oscarless, to woman hastagging Me-too as result of sexual intimidation to the ongoing debate on the lack of ethnic minority nominations. The #OscarSowhite first appeared in 2015 when, as a reaction to all white nominations in the top Oscar Award categories, one citizen turned to twitter, tweeting:

The following year when the list of nominees portrayed a similar lack of minorities nominated for an Oscar, several actors and directors decided to boycott the annual academy awards (Cox, 2016). This year the awards did however, after a quick “envelope snafu” (Gray, 2017, p. 1), have the coming-of-age drama about a gay black man, Moonlight, win the Oscar for Best picture. Still the question remains whether this shattered a glass ceiling for ethnic minority directors, actors and films (Gray, 2017)

In the heat of this debate, On the one hand, the highly feasible ‘academy’ and its “colour-blind” (Rodriguez, 2006, p. 645), mostly white organizational structure is often addressed to as the Evil-doer. However, on the other hand looking at what the Academy awards are a representation of: the film industry, one may argue that the industries occupational careers, predominantly occupied by white man, and the markets “whitewashing” (Lowrey, 2016, p.1), is what leads to disadvantages in opportunities for racial/ethnic minorities. This post revives the ongoing trend of racial and ethnic representation in the film industry & academy awards commenting on the effects of colour-blindness within the organization of the Academy, the industries “social & symbolic boundaries” (Lamont, Molnar, 2002, p. 2 & 3) as well as the whitewashing of film in general. Not to mention the role of the critical/ biased audience in the issue of diversity. In order to get an inside in #whosis/aretoblame for the #Oscarsowhite and finally propose the possible first steps into solving the problem.

In the mist of the 2016th Academy award show La times published an article on the Unmasking of the Oscars arguing that there is an overwhelmingly unequal proportion of white male members in relation to those from a minority (Horn, Sperling, & Smith, 2012). Since 2012 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is mostly white (94 percent) and predominantly male (77 percent) (Horn, Sperling, & Smith, 2012). At that time, black members only accounted for just 3 percent of the group (Williams, Rosen, & Dvalidze, 2015). From an abstract liberalist perspective this lack of diversity, grounded in the Organizational structure (membership list), would have no effect on those who are nominated for opportunity has no colour (Rodriguez, 2006). Besides this, from a quote by Frank Pierson it appears that ethnic and racial matters within the academy are to a certain extent naturalized as he argues “We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn't reflect the general population, so be it," (as cited in Horn, Sperling, & Smith, 2012) withholding any argument incorporating racial or ethnic differences (Rodriguez, 2006). Rodriguez (2016) describes how the above-mentioned sayings are part of a colour-blind ideology emphasizing a perceived equality between racial and ethnic groups despite unequal social locations and varying histories. By claiming that success knows no culture the white dominated academy ‘marks’ themselves as “cultureless” (Perry, 2001, p. 57). I purposely say mark because even unintentionally culturelessness can become a mean to white racial superiority (Perry, 2001)

A solution making sure Academy members avoid marking themselves as cultureless would be easy; simply invite more ethnic minority actors, directors, filmmakers etc. into their voting systems. Unfortunately, this is, as the Oscars uphold a prestige position within the movie industry, not so easy (Williams, Rosen, & Dvalidze, 2015). From the official Oscar website, it appears that becoming a member you must either be sponsored by two current academy members from within their own branch, or be nominated for an Oscar, which automatically puts them up for membership consideration (“academy membership”, 2017). These requirements form both a symbolic boundary; ethnic minority actors, directors etc. who feel unwelcome within the voting sphere of the Academy, as well as an objectified boundary; manifested in their unequal access to and unequal distribution of roles within the voting academy (Lamont, Molnar, 2002) It seems that as long as the current academy voters do not vote for more diversity these boundaries remain persistent. yet nonetheless, an analysis by the Economist (2016) suggests that voter prejudice is not the sole reason for social boundaries. As minority actors have secured only 15 % of the top roles the Academy’s choices remain limited. (“How racially skewed are the Oscars?”, 2016)

