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arrivisting · 3 years

Note

I’d love author commentary on basically the whole scene at Ekkaia in all my war is done (or any individual part of that scene, if your prefer). Taken together, it’s one of the most beautiful and emotionally complex and heartrending things you’ve written, from the description of the sea itself, to the difficulties of Fingon and Alqualondë, to Gil and the ocean and his ‘mother’, to Fingon and Gil beginning to tackle the thorny subect of Maedhros.

I should admit something about all my war is done: it's the most fugue-like my writing has ever been. I jotted down a few notes on my commute into work - I was deeply underwater with my PhD at the time, three months away from submitting - and then the idea of writing a sequel to scion seized me so profoundly that I sat down in the Starbucks where my bus stops, took out my laptop, and wrote instead of just collecting my coffee and walking down to my office. I wrote 15k. In one day. In about five or six hours. I've never achieved anything like that before or since - I do have good days where I can knock 2-4k out easily, but not 15k. (You might note that the posted part of all my war is done is only 12k, but I wrote all the way up into the next bit with Fingon in Tirion that you've read, up until Turgon at the dinner table). I didn't sit down or plan events; I didn't actually know much about what would happen: but I knew they were going to Ekkaia and they'd have some kind of resolution there. These are my phone-notes, from that morning:

You can see, I think, something of the way an idea hits me. I note down a few snatches of plot, not necessarily in any order, some lines I think people should say at some point, although I might not use them, sketch out some things (Formenos's ruins were going to feature more heavily, but they're waiting for a later story).

(It makes me laugh, the words my phone doesn't accept - Gil-galad, for one - and the ones it automatically capitalises from where I've yelled enthusiastically about elf things at people. I never stop long enough to correct spelling etc when I'm trying to get something down).

I clearly knew from inception that I wanted Fingon's place to be called the hill of waiting, and had tried out the name in Sindarin; because my verbs are not good, I came up with Amon Dartha. It was when I was redrafting that I realised Amon Darthir had existed actually in Dor-lomin(!!!) and the name was even more perfect symbolically than I'd meant it to be! Did I know that, unconsciously? I don't know.

You can see, too, that the Sea of Ekkaia was almost the very first point to hit me, and that I knew it and the scene there would be important, and that I knew that the story was about Fingon finding a way to tell Gil-galad that he had been loved, and wanted, and that meant talking about Maedhros; and that at the end I wanted Gil-galad to be gently, impersonally, firmly clear that he would not, could not, be staying to wait with Fingon.

Okay, DVD commentary proper - I'm sorry, I remember awfully little about writing this, given the fugue state and my thesis and everything, so I'm not sure how useful this will be!

“Oh,” said Gil-galad when they broke out of the woods and began to ride down over the dune-lands to the rocky shore. “Oh!”

The Sea of Ekkaia was beautiful, in its own way, but that way that was like no other place in Arda, in either Aman or Middle Earth.

It was a dark-blue that was almost black, even in the late afternoon, and the shore was less sand than gravel, a strange inconsistent rubble of rock and broken sea-shells that had been dashed to pieces by the constant fury of the waves. Staring out to sea, one did not see the far-away horizon the way one did on the gentler coast of Belegaer: there was no gentle faraway blue haze through which one might, perhaps, on a clear day, imagine that Middle Earth could be glimpsed, or at least the Straight Path.

No: instead along the horizon there was a seam of silver light, and then a great blackness, where the Sea of Ekkaia met the Uttermost West that was not quite the Doors of Night, but was certainly the end of Aman itself. If you stood on the shore watching, the seam would ripple with a pulse of light, sometimes green and sometimes white.

It was so far from anywhere the Eldar of Valinor lived. While they clustered around the Belegaer like moths to flame, this shore seemed instead to repel them. Was it the sight of the world’s end itself? It might be; yet Fingon thought there was more to why this wilderness was so little visited, this howling black sea lashing itself against a grey shore. It was beautiful, but not in the way Elves liked things to be beautiful: it was too raw, too unfinished, too savage.

It was too close to where Mandos kept his Halls, which were not only a thing of spirit but also matter, at least in the way that things in Aman were both. Too close to where Nienna’s tower looked out into the Void and where she wept, and wept, and wept. It was too close to death and to rebirth, to judgment and to pity.

There's a little Dawn Treader, I think, in this idea of the uttermost West. I don't know why I thought the seam of the world should pulse with strange light, but it's an uncanny kind of geography, so near Mandos and Nienna, and I like the sense that this is the end of the world, but not the end of the universe.

A lot of this came together serendipitously. I knew some kind of memorialisation of the river that bore Gil-galad needed to be part of his story; that meant going to the sea; and it's clear from the notes that I had already decided that couldn't mean Alqualonde because of kinslaying reasons and memories. (And that that too would need to be confronted). Therefore: roadtrip to Ekkaia. Therefore, the question: what would Ekkaia be like? We don't really know anything about it - only the good qualities of Belegaer. This was really written by a process of inversion, a way of pulling what we know about Belegaer inside-out, and imagining a place at the world's edge, a place that was empty, a place that was uncannily close to difficult things, to Mandos and Nienna; a place that seemed to repel the Eldar as surely as Belegaer drew them like iron filings.

I was thinking visually about New Zealand, too. I spent my childhood summers on the beaches up north, mostly around Tūtūkākā, which are bright and lovely, with golden or white or tawny sand, with gnarled pohutukawa and blue-green water. Like this:

That's what beach and sea meant to me, and it was a shock the first time I went to one of the black sand beaches where the wind howled and the colours weren't blue, green, gold, but iron, grey, navy, black. I loved it, but it felt so other, so passionate, so strange. That shock and that wild beauty and desolation were things I wanted to get at, though Ekkaia would be far more wild and desolate still.

They left the horses in the thin sea-grass, and their shoes, too, and walked down to the water. “I missed it,” Gil-galad said, and closed his eyes, breathing in the brine. “I missed it badly, all the long years besieging Mordor before I died.”

I think Gil-galad would be very marked by his upbringing first in the Falas and then on Balar; you don't lose that, if you grew up by the sea.

The wind took up his long dark hair and made a banner of it as they walked along the rough crescent of rocky ground where the waves met the shore, and around their bare ankles small stones tumbled back and forth in the lace-edge of the water.

When I was young I used to stand in the water and let the waves bury me up to my ankles, watching the water move in, out, spreading skirts of lace overlapping as new waves came in. I could do it for hours. There's something very liminal about the water's edge, between the solid land and the sea, which is why I put this conversation in it, I think. They're in a liminal space and at a liminal moment. It's the scene the whole story has been inexorably building toward, the point where all Fingon's painful scraping-away of his barriers finally reaches his skin.

“Sometimes in Middle Earth it became very difficult to believe in the Valar,” Gil-galad said, his eyes still closed, “in the blood, and the mud, and the filth. There were so many great and small unfairnesses, day upon day, year upon year.” He opened his eyes and looked towards the Uttermost West where the world ended. “And here it is impossible not to. Look at it!"

This is a little more hopeful than the original version, which I don't have anymore, but went pretty much:

"Sometimes in Middle Earth it was very difficult to believe in the Valar,” Gil-galad said. "In the blood, and the mud, and the filth. There were so many great and small unfairnesses, day upon day, year upon year.”

It was a comment more about Gil-galad's rueful scepticism than wonder - because he fought the Dagorlad before he died, because he spent the last ten years of his life in mud and blood and filth and horror. I work on the First World War - its literary legacy and traces in the decades after, more than its immediate experience or actuality, because there was a ten-year period after 1918 where it was more latent than overt, a traumatic lacuna of silence, a Nachträglichkeit- and I thought in the blood, and the mud, and the filth was a little too on the nose.

I kept it, though, because Tolkien was drawing on his own memories of the trenches with the Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes, with those blurred lines of solid land and mud/bog, the living mixed up with the remains of with the dead, all the themes you see again and again in the war poetry and the officer war-books. (Santanu Das is very good on this, as is Eric Leed). Paul Fussell is a bit old-hat now, but his argument that WWI altered the sensibility of its survivors because of their close, consanguinous co-existence with the dead is something I still find valuable. I think there's a lot of WWI survivor in the way I think of Gil-galad, actually, I'm just realising - not that he survived the Last Alliance. He's detached in a different way from Fingon. Fingon's built himself a thick layer of repression/denial, a kind of callous to protect himself from confronting or thinking about what Maedhros did, and what that means for him and to him; Gil-galad is entirely present, but somewhat detached in some ways, the way people who came back from war could be. Not that Fingon and Finrod aren't also separated from the Amanyar by their time in Beleriand and experience of war and death, but Gil-galad lived there for millennia, and he fought a longer, harder, more total kind of war than they did.

But he's at the Sea of Ekkaia, as west as you can get. So much of Tolkien is about that endless longing glance west, that movement: why is this very westernmost edge so under-explored?

I wanted Gil-galad to be softened by this encounter with the sea, so I went back and let his wonder be as much at the spectacle itself as the sea, like the greater hand at work he had sometimes doubted being visible was something wonderful rather than something to be bitter about. I wanted to position him to be potentially open to, perhaps, the Valar; perhaps, to Fingon. I hope he doesn't come off as closed-minded: I think of him as having a fair mind, and good judgment, but - despite placing him here between the sea and the shore - very clear personal lines between what he thinks is just, and what is not. Certainly, it helps a lot, never having known the Feanorians when they had not fallen.

The seam of the universe pulsed with light, and beyond it was – what?

Unutterable nothingness, something worse than death.

Perhaps Maedhros.

This is an important line for Fingon. He hasn't though the name of his own accord for much of the story, flinching away from it; it's only come in when Finrod and then Gil-galad speak the name. This is the first time he's thought it clearly of his own free will, and this is I think the first signal that he's brought Gil-galad here to be as honest and earnest with him as he can be, however much it hurts, or however much it might drive him away. Because if he isn't, and doesn't, Gil-galad will be driven away anyway, and Fingon wants to be connected with him, the first time he's wanted that kind of bond with anyone since he returned.

(I think of Finrod as someone who just kept turning up, regularly, and forcing Fingon to associate with him; and then bringing Amarie; and then his children; and not taking no for an answer. It bothers Turgon rather terribly that they seem to be friends now, when they were never that close Before: that Fingon pushes him away, but allows Finrod to keep pushing; that Finrod does push. He doesn't know about Gil-galad, of course).

He's brought Gil-galad here to show him if possible that he was wanted, to conjure up lost Ringwil where she might be felt if not found; and to do the same for Maedhros. This is a signal that this journey to the sea is as much about Gil-galad's missing father as his missing mother.

The almost-forgotten tang of salt in the air always mingled with the smell of blood in Fingon’s worst memories, and he was not the only one who remembered. The waves were gentle around Gil-galad’s feet, but they boiled furiously around Fingon’s, delivering small spiteful slaps at his calves.

Spiteful was probably the wrong word here. I don't necessarily mean a dramatic boiling or bubbling; but the water is harsh where it touches him, the kind of slapping roughness you get when the tide is coming in rough.

