#every miranda scene : emotional serious and dramatic

[patroclusdefencesquad]

they were so sick for this

[legionofpotatoes]

we decided to watch all story cutscenes from the new resident evil village videogame on a whim, since it’s not really our cup of tea gameplay-wise but seems to be this massive zeitgeist moment that made us morbidly curious. And I know how much everyone cares about my thoughts on things I know very little about, so. let’s get into it huh gamers. and yeah spoilers?

for context, I’ve only played resident evil 4 and a small portion of 5. I also read the wikipedia entry for 7’s plot recently. all this to say I was only vaguely aware of how tonally wacky the series was going in

I also completely gave up following the plot of the mutagens’ soap opera, so that paid off in spades here as you might imagine

anyway so that baby in the intro. that baby’s head is just massive. humongous toddlerdome. when ethan finds the baby’s head in a jar later on. there is no way that head would fit into that jar. bad game design. no not even game design. basic stuff. one hundred years in prison for jar modeler

if I see a single functional hetero marriage in video games I will cry tears of joy. I understand their misery is kind of The Point irt them badly working through the hillbilly romp trauma but like. sheesh. at least set that up as an emotional story goal the plot will help resolve. but nope they start off miserable and it goes nowhere

I know I know the mia thing has a huge wrinkle in it but like. not really in terms of dramatic function?? set up a happy end to the re7 nightmare (miranda can keep up appearances for all she cares) and then take that all away from angry griffin mcelroy for manpain. it will still absolutely work to set up the dramatic forward momentum. why throw in this cliche Hollywood Tension in their marriage if you’re not going to address it oh maybe because it’s normalized as automatically interesting because nuclear families are a self-propagating pit of a very narrow chance at emotional happiness relying on social stigma to preserve their empty function oops my baggage slipped in yikes abort mission

I called him griffin mcelroy because I saw his face on twitter and. yeah. I will continue to do this occasionally. my house my rules

... fuck the reason I’m hung up on this is specifically because the rest of the game is so tonally dexterous (which is a shining point to me! more on that later!), and yet they felt weirdly compelled to create the aesthetic trapping of a family-at-odds trope without following it through too well. a sign of both the good and the bad stuff to come

but listen the real reason why I wanted to talk about any of this is to nitpick the fascinating backwards-engineered nucleus of the entire thing; in that this game essentially creates a melting pot of just SO many disparate horror tropes and then makes a no-holds-barred unhinged effort at weaving thick lore to piece them all together. it is truly a sight to behold. like straight up you got your backwoods fright night situation, your gothic castle vampires, your rural-industrial werewolves, and don’t forget your bloated swamp monsters over there, with then a hard left turn into robotic body horror, and the entire ass subgenre of Creepy Doll writ large, and the bloodborne tentacle monsters, and a hellboy angel bossfight, which rides on the coattails of a mech-on-mech pacific rim bonanza, and just jesus henry christ slow down

almost all of these are textural hijack jobs that don’t really get into the metaphor plain of any of those settings but the game sort-of makes an argument that the texture IS the point and revels in it. It is kind of admirable almost. The same reason why the intro felt boxed in and unmotivated is also why the rest of the game just blasts off of its hinges to the point of complete and self-indulgent tonal abandon. I kinda loved that about it. lady dimitrescu made sure to hold her hat down as she bent forward in mahogany doorways and then suddenly she’s a giant gore dragon and you settle in your temp role as dark souls man with Gun to take her ass down. Excellent??

this rhino rampage impulse to gobble up every horror aesthetic known to man comes to head when the game wrestles with its FPS trappings in what is the most hilarious solution in creating visceral player damage moments. Since most cinematics and the entire game is in first person, that leaves precious little real estate for the devs to work with if they really want to sell griffin’s physical crucible. To wit. This dude’s forearms. Specifically just the forearms. They are MASSACRED throughout the story. The poor man lives out the silent hill dimension of a hand model. by the end cutscene he looks like a neatly dressed desk clerk who had decided to stick both his grabbers into garbage disposal grinders just a few hours prior. like in addition to everything else it manages to rope in that tinge of slapstick violence into its general grievous genre collection except this time it IS for a lack of trying! truly incredible

but wait his miracle clawbacks from everything his poor paws go through are retroactively explained away, yes, but far too vaguely and far too late to console me as I sat and watched everyone’s favorite baby brother reattach an entirely severed hand to his wrist stump by just. placing it on there. and giving it a lil twist ‘n pop terminator-style. and then willing his fingers back into motion right in front of my bulging eyes. this game just does not care. it does not give a shit. and boy howdy will it work to make that into one of its strongest suits

cause generally speaking resident evil was THE premiere vanilla zombie content destinaysh for like a decade, right? and as the rest of the world and mainstream media started encroaching and bloodying its blue ocean it went and just exploded in every single conceivable horror trope direction like a smilodon on catnip. truly, genuinely fascinating franchise moves

yeah the big vampire milf is hot. other news; grass... green. although I do love the implication that her closet is just identical white dresses on a rack. cartoon network-level queen shit

apropos of nothing I’ve said there’s also this hobo dante-devimaycry-magneto man, and I can’t believe this sentence makes sense. anyway he made that “boulder-punching asshole” joke referring to chris redfield and it was probably the only easter egg that really landed for me and boy did it land hard. I have not seen him punch the boulder in re5, mind. I had only heard about how funny it is from friends. and here this dude was, probably in the same exact mindset as me, trying to grapple with that insane mental image. with you on that ian mckellen, loud and clear

