#just watching frames of alan and “tom” together

[categoricalglitches]

This is so funny "Thomas" "Zane" even looks bigger than Alan just. By silhouette? Because of the hair. It's significantly more voluminous lmao

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s What If? Trailer Breakdown and MCU Easter Eggs Explained

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Lost in the shuffle of Marvel’s live action TV slate and its implications for the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe (like DOOM being the secret bad guy of Loki CHANGE MY MIND) is the impending release of Marvel’s first animated series. What If…? follows the theme of the comic of the same name, which explores far-fetched alternate versions of big moments in Marvel history. As you can see from the show’s new trailer, things get very weird when you start messing with the sacred timeline.

The first season of the animated show is going to run for 10 episodes, but it seems we only got a look at four or five possible stories from the trailer. We’re going to try and take it one story at a time. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, take a look below:

Okay, here’s everything we found:

Uatu the Watcher

The framing sequence for every issue of the comic was Uatu the Watcher telling readers how if one thing changed, the whole world might have turned out differently. Uatu is a member of a race of extremely powerful, nigh-immortal beings committed to watching (or “monitoring” if you’re a DC head) the universe, but never interfering. Among his gadgets and gizmos that enabled him to perform those duties were machines that would let him see alternate possible realities. It looks like that framing sequence will make its way to the animated series, with Uatu played by Jeffrey Wright. 

Killmonger and Iron Man

The first big change we see is Eric Killmonger, the Black Panther villain, saving Tony Stark from a bomb at what would have been the beginning of the first Iron Man movie. 

It looks like this one wraps up with a big battle, with Killmonger and Ramonda (T’Challa’s stepmother and queen of Wakanda) each leading forces. What’s potentially interesting about this would be how it ties the motivations of Tony Stark and Killmonger together – Tony, saved from the attack, would not be forced to create Iron Man armor and could potentially give Killmonger a different outlet for his anger at Wakanda.

Thor vs. Ultrons in Madripoor

This next shot looks like a bunch of Ultrons circling a brightly lit building. The color scheme makes me immediately think Madripoor, the southeast Asian island nation introduced to the MCU in The Falcon & The Winter Soldier, but it’s entirely possible that this is just some garishly lit Stark holding.

The Ultrons swarm the building and Thor is there to meet them.

Captain Carter

The second big story teased in the trailer looks to be along the lines of “What if Peggy Carter got the super soldier serum?” The answer is apparently “ride an Iron Man into battle.”

Peggy obviously isn’t going to become Captain America, but her becoming Captain Britain would be a bit of a big deal. Captain Britain is typically an X-Men thing – the original 616 Captain was Brian Braddock, created by legendary X-writer Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe. Brian headlined his own title for a bit, flourishing under Alan Moore and Alan Davis before fading away, only to have Claremont salvage his character family, including his sister Betsy, for his massive, seminal X-Men run.

Brian became Captain Britain when he was approached by Merlin and his daughter Roma and asked to choose between the Amulet of Right and the Sword of Might to see what kind of protector he would be. Interesting that we see Peggy carrying a sword here…

We also get a quick glimpse of Arnim Zola, the Hydra scientist who eventually uploaded his consciousness into a series of televisions to become one of the big bads of Captain America: Winter Soldier.

Here’s where this story starts to take a turn: Dr. Strange meets up with Captain Carter, and presumably from here shit gets real weird. 

Like when Peggy Carter has to fight Shuma Gorath. Shuma was created in the ‘70s by Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner as an amalgamation of a bunch of different, evil, mystical beings: he’s an eye surrounded by toothy tentacles whose name was taken from an old Conan story, while his backstory has a lot of Chthulu in it.

Comics fans might recognize him as the dark god of the Cancerverse from the climax of the excellent Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning Marvel cosmic run, but real fans know him as the only character worth playing in the Capcom Marvel fighting games.

Guardians

Marvel’s What If will also feature the late Chadwick Boseman’s final performance as T’Challa. This time, though, he’s also Star Lord. It looks like T’Challa was picked up at some point by Yondu and raised in space as part of Yondu’s Ravager team.

This is a really interesting swap: the cinematic T’Challa has been largely defined by his relationship to his parents, and to his father especially. He’s swapping one strong father figure for another here, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how much his temperament changes because of Yondu, and how much his temperament changes what Star Lord would do.

One change is front and center in the trailer: T’Challa somehow gets the Guardians of the Galaxy pulled into the battle of New York from the first Avengers movie.

Loki

We know Tom Hiddleston is reprising his role as Loki for the animated series. It looks like Loki’s somehow gathered an army of Asgardians, including Volstagg? Looks like he’s facing off against Fury, too. 

It looks like this story might branch off from the events of Thor – we get a peek at Hawkeye pointing his bow and arrow in the rain, just like his introduction in the first Thor movie.

Loki also gets his hands on the Casket of Ancient Winters again. You’ll recall that he used this weapon to try and destroy Jotunheim in the first movie, but was stopped by Thor destroying the Bifrost. 

Zombies

The biggest performance draw is almost certainly going to be Boseman’s return, but the biggest story draw is going to be the MCU debut of the Marvel Zombies. This is a concept ripped straight from the comics.

The extremely popular series was penned by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman and drawn by Criminal artist Sean Phillips in 2005 as an extended riff on a What If story arc in Ultimate Fantastic Four. It introduced a world where all the Marvel heroes and villains were turned into flesh eating zombies who then went on to eat their way through the galaxy. It was followed by a PROFOUNDLY disturbing prequel comic by Kirkman and Phillips, Dead Days, and later by five (5) sequel miniseries.

Don’t be surprised if this Marvel’s What If…? episode spawns its own series.

Howard the Duck

After a few cameos in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and Avengers: Endgame, our favorite comic book duck is back, hopefully in a meatier role in Marvel’s What If…?

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[ty-talks-comics]

Best of DC: Week of May 29th, 2019

Best of this Week: Doomsday Clock #10 - Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Brad Anderson and Rob Leigh

And yet another wrinkle is added to the DC Universe.

Or should I say, “Metaverse” now? Yes, after I think three months since the last issue, Doomsday Clock returns with yet another strong issue that expands upon the mythos of the DC Universe and just how Doctor Manhattan viewed and affected things at the many different positions of time that he has been able to inhabit.

The issue is framed around an actor by the name of Carver Colman, a very huge star in DCs 1954, who has been referenced or used in previous issues. This gives some kind of continuity in the context of the story as Johnny Thunder was seen watching his movie in the retirement home al the way back in issue two or three. Colman, unfortunately, has a secret that gets him killed soon after wrapping up the filming of his biggest hit, The Adjournment and as we make it through the issue and the back and forth of his life, we find the biggest change to Doctor Manhattan’s character and how he has to bend to the rules of this new universe.

Doctor Manhattan actually meets Colman in 1938 when he was a struggling actor who had just lost his job delivering mail to a movie studio after an unfortunate accident and things he saw. Manhattan takes Colman out for some food, attempting to use him as a rod to focus on to look towards the future as he can’t seem to do so on his own after arriving. He does so and is able to see a year into the future, then four and so on. His abilities work again, but then he hears something strange.

A radio report of a man lifting a car into the air. The first appearance of Superman on April 13th, 1938. Suddenly, it was gone, the crowds of people were gone as if they never existed. He follows the path where Superman existed in 1938 and finds the Justice Society, having formed and waiting for Superman to answer their summons. Jay Garrick “Flash”, “Green Lantern” Alan Scott, Hawkman, Doctor Fate and others, waiting for the Man of Steel to join their ranks and suddenly, they too have never heard of him.

Manhattan follows the many arrivals of Superman, from 1956, to 1986 and sees his arrival change again and again, noting the many deaths of Ma and Pa Kent and how this “Universe” seems to use Superman as a focal point, even going to a thousand years from now when Superman was briefly part of the Legion of Superheroes. So to test how things revolve around Superman, he changes the past by moving the Lantern away from Alan Scott, killing him, and drastically changes the future, creating the New 52 Timeline.

Everything is recontextualized as Manhattan sees that this action changes this universe and that it’s constant state of flux affects the wider multiverse. From the parallel worlds, to the anti-matter, to the Dark Multiverse, Earth Prime is a “Metaverse” in his words. The others change to match whatever is going on in the Prime World and once it realizes what he’s done, it begins to fight back. Manhattan sees Wally West trying to fight his way back to the Universe. This one action causes a chain reaction that will lead to his inevitable confrontation with Superman where Superman either kills him or he kills the Metaverse.

Cutting back to 1954, Manhattan is at Carver Colman’s home on the night that he’s murdered. He doesn’t do anything to stop it.

There’s a saying that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” In the Watchmen Universe, Doctor Manhattan was allowed to do or not do as he pleased because that world was a little bit more grounded or at worst cynical. Though, one might say that because he refused or didn’t care to use his power at a larger scale, Ozymandias’ “evil” won. Though Ozymandias thought what he did was the right thing, this series proved it it be disastrous in the wake of Rorschach’s journal being published, but initially Veidt’s plan did succeed. Doctor Manhattan escaping to the DC Universe put him into direct conflict with the Metaverse and its Hope. Its innate desire to have the good triumph over evil won’t let Doctor Manhattan get away with inaction and in his words, “To this universe of hope… I have become the villain.”

Words can’t describe how hype I was for this. With each and every issue, a new layer is added and brings us closer and closer to the epic conclusion that only Geoff Johns and Gary Frank can realize. I also love how they’ve expanded on the importance of Earth Prime, seeing as how it has indeed gone through many changes. It’s good to finally have an explanation that implies that even through the many reboots and retcons that if DC wanted to, they could tap into those timelines as main universes at any time. Everyone’s favorite time period matters or will matter again soon.

---------------------------------------------------

"One last adventure together…"

Runner Up: Batman: Last Knight on Earth #1 - Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, FCO Plascencia and Tom Napolitano

Joker's words to describe his and Batman's last run together in the hell that is the world after some unexplained event killed numerous heroes, villains and just about anything else. It also describes what MAY be the last time we see Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo do a big Batman story together and I already feel like we're in for a BIG one.

After a curious case of large scale chalk drawings,  showing a dead Batman, leads the Dark Knight to the Crime Alley he inadvertently sets off a trap laid by an unknown assailant using the decomposing body of a ten year old child. He later wakes up in Arkham Asylum, apparently having been there since KILLING HIS FAMILY in Crime Alley all those years ago. Capullo does a great job of setting atmosphere and making things unsettling as even a small fly buzzing around and "Dr. Redd Hudd" looming over a straight jacketed Bruce Wayne looks creepy.

Arkham appears to be just a regular Asylum with Alfred showing up and trying to convince Bruce that Batman was all in his head, showing him a mock costume they made to keep him calm with a cowl stitched to a straight jacket. Bruce sees through it all and fights his way through Arkham until Alfred reveals the truth. He only wanted to keep his boy safe because half of Gotham was just gone. Years had passed and Batman has no idea what happened.

He later wakes up in a desert and coincidentally finds the head of The Joker. He wakes and immediately begins cracking jokes as Batman takes him and they begin to walk to Coast City. I don't know how much of this is real and that adds to the mystique of the story. We're never given an explanation as to how he got there from Arkham or how Joker is surviving.

They arrive at Coast City and the decayed corpse of Mogo looms over a giant crater and ruins. Joker says that all of the Lanterns fell and rings are just there for the taking. Suddenly the duo are attacked by projections of babies before being saved by Vixen and Poison Ivy. Ivy then knocks Bruce out just in case and he wakes up surrounded by the new Amazons; Vixen, Donna Troy, Poison Ivy, Supergirl and Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman explains that one day, Luthor just… convinced most that they should just take what they deserve. He told them that goodness was a lie and they just ate it up. It echoed the future that Luthor saw back in Justice League/Legion of Doom #5, but given that this is a Black Label book, one wouldn't be wrong if they didn't want to think of this as the explanation of that timeline because they're not in the same canon.

Wonder Woman also tells Batman that the one wielding the Anti-Life Equation may be one of the Boys and pleads with him to join the Amazons in Hades.

But Batman is Batman and he decides that he's going to put a stop to this.

Last Knight on Earth reads like an alternative ending for Scott Snyder's Justice League epic. Even though that story is far from over, not even close, there's this unsettling feeling that, if Scott didn't have to have the heroes win in the end, this should be the absolute endgame. A world, no UNIVERSE possibly, under siege by someone wielding the Anti-Life Equation, hope dead and dying and the ever creeping feeling of dread knowing that somehow life and death have lost enough meaning that Joker as a decapitated head still lives… this story is terrifying.

Honestly, this might be some of Capullos best art to date. With Glapion and Plascencia's help, this book feels so atmospheric and dark. Glapion accentuates Capullos lines and shading well with dark-dark inks, making Batman appear to be shrouded in it even in the sun. It's haunting, especially in the Arkham scenes where things are absolutely not as they seem and dark secrets hide behind and within the walls. Plascencia, on the other hand, can make even light and vibrant colors threatening. The red sand on Jokers jar is intense  and the Green Lantern babies are deadly. Hell, Coast City, Hall Jordan's crown jewel, looks unbelievably desolate, colored like a wasteland. Capullo pulls all of this together with as much detail as he possibly can and his work shows.

Faces are expressive, from Batmans fear, to Alfreds regret to Jokers madness. Body language is utilized greatly as Batman fights like a caged animal. He's taken aback by Jokers head, but still finds his resolve. Wonder Woman is still fierce, but even her edge has dulled with the sheer lack of hope that running away and going underground has given her.

This story is terrifying and I absolutely love it. From the creepy visuals of Capullos art, to the expression of thought because of the mature liberties Black Label books can take, it's all beautiful. This one is absolutely going to match my love for Batman: Damned and every one should go and read this. High recommend!

[latchingontoallofyou]

DWTS Premier- day after live blog

Since I didn’t watch last night, I promised to give my “Live blog” as I watched today. If you care to read what I thought, feel free. 

Opening number:

Starting with an interview, this is odd. Really, let’s play the Hannah is single from the get go. I love Kel so much! Whoa, that mirrorball opening this was trippy. I love when the pros open the dancing. Oh, Tom and Erin, I’ve missed you! I really hate this lets not say who they are dancing with and make everyone come in by themselves. They should never do that again. This is quite the process to get started. I think I like the set. It’s very shiny.

This judges twist: I’m guessing they get to save a dancer. Que the eye roll.

Hannah: This is the most of the Bachelor/ Bachelorette I’ve ever seen. That was the most unenthusiastic hello ever. Gosh I love Alan so much! She smiles a lot. I don’t like her costume. She was off timing with her arms a few times. Her movements just seem slow and small. The moves she knows, she hits sharply though. Not bad for the first dance. I think they could go on to do well. Let’s not play the showmance and I’ll be good with them staying for a while.

7,7,6

Kel: I freakin love Kel! Always have. Bringing good burger, love it! I love the reaction. I’m also glad she has someone I like again. Sliding down his tongue. I kinda love their costumes. Opps, missed hands twice in a row. So serious faced. Is he chewing gum? That wasn’t great but I still enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to more from them. Stay around long Witney and Kel! He is really listening to the judges. I like that. And man, those gems on Witney’s lips have to be uncomfortable.

6,5,5

HEY BOBBY! Love that man’s smile!

Kate: I never watched the office…. Pasha, a new cutie. Nice dimples on him. That was the shortest segment. Weird opening to the dance. She almost forgot to take off her costume. She struggled at the beginning. She seems to be almost slipping around on the floor. She’s did well in some spot, struggled through others. I think she’ll do well as the weeks go on. I love that the judges complimented Pasha too. One thing about costumes, why is she in blue and he’s in red? They just don’t really go…

5,5,5

I just love how everyone keeps mentioning that it’s been a year. Maybe they’ll learn and not do that again.

Lamar: I heard this one was bad… Don’t know him. Nice slow clap Peta. She shoots, she scores! He makes her look so tiny and she’s really not that tiny. Oh boy. I like his costume. Oh, so slow! He arms aren’t bad. Those kicks lol. He’s leg don’t need to be flexible for basketball. I mean, it really wasn’t great but knowing what the scores were, I didn’t think it was that bad. Poor guy looks horrified. Carrie Ann, good for you for being kind and really complimenting him. He did the best with what he could.

5,3,3 (Way too harsh!)

Bobby Bones! (If only I could write it like it say it) I’ve missed him on my TV.

Lauren: She’s so sweet and I love her already. I don’t even like country music. But like, why Gleb! Anyone but Gleb! He’s my least favorite male pro. Maybe she’ll take him though. Wow, go girl! She hung right in there with the ladies. She’s acting the part and doing the steps so well too! Weird song for her but it works. That was so short! She did great though! I can’t wait to see more of her. Very well choreographed Gleb.

7,6,6

I saw Kym and MumI!

Christy/ Sailor: Poor Christy! So sad for her but so happy her daughter could replace her. Such a sweet simple meeting. Ah, her excitement over the song. So cute! Aw, Val! He’s so distraught. So amazing that Sailor took over. She’s so beautiful nit like in a normal looking person type way. They are so sweet to each other.  Oh she looks so gorgeopis! Three days and she dances like this! Wow. She’s going to thrive as the season goes on. She’s really jolding her own. And she looks like she is having the time of her life! I love it! I think I’m the most excited for them so far. I loved that she went to her Mom at the beginning of the dance and then the kiss and cry after. Amazing job. Lol, she looks taller than Val. Could just be the hair.

Wow, the worst break the doctor had ever seen. Poor girl! She should have a sling on to hold it elevated!

6,6,6 (I would have liked a 7 or two. I thought it was better than Hannah)

Karamo: Never watched this show either but I think I want to… just need some time… He just looks like so much fun! I am so glad he got Jenna! They are going to be so fun to watch together, like Jenna and Adam. That was the shortest video again. Kill it you two. Haha, there is the camera mess up. So embarrassing for whoever that was. They are killing this, and they just look so good. He’s having a blast! That was so fun! He did really well too. They could do really well too. Can’t wait to see more of them, without the camera mess up.

6,5,6

And I already want to tell Len to shut up! Remember, they are just learning to dance. How can you expect them to have every piece perfect already! You trained for years so you don’t know how hard this is for them so shut up and stop being so grumpy. Yes, idealistically, the dancers need to be able to do all things but why be so angry week one when the can’t? Ok, end of rant, for now at least. Back to the show.

Ray: He’s handsome and he just looks like a good man. He looks so happy to see Cheryl. It’s so sweet.  I always have mixed feelings when she comes back but I’m glad she did. Um. Nice little solo there. Those facials were creepy. He danced better on his own but he’s hanging in there. Stand up a little more Ray. Ok, yea, that was kind of creepy but that may have been thanks to the song… Not my favorite but not horrible. He seemed to be having so much fun. Good for him.