It took Gil-galad longer to mark the difference, engrossed in the joy of the sea and spectacle as he was, and when he did, his face changed. There was something terribly sad in his eyes when he lifted them from the water to look at Fingon.

It wasn’t why he had brought Gil-galad here; but Fingon didn’t want to imagine the look he would receive if he brushed aside the silent question. “No,” he said. “I am not forgiven.”

“So I see.”

They could probably leave it there.

But Fingon won't, because he's trying. He's really trying to connect after all the time flinching away from it, and he's remembering what Gil-galad said about talking, and what Finrod said about mistakes and silences in their first life.

He said, “You said you loathed the thought of being the son of – a murderer. But my own hands have not been clean since Alqualondë, and death didn’t unstain them. All the time you thought I might be your father, you must have known I was a Kinslayer, too.”

I tried to signal this in their earlier tower conversation with Finrod, and Gil-galad's changing of the topic, but I feel like it's a little abrupt here.

“Yes,” Gil-galad said, and his expression didn’t change. “And when the knights that had served you came to me, they told me that you killed that day in ignorance, that you came upon a battle already being fought; that you took up your sword to save those you loved and didn’t question whether it was just. I heard that from others, too, those who had less reason to bend facts to a flattering pattern; survivors of Gondolin and of Nargothrond. I did ask."

“Ignorance wasn’t an excuse. I died ashamed of it, and I live again with the shame.”

"Good!” said Gil-galad, and there was no forgiveness in his voice, even when Fingon jerked his head up in shock. Instead there was the stern ring of a king used to weighing the ideals of justice against the world as it was, the king who had walked arm in arm with Eonwë the Maia, led his people through many full-fledged wars, and held court and meted justice to them for an Age. “That gives me a far better opinion of you than any of the stories did! I’m glad.”

I remember talking to you about this in the comments, about what it meant that Gil-galad wasn't forgiving him. I think I really meant condone, but I also don't think it's Gil-galad's place to absolve Fingon - he wasn't the one wronged! - and that it's important to me that, because Fingon does truly regret it, he doesn't wish to be absolved, to slide away from it. I don't mean he ought to wallow in it or flog himself with it daily, but I think it would be important to him to shoulder and own that guilt rather than ever allowing himself to put it behind him or have someone else tell him it’s quite all right.

I think this is a moment where I show that they're quite similar, too, because even if Fingon wasn't aware that a bracing, clear assessment was just what he wanted, it was what he needed, rather than people being kind (which he's had a lot of, since he returned; and which hasn't touched that central guilt he's hidden from them, that he loved Maedhros, who had done such terrible things. It's prevented him from accepting kindness made him block people reaching out to him. Gil-galad is not being kind, but just, and still reaching out).

It felt like Fingon had been struggling to take a full lungful of air for a long time, and now something constricting in his chest had loosened, as it hadn’t even after the Valar themselves had judged him. It was only now that he realised that he hadn’t wanted Gil-galad to forgive or absolve him. He had wanted – needed – Gil-galad to be better than him, to withhold forgiveness when it was unmerited; and Gil-galad had. He had become the shining legacy they had all hoped he would be, the thing they had all somehow done right.

The water slapped at his ankles again, in impatient reminder.

This is too brief a transition. I should have fleshed the join out more.

“I think Ulmo would come to you here, if you called. You were a king by the sea in Middle Earth, and you may not remember it, but it was a river who gave you life.”

Gil-galad looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “What?”

“I brought you here for a reason,” Fingon said. “Where did they go, the drowned and poisoned rivers of Beleriand? I don’t know; but Ulmo might.”

I've really personified the rivers, but I think it's a clear and easy extrapolation from the Withywindle and the River-daughter in The Fellowship of the Ring that I don't need to justify in order to argue that every river might have had its own attendant Maia-spirit. It does make what happened to the Rivers of Beleriand much worse, though, and I wanted to look at the way a character that was a throwaway mechanism in scion ended up being sickened and dying as horribly as Beleriand did; this story was really about following all those lighter bits in scion home, to the end of the line, and looking at the long-term impacts of something that began more lightly. In this verse, Ringwil was a river, but also a person; and I think of her and Finrod as sharing a strange human-river friendship and overlapping enthusiasms.

He clapped Gil-galad on the shoulder, hoping it said all the things he meant it to say. Affection had been so easy for him once, in the life that had been taken from him by the fiery flails of the Balrogs, but now it came hard, and the sea-smell was in his nose, the terrible memories too close to the surface.

He had surely outstayed Ulmo’s tolerance by now. Fingon left Gil-galad there in the water, and didn’t dare glance back until there was thin sandy soil under his feet again.

Only then did he look once more towards the sea.

Gil-galad was standing in the shallows. His broad shoulders were bunched tight, as if he was readying himself for something very difficult, a confrontation with one of the Valar he had long doubted.

Then he spread his arms out, empty-handed, and tipped his head back, and the light on the horizon grew unbearably bright, whiter than white, more silver than silver; and a face began to move upon the water.

I really like this, honestly. Which I can't/don't say often! The temptation to overwrite this was strong, to show this encounter, to describe the Vala: but I think it's often stronger not to show something numinous, to pull away, to let the mind fill it in.

Again, this is Gil-galad as I imagine him: still somewhat distanced from the Valar by the Dagorlad and the things that happened there (and I think perhaps doubly unhappy in that he lived through the end of an Age once before, and that time, at least, the Valar came: they did not come in the Second, nor send so much as a messenger, and such obscenities as the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and the drowning of Numenor had been allowed to happen, and Men and Elves were left alone to come together and break Sauron's grip). Doubting, but not angry; doubting, but still curious. Open to listening.

a face began to move upon the water is of course a deliberate sideways reference to

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

It took a very long time. Fingon could not watch; his eyes dazzled.

Can you tell I was teaching The Duchess of Malfi at this time? Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young. That sense of a light too bright and white to look upon; that sense of guilt; that faint reference to life lost untimely. This wasn't meant to be a direct intertextual reference, but that net of meaning was there, lightly. Again, I wanted to under-write rather than over-write. I know I have a tendency to over-write.

And of course - there's a sense here that Fingon is refusing the kind of close enoucnter with Ulmo he could/might have. There's water in his eyes. From the wind?

“Thank you,” Gil-galad said when he rejoined him at last. His eyes were glowing, and he whistled Ceredir to him from where he was tearing ropey roots of sea-grass from the dunes with great relish. “Thank you for bringing me here;” and he didn’t say it the way he’d thanked Fingon for the horse, or the armour, or the sword, or even the lance.

Because this is a real gift, something that means something to both of them, something more honest/painful. Fingon's been trying to connect through gifts but not serious conversation or sharing, like some estranged parents do, throwing money at the problem rather than giving of their time or their selves, and however well-meant, it hasn't worked.

“I didn’t truly do anything."

“You brought me to the Sea. I know – I could see – how difficult it was for you."

"Well,” Fingon said lamely. He cleared his throat. “What did Lord Ulmo say about – oh, I can’t call her your dam! – the Maia who bore you? Did she – was she there?”

The dam pun is Finrod's. Don't blame me.

A little of the light dimmed, but it didn’t quite fade away. “No, she’s gone. Back to the Timeless Halls, he says; but one with him again, Ulmo, at the same time.” Gil-galad made a noise. “I don’t pretend to understand any of it, all the metaphysical nonsense of the Ainur! But he was kind to me, and he told me something of her – that she delighted in the making of me.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I left the flowers we gathered earlier in the waves for her and the sea didn’t dash them back onto the shore. I’m sure Ulmo broke a few laws of Arda there.”

I like this image of the flowers suspended in the water. I had it clearly in mind from before I began to write.

"You were wanted.”

“I’m beginning to believe it,” Gil-galad said.

“You should,” Fingon said. He took a breath. Talking is how you sort things out; and a long time ago, Fingon had been known for his valour. Gil-galad deserved to know how much he had been wanted, who had called himself a political compromise given birth. The truth of that had stung.

And it was less than the truth. Fingon could still remember the first time he had opened his mind to Maedhros over the leagues between them and let him see Gil’s small face through his own eyes, holding nothing back. He had shown Maedhros the dark long lashes and the squashed baby nose, the milk-blister on the bow of Gil’s upper lip, the way his whole head turned an alarming red when he wailed; shared with Maedhros Gil’s fondness for being tossed in the air, his splashing joy in his bath.

This is is me trying to describe a baby without being too sentimental about it, because Fingon wasn't all, oh look at the toesie-woesies, or my son, my son: his eye was more detached, and you see him in scion thinking of Gil-galad as it.

I've been thinking about why Fingon in no way allowed himself to consciously dote on the baby, why that streak of denial that's so strong in his second life was there in his first light, and really: it would have been dangerous to let himself love him, to see Gil as his son and Maedhros's. He was born at a time of terrible loss, after the Flame, when they all expected they could die themselves. He was moved around Beleriand like a game-piece. Fingon was always going to lose him: he wasn't going to get to raise him, after all, until and unless Morgoth was defeated. Maedhros wasn't going to meet him, until and unless &c. It was easier not to let oneself get attached than it was to confront those hard facts and let oneself be hurt by them. Easier to think of him as a baby Finwean prince, and that only: a political pawn, not a son.

Conversely, Maedhros maintains a physical distance, but not an emotional one. Here's a bit from Maedhros's perspective:

Finrod had told him that. They had written, back and forth, in the long months as Ringwil’s belly swelled, as the child formed, as it began to move and stretch and turn frog-like inside her. They had corresponded constantly during the first months of the child’s life in Nargothrond, and during the first months of his life, Finrod had sent long scrolls detailing every change in Artanaro’s weight, his length, his hair colour, his eye colour, how much milk he’d consumed each day: screeds winging forth to Himring until the child was old enough to survive the secret trip north.

Fingon’s letters had been infuriatingly spare of useful information while the child was fostered at Barad Eithel. Beloved, ineloquent Fingon: Fingon, who had nevertheless shown him the child as no reams of paper could.

Fingon had given him forever the rounded bloom of his full cheeks, and the pursed mouth, sullen in sleep: the feathery, rather cross-looking eyebrows, and the small hands with their deep dimples and smaller fingernails, curled into the edge of Fingon’s furred mantle.

Maedhros had felt the way Fingon hovered between wonder and confusion at what they’d wrought: the way he couldn’t quite manage to think of the child as his own, this thing spun out of air and calculation and freshwater into heavy, solid life. He could have loved him so desperately, Maedhros knew that. He was halfway there, hovering in terror on the edge, afraid of falling. If the baby had stayed in Barad Eithel longer; if Fingon had watched him begin to creep around on fat little knees, to pull himself up on the furniture and to take his first steps – to hear the baby babble turn into words and speech – his heart would have opened to him like a flower, and the child would have become the centre of his universe, the sun in his sky.

Fingon had never known what to do with Idril as an infant, either, but he’d easily become an adored uncle as she grew up. If they’d had more time – if the child had been permitted to stay with Fingon even a month longer before being sent for safety to Cirdan –

Well, they’d never had enough time.