I advocate vehemently against the shallow pursuit of hyper photorealism in art direction but I gotta admit it works really in favor of immersive horror like this. the european village shacks especially gave me super unchill flashbacks to my rural countryside retreat in western georgia. I could smell the linoleum dude. not cool

faces are weird in this game. can’t place it. nice textures, good animation, but the modeling template is... uuh strange? and the hair. it has that clustered-flat-clumpy look that harkens to something very specific and unpleasant but I just don’t know what. sue me

griffin’s mental aptitude to take all this shit in stride and end every seemingly traumatizing bossfight involving some fucking eldritch being yet unseen through mortal eyes by essentially throwing out an MCU quip is just. What the fuck dude? I mean that was funny how you casually yelled the f-word at a god damn werewolf that you considered a fairy tale an hour ago but are you like, all right?? it was swinging a sledgehammer the size of a bus at you, ethan

oh oh the vampires are afraid of cold and your last name is winters. I get it haha

Pro Gamer Nitpick: boss fights seemed a bit unnecessarily long?? idk why the youtuber we picked decided the ENTIRE propeller man fight counted towards the vital story scenes he was stitching together, but man mr big daddy lite there really had some get up and go huh??

why are they saying dimitrescu.. like that. is it really how you say that word or is the english language relapsing into its fetish for ending every single word with a consonant at all costs

I’m not saying it’s a dramatic miss of a twist in context of all that’s going on, but the “you died in the last game actually and have been DC’s clayface ever since” revelation is low-key. it’s. it’s just funny to me, I dont know what to say. century-old god-witch fails her evil plan after she mistakenly removes heart from what was definitely NOT just some white guy with eight fingers after all

chris realizing he’s about to become the player character and immediately swapping out his tsundere trenchcoat for the muscletight sex haver sweater

the little bluetooth speaker-sized pipe bomb he taped to his knife was nuclear?? really??? I must have missed something because that is just too good. I buy it though I totally buy it. chris just got them fun-sized nukes in his car trunk for, you guessed it, Situations

anyway this is all for now just wanted to briefly touch on how unexpectedly funny and tonally irreverent this seemingly serious game turned out to be. did not articulate any cathartic story beats whatsoever but my god it had fun connecting those plot points. he just fucking put his severed hand back on his stump and it Just Worked todd howard get in here

[just-my-interpretation]

Date night

Fictober Event 2020

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Day 1

“No, come back!”

Roman and Janus get ready for their date. Or at least that's what Janus thought.

Also based on Miranda!'s song "Me gustas tanto" [I like you so much] because I have like zero originality. https://youtu.be/sqikoRiW7y0

Pathetic. That’s what it was. If someone had told him a year ago that he would be smiling like an idiot while looking at his boyfriend he would have answered with a sarcastic laugh. But there he was, watching his best friend’s brother get ready for their date while singing to an upbeat Spanish song. Definitely pathetic.

He liked him more than he should honestly, but he couldn’t help it. Roman had entered like a force of nature in his life and he couldn’t do much than watch as he wrecked all his defenses and left him completely smitten. But sure, any other human being could have been totally able to resist his chivalrous ways, his antics, his awful voice... He didn’t need to calm down at all, this was totally healthy and he definitely wasn’t way too invested for his own good.

He sighed and tried to shake the insecure thoughts away. It isn’t like this was the first time that it had occurred to him, but it wasn’t anything serious. Sure, things weren’t as smushy as they were at the beginning but every couple has his honeymoon face, and then things calm down to a new normal. Right?

“Jan, my dearest love, what do you think should I wear my red jacket or gray melange blazer?” His boyfriend asked, interrupting his train of thought. Immediately all his doubts were out of mind. How could he worry when the ugliest men in the world were in front of him pondering on the clothes he’ll use for their date? He couldn’t avoid the smile creeping on his lips. Curses.

“Why? I’m sure that either of those options would look absolutely terrible on you” he retorted with his usual sarcasm standing up to embrace the other.

“Oh, excuse you much? I’ll let you know that I look fabulous in either of them” he fake offense in the most dramatic way he could without leaving the other arms.

“Then why don’t you just pick one already, Wroammin?” he teased knowing that he had walked right into his trap

“Ah! You played me like a fiddle” the other lament pushing him away and closing his eyes to increase dramatism

“Oh, honey, no, I would never” he denied, raising his hand at his chest.

“You wouldn’t?” Roman questioned, peeking with only one eye and trying to figure out if Janus was being honest for once.

“No, dear, fiddles are actually very hard to play.” he explained with the most innocent look he could gather slowly getting closer and waiting for the other to let his guard down before landing his last punch looking at him dead in the eyes "I played you like the cheap kazoo you are" 

"Ah! You wound me, fiend!" Roman yelled, collapsing on the couch while faking an injury in his side.

 "I'm sorry, love. You've been getting ready for the last hour, you were practically asking for it and I couldn't help myself. You know I love you." He mock while taking a place next to him.

"Yeah, I guess..." He accepted lightly "but there are no second chances for first impressions, you know..."

Janus stopped in his tracks and had to take a minute to process what the other had said.

“First impressions?” He repeated, uncertain about what he was talking about.

“Yeah, tonight is the cast dinner, I send you a text after the script meeting tod-”

"No, you didn't" Janus cut, not a trace of a smile left in his face.

"Really? It must have slipped my mind" Roman brushed it off nonchalantly, not noticing the sudden change in the ambient.

All the insecurities that he was trying to bury in the back of his head immediately scaped from their little boxes and hit him like a truck. Stay calm Janus, it’s just a misunderstanding. I’m sure that if you offer him the facts he would realize his mistake. No need to cause a scene. He thought to himself.

"We have plans tonight" He tried carefully.

"We did?" Strike one. Breath Janus.

"Let me guess, it slipped your mind too?” he asked sourly.

“Whoa whoa, calm down. It's not that big of a deal” He inhaled sharply. Strike two. Calm down...

“So you're gonna skip the diner?” He offered again. He had to be able to take a subtle hint.

“What? No! I told you that there is only one chance to make a first impression!” Well, that does make sens- wait a minute!

“What are you saying?! You already made a first impression at the script meeting!” he yelped.

