#film production Asia

[unproduciblesmackdown]

behind the scenes shots ft. akd as the adjudicator, from this article about the cinematography

“In Hollywood, action filmmaking was kind of looked down upon until The Matrix, and then people realized that action could also be part of the story,” [director] Stahelski notes. “I come from a place of loving dance and theater and fine art — action can be all of those things — and one of my favorite painters is Caravaggio.” When he was looking for a cinematographer for John Wick: Chapter 2, Stahelski recalls, “I asked myself, ‘Who paints with light?’ The answer is Dan Laustsen.” In strictly cinematographic terms, Parabellum functions less like an action movie and more like a Hollywood studio musical. The film’s first battle is a close-quarters knife fight in an antique weapons shop, where the camera cuts from wide shot to wide shot, sustaining the action in long takes so that the audience can better appreciate the physical prowess of Reeves’ performance — an elaborate fighting style that combines Japanese judo and jujitsu, Brazilian jujitsu, Russian sambo, Filipino kali, and Muay Thai, more for the benefit of show than for self-defense.  “Ninety-nine percent of high-level stunt work is dance — not pirouettes, but how you move your body,” asserts Stahelski, who continues to train stuntpeople with Leitch through their company 87eleven. “I love the aesthetic of motion. A lot of our shots [in Parabellum] are lifted straight from Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story. We’re mixing Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with Hong Kong cinema from John Woo, Jackie Chan and the Shaw Brothers.” “We wanted to go wider than Hollywood action films normally do and really show off the choreography,” Laustsen agrees. “When the camera, lighting and actors are all moving together, it really is a dance.”

“After we made Chapter 2,” Laustsen notes, “we discussed how we could make 3 even more visually powerful. The main setting was still New York, but we wanted to bring out the city even more forcefully. We decided to shoot all at night, with rain as much as possible. Rain is fantastic because it gives a third dimension to the picture, but it is a challenge to do it, especially in a city like New York.”

The Master Anamorphics’ low-distortion design also prevents dramatic, streaking lens flares, and so the technicians at Arri Rental in Secaucus, N.J., fashioned a flare filter — comprising three strands of nylon fishing line stretched across an empty filter frame — for the XT’s and Mini’s Internal Filter Modules. When a front-of-lens filter produces a flare, Laustsen observes, it “just looks like the light is catching on a piece of flat glass in front of the lens. It’s more beautiful when the flare comes from the lens itself” — and that’s the effect that was replicated with the behind-the-lens nylon lines. “With the filters inside the camera,” the cinematographer adds, “it was also easier for first assistant Craig Pressgrove to do the lens changes.”

The exterior of the Continental was shot in lower Manhattan, but the hotel’s interiors were filmed in downtown Brooklyn, in the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower — which now serves as an event space —whose glass-and-wrought-iron front doors open to a 128'-long vaulted banking hall with limestone facing, marble floors, carved teller stations, and a 63'-high ceiling supported by Romanesque columns. For its role as the Continental’s lobby, the hall was furnished by Kavanaugh with two round settees crowned with statues of the Roman war gods Bellona and Mars, a fully-stocked bar, and a lounge on the mezzanine. 

Parabellum’s stages were located at Gold Coast Studios in Long Island, N.Y. The first of the production’s two notable stage-bound sets is the Continental’s terrace, for which the Rockefeller Center rooftop garden was used in Chapter 2. The schedule didn’t allow for much time to shoot Parabellum’s scene, which takes place at sunrise. “You cannot make the sun rise [for] a movie,” Laustsen notes wryly. “It’s one or two shots, and then you have daylight, and then you’re fighting to control the light.”  So, for more control, the scene was moved onstage, where the set was surrounded with a sectional 45'x350' bluescreen lit with SkyPanel S120s; a 120' black velour curtain was used to control blue spill coming from off-camera. Early-morning ambience was provided by 176 overhead SkyPanel S60s, and the light of the rising sun was simulated by a 20K tungsten Fresnel and a 24K Dino light with medium bulbs, both gelled with 1⁄2 CTS. The other key set built at Gold Coast was the “manager’s office,” a labyrinthine two-story glass-and-steel structure meant to represent the top floors of the Continental, with a 270-degree view of the adjacent skyscrapers. It’s in this space that Wick and Zero ultimately face off mano a mano. “The concept was to create a space where everything is exposed, a place where there are no secrets,” Kavanaugh explains.  To help him integrate the lighting into the design of the set itself, Laustsen worked with a virtual-reality computer model based on Kavanaugh’s design. “Chad, Kevin and I had discussions about color — cool lights inside, warm light outside,” says the cinematographer, who wanted what he describes as an “organic” light element for both spaces. The art department therefore added a 35'x14' LED wall to the set’s second floor and a 28'x12' LED billboard to the rooftop; the latter was positioned between the glass structure and a 40'x440' Rosco SoftDrop that was backlit by 150 SkyPanel S60s through Magic Cloth sourced from The Rag Place.  Almeida and his rigging crew installed more than a mile of LiteGear Chroma-Correct RGB-Daylite LED LiteRibbon into the glass and steel set, using aluminum profile and plastic diffusers provided by Kavanaugh’s art department. Cues were orchestrated from an ETC Ion Xe console operated by Kent Arneson; Laustsen took advantage of that control to increase the intensity of the light over time — until the very end of the fight, when the two combatants are photographed primarily in silhouette against the LED walls. 