There had been few walls between them then, so he had felt Maedhros’s bright joy, the painful love, in its moment of birth: swelling and swelling like a cloud with rain, as though his heart was growing and his blood was leaking out of him at the same time, transmuting into pure tenderness and iron purpose.

I like this because I think of the Ekkaia scene as a cloudburst, full of emotion that has been swelling and swelling and now released. This is one bit of the breaking-through.

He had never needed to ask whether Maedhros considered Gil-galad a son.

“I don’t want to talk about – him,” Fingon said with difficulty, and the salt breeze stung his face, his eyes. “I know you loathe him, and rightly; and I do, too. I do hate him; or I hate what he did. I do! But you should know – you deserve to – that he wanted you, badly, although he never met you; he never wanted the shadow on him to touch you or to taint you.

And this. You can see here where I spun off into cliffs of fall, which isn't a scion story, but sprung out of this speech. It was already there in those sketchy notes, too, a lot of what Fingon's saying here: this important line about hating Maedhros, or what he did (that movement from clear certainty to trying to separate the deeds from the loved one; to urgent reptition - I do! I mean it, I really do! - which means he doesn't, can't: this is the heart of Fingon's guilt, because he wants to hate Maedhros utterly, but he can't, and he is profoundly in denial about that).

“He always wanted children; I took that from him even before the Oath did, but I gave it back to him with you. I loved you first of all for that, but he loved you for yourself. Because you existed, against all hope and possibility and fate and chance; and because you were ours.”

Gil-galad said nothing. There was still a wildflower tucked behind his ear, but the brilliance had quite left his eyes.

“Well,” Fingon said at last. “I needed to tell you that. You should know that you were never – not only – you were wanted very much."

Beloved ineloquent Fingon, &c.

They were some miles from the beach when Gil-galad said, “‘Ours’?”

“Yes."

I was trying to let the gaps and breaks talk for me in the text. Under-writing.

The beginning was full of these little breaks, too, because they didn't yet know how to talk to each other; now at the end, that connection, and their conversations, are breaking down again. It's echoing that ride together at the beginning very strongly, but now it's not Gil-galad trying to become acquainted and Fingon giving light, unsatisfying answers. These are the real questions/answers at last, and the whole story has really been about getting to the point of Fingon and Gil-galad in Aman where they actually could have the kind of conversation Gil-galad was trying to have at the start.

Some miles further, Fingon said, “Did you ever meet him in Beleriand? After I died. I always wondered.”

“No,” Gil-galad said.

It didn’t seem like he was going to speak again, and Fingon had begun to assimilate that knowledge, that pain – that Maedhros had never seen him, had only ever known him through Fingon’s own eyes – when he added,

“But I saw what he did. Have you ever seen a whole city ruined, and known the ruiners to be Elves? It wasn’t even a city, poor Sirion! It was a refuge, a place for the desperate, as far to the West as they could get, as close to the safety of the Sea. They had so very little. No great stone palaces, no towers, no spires. Little enough fresh food. They were able to grow so little, and they lived on fish, and sea-weed, and what brave hunting parties would bring back; and hope. They lived on hope, and they thought Elwing wore it around her throat, but the Valar didn’t come for them: Maedhros Fëanorion and his brothers did instead, and they burned and killed and ravaged. I’d say they salted the earth, but it was salt already. To fall on any innocent Elven city would be a horror: on poor Sirion it was the greatest cruelty I ever saw, and entirely pointless."

They said nothing more.

I like this, too, actually. You see a little here of why Gil-galad might be healthily sceptical of the Valar - they didn't come for them: Maedhros Feanorion and his brothers did instead - and that very post-war experience of seeing a descrated, destroyed town. Worse when you had seen it when it was whole, when you knew the dead and fled.

Sirion is, I think, the worst thing the Feanorions did. I find it worse than even Doriath or Alqualonde (though they're all awful!). These were desperate survivors, huddled together at the edge of the sea for protection. So many of their leaders had been killed or lost. Idril and Tuor had disappeared; Earendil was away; Maedhros and the others struck while only Elwing was there, and she was so young, and so alone, and so damaged already by what they'd done in Doriath. And now they’d come again. There's something about the revictimisation that gets me. It's awful.

I wanted it to be weight and counter-weight - that soft, painful, remembered moment of Maedhros seeing baby Gil-galad through Fingon's eyes, something Fingon has clearly not deliberately thought about since he was reborn, but dredges up now for Gil-galad, because he should know: and which is echoed in the beginning by Fingon's question to Finrod. But Maedhros is still the person who did the things he did, and I wanted to set that soft moment of truth against his deeds at Sirion, another truth, to point out clearly why Gil-galad would recoil so hard from this offering, this honesty Fingon wants to be able to give him. This is the dichotomy at the heart of the story: reconciling Maedhros and how one felt for him with what he did, and how one feels about that. It is irresolvable, at least for Fingon, at least at the moment I've ended it at for now.

I don't know if this is quite what you wanted, @warrioreowynofrohan, especially because like I said, I wrote this story in a frantic fog, but I hope this in some way suffices!

#not!fic

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baroquesyndrome · 3 years

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Recently, the director of the original version of Baroque, Kazunari Yonemitsu, opened a Twitter Spaces event where he did a small Q&A. A member of the discord, pavaal#5795, transcribed some dialogue from the event and gave permission to repost. here it is, with commentary from pavaal in [brackets]

Q: What is the world like after completing the game? A: It doesn't change much. But that is the way the protagonist wished it, so that's not a bad thing. (some people bring up the manga ending which seems a bit more hopeful with the sprouting flower and protag's ability to talk) ...right, it's really all up to the player, since it's pretty vague. How much the protagonist can speak, how much the world changes, so on and so forth is up to you. Q: What's at the top of the Neuro Tower? Why do we not ascend when it looks so important up there? A: It was just a design mistake, honestly. We went in with the idea of a "dungeon" but designed a tower, realized our mistake, and went "well, whatever" and continued with the idea of descending. Q: I'd like to ask about the lives of the other NPCs. A: We thought of them to the extent that's necessary to propel the story forward. Of course, over time, their backstories developed in our minds, but we never made anything concrete in the game itself, and there was never really anything like "we planned for this to be revealed, but it was cut for time." There are a few things I had decided, but I honestly don't remember them now. Q: What's up with the sweat bone? And why is it called a "body fluid" bone in Japanese, but "sweat" in English? A: There's no real reason. I think sweat is a fine translation. Q: Why does the protagonist have a female voice actress? Does it have anything to do with the plot? A: We were thinking of Summer Vacation 1999 in cultivating the atmosphere. There's no real plot reason... we were just very much inspired by Summer Vacation 1999. Q: Is the Archangel really really really named Tenjou Kyushiro? A: It was a half-assed answer. I'm really sorry. He doesn't have a name, but if you need one, that's what I've got for you. Q: Is the Archangel albino? If he's Japanese, and has that kind of coloring... A: You're thinking too much about it, but maybe he is. He might also just bleach his hair and use contacts, like a visual-kei artist. Q: Where did the idea of twins come from? A: We were inspired by Summer Vacation 1999, or if you go back a little further, by Hagio Moto's Heart of Thomas. The scene where the older brother (in Baroque) jumps from the tower was inspired by the suicide in this manga. We took a lot of inspiration from Hagio Moto. Q: How and why would people join the Malkuth group? A: Well, of course if they were suspicious or curious about the existence of god. Also, the Order of Malkuth produced plenty of pieces of entertainment before the Blaze, like idol groups and things like that. It's a rather big group as a result, with members of varying ages and strength of beliefs. Q: So... how is the Archangel doing? Like, emotionally? A: I have no idea. Q: What's with that big flower in the Boxbearer's room? A: I... honestly don't know. We designed it originally, and I think we just never took it out. It just looks nice. Q: What is the protagonist's name? A: I don't know. I can't make that decision. People will definitely get mad if I say anything. ...there's none. Yeah, no. He doesn't have a name. Yeah. With a character like that, that's for everyone to do with as they please, it feels wrong for me to decide something like that for myself. I think the people who care enough to ask could probably come up with a more appropriate name that suits their impression of the character. Q: There are people who really can't choose, though, and would like to hear your impressions of a "default" name. [then there's a long discussion here about yonemitsu's approach to character creation and things like that, and someone else pointed out that there are some creators who think of their characters as their children and their own things to be decided by them, but he doesn't feel that way. he likes learning about his characters from the people who experience them and give back, as in the case of the archangel's sister] [he also talked a bit about his original pitch (?) for baroque. something about "the fragment of a boy, the soul of a girl" and maybe originally rather than twin brothers it was some complex distortion with a hero/heroine?] Q: What is the “Red Queen” story that had been cut? A: There was a train derailment incident just before the Blaze that ended up at the base of the Neuro Tower, where government officials and cult members were both involved. [The audio was bad here, but someone managed to catch that the name of the train itself was probably The Red Queen, like the names for the various bullet trains and other special trains in Japan.] Q: What is the relationship between the Baroquemonger and the Horned Girl? A: Not a clue. Q: When the Archangel says that he “likes” protagonist, his “foolishness”…? A: I don’t know what the Archangel is feeling. Q: Moon is just a fish? A: Yeah. It’s probably delicious. Q: Tell us about the Twisted Ones in the Outer World. A: Only a couple of them are actually members of the Order of Malkuth. The others were involved in the train incident and/or were just being kept/confined by the Order of Malkuth. [and a clarification on what i thought was the pitch for baroque was actually the (scrapped) idea for a sequel it was going to be a choice-based game but not strictly a visual novel, more like something with intentionally basic gameplay that explored the distortion of two people (the aforementioned boy and girl) at the moment of the blaze.] [based on what we know from the explanation on heat day and what already exists, the red queen was indeed the name of the “quantum measurement train,” a train with an unknown (to us) purpose that ran near the neuro tower. since it was cut in the main game as a playable area (yonemitsu has talked about this before iirc), it was incorporated as a railway accident that occurred as the result of the blaze, and the non-malkuth npcs were riding the train when it happened (as they would have been in the cut content) and that’s how they ended up where they are. the red queen theory itself in the real world is the theory that species basically have to evolve or die because everyone else is evolving, combine that with the (quantum) measurement problem which is the schrödinger’s cat thing, and you have the impression of a train that was functioning as a schrödinger’s cat for distortions? which seems reasonable enough to me...]

#Baroque Syndrome

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kingdomofkitten · 5 years

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Rant on Disney’s New Star Wars Blu-Rays

So, this is a touch out of the blue, I suppose. But I found enough time to sit down and write about this, so I figured I might as well get to it.

I also know the combination of Disney and Star Wars tends to cause some....friction, amongst people. Please, let’s not turn this into a brawl of Star Wars fans. This isn’t about how George Lucas felt betrayed, or Rian Johnson killing the series, or that anyone who hates the Sequel trilogy is a Trump supporter, or whatever the hell. Please don’t do that. In fact, let us join in unison. Why? Because no matter if you’re for or against Disney’s Star Wars films, if you happen to support this, there’s a decent chance you’re getting royally fucked over.