“Oh, but it's still a first impression outside of the workplace! You know this is my first real role and I have to be on the good side of these people!” Roman explained starting to worry about his partner

“But we already had plans for tonight” he pouted softly and almost resigned. 

Almost.

“Oh, come on! I can't just bail on them for a date!” WHAT? Strike number mother fucking three.

“What is that even supposed to mean?!” he raised his voice getting up off the couch and starting to pace around trying to not get emotional and think straight. 

“Isn't it obvious? It's not that important!” Roman call on also starting to turn up the volume as well.

“So now I'm not important??!” He snapped, all intents to avoid a scene left behind. 

“Woah!” he exclaimed, surprised, getting up from the couch and trying to reach for his boyfriend “You are blowing this out of proportion! It's just one night!”

“One night where you had a previous engagement that you didn't even bother to cancel! And you had me here all this time waiting for you like an idiot!” he countered stepping back to maintain some distance between the two of them.

“I thought we were hanging out!” The other groaned, getting exasperated.

“You didn't even pay me attention until you asked me to choose between your ridiculous jackets” he protested, next to incredulous.

“It's a jacket and a blazer, they are completely different” he shrieked reaching for the clothes.

“That's what you want to focus on right now!?” he full-on yelled, completely disbelieving at that point.

“You are the one that's blowing out of proportion one little mistake!” Roman insisted, throwing the red jacket on the couch.

“One little mistake? You've been canceling dates for weeks! You don't answer texts, you never want to hang out unless I just appear at your door!” he complained, letting out all his insecurities.

“I was preparing for a big role!” he unfolded, losing the little patience he had left “Oh my goodness, you are unbearable today! Do we have to do this now?”

“Why? Do you have anything better to do?” he inquired on the bridge of tears but he would be damned if he’d let it show.

“Yes!” he squealed “I have the fucking dinner!” he growled while picking up his stuff.

“I can't believe you! I swear to any higher Entity that you like if you go through that door you would have seen the last of me” Janus warned hoping that it would convince the other to stay and at least talk things up. Wasn’t he worth staying a while? Why wouldn’t he compromise and arrive late to make sure that his boyfriend would stay in his life?

“That's definitely a lie.” Roman accused bitterly, “And I can't believe you are doing this! You know what? Fine! Whatever fits you.” he resigned walking to the door. “I don't need someone that doesn't support me and my work, just leave the keys down the mat when you leave!” And with that, he slammed the door shut.

There was a split of a second where everything went silent. An eternity went through Janus' mind, trying to comprehend what just had happened. And then he breathed again. And then it dawned on him. He fucked up.

“No, come back!” He screamed running to the door and violently opening it. "Roman!" he cried into the hallway where all the neighbors definitely listened. 

It didn’t matter. He was already gone.

[pretoriuspictures]

https://www.talkhouse.com/on-the-virtues-of-cinematic-failure/

///

Most journalists who have spoken to me about my new erotic drama PVT Chat (starring Peter Vack and Julia Fox and streaming now on most VOD platforms) assume it’s my first feature film. Actually, it’s my third. My first two features never played a single film festival and haven’t been seen by more than a few hundred people (mostly friends and/or curious followers of my rock band, Bodega). They were financial failures (even though they were made extremely cheaply), but you couldn’t call them critical failures because nobody has ever reviewed them. I spent the last decade working on these films and yet their cultural footprint is practically nonexistent.

Despite that, I still believe in them and hope one day I’ll make a movie (or record) that inspires people to seek them out. My early cinematic attempts certainly failed at behaving like normal movies, but to me it is precisely this failure that makes them interesting.

Godard said of Pierrot le Fou (1965), “It’s not really a film. It’s an attempt at a film.” This is a purposefully cryptic statement, but I think I understand what he meant. There is a sketch-like quality to his films from that period. He was less interested in following a particular plot through to its conclusion than suggesting narrative ideas and moving on. He enjoyed employing classical narrative tropes but didn’t want to waste screen time on the proper pacing required to sell those tropes to an audience. Instead he filled his screen time with spontaneous personal, poetic, and political ruminations that occurred to him literally on the day of filming. Many found – and still find – this approach infuriating, but for a select number of Godard disciples, like me, this type of filmmaking is still revolutionary. I remember seeing Weekend during my sophomore year of college at the University of South Carolina and having my mind completely ripped open. Suddenly the world wasn’t a small, mediocre, predictable place – it was full of music and color and philosophy and eroticism. There were people out there genuinely disgusted with the status quo and boldly proclaiming it with style.

Godard’s work is a fulfillment of the dream of the caméra-stylo – a term coined in 1948 by Alexandre Astruc that argued it was theoretically possible for someone to compose a film with as much direct personal expression as exists in prose. In order to achieve this level of expression, one often needs to move beyond the realm of mere plot and narrative naturalism, the principle that what you are seeing on screen is real. (On most movie sets, the filmmakers and actors work overtime to sell this illusion.) Films that focus solely on plot, character psychology, and one literary theme have to direct the majority of their screen time toward plotting mechanics and emotional manipulation of the audience. What you gain in dramatic catharsis you often lose in intellectual honesty. There’s always a tradeoff. I am invested in a cinema of the future that veers toward self-expression, but doesn’t need to avoid dramatic catharsis as Godard’s films did. Certainly many filmmakers my age are working to achieve such a synthesis of intellectual directness and narrative pleasure. Experimentation is required and many “bad” films need to be made to pave the way for future successes.

I graduated college in 2010 high on this dream of the caméra-stylo and philosophy (my field of study) and in 2011 started filming my first feature, Annunciation, with experimental filmmaker Simon Liu. Annunciation is an “adaptation” of the Mérode Altarpiece, an early Northern Renaissance oil painting triptych by Robert Campin. The film features three short separate narratives, one for each panel of the famous 15th-century painting. I wanted the performances in Annunciation to be controlled and somewhat surreal, as if the whole film existed in a heightened but slowed-down hypnotic state; I was thinking about Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni and, of course, Godard (particularly his work from the ’80s). There is some plot, but the main goal of the movie was to reveal the miracle of existence in the everyday. And because the Mérode Altarpiece depicts the scene in Christianity where the Virgin Mary was impregnated by light alone, the film had to be shot on 16mm film.