Wick literally fights his way through the set — alternately smashing his opponents and being smashed through glass pedestals, walls and floors — until he comes face to face with his nemesis. “We filmed this sequence with a [Chapman/Leonard Hustler IV] dolly and a Libra head, a Steadicam, and a couple of crane shots [with a MovieBird 45 and Aerocrane jib],” Laustsen details. “We didn’t want to go handheld because of all the straight lines. It would be a much more powerful look for the film if the frame was always parallel to the set.” “When we did bring in lights for the close-ups, we used Arri SkyPanel S60s and Astera AX1 LED tubes that we could attach virtually anywhere using magnets and clips,” Almeida adds. “The Astera tubes worked out great because they’re easy to hide, and if you saw a reflection, it just looked like the lighting that was built-in already.”

[madurapost]

Irwan Sumenep: Dari Vokalis Band hingga Bintang Dangdut Nasional

PAMEKASAN, MaduraPost – Irwan Krisdiyanto, atau yang lebih dikenal dengan nama panggung Irwan Sumenep, lahir pada 17 November 1993 di Sumenep, Jawa Timur. Sejak kecil, Irwan sudah menunjukkan bakat luar biasa dalam dunia musik, yang akhirnya mengantarkannya menjadi salah satu penyanyi dangdut terkemuka di Indonesia. Irwan mulai dikenal luas setelah mengikuti ajang pencarian bakat D Academy musim…

[metropolitant]

X3D STUDIO: PIONEERING VIRTUAL PRODUCTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

[vintagegeekculture]

"Brawl Busters" (1978) was a martial arts film that was advertised as being from the "Chinese Black Belt Society" in an opening card. Not only does this group not exist, the movie isn't even Chinese, but Korean. It was common for a lot of Korean films of this era to be set in China and have a Hong Kong cast. The film also was said to star "Black Jack Chan," who not only was not in the film, but also doesn't exist at all. As the images above show, it is a female led martial arts film.

This deeply strange credit to a made up Kung Fu Society and a claim to star a completely made up Chinese leading man was because, as surprising as it is to consider today, there was a time when it was extremely rare to have any entertainment come out of South Korea, and the producers figured it would have a bigger audience in Asia if this film was thought to be from Hong Kong. If it was known to be Korean, it would come off as a knockoff, which, to be fair, it completely was. South Korea was under military rule until the 1980s, and nearly all of its early entertainment industry was based on the blueprint of the cultural capital of Asia in the 70s-80s, Hong Kong, like Hitman in the Hand of Buddha, Woman Avenger (a Korean version of the very Chinese story of Wing Chun, famously played a decade later by Michelle Yeoh). Korean films of this era had many Hong Kong stars like Angela Mao, who made Hapkido and When Taekwondo Strikes in the early 70s there as joint Korean/Chinese productions. It also went both ways: many Korean talent in this era had to emigrate Korea to get into showbusiness, like "Thunderfoot" Hwang Jang Lee. After all...who ever heard of getting famous in entertainment in South Korea, anyway?

[chaos0pikachu]

Is BL Being Overly Influenced by Modern Western Romance Tropes?

Short answer: No. anyways, in the following essay I will explain that James Cameron is a weeb...

(okay fine~~ lets actually do this)

TLDR: discussing what media globalization is, how fandom can distill it down to only American/European cinema, showcasing how a lot of current BL is influenced by countries within it's own proximity and NOT "the west" but each other, also James Cameron is still a weeb

I had seen a post that basically proposited that BL was being influenced by modern western romance tropes and had used things like omegaverse and mafia settings as an example. I found this, in a word, fucking annoying (oh, two words I guess) because it's micro-xenophobic to me.

It positions western - and really what we mean by this is American/European countries, we're not talking about South American countries are we? - cinema as the central breadbasket of all cinema in and of itself. Inherently, all following cinema must be in some way, shape, or form, influenced by American/European standards, and as such America/European countries are directly responsible for cinema everywhere else, and these places - namely non-white countries - do not influence each other, nor have their own histories in regards to storytelling or cinema and do not, in turn, also influence American/European film making either.

Now like, do I think all of that~~ is intentionally malicious thinking on behalf of folks in fandom? No, so chill out.

I do, however, think a lot of it is birthed from simple ignorance and growing up in an environment where ~The West~ is propagated to be central, individual, and exceptional as opposed to the monolith of "Asia" - by which we mean China, Korea, Japan don't we? How often in discussions of Asian countries is Iran, India, or Saudi Arabia brought up even tho they are all Asian countries? - or the monolith that is South America - in which some folks might believe regions like the Caribbean and/or Central America belong to, but nope there both North America.

Anyway, what we're talking about here is the concept of "media globalization":

"The production, distribution, and consumption of media products on a global scale, facilitating the exchange and diffusion of ideas cross-culturally." (source)

"The media industry is, in many ways, perfect for globalization, or the spread of global trade without regard for traditional political borders. [...] the low marginal costs of media mean that reaching a wider market creates much larger profit margins for media companies. [...] Media is largely a cultural product, and the transfer of such a product is likely to have an influence on the recipient’s culture." (source)

Typically when I see fandom discussing what falls under MG the topic is usually focused on how "the west" is influencing Thai/Korean/Chinese/Japanese media.

Enter, Pit Babe.

Surely Pit Babe was influenced by Supernatural right? Omegaverse is huge in the west - love it, hate it, meh it - it originated in the west - specifically via Supernatural after all.

Nah.