I was over at my local Target, just killing time (I had sent my dog to get cleaned up, and would need to pick her up in a few hours), and went over to the movie section. Not really looking for anything in particular, just up for browsing. And then I spotted this.

That looked a bit interesting, so I opted to look a little closely. Turns out, it seems Disney themselves (under Lucasfilm) decided to re-release all the Star Wars films they own on Blu-Ray. Presumably to hype up The Rise of Skywalker, which will be coming out in about 2 months from now. At first, I thought that sounded cool! Now all three trilogies can live under one roof! Plus, the cover design for all the films (including Rogue One and Solo, as you can see) are nice and consistent overall.

Then I decided to look at the back of one of them. Ya know, just to see what kinda cool new extras they would include.

I-wait...wait, is...is there no extras? Wha, that can’t be right, what does that sa-

.....deadass?

So, yeah. No bonus features on the Blu-Ray disc. Just on the digital copy....so, if you don’t download that copy in time, tough shit, you just get the movie.

Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking, “well, that’s probably for the Original and Prequel trilogies. They probably just couldn’t get extras ready in time.” Except I double checked.

Please pardon the crumpled up paper quality, apparently no hi-res scans of the backs are available as of now. But yeah, if you look closely, this The Last Jedi Blu-Ray has the exact same thing. No extras on the disc itself, just on the digital copy. Now, here’s the thing. I own the movie on Blu-Ray already. I know, some of you are weeping for me, I never claimed to be a role model. But let’s take a look at that back cover, shall we?

Hold on, there are extras here! A documentary, deleted scenes, commentary, even an Andy Serkis thing! And yet....none of that is in this new re-release? I’m sorry? And you can’t make the argument that Disney couldn’t have gotten the extras ready in time, they released this film already! They couldn’t have just taken the existing Blu-Ray disc, slap a new label on it, and call it a day? They could’ve done that with all four of the Disney Star Wars films so far, and yet they decided to leave them baren.

But okay, I hear some of you going, “well, that’s The Last Jedi, how about some REAL Star Wars films, like Revenge of the Sith? Surely these are all one needs, then.” Well, let’s go back to that first pic, shall we?

Firstly....not sure if you noticed, but Revenge of the Sith and The Last Jedi kinda look very similar here, so you might make a mistake there, and buy TLJ instead. Wocka wocka. :3

But secondly, notice something in the corner? Right next to The Force Awakens? Lemme zoom in for ya.

That is the Star Wars Complete Saga Blu-Ray set 20th Century Fox put out a couple of years ago. There have been a few re-releases of it over the years, sometimes with more stuff, sometimes with less, but as far as I know, it’s still in print. This contains the films from The Phantom Menace, up to Return of the Jedi. Not sure if you can read the sticker, but it has “over 40 hours of extras”. Speaking as someone who has that set, I cannot confirm it, as I haven’t dived into all of the extras, but I would not be surprised. While the movie discs themselves are relatively sparse on extras, they still HAVE some, mainly commentaries by the cast and crew. But if that’s not enough, alongside the six movies, there are THREE discs dedicated to just bonus features. One with behind the scenes material for the original trilogy, one with behind the scenes material for the prequel trilogy, and one full of documentaries and spoofs of Star Wars. Yeah, they went as far as to include PARODIES of the franchise in their big box set. The set was made to where you can dive into the saga, and also get a bunch of added goodies for the hell of it. All for a hundred bucks.

Now, I’m sure some will argue, “well, that’s a premium set kind of thing! This is more budget releases, meant for those who can’t afford that kinda set.” Well, let’s put that to the test. How much are each movie going fo-

JEEZUS

The fuck kinda budget release is that?! For just a movie, I’d expect...I dunno, $5? But okay, fine. That’s the price they want to go with, that’s okay. Now, like I said, that big box set, with the original 6 films is about $100, not including tax. So, let’s just put the prices for those six in. We’ll just round the price to $23, to be fair.

So, the price of those six barebones movies in total, not including tax?

$138.

Again, not including tax. You are quite literally paying more for less here!

My advice, if you want the whole series, get the Complete Saga set, and see if you can find the regular releases of the Disney films. As far as I know, all of those are still in print, and if you know where to look, you can get great deals on them. The big kicker about that? The Complete Saga set was made by 20th Century Fox...who, if you remember, Disney owns now. So if you buy that set, you’re giving them money, AND getting bang for your buck! It’s a win-win scenario, and I don’t understand why Disney didn’t get that!

I don’t speak as a major Star Wars fan. I mostly acquired the movies from my family. But I speak as an average consumer. Disney, I don’t give a shit what you’re doing to that world in a galaxy far, far away. But when you start bordering on scamming people, THAT is where I draw the line. People, no matter where you stand on these films, if you decide to buy one of these things...you’re probably being ripped off. Even for a company as stereotypically evil like the Magic Kingdom itself, this is just fucking gross.

P.S. I am aware there is a possibility that the original trilogy ones may have the original Theatrical versions, as opposed to the Special Edition versions with Greedo shooting first, and all that CGI, that’s on the Complete Saga set. If that’s the case, then to die-hards, MAYBE I can see a reason to buy these, but....again, to an average consumer, does that really add much? I don’t really think so.

#disney #star wars #blu ray #rant

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sinsins52 · 6 years

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Everything Wrong With Everything Wrong With No Suck Luck

ORIGINAL VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ68m3--L3M&t=8s&list=PLrDezo9S25JfUhOfYA8FIyby_t2kanoAw&index=3

1.No Such Luck Spoilers Everything (duh) wrong with.

2.Also, no “In X minutes or less” even though it’s oi the thumbnail.

3.”I get that Lincoln wearing a Leprechaun hat relates to luck, but with this title a viewer might mistake this with a St Patrick’s day episode” Only if they’re stupid.

4.”I wonder what comic shows an advert that gives you a chance to win 10,000 dollars” It’s not really that impluasable.

5.”Who the f*ck place a baby bottle on top of the fridge?” People who don’t want the baby to get it on their own.

6.Also, that typo (no “s” where it should be) wasn’t me, it’s him because he doesn’t know how to proofread I guess.

7.”obvious heads taken by the character pictures is obvious” What?

8.”Sometimes a guy needs time to himself” ‘Based on the number of sisters you have, I wouldn’t count on that” Well yeah, that’s kind of the point of this episode, and many others.

9.”Because Lynn threatened Lincoln like that, Lincoln should have shouted or tell anyone about it” But then she’d be even angrier and frankly it’s easier to just go to the game.

10.Also, I get the subtitles having errors but you said that out loud so it just seems you naturally have shit grammar.

11.”Lincoln should have known that Lynn wouldn’t actually hit him” Better safe than sorry and all that.

12.”Show steals SpongeBob’s Now that We’re men song and turned in into a baseball tune” I heard that tune in random ad once pretty sure SpongeBob doesn’t own it and they can use it if they want.

13”Commentary man knows about luck before we get to know about it, which means the entire bad luck bullsh*t might have been his fault” …Not sure what you mean by the first thing and the 2nd thing is wrong because Lynn already had the luck ritual.

14.”There are a lot of reasons why you lost that game-” I get that Lynn blaming Lincoln is dumb but that’s the point. You already sinned it for the right reason, don’t go on like this.

15.”Softball Gods” I don’t get why that is a sin.

16.”Also Lynn in believing in Softball gods: Series Sins sinning Softball gods twice in a row.

17.”For some reason Lola has stupid big hair” Does she need a reason?

18.”Finally, some f*cking sense in this episode” And yet you sin it anyway.

19.”Lincoln being alone doing his stuff montage” Stating what is happening on screen.

20.”The exact same montage only Lincoln is now bored” This episode has plenty of problems, no need to pad the sins out like this.

21.”Lana being dirty and disgusting”Yeah, that’s her character.

22.’I guess I brought this on myself’ “Mostly true but if you just no to going to Lynn’s softball game, none of this sh*t would have happend” But she was threatening him, he didn’t have much of a choice. Even if you were right, his statement would still be true.

23.”Stupid excuse ever”Please learn to proofread, I’m sick of harping on this.

24.”Also let me remind you once again because YOU invited him, you lost that game” How was she supposed to know he’d be “bad luck”?

25.””This cheroraphy is so dated” “Said someone who has a dab.gif” That was outside of the show and the dab is at least semi recent.

26. (After the time card)”I’m surprised the SpongeBob narrator didn’t say anything in this scene”This show that show.

27.”well good f*cking luck is that? Or rather how the writers made it” What?

28.Sentance.

29.Also, before that his last sin started off fine, but then went into this weird thing about child abuse.

SINS VIDEO SIN TALLY: 29

SENTENCE: Bad Luck

Finally covered a normal Series Sins video. Last time I did one of his videos, I said I felt bad for kind of harsh since he wactually wanted CinemaSinsSins to do his video. However, after watching his first impressions type video for the TTG Movie…yeah I don’t feel so bad.

But we’ll talk about that when the time comes.

Next week, animated sequel sin sins.

#Off Brand Sins #TV Shows

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cindyfelicia · 6 years

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Hi, I hope you’re doing well!! I was just wondering if you read comics? If so could you recommend some/ how to start getting into them? I want to start reading them, but it’s so stressful trying to figure out where to start. Also I love you blog!

Hi there! you’re all manners of sweet and kind thank u my advice abt approaching comics is going for solo runs first, this is how I, personally, did it and it’s way easier than jumping in on team books, or worse events bc they tend to be messier and need more bg info and pre-existing knowledge than a comic that focus on just the one character; I also feel it’s good to start with current or at least recent comics, you can always read the old stuff when you’re better acquainted with how comics work and which characters, artists and writers you like (or can tolerate).

actual recs under the cut because this got so long

i was gonna do a whole list of mcu characters’ solos because most people entry point to comics rn is superhero movies, and hmu if you want that, but instead I think I’m gonna rec you some good comics that are either separated enough from main marvel continuity as to be intelligible without extensive info gathering, or I just think they’re great and worth a bit of confusion (part of starting out reading comics is not knowing fully wth is going on sometimes, but stiking with it for some good art or for characters you love -I’m not gonna go so far as to say for good writing bc that’s just not realistic):

if you like yourself some spider-people:- silk (2015) and vol 2 (2016) are my absolute favorites- I’m not very much into spiderman but I read renew your vows and it’s lovely, it’s just not a main universe comic it’s an au where things are as, imo, they should be with ye old web slinger, and it’s good for getting your feet wet in the huge pool of spider-man comics;- I love miss jessica drew (spider-woman) but her solo is……. questionable if someone has a good jess drew intro rec pls tell me so I can pass it on, - miles morales has been written badly in more ways than one but I love him so I suffer, I can direct you without scruples only to his novel tho, absolutely lovely and not written by brian michaelbendis lmao- anya corazon is a really good character that marvel loves to forget it has, let’s not make the same mistake;- black widow 2014 and 2016 and bw: the name of the rose are all good comics (I know technically nat isn’t a spider person but like nothing about spider-woman’s powers screams ‘spider’ either so..

