#especially when the acting isn't bad either...the direction is super weird and the editing is sort of awkward but I don't dislike the actors

[spaceorphan18]

it’s always been funny to me that when people talk about acting on glee, some point out chris in s5b as being “checked out” when i assumed that kurt’s exhaustion and frustration was the point. kurt was probably overwhelmed from working/interning while being a full time student (especially following finn’s death and burt’s health problems), then comes him being the victim of a hate crime and having relationship problems all while he’s living in close quarters with multiple people and zero privacy. imo it makes perfect sense that kurt would be disengaged. i personally think chris was one of the best actors in the show overall and pretty consistent in acting as kurt, though kurt did also have some of the best and most consistent writing lol

I mean, yes I agree with all of this.

I think something we didn't know when it was airing but had a feeling about was the fact that something bad was going to happen to Klaine. I think Chris (and Darren) did know where the season was going -- and where Season 6 was going, and played it accordingly. I think Kurt's actions within the context of the bigger story, make sense.

I do think, though, that Glee was trying to walk a tightrope, though -- and make sure that Klaine was in a decent spot by the end of Season 5 so to be semi-satisfying if they had to be cancelled.

I agree, too, that especially among the young actors - Chris was at the top of the list.

When I think about what was going on during Season 5 behind the scenes -- Cory had just died, Chris was in the middle of whatever the hell was going on with Lea and Naya, his books were just taking off, he was in a new-ish stable relationship with someone he really cared about and the Tinhatters are threatening this person's life and attempting to sabotage his career... it's kind of remarkable that Chris didn't outright quit.

(In fact - those of use who were around - remember when Chris's twitter was hacked in the hiatus between 5 and 6 saying that he was leaving the show? And we all pretty much believed it because, um, yeah??)

And still, Chris had some of the highest professionalism even when we know he wasn't thrilled with some of the plot lines he was given.

I also agree that Kurt had some of the most consistent writing. I mean, more goes into a show than acting, and as I've said before, there's some really weird writing, directing, editing, etc choices on the show. The tone is all over the place. The show, as a whole, is a really hot mess -- and I'd argue it was that way even in the beginning. So, the fact that Kurt was relatively on even ground throughout the series is kind of remarkable.

Back in the day - a lot of it was from Kurt stans who wanted to layer a reason of hate over the Klaine stuff (which was super annoying then).

Now - there's this weird reassurance of it -- but in general, the back half of Season 5 isn't as beloved with new groups of fans? Have no idea why?? But I'm not about to go on to TikTok and figure it out.

I'm so over the Chris/Season 5 stuff, tbh. It is what it is. Either enjoy the show for what it is or don't? Idk.

[kuronekonerochan]

Random rant about Court Lady (ps: if you like the drama just don’t read it pls, or if you do, don’t @ me)

Disclaimer: I personally hate this drama and I almost never post about dramas negatively, just for the ones I like and ignore the ones I dislike. This one annoys me and I am aware that my criticism is probably only partially objectively valid and also partially nitpicks that irked me but are not “wrong” per se.

Also,just bc I don’t like it, if others like it, I have nothing to say about it except that liking it is as valid as my opinion and If you’re enjoying it, I’m glad and in no way judging bc in the end it’s just fiction and to each its own :)

I started watching this and dropped it at about ep8 bc I didn’t really enjoy it, despite the fact that I did find the production and technical aspects of the drama good and a bit different from the usual (including costume choices, etc). I even liked some of the characters like the Lu Daughter, the Pirate and the Princess (the one who hooks up with the ml’s brother). Mostly I liked Xu Kai, even as a bratty dude. Still, not enough stuff to keep my interest. After that I saw a random ep and realized the leads barely show up (and not even together) and that the screentime was dedicated to way too many  secondary characters, none of them the least interesting or likable.

But then I got bored and watched the latest eps of court lady,and tho pirate, princess and enemy daughter all show up, it's still boring and although it has  tons of characters, 99% of them are entitled psychopaths, and not even interesting psycho types at that, or masterminds that are enjoyable to watch. Nope they are all just annoying bullies and horrible ppl, men and women alike and what enjoyment can I get from this drama where the leads are almost never on scene together, there is a million subplots and characters yet almost no characters are likable and worth rooting for?