Now picture this: a 22-year-old walks into a conference room in Midtown Manhattan and gives this pitch to a producer who was then investing in thriller movies: “Every time light strikes a piece of celluloid, a miracle similar to the Annunciation scene occurs: an image appears in the likeness of man that redeems our fallen world and reveals it to be the beautiful place that we take for granted in our normal day-to-day.” This wasn’t met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for. “Don’t you see,” I said, “this is a film about the ecstatic of the quotidian! This is a film that audiences will flock to! It could do for Williamsburg and Bushwick what Breathless did for Paris!” Looking back, I am both shocked and charmed by my youthful naiveté, courage and idiocy.

I was laughed out of the room, but the producer was kind enough to wish me good luck and welcomed any future pitches, should I come up with something any “normal” person would want to watch. I never thought of films in the tradition of the caméra-stylo as being elite works only for the gallery or the Academy. I, like Godard before me, have always assumed that audiences are intelligent and long for thoughtful, challenging movies. That belief I carry to this day and thankfully it sometimes seems to be true. How else could you explain the recent success of heady films by Josephine Decker or Miranda July?

Thanks to small donations from family members (and credit cards), I was able to shoot Annunciation without any official backing. I cast the film with a mixture of non-actor friends and some undiscovered Backstage.com talent and dove head first into the production. Right as our principal photography began, Occupy Wall Street gained momentum, so Simon and I spent time at Zuccotti Park filming our actors experiencing the movement. The hopeful promise of OWS seemed to reflect the yearning desire of our film’s protagonists as well as our own idealist cinema experiment.

When the film was finished and edited, I naively assumed that we were well on our way towards global cinematic notoriety. Surely, I thought, this important film that manages to blend fiction with actual footage of OWS would premiere at Cannes or Berlin and the Criterion Collection would issue the DVD shortly after. In actuality, it was rejected from every single film festival we submitted to.

Undeterred, I conceded that maybe there were a few minor structural flaws in the edit. It was probably a little too long and perhaps the three separate narratives would work better if they were crosscut more. A year later, this new edit was again rejected from almost 100 festivals. Stubbornly, I thought that perhaps what could really bring the movie together was a comic voiceover by my then cinematic muse Nick Alden (who is a lead in both Annunciation and my second film, The Lion’s Den). Audiences seemed to ignore the comic tone underlying Annunciation. If only I could unearth it, they wouldn’t be put off by the pretensions to greatness the movie wore on its sleeve. There is nothing so offensive to American audiences as pretentiousness.

I didn’t send the overcooked voiceover version to festivals. I knew it was forced and worked against the core concept of the film. But it was then that I started for the first time to have doubts about Annunciation. Maybe my film wasn’t as emotional or clever as I imagined. Maybe it was bad? “No,” I decided. The film, whatever its flaws may be, has value. Herculean delusions of grandeur come in handy when you are trying to become an artist.

I opted to edit the film back to its original state, but without some of the weaker, obviously didactic moments, then hosted a few local screenings in NYC (most of them at DIY venues where my rock band would play) and put the film up for free on Vimeo. Around this time, it occurred to me that editing Annunciation had been my film school. Failure is a wonderful learning tool. Editing the same raw material in a myriad of different ways taught me about pacing and tone. Still to this day, when I find myself in a certain state of mind, I open up the Final Cut sessions and do a new edit of the footage just for fun, like some sort of DIY George Lucas tinkering with the past. Last year during quarantine, I did a new edit of Annunciation and uploaded it to Vimeo without telling a single person. It has become my own little cinematic sandbox to play in.

When people did chance upon one of my myriad edits, they often commented that they enjoyed its style but found the acting too unnatural. My response to this was to make my next film, The Lion’s Den, a cheaper HDV feature that doubled as a political farce and an essay about naturalism in cinema. The film is about a group of ding-dong radicals who kidnap a Wall Street banker and plan to donate his ransom money to UNICEF so salt pills can be provided for dehydrated children. The UNICEF plot was drawn from Living High and Letting Die, a 1996 work of moral philosophy by Peter K. Unger. It was both a serious attempt at political philosophy and a total slapstick farce; I was imagining the comedy of errors in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game mixed with the Marxist agitprop of Godard’s La Chinoise.

The acting style in The Lion’s Den was purposefully cartoonish; at no point in the film could an audience member believe that what they were seeing was real. I like to think that The Lion’s Den was an attempt at theatre for the camera, part Shakespeare and part Brecht. This was my own personal response to our epoch’s hyperrealism fetish. At the time, I believed that the current obsession with neo-neorealism, mumblecore and reality TV was worth combating. Art with a realistic aesthetic, I thought then, was inherently conservative and accepting of the political status quo (whether the artists were aware of this or not). Art with an imaginative anti-realistic aesthetic, so I thought, was utopian. It opened new vistas and ways of thinking and being. It dared to believe in a more beautiful world than the one we are living in.

The making of The Lion’s Den was extremely difficult. It was by far the hardest thing I have physically done in my life. At the time, I was malnourished and broke, not unlike the character of Jack in PVT Chat; my diet for that month we made the film consisted mostly of coffee, rice and beans, ramen, light beer, and the occasional waffle or fruit smoothie from the vegan frozen yogurt stall I worked at. Unlike Jack, my addiction wasn’t cam girls or internet gambling, but independent filmmaking. I begged, borrowed and scrimped $10,000 to make a film I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell. Despite having some key collaborators near the beginning of the shoot, most of the film was made with just me, the actors and a loyal boom operator, all living together in a house in Staten Island. This meant that I had to assemble all of the cumbersome lights for every setup, handle the art for every scene (which involved a lot of painting), block the scene and direct the actors, throw the camera on my shoulder and film, and then at the end of the day transfer the footage while logging the Screen Actors Guild reports and creating the call sheets for the next day’s scenes. Exhausted both mentally and physically, I often couldn’t stand up at the end of the day’s filming.