5,5,5

Mary: She’s beautiful! 75  and a half… I love it! What a personality. She is so sassy and she’s gonna be so fun! I love how he said, “you got some good rhythm” and she just goes “I’m black” lol. Brandon, love you too. We get to see so much of personality in the video. He’s leading her so well and she looks so elegant. She’s moving well. He arms could be a bit sharper bit She did well. They are so fun. Carrie Ann is being so sweet, and Len can’t stand it. Lol, Len saying they are the same age and she asks him if he’s 75 and a half and he’s just speechless!

6,5,6 (I love how excited she is about her scores. You can tell she is loving every part of being here)

Ally: She’s so tiny. There was no doubt she’d get Sasha (eye roll) Love her brutal honesty about not being flexible. Where was the package. Nice solo to start but that was girl group dance moves. She has a lot of energy, but Sasha brings that out in all of his partners. I’m not even sure what this dance is supposed to be. Oh, she missed timing and spacing towards the end there. Sasha’s fighting Len already. Len, I actually agree with you for once tonight. More like a Beyoncé dance, not ballroom. No real connect to them at all for me. Sasha has a pink snakeskin jacket, lol

5,5,6

Oh, I just saw Andrew East, but I didn’t see Shawn. I knew they were both there thanks to Instagram.

Sean: I have no feeling about him other than I wish he would have got someone else besides Lindsay because I just love her so much and I don’t want her to go out early like I expect him to. Not sure who I would want him to have otherwise. Maybe Cheryl (sorry Cheryl). Having trump say to vote for you probably isn’t going to help him… pre preschool level dancer lol, oh Linds. That shirt is just awful! He really is bad! He put effort in. This is kind of scary! I still love you anyway Lindsay. At least he seems like he had fun. Bruno couldn’t even talk about the dance. He was stuck on the bongo playing. I really don’t need him to go on past next week. Best comment from Carrie Ann “You were off beat most of the dance” love it!

4,4,4 (how did that get 4s and Lamar got two 3s?)

I love that no one has to go up those awful steps after their dance for interviews. So much better. And maybe we’ll get cool videos from the pros and stars from there.

James: Yes for brunette Emma! I hope she keeps her hair brunette. It breaks up all the blonde. I have no clue who he is either but he’s handsome. Oh my gosh, his kids are so adorable! All those blonde curls. Emma’s reaction is priceless. They are going to be a fun partnership too. Um, best solo part of the night. She looks gorgeous! Strong frame James. Sharna said that he reminds her of her James, and I agree. She just looks almost like a natural. Wow! That was just awesome. He’s definitely a front runner.

7,7,7

Overall, it was a good premiere. I still miss Sharna and Artem. I miss seeing their beautiful faces. I’m happy the good band is back. One of the band members has Sharna’s hair…I like the new ballroom layout. They are going to be a fun cast. I think Sean might go home at the end of next week but maybe Lamar. I’m ok with either.

I missed live blogging with you all last night, but I will be back to it next Monday, Lord willing. In the meantime, here to actually getting pictures and videos throughout the week.

[dwtspd]

DWTS S27 Week ONE!!! Nights 1+2 review

Man, when I saw Tom I suddenly felt like it had been AGES since I watched this show, then I realised, I didn’t even watch the athlete season. My friends told me it’s not worth it so I will probably never watch it.

Idk how the two-night thing is gonna work out so this is a combined post.

Night 1

Mary Lou Retton and Sasha Farber - Cha cha okay, was that video package kinda short? Also maybe it’s cos I’m not American but I’m soooo over all the “yay USA” themed dances. Anyhows, Mary Lou is a former US gymnast who won gold in 1984, the first US woman to do so. No mention of her current embroilment in the USAgym-gate. Okay, she can definitely remember steps. She needs to work on timing and also getting those latin shapes. 6-7-6 T19 huh that’s kinda harsh?? Might have been 1-2 pts higher if she went later I think.

Milo Manheim and Witney Carson - Cha cha Sorry Milo, but Zombies aiiiin’t that great. In case anyone doesn’t know, Zombies is a cheesy af DCOM musical. I really like his energy though. “Tell me about yourself.” “I’m still in school.” I love that. It’s quite refreshing cos we don’t get young male contestants as often as the girls. Whoa, he has those hips! I don’t think his limbs were as messy as the judges made it sound. His legs looked a little awkward during the cha-cha walks. That aside, this dance was so fun to watch! 7-6-7 T20 “That’s good, that’s good!” Witney tells him. Again, I think he could get a tad higher scores if he went later.

Evanna Lynch and Keo Motsepe - Foxtrot OMG Keo’s reaction was priceless. Evanna probably needs no introduction, but anyway, Luna Lovegood. She wanted to go to dance college, but was rejected so DWTS was the next best thing. I think the song did them in, but I found some of her movements too sharp for a foxtrot. She has nice frame and did something weird with her hand once. Definitely has potential. 7-5-6 T18 oooooh Len that was harsh. Tom, the correct term is he who shall not be named.

Speaking of, I like the new green glitter score background.

Danelle Umstead and Artem Chigvintsev - Foxtrot Danelle is a blind alpine skier but gosh she has good footwork and lots of grace. Her shoulders came up a bit and I think she had to adjust her footing going into the spin. When I saw the opening, I was like “Artem is making her walk down the steps to him??!!” At least they went down together. I think her and Artem will be a very nice, friendly, genuine partnership. 6-6-6 T18

Side note: I really didn’t need to hear “Rise Up” again.

Bobby Bones and Sharna Burgess - Jive Bobby is...a lot of things. I’ll say entertainer. His main schtick right now is his country radio show. Guy has boundless energy, I’ll give him that. Jive suits him. He had to point his feet, and the footwork was real rough. If he was judged for enthusiasm though, he’d get a perfect score. 7-6-7 T20 yeah that’s too high. I think the judges got a little high off his energy. I think he should be sitting at a 16-17.

Juan Pablo Di Pace and Cheryl Burke - Salsa Juan Pablo is an actor most recently from Fuller House and Mamma Mia. Uh huh, here’s the sexy hot couple of the season right here. It took really long to get into actual salsa though. Some of the moves looked unpolished and uncertain, but he had a sense of timing and can move. his. hips. 7-7-8 T22 haha we all knew Bruno would like it.

Ayyyy hey Rashad! Apparently he’s going into hosting, showing us the DWTS BTS web series. Go support that guy, he’s an all-round all-star.

Nikki Glaser and Gleb Savchenko - Salsa Nikki is a comedian and entertainer. She told Gleb he looks like he should be emerging from a pool, which I’m pretty sure he has done before for some modelling thing. Apparently she got injured over the weekend. Could have affected the performance. She seemed fine in rehearsal but looked really ginger and reserved while dancing. Her limbs looked awkward. Arms were kept really close to her body and her legs...I don’t know any other way to describe it except “baby giraffe”. 6-5-6 T17

Alexis Ren and Alan Bersten - Jive Alexis is an instagram influencer and model. She’s doing the show for her late mother who enjoyed it. Okay I’ll say it here, she is the one to beat technique-wise. My only complain is she could be more bouncy. Everything else was spot on IMO. I think her possible downfall would be her sketchy voting base. Lots of insta followers doesn’t necessarily mean they will vote. We’ve seen that with past social media stars. 7-7-7 T21 I think she should be equal with Juan Pablo honestly.

John Schneider and Emma Slater I’ve never heard of his Dukes of Hazard show but his name sounds familiar. He’s done so many things, I’ve probably seen him somewhere. Well he certainly has the right attitude. His dancing was...here and there. Some times I was like ‘oh, that’s not bad’ and then i’d be like ‘okay that needs improvement’. I think he’s good enough and charming enough to appeal to the DWTS demo though. 7-5-6 T18

Tinashe and Brandon Armstrong - Jive Tinashe is a singer...who I’ve never heard of. But I live under a rock. Brandon is newly promoted and awwww he’s so adorable. He gave her lots of content which she handled fairly well. She was very clean but I feel like it was toooo clean. Like you know how if you strip water of too many minerals it’ll just burn your tongue. I feel like sometimes I was watching a stick figure dance. Could have used more bounce. CAI’s comment didn’t make sense. 8-7-8 T23

Nancy McKeon and Val Chmerkovskiy - Quickstep Nancy was an actor from a show called The Facts of Life which probably pre-dates me. She has the facial expressions!!! Quickstep on week 1 is no joke but she kept up for most of it. Yup she was wobbly at times, because she was lacking the contact in hold with Val, but that seems to be a Thing TM with all his partners so it’s more Val’s fault. For a while I was like “omg is Val choreographing a solid routine with moves in hold??” and then they broke hold. I’m surprised Len didn’t call that out. Nancy was reall animated in that section though. 6-6-6 T18

Joe Amabile/”Grocery Store Joe” and Jenna Johnson - Quickstep Joe is from the Bachelor franchise and got his nickname because he owns a grocery store. He wants to become Dancing Joe now. He’s kinda cute, sorta charming in a slightly-awkward-little-self-depreciative way. Very likeable guy. I think with his personality and the bachelor backing, he’ll stick around for a while. Yeah that definitely wasn’t the best dance. He was flat footed, made mistakes, getting QS definitely didn’t help either. Can see he is trying to stay positive. 5-4-5 T14

Demarcus Ware and Lindsey Arnold Soon to be NFL hall of fame inductee. Has won the Super Bowl. You know, I hate American football as a sport, but these NFL guys always come in and work hard and it pays off. Demarcus can move and seems to have hella groove, with personality to boot. He’ll have to clean up some lines, but I can see him growing a lot on this show. Such a delight! 8-7-8 T23

Night 2

Ohhhhhh I love that opening number!! I can see why it’s not a premiere opener but wowwwww.

Okay so apparently the bottom half after judges score and votes from night 1 will have to dance again. Everyone else would have rehearsed a second dance for nothing...I guess. I feel like maybe they should have let everyone dance their second dance, but only score those in jeopardy.

Rashad out there with a message for Demarcus. I was kinda waiting for that the first night.

Safe - Demarcus, Tinashe, and...JOE!!!!!! That was the chillest reaction to a (not so) surprise safe.

Jeopardy - Nancy

DWTS Jr pros dance and make me feel old. Jake Monreal!!! And okay, JT Church has some ballroom moves. There’s one brunette guy (not Sage) who has nice hair. And the blond boy looks a little familiar but I can’t put my finger on it.

Safe - Juan Pablo, Bobby

Jeopardy - Nikki, John, Alexis

Alexis and Bobby’s placements are telling about the voters.

Okay. I watched the two episodes back to back. People I forgot about by the time I started night 2: Mary Lou, John, Danelle, Nancy. Also I knew Tinashe, Evanna and Juan Pablo were there but I kinda forgot how their dances looked.

Lmao Milo and Tom. “Why are you so scared about what I’m gonna ask you?”

Amy Purdy with a message for Danelle. She looks so different than I remember.

Safe - Milo, Evanna

Jeopardy - Danelle, Mary Lou

Okay so summary Top 7: Demarcus, Milo, Juan Pablo, Bobby, Evanna, Tinashe, Joe Bottom 6: Alexis, Danelle, John, Nikki, Nancy, Mary Lou

So they are bringing back the Judge’s choice encore from when they had result shows. This week: Demarcus.

They introduced the Junior stars. I’m having a hard time remembering who is who but: - JT’s “OH MY GOSH” when his pro-skateboarding partner did a trick - Mackenzie Ziegler is not a “pop star” she’s as good as a pro dancer. WHO’S BRIGHT IDEA WAS IT TO MAKE HER A CONTESTANT???!?!?

Can they intro the Jr pros too? All the cast of Juniors including the adult pros do a dance number and all I get from it is that red latin shoes are not in style.

Okay so we don’t have time for 6 dances or something so John is safe and won’t have to dance for his life any more.

Couples will dance the same style as night 1, but the choreo and song will be different.

Mary Lou and Sasha - cha cha okay I dunno what their rehearsal strategy was, but this dance felt very basic and less rehearsed than their first. She was more precise and controlled, but seemed to have less energy in it. 7-7-7 T21

Danelle and Artem - foxtrot the rehearsal vids seem to imply the couples were only given Monday night to come up with their second numbers. If so it must have disadvantaged Danelle. She was more timid and reserved. 6-6-6 T18

Nikki and Gleb - salsa She looked more confident this time. Legs less giraffe-y. Her arms were still awkward. 6-6-6 T18

Alexis and Alan - jive Ooooohhh this was good. Her technique was good again, but I think the mood of this dance suited her far better. I think she had a lot more energy and personality in this performance. 7-8-8 T23 Len says it is the best dance of the night and I agree as does Bruno.

Nancy and Val - quickstep Oh dang, the shorter dress exposed Nancy’s shortcomings. Her lines were wonky and she still looked a little unstable sometimes in hold, which was easier to see in this costume. It also made her look like Tweety Bird tumbled dry, They stayed in hold this time though. 7-7-7 T21 that seems generous.

Okay so Mackenzie Ziegler sings. She has a decent voice. Gotta set herself apart from her sister I guess.

Online voting for night 2 was open for...10 minutes? And I wager only US east coasters could vote.

Results time! (finally.)

Safe - Danelle, Alexis (yay!), Mary Lou

Nikki vs Nancy...Eliminated: Nikki. no surprise.

My favourites are Milo and Alexis. Also rooting for Danelle on a slightly lower tier. Surprisingly, Evanna isn’t really on the forefront of my mind.

Also, whether or not the couple danced on the second night might affect their memorability. Like, Bobby make an impact night 1, but after night 2 I kinda forgot about him. The only person who didn’t perform night 2 who I remember is Milo. Everyone else I was like “oh wait, who’s here again?”

[fiendfyred]

Hey there Favourite Harry Potter movies scenes?

Oh geez….so many, here it is, in no particular order (maybe chronological order)

Harry getting his wand

Harry getting through platform 9 ¾ and we see the hogwarts express for the first time

“honestly woman you call yourself our mother”

When we see the Hogwarts castle for the first time

Harry’s first quidditch game

The chess game, esp the one beat before the queen stabs Ron’s knight

Last shot of Sorcerer’s Stone, if only because of the score (Leaving Hogwarts makes me so emotional)

When we first meet Dobby

Harry vs the basilisk (even though i haaaaate snakes), esp when Harry stabs the diary with the basilisk fang

“Dobby is free!”

The Weasley twins giving Harry the Marauders Map

Sirius and Remus reuniting

The whole sequence when Harry and Hermione go back in time, esp when Harry conjures the patronus to save Sirius

The dragon challenge

When Harry spits up on himself while he tries smiling at Cho

Fred Weasley asking Angelina Johnson to go to the ball

The maze when everything is intense

Dumbledore’s tribute to Cedric

Literally all of OOTP (it’s actually like my fav movie, fight me)

Specifically:

Mr Weasley using the subway

When the Order comes to get Harry at Privet Drive

“You’re just as sane as I am”

When Ron sticks up for Harry in the common room

When Umbridge gives her speech and the Weasley twins go “That’s likely”

When the Weasley twins bet on Ron and Hermione’s duel

Weasley twin fireworks

Basically the Weasley twins owned this movie

“I don’t know, maybe Lord Voldemort?”

Also, when Harry straightup tells everyone he didn’t really know what he was doing when he fought Voldemort and said it was a lot of luck and people helped him…that’s lil harry in a nutshell

Anytime Dumbledore’s army is together, esp the patronus lesson

The entire ministry of magic scene, from when they go into the hall of prophecy to when voldemort is trying to possess harry and then harry sees his friends and tells voldemort to shove it

I even love the scene when Sirius dies because it’s so sad but so emotional and a;lkfj feels

Anytime Ginny Weasley does something badass (reducto)

Also the score in this movie is on point

When Harry and Ron fight for the Potions book in Slughorns class because honestly it’s like the only time in the last three movies their friendship is accurately portrayed

When Ginny snatches the Potions book from Harry’s hand because honestly it’s like the only time in the last three movies their relationship is accurately portrayed

When Ginny tells everyone to shut it because it’s the only time movie Ginny is like book Ginny

When Harry and Ron are on the train and Lavendar is drawing hearts at Ron on the window, and Harry plays with the movable arm rest to diffuse the awkwardness

The first time horcruxes are mentioned in the flashback, there’s just this amazing beat, when Tom says it, and you can feel the weight of the rest of the saga resting on that one word

When Harry and Dumbledore get the locket

The astronomy tower

Hogwarts tribute to Dumbledore (also Dumbledore’s Farewell score…a+)

The last scene of HBP when the three of them are leaning on the balcony (The Friends score…gah. i know john williams nailed 1 and 2, but for real 5 and 6 had really great scores, thank u nicholas hooper)

The Three Brothers animation…so beautiful…the only redeeming thing about 7

“Dobby has no master. Dobby is a free elf.”

Okay when Dobby dies. I hate that he dies but also it gives me a lot of feels because “never try to save my life again” but he dies saving his life…. a;slkfj dammit

The warners bro logo of 8 with Lily’s Theme…goosebumps. will never forget the first time i watched that

Image of Snape standing alone in Hogwarts watching with all the dementors floating around

Neville appearing in the picture frame

“She’s got lots of those, only one Harry” “Shut up Seamus”

“how dare you stand where he stood”

McGonagall and Snape dueling 

“You and whose army?” 

Moments leading up to Snape’s death because alan rickman nailed it…you know the exact second he realizes voldemort is going to kill him Rip alan rickman

Snape’s memories… yeah i know he’s trash but it’s still moving

king’s cross station minus the creepy voldemort baby

neville pulling the sword out of the hat…level 100 badassery

Aberforth’s patronus

the golden trio standing in the ruins of hogwarts as the sun rises… a new beginning score… imma cry. 

I hope you have enjoyed this brief summary of the Harry Potter movies.

[poorquentyn]

Considering Spielberg is your (second?) favorite director, do you have any kind of ranking of his filmography? (If so, I hope you give Empire of the Sun the high marks it deserves. It's the quintessential Spielberg film! A boy's own adventure story that gets eaten alive by a war drama!)

*rubs hands together*

Ok, so, only ones where he was in the director’s chair; none of even those producer’s credits where you can feel his indelible stamp on the final product, so no Goonies, Gremlins, Poltergeist, or Back to the Future. Even then, I’m leaving out a lot, so honorable mention to Lincoln, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me if You Can, War of the Worlds, The Color Purple, Bridge of Spies, the two worthwhile Indy sequels…

10. Jurassic Park

Start with the gaze upon himself: Jurassic Park as a $63 million self-portrait released on the exact tipping point of his career. John Hammond and Steven Spielberg’s miracles are one and the same: one brings dinosaurs back, the other convinces us they’re real. One uses DNA, the other uses CGI. When the characters stare in wonder, they’re meant to mirror our own at the imagery; when Jeff Goldblum mutters “that crazy son of a bitch actually did it,” he’s speaking for an entire industry once again forced to up its game by a Spielberg Miracle.