for wakanda I’d say good recent start-ups would be: - black panther (2016), - black panther: world of wakanda (w/ a lesbian couple as protag), - and rise of the black panther (ongoing)

some non x-men team books that are easier to approach as a beginner imho:-young avengers vol 2 (vol 1 has its moments if you want to start from the beginning with them but a lot of it involves the civil war arc and stuff.. also some characters die, the art is less good and I want to protect people from 17’s yo cassie lang’s nipples poking through her shirt.. I wish someone had protected me tbh) -I want to rec some Runaways but besides the current run (which is alright) there’s a lot to be said against the writing in most of the rest of them maybe vol 1? to have the origins pinned down-I feel like after a small read through of what exactly the hell was going on with secret wars you could approach A-Force vol 1 and the first half of vol 2 (the second half ties in with civil war II and I’m not touching that mess) and that and avenger world and sometimes secret avengers to me are good avengers books-she hulk 2014 and totally awesome hulk are my greens of choice but if you want an intro to bruce banner idont actually know, sorry-for the asgardians: thor 2014 and it’s follow up mighty thor, thor: god of thunder, angela: asgard’s assassin and its sequel angela: queen of hel, and loki: agent of asgard are my pick of this crop-we also have Fun here at marvel comics on occasion and both patsy walker aka hellcat and squirrel girl are nice in their own way although the latter isn’t really my thing

some follow up on the young avengers:- hawkeye (2013) an absolute fan favorite, good to discover that actually clint barton was a good character it’s that the avengers movies are just bad and hate people with disabilities- a couple of follow-ups to that (x) (x) and the kate bishop solo all pretty nice- america chavez’s solo (I’m just here to suggest gay comics, that’s almost all I read really)

I want to rec Champions to people but frankly it’s just a long series of event interruptions and bullshit interspersed with a couple of nice moments so far, so I’m gonna rec you some kids that are in the champions and have solos I haven’t already mentioned:- kamala khan’s book is probably my favorite ongoing series at marvel right now about any non-mutant char, I cannot say enough good about it,- nova is nice,- miles morales (spider-man) and amadeuscho (totally awesome hulk) are also there but I’ve already mentioned themalso in this house we love and respect elektranatchiosand any other attitude just isn’t tolerated.

on to the x-men, gotta love those guys, you just gotta:- like I said I prefer to tell people to start from recent comics but with the xmen that’s so difficult? it’s been 10+ bad years for them because of the movie rights situation and just marvel being shit in general, so my one recent team book to approach the x-men is prob x-men ‘92? because its based off of the xm animated series so you don’t have to straightaway deal with some mutant plague, eugenics plots, and other catastrophic events, but you can still get to know more of the char we all love - I want to say generation x vol 2, it’s not a good starting point for anything really but I love it so so much I had to mention it even tho it was cancelled and I’m still angry as hell about it.

the solo situation is better. I’m gonna be able to breathe without tasting my own bile while I type this, hurray!-all new wolverine follows laura kinney as she takes up the mantle from logan-iceman, good solid comic abt coming out and ice puns, who doesn’t like bobby really-jean grey, yes she’s a teen girl in this, yes it’s weird and I hate de-aging characters but it’s nice to see her train with different mutants, struggling with the incoming phoenix force and her adult self’s shadow, not really great entry point to jean grey but id read it anyway-if you were into the 00’s xmen movies like me, or at least a normal person’s amount the phoenix recently returned and with her adult!jean grey, it was a good book for me and good if you want to later start reading the actual phoenix saga (which is a lot of material so starting small with this might help) -I love wandamaximoff and despite what they’ve done to the maximoffs in order to bring them into the mcu (was it worth it for that result btw? really?) her recent book was good and I genuinely loved it -storm’s solo is so good, you’re gonna fall in love with an het ship and you’re not gonna regret it either-rogue and gambit, is ongoing and it’s good to get a little acquainted with these characters but mostly it’s about explorign their relationship

I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of good x-men content atm but I can’t stop thinking I need to mention that there are ongoing series you could pick up its just.. I hate them.. some started out promising (xmen gold, astonishing xmen), but they’ve not developed in good directions imo, but I still feel they should be mentioned, there’s also a weapon x comic if you want to go for a more bloody kind of book and xmen blue if you like time displaced teens or something? god its bad

jeez this is so so long and guess what? I haven’t even finished yet.. there’s some excellent indie comics out there and with those you really don’t need to worry abt knowing any 30 years old lore or anything you pick them up and they explain themselves like any other normal media out there, I know, be still my heart:

- lumberjanes is my absolute favorite, a little corny, but so much fun and cuteness and if I could go back in time I’d give it to my little bi self so she’d know she’s not alone and anything I feel that ways about has a special place i my heart js

- Motor crush, there really isn’t any other comic book with a black lesbian as protagonist out there that I can think of, good if you’re into motorcycles but if like in my case that threatens to put you to sleep, it also has a sci-fi streak and solid character work, you won’t regret giving it a try

- moonstruck, cute non-white gay werewolves and other mythological creatures are there, I feel this cathers to me specifically every time I open it?? bless

- Hi-Fi fight club or heavy vinyl (they changed the title) if you want a period piece that’s fun and cute and gay (I meant it about me reading only gay comics as you can tell)

- saga, for a space, well ya know.. saga I feel that I can describe it as romeo and juliet in space with added racial commentary except they don’t kill themselves, I have to say not my favorite but you might stick with it for the characters, I sure do

- the wicked + the divine, I feel very much the same about this as I do about saga, only this is mythology based so like.. I sold my soul to it, but please do tread with care there’s a lot of deaths in it and so many of these dead people are gays and/or poc.. I’m none too pleased about it and I’d understand anyone not wanting to pick it up, I mean the deaths are basically in the premises of the books but that doesn’t change the end result..

lastly like I said dc is not my area of expertise but I’ve been following with pleasure both batwoman and green lanterns, and mr miracle was an amazing comic so I thought I’d mention them

#this is so long I'm sorry #I do hope it's somewhat helpful #Anonymous

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fate-magical-girls · 7 years

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Justice League Thoughts

There will be spoilers. You have been warned.

I watched Justice League last night, and while I enjoyed it, I could see some glaring flaws, and I know why it faces heavy criticism.

The movie was slow to start. It took a long time to get everyone in the same place. However, there were lots of action sequences, so it was never very boring. The banter between characters and the one-liners didn’t really bother me until the ending, when I feel the movie could have done better by letting everyone stand back and silent enjoy the sweet scent of victory. The cinematography was beautiful. Like Zack Snyder’s other movies, each shot could be a comic panel. The movie aesthetic was usually dark and gloomy, but it makes the well-lit scenes (Wonder Woman’s rescue of hostages, Superman and Lois on the farm, the ending scene with peace and hope and light restored) all the more precious. However, the CGI fails in some places, especially Henry Cavill’s mouth. Having watched Transformers, the motherboxes made me giggle. Three Allsparks! The Apokolips Invasion also lacks the original Kirby aesthetic, which is a huge disappointment.

I must say, I absolutely hate the idea of adapting the Justice League movie from Geoff Johns’ N52 Justice League origin. Disregarding the fact that Justice League: War, a faithful adaptation of the storyline, gave everyone boring, one-note personalities and changed the team make-up, something as big as the 4th world should not be part of an origin story. The Justice League is young, inexperienced, untried. They have not yet learned to work alongside each other, much less formed the strong friendships that would later guide them as a team. Darkseid and his armies are the greatest villains in the DCU. They are the very incarnation of evil. They are a force of destruction and decay to be slowed but never stopped. And yet the viewer is asked to believe that a fledgling team of misfits can defeat the greatest evil the world will ever know. Either the Justice League fails miserably, or Darkseid must be weakened to allow the Justice League to defeat him. And then? Defeating the greatest villain the universe has as the origin story means that any sequels will an inevitable letdown. What could feasibly threaten a team that has already defeated the incarnation of all evil? In terms of narrative escalation, this just isn’t done. I would prefer having Starro, Dinosaur Island, or White Martians as the enemies for the origin story. Threatening enough to destroy the world, yet still on the same level as a just-formed Justice League.

I generally liked the cast. I thought they had great chemistry. I loved the friendship between them, especially for the big three of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. A little bit on the individual characters:

Wonder Woman: I absolutely loved her. She and Cyborg were among my favorite parts of the team. She is an older and wiser hero, but still idealistic, still loving. She helps Cyborg deal with his pain and serves as Batman’s voice of reason. She and Batman are very close friends, but never romantic (in fact she’s still longing for Steve). The same can be said for Superman. She helps him remember who he is, but it’s Lois who really calms him down. Overall, Batman might have recruited the team, but Wonder Woman is the glue that holds them together. Gal Gadot is a little flat on the sadder scenes, but she’s absolutely fierce during the action scenes and I like that.

Cyborg: Cyborg was perfect. His personality and character arc were very well-done and very comic faithful. He even gives a “booyah.” Sadly he’s interacting with Flash and the Justice League and not Beast Boy and the Teen Titans, but you can’t have everything. His jagged metal shard look is also something I dislike. I would have liked something more robotic instead of Michael Bay Transformers, down to his crotch.However, the action scenes were enough to distract me from Cyborg’s less satisfactory look. He also made the Apokolips invasion plot seem less bad, because Cyborg is a very plot-relevant character. The actor was absolutely perfect, going through Cyborg’s fear and pain and later fascination with his abilities.

Aquaman: OUTRAGEOUS. I think Jason Momoa’s portrayal was okay. The American accent was jarring, since he was very much not in America when he started speaking English. Sadly he was the least developed of the League. It took a lasso around the leg to make him confess his thoughts.

Superman: Now that Cavill isn’t brooding or angry all the time, I can actually see his heavy resemblance to the Curt Swan/Kurt Schaffenberger Superman from the Silver Age comics. Now, I am no fan of Pre-Crisis Superman, but I very much love the art from the comic greats Schaffenberger and Swan. Cavill looked every bit as Superman should be: smiling, brave, hopeful. I loved his appearance during the final fight, when he acted as the beacon of hope. Also great his his resurrection. Diana might have restored his memories by addressing him as Kal-El, but it’s Lois appealing to him as Clark that brings him back to himself.

Batman: Ben Affleck’s Batman is pretty okay. It’s even refreshing to see a Batman who isn’t perfect, who doesn’t have a plan for everything. He makes mistakes and he’s fallible. But he also tries to be friendly with his teammates, cracking dry jokes to Flash and Aquaman and allowing himself to be vulnerable around Wonder Woman. Affleck did great at portraying an older, tired Batman. Besides, he gets the team together. What more can you ask of him?