Once we’d wrapped and everyone had gone home, I stood in the middle of our set and played Beethoven on my headphones. Within seconds, I began bawling my eyes out, partly from exhaustion but also from the melancholy that all my friends had left and I was now alone for the first time in a month. I collapsed and slept for hours. When I woke up, it was my 26th birthday. I celebrated by watching Citizen Kane alone and then started the process of painting the walls back to a neutral white. The actor Kevin Moccia (who has been in all three of my films and actually works as a house painter) heroically came back to set and helped me. I told him that despite all of the agony of the past weeks (my bank account was now in the red, with overdraft fees piling up), I was happier than I had ever been. Working passionately on something that has great value to you is, without a doubt, the key to happiness.

Shortly after returning to the real world and my job at the vegan yogurt shop, I passed out while on the clock and was taken to a hospital by my very supportive girlfriend. Turns out, all I needed was an IV and some nutrients to get back on my feet, but unfortunately the trouble with The Lion’s Den had just begun. At some point, I formatted the production audio memory card and, in one instant, accidentally deleted everything on it. For the next two years, my friend Brian Goodheart and I worked with all of the actors to dub all of the dialogue and sound effects in the movie. Each actor had to completely re-do their verbal performance. It felt like remaking the entire movie. The result made the film especially un-naturalistic (which pleased me at the time) and it turned out far better than I think Brian and I expected.

By then, I had some hopes that The Lion’s Den could reach a small audience. It is aggressively philosophical but also features a love triangle, a car chase and a final shootout. Its comic style, I was hoping, would attract people who were put off by the purposeful flatness of Annunciation. Nevertheless, the movie was also rejected from every conceivable festival. I now realized that submitting an aggressively experimental narrative film without a single famous person in it to festivals is basically like flushing your money down the toilet. Yet I continued submitting, like an addict at a casino putting all of their savings on the roulette table. You never know, right?

In hindsight, I now see The Lion’s Den as a very angry film that perhaps uses comedy to soften the blow of some of its hotheaded fervor, and suspect some of its critique of capitalism and naturalism came from hurt and jealousy. “You think my work isn’t natural enough, eh? I’ll show you motherfuckers naturalism!”

Sometime in 2017, to my surprise I became smitten with certain neo-neorealist filmmakers (Joe Swanberg, in particular) and decided I wanted in on the mumblecore party, albeit from my own outsider perspective. I began to see how I could work symbolically with naturalistic performances, which led me to my latest film. PVT Chat is by no means a work of strict realism, but nevertheless focuses on believable dramatic performances. The film’s cast blends some actors from my past work (Kevin Moccia, Nikki Belfiglio, David White) with some heroes of the modern neo-neorealist indie cinema (Peter Vack, Julia Fox, Buddy Duress, Keith Poulson).

I want to end with a bit of advice to other filmmakers: Don’t put your self-worth into the hands of festival reviewers or distributors. The future of the moving image will belong to the films that are willing to risk cinematic failure. If you make an earnest film that doesn’t behave like a normal movie, I want to see it, even if it is full of technical or narrative mistakes (which it most likely will be). There’s no right way to make a movie. Follow the dream of the caméra-stylo and make a film that if nobody else made, wouldn’t exist.

[batmandarknightrisise-blog]

The Dark Knight Rises: Film Review

The real world threats of terrorism, political anarchy and economic instability make deep incursions into the cinematic comic book domain in The Dark Knight Rises. Big-time Hollywood filmmaking at its most massively accomplished, this last installment of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy makes everything in the rival Marvel universe look thoroughly silly and childish. Entirely enveloping and at times unnerving in a relevant way one would never have imagined, as a cohesive whole this ranks as the best of Nolan's trio, even if it lacks -- how could it not? -- an element as unique as Heath Ledger's immortal turn in The Dark Knight. It's a blockbuster by any standard.

PHOTOS: Batman Through The Years: Christian Bale, George Clooney and Others Who've Played the Dark Knight

The director daringly pushes the credibility of a Gotham City besieged by nuclear-armed revolutionaries to such an extent that it momentarily seems absurd that a guy in a costume who refuses to kill people could conceivably show up to save the day. This is especially true since Nolan, probably more than any other filmmaker who's ever gotten seriously involved with a superhero character, has gone so far to unmask and debilitate such a figure. But he gets away with it and, unlike some interludes in the previous films, everything here is lucid, to the point and on the mark, richly filling out (especially when seen in the Imax format) every moment of the 164-minute running time.

the dark knight rises full movie in hindi filmyzilla

In a curtain raiser James Bond would kill for, a CIA aircraft transporting terrorists is sensationally hijacked in midair by Bane (Tom Hardy), an intimidating hulk whose nose and mouth are encumbered by a tubular, grill-like metal mask which gives his voice an artificial quality not unlike that of Darth Vader. What Bane is up to is not entirely clear, but it can't be good.

Batman’s Onscreen Villains: 10 Greats From The Joker to Bane

Although it's only been four years since the last Batman film, eight years of dramatic time have elapsed since the climactic events depicted in The Dark Knight. Batman and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) have been in suspiciously simultaneous total seclusion, much to the consternation of loyal valet Alfred (Michael Caine), who, upbraiding his boss for inaction, accuses him of “just waiting for things to get bad again.” They do, in a hurry. But in the interim, Gotham has scarcely missed him, as he's publicly blamed for the death of D.A. Harvey Dent and hasn't needed him anyway since organized crime has virtually disappeared.