Omegaverse has been popular in Japan and China for almost a decade, if not longer. The earliest omegaverse manga I can think of is Pendulum: Juujin Omegaverse by Hana Hasumi which was released in 2015, almost a decade ago.

(what if you added furries into omegaverse? WHAT IF?? - Japan)

There's countless popular omegaverse manga too, and the dynamics only moderately resemble the ones we're familiar with in the west. Juujin is part omegaverse and part furry/beastmen - the alphas are all beastmen the omegas are humans - while something like Ookami-kun Is Not Scary only slightly resembles omegaverse dynamics as a hybrid series - beastmen are really popular in Japan in part b/c of historical mythology (you see the combination of romantic Beastmen and Japanese culture & folklore in Mamoru Hosoda's work The Boy and the Beast and Wolf Children).

Megumi & Tsugumi (2018) is so popular they're an official English edition published by VIZ's imprint SuBlime and that's a straight up omegaverse story.

(look at the omega symbol on the cover loud and proud baby)

So if Pit Babe was influenced by anything, it certainly wasn't "the west" it was Japan, Korea and China. Because those countries have a thriving omegaverse sub-genre going and have had such for 10 plus years now. Supernatural is popular in Japan, yes, and that may be where Japan and Japanese fans originally found omegaverse as a fictional sub-genre.

HOWEVER

Japanese fans took the sub-genre, bent it, played with it, and evolved it into their own thing. As such, other countries in their proximity, like Thailand, China, and Korea who read BL and GL manga, found it and were like "hey, we wanna play too!"

(is that an omegaverse yuri novel I spy?? yes, yes it is)

When I watched the Red Peafowl trailer, it had more in common with Kinnporsche, History: Trapped, along with films and shows like: Jet Li's The Enforcer, and Fist of Legend, Donnie Yen's Flash Point, Raging Fire, and Kung Fu Jungle, Han Dong-wook's The Worst of Evil, Kim Jin-Min's My Name, Lee Chung-hyeon's The Ballerina, Baik's Believer & Believer 2, Yoshie Kaoruhara's KeixYaku, popular Don Lee films The Gangster, the Cop and the Devil and Unstoppable alongside BL manga like Honto Yajuu and Bi No Isu (probably one of the most well known yazuka manga to date).

Like, we're seeing a rise in mafia based BLs and people think that's because of "western influence" and not the absolute insane success of kinnporsche??? Especially in countries like China, Korea, Taiwan, Philippines and other Asian countries???

Mafia films and gang shows aren't even that popular here in America/Europe; don't get me wrong, they still get made and exist, but the last full length film was The Irishman which did not make it's budget back, and while Power is still on-going it's not a smash hit either. The heyday of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, Goodfellas, and Scarface are long gone. And if you've watched any those shows or films they have very little in common with Kei x Yaku, Kinnporsche, or Red Peafowl in tone, or style.

(who knew martin just wanted to make his al pacino/robert de niro fanfic come to life all these years?)

Another example, The Sign, which is clearly taking inspiration from Chinese costume dramas: Ashes of Love, Fairy and Devil, White Snake (and it's many adaptions), Guardian, & Ying Yang Master Dream of Eternity. Alongside Hong Kong and Korean cop and romance shows like Tale of the Nine-Tailed, Hotel Del Luna, Director Who Buys Me Dinner, First Love, Again, and previously mentioned cop dramas.

Like, I know y'all don't think Twins is influenced by, what, American sports classic Angels in the Outfield?? Gridiron Gang?? Rocky?? Nah that shit is inspired by the popularity of sports manga like Haikyuu!!, Slam Dunk, Prince of Tennis (which even has a Chinese drama adaption), and the like. And also probably History 2, & Not Me but I'm like 87% sure Twins is just Haikyuu fanfic.

So like, does this mean that there's NO history in which American and European cinema influenced these countries? What, no, obviously that's not true, American/European totally have had media influence on countries like Korea, Japan, etc.

Astro Boy by Osamu Tezuka considered "the father of manga" was inspired by Walt Disney's work on Bambi. Another more recent and prominent example is director Yeon Sang-ho and his film Train to Busan.

"And it was Snyder’s movie [Dawn of the Dead, 2004], not the 1978 original, that filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho recalled as his first encounter with the undead. “That was when I started my interest in zombies,” Yeon said, in an email interview through a translator from South Korea. Even today, he added, “it’s the most memorable and intense zombie movie I’ve ever seen.”" (source)

HOWEVER, the global influence doesn't stop there. It's not a one-way street. Yeon Sang-Ho was inspired by Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead, a remake of George Romero's own work, but Yeon Sang-Ho's work has inspired countless Korean film makers to make their own zombie media; following Train to Busan there's been: Kingdom (2019 - current), All of Us Are Dead (2022), Zombie Detective (2020), Zombieverse (2023), Alive (2020), Rampant (2018).

And hey, wouldn't you know it now we're starting to see more zombie media coming out of places like Japan (Zom 100 the manga, movie, and anime) and High School of the Dead.

Do you know what Domundi's series Zombivor (2023, pilot trailer only) reminds me of? It's NOT The Walking Dead (which is the only relevant zombie media America has created in the last decade) it's Korea's All of Us Are Dead (2022). Comparing the trailers, the settings, the tone, it's clear where Zombivor is pulling inspiration from: Korean zombie cinema. NOT American zombie cinema.