(Also, on nitpicking stuff, even tho they are probably historically accurate, I  ended up really disliking those stupid male hats and that terrible female wig style updo that looks terrible on almost every actress, while also making most of them impossible to tell apart. Besides, I changed my mind about the costume design...it ended up being a mess (not bc I don't like it personally) but bc you have scholars, penniless retired pirates, nobleman and royalty all wearing the exact same type of clothes with no difference in fabric, or embellishments or accessories to tell apart their hierarchic rank. Truly, one of the royals was addressed as your majesty and I'm like "dude, your clothes seem cheaper than the extras and servants around you".)

I ended up watching one of the latest ep where the leads finally have decent screentime...and omg it's not only the 1000 side characters who are unlikable, the leads are awful too...why would anyone do a drama with just terrible people? I kind of wish them all the equivalent of period White truck of Doom ending (maybe a collective corpse bridge like 2ha or TGCF?).

And for final exit rant on the latest eps:

Idk what I was thinking checking this drama out  again...seriously all the chars in this are either plain bullies, or that plus rapists (both genders, really...dudes all try to force themselves on the women and all the women take advantage of the men being drunk/poisoned, etc to sleep with them without them being able to give conscientious consent)...this might be the worse char ensemble drama I've ever seen. not a single relatable/likable char on sight, and they give us a million of them too.

 This is truly bizarre... this type of behavior dramas usually give to their villains, so you know, of those actions they're showing are morally bad. In this one all the characters are bad doing shitty things but the drama itself is so blase about it it kind of treats all of this stuff as normal and okay?! 

It's not as if I'm usually an sjw on fiction...I enjoy my bastard characters, but the whole vibe of this drama is...off, like completely disconnected from regular human behavior, as if they all got their moral compass set to fucking awful, so fucking awful became the new normal. It's very weird bc it's almost as they don't care if there isn't anyone worth rooting for.

 And it's not just the actions of the characters...on some (much better) dramas/novels, the "heroes" are also just as morally grey as the villains and the only reason we root for them is because we're on their side (e.g. Joy of Life, Qi Ye, WoH, The Advisers’ Alliance, Ever Night S1), but usually on those dramas the characters have their own personal reasons for "ends justify the means" and from their perspective, whether doing bad or good stuff they don't think of themselves as villains, and likewise the “true” villains in those dramas also have their own narrative and reasoning which makes them somewhat relatable even if we disagree or hate them. In this ppl act shitty, fully aware that they are shitty and without remorse, for very weak reasons and honestly most of those actions are more bc they can than to serve a purpose. They are all amoral idiots. I'm weirdly fascinated by this drama's mindset.

Basically they are all that dude friend from To Rule in a Turbulent World on the first chapter beating Sanado to death just bc, but instead of giving him a context and character depth showing different sides to him (and I ended up really liking that character), the ppl in this drama just have their characters doing that shit again and again and never try to give any sort of dimension to them.

I am the Ryan Reynolds "but...why?" meme watching this.

PS: I am very aware of how repetitive and unfocused and messy this rant is, but this is a compilation of my watching experience at various stages blended into this one post and honestly this drama does not deserve me wasting my time to make this text any more cohesive, so rambly barely comprehensive mess it is.

[iamcinema]

IAC Reviews #19: Wishbone (2000)

Hey, is anyone still alive out there? I hope so.

Coming off of last year was a disaster, and well, we didn't enter 2021 on the highest of notes. I guess you could say I've been burned out and not having a ton of motivation to do a lot, even with how much I've been grinding on Letterboxd over the past few months. I think I'm ready to come back, and since there's a storm is brewing outside, let's make today a movie night...and boy, do I have a treat for you.

I think I've made it kind of apparent that I have a weakness for terrible, low-budget, trash fires. There's something oddly charming about them where they always find a way to lure me in, and given the scene on Letterboxd, there's a bunch of SOV masochists out there waiting to get their next fix. While digging around for material to cross off my lists on titles to find and add, I was reminded of a terrible, low-budget film that was shot in my hometown over 20 years ago. I'm full of fear for what's to come, and you should be too.