Our protagonist, however, is shitty with computers, so Alan Grant terrifies a child the old fashioned Jaws way: with a prop (a raptor claw) and his imagination. Hammond whisks him away from that to a world where one can press a button and make yourself appear on screen, mirroring how Spielberg has done the same with Hammond as his craft has evolved from malfunctioning sharks to CG velociraptors. The heart of the film comes when this giddy wonder in the possibilities of “we have the technology” is soured and our author avatar is left disillusioned and afraid, eating ice cream in a room full of merch he’ll never sell (but Spielberg will), telling Laura Dern about how he started off with a flea circus. That, right there, is a metaphor for moviemaking, and specifically Spielberg’s brand of it: pulling invisible strings to make us think that impossible things are real, to make belief believable.

Above all, Jurassic Park is afraid for the kids. Another perfect metaphor for the meta-tastic whole comes when the T-Rex crashes down through the car roof, only glass separating him from devouring the children; their hands are desperately keeping the monster behind the rectangular transparent plane, on the screen, even as Spielberg/Hammond’s tech is so real it threatens to burst right through. “He left us!” one kid wails about the character representing the studio weasels. “But that’s not what I’m gonna do,” Alan Grant whispers, half in shadow, blue eyes ablaze with a promise he didn’t know he was going to make. He can’t keep it. There are monsters in the kitchen. Spielberg’s next movie, released only a handful of months later, is Schindler’s List.

9. Duel

Such a seam scratches the tape; rewind, start again. Where did this begin? On TV, in the backseat of a car, backing out of the garage. Duel is the world’s most accomplished demo reel, cinema stripped down to its bare minimum to let the director’s preposterous surplus of talent shine through. It’s about a man (named Mann, both appropriate and touchingly pretentious) who pisses off a truck driver we never see, who then chases our protagonist with lethal intent, and that’s it.

And that’s all Spielberg needs. What follows is the future, a steel-shod gauntlet of precise camera angles and insidious sound design that builds the bridge between the B-movie and the blockbuster. By the end you feel spent but sated, as if every possible creative drop has been wrung out of the slim scenario. It’s nothing more nor less than the finest Roadrunner & Coyote episode imaginable, to the extent that George Miller was clearly reaching back to it for inspiration again and again in Fury Road. Indeed, while Duel is set in the modern day, Spielberg needs no trickery to make the antagonistic truck look positively apocalyptic.

It’s such a vivid example of the medium’s unique possibilities that you have to stop to remember that it was made for TV. And then you stop to think that he was only 24, same age Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. Lofty comparison, I know, but Duel proves it’s not what your movie is about, but how it’s about it that counts. Spielberg made it look easy, and so everyone followed. The road goes ever on and on…

8. Munich

…until it doesn’t. No exit.

Munich is the culmination of Spielberg’s Blue Period, his great here-comes-another-bloody-century trepidation, punctured by Stanley Kubrick’s death and 9/11. The former gave birth to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the movies about closing doorways and agonized faces that followed. The latter palpably haunted Spielberg’s projects in its wake: even Minority Report, a script written years earlier and adapted from a decades-old story, was uncannily timely in its portrait of overreaching security and law enforcement built to placate (and control) a population reeling from loss. Then came the director’s outright Twin Towers Trilogy: The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich, addressing the event from different angles and through different filters. Of course, the intriguing and emotional setup in The Terminal’s opening minutes, framing post-9/11 bureaucracy as fluid chaos eating away at the state from within, quickly gives way to disappointing inanity. And while I maintain that War of the Worlds is absolutely perfect as an on-the-ground recreation of 9/11 as an alien attack for the first 50-60%, things go downhill fast once Tim Robbins shuffles onscreen.

Munich is the one that actually has the courage of its convictions, in large part because it’s about the director and protagonist alike breaking down in tears and admitting they don’t know what to believe anymore. Every set piece unfolds with a quiet chill and ends with you contemplating mortality. It’s a deliberately non-thrilling thriller. The ideology dissolves, not in neat bromides but in the day-to-day realities of ending human beings. Revenge fills you with fire, hot and bright, and then turns sour in your mouth. Narrative strands cross and recross, and the film’s inciting event, murder before the world’s watching eyes, sinks into that abyss known as Context.

By the end, you don’t even know what you’re fighting for anymore but your family, and you’re haunted by the knowledge that your kids will be fighting the same damn fight. The last thing to be corrupted, then, is the dinner table. Our protagonist begs to break bread with his handler, and the final word of the Blue Period is “no.” The camera tilts over to the Twin Towers, their loss contextualized as just another curl of a horrorshow helix, and the exorcism is complete. The anger and grief has largely vanished from Spielberg’s work since, as he’s settled into a comfortable John Ford mode. He left his questions here, unanswered.

7. Minority Report

If A.I. was Spielberg’s 2001, a millennia-spanning epitaph for humanity and a glimpse of what we leave behind, Minority Report (following the Kubrick trajectory) would be his Clockwork Orange, stepping down from the stars to gaze with cold horror on the things we do to one another with power. In the future, three young seers see crimes before they happen, enabling the state to lock people away for crimes they haven’t committed in the name of wiping out crime for good. Indeed, this fleet fluid fever dream makes explicit visual reference to Clockwork’s Ludovico scene (see above). In Spielberg’s memory machine, though, the image of an eye forcibly kept open by metal claws takes on a meaning beyond social and political analysis, though those are certainly still in there. It’s something more spiritual: Minority Report is about divine sight in a postmodern age.

Our protagonist’s rival went to seminary, his own men tell him they’re more priests than cops, but Tom Cruise’s John Anderton can’t bring himself to recognize the Spielberg Miracle at work here. The larger moral revelation of the “precogs,” the framing of their ability to see crimes before they happen as a techno-noir version of Biblical prophecy, is lost on Anderton because it can’t bring his son back. For him, that the future is known points to the futility of human existence. If there’s no free will, if we’re all doomed to perpetually fall in a fallen world, what’s the point?

And then one of the precogs asks him: “Do you see?” So begins the murder mystery that will see him accused of a future murder, that of the man who ostensibly killed his son. Anderton chooses mercy, only for the man to grab and pull the trigger because it’s all a setup to prevent Anderton from learning the truth about the precogs: they, too, are children stolen from their parents, all our characters trapped in a Möbius strip of loss they can only watch unfold, again and again, as if on the film’s countless screens. The images have been manipulated to hide the truth, the divine vision sullied by contact with the greedy exploitative systems of the Blue Period. But our detective finds the truth, and an existential triumph in making the right choice even if he can’t change the outcome. I’ve always taken the happy ending, a startling glimpse of green after a movie of blues and grays that look etched in stone, as just another vision. Closure is there, your family is there, in the future, in the past, just out of reach, smiling back at you. It hurts to look, but even as your eyes are torn out and replaced, you can’t look away.

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Well now, see, this one’s a tad criticism-proof by design, being as it is smelted and shaped to get under your defenses. “Disarming” seems like a strange choice of defining adjective for this most white-knuckled of action/adventure movies, but for all the staggering moviemaking skill on display, Raiders is ultimately a puppy shoving its nose under your hand. Given the slightest opportunity, it will make you love it. Fun is its religion, so deeply felt and communicated is the generous desire to entertain, rooted in the pulp serials that first lit the fire in its makers’ bellies to create.

And that fire again burns hot and bright, which is Raiders’ other secret magic trick: underneath all the cleverness, the jokes within jokes and setpieces spilling into ever more elaborate ones, the sense that every single moment was designed to make the rest of the genre look paltry and stingy by comparison, what happens at the end is nothing less than the very specifically Old Testament God stepping in to fry Nazis’ faces off. It’s the Ghostbusters trick of grounding helium-high hijinks in metaphysical forces that are not in any way kidding around. Our action hero, at the climax of the movie, is simply the one who (in an inverse of Minority Report) is smart enough to look away. So many Spielberg movies boil down to a shaft of divine light, and sometimes the light burns.

Then came the bizarre, hallucinogenic Temple of Doom and the sturdy, winning Last Crusade and that fourth one we don’t talk about, but they’re all in some way reactions to the nigh-flawless original. All you can do is go back, wearing the leather deep, Indy ageless, his eyes blazing shut against the light.

5. Empire of the Sun

Equally criticism-proof, but for the exact opposite reasons. This is the one no one can quite explain. Spielberg isn’t telling; he might not have any more idea than the rest of us. It shares certain themes with the rest of his work, especially regarding how children process the collapse and change of their world, but the similarities are strictly on paper. It feels different. I don’t what it…is. What it’s for. What it means. These sound like bad things, but they’re not. Empire of the Sun is utterly arresting, every bit as much as those canonized Spielberg classics of which anyone can explain the appeal. It’s just that it unfolds like a dream, and I’m left grasping after it in the same way. It might be one of the more accurate adaptations put to film in only that it feels so much more novelistic in its thrust and tone than most.

What can be pinned down is a series of images and sounds about the fall and occupation of Shanghai by Japan in WWII, told from the perspective of the naive sheltered son of a British emissary. Our hero is played by Christian Bale, in what might be my favorite child performance. To the extent that Empire of the Sun is about anything beyond the experience of watching it, it’s about his breakdown, and that’s what grounds the dreamlike style: we’re watching a bubble burst. Death and decay unfold out of the corner of his eye, like a memory he can’t quite bear to fully recall. His childhood vanishes when he shrieks surrender at anyone who will listen, trusting the rules to snap back into place and the world to make sense again, only for the collapse to continue unabated.

It’s made out of smoke and corners and quiet sadnesses. It’s runny, like an egg. I dream about it sometimes. You should watch it if you haven’t.

4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

*harrumphs, wipes eyes* so um uh my name is Emmett, you see, and it begins with a….an ends with a….shut up.

That’s the point, though, of the movie: identification so strong that it almost kills you. E.T. is love, that’s all. All of it is here, from pure warm glow to heart stopping loss, swept up in imagery and sound that seem to positively hum with rich rueful feeling. Much has been made of how much of the movie is shot from a child’s POV, but everything about the movie operates on kid-logic. ET himself, for example: botanist or pet? Both. The connection he forges with Elliott swirls all such categories together. Elliott needs this, is yearning for love so badly, and even when it hurts, he’s more alive than he was before, with Dad gone.

But what makes E.T. different from, say, Star Wars and Harry Potter is that our hero only gets a taste of this other world, his fingertips brushing against magic as he passes it in the night. The gold-and-purple-brushed cinematography and the ecstatic, eternally swelling score sweep the profound and mundane together as one, bike rides and trick-or-treating and a psychic connection with an alien, yet the narrative eventually teases them apart like a sad parent forced to tell their kid that the dog is dead, and what “dead” means. ET returns to life, the definitive Spielberg Miracle…and then he leaves. Elliott will go home to his melancholy, frustrating life. School is still hard. His emotions still confuse him. Dad is still gone. The final shot of his face is not one of wonder, but maturation. It’s the moment Elliott grows up, and it’s the very definition of bittersweet.

What do you do, when you’ve loved and lost? You go home, you play with your toys, you send letters into Weird Things and Such SF Monthly, you make movies in your backyard, and you watch the skies….

….until they come back.

All of them.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I smiled just typing the words. I whispered them to myself, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This movie is a lil shining red ball dancing in my eyes; it is glee given form, a rainbow-colored pony ridden by a Willy Wonka-suited Care Bear on twenty tabs of LSD. The last half-hour, all glowing light and warm noise, earns the cliche: it makes you feel like a kid again, in the best possible way. After a movie’s buildup of wonder and terror, the sight and sound of a colossal lit-up mothership cheerfully BWAMMing out a melody is so cathartic that it’s impossible to sit still.

As with Raiders, though, it’s worth digging into the movie’s layers to understand where that light is coming from, and what it costs you to look at it. Close Encounters is a movie about communication, of course, from the alien lights to the translator forever accompanying Francois Truffaut (a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about capturing kid-logic on screen). It’s a movie about the fragility of family life in the face of the unknown, hence that devastating scene around the dinner table: something’s wrong with Dad, a subject near and dear to the director’s heart.

But above all else, it’s a religious movie, the religious movie. It’s about rushing upwards, and leaving all else behind. Roy Neary sees a divine light in the sky, and can’t reconcile it with the life he was living. He obsessively recreates his vision in idols, chases it across the country, driving his wife and children away in favor of his fellow prophets: here are my mother and my brothers. And the sting in that gorgeous symphonic ending’s tail is that it’s so good that Roy sheds this mortal coil to join them in the heavens. Spielberg has said that if he made it now, he wouldn’t have let  Roy get on that ship. And when you look at E.T. or the movies he made from Schindler forward, it’s clear why: in joining the interstellar flock, the man-child left his family to the wolves. By the time Roy/Eliot came home, his skin had sagged, his hair had gone white, and his children were waiting for him with eyes that cut.

And what do their movies look like?

2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The ultimate deconstructed fairytale; a honeyvelvetacid-glazed gaze into a heart-shaped abyss; Kubrick a darkwinged angel looming over ET’s crib, brushing a final tear away from his metallic eye…

So does Steven Spielberg, our flesh and blood Peter Pan, grow old and tell the children he lied. The monster is inside the house, inside your head, and inside the stories. At the core is a child’s innocent love for his mother…programmed in him, by her, a debt she cannot and will not repay. “His love is real, but he is not.” Pinocchio but for robots, A.I. takes its sci-fi trappings as a launching pad for a guiding philosophical question: “if a robot could genuinely love a human, what responsibility would that person hold towards that mecha in return?” The boardroom exec who poses that question pauses, almost bashful to ask the next one in a room full of people who treat the abuse of robots like a joke or a PowerPoint presentation, and then proceeds: “it’s a moral question, isn’t it?”

It is indeed, and for David’s adoptive family, the answer is none. He is abandoned, and chases his Blue Fairy and his happy ending across the apocalypse. As his fellow robots are torn apart to the cheers of the crowd in front of him, as his entire environment upends his hardwired fairytale logic into a sleazy neon-and-smoke nightmare, as his companion Gigolo Joe warns him presciently that “they made us too smart, too quick, and too many…they hate us because they know that when they’re gone, all that will be left is us,” David keeps looking for the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy so Mommy will love him again. He has no choice. His brain literally will not let him do otherwise. There is no will to power here, no core he can call upon to upend his puppet masters’ plan and prove himself Human After All. All he has is love, and they’ve used it to enslave him: at journey’s end, he finds his maker, who reveals that everything post-abandonment was staged to test if his love held. It did, and as such that love is now a corporate-approved field-tested quality-assured Feature that can be passed onto the hungry customer. This is not a Hero’s Journey, because you are not a person. You are a thing, and this is a product launch. David sees a dozen faces like his, stretched on a rack and ready. There is a row of boxes. They have David’s silhouette on them. All of a sudden, one starts to rattle and shake…

In the face of this existential horror (“my brain is falling out”) David promptly chooses suicide, whispering “Mommy” as he jumps from the statue he saw in his first moments. Down in the void, he finds the Blue Fairy and prays to her for millennia, but she cannot answer his eternal plea. She is a statue. An image, nothing more. She crumbles into a thousand pieces in his arms. He finds his mother, too. She is a fake, a digital mirage. Future robots create a simulacrum of her, as David himself was a simulacrum to replace her comatose son, designed in the image of his creator’s dead son…and of course, he cannot tell the difference. He gets his happy ending, on the surface. Underneath, what’s actually happening is that he’s an orphan who will never grow up being shown a movie and told everything is going to be all right. He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts…

…but it doesn’t matter how much he wants it, that is not his mother and his mother never loved him. We know these things even if he doesn’t. He claps because he believes in fairies, forever, eyes and smile frozen, waiting for them to appear, any second now. This is Spielberg showing you a brain on Spielberg. David followed Story over the waterfall’s edge, and now has only time’s vasty deep into which to shout “I love you” and convince himself the echoes are his make-believe savior and his long-dead mom. There is only the water that swallowed up Manhattan, and then the world, and him with it…

Wait.

There’s something in the water.

1. Jaws

To borrow from Alien, the closest thing it has to a peer: Jaws’ structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. You could just call it the perfect movie and walk away, except that if you try the floor tilts up beneath you and down you go into the mouth, the most abyssal maw in imagination’s history, and those black eyes roll over to white and you beg for more.

Run down the pedestals at the Movie Museum: Citizen Kane wants you to breathe in a life. Rashomon wants you to question how storytelling works and what Truth actually is, or if it exists at all. Jaws wants to eat you. Not the characters, you. That’s what Spielberg figured out how to do, and the entire industry reshaped itself around copying him: tonal immersion so absolute that he could make the audience feel anything he wanted, on a dime. Hitchcock played your spine like the devil on a fiddle; Spielberg is a rainbow-wigged mad scientist strapping you on a rocket to the sun. He created his own genre, and it’s the one that still dominates the medium in every corner of the globe. With a shark. A shark that, as a prop, did not fucking work.

Details? How do you pull one strand out of a web like this one? I can only say “perfect” so many times, but I mean it. Shot for shot, line by line, beat by beat. Every domino falls. The calm moments and the funny ones and the frantic blood-soaked ones, everything is earned. As with Raiders, the highest compliment I can pay is that other movies taste like shit for a month afterwards. When I hear the word “craftsmanship” I do not think of cars or cabinets, I think of Jaws. It feels hewn.

The numbers came later. The myth, the legend, the pale imitations, the bad sequels, the ripple effects, all secondary. What Jaws is, is sensation. It cannot have been made, surely, it hatched. It was never launched. It will never fall. Smile, you son of a–

[aion-rsa]

The Dark Knight: Why Heath Ledger’s Joker is Still Scary Today

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It’s one of the great villain introductions in cinema history. Standing with a slight hunch at the center of a massive 70mm image, Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker not so much dominates the frame as he commandeers it. He seduces the IMAX camera, which is still capturing vast amounts of Chicago’s cityscape around him, and draws it closer to his sphere of influence, and by extension us. Before this moment in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the director’s Gotham City functioned with clocklike precision. Even its greatest villains were slaves to the need of rationalizing everything in cold, utilitarian logic.

Not the Joker.

Within our first breath next to Ledger’s clown, one senses a malevolent spirit has been summoned, and he’s chosen to manifest out of thin air at this exact moment, on this exact street corner. He’s come to claim Gotham’s collective soul, but he’ll settle for any individual with delusions of virtue who crosses his path—including you.