In fact a lot of Domundi's shows - Cutie Pie, Middleman's Love, Naughty Babe, Bed Friend - are all very clearly inspired by Korean filmmaking, specifically that of romantic kdramas from the 2016 - 2020 era. Not always in story, but rather in technique.

This is media globalization. It's not simply ~The West~ influencing non-American/European countries but countries who are often more close in terms of: proximity, culture, and trade are going to have more influence on each other.

It is far more likely that Aoftion (Naughty Babe, Cutie Pie, Zombivor) was influenced by watching Train to Busan, All of Us Are Dead, and other Korean zombie shows and films than a single episode of Walking Dead.

My point isn't that this goes one way only, but rather it is very literally a global thing. This includes American and European film makers being influenced by non-American and European cinema.

Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, the Wachowski sisters, George Lucas and James Cameron have all been influenced by Japanese film making, especially the works of Akira Kurosawa, Satoshi Kon, and Mamoru Oshii.

John Wick's entire gun-fu sub-genre is heavily influenced by classic Hong Kong action films, specifically John Woo films. Legend of Korra, The Boondocks, Voltron, Young Justice, My Adventures with Superman are all obviously inspired by Japanese anime but animated by a Korean animation studio (Studio Mir). Beyond that, the rise in adult animated dramas like Castlevania, Critical Role Vox Machina, and Invincible to name a few are very clearly taking inspiration from anime in terms of style. The weebs that were watching Adult Swim's Inuyasha, Bleach, and Dragon Ball Z have grown up and are now working in Hollywood.

Okay so like, what's the point of all this? What's the issue? Since American/European cinema does influence et all cinema does any of this really matter?

YES.

I take contention with this line of thinking because it centers "the west" and our supposed individual importance way to much. Declaring definitively that "BL is being influenced by western tropes" and then including tropes, narratives, and film making styles that aren't inherently western and actually have major roots in the cinema of various Asian countries, removes the existence of individual history these countries have which are rich, varied, and nuanced. It removes the "global" part of globalization by declaring "the globe" is really just America and Europe.

It distills these countries down to static places that only exist when American/European audiences discover them.

BL doesn't exist in a vacuum you can trace the development of Korean BL to the development of Korean het dramas almost to a T. You can also trace their development to the queer history of each country and how Thailand interacts culturally with China, Japan, Korea, etc and vice versa. It also ignores the history of these countries influencing American cinema as well. Don't mistake "the globe" for only your sphere of experience.

Anyway James Cameron is a damn weeb y'all have a good night.

Check out other posts in the series:

Film Making? In My BL? - The Sign ep01 Edition | Aspect Ratio in Love for Love's Sake | Cinematography in My BL - Our Skyy2 vs kinnporsche, 2gether vs semantic error, 1000 Stars vs The Sign | How The Sign Uses CGI | Is BL Being Overly Influenced by Modern Western Romance Tropes?

[like these posts? drop me a couple pennies on ko-fi]

[neil-gaiman]

Dear Mr. Gaiman, I saw your Wired interview on mythology support on YouTube, and I would like to ask a question regarding mythological studies if I may: being a British white man as you are, is it okay to study Christianity's mythologies like it's a set of story elements that can be treated as decorationa of commerical products like video games, comic books and novels, or is Christianity something that cannot be toyed with with a light attitude for a Westerner? I'm East Asian myself (my first language is Mandarin and my family is Buddhist) and in East Asia mythological elements are talked about like material to be used in video game design or storytelling, and I know that that can be troubling for the truly Christian communities. So basically what I'd like to ask you is your view on the propiety of using biblical references in commercial fiction or products, especially with regards to taboos like the names of demons, which is often seen in Japanese video games and popular media. Is it okay to view such usage as harmless to the audience such as children or teens?

Good question. I don't know. I was a Jewish kid who was a scholarship kid at a Church of England school, the kind with chapel services every morning, so I was more familiar with High Church Protestant songs and services than with Jewish ones. I was top of the class, always, in religious studies, even though for me they were all just more mythology.

I suspect that my attitude was "if I have to learn this then it's mine to use". If they didn't want me to use it, they were free not to teach it to me.

When Terry Pratchett and I wrote Good Omens, we put a lot of Christianity into it, with me being the one that had actually read the Revelation of St John of Patmos, and made notes on what we needed to include. Good Omens began as humorous look at The Omen, which was itself a mass market film about the coming of the Christian End Times, so we felt one of us needed to have read it for research. Good Omens was also inspired by a particularly antisemitic moment in The Jew of Malta, John le Carre's spy novels and most of all by Richmal Crompton's William books.

I would need a deep dive into what you mean by "harmless" before I could hazard a guess as to whether it was that or not and whether fiction should be harmless or not.

[omar-bb]

notes & quotes from omar's live today

he wanted to release Red Light sooner but he and his team wanted to get it right

he's excited to headline at Gröna Lund - gonna be playing a new song there and at his other shows this summer!

"one of my favorite songs. i'm telling you, you will fucking choke when you hear that one. it's dark, it's dirty, it's groovy..."

"should I leak some of it? it would be fun for you to be able to sing along..."