“If the industry as a whole is not doing a great job in opening up its ranks, it's very hard for us to diversify our membership." – writer-director, Phil Alden Robinson (as cited in Horn, Sperling, & Smith, 2012)

From the quote by Robinson it appears that social and symbolic boundaries are also visible in the film industry at large (Lamont, Molnar, 2002). From a historical context it’s found that when post war America had tried to assimilate native Americans into American culture but failed to offer an equal position, the upcoming movie industry knew a similar process failing to include the society at large (Magnien, 1973). From history, onwards this white ideal has led to today’s whitewashing of the movie industry (“BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”, 2017). Whitewashing is the practice of erasing people of color commonly with a white actor replacing a minority actor, or the other way around (Lowrey, 2016). Those in favour of non-white actors and actresses playing Asian or African kings and pirates, argue that the industry “simply choses the best” (Lowrey, 2016, p. 4) regardless of their ethnicity. Besides that, financial uncertainty causes director and producer to choose star power over risking to lose their audience to unknown minorities (Lowrey, 2016). These are all excuses according to Dr. Nancy Yueng who, in her book Reel inequality, comments on the lasting problem of whitewashing in the movie industry. In an interview with the BBC commenting on the recent movie cancelling of actor Ed Skrein after receiving criticism for being cast for an originally Asian role, he asks Yueng: haven’t we not passed the white washing? (“BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”, 2017) No, Yueng responds. saying that “Hollywood isn’t just there yet” (as cited in “BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”, 2017) due to their risk adverse behaviour (“BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”, 2017). An example of this can be found in how, casting calls often call for “Caucasian or any other ethnicity” (Lowrey, 2016, p.4), marking any ‘other ethnicity’ as the odd ones out, is simultaneously preferring the unmarked category of the ‘Caucasian’ (Brekhus, 1998). As a result of marking ethnic minorities are often typecast in particular roles. For example, black actors who are type casted into ghetto roles, characterized by an alternative speech (Yueng, 2010). These type castings again limit the reach of ethnic or racial minority cultural practioners, but why?

Although only being small part in the production process is the audience demands, it is worth mentioning that looking at the cognitive behaviour of the audience, it becomes clear that a reason for the industry her whitewashing and typecasting can be found in the fact that even “America’s minority audiences watch the movies that ignore them” (Cox, 2016, p.1). The audience, critical demand for a more diversified industry is in immediate contrast to what we buy our tickets for (Cox, 2016). When looking ate Griswold’s “Cultural diamond” (“Diagrams of Theory: Griswold's Cultural Diamond”, n.d, p.1) it seems that consumer demands influence cultural producers but cultural producers also influence consumer demands creating a virtuous circle (see figure 1.1). So as long as America needs the motion picture business, and the motion picture business needs the United States audience, ethnic minorities are stuck in the typecasting roles that have brought the audience commercial success and the audience viewing pleasure (Magnien, 1973). In order to break this circle solutions must be found both from within as well as from the outside.

Luckily, today, audience demands are influenced by changing demographics, where people are growing up in more diverse environments and want to see people that represent themselves and where they come from. (“BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”, 2017). This is in line with what McCarthy (2016) describes as searching for the real authentic experience. The industries reaction to this upcoming trend would in contrast to the whitewashing of film, cast more people of color for roles written for them in order to achieve the ‘real’ dimension of the film and generate the authentic experience. As the ongoing debate from the outside the industry has already revised conventional patterns of markedness, by bringing the lack of ethnic minority representation within the film industry to the foreground (Brekhus, 1998). Brekhus (1998) argues that from within, marking everything, filling in all the shades of social continua, there can no longer be a distinction made between cultural practioners from different ethnic backgrounds. This can only be achieved however through the further ornamentation not only of the unmarked centre but of the interior segments of the poles that fall below a visible threshold of markedness (Berkhus, 1998). no longer distinguishing between ‘causation’ and ‘other ethnicities’ on their calling sheet will only affect ethnic minority inclusion once the choice is no longer effected white predjudice. As far as for the academy, as they are eventually choosing the best and the “professional” (as cited in Horn, Sperling, & Smith, 2012) in doing so it is however important to not ignore but incorporate the unequal positions of actors, directors and filmmakers within the industry instead.