This is of course just a fleeting moment in The Dark Knight; a brisk tease before Ledger’s shown his makeup-encrusted face or uttered even a word. In fact, Nolan and the actor dole out the character with impressive restraint: first as a masked Mephistopheles who is primarily a sing-song-y voice until he unmasks at the end of a bravura bank robbery. Later he becomes an actual narrative presence when he shows up again more than 20 minutes into the film, demonstrating for Gotham’s criminal underworld how to perform a magic trick.

As an isolated performance, there’s an argument to be made that none has ever been finer in the realm of superhero movies. Sure, there’ve been showy turns before and since in comic book blockbusters; there have even been great interpretations of the Joker before and after Ledger. Yet what the actor was able to do in 2008 transfixed audiences because he, like the character, had the freedom to bend the film to his will—even as Nolan prevented the movie from simply becoming merely a showcase for the performance.

With the grungy strung out hair of an addict who hasn’t showered in three months, greasy self-applied pancake makeup, and a grisly Glasgow smile that’s as unnerving as it is uneven (suggesting perhaps half of it was self-inflicted to make a matching set of scars), Ledger’s anarchist supervillain was a long way from Jack Nicholson’s hammy version of the same character in 1989. For audiences, and even comic book fans baying for something darker than Nicholson, it was abrasive in its time—and electrifying, like a punk rocker leaping into the mosh pit. Indeed, Ledger reportedly based the character’s appearance in part on the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, and there is more than a hint of Tom Waits’ gravel in Ledger’s cadence whenever the clown growls.

But more than aesthetic culture shock, the enduring horror (and not-so-secret appeal) of Ledger’s Joker lies in the effect he has on the film, both in terms of its narrative storytelling and its enduring pop culture standing. Speaking strictly about this Joker as a character, the villain is off screen for far more of The Dark Knight’s running time than he’s on it. Appearing in only 33 minutes of The Dark Knight’s epic 152-minute running time, the average length of a Hollywood spectacle passes without the Joker on screen. Yet he’s omnipresent in the film, a shadow that hangs over each of Nolan’s three relatively equal protagonists: vigilante Batman (Christian Bale), police lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), and district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

Nolan and his brother and co-screenwriter, Jonathan Nolan, have admitted the setup is somewhat inspired by another quintessential blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In both films, three disparate, combative male authority figures band together for a mythic battle against a presence so malignant and evil, it transcends being simply a shark or a madman in makeup—or even a comic book supervillain. Like that beast, Joker has no arc, no psychological growth, he’s a force of primal evil unbounded. And as the heroes’ battle against him creeps on, it seems like the sanity of their entire community is being dragged into the abyss.

This framing allows Ledger’s Joker to functionally be a catch-all stand-in for many of the social anxieties that kept American audiences up at night during the Bush years. Some of them still do today. There are of course obvious implications to the Joker being the terrorist, the non-state actor who cannot be negotiated with, and who doesn’t play by preconceived rules or notions of fairness. There is also shading of the lone wolf, the usually male gunman who inexplicably pulls the trigger. Most of all though, the Joker represents the hole in which much of humanity’s irrational predilections toward violence is collectively stored and ignored by our cultural memory… until it can’t be.

As Michael Caine’s Alfred Pennyworth famously reasons, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” That summation of staring into irrational, needless cruelty is what gives The Dark Knight bite. And what a sharp bite it is in moments like when Ledger’s Joker laughs manically at the Batman, our ostensible hero who’s resorted to pummeling (or torturing) the villain in an interrogation room. The clown gloats, “You have nothing to threaten me with, nothing to do with all your strength.”

This is why the Joker is such an effective villain for The Dark Knight’s parable about how best to use moral power in immoral (i.e. irrational) times—and perhaps why the thrill of Ledger’s performance was so strong on first glance that it powered him all the way to a posthumous Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category seven months after the film’s release.

Still, Ledger’s Joker, more than any other movie villain in recent memory, continues to haunt well after that Oscar night. The mental image of the character slipping his tongue out of the corner of his mouth, like a cobra, and licking his scars—a tic Ledger invented to keep his prosthetics in place while upping the creep factor—has stayed with us like a subconscious boogeyman. Thirteen years on from The Dark Knight’s release, Ledger’s depiction of the Clown Prince of Crime has gone down in the annals of cinema alongside Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs or, well, that shark in Jaws again. He’s an enigmatic and mysterious persona who is barely seen in his film, yet unmistakably casts a pall of evil over the whole proceeding.

We don’t know why Ledger’s Joker actually became the way he is, or what made him so obsessed with the Batman—to the point where he was inspired to put on “war paint” and declare his love for the Caped Crusader by saying, “You complete me!” The Joker gives multiple versions of his origin story in The Dark Knight, telling one mobster played by Michael Jai White that he’s a victim of an abusive father while later recounting to Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that he scarred his own face to cheer up his similarly disfigured wife. Both tales are of course lies, transparent manipulations intended to prey upon perceived vulnerabilities in his victims. This touch was inspired by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke where the comic book Joker provides the reader with a sob story flashback, and then confesses he probably made it up.

“If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice,” he says on the page.

Read more

Movies

Joker: 6 Actors Who Have Played the Clown Prince of Crime

By David Crow

Movies

The Dark Knight, The Joker, and Game Theory

By Ryan Lambie

The Nolan brothers understand the horror of this, and they keep the Joker a manipulative and inscrutable evil. Beyond obvious sociopathic tendencies, we know nothing about his inner-psychology and barely can ferret out his real motives beyond an odd devotion to maintaining Batman’s attention. He claims to be an agent of chaos who wants to “just do things,” yet his meticulously planned attacks belie this claim. In the end, he sees himself in a battle for “Gotham’s soul.” Like Amity Island’s Great White Leviathan, or the original incomprehensible nature of Thomas Harris’ cannibal serial killer in the earliest books, we never know the truth about why he is, and how he’s able to do what he does.

That mystery makes him live on in our own heads for years after the story ends and the credits roll.

It’s interesting to consider that effect now, after years of pop culture storytelling going in the completely opposite direction, particularly in comic book movies and other fanboy-driven media. Rather than find satisfaction in the inexplicability of evil, or standalone visions, we like to rationalize it and sympathize with it, even while glorifying it. Most of all, however, we insatiably seem to simply want more.

The need for endless content being generated by intellectual property has led to prequels, sequels, and even spinoffs that explore and too often redeem villains. Even the Joker himself is not wholly immune to this.

Since 2008, there have been two big screen versions of the Joker. Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix both had the unenviable task of stepping into Ledger’s shadow, with at least one of them being dwarfed by it. Leto’s attempts at “method acting” stunts on the set of Suicide Squad shows what can go wrong when scenery-chewing is mistaken with Strasberg.

Phoenix obviously fared better in his own Joker movie two years ago, making the actor the second performer to win an Oscar for playing the comic book villain. However, his film’s interpretation is diametrically opposed to Ledger’s enigma. Instead Phoenix’s film attempts to rationalize everything about the character, depicting the Joker as a mentally ill sad sack whose motivations are borrowed from other iconic movie screen villains and anti-heroes like the mother-obsessed Norman Bates (Psycho) and ticking time bomb Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver).

It still makes for a fascinating (if unoriginal) portrait, but one divorced from the terror of the unknown. We understand who Phoenix’s Joker is and why he is. Society, man. Phoenix’s Joker even outright states it before murdering not-Johnny Carson (Robert De Niro). “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? I’ll tell you what you get, you get what you fucking deserve!”

Technically, Phoenix’s Joker appears closer to our reality and our daily horrors. With clown makeup inspired by real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy and preening self-pity parties resembling the manifestos of so many mass murderers, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is modeled as much off nightly news nightmares as comic book panels. Writer-director Todd Phillips is inelegantly blatant about it.

Nevertheless, whatever ugly truth there may be in that approach, it’s not as haunting, or exhilarating, to witness as what Ledger did in his own rock star interpretation of evil. Save for a blink-and-you-miss-it insert shot, we never see Ledger with the makeup off. And while he might indulge in mocking “society,” he is a character who says more by basking in the chaos of a city in terror, literally sticking his head out of a stolen police car like a dog with the wind in his hair and our horror on his face. It’s a more enduring image than a didactic conversation about insecurities with a father figure. Thirteen years later, Ledger’s version of the character continues to confound, horrify, and ultimately thrill. He still has the last laugh.

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[thebibliomancer]

100 Days of Comics! 084/100: Batman #237 (1971)

Today’s pull from the box of ever decreasing mystery is a Batman! From 1971!

This particular physical copy of the book is missing its cover. But I can’t be too upset. Its older than I am. I’m holding paper that is older than me. Also its a big beefy book with not only 25 pages of comic but a reprint from Detective Comics #37 from 1940. Content!

Also, this specific issue is a special Rutland Halloween story. I’ve covered Rutland, Vermont’s Halloween celebrations a couple times from the Marvel end so its neat to see how the other half lives.

We start with a dead Batman, staked to a tree. Is this Red Rain?

But on the next page, Dick Grayson and his college chums are taking in the Rutlan Halloween Parade, with one becoming increasingly fascinated by the parade floats. Granted, he’s been up three days cramming for an art exam.

Also, you may remember that on Marvel’s side of things, they use thinly veiled expies the Squadron Supreme to stand in for the DC characters that people will be dressed as at the parade.

DC just up and puts Marvel characters in the parade. There’s an off-brand Captain America, a Quicksilver mostly hid behind a float, and just Havok.

Dick and pals are headed to Tom Fagan’s Halloween party when they see some thugs beating up a fellow dressed as Robin. Dick and co intervene and Dick almost managed to beat up the thugs without coming off too Robinish but the float obsessed art major gets in his way to demand if he saw those outasight floats.

Still, the thugs are chased off. Costume party Robin says the thugs seemed convinced that he was the real Robin. But something seems fishy so on the pretext of hunting down the float maniac, Dick splits off from his friends to go investigate as TEEN/YOUNG ADULT WONDER, ROBIN.

And that’s when he finds dead Batman. Or rather, dead someone in a Batman Halloween costume.

And then the Grim Reaper bursts out of the darkness and menaces Robin with a scythe. This is less whimsical than Marvel’s Rutland stories tend to be.

While dodging, Robin trips over a rock and falls off a cliff, knocks himself unconscious, and starts drowning in a very shallow stream.

And the float maniac wanders by blissfully unaware, trying to find someone who will talk floats with him. 

Luckily the real Batman is really in the area for reals and happens to spot the hapless college-aged boy wonder. He takes Robin to the mansion of Tom Fagan to be ministered by Doctor Gruener.

Gruener is in fact the reason Batman is in town. He was once an inmate of a concentration camp run by Nazi Colonel Kurt Schloss, aka the Butcher. Obviously a real bad dude who did a lot of torture and killing.

Gruener happened to spot Schloss while shopping for a gift for his daughter. The store clerk told Gruener that Schloss had retned a pirate costume to be delivered to Rutland, Vermont. Schloss apparently really loves masquerade parties.

Obviously, Gruner alerted the authorities. Hence why Batman is here.

As for the thugs beating up Robins and murdering Batmen. Well, some of Schloss’ ex-underlings are hunting him for the Nazi gold he stole. They must be trying to take care of Batman and Robin before they can interfere.

But since Robin is too injured, now it is Batman time.

He heads downstairs and runs into Tom Fagan who praises his Batman costume and the muscles that go with it. A nonplussed Batman just stammers that he exercises a lot.

And at the party we see Havok again, claw-hammer collander-helmet variant Thor and someone just dressed as Spider-Man but calling himself Webslinger Lad.

Someone once told me that the Squadron Supreme seemed a really disrespectful way to spoof DC but at least Marvel tried to put some layers between spoof and thing being spoofed.

Outside, float obsessed art student tries asking the Grim Reaper if he digs floats and then realizes its the Grim Reaper and runs screaming for help.

Float Guy runs into Batman who examines the body the Grim Reaper left and tells Float Boy to hide somewhere but not to breath word of the murders. If a panic gets out, they’ll lose their chance of nabbing Schloss. And if you can’t bring in Nazis to face justice for their crimes then civilization is a farce. And that’s from Batman.

Batman notices that the light in the tower of Fagan’s mansion is blinking in morse code and realizes it must be the thugs. He runs upstairs, missing a man in a pirate suit hidden in a cupboard and beats up some thugs.

The thug spills the beans with Batman implicitly threatens to drop him off the roof. They observed Schloss arrive in a yellow car so they rigged it up to explode.

And before Batman can warn Schloss the car explodes.

So three people have died, including an innocent man whose only mistake was dressing up as Batman. But the case still isn’t closed. The Reaper is still out there and responsible for killing the man in the woods.

And Batman knows who it is and goes to the site where the fake Batman was killed.

Oh, hi Thor, Spider-Man, and Havok again.

Batman confronts the Reaper. The men chasing Schloss had no reason to know Batman was around, not unless someone told them. And Doctor Gruener told them after having a change of heart and deciding to take personal vengeance on Schloss.

Gruener lost his parents and sisters in the concentration camp and watched Schloss laugh as they died. He still awakes from sleep screaming even after all these years.

Batman says he has no right to judge but neither does Gruener. And there’s not enough water in that stream to wash the blood from the hands of anyone who takes a life! Better way! Etc!

Gruener swings his scythe around, smacks Batman in the chin and then runs off. A part of Batman wants to let Gruener go, seeing some of himself in him. BUT NO HIS WAY IS WRONG!

Meanwhile, Float Guy is on top of the dam telling his college chums about meeting Batman and the Reaper and he’s at least stopped talking about Floats. Also his name is apparently Alan. Which I’d probably know if I read issues before this about Robin’s college adventures.

Then Gruenereaper comes charging along and demands that Alan get out of his way. In frustration over Alan not moving fast enough, he goes to swing the scythe at him but notices a star of david necklace that Alan was wearing.

And ashamed of what he has become, Gruener involuntarily takes a step back. Right off the damn. Where he falls and dies. He’s dead. That’s how this issue ends. Gruener dead lying on the dry side of the dam, star of david necklace conspicuously wrapped around one of the handles of his scythe so its framed obviously in the panel.

Apparently this issue was inspired by two things. A real life spooky occurrence at Tom Fagan’s real life spooky Halloween party when Berni Wrightson tried to scare the other DC staffers when they were exploring the forest by positing that someone in an orange wig from the party was hunting them through the forest because he hated comics artists and writers. And then they heard rustlings in the underbrush...

The other half of it was Denny O’Neil’s friend Harlan Ellison suggesting he do a story about Nazi war criminals. Put ‘em together and what have you got? Bippity boppity boo.

I don’t want to go longer by covering the reprint. I’ll just say that Batman investigates a conspiracy to create an international incident that he coincidentally overhears when he gets lost and stops for directions at a spooky house. World’s Greatest Detective.

He also kills a man, indirectly. The guy threw his sword, Batman blocked it with a door, and later punches the dude so he stumbles into the sticking out blade part and dies. And Batman basically says ‘good, I’m glad he’s dead.’

But this reprint was from Detective Comics #37. And in Detective Comics #38, Robin was introduced. Batman probably stops murdering so much when he has an impressionable child around.

[izzystitchlover2]

Animation Principles Analysis

All 12 Principles of Animation by Alan Becker

I started my research by coming up with a list of films which I though showed use of the principles in certain scenes. Though I first watched the full series Alan Becker created on each of the 12 principles to remind me of what each one was, by also showing me examples of them being used in different situations.

Squash and Stretch - Tom and Jerry:

Tom and Jerry are one of the best when it comes to animating squash and stretch action, as almost all movement is exaggerated to the max. In this example Tom opens the door to look for Jerry, not expecting him to be bigger than he is. Jerry then hits Tom on the head with a hammer causing him to be squashed, his body then stretches upwards as he springs back up again like a jack-in-the-box. Involving squash and stretch also helps exaggerate motion and make for a more believable appearance. If the animation didn’t include the principle, the force at which the hammer hits Tom wouldn’t be as believable, it would also give a different effect making the hammer appear lighter.

I’d like to incorporate this principle a lot more in my work, especially in the morphing animation I'm working on at the moment where Maleficent's staff turns into a ball which then morphs into the spinning wheel. I’ve only just made a start on my morph at this moment in time as I've been struggling a lot with it, so I might even restart it depending on how easy it is to edit as it is, but I would somehow like to incorporate this principle into the finished piece.

Anticipation - Tangled:

This is a really good example of anticipation as you know something will happen before it even does. Just before Rapunzel accidentally whacks herself in the head with the frying pan, she gives it a spin to make herself look ‘cool’. In the film the spinning of the pan beforehand goes on for longer (the gif only really shows the end result), starting slow and speeding up. This build up of momentum shows her gaining confidence with her skill of using the frying pan. The anticipation allows the force at which the pan hits Rapunzel’s head to appear harder, thus more believable to the audience. The anticipation also gives the audience time to capture what is about to happen, so where on screen they need to look next.

Staging - The Lion King:

The Lion King is one of my all time favourite films by Disney, from its musical script to its visuals, its definitely one of my favourites. Staging plays a large part in the film too, especially right at the very beginning where it contains multiple examples of good staging. The gif above shows one of these well staged scenes. It captures how high up Rafiki is on ‘Pride Rock’, when the camera zooms out on him showing Simba to all the other animals. The scene captures Rafiki's importance in the film when he is bestowed the honour of holding up the future king to the animal nation on the highest rock in the Land. The staging also makes the audience focus on what the animator wants them to see, and the order they want them to see it in. In this example your eyes are drawn to Simba being held up by Rafiki, then it zooms out on them and is aimed at the animals cheering from below.

Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose - Bolt:

The straight ahead technique is to animate an action from drawing 1 to the end of a sequence. In the gif above the action is Bolt as a puppy running up to his carrot to pounce on it. The pose to pose technique is when the keyframes are drawn first (often the beginning and end drawing of the action). The in-betweens are then added to fill the rest of the animation. Here the key poses of Bolt are; at the beginning when he's about to charge, then at the end when he returns to the ‘play’ position after he has pounced onto the toy carrot. Actions that require tight timing and structure are often animated with the pose to pose technique to show more realistic movement. This method also helps to maintain a solid structure and preserve the volume.

Follow Through and Overlapping Action - The Little Mermaid:

Follow through and overlapping occur when momentum makes part of a person or item keep on going, even when they have come to a halt. In this example, Ariel’s hair carries on moving in a spiral, even after she has stopped spinning. This motion allows the audience to identify that she is in water as the rates objects come to a stop is far slower in water then it is on land. Overlapping is shown by Ariel spinning and her hair then following just behind. Follow through and overlap occur as it takes allot of effort to get an object to a speed, objects don’t just instantly gain speed.