Bruce begins being dragged back into the limelight by slinky Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a spirited cat burglar who lifts his fingerprints and a necklace from his safe while pulling a job at his mansion. It was always a question how this ambiguous feline character (never called Catwoman herein) would be worked into the fabric of this Batman series, but co-screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan, working from a story by the director and David S. Goyer, have cannily threaded her through the tale as an alluring gadfly and tease who engages in an ongoing game of one-upmanship with Batman and whose selfishness prevents her from making anything beyond opportunistic alliances.

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Commandeering the city's sewers with his fellow mercenaries, Bane begins his onslaught, first with an attempted kidnapping of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), then with a brazen attack on the Stock Exchange, which, at the film's 45-minute mark, has the double effect of luring Batman out of hiding and bankrupting Bruce Wayne. The latter catastrophe forces the fallen tycoon to ask wealthy, amorously inclined board member Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) to assume control of his company to squeeze out Daggett (Ben Mendelsohn), who's in cahoots with Bane.

Nolan has thus boldly rooted his film in what are arguably the two big worries of the age, terrorism and economic collapse, the result of which can only be chaos. So when virtually the entire Gotham police force is lured underground to try to flush out Bane, the latter has the lawmen just where he wants them, trapped like animals in a pen waiting for slaughter. And the fact that Gotham City has, for the first time, realistically used New York City for most of its urban locations merely adds to the topical resonance of Bane's brilliantly engineered plot, in which he eventually takes the entire population of Manhattan hostage. Nolan has always been a very serious, even remorseless filmmaker, and never more so than he is here.

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Inducing Selina to take him to Bane, Batman gets more than he bargained for; physically, he's no match for the mountainously muscled warrior, who sends the legendary crime fighter off to a literal hellhole of a prison, with the parting promise of reducing Gotham to ashes. Seemingly located in the Middle East, the dungeon resembles a huge well and has been escaped from only once, by none other than Bane, who is said to have been born there and got out as a child.

Here, as elsewhere, there are complex ties leading back to the comic books that link characters and motivations together; with Bruce and Bane, it is with the League of Shadows, which occasions the brief return of Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul, last seen in Batman Begins (in 2005). A solid new character, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's resourceful street cop John Blake, is a grateful product of one of the Wayne Foundation's orphanages. Many of the characters wear masks, either literal or figurative; provocatively, Batman's mask hides his entire face except for his mouth, the very part of Bane which is covered. This is just one of the motifs the Nolans have used to ingeniously plot out the resolution to their three-part saga, which involves at least one major, superbly hidden surprise.

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While Bruce Wayne languishes in the pit rebuilding his strength for an escape attempt, Bane spectacularly and mercilessly reverses the entire social order of Gotham City: 1,000 dangerous criminals are released from prison, the rich are tossed out of their uptown homes, the remaining police hide out like rats underground, and a “people's court” (presided over by Cillian Murphy's Scarecrow) dispenses death sentences willy-nilly. With virtually all bridges and tunnels destroyed, no one can leave the island, which is threatened by a fusion device, initially developed by Bruce and his longtime tech genius Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) as a clean energy source but now transformed at Bane's behest into a nuke, which he promises to use.

Some of the action scenes, such as multiple chases involving the armed motorcycle Bat-Pod (mostly ridden by Selina) and the cool new one-man jet chopper-like aircraft called The Bat that zooms through the city's caverns like something out of the early Star Wars, have something of a familiar feel. But the opening skyjacking, the Stock Exchange melee and especially the multiple explosions that bring the city to its knees -- underground, on bridges and, most strikingly, in a football stadium -- are fresh and brilliantly rendered, as are all the other effects. The film reportedly cost $250 million, but it would be easy to believe that the figure was quite a bit more, so elaborate is everything about the production.

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But the fact that all the money has been put to the use of making the severe dramatic events feel so realistic -- there's not a hint of cheesiness or the cartoonlike -- ratchets up the suspense and pervasive feeling of unease. One knows going in that this film will mark the end of Batman, at least for now and as rendered by Bale and Nolan, but for the first time there is the sense that it could also really be the end for Batman, that he might be sacrificed, or sacrifice himself, for the greater good.

Needing to portray both his characters as vulnerable, even perishable, Bale is at his series best in this film. At times in the past his voice seemed too artificially deepened and transformed; there's a bit of that here, but far less, and, as Bruce becomes impoverished and Batman incapacitated, the actor's nuances increase. Caine has a couple of surprisingly emotional scenes to play and handles them with lovely restraint, while other returnees Oldman and Freeman deliver as expected.

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Bane is a fearsome figure, fascinating in his physicality and blithely confident approach to amoral anarchy. With the mask strapped to his head at all times and his voice altered, Hardy is obliged to express himself mostly through body language, which he does powerfully, and at a couple of key moments his eyes speak volumes. All the same, the facial and verbal restrictions provide emotive limitations, and his final moments onscreen feel almost thrown away; one feels a bit cheated of a proper sendoff.

Hathaway invests her catlike woman with verve and impudence, while Cotillard is a warm and welcome addition to this often forbidding world. Even though Nolan and Bale have made it clear that The Dark Knight Rises marks their farewell to Bruce Wayne and Batman, the final shot clearly indicates the direction a follow-up offshoot series by Warner Bros. likely will take.

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As before, the production values are opulent and sensational; nothing short of the highest praise can be lavished on the work of production designers Nathan Crowley and Kevin Kavanaugh, cinematogtapher Wally Pfister, costume designer Lindy Hemming, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, editor Lee Smith, composer Hans Zimmer and sound designer Richard King, just for starters.

The only conspicuous faux pas is a big continuity gaffe that has the raid on the Stock Exchange take place during the day but the subsequent getaway chase unfold at night.