"i hope it's fine by my team that I just leaked that"

"maybe it'll be the next single after Red Light. only maybe. I'm not promising anything"

someone asked about an Asia tour - "I cannot be live bc I'm gonna leak a lot of shit. But you wanna know something funny? This song .... it is actually a k-pop pitch song from start. it was made with k-pop in mind. it is not fully k-pop and now that i've been doing my touch on it, it is a little less k-pop but.. they actually wrote the song k-pop in mind."

teased doing a tour in the future

another "leak" - "I was actually meant to go to korea like right now or a month ago, like after the oscars ... i was supposed to go to korea. but it never happened. i was very sad. but maybe one day.

he had a scared moment where music started playing in the other room and he thought it was an unreleased song but it was just his alejandro tiktok lol

inspo for red light? "I didn't write the song ... it was a demo that got sent to me. at first ... it was a girl singing red light, and when i heard it the first time i was like yo this sounds like fucking rihanna ... i was like is this a long lost rihanna song? this is the greatest thing i've ever heard. and then i just fucking took it. i was like this is my song before rihanna takes it from me. and now it's my song."

Red Light music video when? "we shot a visualizer, so it's not a music video ... it's very beautiful. very stunning. i've never done anything like that. ... it's not a real music video. it's more visuals for the song."

will be doing red light on 25 may and also a new song

"you'll hear a whole new omar when you hear that song"

he has been replying to messages in his community on whatsapp and sms. they'll be leaking more stuff through there

new OMR Beauty product when? "....................... stay tuned"

"you will die when you see the next launch of OMR Beauty. that's all I'm saying. Next!!!"

will he start a fashion brand? "i don't really have the time for that unfortunately. ... not for now"

thinks he is not gonna bleach his hair

Someone asked red light spanish version when? and he sang a bit of it in spanish

omar backflip when? "when i'm in heaven"

is he going to act again?"i'm actually reading some scripts right now. just reading, it's not anything happening really yet, just testing the waters. we'll see, i would love to act. i actually miss acting, it was a fun time ... nothing will ever be like YR obviously, but just the thought of meeting new ppl, new friends, being together for a few weeks or a few months, and filming smth very special, that would be so much fun. ... i'm actually reading a really cool script right now" but more focusing on music right now

he has 40-50 new songs from the last year apparently??? Maybe i misunderstood this

album when? "don't know, we'll see" - he has a lot of songs and could drop an album but he wants it to be perfect so it'll be awhile

there will be red light merch this summer

he and edvin hang out sometimes

not doing Rix FM this year

there will not be 12 red light remixes lol "but maybe a few"

Eurovision 2025? "absolutely not. sorry not sorry." something about always being thrown out of the competition

he's stopped drinking coffee regularly and drinks matcha instead

someone suggested hoemars as the fandom name and he laughed lol

a lot is happening in May he says !! "y'all better eat good, sleep well" lolol

he said he might do another live next week once Red Light is out

[akajustmerry]

anyways, putting the shit music and lestat abuse apologism and sidelining characters of colour aside, the other huge issue with iwtv season 3 will be the orientalism. because if there's something I know it's that even productions purporting to care about Representation™ and Diversity™ because they cast actors of colour, those productions will still very happily be orientalist and islamophobic as fuck dehumanising Arab cultures for their lowkey white supremacist art and most everyone will eat that shit up. if you don't believe me, I'll point you to the fact that Dune 2 was one of the biggest films of the last 12 months and pop culture unironically calls the 1990s The Mummy movies iconic bisexual movies and clout it non-stop. like iwtv season 3 is on some level gonna be lestat fucking an Egyptian goddess because a white woman wrote that a backstory that was like "this Egyptian queen's blood is why this white man is as powerful and violent as he is" and a lot of you don't see a problem with that!!! And guess what!!! There's no amount of ethnically accurate casting that will fix that level of racism, misogyny and orientalism. Like that's Edward Said's Orientalism 101 ie. that the middle east, Africa and Asia exists for white men to conquer and fuck to empower themselves. But of course no one really cares because people in the West have basically been conditioned not to at this point. Why would you care. They'll just repackage the racism as vaguely feminist or as part of the horror and people will be like, "it's actually really cool and exciting that this Egyptian woman is a sexy bloodthirsty maniac who's the root of all evil and then gets brutally murdered!!!!!" anyway.

[chthonic-cassandra]

what vampire musicals are there? asking bc of the tag meme you posted a few days(?) ago where you said it was pretty accurate aside from no vampire musicals... i know wildhorn dracula, but what else? (and which are good?)

Thank you for asking a question which allows me to indulge myself by recounting all this. The question of "good," however, is rather fraught, and I ask everyone to remember that these opinions are just my own.

The (probably) first, and the only one to achieve significant success, was Jim Steinman's Tanz der Vampire/Dance of the Vampires, first stage in 1997. Tanz was an adaptation of Roman Polanski's comedic vampire movie The Fearless Vampire Killers, and features "Total Eclipse of the Heart," a song Steinman always intended to be about vampires. Tonally, the musical veers wildly between the broad comedy of the source film and something approaching sincerity and the comedy sections have never really worked for me, but it's certainly the most musically sophisticated of the vampire musicals and at its best, like in the major ballad sung by the lead vampire character about the loves he has killed (here sung by original cast Steve Barton, and here by Drew Sarich, who is in all the major vampire musicals and who we shall have more to say about anon) it's spectacular gothy camp glory.

Tanz was incredibly popular in Austria, where it was first staged, and then throughout Europe and in Japan. However, when it was brought to Broadway it was drastically rewritten, partly at the behest of Michael Crawford, starring in the show and anxious about changes in his body and being compared to his career-making performance in Phantom of the Opera. The comedy was foregrounded and the show was constantly being rewritten, to the point that the actors didn't know how their parts might change performance to performance. I didn't see the Broadway production, but it is accounted by all to be a colossal failure. The show remains popular worldwide to this day, but has not received another major staging in North America.