Slow in and Slow out - Sleeping Beauty:

Slow in and slow out (easing) is used to make small and large movements more believable. For an object to move it needs to build up speed to start with and it needs to slow its speed in order to stop. In this scenario, Princess Aurora and Prince Phillip are dancing together across the patch of grass. At the start (to step into the dance), Phillip slowly walks in front a little to pull Aurora towards him. At the end, Aurora is twirled outwards (away from Phillip) until she comes to a stop, for realistic movement. 

Arc - The Jungle Book:

People and animals naturally move in arcs, from arms swinging when a person walks, to an animal’s head swinging to and fro whilst it’s moving. They all move in a non linear way. In this example, Kaa the Snake is swinging a sleeping Mowgli back and fourth, as if he was being a hammock. The shape Kaa has created with his body is a physical ‘Arc’, and his movements are like that of a pendulum. Even Mowgli’s arms react in a similar way (they follow through). This movement makes the idea of Mowgli being swung more believable.

Secondary Action - Winnie The Poo:

Secondary action is very important in order to make a movement more believable. In this case Tigger from Winnie The Poo has the primary action of turning his head, followed by the secondary actions of his ears drooping and him closing his eyes. This not only adds more effect to showing Tigger’s guilt, but it also gives the primary action more flow and making it less robotic and more smooth. If Tigger just turned his head, the motion would just seem scripted with no emotion. However, due to the secondary actions, the ears and the closing of the eyes allow for the head turning ‘in shame’ to look more believable, thus helping the animation of Tigger appear ‘guilty’.

Timing - Howl’s Moving Castle:

In this scene from the Studio Ghibli film ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’, Turnip Head the Scarecrow is slowly standing upright. The speed at which he stands up at is fairly slow and steady, meaning more frames would have been added in-between the two main poses to make the action slower. This is a good use of timing as it also brings across Turnip Heads nature and personality more, as the speed the character moves at helps show his kind and easy-going nature in the film.

Exaggeration - Monsters Inc:

In this scene, Sully from Monsters Inc is my favourite example for the use of exaggeration. The exaggeration is heavily used for both comedic purposes (for the audience) and extreme terror and worry (for Sully). It helps to convey the characters emotions much more effectively and is especially needed for this particular scene. Exaggeration allows the audience to quickly and easily identify what it is the animator wants to portray. Here, Sully is seen pulling his face down whilst his eyes go all dazed and his mouth opens wide to form an ‘0′ shape. This gives a strong indication that he is utterly traumatised by what he is seeing. If this scene wasn’t exaggerated, you might get the impression that Sully wasn’t as horrified as he looks in the gif above.

Solid Drawing - Mickey Mouse:

Solid drawings are important to use as it ensures consistency with the character design from each pose. It is especially needed for complex 3D characters but also 2D ones as well to keep consistency perfect, such as Mickey Mouse. The use of solid drawing also helps to understand the perspective of the character as you draw even the stuff you don’t see, so when you do see it it’s in perspective. In this example, Mickey’s left hand is not really visible until he moves it from his side to use it to turn on the ice cream tap.

Appeal - Inside Out:

For any animation to be successful, it must have appeal. This includes the design of the characters, the set, and the overall aesthetics of the film. Inside Out definitely has appeal, taking inspiration from the five main human emotions and turning them into their own unique characters, as well as bringing Bing Bong, a child’s imaginary friend to life. Inside Out also has appeal in the way they have interpreted a person’s ‘memory’ by turning each event into a ball once it had taken place in real life. This is one of my favourite films in terms of its appeal and aesthetics. This appeal helps to draw the audience into the story, unappealing characters lead to a loss of interest in a story.  

[satelliteofmstielove]

K18 The Million Eyes of Sumuru

                                 Like Fu Manchu, but with more sexism!

General notes

          So, sorry it took me like four months to get this next entry out. School got busy faster than I expected. But last time it was almost a year and a half, so at least there’s that…anyway…

          The Million Eyes of Sumuru is a 1967 British spy film about a scary lady and her army of scary ladies. It’s based on a book series by Sax Rohmer, a man whose name sounds like the title of a film-noir western about a jazz musician wandering in the desert. He also wrote the Fu Manchu books, which explains a lot. Also, it was directed by a guy named Lindsey. This movie includes some celebrities (sort of- does Frankie Avalon count as a celebrity?) and was produced by our other Castle of Fu Manchu friend, Harry Alan TOOOOOWEEEEERRRRRRRSSS. Wilfrid Hyde-White is in this, he played Colonel Pickering in the movie version of My Fair Lady. (I only mention that because I somehow didn’t recognize him until most of the way into this movie, even though I’ve seen My Fair Lady several times.) It also stars George Nader, from the famous and hilariously terrible Robot Monster, which we’ll get to watch later on in Season 1.

          The main interesting note about this episode is that Tom Servo leaves partway through the movie. Again, it’s a case of Josh needing to be somewhere at the same time they were taping. He’s still in the host segments, because they always taped those before the movie part. Now, let’s get to Sumuru. (I don’t have a link for this one because it’s not on YouTube, but you can find it at Club MST3K.)

Prologue

I don’t know if I ever mentioned that I like the little tentacle things in the KTMA doorway sequence.

Oh man, continuity! That’s unusual for this show in general, not even just KTMA. They did a “previously on…” sketch as the intro for The Deadly Bees [905], but that one purposefully had nothing to do with anything that has ever happened on the S.O.L. They also did general premise recaps fairly often in Season 1 and occasional other times, and some story arc recaps in Season 8 when they were forced to have a story arc. This is the only episode I know of, thought, that has a classic “previously” bit, separate from the rest of the host segment, that recaps with a clip from the previous episode. Neat.

Also, does anyone recognize the voice-over voice? Josh or Kevin are the usual deep-voice go-tos, but this doesn’t sound like either of them. The musical sting comes from Fugitive Alien (I thought it was Time of the Apes at first, which goes to show how well I don’t know my Season 3 episodes).

After the clip, we join the Mads trying to get a look at Joel floating outside the satellite. They confirm for us that he is not floating naked in space, but is actually wearing underwear (which we could kinda tell from that very accurate action-figure Joel model). I had to look up what “BVDs” were, though. I had to look at this so now you do, too:

Whatever camera they’re using to look at Joel must have really good zoom if they can tell his cheeks are blue.

Has he been out there for a whole week? That’s impressive. Much later, in Time Chasers [821], the S.O.L. seemed to maybe have a Tardis-like air bubble-forcefield thing around it when it docked with Pearl’s van, so maybe that’s how Joel managed. Of course, a week in the cold of space with no food or water doesn’t really leave him very well off even if he had air, but those are all science facts. More likely this episode and the last one just take place closer together that that. (My default headcanon assumption is most episodes take place roughly in real time with when they aired, but there’s exceptions to that for sure). But again, I’m more than willing to relax about this kind of thing. I just speculate for fun.

The Mads are 2001-loving dorks, and we love them for it. As characters. As people, they’re jerks.

I think this may the first occurrence of weirdly affectionate Dr. F nicknames for Joel. We’ve had a few weird insults in previous episodes, but I think this is the first of this particular kind.

I didn’t know the Mads could open the S.O.L. doors from down on Earth. But I guess they control all sorts of other things from their lab, so why not the doors? Larry doesn’t actually press any buttons, but Joel gets inside anyway. Maybe he pressed it under the desk.

Joel is putting on his jumpsuit as he comes onto the bridge. The bots must have left it right by the door. Why did Joel take it off to go outside in the first place? Was he in the middle of changing and got sucked out the door? Actually, a random semi-nude spacewalk doesn’t seem too far outside something Joel might do on purpose…

Joel also thanks the Mads for letting him inside. It’s good to be polite to your captors, I suppose. In some episodes, rudeness does result in punishment, so probably a smart idea.

 Locked you out again? How many times has this happened, Joel? Maybe you need to get another key. Although if he’s going out into space in only his underwear, he might not have a good place to keep it…this is getting weird, let’s move on.

Trace’s weird expressions in this segment keep making me laugh.

The Mads are really enjoying taunting Joel this week. I like their doofy handshake. I can imagine them doing that in the halls at Gizmonic and other mad scientists just looking at them like they can’t stand them.

Joel’s response is actually much more sarcastic than usual for him (outside the theater). 3-12 weeks? What’s he talking about there? Anyone know? Did KTMA have multiple seasons?

Poor guy, he sounds really done. Being stuck out in the vacuum of space for a while probably does that to you.

The Mads’ movie intros are starting to sound more like they will for the rest of the series. Also, Larry tells Clay to get the movie, and he does. I sometimes forget that Dr. F and Dr. Erhardt were portrayed mostly as equals during KTMA. The junior doctor/henchman thing didn’t really get going until Season 1.

I never know what to make of angry Joel. It happened more often in KTMA, but still not that much. Also, his hand gestures are weird.

We didn’t see the bots in this segment, probably because they’re off hiding from Joel and their impending punishment.

Movie pt. 1

Wow, the Mads were right; this is a really washed-out print.

Joel comes into the theater dancing to the parade music from the movie. He seems to have forgotten about being angry. Maybe the bots got an earful on the way down.

4:32, time and temp: 6:04 and 67°. The episode originally aired in early May, so I’d assume this is sometime around then, if not the exact night. I don’t know if TV23 re-ran these or not.

Crow mispronounces “emperor” at 4:39, and corrects himself, which makes Joel chuckle.

At 4:43, Tom tries to apologize for locking Joel outside, saying they “didn’t really know it was [him].” Joel understandably doesn’t respond.

During the opening credits, they do a lot of “relative of famous person with same last name” jokes. Those became a staple during credits for the rest of the show, especially the Joel seasons.

Servo doesn’t know who the Buddha is at 7:27. Also, Joel’s Wisconsin accent really comes out when he says “Buddha.”

At 7:46, Joel starts a riff that just sort of peters out. Something about the plant in front of the camera, but I’m not sure what he was trying to say.

8:13, Joel makes a pun and asks Crow if he likes it. Crow doesn’t seem overly enthused, but he says it was cool, anyway. Tom then tells him should laugh at it, since Joel’s upset with them. He hasn’t been acting too upset since they got into the theater, but maybe he’s been glowering or something.

Crow and Joel both talk at the same time at 8:31. They’re usually pretty good at not doing that, considering it’s improv.

At 8:35, Joel says “whoops” and looks down. It looks like he was just moving out of the way of the movie, but maybe he hit Crow’s arm or something.

Movie thing: I know it’s not even 10 minutes in yet, but the editing in this is really bad.

At 11:52, Joel tells Crow a terrible joke, which he kinda laughs at, but it seems to make him a little bit sad. Joel laughs, though.

Servo’s Frankie Avalon joke at 12:27- does that come from somewhere or did Josh just make that up on the fly? It’s very clever. Josh always has been the best of the MST alumni at off-the-cuff quips. Crow and Joel groan, though.

At 13:01, I’m not sure what Joel’s laughing at.

Joel bats at the old man at 13:16.

Movie thing: Gosh, 60s white-people dancing is always so second-hand embarrassing. Also, along with being washed out, the sound is really bad in this, too. I’m having a hard time understanding what anyone is saying.

I appreciate their Batman riffs at 15:43.

At 16:36, Tom makes fun of Frankie Avalon for being in the movie, but since Frankie’s hugging a pretty lady on screen at the time, Crow disagrees with his assessment. His enthusiastic follow-up about Frankie’s hand placement makes me laugh, along with Joel.

Josh calls commercial at 17:22, while making fun of Colonel Medika’s line delivery.

The guys are talking over each other a lot this week. I guess they’re just full of riff ideas.

Joel’s delivery at 17:45 is kind of adorable, for some reason.

All their riffs about the van starting at 18:26 are really funny, but what was that, Joel? Freeze him and make him into little bongs? Bombs? Huh?

I’m sorry, but WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

You can’t really see it because the quality is so bad, but at 19:27, Joel and the bots lean along with the car-chase cam.

Terrible pun from Joel at 20:20ish.

Some more of the Crow attitude we know and love at 22:20.

At 22:29, Servo complains to Joel about hearing voices in his head. Joel sounds a little concerned, but then Tom drops it.

Joel starts poking at Frankie’s giant chin at 22:57.

Crow just can’t let the poor framing in this scene go.

Tom’s confused about the number of Sumuru’s eyes at 26:10.

Joel gives the naked woman two thumbs up at 26:52, then stands up to look down at her chest! Unexpected from him. Things are getting awfully blue in here…

Crow starts a game of tag with Joel as they leave the theater, which is cute. Joel takes a huge obvious step over Trace on the floor, and mumbles something. I can’t tell whether he says something to Trace, or say something about “chase”. Either would make sense in context.

Host Segment 1

 We go right into the host segment, skipping the doorway sequence. It’s hard to tell with these VHS recordings whether that’s how the episode was made, or if the person just cut it out. It does look like a little bit from the beginning of this segment is cut off.

Joel is still mad about being locked out of the ship, so he’s attached “idioprobes” to the bots. They look like strings, and apparently administer pain while attached. That seems a little harsh to me, but I’ve also never been stuck out in space in my underwear, either. I like the way Crow sidles sideways into frame.

When Joel rips the idioprobes off the bots, you can clearly see the string on Servo, but he just pretends to grab something off of Crow. They didn’t have any extra string for a prop?

After Joel removes them, Servo starts trying to give the “we didn’t know it was you” excuse again, saying they thought it was any of several dead musicians. (All the people in the list are drummers, except for Elvis.)

Joel’s not having it, and threatens the probes again. I’m not really sure why they’re called probes; they’re not really probing anything.

Tom demands a trial by his peers, and Joel says that he’d build them more peers if he could. Interesting- does that mean he’s used up all useful robot building parts on the ship already? That would explain why he stopped at four, besides the fact that four is more than enough to deal with.

Then Joel asks where Gypsy is, and the other two hem and haw and finally admit they left her stuck in the spiral-on-down, which I think is the way to the theater? I know they’ve used the term before, but infrequently. Anyway, Joel’s not happy about that, either. Servo’s defense is pretty reasonable, since his arms don’t work. Crow’s in trouble, though.

Apparently you can unstick Gypsy from the spiral-on-down by pressing a button on the little control panel thing. I wonder if that unsticks her from anywhere in the satellite, or if it’s just for that one spot. Crow calls it a robo-purge button, which kind of makes it sound like the former.

I love Gypsy’s screech when she gets released.

Joel seems so done with the bots and everything by the end of this segment. He can’t do anything but smile and (metaphorically) wave. The cheesy grin isn’t usually his style; that’s more of a Mike thing.

Movie pt. 2

Still 67° at 6:38 (am or pm).

Joel sings a little Sumuru song at 35:48. I’m not sure if the tune comes from somewhere or if he was just making it up on the spot. Anyone recognize it?

At 36:20, Joel and the bots mess with the car dashboard.

37:33- Tom makes another off-color joke. I have a feeling more are on the way, given the content of the movie.

At 44: 20, Servo brings up the slant-6 Swinger car again, the one they mentioned in a few previous episodes.

He also calls commercial at 44:45.

Joel’s sounding extra sleepy in a lot of his lines.

Ah good, it’s time for the movie to dial up the sexism again.

By 51:11, Crow’s lost patience with the kissing scene.

At 52:04, Tom tells Joel he needs to leave, because he needs to go bake brownies for the Pinewood Derby. The real-life reason was mentioned at the top, but I’m thinking in-universe, Servo was just tired of watching this movie. Joel’s fine with him leaving, as long as he agrees to show up for the sketches between the movies segments. Tom promises, and wonders if they have eggs. Just a pointless thought, since it doesn’t matter how they eat (or breathe), but I always assumed either the Mads send them supply shipments, or they have some kind of food synthesizer that makes it for them. They definitely have the latter by the end of the series, since Crow mentions it in Soultaker [1001], but earlier than that, it’s not clear. Maybe both?

Host Segment 2

Joel tries to hold a trial for the bots, but, as usual, everything is a joke to them. They just won’t go along with anything he’s trying to do. The courtroom thing reminds me of Crow’s trial for cheating in Wild World of Batwoman [515].

The bots go off on another word-association tangent, which leads to a game show sketch, while Joel just looks on impatiently.

He uses the button panel as a gavel.

Even Gypsy gets in on making life difficult for Joel. It looks like maybe Josh was throwing his voice to do Gypsy from the other side of the desk. Either that or they recorded that part in post. Either way, Trace or somebody else must have been operating her.

Time and temp comes up on the host segment this time; Still 67° at 7:07. The updates are more frequent this week than last time.

Joel gives up on getting order in the court, and picks up Tom and kisses his head while misquoting Jimi Hendrix. What else can you do but give into the madness?

What is that on the desk besides the papers? It looks like an upside-down mug, maybe?

I like the weird noise Crow makes when Joel calls Movie Sign.

Movie pt. 3

 As Servo mentioned, he doesn’t go back into the theater with the others. Joel was holding him as they ended the last segment, so I guess he must have put him down somewhere on the way to the theater.

Joel and Crow try to move away from the spraying champagne at 55:10.

I agree with Crow at 56:27, please stop.

Man, Crow keeps saying what I’m thinking.

At 59:45, Crow calls back to the oceanic opening credits from the Gamera films.

Oh goodness, again with the Brain That Wouldn’t Die-style KPORN saxophone…also, so does security want to like, check her bag or anything before she goes in to the president? No? Yeah, see, that’s exactly why security exists.

Wait, he did get shot? Huh? It would be nice if they would SHOW us what’s happening! And this is the most ineffectual political security ever.

Host Segment 3

As promised, Tom is back for the host segment.

I love Crow’s flowers on his net.

Joel was out in space for five weeks? I guess it was longer between episodes than I thought.  That’s what I get for not checking first.

It amuses me that the bots are just now asking about this, even though they obviously thought about before, since Servo did calculations. But Joel’s got a guitar and he’s ignoring their questions, sort of like how they ignored him earlier when he was trying to put them on trial.

Time and temperature again, 7:28 and down to 65°.

Joel and the bots sing us a lovely part of the theme song to remind us to just relax about the eating and breathing thing. I’m guessing they anticipated people calling/writing in with questions about how Joel survived. As much as this episode guide exists to overthink things, that kind of science fact I am quite relaxed about, and I don’t mind being reminded.

I wonder whose guitar that is. It might be Josh’s, since I know he has musical inclinations. It doesn’t look the same as the guitar Larry has during the Clay and Lar’s Flesh Barn song in Women of the Prehistoric Planet [104], but that doesn’t mean it’s not still his. Also, do you think Joel’s really playing the guitar here? It sure looks like he is, but I’ve heard him say in interviews that he doesn’t play the guitar. Maybe he just meant he doesn’t anymore, or very much.