Flash: Sorry, Ezra Miller fans, but I absolutely hate every single thing about his Flash. To start with, he’s not Barry Allen. He’s a student, not an actual chemist. He’s younger than most of the cast. He’s energetic, naive, and neurotic instead of calm, careful, and meticulous. Barry Allen might be awkward, but he’s also no slob. He’s fascinated by his speed powers, not so scared he only knows how to push people. Barry admires his fellow heroes, but he doesn’t worship them like a fanboy. Movie Barry acts more like DCAU Wally. He’s the general perception of what a Flash should be, with the name of “Barry Allen” slapped on. The Flash costume is also bad, as it’s a version of his over-complicated DCYou costume that looks like someone ripped off patches of his skin. Even more ridiculous is his speed effect. The Flash’s gig is running, yet the movie rarely shows him actually running, not even using the TV show’s much more comic-faithful streaking effect. Instead, he just teleports everywhere in a crackle of thunder. When he does get close up shots at him running...he barely knows how to run. Ezra Miller gives him an over-dramatic flopping stance that’s cringe-worthy to look at. However, I guess that matches the nervous, nerdy boy he’s characterized as. The biggest problem is that the Flash does not seem to be in the same movie as the rest of the team. He’s funny and quirky, but ultimately he’s more like an inserted audience member or a commentary track. He’s there to comment hilariously on himself and the situations the team gets in, and squee over the other heroes. His attitude during fight scenes is also jarring. Everyone else is ready to go, and yet the Flash is a ball of nerves constantly complaining over his phobia or his health. (the only thing missing is a “I want my mommy” line, which I’m sure we’ll see enough of in a Flashpoint movie) As a result, he destroys the heroic, hot-blooded mood of every scene he appears in. I would say he’s definitely the weak link in this movie.

Dealing with loss and grief and regaining hope is a big part of the movie, and I do like this overarching theme. However, the build-up to Superman’s big world-saving return and suddenly improved relationship with the Justice League falls a little short. However, I don’t mind this. It’s actually the previous Snyder films that caused problems with this one.

IT IS ABSOLUTELY ZACK SNYDER’S FAULT THAT THE DCEU BECAME A DARK, DEPRESSING MESS.

Zack Snyder made a dark and depressing Superman film, truly an achievement in failure. He gaffed with Batman and Superman’s first meeting in the DCEU, making the hole deeper. And if the news is right, his Justice League would have been more of the same fare. The movie we got is far from perfect, but I enjoyed it, and I don’t know if I’d say the same thing about the Snyder cut.

#dceu #justice league

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toraonice · 7 years

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Yuri on Ice BD choreography commentary translation - Volume 4

You’re seeing right... At last, the full translation of the choreography commentary from the BD/DVD vol.4! I’ve just been really busy, I haven’t abandoned the project of translating all the BD/DVDs of course. The commentary is by Kenji Miyamoto & Mitsurou Kubo, as usual. This time it’s Guang-Hong’s FS, Chris’ FS, Phichit’s FS, Georgi’s FS, Seung-gil’s SP, Michele’s SP and JJ’s SP. As you can guess from the list it was very long so it took a long time to write down and translate (I’m already scared of vol.5 lol).

Notes: -It’s two people talking, not a written interview, so expect them to hop from one subject to another within the same sentence… Even if it sounds a bit unconnected at times, that’s how they said it. -I still arranged it a little to make it easier to understand as written material, by removing lots of “ehm” “uuhm” “you know” “yes” (I especially removed all instances where someone says “yes” in the middle of the other speaking) and fumbled words. -Amusingly enough both their initials are KM/MK, but I used the surname initials so M is Miyamoto and K is Kubo. -I put (LOL) when they’re laughing because otherwise some lines might sound serious while they’re actually joking.

***VERY IMPORTANT*** Do NOT use this translation for subtitles, in ANY way. I don’t support the upload of bonuses contained in BDs/DVDs, as they are meant to be (as the word says) bonuses for the people who spent money to purchase them. Unfortunately A*ex is a b*tch but still...

Translation under the cut.

Miyamoto: Hello, I’m the choreographer Kenji Miyamoto. Kubo: I’m the original planner Mitsurou Kubo. Hahh… M: Yay~ K: So, this time you will be able to see a lot of choreography footage. The first one is the choreography of Guang-Hong Ji’s free skating program, “The Inferno” from the movie “Shanghai Blade”. Regarding “Shanghai Blade”… in Yuri on Ice some of the choreographies are based on music from the soundrack of fictional movies. This is the soundtrack of “Shanghai Blade”, which is one of these fictional movies and is about the Underworld of Shanghai. It looks cool because it was made in Hollywood, but it’s a gang action noir with the themes of fraternity, bonds and betrayal. M: That was a very clear explanation! K: (LOL) M: I used kung fu-like kicks and other things in this choreography, but it was quite difficult to make it easy to understand… K: Oh, I see. M: Though, acting like I’m wielding a sword when the sword sound plays was a little embarrassing. K: The story was decided in detail, so there is a lot of gun and sword action, battle scenes, scenes like the character entering the enemy’s hideout alone, etc. I think it’s important to make it easy to understand. M: Yeah. K: Like, with this spin, the protagonist goes to the boss’ place led by his past comrade, but just before the goal he is betrayed and loses consciousness. There are quite a few portrayals of sadness, like the protagonist being betrayed by his comrade, or being confined, and some of them were actually shown with visuals in the anime too. M: Yes. I also kind of tried to play two different roles by putting on and removing glasses. Ah, sorry, you didn’t mean it like that, did you (LOL). K: I didn’t mean it like that (LOL). But, yeah, since you performed the choreography a few times, we put together different parts, so there are times when you have glasses on too. Is it easy to dance with your glasses on? Don’t they get in the way? M: Well, if you don’t do rotational jumps or fast spins, I think it’s ok. K: So indeed your glasses would fly away during spins or jumps. M: Yes. Is this the battle scene? K: The battle has started. I think we’re almost at the car chase, aren’t we? M: Ooh! K: Aah! M: He turned the wheel (LOL). K: He did (LOL). M: There was a vrooom sound (LOL). K: Yes. We’re almost at the climax. Here it is! Sword-drawing Ina Bauer, meaning that he performs Ina Bauer while drawing the sword. And here he’s also holding a gun. M: Yeah (LOL). K: No time to rest. M: It was quite embarrassing (LOL). K: The sword-drawing Ina Bauer was very cool actually. M: Was it? K: Yeah, this Guang-Hong was really amazing. The protagonist goes to save his sworn brother, who is cornered. How will it end!? Ah, here he’s timing the seconds of the spin. M: Yes. K: Ahh… It ends with a gunshot, and the protagonist being shot down as he protects his sworn brother. Thank you, Kenji-sensei. M: Thank you.

K: OK, the next one is the choreography of Christophe Giacometti’s free skating, “Rapsodie Espagnole (Spanish Rhapsody)”. M: Uff, had I known this would happen I would have set my hair. K: (LOL) Is it not set here? M: Not set. This pose too, I received lots of requests from director Yamamoto and Kubo-sensei. K: Yes. In all the choreographies we have asked quite a few times for poses that would leave a strong impression, but in this program there are a lot of wonderful poses, I really like it. M: Thank you. I tried a few different kinds of poses, to get closer to the image you requested. Like this (LOL). K: Ah, this! A pose where you’re kind of.. holding something in your arms, it’s nice. Though you originally practiced it when the rink was open to the public… M: Yeah (LOL). K: I remember that we decided that this was a nice pose with all the normal visitors skating around. Is it embarrassing if there are people looking at you? M: Once you get absorbed in the performance it’s not embarrassing at all, but if you look back on it it’s a little embarrassing (LOL). K: (LOL) We ordered this song for Chris’ free program, and we asked to make it sound powerful to give the impression of a program that can win, so we also requested the choreography to express Chris’ strength as a veteran, since now that Victor isn’t here he’s the oldest. Are there choreographies that look like “for veterans”? M: Well, doing wide movements, for example, means that you are moving with confidence, so I took that into consideration when I created this choreography. K: I see. M: The spiral that doesn’t rise (LOL). K: The spiral that doesn’t rise (LOL). M: I can’t raise my leg that much, I leave it to the animators to make it look nice (LOL). K: Right. Apart from your personal example, is it true that when someone is young it’s easy to do spirals and it becomes more difficult as they grow up? M: Well, men don’t really need to do it in the first place, and also a lot of the time is taken by jumps, so there’s no time to put it in the program. K: I see. M: Actually, I made this choreography symmetrical, so that it looks like he’s moving symmetrically left and right. K: Oh, really? M: Really. K: Symmetrical? M: Basically, I go to the right and then go to the left, using the whole area of the rink. K: Oh, I see. When you watch it it’s kind of vague, it looks kind of like the skater is twisting a curtain, like, they skate in one direction, then they rewind and then they go to the opposite direction again. I often watch figure skating with that image in mind. M: Sorry, I don’t get what you mean at all (LOL). K: I mean, it’s kind of like.. ah, it’s almost over! Hum hum~. Right. Hmmm Chris! Chris! And then in the Grand Prix Final Minako-sensei brings a flower crown and puts it on his head. M: I see.

K: The next choreography is Phichit Chulanont’s free skating, “Terra Incognita” from the movie “The King and the Skater 2”. This is yet another movie song. Phichit-kun used “Shall We Skate?”, from the movie “The King and the Skater”, for his short program, a song that he had always wanted to use. And… actually, according to the setting, “The King and the Skater” was a hit and so they decided to make a sequel. A song from the sequel is what he is using for his free program. The sequel is set in the near future. While “The King and the Skater” is about traveling back in time, in “The King and the Skater 2” the king of Thailand is sent from the 19th century to the future, to a 21st century skating rink that has become a clubhouse, together with the English skater who was hired as his tutor. They come to the 21st century and dance wildly together. The movie is a romantic comedy released in 2004 that became a hit in the US and is said to have supported the current popularity of figure skating. M: So that was the setting (LOL). K: Yes (LOL). Well, of course the movie doesn’t actually exist. M: The settings are always so detailed (LOL). K: Yeah, though well, this is the setting we thought when we were thinking about the choreography, so it’s a little different from the official anime setting. It was to create a detailed image for the choreography. M: I see. At the time I remember looking at lots of pictures together with you and the director because we wanted to include movements and dance poses of the Thai folklore. K: We did (LOL). We were like, what kind of poses look like Thai poses? And coming up with this and that. M: Yeah. K: So we incorporated lots of movements and then you couldn’t lift your left shoulder anymore… (LOL) M: Yeah (LOL). From the footage you don’t really see that it hurts I guess. My left shoulder was actually hurting, but I tried to show the choreography as nicely as I could. It was a really difficult program, because I moved my joints in directions I normally don’t use. K: (LOL). But I think that this choreography is really beautiful, it really shows Phichit’s personality perfectly. I see, so there are some directions you don’t normally bend your limbs in? M: Yes. For example, the way I use the toe here is unusual for me, and the way I use my head too, is something I don’t usually do. I’m actually laughing here though (LOL). K: (LOL). Are you laughing because it hurts? M: No, I was thinking, “this program is really tough” (LOL). K: We also ordered the song to sound, more than “Thai”, somewhat like traditional folk music, and I was told that the lyrics are in a fictional language. It’s really nice. And here it’s supposed to be a Klimkin eagle (cantilever) done in a Thai-like pose. M: I can’t do it, so in the footage it looks like that. K: Is the Klimkin eagle difficult? M: It is! K: I have no idea how they can balance themselves in that position. M: I haven’t either (LOL). By the way, Phichit-kun is popular in Thailand. It’s really amazing. K: Really? M: Yes. K: I’m so happy~. I really want Phichit-kun to have a great career in Thailand, I mean, I don’t mean as in a sequel of the anime, in general. M: Yeah. K: It seems that many fans of Phichit-kun are married women. M: Oh. K: Of course I’m sure that he has many young fans too, but I guess he feels like a young skater that you can safely cheer on. Ah, right, this last victory pose is so nice (LOL). M: That is kind of embarrassing! I was so tired I couldn’t move…