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Wishbone is a 2000 horror film directed by Timothy Gaer and co-created by Michael Fasciana, centering on a woman named Laurie who receives an unusual artifact from her eccentric aunt she acquired from a pawn dealer that causes those around her to disappear when they make wishes on it. Hmm, seems simple enough. Let's what we're in for, and I'm absolutely not ready because the IMDb page says this shit is over two hours long, despite a version on Youtube having it just a bit over 90 minutes. Let us pray.

Wishbone in One Gif:

This acting is might be the death of me, but I'm not sure what's going to be the catalyst that causes me to fall down the stairs and break my neck: the sound quality, the weird editing, or the music...oh, god what the fuck is the music doing? So much noise, noise noise!

Okay, so let's dig into this before I take too long of a break and I don't come back to this. I've already had to pause the movie a few times to catch my breath or just rewind and go back because there's a good amount that I keep missing because, apparently, the star of the film is the score and not Laurie. This is so, so slow. I've seen a lot of long horror movies, but at least with those, it feels like things are happening. Even Blood Lake had filler that did something to some degree, and with that, it was consistently bad. This movie doesn't even know what it wants to do. So, as a disclaimer, there's a good chance I'm probably missing some key details that I didn't hear because it seems that characterization isn't important if the music insists on talking over everyone.

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So, to date, this might be one of the worst horror movies (and movies in general) that I've ever seen and it might be one of the slowest things in the entire megaverse. This is over 90 minutes of, somehow, nothing and something happening simultaneously - if that makes any sense.

This takes its sweet ass time moving along and there's so little pay-off. The majority of the characters are either nameless or we aren't introduced to them in a way that matters enough for us to care about them. It's kind of like with Violent Shit and other low-budget slasher films where the majority of the characters serve no purpose but to be disposable. Next to the two main leads, Laurie and Joe, and maybe a few others, everyone is just forgettable and even then I couldn't honestly tell you anyone's name if it was explicitly brought up. IMDb isn't helpful either, and at this point it just makes me care even less. I'm not sure if my patience has been tested too much with this, but it's kind of sad that I'm more invested in seeing what the background characters are doing than Laurie and Joe - even though I can't really hear what the hell they're saying.

Yeah, I really can't move on without talking about the sound and the music. Why is it always the audio with these movies? This has an estimated budget of $100,000, or $154,779.43 today in August 2021. How do you have the ability to somehow not make this look like a potato for the most part, well for the day shots that is, but you don't have it in you to get a good mic and someone who knows how to mix and edit correctly? I would sort of understand if you spent the majority of the money on talent to cut corners, but this is just ridiculous. Did they use the cameras' built-in mics to catch the audio here?

I feel like I need to interrupt the movie constantly to tell them to speak up because if I turn up the volume, I'm just getting bombarded with this really weird soundtrack that doesn't fit. I shit you not, during one of the kill scenes, the music booming over it sounds like it was ripped from Kevin MacLeod's "lounge" library and then the reverse happens where ominous music is playing over a more touching scene - and that's not even a dig at Kevin as an artist. That's just how inappropriate and unfitting this editing is. The weird fucking thing about this specific kill scene is that it sounds like the audio is stacked, so there are two different instrumental tracks going on.

How do you fuck something as basic as tension up like that? The audio choices are so painfully inconsistent and it doesn't know what it wants to do. There are moments where you can hear the dialogue just fine, but then the music comes in out of nowhere to segway us into the next scene and it starts to muffle things out. If it isn't that, then the dialogue is just so soft that you'd think there was a pillow on the mic or we're hearing them from the opposite side of a sound-dampened room.

This is what I meant earlier when I said I apologize in advance if I miss anything crucial because I can't make out half of these conversations. So, I'm having to keep going back if I care enough or just having to pause and take breaks because there's only so much I can handle. This means that there's a good amount I'll blank on because I have to keep going back because I can't remember the majority of these no-named characters. Who the fuck are you people? Why am I supposed to care?