I think Crow is just moving his mouth, not actually singing. Nice harmonies from Tom, though.

Movie pt. 4

Haha, she’s running to her inevitable death, it’s funny! These highly-trained assassins sure jog at a casual pace, don’t they? I guess they’re probably in heels.

At 1:08:21, Joel mentions that he likes a movie with lots of midriff. This one ought to make him happy, then, no midriff shortage here.

Classic “oh wow” from Joel at 1:12:28, and another at 1:12:39. I don’t know if I’m going to note all of them. Maybe I should, and then someday someone can make a pointless compilation video or something.

Wizard of Oz reference #16 at 1:12:46. Maybe someday someone can make a pointless compilation of these, too.

Crow makes Joel laugh at 1:12:53.

The guys have no patience for Frankie’s fourth-wall-breaking joke at 1:13:01.

Wow, what a pointlessly prolonged scene leading up to nothing. They did in two minutes what they could have done in 30 seconds. That’s padding Roger Corman could be proud of.  

Also, that cut. This movie can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy or not. Not that it’s succeeding at comedy, but sometimes it’s sure trying.

“I know it’s best” because I’m a man, albeit a wimpy, useless one. Man, just like City on Fire, this movie annoys me so much I can’t leave it alone, even though that’s not what this guide is for. (I also think it’s easy to start filling in riffs yourself in KTMA, when it’s slow.)

I just noticed Joel’s leaned way back in his chair.

He calls commercial at 1:21:07.

Sumuru’s mines are operated by switches? That seems far less effective than normal mines…

Joel keeps talking about midriffs. I guess he really is a fan. 

I’m sorry I keep talking about movie things, but why the heck is Frankie here? Isn’t his character just some rich playboy with no actual skills? Did I miss some line near the beginning that explained his extensive military training? I really might have, the sound was terrible.

Joel’s riff attempt at 1:32:26- he pauses to get his sentence in order, then still says “fooms” instead of “films”. I find that way funnier than I should.

Is Joel okay? He’s having a really hard time getting over Trace on the way out, again. Maybe they’re squished closer to the wall than usual?

Conclusion

 Apparently Servo’s mouth is broken now, so Joel moves it for him and makes him sing.

Joel mentions they’ve got 900 people in the fan club. That’s extremely impressive for a dinky little puppet show on local UHF. Seems like people could tell from the beginning that MST3K was destined for greatness.

The fan club newsletter is called The Binding Polymer? I wonder why. Just science-y sounding, I guess.

Why does Joel need to move Servo’s mouth to talk when he’s not even onscreen? Maybe he can’t talk at all if his mouth doesn’t move. That seems like an odd design choice for a robot, but then again, so do most aspects of the bots. Speaking of Tom’s mouth, is KTMA Tom’s mouth the same as regular Tom’s mouth, but upside down? I’m probably just crazy.

Crow seems shocked by Joel’s sudden button press.

As he often does, Joel looks offscreen before the camera cuts away. He really does seem tired this week, doesn’t he? Hope he went home after this and slept.

Kevin’s listed under “Puppet Operation” in the credits. Maybe that means he was running Gypsy in the second host segment.

Thoughts on the Movie

          Wow. You know, after reading a little bit about it, I had hopes that The Million Eyes of Sumuru would be a little bit higher quality than the past few movies we’ve seen. In some ways, that’s true.

          But overall, I have to say…WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MOVIE?! I have so many questions: Why can’t George Nader and Frankie Avalon stop being smug and sardonic and cutesy for three and a half seconds? Why did they frame shots so half the time you can’t tell what’s going on? And President Boong? First of all, Boong, really? Second of all, Sinonesia? What? Third of all, he is clearly a white guy in eyeliner and all of this is supposed to be remotely acceptable to the audience!? I mean, Fu Manchu was racist, too, but at least they made some attempt to suspend audience disbelief.

          And the really big one: how do you think they fit this much misogyny into one film? Remember, even if a woman hates men and has dedicated her whole life to destroying them, she still becomes instantly smitten if touched by a man, no matter how unattractive. Also, even if she is a trained martial-artist-assassin, she will not make any attempt to stop said man from touching her, because she is a woman. Yes, women exist solely as sexual creatures who could never desire anything more than to be dominated by men, no matter what they may try to convince themselves otherwise. In fact, every human being is motivated only by sex at all times! And was that significant glance between Helga and the other chick at the end there supposed to redeem anything? Sax Rohmer, Harry Towers, Kevin Kavanagh (screenwriter on this fine, fine film)- y’all have issues.

          This movie has plenty of other stupidity which I’m not going to bother to get into. I think I’ve expressed my feelings adequately. It’s not unwatchable in the way Castle of Fu Manchu is, but it’s plenty more offensive. Let’s just move on with our lives.

Review

          This one was okay. As I said before, Josh thrives the most on the improv riffing, and the second part really starts to drag once he leaves. I still laughed out loud at several riffs, (favorite riff- Crow: Does she always make that noise when she walks?) but there’s a lot of dead space in between. Compared to the past few episodes, it definitely has less energy, which also makes it easier to get caught up in the badness of the movie.

          Overall, had good parts, wouldn’t put it in my KTMA top five, by any means. Still, with every episode the guys seem to figuring out more and more the feeling they want in the movie and host segments. You can see it moving towards its destination.

[thesnhuup]

Pop Picks – February 3, 2020

What I’m listening to: 

Spending 21 hours on airplanes (Singapore to Tokyo to Boston) provides lots of time for listening and in an airport shop I picked up a Rolling Stones magazine that listed the top ten albums of the last ten years. I’ve been systematically working through them, starting with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I just don’t know enough about hip hop and rap to offer any intelligent analysis of the music, and I have always thought of Kanye as kind of crazy (that may still be true), but the music is layered and extravagant and genre-bending. The lyrics seem fascinating and self-reflective, especially around fame and excess and Kanye’s specialty, self-promoting aggrandizement. Too many people I know remain stuck in the music of their youth and while I love those songs too, it feels important to listen to today’s music and what it has to tell us about life and lives far different than our own. And in a case like Twisted Fantasy, it’s just great music and that’s its own justification.

What I’m reading: 

I went back to an old favorite, Richard Russo’s Straight Man. If you work in academia, this is a must-read and while written 22 years ago, it still rings true and current. The “hero” of the novel is William Henry Devereaux Jr., the chair of the English Department in a second-tier public university in small-town Pennsylvania. The book is laugh aloud funny (the opening chapter and story about old Red puts me in hysterics every time I read it) and like the best comedy, it taps into the complexity and pains of life in very substantial ways. Devereaux is insufferable in most ways and yet we root for him, mostly because A) he is so damn funny and B) is self-deprecating. But there is also a big heartedness in Russo’s writing and a recognition that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and life’s essential dramas play out fully in the most modest of places and for the most ordinary of people. 

What I’m watching:

I can’t pretend to have an abiding interest in cheerleading, but I devoured the six-episode Netflix series Cheer, about the cheerleading squad at Navarro College, a small two-year college in rural Texas that is a cheerleading powerhouse, winning the National Championship 14 times under the direction of Coach Monica Aldama, the Bill Belichick of cheering. I have a new respect and admiration for the athleticism and demands of cheering (and wonder about the cavalier handling of injuries), but the series is about so much more. It’s about team, about love, about grit and perseverance, bravery, trust, about kids and growing up and loss, and…well, it’s about almost everything and it will make you laugh and cry and exult. It is just terrific.

Archive 

January 2, 2020

What I’m listening to: 

I was never really an Amy Winehouse fan and I don’t listen to much jazz or blue-eyed soul. Recently, eight years after she died at only 27, I heard her single Tears Dry On Their Own and I was hooked (the song was on someone’s “ten things I’d want on a deserted island” list). Since then, I’ve been playing her almost every day. I started the documentary about her, Amy, and stopped. I didn’t much like her. Or, more accurately, I didn’t much like the signals of her own eventual destruction that were evident early on. I think it was D. H. Lawrence that once said “Trust the art, not the artist.” Sometimes it is better not to know too much and just relish the sheer artistry of the work. Winehouse’s Back to Black, which was named one of the best albums of 2007, is as fresh and painful and amazing 13 years later.

What I’m reading: 

Alan Bennett’s lovely novella An Uncommon Reader is a what-if tale, wondering what it would mean if Queen Elizabeth II suddenly became a reader. Because of a lucked upon book mobile on palace grounds, she becomes just that, much to the consternation of her staff and with all kinds of delicious consequences, including curiosity, imagination, self-awareness, and growing disregard for pomp. With an ill-framed suggestion, reading becomes writing and provides a surprise ending. For all of us who love books, this is a finely wrought and delightful love poem to the power of books for readers and writers alike. Imagine if all our leaders were readers (sigh).

What I’m watching:

I’m a huge fan of many things – The National, Boston sports teams, BMW motorcycles, Pho – but there is a stage of life, typically adolescence, when fandom changes the universe, provides a lens to finally understand the world and, more importantly, yourself, in profound ways. My wife Pat would say Joni Mitchell did that for her. Gurinder Chadha’s wonderful film Blinded By The Light captures the power of discovery when Javed, the son of struggling Pakistani immigrants in a dead end place during a dead end time (the Thatcher period, from which Britain has never recovered: see Brexit), hears Springsteen and is forever changed. The movie, sometimes musical, sometimes comedy, and often bubbling with energy, has more heft than it might seem at first. There is pain in a father struggling to retain his dignity while he fails to provide, the father and son tension in so many immigrant families (I lived some of that), and what it means to be an outsider in the only culture you actually have ever known. 

November 25, 2019

My pop picks are usually a combination of three things: what I am listening to, reading, and watching. But last week I happily combined all three. That is, I went to NYC last week and saw two shows. The first was Cyrano, starring Game of Thrones superstar Peter Dinklage in the title role, with Jasmine Cephas Jones as Roxanne. She was Peggy in the original Hamilton cast and has an amazing voice. The music was written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, two members of my favorite band, The National, with lyrics by lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, directs. Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play is light, dated, and melodramatic, but this production was delightful. Dinklage owns the stage, a master, and his deep bass voice, not all that great for singing, but commanding in the delivery of every line, was somehow a plaintive and resonant counterpoint to Cephas Jones’ soaring voice. In the original Cyrano, the title character’s large nose marks him as outsider and ”other,” but Dinklage was born with achondroplasia, the cause of his dwarfism, and there is a kind of resonance in his performance that feels like pain not acted, but known. Deeply. It takes this rather lightweight play and gives it depth. Even if it didn’t, not everything has to be deep and profound – there is joy in seeing something executed so darn well. Cyrano was delightfully satisfying.

The other show was the much lauded Aaron Sorkin rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring another actor at the very top of his game, Ed Harris. This is a Mockingbird for our times, one in which iconic Atticus Finch’s idealistic “you have to live in someone else’s skin” feels naive in the face of hateful racism and anti-Semitism. The Black characters in the play get more voice, if not agency, in the stage play than they do in the book, especially housekeeper Calpurnia, who voices incredulity at Finch’s faith in his neighbors and reminds us that he does not pay the price of his patience. She does. And Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape – “convicted at the moment he was accused,” Whatever West Wing was for Sorkin – and I dearly loved that show – this is a play for a broken United States, where racism abounds and does so with sanction by those in power. As our daughter said, “I think Trump broke Aaron Sorkin.” It was as powerful a thing I’ve seen on stage in years.  

With both plays, I was reminded of the magic that is live theater. 

October 31, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

It drove his critics crazy that Obama was the coolest president we ever had and his summer 2019 playlist on Spotify simply confirms that reality. It has been on repeat for me. From Drake to Lizzo (God I love her) to Steely Dan to Raphael Saadiq to Sinatra (who I skip every time – I’m not buying the nostalgia), his carefully curated list reflects not only his infinite coolness, but the breadth of his interests and generosity of taste. I love the music, but I love even more the image of Michelle and him rocking out somewhere far from Washington’s madness, as much as I miss them both.

What I’m reading: 

I struggled with Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo for the first 50 pages, worried that she’d drag out every tired trope of Mid-Eastern society, but I fell for her main characters and their journey as refugees from Syria to England. Parts of this book were hard to read and very dark, because that is the plight of so many refugees and she doesn’t shy away from those realities and the enormous toll they take on displaced people. It’s a hard read, but there is light too – in resilience, in love, in friendships, the small tender gestures of people tossed together in a heartless world. Lefteri volunteered in Greek refugee programs, spent a lot of interviewing people, and the book feels true, and importantly, heartfelt.

What I’m watching:

Soap opera meets Shakespeare, deliciously malevolent and operatic, Succession has been our favorite series this season. Loosely based on the Murdochs and their media empire (don’t believe the denials), this was our must watch television on Sunday nights, filling the void left by Game of Thrones. The acting is over-the-top good, the frequent comedy dark, the writing brilliant, and the music superb. We found ourselves quoting lines after every episode. Like the hilarious; “You don’t hear much about syphilis these days. Very much the Myspace of STDs.” Watch it so we can talk about that season 2 finale.

August 30, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.

What I’m reading: 

Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.

What I’m watching:

Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.

What I’m reading: 

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.

What I’m watching: 

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life.  While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading: 

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library.  It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more.  It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching: 

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to: 

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading: 

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous. 

What I’m watching: 

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s  AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star.  The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018 

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching.  And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia.  It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan.  Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news. 

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

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[jurassicparkpodcast]

Jurassic June Highlight: Functional LEGO Jurassic World Gyrosphere Track from the Great Northern LEGO Railway

It’s Jurassic June – and that means it’s a chance for all of us Jurassic Park and Jurassic World fans to really come together and highlight some of the coolest things which our community have accomplished over the past year.

Now, any of you who know me well enough will know that I am a massive fan of LEGO – with some truly great LEGO Jurassic builds out there on the internet. I’ve seen people do it all – from intricately detailed Velociraptor Paddocks to full-scale recreations of the Visitors Centre. There really is a ton of creativity in this community.

The other day, however, I stumbled upon something which goes above and beyond – over on the Beyond The Brick YouTube channel. I have been subscribed to these guys for long-time thanks in part to my love for LEGO – so imagine my delight when a fantastic LEGO Jurassic Roller-coaster popped up! Capturing the essence of Jurassic World perfectly, I got in touch with the creators of the channel to get hold of details for James – the gentleman behind this project. Here’s what he had to say about this fantastic project:

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Hey James, thanks for sitting down with me. I’ll kick it off light – how did you get into Jurassic Park?

Hey, you’re welcome – thanks for getting in touch with us. First and foremost, we are a group of friends and LEGO nerds from Portland, OR. We belong to a few recognized LEGO clubs in the area, specifically Great Northern LEGO Railway. We put on displays at community events a few times a year, like comic cons model railroading shows, or community/fundraiser events at museums.

One of our club members has been obsessively collecting LEGO dinosaurs for the past few years. On a whim about two years ago, we started putting a bunch of his dinosaurs out on our town display for a model railroad show. The kids absolutely loved it. Even though we had put all this effort, blood and sweat into creating LEGO renditions of real-life trains, the kids paid most attention to bunch of dinosaurs we just kind of placed around randomly on our layout. The idea grew from there, and ignited the idea of building a whole proper LEGO Jurassic Park.

I notice the great uniforms – do you guys cosplay in your spare time as well? Any involvement with other fan groups, such as the JP Motorpool?

A few of us cosplay as a hobby, but the uniforms idea came about to get attention at public events, and like most of our ideas, just snowballed.  For the recent event in Vancouver, BC, we all picked roles we wanted to play – Park Ranger, Security Officers, Emergency Techs – and put together the uniforms accordingly.  One of our club members, Davey Olson, came up with the standards for shirt, patch placement, etc. 

We found that cosplay is a match made in heaven with LEGO.  Not only do kids get to come see cool LEGO displays, but they also get to talk to a real-life Park Ranger.  We really wanted to make people to get an immersive experience.

Now we are talking Jurassic LEGO – have you got all the LEGO sets?

I don’t personally, but Bob Day is the club member I’d mentioned before, who obsessively collects the dinosaurs.  He has at least one copy of every Jurassic Park / Jurassic World set released, and in some cases, dozens of copies.  He’s even gone back and collected at least one of every dinosaur LEGO has ever released, dating back to the early 2000s.  I have most of them, but not nearly as many as Bob does.

Which one is your favourite?

I really like the set # 75932, Jurassic Park Velociraptor Chase.  It was launched as part of the 25th anniversary of the original films, and you get minifigures of Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Lex Murphy, and Tim Murphy.

The build itself is amazing – do you have an estimate on how many bricks are in it?

Thank you!  It’s a collaborative build, so quite a few of us had a hand in it.  We estimate there’s probably about 150,000 LEGO pieces in.

The build includes many dinosaurs not in the ‘Jurassic’ line – can you explain to Jurassic fans where those come from?

LEGO first began releasing specialty-molded dinosaurs in the early 2000s.  This would be excluding brick-built dinosaurs – so we’re talking specialty pieces like heads, torsos, arms, etc.  One of the first was an “Adventurers” sub-theme called Dino Island.  Most of those dinosaurs were pretty primitive-looking, without a lot of details such as printing or articulation.  Later, there was an educational series that contained mix-and-match elements where you could make your own dinosaurs, such as a Brachiosaurus, from a few specialized parts.  LEGO made two licensed sets in 2001 as a tie-in to Jurassic Park III, but those were primarily brick-built dinosaurs and honestly, pretty heinous.

There was a short-lived theme in 2005, called “Dino 2010,” and then another theme in 2012 that was simply called “Dino.”  The 2012 Dino theme was the predecessor to the modern, “Jurassic” lines you see today.  The molds were much more detailed, they had better printing and articulation, and overall, just looked a lot cooler.

Jurassic World sets first appeared in 2015, and then again in 2018, as tie-ins to Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, respectively.

What was the most time-consuming part of the build?

The landscaping!  Landscaping with LEGO takes a tremendous amount of parts.  LEGO is squared off edges and very “blocky,” so to make convincing landscaping is very time-consuming.  You’ve got to put a lot of work into making it look random.

How did you go about recreating the Visitor’s Centre? Did you use lots of reference material?

That was one of my builds I contributed.  I pulled a lot of reference materials from image searches online, and collect them all into shared photo albums.  There are some visitors centers that people have already built and posted online on Flickr and Instagram, but I didn’t see a whole of actual physical builds – most were just built digitally and rendered.  I really wanted to try to get as accurate a representation of the Visitors Center as possible, because it’s such an iconic structure.

After getting my reference materials in order –honestly, I just began free-building.  I’d grab bricks I had on-hand, even if they weren’t the right color, and just start framing out how I wanted the center to eventually look.  Free-building can be rewarding, but also really frustrating.  I probably built and rebuilt the whole thing about 4 times.