K: The next one is the choreography of Georgi Popovich’s free skating, “A Tales of Sleeping Prince”. In his short program Popovich-san performed Carabosse from the Sleeping Beauty, and since he is maintaining the same atmosphere, this time it’s the man’s feelings in the Sleeping Beauty, though it’s not a ballet song. The image of the story is actually pretty clear: I will become a prince, save everyone with my kiss and take back the girl’s smile. He regrets having cursed her into eternal sleep, gets depressed and feels lonely, so he decides to become a prince and save everyone with his kiss. He saves everyone with his kiss, everyone becomes happy, and in the end the girl wakes up and gets back her smile, and we have a happy ending. This is what happens in the free. M: I see (LOL). K: (LOL). Well, this is the tentative story we decided. When we talked with Kenji-sensei we told him some things about the image of the song ad asked him to dance with somewhat of a lonely aura. M: Yes. In the first half, and well, in this part too, I created the choreography to make it look like I’m feeling lonely. K: Yes, we requested the song to be that way, but we also made it on purpose so that, if you listen to the lyrics, one false step and it will sound like a stalkerish kind of love. We thought maybe it would fit a Russian guy (LOL). M: I see (LOL). K: Popovich is the same age as Victor-san and his birthday is the next day, so for all this time he couldn’t see the light of the day and stayed in his shadow. For this reason, we thought it would be nice if he could express love in a different way than Victor. I really love both this song and the choreography. M: I tried to raise my arms as much as possible when it says “promise”. K: Yeah, when it says “promise” he raises both his fists to the sky and I really like that. Makin’ up~. He’s kissing her! M: Yes. Ok, if you say it out loud it’s kind of embarrassing (LOL). K: (LOL). Yeah, but you know, what is nice is that there are lot of clear meanings in this song and they are all expressed. M: I made them visible. Also, this time I have a microphone attached to my left leg. K: Oh right, he’s not injured, this time he has a special microphone attached to him to record the sound of the edge grazing the ice as he skates. M: It made it kind of hard to perform. K: I guess normally you don’t skate with something like that. M: I don’t. K: I’ll save you now~. Ah, at the back you can see the sound staff holding the directional microphone, but he’s sitting right on the ice without anything under him, we were really worried he would freeze to death…

K: Thank you. Ok, the next choreography is Seung-gil Lee’s short program “Almavivo”. This is one of the songs that I really wanted Kenji-sensei to choreograph. The reason is that… it’s mambo! M: In this program too I did my best to incorporate easy to understand mambo movements. How do you like it? K: It’s perfect. I remember how I felt when we took this footage (LOL). The director and I were so excited, it was awesome. By the way, the theme of Seung-gil-san’s programs this season is “greed”. Since he is composed and isn’t good at showing his emotions, with this song he tried to radically change this image. M: I see. K: So basically, more than his expression, the costume was surprising. When I wrote the manga storyboard we still hadn’t decided the costume, but when it was turned into an anime it had become a costume that really looks like some bird living in the tropics… That’s quite a change of image (LOL). M: Here I was looking at the camera and dancing aggressively to catch the attention of judges, but yeah, Kanako-sensei was just bursting out laughing. K: Yes, Kanako-sensei is the one holding the handy camera and filming up close. It was really fun to look at too. M: Was it? (LOL) K: Yeah, Kanako-sensei was laughing too… Come on, look at the camera! (LOL) M: I was laughing too in fact (LOL). K: It was nice. Everyone was looking and I was also absorbed in filming. M: I tried to use light steps and dance following the rhythm. I looked a bit stiff though. K: (LOL). You know, mambo is not a music style that you can use more than once in the end. M: Yeah. K: So you have to choose the right time to use it. Seung-gil~. Thank you. So this was Seung-gil Lee’s short program.

K: The next one is the choreography of Michele’s, I mean, Michele Crispino’s short program, “L’homme Armé” from the movie “Destiny of Knights”. This is another song from a fictional movie, “Destiny of Knights”. For the costume we had Michele wear an armor costume in the European style everyone loves. M: He drew the sword. K: He did, another program where the skater draws a sword. But it’s not a Japanese sword, it’s European, I guess the drawing style is different? [translator’s note: I adapted this line because the original was impossible to translate literally into English. She is using the word “battou”, which literally means “drawing a sword” but it’s normally used to refer to Japanese katanas, so in the original Japanese line she is actually wondering whether there is an exact term to refer to the drawing of an European sword.] M: Since he is supposed to be wearing an armor I was careful to make his back look powerful in the choreography. I’m keeping my back straight so that it looks square, without bending it because it would make it look softer. K: Aah, it’s wonderful. The theme of Michele’s programs this season is “chivalric romance”. A knight worships his lady but it’s not romantic love, he must be satisfied with just spiritual love, and since Michele has never had a lover we had him represent this concept of carnal love being forbidden. Since he loves his younger twin sister a lot. The movie is an action fantasy movie set in medieval Europe and this is its theme song. It’s about the spirit of chivalry. Though well, in the end I just wanted to see an armor (LOL). Sorry for being that simple. You can hear roaring… some animal howling… I mean, not howling. It’s the roar of a tiger or lion. I discussed with the director on whether we should insert this sound or not, and in the end we decided to insert it. It’s nice to add this kind of sound effects (LOL). M: It makes it feel more realistic. K: Realistic (LOL). I felt that it would sound more like movie music, and it would be easier to have a clear image of the story. Now he just swore his loyal love. Thank you.

K: The last choreography is Jean-Jacques Leroy’s short program, “Theme of King JJ”. This song is so popular. With this program JJ did something quite wild. He got a rock band – a rock band so hugely popular in North America that they could get a Grammy Award – to write a song for him with his name in it, and used it for his program. M: But the song is cool. K: Yeah, i love it too (LOL). M: Seriously, when I created the choreography for this program the song stuck to my head all day (LOL). K: (LOL). It was the same for us. Aah, JJ is so cool. We pictured him as a skater representing North American strength, and he really turned out that way. I think it’s expressed very well. JJ. Though well, Victor has been on top of JJ for a long time, so actually he has never gotten a gold medal in the World Championships or the Grand Prix Final. M: I see. K: So he is referring to himself as “king” to encourage himself. Even though he’s still young. He says, “everyone, sing!” and from here the audience starts to sing the lyrics. M: Yes (LOL). K: In real sport venues you would probably annoy the person next to you if you started singing, and they would glare at you, but since this is an anime we thought it would be ok to do something a little unrealistic, so we had them sing. And some time ago there was an all night screening of “Yuri on Ice”, and the public was actually singing during this program. M: That’s cool (LOL). Before creating this choreography I was told about JJ’s, how do you call it, pose? But I refused to incorporate it in the choreography. K: (LOL). I’m glad you did. It’s fine. Ah, this is the cut version for the TV broadcast so it’s shorter. Ahh~ JJ, J-J, J-J! Stop! It’s JJ style. Waah~. This is what is happening now. M: Is it happening? (LOL). K: Thank you. We have looked back on a lot of choreographies. How do you feel? M: Well, uhm, first of all I’m surprised to see once again how many choreographies I made, and then I feel that you and the staff really have too much passion, and I hope that I was able to live up to that passion… K: Only you could have met our expectations so much, Kenji-sensei. M: No no (LOL). K: Thank you very much. M: I had a lot of fun working on this, though. K: Looking at the choreography footage I remembered that at the time I thought “oh, we’ll be able to see this animated!”, but even without seeing it in the anime, I was happy enough to be able to see your choreographies every day. I went home every day thinking that. Looking at the morning sun in Edogawa. M: Yeah (LOL). Everyone was chilled to the bone (LOL). K: Right. It was exactly one year ago. One year has passed, and “Yuri on Ice” is now a work loved by people all over the world. Thank you very much. M: That’s really wonderful. K: It’s really really wonderful. I think there is still some choreography footage left, but did your state of mind change from one year ago? M: I must say that I’m happy that in this way I was able to make a contribution to the world of figure skating. K: Thank you. Bye-bye~. M: Bye-bye~.

I personally appreciated that she asked him some of those “questions that you would like to ask but are afraid to sound stupid or a figure skating n00b” like “what happens to your glasses when you spin”, “why don’t men do spirals” etc.. Also, some techniques like eagles and cantilevers are famous because they are impressive and easy to recognize, but actually it’s not like every single high level skater can do them (sometimes it’s because of physical reasons related to joint flexibility etc., Akiko Suzuki explained that about the eagle in the YOI-related figure skating talk event in March). By the way, I think the cantilever is only called “Klimkin eagle” in Japan?

The contents of vol.5 or other interviews will be translated next... (Hopefully “next” is not “next month”, though I already have plans for almost ALL weekends until the end of November and it’s mostly YOI’s fault..)

#YOI #Yuri on ice #translation #choreography #Audio Commentary #kubo mitsurou #Kenji Miyamoto #BD #guang-hong ji #christophe giacometti #phichit chulanont #jean-jacques leroy #JJ #georgi popovich #seung-gil lee #michele crispino

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femcurrent · 7 years

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Sorry Gen X, Blade Runner 2049 was better than the Original

by Caity

Four hours ago, I walked out of the Seattle cinerama--one of the last four theaters of its kind in the world--awestruck by Denis Villenuve’s latest cinematic marvel. Sixteen hours before that, I was falling asleep watching the cult classic it was based on.

Now before any flamethrowers comment on this basing their responses purely on the title of my post and that line, I will say that I paused the film as soon as I noticed my weariness, went to sleep, and finished it the next morning so that I did not miss any part of the film. And for the most part, I enjoyed it. Ridley Scott created a beautifully shot film with an amazing score, and it had one of the most moving antagonist death scenes I’ve seen on screen. I even forgave the ridiculousness of Roy jumping across building tops clutching a dove after he uttered the line, “All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”

But as someone who identifies as both a cinephile and general fan of science fiction, this film was a bit of a let down. A large part of that is due to the source material--Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Our protagonist, Deckard, a generally uninteresting bounty hunter type, learns of four rogue replicants who have returned to earth and are causing chaos, and he then proceeds to hunt down and “retire” them. (It’s not execution if they’re not humans!) That’s the whole plot--incredibly linear. Sure, along the way, he develops a loose romantic connection with another replicant, Rachel, who is having a bit of an identity crisis after learning she’s not really human, but Rachel’s purpose in the film is mostly for Deckard to realize that maybe replicants are people after all. (And spoiler alert--he might be one too!) The final scene with Roy showing empathy and recounting his love of life as he slowly dies accomplished that point way more than any of the moments with Rachel.