Nearly half the film, including all the big action scenes, was shot with large-format Imax cameras and, with both versions having been previewed, the 70mm Imax presentation that will be shown in 102 locations worldwide is markedly more vivid visually and powerful as a dramatic experience; the normal 35mm prints, while beautiful, are somewhat less sharp.

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Despite all the advanced technology deployed to make The Dark Knight Rises everything it is, Nolan remains proudly and defiantly old school (as only the most successful directors can get away with being these days) when it comes to his filmmaking aesthetic, an approach indicated in a note at the end of the long final credits: “This motion picture was shot and finished on film.”

[joeal-kaysani]

@gay-halforc and i have been talking about a “flint but with prince john’s personality au” (based on this post) for like two hours and we can’t decide which one’s worse: 

james adopting that persona to become flint, or 

james having been that way all along

so either

he was just the normal james mcgraw in the london era

the tragedy of what happened to thomas drives him to become flint, but a far more openly gay version just to spite alfred

miranda and gates are the only two people that understand it’s an act

eleanor gets a glimpse of the real james during the oar and shovel speech but it’s fleeting and she still thinks he’s annoying

“I WILL DELIVER THEM, HAL” “I AM YOUR KING” except it’s 24/7 and cranked up to full volume

as well as his ongoing feud with charles, he also has beef with jack because he believes he stole his shtick

for the first two episodes we believe he’s actually this flamboyant hilarious asshole and it isn’t until he collapses at miranda’s house that we realize it isn’t real and start to see behind the mask

and the rumor that miranda’s a witch stems from the fact that no one believes he actually has a wife/girlfriend/female significant other

then he meets silver and they connect because they both recognize that the other is performing, but neither of them trust the other because of it

so when he tells silver “in my head, you’re not welcome” he truly means it because he realizes that silver’s getting too close and seeing past his act

but silver realizes immediately that he’s gay (of course) so there’s an awkward “god, i hate this asshole but he’s so cute” tension between them immediately that’s even worse than in canon

the combination of losing miranda and finding out that silver sacrificed his leg to save the crew (something he thought a pirate wouldn’t be capable of due to selfishness) shake him up so badly that he slips even further into the role in his mental breakdown, to the point where silver in private is like “dude, this is just an act, relax”

but there’s no one left alive that remembers who he actually is and without them the lines become so blurred nearly loses himself completely 

the coming out scene over the campfire scene is hilarious but so much worse at the same time because james still acts like it’s a secret that he had a male lover and silver’s like “...... yeah” but then he shows real emotion and vulnerability for the first time and he doesn’t know how to handle it

he grows so tired of the charade that he gladly gives up that persona when he’s reunited with thomas after watching silver essentially become him and then replace him

silver!! breaks down the legend!! that is captain flint!! just to end up becoming him, not realizing that its it’s own curse and that someone will inevitably replace him too until it’s too late

thomas is the only person left who remembers james mcgraw and he helps him come back from being flint (like in canon) because in the immortal words of toby stephens, “he became himself with thomas hamilton”

basically all about eve but with fucking pirates because hell yeah

in retrospect this is very similar to the actual plot but flint shouts “DO YOU LOVE ME?” every time they take a prize

OR

james mcgraw was just Like That all along

like silver, he uses deceit and manipulation to rise from a carpenter’s son to a navy lieutenant

he and thomas instantly butt heads when they meet because james is such an asshole

“you’re more literate than any three boys i knew at eton” “shows what they teach you at eton lmao”

“he’s the absolute worst, miranda. the most obnoxious man i’ve ever met. god he’s so pretty i hate him. i can’t believe i’m going to have an affair with him.” “you don’t have to.” “no i’m gonna.”

within thirty seconds of meeting him, alfred knows james is gay and is furious with thomas like, “are you serious? HIM?”

he decides very quickly after being thrown out of his house that he’s going to destroy james whether he’s having an affair with his son or not because between the pardons act, the affair AND just being a general asshole, he’s really toasting alfred’s waffles

he decides to have james hospitalized instead but james thinks it’s hilarious

“you think no one’s ever tried that before?”

everyone in the navy thinks he’s crazy but he’s so effective despite his personality that they ignore it and the plan fails

so alfred decides to do something he knows will work and hurt james even more: have thomas committed in his place

and for the first time, we see genuine heartbreak and agony in james’ face

while their relationship had started as hate ***/reluctant but successful political partners, he realizes only after alfred has him committed that he was truly in love with thomas

which makes alfred’s murder both satisfying and terrifying as he drops the act for a second time just to go straight-up ax murderer on him

losing thomas basically destroys his empathy and compassion and his worse characteristics take over and become the Captain Flint persona

silver thinks it’s an act and tries to get closer to him to find out the truth but then realizes that he really is that overdramatic and annoying like “oh my god you actually live like this?”

the parallels between thomas and silver’s “he’s insufferable, i love him” are crystal clear and intentional

once again, miranda (and gates to a lesser extent) knew his tragic backstory and that parts of him were exaggerated to create this pirate character, but losing both of them just makes him far worse

"it's time for a dramatic haircut to prove that i'm reached a turning point in my life" "please shut up and give me the scissors"

in the end, when they’re reunited at the plantation, thomas realizes that beneath his cold exterior he really had cared all along, waited a decade for him and tried to start a war in his name

enemies to lovers to friends flintham au

they’re gay in love and live happily ever after in either version the end

[septembercfawkes]

How Structure Affects Pacing

How structure helps you speed up or slow down pacing, followed by some examples from Hamilton, because of course ;)

Last week I talked about 8 Common Problems with Pacing and discussed pacing overall. Today I'm going to get more technical and talk about how structure affects pacing, and how and when to use structure to speed up or slow down, and then follow up with an example.

How fast and how slow you go in a chapter, scene, or paragraph depends on the content, story, and the effect you want the reader to experience.  

Speed Up

When:

Speed up when you want a moment to feel more intense, snappy, energetic, or even the obvious one, quick.