I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out.  I really like the open back so you can peer in through the actual center itself.  I’d like to do a version 2.0 and put in proper basement, and finish up the rear of the building. Then maybe have it open up in the back, dollhouse-style.

You have a great ACU Building – was this inspired by Jurassic World Evolution at all?

You caught me.  Yes – 100% inspired by Jurassic World Evolution.  The game has some great reference material for LEGO builds.  I actually put that ACU building together in one evening. 

Another great source of ideas and inspiration for structures is Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis from the early 2000s.  The graphics are already a little blocky, so they translate well to LEGO. 

If you could add one more thing to this build, what would you choose to add?

If I had unlimited resources and money – I would love to build an entire surround mountain range, like the mountains of Kualoa Ranch in Hawaii, where parts of the movies were filmed.  It would take so many LEGO pieces to make, but it would look amazing.

If you could get one new dinosaur in LEGO format, what would it be and why?

Sauropods!  Particularly a Brachiosaurus.  LEGO has only released one, in the early 2000s, and it’s got a face only a mother could love.  I would like to see an updated, modern Brachiosaurus to complement the other current dinosaur designs.

Where should LEGO Jurassic fans watch for your next build?

We will take LEGO Jurassic Park up to Seattle, WA, for BrickCon October 5-6.  BrickCon is a LEGO fan expo / event that’s held every year.  We already have quite a few new surprises in the works.  You’ll be in for a treat.

James – thank you so much for sitting down to talk to us, and for taking us through just a taste of this fantastic build! There is so much to it – from the automated Gyrosphere track, to the fantastic tour train which echoes both the Ford Explorer and the Jeep Wrangler from the original film here. The team here really have packed this build full of incredibly intricate details – so I really do recommend checking it out. We will link the Beyond the Brick video at the end of this article.

For now, thanks for reading guys – we hope you enjoyed this spotlight.  If you want to share your own builds with us, please do – either in the comments below, in our Facebook group or by Tweeting at us.

Take care – and enjoy this Jurassic June!

Written by: Tom Fishenden

[itsworn]

Adam Sorokin Repeats As March Meet Top Fuel Winner in Chevy-Powered Champion Speed Shop Slingshot

Just as nitro-starved victims of the fuel ban flocked to Famoso for their winter fix starting in 1959, thousands arrive each March to get dosed with more nitromethane than any other modern meet delivers. Six of 16 March Meet eliminator categories run on “pop” and, with one exception, superchargers. Every run lasts 1,320 feet.

Despite the continuing decline of AA/FD entries (nine here) and a relative abundance of fuel floppers and fuel altereds, the March Meet remains a “dragster race”—at least in the minds of folks old enough to remember 100-plus Top Fuelers fighting for 64 spots. A half-century after the low-dollar Surfers won it and soon retired, anyone meeting Tom Jobe invariably asks how he and late partners Bob Skinner and Mike Sorokin pulled that off in 1966. If Mike’s son, Adam Sorokin, shows up 50 years from now at Milt’s Coffee Shop, some customer will surely inquire about the crazy circumstances contributing to his unlikely 2019 victory.

Fuel altered rookie Ron Capps was properly baptized into the world of Awful-Awfuls while qualifying a brand-new chassis (wearing a Fiat body bought from Mike Sullivan). Owners John and Roxie Hertzig initially suspected somebuddy’s prank when the big show’s 2016 Funny Car champ called to ask whether he might fill the open seat—and bring along his father and brother to help wrench on both Hertzig altereds. Capps fell to perennial March Meet winner Dan Hix in Round One but made the favorite work hard by leaving first and nearly forcing a sub-6.00-index breakout by Hix, who survived with a just-safe 6.021, on the brakes (208 mph). Famed freelancer Paul Sadler, whose lenses have favored AA/FAs since their early-1970s heyday, got the shot.

Sorokin’s upset of world-champ Mendy Fry concluded a final round that produced fellow winners Bobby Cottrell in AA/Funny Car (defeating impressive rookie Jerry Espeseth); James Day in Fuel Altered (d. Dan Hix); Mike Halstead, Rear-Engine T/F (d. Billy McDevitt); Dan Hix, Classic F/C (d. Rodney Flournoy); Kin Bates, A/FD (d. Wayne Ramay); Don Enriquez, Jr. Fuel (d. Alan Hull); Steve Faller, 7.0 Pro (d. George Vanderpool); Jason Barta, Nostalgia I (d. Lloyd Harder); Terry Linblad, N/E II (d. George Chatterton); Ron Anzalone, N/E III (d. Don Morris); Jim Teague, A/Gas (d. Frank Merenda); Steve Pullin, B/G (d. Nick Kendrick); David Stage, C/G (d. PJ Glacalone); Bill Norton, D/G (d. Bob Gonzalves); and Stacy Roberts in the DYO Hot Rod bracket (d. Dan Rowley).

Undefeated in NHRA’s Hot Rod Heritage points series for a full year since runner-upping at the 2018 March Meet, Fry’s title defense got off to a rocky start belied by results sheets listing two world-record runs, overall low e.t. (5.49), top speed (265.43), and another second-place finish. Earlier, during qualifying, a freak failure of the drive coupler had the predictable effect on a Donovan Hemi that reportedly zinged past 12,000 rpm. One engine and run later, the coupler’s culprit revealed itself when a cracked rearend mount separated from the chassis at speed, taking out the brakes. Her ’chutes alone couldn’t keep Mendy from bouncing into the rain-hardened sand trap. Owner Tom Shelar and his veteran crew thrashed ’til 3 a.m. Sunday to clean out the mud and install a fresh axlehousing that friend Bruce Dyda fetched from his L.A. chassis shop two-plus hours south then drove straight back to deliver.

A huge upset saw Ron Capps’s teammate, James Day, wrestle the Hertzigs’ traditional, short-wheelbase, wingless American Bantam to a rare defeat of Dan Hix’s dominant “transformer” (i.e., a slow NHRA Funny Car rebodied as a roadster and planted by two big wings fore and aft). The difference was a holeshot (6.22-6.16) that prevented Hix, whose Mustang topped the 5.90-indexed, six-car Classic Funny field, from scoring possibly the first fuel “double” at a major nostalgia meet.

Entering eliminations against friendly archrival Jim Murphy, Fry had yet to make a full pass. She promptly uncorked a winning 5.518, the quickest in slingshot history, at 265.43, the top speed overall (just edging Dan Horan’s 265.22-mph Funny Car). Fry broke through the 5.40 barrier in the semis, but left so uncharacteristically late (0.219 r.t.) that she needed most of the 5.490 and a top-end charge of 259.71 to overcome Bret Williamson’s event-best (0.051) r.t. and 5.85 e.t. Fry’s lousy light was traced to worn throttle parks that got replaced just in time to warm the Hemi for what, on paper, figured to be a mismatch with a wounded Chevy car fully 3.5 tenths and 50 mph slower on the day.

Instead, an overlooked screw in that hastily assembled throttle linkage backed itself out somewhere between Fry’s burnout and staging; at the hit, nothing happened. For her second straight year, the favorite watched from the left lane while a longshot opponent drove away to nostalgia racing’s biggest prize. As winner Adam Sorokin understated afterward, it was lucky for him “that they don’t run ’em on paper.”

One new build always seems to steal the casual pitside shows that accompany Famoso’s two big races (the other being NHRA’s California Hot Rod Reunion, upcoming October 25-27). Jason Brown didn’t let wet roadways derail a long-planned maiden voyage for an LS-powered, Tremec-shifted ’28 Ford under construction for four long years. Only the metal above the belt line originated in Detroit; the rusty rest was replaced with sheet steel shaped by Bakersfield’s TL’s Rods. The one-stop shop also trimmed 9 inches of ugly air from all window openings, created a cowl-firewall assembly, and applied the paint. That oh-so-low roof makes McLean’s rear wheels look ever taller than their 20 inches. Note how the headers and radius rod follow the arc of TL’s fabricated frame, which tapers down from 4×2 tubing at the 9-inch Ford rearend. Brandon Gross of TL’s Rods slid behind the wheel for Hot Rod Deluxe to demonstrate the low-down, set-back seating position that comfortably accommodates his six-foot customer.

At once one of the darkest yet most colorful early pickups on the planet, the blacked-out ’41 Ford belongs to Mike Brown, brother of the chopped Model A’s owner. TL’s Rods added a Chevy LS and Mustang II suspension while subtracting 8 inches of bed length. Shop owner Brandon Gross personally painted both brothers’ hot rods.

Mendy Fry experienced a whole season’s worth of drama in the season opener, highlighted by the quickest and second-quickest slingshot e.t.’s ever. She’d been in record territory before, as a teenager driving two cars built together with her father, the late Ron Fry. Their full-fendered roadster was the world’s fastest street-legal car. The teenager’s unprecedented 6.15 in 1988 tentatively claimed NHRA’s Top Alcohol Dragster national record until the car slowed to 6.27 on her next, last chance for the mandatory backup. This time, the veteran, who describes herself as “the son that my dad never had,” made sure it stuck with back-to-black blasts of 5.518 and 5.490.

Here’s the Rick Dore build that launched the second season of his Rusted Development series. Marc McCaslin’s two-year search for an unmolested ’36 paid off in a complete, two-owner coupe suffering nothing worse than two small dents and the blown head gasket that sentenced it to decades of covered storage outdoors. Surprisingly stock below the windows, the car even retains both original bumpers, swapped end for end. A crate 350 Chevy and TH350 keep the show rolling. McCaslin (wearing the dark jacket, rear) drew smiles by cruising into and out of the Famoso Grove at approximately this ride height. The fourth-generation Bakersfield farmer relies on adjustable, poly bumpstops in all four corners to safely maintain as little as 1/4 inch of clearance “on a road that’s real smooth; no bumps!”

Here’s another way to extract exhaust from a tight overhead conversion. Philipp Meyer didn’t drive his Chevy-powered coupe all the way from his home in Germany, but he’s covered much of this country in the Model A built by Mackey’s Hot Rods. Local tube bender Sean McDougall formed the sexy stainless system.

Lewis Milmich (shown), who spends weekdays restoring early Cadillacs and C10 pickups for customers, got talked into helping build a shop truck by his son Lee, who also recruited father-in-law Bill Lynch. Over eight months their family affair progressed from a disassembled ’56 stocker to what you see here. They left the body and paint as found, except for fabricating the firewall, adding an aftermarket rear-window kit to the standard cab, minitubbing the inside of the bed, and installing a donor truck’s running boards and bed sides, painted and aged to match the surroundings. A coat of satin clear preserves the patina. A 460 plucked from an F-250 benefits from a Comp cam and Holley Sniper injection. Detroit Steel supplied the 20×9 and 20×11 rims.

Reminders of engine builder and Pro 7.0 racer Cub Barnett appeared on Juggers club mate Boyd Schafer’s ’40 Olds gasser and one of several pitside benches recognizing California Hot Rod Reunion honorees. He raced in Southern California and operated the dyno at Scotty’s Muffler Service prior to moving north to work for Ted Gotelli in 1961. He later partnered with Andy Brizio in Champion Speed Shop and operated his own engine shop until the end. Cub, the younger brother of pioneer racer Bud Barnett, suffered a heart attack while undergoing cancer treatments the week of the March Meet, just shy of his 85th birthday.

Saturday’s surprises included back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back exhibition runs by five wheelstanders, ranging from the ancient stagecoach of Ed and Wendy Jones (pictured) to Mike Kunz’s spunky and fast PT Cruiser. The wheelie rivals staged an impromptu, side-by-side header burndown on Sunday. The coach took the main stage immediately after the Mopar’s last pass and was circling at midtrack when Nitro Mike came down the return road and stopped, directly opposite, to unleash an extended firestorm that the Outlaw returned across the guard wall. As usual, the candy man later strolled the fence line and had screaming fans eating out of his hand. As far as kids are concerned, nobody keeps up with the Joneses. The Idaho couple’s 17-year, two-vehicle deal with family-owned Jelly Belly is among drag racing’s longest-running sponsorships.

Adam Sorokin never saw his final-round opponent but wasn’t taking any chances, keeping the hammer down even after his blower gave up the fight. A slowing 5.84 at just 212 mph clinched a second March Meet title for the son of 1966 champ Mike Sorokin. Paul Sadler’s photo illustrates why top-end shooters challenge each other to capture the 377-inch minimouse motor with a belt still intact at 1,320 feet.

Ask Bobby McLennan why he continues shoving pressurized nitromethane through a limited engine design abandoned by Top Fuel racers before the original slingshot era ended and he’ll answer, “Because the Chevy was my dad’s deal.” Father and son both appear in a previously unpublished Petersen Publishing image that HRM editor Wally Parks composed during a 1962 summer meet at Pomona. The late Jim McLennan (left), whose injected and blown slingshots were frequently featured in manufacturers’ late-1950s and early-1960s “hero” ads as the world’s quickest Chevys, is seen talking with longtime NHRA tech director Bill “Farmer” Dismuke. McLennan never won the March Meet, but his youngest crewman (who has already learned that nitro is for racin’ while gas is good for washin’ parts), his son Bobby, grew up to build the billet small-blocks that made Adam Sorokin the Top Fuel Eliminator of 2010 and 2019.

The post Adam Sorokin Repeats As March Meet Top Fuel Winner in Chevy-Powered Champion Speed Shop Slingshot appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

from Hot Rod Network https://www.hotrod.com/articles/adam-sorokin-repeats-march-meet-top-fuel-winner-chevy-powered-champion-speed-shop-slingshot/ via IFTTT

[funnythingshere0-blog]

Things to Do With Kids in Queens on June 1

New Post has been published on http://funnythingshere.xyz/things-to-do-with-kids-in-queens-on-june-1/

Things to Do With Kids in Queens on June 1

Pajama Story Time: An Animal Tale – Queens Zoo June 01, 2018 – Flushing

Enjoy an evening at the Queens Zoo! The zoo may be closed but there is still plenty to see. Explore the marsh and aviary to learn about the birds, meet some of ther farm animals, and see some other animals up close! Enjoy a nice summer evening with cookies and milk and a fun story under the tent.

Queens Library & Sciencetellers Rock with the Wild West: ‘The Mystery of the Golden Piano’ – Jackson Heights Library June 01, 2018 – Jackson Heights

Throughout this absolutely wild adventure story, volunteers from the audience will explore the fascinating science behind chemical reactions, combustion, air pressure, inertia, and more. Don’t miss this classic action-packed western with ‘notes’ of science!

Global Mashup #4: Balkans meets El Barrio – Flushing Town Hall June 01, 2018 – Flushing

We’re mashing up 2 cultures on 1 stage with an open dance floor! Raya Brass Band thrills audience with intense, soul-shaking Balkan wedding music and Spanglish Fly returns with irresistible grooves that play 60’s soul inspired by Latin boogaloo. Each band plays a set, then the two meet and jam. Come ready to dance!

Toddler Time – Bowne Park June 01, 2018 – Flushing

Come play in the sprinklers, play with some balloons, have a snack!

TOM DO BRASIL (SOUND OF BRAZIL) – Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning June 01, 2018 – Jamaica

Clarinetist and singer Kristen Mather de Andrade will perform our favorite Brazilian music along with the best Brazilian musicians in the NY. Andrade founded the group Tom do Brasil in 2012 to study the Portuguese language but branched out via her niche of storytelling through melody. Since then they’ve been no stranger to live performances. Exploring a range of styles from classical to contemporary and folk, she and her group of rising stars will be sure to wow you with the versatile sounds of Brazil.

Pajama Story Time: An Animal Tale – Queens Zoo June 01, 2018 – Corona

Summertime is almost here. The zoo may be closed, but there is still plenty to see.  Explore the marsh and aviary to learn about the birds. Meet some of the farm animals and see some other animals up close. Enjoy a nice summer evening with cookies and milk and a fun story under our tent. Registration required.

Global Mashup #4: Balkans meets El Barrio – Flushing Town Hall June 01, 2018 – Flushing

We’re mashing up two cultures on one stage with an open dance floor! Raya Brass Band thrills audience with intense, soul-shaking Balkan wedding music and Spanglish Fly returns with irresistible grooves that play 60’s soul inspired by Latin boogaloo. Each band plays a set, then the two meet and jam. Come ready to dance!

Queens Library & Sciencetellers Rock with the Wild West: ‘The Mystery of the Golden Piano’ – Jackson Heights Library June 01, 2018 – Jackson Heights

Throughout this absolutely wild adventure story, volunteers from the audience will explore the fascinating science behind chemical reactions, combustion, air pressure, inertia, and more. Don’t miss this classic action-packed western with ‘notes’ of science!

Let’s Go Mets – Citi Field June 01, 2018 – Flushing

Cheer on the Amazin’s when they take on the Chicago Cubs from  Windy City.  All fans in attendance receive a Michael Conforto Replica Jersey.

Toddler Time – Bowne Park June 01, 2018 – Flushing

Come and play in the sprinklers, play with some balloons, have a snack!

$5 Friday Fun – My Gym Fresh Meadows June 01, 2018 – Fresh Meadows

Friday Fun Night! Head over to My Gym Friday night for an hour of pure fun. Kids will have a blast climbing, hanging, sliding, and using their imaginations. $5/per child. Cash only payments. RSVP here to secure your space. Pay at the gym.

Pajama Story Time: An Animal Tale – Queens Zoo June 01, 2018 – Corona

Have your family meet the animal families! Hike the zoo, see animals up close, and discover why spring is great time to learn about young animals. Take a family picture and create a picture frame to commemorate your night! Snuggle up during snack and story time. Registration required.

11th Annual World Science Festival 2018 – Various locations Through June 03, 2018 – New York

This year’s festival features over 50 events at venues that span the five boroughs, all celebrating the wonder of science. Highlights include stargazing in Brooklyn Bridge Park, street science in Washington Square Park, Alan Alda’s Flame Challenge and a catch and release fishing experiment. This year the festival will celebrate the achievements of Women in Science, and explore the impact of the award-winning teachers on the future of scientific discovery See separate listings for full details.

Family Movies – Bayside Library Through June 09, 2018 – Bayside

Come watch movies together with families and friends. 5/19: “Inside Out” (2015, PG), 6/9: “The Incredibles” (2004, PG)

Family Movies – Bayside Library Through June 09, 2018 – Bayside

Kids can spend their winter break with us! On 2/21, Puzzle Time, on 2/22, Craft time, on 2/23, we’ll screen the movie “The Secret Life of Pets.”