All in all, answering the question of who is to blame for the Oscars being so white it is difficult to point fingers into one direction. Although we may to some extent speak of increasing cultural awareness within the field, the vicious circle which entails how the academy’s colour-blindness might be a reflection of the industry’s easily replacing of an actor with color for a white actor in order to be certain of their market success, is still persistent as the debate continuous to exists. The question remains whether the future will ever know the hashtag of #Oscarssoinclusive. And Even when, in the search of authentic as well as raising cultural awareness, marking everything, will lead to a more diversified movie industry and more ethnic minority representational in the nominations, we must quickly move onto the next issue because hey, what would the Oscars be without a little scandal?

By Bente Lutteke

Bibliography

Academy Membership. (2017, October 13). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.oscars.org/about/join-academy

“BBC Interviews Dr. Nancy Wang Yuen on Whitewashing”. (2017, August 29). Retrieved October 30, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIp9a0LkbE4

Brekhus, Wayne. 1998. A sociology of the unmarked. Sociological Theory 16 (1): 34-51.

Cox, D. (2016, February 26). What #OscarsSoWhite got right – and wrong. Retrieved October 30, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/feb/25/oscarssowhite-right-and-wrong-academy-awards-audience

Diagrams of Theory: Griswold's Cultural Diamond. (n.d.). Retrieved October 31, 2017, from https://www.dustinstoltz.com/blog/2016/12/30/diagrams-of-theory-griswolds-cultural-diamond

Gray, T. (2017, October 26). Oscars: Why Wrong-Envelope Snafu Sets the Tone for the New No-Rules, No-Logic Race. Retrieved October 30, 2017, from http://variety.com/2017/film/news/2018-oscars-wrong-envelope-snafu-1202598359/

Hancock, B.H. 2008. “Put a little color on that!” Sociological Perspectives 51 (4): 783-802.

Horn, J., Sperling, N., & Smith, D. (2012, February 19). Unmasking Oscar: Academy voters are overwhelmingly white and male. Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-unmasking-oscar-academy-project-20120219-story.html

How racially skewed are the Oscars? (2016, January 21). Retrieved October 29, 2017, from https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/01/film-and-race

Lamont, Michèle & Virág Molnár. 2002. The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual Review of Sociology 28 (1): 167-195

Lowrey, W. (2016). People Painted Over: Whitewashing of Minority Actors in Recent Film. Lake Worth, FL: Palm Beach State College. Web, 11.

MacCarthy, M. (2016). Touring ‘Real Life’?: Authenticity and Village-based Tourism in the

Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. In ALEXEYEFF K. & TAYLOR J. (Eds.), Touring

Pacific Cultures (pp. 333-358). Australia: ANU press, pp. 335

Magnien, N. (1973). An Actor’s Outrage, or a Generation’s Wake-up Call? Native American Activists’ Declaration at the 45th Academy Awards Ceremony. KANATA, 40, 118.

Perry, P. (2001). White means never having to say you’re ethnic: White youth and the construction of “cultureless” identities. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30 (1): 56 – 91.

Rodriquez, J. (2006). Color-Blind Ideology and the Cultural Appropriation of Hip-Hop. Journal Of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(6), 645-668

Williams, B., Rosen, C., & Dvalidze, I. (2015, February 20). Why It Should Bother Everyone That The Oscars Are So White. Retrieved October 29, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/20/oscars-diversity-problem_n_6709334.html

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