Next comes the Frank Wildhorn Dracula the Muiscal, which I know you know about, but as it is vital to this narrative I must give some explanation. Wildhorn is a sort of mid-tier musical theater composer, known for melodrama and period pieces. After the popular (though not critical) success of his Jekyll & Hyde musical (1997 on Broadway) he co-wrote Dracula with lyricist Don Black, premiering on Broadway on 2004.

While I maintain that Dracula the Musical has been unjustly maligned by comparison with some other works of musical theater, it is admittedly a mess, and the Broadway production, which was, despite highly publicized special effects, shockingly static, did it no favors. It tries to do far too many things, combining sections of relatively close novel adaptation (Christopher Hampton's book is often quietly strong) with a messily shoehorned Dracula/Mina romance. The score is variable, ranging, even just in Dracula's material, from the rousing "Life After Life" as Dracula welcomes the transformed Lucy, to his cringe-inducing "The Longer I Live". (I still think almost all of the music and lyrics are better than those of Les Miserables but then again I think most things are better than the Les Miserables musical.) The Broadway production had a reasonably strong cast, including Melissa Errico as Mina and Kelli O'Hara as Lucy, but it failed nearly as badly as the American version of Tanz had, if not quite so dramatically.

Wildhorn subsequently brought DtM to Europe, where it enjoyed significantly more success, first in a stripped down modern production in St. Gallen starring Drew Sarich and then in Vienna where the role of Van Helsing was expanded for popular star Uwe Kröger. It's continued to be performed in Europe and Asia, and in some USA community theaters.

Next up was Elton John's Lestat in 2007. One would expect that this musical would have been wonderfully over-the-top glam rock, but somehow Lestat ended up being one of the most staid things I have ever seen. Filled with forgettable music (even if we all do want to see Sam Reid and Jacob Anderson doing "Embrace It". It was further brought down by a lackluster performance of the title character by Hugh Panaro, previously known for his mediocre (sorry Panaro fans!) turn in Phantom. It was enlivened slightly by Carolee Carmello as Gabrielle earning one of the show's only Tony nominations and Drew Sarich (there he is again!) playing a decidedly not book accurate but very entertaining Armand. It also involved a Buddhist monk Marius de Romanus, but I constantly question whether this was a fever dream of mine. Lestat was yet another failure on Broadway and, as far as I can tell, has had no real subsequent afterlife, though I've been wondering if that might change with the IwtV show (and Sam Reid's evident enjoyment of the musical!).

Those are the major vampire musicals, for what they are! But there are also some others which never got even this level of attention, including:

Two dueling French-language Dracula musicals with almost the exact same name, Dracula - L'amour plus fort que la mort and Dracula - Entre l'amour et la mort

A Nosferatu musical which is a strong contender for the worst lyrics I have ever heard but also entertains me

another mysterious Dracula musical made in the UK with songs of wildly varying qualities, but containing the only Mina hero ballad with which I am familiar

There are also edge cases like Bat Boy and Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I would not call vampire musicals but someone else might.

Anyway! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to share some of the truly disproportionate amount of information I have about this topic in my head. I hope this brought some entertainment.

[venusvity]

If you were concerned that the girls were being overworked before, welcome to the year, Angelico proved you right ten times over! Refusing to lose their hype and cash flow, Venus would release their first full album, "BRAINROT," alongside the title track WORMZ4BRAINZ. "WORMZ4BRAINZ" received positive reviews from critics, who praised its production and the group's vocal delivery. It attained commercial success, peaking at number two on the Gaon Digital Chart and number three on Billboard's World Digital Songs chart.

Showing their full versatility this year, the girls would come back with their sixth mini album, "#dontlike" taking on a more "teen crush" type concept. The EP debuted at number two on the Gaon Album Chart and number six on the Billboard World Albums chart. The songs from the album also performed well digitally. "#dontlike" charted at number one on the Gaon Digital Chart and number three on the Billboard World Digital Song Sales chart.

Controversially, just two months after Jiah turned 19, Venus would release "Come N' Get It," a sexy summer mini album. While a group of Constellations were very vocal about how inappropriate it was for this concept to be done on a freshly legal adult, the general public didn't seem to care. "Come N' Get It" debuted at number 27 on South Korea's Circle Digital Chart. It rose to number one the following week. The song debuted at number one on Singapore's Top Streaming Chart, the Malaysia International chart, and the Billboard Hits of the World charts for Hong Kong and Taiwan, earning Venus their first number-one in Hong Kong.

When asked about how she felt looking back on Come N Get It in the "The Road To Venus" documentary in 2023, Jiah would discuss how she feels currently about the concept vs. how she felt at nineteen.

The music video, full of provocative dancing and the girls in swimsuits, was filmed two days after Jiah's birthday, resulting in another wave of concern from fans. Jiah would only concern fans further by saying she's been waiting to do a concept like this and was very excited to show this side of her.

As a means of damage control gone wrong, VENUS would close out the year with their second digital single, "BAD GIRL," which spearheaded the Venus Hate Train of 2020. A hate train when you're in a successful girl group is to be expected, and the girls handled it to the best of their ability. However, online critics did nothing to the girls charting power and influence.

"Bad Girls" was named the best K-pop song of 2020 by Business Insider, second by Zenerate, and amongst the best songs of 2023 by Elle. Apple's campaign and "Bad Girls"'s music video received awards at the One Show and the Spikes Asia Awards. The song received four music show awards, twice on both M Countdown and Inkigayo.