2018 QBG Bird Walks with NYC Audubon – Queens Botanical Garden Through June 09, 2018 – Flushing

It’s a fun-filled celebration of trees and the environment at QBG’s Arbor Fest! Enjoy a variety of activities for all ages, including live music, arts and crafts, demonstrations, a petting zoo, beer, wine, and local food vendors!

Rennie Harris: ‘Funkedified’ – The New Victory Theater Through June 10, 2018 – Midtown

Watch as umbrellas take flight, balloons sprout minds of their own, and shimmering silks ripple to the rafters in a modern circus spectacle. With knowing smiles and suitcases full of surprises, the globetrotting Acrobuffos, Seth Bloom and Christina Gelsone, animate airflow, goad gravity, and make buoyant, beautiful and really, really high art out of the very thing we breathe.

Bayside Library – Wii Game Challenge Through June 13, 2018 – Bayside

Play and challenge friends via these Wii games: “Mario Kart,” “Just Dance,” or other Wii games in the collection.

Parent and Child Yoga – Court Square Library Through June 22, 2018 – Long Island City

Partner with your toddler in simple animated poses, games, art, music, and breathing exercises that help to strengthen coordination and build body awareness. Registration required.

Science in the Park: Science in the Woods – Alley Pond Park Through June 23, 2018 – Douglaston

Nature based programming, including birding, catch and release, crafts, and more. Registration recommended but not required. All materials and free giveaways included!

Science in the Park: Science in the Woods – Alley Pond Park Through June 23, 2018 – Douglaston

Nature-based programming, including birding, catch and release, crafts, and more. Registration recommended but not required. All materials and free giveaways included!

Science In The Park: Science in the Bay – Little Bay Park Through June 24, 2018 – Whitestone

Nature based programming, including wadding and netting, nature based crafts, and more.  Registration recommended.  All materials and free giveaways included. Children should know how to swim.

Science In The Park: Science in the Bay – Little Bay Park Through June 24, 2018 – Whitestone

Nature-based programming, including wadding and netting, nature-based crafts, and more.  Registration recommended.  All materials and free giveaways included. Children should know how to swim.

Family Movie Afternoon – Howard Beach Library Through June 29, 2018 – Howard Beach

Summer plus movies equals family fun!  Enjoy these screenings June 1 – Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (2017, R), June 8 – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017, PG-13),June 15 – Paddington 2 (2017, PG), June 22 – Pitch Perfect 3 (2017, PG-13),June 29 – Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017, PG-13).

Children’s Friday Matinee – Mitchell-Linden Library Through June 29, 2018 – Flushing

Don’t miss these screenings of blockbuster children’s movies. 6/1: “Emoji Movie” (2017, PG); 6/8: “Early Man” (2018, PG); 6/15: “Sing!” (2016, PG); 6/22: “My Little Pony” (2017, PG); 6/29: “Wreck-it Ralph” (2012, PG).

Family Movie Afternoon – Howard Beach Library Through June 29, 2018 – Howard Beach

Summer plus movies equals family fun!  Enjoy these screenings June 1 – Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (2017, R), June 8 – Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017, PG-13), June 15 – Paddington 2 (2017, PG), June 22 – Pitch Perfect 3 (2017, PG-13), June 29 – Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017, PG-13).

Children’s Friday Matinee – Mitchell-Linden Library Through June 29, 2018 – Flushing

Don’t miss these screenings of blockbuster children’s movies. 6/1: “Emoji Movie” (2017, PG); 6/8: “Early Man” (2018, PG); 6/15: “Sing!” (2016, PG); 6/22: “My Little Pony” (2017, PG); 6/29: “Wreck-it Ralph” (2012, PG).

‘Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of ocean pioneer Jacques Cousteau, offers a breakthrough look at a secret world within the ocean that is perhaps the biggest story of all – that the smallest life in the sea is the mightiest force on which we all depend. Alongside marine biologist Holly Lohuis, Cousteau invites viewers to dive into this whole new world that will leave them in awe of the beauty and diversity of the oceans and inspire an even stronger desire to protect what they have either seen for the first time or perhaps re-discovered along the journey. Narrated by renowned oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, Secret Ocean 3D introduces audiences to over 30 species, illuminating behaviors captured for the first time thanks to the development of new tools that allow underwater filming in 3D, ultra- HD 5K, slow motion, macro, and with motion control, and takes them to remarkable and vibrant environments such as the Bahamas, Fiji, and Bimini. Duration: 20 minutes.

‘Dream Big: Engineering Our World’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

Narrated by Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges, Dream Big: Engineering Our World will transform how you think about engineering. From the Great Wall of China and the world’s tallest buildings to underwater robots, solar cars and smart, sustainable cities, Dream Big celebrates the human ingenuity behind engineering marvels big and small, and shows how engineers push the limits of innovation in unexpected and amazing ways. With its inspiring stories of human grit and aspiration, and extraordinary visuals for the world’s largest screens, Dream Big reveals the compassion and creativity that drive engineers to create better lives for people and a more sustainable future for us all. DREAM BIG is a MacGillivray Freeman film produced in partnership with American Society of Civil Engineers and presented by Bechtel Corporation.

‘Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of ocean pioneer Jacques Cousteau, offers a breakthrough look at a secret world within the ocean that is perhaps the biggest story of all – that the smallest life in the sea is the mightiest force on which we all depend. Alongside marine biologist Holly Lohuis, Cousteau invites viewers to dive into this whole new world that will leave them in awe of the beauty and diversity of the oceans and inspire an even stronger desire to protect what they have either seen for the first time or perhaps re-discovered along the journey. Narrated by renowned oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle, Secret Ocean 3D introduces audiences to over 30 species, illuminating behaviors captured for the first time thanks to the development of new tools that allow underwater filming in 3D, ultra- HD 5K, slow motion, macro, and with motion control, and takes them to remarkable and vibrant environments such as the Bahamas, Fiji, and Bimini. Duration: 20 minutes.

‘Journey To Space 3D’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

Journey to Space is a celebration of space exploration, a tribute to international cooperation in space research, and a vision towards our near-term future beyond Earth’s orbit — a manned mission to Mars within a generation. Learn about the important role of the International Space Station, uncover what NASA and the space community are working on, and the challenges they face to carry out bold missions such as capturing asteroids and landing astronauts on Mars. Narrated by Sir Patrick Stewart. Duration: 20 minutes.

‘Conquest of the Skies 3D’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

The power of flight is one of nature’s greatest achievements. From its humble beginnings, over one hundred billion creatures soar through the sky today, from tiny, nectar-drinking hummingbirds to armored, airborne beetles, bizarre winged lizards and sonar-guided bats hunting in the dead of night. In Conquest of the Skies 3D, travel through time to unravel the astonishing, 300-million-year story of the flying animals. Who were the first flying creatures, where did they evolve, and how did they adapt into the massive variety of aeronauts that fill our skies today? The film uses cutting-edge CGI, the very latest in high-resolution filming techniques, and pioneering scientific analysis to reveal the hidden mechanics behind the gravity-defying skills of animals. Embark on an extraordinary journey to unravel the evolution of flying animals, from the first flying creatures to the organisms we know today.

Saturday Morning Painting Class With Mr. Steve – The Poppenhusen Institute Through June 30, 2018 – College Point

Students will be taught a variety of styles and techniques in order to encourage their creativity.

‘Conquest of the Skies 3D’ – New York Hall of Science Through June 30, 2018 – Corona

Marvel at homemade gingerbread houses made entirely of edible gingerbread, royal icing and candy. The houses are drafted, designed, baked, planned, built and decorated by creator Jon Lovitch over the course of an entire year. GingerBread Lane has won the Guinness World Record for 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 for the largest gingerbread village. Lovitch’s creation will again contend for this year’s Guinness World Record. Closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

Cirque du Soleil: ‘Volta’ – NYCB LIVE, Home of The Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum Through July 01, 2018 – Uniondale

A melange of music, aerial stunts, baton twirling, unicycle riding and lots of heart-thumping moments make this show the one to watch. You will not be disappointed!

Autism Spectrum Tour: The Discovery Squad – American Museum of Natural History Through September 01, 2018 – Upper West Side

Families with members on the autism spectrum can attend a 40-minute tour led by specially trained guides, then spend some time exploring the Discovery Room before the museum opens to the public.

Children ages 5–9 will discover the dioramas in the Jill and Lewis Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals, which offers a snapshot of the plants and animals native to North America. They will then plunge into the ocean to explore the dioramas in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life. Children ages 10–14 will take a trip through the David S. and Ruth L. Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth to explore the planet we live on and the forces that create volcanoes, earthquakes, and rock formations.

Space is limited and advance registration is required.

Built Exhibition Opening – Socrates Sculpture Park Through September 03, 2018 – Long Island City

A park-wide solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Virginia Overton that refashion found materials with dynamism and potency. In succinct, elegant forms, often accompanied with wry humor, Overton addresses concepts of labor, economics, and the land. Her material choices–fundamental elements for construction and fabrication–combined with her transparent approach to the process, evoke narratives of self-reliance, creative constraints, and expediency. At the park, Overton creates new iterations of familiar works–an altered pickup truck, a water feature, a roof truss gem sculpture, and a suspended beam, among others.

Yoga – Socrates Sculpture Park Through September 15, 2018 – Long Island City

A park-wide solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Virginia Overton that refashion found materials with dynamism and potency. In succinct, elegant forms, often accompanied with wry humor, Overton addresses concepts of labor, economics, and the land. Her material choices–fundamental elements for construction and fabrication–combined with her transparent approach to process, evoke narratives of self-reliance, creative constraints, and expediency. At the park, Overton creates new iterations of familiar works–an altered pickup truck, a water feature, a roof truss gem sculpture, and a suspended beam, among others.

Yoga – Socrates Sculpture Park Through September 15, 2018 – Long Island City

Socrates offers Vinyasa Yoga presented by three unique practitioners with varying styles and backgrounds: 9:30 am Saturday classes are taught by Jennifer Batson, 11 am classes by Morgan Miller; Sunday classes are led by Yojaida Estrella (habla Español). In all classes, participants flow through a series of connected yoga poses with an awareness of the breath in this welcoming waterfront environment of nature and art.

Rocket Park Mini Golf – New York Hall of Science Through October 28, 2018 – Corona

Kids ages 6 and older will putt their way through a 9-hole miniature golf course that teaches the science of spaceflight. Players will explore key science concepts such as propulsion, gravity, escape velocity, launch window, gravitational assist, and more. 

The game reveals that the same laws of motion and gravity that guide the path of a spaceship control the motion of golf balls here on Earth. In this nine-hole miniature golf course, players will explore key science concepts such as propulsion, gravity, escape velocity, launch window, gravitational assist, and more.

Rocket Park Mini Golf – New York Hall of Science Through October 28, 2018 – Corona

Kids ages 6 and older will putt their way through a 9-hole miniature golf course that teaches the science of spaceflight. Players will explore key science concepts such as propulsion, gravity, escape velocity, launch window, gravitational assist, and more. 

The game reveals that the same laws of motion and gravity that guide the path of a spaceship control the motion of golf balls here on Earth. In this nine-hole miniature golf course, players will explore key science concepts such as propulsion, gravity, escape velocity, launch window, gravitational assist, and more.

Governors Island Open Season – Governors Island Through October 31, 2018 – New York Harbor

Beginning May 1, New Yorkers are invited to enjoy the Island’s open and expansive park spaces with unforgettable views of New York Harbor, car-free recreation and a robust calendar of free public programming just a short ferry ride away from Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn.  Ferries will be free for all visitors during the first week of the season, from May 1-6.

Seasonal Farmstand – Queens County Farm Museum Through November 04, 2018 – Floral Park

Find out what’s ‘growing on’ at Queens Farm  at the on-site Seasonal Farmstand. We grow over 50 varieties of vegetables, so come by and see what’s in season each week!  Get tips on how to make easy, nutritious meals for the family.

EBT & SNAP benefits accepted.

Members always receive 10% off produce.

Farm-fresh eggs available starting at 12 pm (1 doz/customer; first-come first-served)

Socrates Mini Market – Socrates Sculpture Park Through November 17, 2018 – Long Island City

Enjoy a fresh brewed ‘cuppa’ from Henley Coffee & sample a selection of fresh-cut produce & small-batch products such as hot sauce from Hellgate Farm. Little Wildbranch Bakery will also be popping up to sell fresh baked goods! Throughout the season other special vendors will be featured including The Connected Chef.  Cash transactions preferred.  Major credit cards accepted by select vendors.

Guess What: A PG Stand Up Comedy Show for Families – The Creek and the Cave Comedy Club Through January 01, 2019 – Long Island City

The Guess What comedy show is a stand-up comedy show with the perfect recipe for parents and kids: funny jokes and no sailor talk. Plus parents now don’t need a babysitter to see a comedy show.

Watch top NYC comics make their PG best jokes and, in between, kids get a chance to go on stage and tell a joke. The vibe is definitely kid-friendly as the hosts of the show are a dad comic and his 9-year old daughter. Tickets are free. Different comedians each month. Great brunch and kids menu. 3rd Saturday of Each Month Doors open at 12:30 pm. The show starts at 1 pm.

[its-just-like-the-movies]

March 2018 Viewing Log

March Viewing List:

Félicité (17, A-): You watch it in your head the way you watch Get Out in your guts. Deftly negotiates an evolving story, impenetrable characters. 3/1/18

I, Tonya (17, B+): WHERE is Sebastian Stan’s nomination? 3/3/18

The Salesman (17, A-): N/A 3/5/18

Since You Went Away (44, B): Homefront patriotism often blunt, but melancholy and deep family ties are richly evoked. Colbert works it. 3/5/18

Since You Went Away is an Important film that I like well enough but Airplane! ruined that goodbye train sequence for me

The Descent (06, B+): Human terror of the first half amplifies and complicates the inhuman ones of the second. Fuck caves. 3/6/18

I don't know WHAT is in those caves but this is scary enough without subterranean hell beasts

Western (18, A): Astounding document of communication, of assimilation as filtered by fondness, prejudice, and outsider status. 3/8/18

A Wrinkle in Time (18, B-): Impassioned heart of first half (C+) limit its impact, but raised stakes of second half (B) bring it to life. 3/9/18

Black Panther (18, B): Three times I've seen Black Panther now, and every time I've had a different reaction. What an unexpectedly slippery film. 3/10/18

Plus: Wakanda and the characters are wonderfully realized on a visual scale. Minus: Morrison is so the film's most uneven contributor, and the editing's not super either

The Party (18, D+): Why offer ideas when I can just state my personal ideologies in overbaked witticisms? That's the same thing, right? 3/11/18

Lifeboat (18, B): Stylistically limited. Script muddled. Impactful nonetheless, but there's a tougher film inside. Tallulah pretty good 3/11/18

Stonewall (15, D): Engages ideas with barely any complexity, horrendously made and acted. Perfect case of what not to do at every turn. 3/13/18

Whoever this is playing Marsha is Bad

Every scene of Stonewall opens like it's a porno but then just devolves into abusive nonsense or mangled attempts at pathos

Can't believe I just had to watch Jeremy Irvine almost cry his way through a blowjob

Why is there not one sexual encounter that isn't remotely horrifying in one way or another

*with completely unconvincing anger* GAY POWER!!! GAAAYYY POOOWEER

Wow this really. Does not know what to do with the riot huh?

You're telling me there were FOUR ADDITIONAL NIGHTS and just skipping them over for what? For that? What kind of nonsense is this?

The Danish Girl (15, D): Dismal understanding of its own characters, further heightened by Hooper's directorial style. Final scenes laughable. 3/14/18

I saw folks criticize Get Out for its painfully low budget but like, Danish Girl is buried in money and has no idea what good framing is

Redmayne is weirdly creepy?, and Vikander's hardly the life raft I remembered

I would honestly take the very fascinating and somewhat engaged failure of Stonewall to the overwrought disconnect of The Danish Girl

Why does the actual surgery seem so terrifying? For fuck's sakes

Why are they playing it like Lili knows she's doing the new surgery too soon and - ergo - is planning on dying? What is this?

Tom Hooper's sense of framing is absolutely hazardous

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (11, B): N/A 3/14/18

The Big Sick (17, B): Appropriately messy, but could be leaner. Heart, warmth, terrific writing and performances more than worth it. 3/15/18

Fullmetal Alchemist (18, D-): Atrocious wigs. Even more atrocious CGI (besides Al). Even more more atrocious adaptation. 3/19/18

It's bungling the iconography soooo badly

Velvet Goldmine (98, A): Deconstruction/eulogy/celebration uses the emptiness of its era to poignant, startling effect. 3/20/18

Gloriously mounted, delightfully pansexual, rich with ideas. Haynes, Powell, Alberti all flying above us.

In honor of Brian Slade I'm gonna fill my queer cinema paper with lots of big, flashy words and drain it of any substance whatsoever

My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (17, B): N/A 3/23/18

A Woman's Life (17, A-): N/A 3/23/18

Double Indemnity (44, A-): Deliciously entertaining, muscularly constructued. Script, actors fit together like a watch. 3/23/18

Love, Simon (18, B): Incredibly charming cast & story. Kinda long, ends a lot, but more personality and gayness than I expected. Miller the MVP. 3/25/18

I’d like to amend here and now that after stewing on it some more I rank it at about a C+, think the cast is sorta iffy outside of Miller, and that the film’s relations to queerness and to race are problematic

Moonlight (16, A-): The kind of film that gives Best Picture a good name. Hard to image a storytelling mode it doesn't perfectly utilize. 3/26/18

Contextualizing this for class has made me even more impressed with the film as an act of representation and as a marvelously assembled artwork

Ali, Rhodes, Holland, Laxton, Brittel, Jenkins, all all all all perfect. Sound mixing, editing even better than I remembered

The surest sign that I'm learning shit in college is that I feel a lot more confident in my ability to explain what I love about this film in a way I know I couldn't last year

The Death of Stalin (18, C+): Cast, script have many moments but escalation of Ianucci's themes yield broader, easier film than In The Loop. 3/26/18

Menace II Society (93, B): More schematic, less impactful than Boyz, but does right by less respectable characters without glorification. 3/26/18

The Imitation Game (14, D+): Not a bad codebreaker film, decently acted. Near absolute failure to engage with Turing's sexuality pathetic. 3/28/18

Fifty minutes into the Imitation Game. Still no mention of his homosexuality. Still no need for the schoolboy shit. Still whatever

59 minutes. First sighting of homosexuality

My fuckin skull hurts how did this WIN adapted screenplay

Has any character gone without one monologue about how awful Alan Turing is? I don't think so

I should clarify that yes, I am upset about how the film handles his homosexuality, but also it's just terrible from a storytelling standpoint

Wishing Carol had won Adapted Screenplay even more just so we could've gotten four consecutive years of The Gays absolutely OWNING that category