Often (not always) you want to speed up moments of action, especially fights. Intense scenes, quick thinking, and arguments can work well too.

How:

Speed up the story in these ways.

Shorten - Shorten the chapter, scene, paragraphs, sentences, or even words. This makes the moment feel faster (for obvious reasons).

Short Syllables - Use words that have few syllables. Choose the word "dance" over "promenade," for example.

Familiar > Unusual - Choose words and concepts that are more familiar or common to the audience. For example, choose "guess" instead of "hypothesize."

Simple > Complex - Similarly, choose words and concepts that are simpler. The more technical you get, the more the audience needs to slow down and digest.

The field that Steve stumbled upon was prodigiously verdigris with anthophilia circumnavigating every inflorescence.

vs.

The field that Steve stumbled upon was largely green with a love of flowers sailing around every floral arrangement.

Use More Telling - Telling is faster than showing. Tell what's happening when a quick pace is absolutely needed. Showing always takes more time.

Note: Often beginner writers will write action blow-by-blow, which might work in some entertainment mediums, but can be boring in the writing medium. It slows the pacing down, especially if the action is too complicated and technical. Sure, some writers know how to break this rule well, but as a generality, you usually don't want to write blow-by-blow passages. Instead, simplify and shorten the moment, and make sure to infuse it with your character's thoughts and emotions.

Note: Fast doesn't mean sloppy.

Slow Down

When:

Slow down to create a more dramatic effect; to take time to be more serious, weighty, intellectual, technical, or leisurely; to give the audience important details; and to let them catch their breath and digest.

How:

You would think that slowing down would be most effective by doing everything opposite of what it says above and some of that is true, but it depends on the situation. Yes, writing longer sentences will help slow a passage down, but if you simply do the opposite of everything listed above, you can easily run into The Purple Prose problem.

Often the best way to slow down is to add more showing, details, and/or concepts.

It's like watching slow motion in a movie. The audience can see more detail. We get specific shots. Time itself seems to slow or even stop.

Slowing down in a story can work in the same way.

Notice how this moment (from an action scene) in Harry Potter slows down by getting more specific and more detailed. Up to this point there has been fighting and action, and then something important happens, so it slows down and gets detailed.

It seemed to take Sirius an age to fall. His body curved in a graceful arc as he sank backward through the ragged veil hanging from the arch.

And Harry saw the look of mingled fear and surprise on his godfather's, wasted, once-handsome face as he fell through the ancient doorway and disappeared behind the veil, which fluttered for a moment as though in a high wind, then fell back into place.

But here's the thing about slowing pacing way down for dramatic effect, and an aspect that I see writers get a bit mixed up on a lot. Do not try to slow it down by repeating the same information the same way or even the exact same information in the same way.

That doesn't slow the pacing, it positively kills it to a dead, annoying stop. Instead, add more ideas, images, and concepts, as I explained in more detail in the second half of this article here.  (I'll also touch more on this in the example below).

Sometimes you can slow down in a novel simply by the content of the scene. Two characters trying to figure out what just happened through a dialogue exchange will help the audience digest it themselves and catch their breath.

If there is something complicated the audience needs to understand, you may need to slow down, just a bit. (Just make sure it doesn't turn into an info-dump.)

Example: Hamilton

The duels in Hamilton are a perfect example of when to speed up and when to slow down, and the effects of each.

The first duel has what I'll call an establishing, even pace. It explains to the audience how duels work, but in an even enough pace so that it doesn't feel like a boring info-dump (the information is balanced by the quickness of the actual music.)

Notice the song is 1:47

In the second duel, the pacing is quick and the duel itself is only about 20 seconds long (starting at 2:30) . We understand how duels work now. Not only do we not need them re-explained, but because it's so short, it emphasizes the speed at which the action happens, and likewise emphasizes how quick life can change or be taken.

As another note, notice that one of the shooters only waits until seven to shoot instead of ten. (I'm not sure if this is historically what actually happened or just an artistic choice.) This increases the speed even more.

The final duel is more important and dramatic, and it slows waaaaaay down. In fact, you get like an entire song as the bullet is coming toward Hamilton (notice this duel is about 4:30 minutes long).

Now, imagine for a second if  Miranda wrote that song and it really did just sing literally about a bullet coming closer to Hamilton, over and over, for an entire song. It doesn't work. It's boring. It feels slow. It feels melodramatic.

Yet this is the mistake I see writers make when trying to heighten drama by slowing pacing. It's one of the aspects of purple prose that new writers slip into. They understand that a "slow-motion" moment can make the scene more dramatic, but all they literally do is slow down the bullet--they repeat the same information over and over, with or without different words. But, as I talk about in that post, it's the ideas, images, and concepts that are important.

So when the bullet is coming towards Hamilton, it becomes dramatic and significant because of all the culminating ideas, images, and concepts within that moment. It ties back to everything--his childhood, his family, his political journey, and perhaps most importantly the theme--how he will be remembered. It resonates with everything that's been established and builds off it for more power (both in content and in the actual music).

When you need to slow down for a dramatic moment, you do the same thing.

How much you slow down depends on how much drama the moment merits. In this Hamilton example, this is the climax of the story, so it merits a lot of attention to fulfill its significance. But if you tried to slow that much down elsewhere, it might come across as melodramatic because it's more than the moment deserves. It hasn't gotten the same level of build up. It's not as important.

So, make the moment dramatic by getting detailed, but make it more dramatic by adding more concepts and resonating with what came before. Everything should either be significant or contribute to the significance of whatever you are slowing down.

Then, notice also in this example how everything else seems to stop, including the music itself. It's quiet. It's only Hamilton and the bullet. All the focus is on that moment, nothing else detracting from it.

Finally, notice how something similar happens again with Burr. We get details. There's wailing in the street. He's getting a drink. He's told he "better hide." The music isn't fast and snappy, it's slower.

And that, my friends, is pacing according to Hamilton.