[discountalien-pancake]

Do people not know that Tolkien never specified the length of elves’ hair in his writing?

Look. I need all of you to understand something when you say “xyz cosplayers could do better!” when talking about wigs. No. They could not. I love cosplayers and i have seen many an excellent cosplayer and some of them have fantastic wigs! For cosplay. They aren’t real hair, they don’t look like real hair, and they aren’t meant to.

More importantly, starting in 2020 there was literally a shortage high quality, human-hair wigs. Covid shutdowns disrupted supply chains in Asia and Europe, and made it difficult for workers to go to factories to actually make wigs. The lace needed to make them also sold out. Filming usually takes place starting 1-2 years before a show or movie is released, which means that there literally were no wigs for the production.

“But HOTD had wigs—“ and everyone thinks they look like trash, because they are synthetic. TROP took the route of having as many characters sport their own natural hair as possible, so we get things like most of the male elves having shorter hair because their actors didn’t have time to grow their hair out. The wigs got reserved for main cast characters:

And they look a million times better than what HOTD had going on. Would they have looked this good if they split the hair budget up to put every fucking elf in a plastic wig? I doubt it!

You know what was way more important than elves with long hair?

Valandil and other brown and Black characters with natural hair.

[beguines]

The Indian state has already begun to evict indigenous communities from their homes. In late 2020, tribal communities received notice that labeled their homes as illegally occupying forest land. Their homes were demolished. This bears an eerie resemblance to Israel's targeting of Bedouin communities of Naqab, where Israel gave the lands of these communities to Jewish settlers and the military. The logic of Bedouin dispossession was premised on the fact that as nomads, they had no right to the land.

In Kashmir, these communities were living on lands that the Indian state wanted to use for the development of tourist infrastructure. Part of the plan is to transfer agricultural land to Indian state and private corporations. Kashmir has already lost 78,700 hectares of agricultural land to non-agricultural purposes between 2015–19. This decline in agricultural land—which a majority of Kashmiris still rely upon as the foundation of their economy—will disempower farmers, result in a loss of essential crops, make Kashmir less agriculturally self-sufficient, and create grounds for economic collapse in the near future. It is of course, only when Kashmiris are economically devastated that India's job in securing their land will be made even easier.

Alongside the destruction of agricultural land, the Indian government has also been charged with "ecocide" in Kashmir, which, "masked under the development rhetoric . . . destroys the environment without care, extracting resources and expanding illegal infrastructure as a way of contesting the indigenous peoples' right of belonging and using the territory for their own gain." During the lockdown in late 2019, the valley saw unprecedented forest clearances. In June 2020, the Jammu & Kashmir Forest Department became a government-owned corporation, allowing it to sell public forest land to private entities, including to Indian corporations. The rush to secure and extract Kashmir's resources has typically come at an immense cost to the region's vulnerable ecology, prompting local activists' fears that a lack of accountability will almost certainly exacerbate the climate crisis in South Asia. Just as Israel has secured control over Palestinian resources, India's stranglehold of Kashmir's natural resources and interference with the environment will ultimately make Kashmiris dependent on the Indian state for their livelihoods.

All of these shifts in land use reflect the "Srinagar Master Plan 2035," which "proposes creating formal and informal housing colonies through town planning schemes as well as in Special Investment Corridors," primarily for the use of Indian settlers and outside investors. Indeed, the Indian government has signed a series of MOU's with outside investors to alter the nature of the state by building multiplexes, educational institutions, film production centers, tourist infrastructure, Hindu religious sites, and medical industries. Kashmiri investors are no competition for massive Indian and external corporations and have a fundamental disadvantage in investing in land banks that the government has apportioned toward these purposes. Back to back lockdowns have resulted in massive economic losses for Kashmir's industries, including tourism, handicrafts, horticulture, IT, and e-commerce. Furthermore, "as with other colonial powers, Indian officials are participating in international investment summits parroting Kashmir as a 'Land of Opportunity', setting off a scramble for Kashmir's resources, which will cause further environmental destruction." India has always kept a close eye on Kashmir's water resources and its capabilities to generate electricity, while intentionally depriving Kashmir of the electricity it produces.

As more economic and employment opportunities are opened up to Indian domiciles, Kashmiris will also be deprived of what little job security they had. In sum, "neoliberal policies come together with settler colonial ambitions under continued reference to private players, industrialization and development, with the 'steady flow of wealth outwards.'"

Azad Essa, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel

[agentoffangirling]

as a south asian why the hell did they make aladdin and jasmine south asian. I am so confused. Isn't jasmine's name literally persian

Okay okay so there's a bit of a story for this

And to quickly answer your last question, yup, Jasmine is one of the forms of Yas/Yasmine, our jasmine flowers

So back in the 90s, and still a little bit today, many production companies such as Disney didn't really see a difference with the Middle East and South Asia. When Disney decided they wanted to make an adaptation of "Aladdin" from "One Thousand and One Nights" (slight tidbit here, the story of Aladdin is not part of the original book. A French guy added it in and for some reason, set it in China? One Thousand is a Persian story, most of the stories in there are Persian, so this choice was. Interesting), it's not like they suddenly hired a bunch of Middle Eastern experts to consult on the film. No, they just created a desert-y landscape and lumped in Persian, Arab, and South Asian all in there