If I'm understanding the non-existent rules of the wishbone, you're connected to whoever dies in some way. So, why is any of this relevant to what's going on? If it's random, then it's another reason for me not to care just because some frat kids made a wish at some point. Again, who the hell are you and why am I supposed to lament over them? Why is there so much useless filler here? Did I mention that this is over 90 minutes long and there are *three* fucking party scenes? Party scenes are to Wishbone as ten-minute-long jetskiing and beer game scenes are to Blood Lake.

Oh, speaking of other shit that's annoying. Let's talk about general editing because the sound isn't the only thing that's a mess here.

I swear that almost every single scene in this ends with a fade-out/fade-in shot. Only one or two scenes come to mind where this doesn't happen, and the first time it did I thought my browser was freezing because it abruptly cut to black and then smash cuts to a party scene. I've never, ever seen a movie that abused this that much before and it's on par with something I would have seen made by a bunch of high school kids. So, when we have a moment where this doesn't happen and it plays out normally, it feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm sure this movie's run time could have been shaved down by at least a minute or two if this wasn't a problem, along with all the useless close-up shots that serve nothing to the plot.

It's such a waste of time. I'm so fucking tired. How was this movie's budget $100k? Did they spend most of it on renting the Scranton Police Department for a few shots or did it go towards their impromptu trip to Party City? I'm so tired and I don't care anymore.

Do you want to know what the real kicker is? With just barely twenty minutes left, the whole lore about the monkey's wishbone paw comes back and that's when Laurie and her friend Karen think something is weird. Isn't this whole realization trope that happens within the first or second act, not now with your Great Value brand version of the Dream Warriors?

Also, it's not specified how much time has gone by since the start, but it has to have been at least a week or two. It's incredibly weird how they paint the main characters and the unnamed background ones as such good friends that they don't think it's weird how almost all of them have disappeared - especially one girl who doesn't seem off-put that her boyfriend (or ex) disappeared after getting into an argument at one of the parties and none of his friends could reach him either at his own house.

The final showdown is an utter pain in the ass to get through because the conflict ends as abruptly as it starts and it's so unsatisfying. We get to see the face of our villain, I guess, and then more or less cut to our leads holding hands down the street set to the same looping lounge music we've been dealing with for over 90 damn minutes. Is everyone else who went with them dead? Did they live? Who cares! That's one thing the movie and I can agree on since we never see them again. We end on a shitty cliffhanger that's supposed to prepare us for a sequel, which thankfully never happened.

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And that was Wishbone. Holy fucking shit, I've never been so thankful for a movie to be over in my life. It's 11:07 PM as of tinkering with some minor revisions and I've been in purgatory with this for over five hours, and yet, it feels like an entire lifetime has gone by.

I've raved about how bad Blood Lake was with its incredibly bad pacing, but this is next level awful and a testament to bad filmmaking if I've ever seen it. I expect a lot of the things I complained about from super amateur filmmakers who are shooting on an actual shoestring budget, not people who had that much money to fuck around with. How did they have that kind of a budget, and the most they can give us is bad audio, Windows Movie Maker levels of basic editing, three wrap parties, and a few crumbs of gore that we could see?

This was physically painful to see and I'm in much worse shape having endured it than I would have been if I sat through something liked Boardinghouse, and that has a two-and-a-half-hour-long version tied to it. This is just a marvel and I mean that in a so-bad-it's-bad way, not like how SOV enthusiasts who love this stuff pine over. If I had to give one thing going for it, one single granule of gold that I enjoyed from this, it's the limited shots we get of the area so I could make a game out of seeing what local spots I recognized. If playing I Spy is the only way for someone to endure your movie, then I don't know what else to say.

Wishbone is a hot mess where shit's happening, but also nothing is happening at the same time. I wouldn't wish this on anyone. In fact, I wish this movie never existed or would die in the ether and never return to our mortal realm ever again. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go have a smoke and hope I don't get run over by a hearse tomorrow.

RATING: 0.5/10