This is why the palace of Agrabah heavily resembles the Taj Mahal on a more Arabic-sounding name. Rajah, Jasmine's pet tiger, is an Indian word for king. Names such as Jafar and Jasmine are Persian in origin, while a lot of the clothing is Turkish-inspired. Villains such as the Captain and Jafar have a lot more stereotypically Middle Eastern features (hooked nose, bushy eyebrows, etc [and it's a convo for another day about how the "good" characters don't have these exaggerated features])

This melding of several cultures is what led up to the live-action "Aladdin" in 2019. The creators of that movie wanted to be more respectful of the region, and so this time, they did hire consultants and the like to help ensure it would be much less offensive ("where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face", nice going 1992)

And for the most part, they did that. Except for Jasmine

Jasmine is played by Naomi Scott, a half white half Indian woman, and look, it's pretty obvious she only got this part because she's well known. I would also like to point out that the casting calls for the characters in general once again lumped Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern people, however, almost all of the cast is Middle Eastern, and several of them are Persian (Sultan and Mara, notably)

So while everyone else is wearing clothes more indicative of the Middle East, you have miss Jasmine over here dressed in sarees and Indian-inspired clothing because costuming department went "oh! She's Indian now!" Agrabah is also a lot more similar to South Asia than the Middle East, further deepening this issue

To an outsider, "Aladdin" is Indian. To them, there's some Arab inspo, but they would mostly think it's set somewhere in India or South Asia. That's what the casting and costuming department in "Rise of Red" were working with, and so they just opted to go the whole South Asian angle. None of the actors who portray Jasmine, Aladdin, and their kid are Middle Eastern, they're all South Asian. The clothes they're wearing are very obviously from that region

And if I'm being completely honest, that's exactly what I expect from Disney. Why would they bother to do research for extremely minor characters with two lines? The problem here is what I've been talking about above, is that Hollywood is constantly thinking South Asians and Middle Easterners are interchangeable when we're not. If I see a MENA character on screen, more often than not the actor is South Asian. This is a continuous problem no one from these places wants to see happening, and yet it is because Hollywood doesn't actually care. The more it's done, the more they think it's okay and so they continue to blur the lines between several different cultures

So, on an ending note, Jasmine and Aladdin are Arab, if not Persian, and the idea that we are interchangable with South Asians harms both our cultures

[sifu-kisu]

After three years of training with acclaimed Chinese martial art wushu teacher Wu Bin, Jet Li won his first national championship for the Beijing Wushu Team. Between 1974 and 1979, he won the title of Men's All-Around National Wushu Champion five times. After retiring from competitive wushu at age 18, Li went on to win great acclaim in China as an actor, making his debut with the film "Shaolin Temple" (1982), which instantly catapulted him to stardom in East Asia.

In 1998, he made his international film debut in "Lethal Weapon 4" which also marked the first time he had ever played a villain in a film. He agreed to do "Lethal Weapon 4" after the producer Joel Silver promised to give him the leading role in his next film, "Romeo Must Die" (2000), alongside singer Aaliyah. The film became a box office hit. Though Li spoke very little English at the time of production, his performance as Chinese mafia hitman Wah Sing Ku was praised.

Li was in the Maldives when a tsunami hit during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. Although it was widely reported at the time that he had died during the disaster, he only suffered a minor foot injury, caused by a piece of floating furniture while he was guiding his four-year-old daughter Jane and the family nanny holding his one-year-old daughter Jada to safety of higher ground amid dangerously rising ocean water. The four of them were by the pool and slightly above the beach when the wave came ashore, barely escaping to the upper floors of a hotel building.

According to Li, everything he has ever wanted to tell the world can be found in three of his films: the message of "Hero" (2002, below) is that the suffering of one person can never be as significant as the suffering of a nation; "Unleashed" (2005) shows that violence is never a solution; and "Fearless" (2006) tells that the biggest enemy of a person is himself. Li thinks that the greatest weapon is a smile and the largest power is love.

"We are a global family. The religion is different, the languages are different, but we are human beings and we need to help each other." (Wikipedia/IMDb)

Happy Birthday, Jet Li!

[lightofraye]

Fine. If we shouldn't stan Danneel, then who SHOULD we stan?!

Hi anon!

I’m glad you asked.

Audrey Hepburn.

Why?

Where should I begin?

Did you know that she did what she could to help to resist the Nazis? She performed ballet to raise money to support the Dutch resistance. She worked, first by studying ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory, then with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam and then Marie Rambert in London. She also performed as a chorus girl in West End musical theatre productions.

She studied and then worked. All while surviving World War II, nearly dying of a severe infection, suffering from malnutrition, in the meantime.

Audrey did so well in her first starring film (she did do small roles beforehand) in the romantic comedy Roman Holiday that she was the first actress to win an Oscar, a Golden Globe Award, and a BAFTA Award for a single performance! She also won a Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Play for her performance in Ondine.

Later in life, she devoted much of her time to UNICEF, which she contributed to since 1954. Between 1988 and 1992, she worked in some of the poorest communities of Africa, South America, and Asia.

She once said: “The 'Third World' is a term I don't like very much, because we're all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.”

In October 1989, Hepburn and Wolders went to Bangladesh. John Isaac, a UN photographer, said, "Often the kids would have flies all over them, but she would just go hug them. I had never seen that. Other people had a certain amount of hesitation, but she would just grab them. Children would just come up to hold her hand, touch her – she was like the Pied Piper."

We should be turning our adoration to people like her. I hope it’s clearer now, anon.