So why was the new one better? I’ll tell you five reasons in the least spoiler-y way I can.

1) Representation: The first film created a world that, understandably, featured Chinese people, food, and language assuming the future interconnected world of 2019 would be influenced by the planet’s majority culture, but basically every main character was white, and overwhelming male. There were three female characters, Rachel, Pris, and Zhora. Zhora got zero character development, Pris, a “pleasure model,” was essentially a sexual being whose main goal was not dying, and Rachel, while empathetic and given a decent amount of screentime, did not really have a personality.

Blade Runner 2049 had TWO black people (they didn’t disappear in this futuristic world--I wasn’t sure), a few Latino people including Edward James Olmos revisiting his role from the first one, and a much more balanced male to female cast. Robin Wright, ever powerful, plays a police chief who perhaps values order over individual life. Ana de Armas plays an AI with a heart of gold. Carla Juri gave a stunning performance as a memory scientist/artist. And Mackenzie Davis plays a charming prostitute. Furthermore, Sylvie Hoeks’s character “Luv” was a typical badass right-hand man type. The role could have easily been played by a man, but it wasn’t! Speaking of the antagonists and representation, Jared Leto plays a wealthy CEO desperate to find a way to make even more money, and he was blind. It did not hinder his ability to do his job, and it also wasn’t his only character trait. It was just...part of who he was. It was awesome.

While the film could have included some more people of color in prominent roles and an LGBTQ character should have been included, overall, the cast of the second film was significantly more diverse than the first.

2) Storyline and characterization. I already mentioned the lackluster plot of the first one, but 2049 was brilliant! Instead of telling the audience in a 10 minute infodump exactly what’s going to happen at the start of the movie, we discover details of a curious case alongside our protagonist, K. We make predictions that are sometimes true, and sometimes we’re thrown some curveballs. And unlike the first one, I actually cared about the people in the film. They had backstories, reasonable motivations, and enough screen time to fully develop them along the way. The first movie was 1 hour 57 minutes long and dragged. The second was 2 hours 43 minutes and I did not notice the time go by.

3) Female Sexuality. I haven’t done much research, but I’m sure there are plenty of angry blogs about the sex scene in the original film. If you are unfamiliar with this scene, let me tell you: it did not age well. And while the new movie tried to excuse it, providing evidence that Rachel was interested in Deckard from the moment they met, it’s really hard for me to watch a scene where a woman actively runs away from a man who kissed her, is blocked, and then told to say “Kiss me” to him and think to myself, “Oh yeah, this seems consensual. She’s definitely not just saying that out of fear of her current situation.” The new film was not able to change what was made, so the writers, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, played it off as she was afraid of any form of intimacy with a man she was interested in, and not just afraid of Deckard himself. Way to work with what you’ve got fellas! But the new film’s sex scene was completely the opposite. Ryan Gosling’s K is completely satisfied with not being able to touch his romantic partner. However, she wants more and finds a creative way to get around the whole holograms-don’t-have mass thing. It was a moving moment and definitely a step forward for female sexuality.

4) Social Commentary. While the Original Blade Runner definitely hit on the idea of overpopulation (people had to move off of planet earth!) that wasn’t the main goal. And it did bring up the important question of “what does it mean to be human?” subverting the idea that “antagonist” means “bad guy.” The replicants just wanted to live. But Blade Runner 2049 took it a step forward--replicants are second class citizens for no real reason other than they aren’t the ones in power. I’m sure the line, “Dying for the right cause? What could be more human than that?” resonated with many people in the audience.

On top of that, there was a ton of social commentary on resource management and global warming. LA had to be walled off from the rising ocean tide, there was constant rain, and for some reason, it alternated between snowing and scorching heat over the course of very little time and distance.

5) Cinematography. Ok, actually, the cinematography of the first one was brilliant. No complaints here. But the new one does not disappoint. #giveDenisVillenuveadamnOscar

Where the first film felt like, “The future if it were the 80s” complete with sharply angled flying cars and shoulder pad power suits, this one is a representation of “the future if it were the mid 2010s.” There were corrupt corporations, women taking control, abuse of the environment, and an oppressed people fighting for equality. In conclusion, if you haven’t seen Blade Runner, you could still enjoy Blade Runner 2049 if you like well shot, futuristic suspense films with legitimate female representation. If you liked Blade Runner, go see Blade Runner 2049 and don’t be a slave to the ideology that “the sequel is never as good as the original.”

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joyofcrime-elinorhigh · 5 years

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All My REVIEWS REVIEW: (2016 and 2017)

Review-ception!

Hello everybody, my name is JoyofCrimeArt and welcome to my first review of 2018! I guess you could call this season three? Which if we're going with that analogy that means that this and 2019 will be my best years of reviewing. And then it'll be all downhill from there, as I slowly fall into a rut of perceptual seasonal rot. So enjoy it while it last, damn it! It's insane to think that I've been doing this for almost two years. And as this dawned on me, I started to feel a bit...introspective. We've all look back at our past, sometimes with regret, other times with nostalgia. And we've all made mistakes that we are not proud of- EXCEPT FOR ME CAUSE I'M A FU*KING BEAST! -And I got to thinking about my past works, my old reviews, and began to wonder if they actually still hold up. It had been forever since I had actually reread some of those older ones. And that's what we're going to be doing here today. Because what kind of critic would I be if I couldn't take criticism myself? And since they say that "you are your toughest critic" I figured it be good to see if I could take what I've spent the last two years dishing out. Here's how this is going to work. I will be looking at all twenty two of my past reviews, and give my BRIEF thoughts on each of them, as well as possibly give some context on where my mindset was when I was writing them. Think of this like a directors commentary of sorts! However, any multi-part reviews will be counted as one for the sake of convince and time. So really it's closer to eighteen reviews. Also, obviously, this review will be sort of a companion piece to those reviews, so might wanna read those reviews first. But with that all said, let's jump right in and start at the beginning, with my first ever Deviant Art review... Powerpuff Girls 2016 REVIEW Part 1: (04-14-16) Powerpuff Girls 2016 REVIEW Part 2: (05-02-16) Powerpuff Girls 2016 REVIEW Part 3: (05-19-16) So I wanna explain where my mindset was with this review, and what inspired me to start reviewing in the first place. If you remember back in early 2016 EVERYBODY in the cartoon reviewing community was going on and on about this show. Everybody was hating on it and bashing it, even before the show had premiered. Saying that it was going to suck. I was cautiously excited for the reboot, excited at the idea of the Powerpuff Girl's becoming a spanning franchise in the same way as Batman or Ninja Turtles where. If this show turned out well, Powerpuff could become a cartoon that's remade every decade or so, and people could watch and experience it for decades to come. And when you're in the minority opinion, and you see everybody just bashing the thing that you are super excited about, it can be a bit discouraging. When the show actually premiered I thought it was...okay. And the problems I did have with it weren't the problems that everybody else had. But as more and more videos came out from popular cartoon reviewers, I decided that I wanted to write a review in order to release all my pent up thoughts and frustrations. So yeah, my reviews weren't made because of a love and passion for reviewing and animation, but out of BITTERNESS AND HATE! Re-reading the reviews, They weren't AS bad as I thought it would be, though there is very much a "pilot" type of vibe to it. There's no videos or images like my future reviews would have and it's kinda light on actual jokes. There's a part in this review where I said that Craig McCracken gave his blessing for the show, we now know that isn't the case. But at the time that's what Tom Kenny said. And I don't want to change it because I believe that it's important not to try to undo past flaws and mistakes. I also feel like I was too nice in the review looking back on it now. I don't know if it's just my opinion changing or just me wanting to extenuate the shows positives because oh how much everyone else was extenuating it's negatives but if I wrote this today I wouldn't be so kind. I said the show was meh but now I think it is a bad show. I just don't think it's the "end of CN" like so many people were saying at the time. But regardless I feel like I still stand by a lot of my points I made in the review. I still don't care about the memes, or the change in crew and voice cast. I'm upset by writing and lack of action and comedy that made the old show great. And I still hope that CN will give Powerpuff another try sometime down the line, and give it the reboot it deserves. But I had a lot of fun making this review, and it would inspire me to make many more in the future. So I guess Powerpuff 2016 changed my life for the better.... Steven Universe Hit the Diamond REVIEW: (06-16-16) Honestly...I think this one really holds up. You can easily tell that this review set the trend for what my reviews ended up becoming overall. Images and videos where added, there's a really good balance of both comedy and analysis. My intro was introduced (yeah, I didn't realize this till now but the Powerpuff Girls reviews didn't have my typical intro.) And it started the Lapis "This plan sucks" meme. A bit of background, originally this wasn't going to be my fourth review. I was going to review the CN short program "Mixels" because somebody had asked if I had. But after watching through it I just...had nothing to say on it. Then I saw this episode and impediment got re-inspired. I remember writing the whole review in just two or three days, it was all very impromptu. Overall I'm proud of this one, and I think it would be a good "first review to read" kind of thing to introduce someone to my reviewing style. I'm not sorry for that RWBY Chibi joke by the way. It was my finest moment. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared REVIEW: (08-22-16) "So that's my review of Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared (Hopefully it didn't come off as too rambly and fanboy-y)" Well too bad past me, because it totally did. Okay, to be fair, this review isn't THAT bad. Not as bad as I remembered it being, but still not one of my best in my opinion. Part of it has to do with the topic. DHMIS is a hard series to summarize and explain, and that's kinda the point of it. But I still feel like I could of done a better job describing it. The problem is a lack of structure, and the whole thing comes off as kinda rambling and confusing. Especially if you were a newcomer who had never heard of the series prior to my review. I feel like I did a better job talking about the production side of the series than I did talking about the plot and characters. During this time I feel like I really struggled with purely positive reviews. I feel like a lot of them just came off as, like I said, rambly and fanboy-y. That's why I did so many "so bad it's good" movies and episodes in my first year of reviewing. I feel like if I had given it another draft it could of been a lot better, but what are you going to do. Camp Camp REVIEW: (09-24-16) I remember this review being a bad one, but after rereading it, It's nowhere near as bad as I remembered. It's far from one of my best review and a lot of the problems I had in regards to doing positive reviews are still present thought. (Over-explaining things, a bit fan boyish at parts.) Overall though, it's not a BAD review, just a very "average" one. The only noticeable things about this review in particular is that 1.) It's my first review where I had links at the bottom to other reviews and 2.) it's the only review to my knowledge that actually convinced somebody to watch the show they probably wouldn't have watched otherwise. And that really means a lot to me, cause that's a huge part of why I even do this. To introduce people to things that they will hopefully really enjoy. So in that regard I can't look upon this review THAT harshly. Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktacular REVIEW: (10-24-16) "Anyway, then we Jimmy appear on top on a tombstone dressed in his devil pajamas," Yes past me, "Then we Jimmy appear" indeed. SERIOUSLY WHY DO ANY OF YOU WATCH ME- When it comes to my reviews there are two main types. There's the one's that are deep analysis, often based on series that I feel very passionate about. These reviews are made with the purpose of introducing people to these underrated series with the hope the reader will check out the series, and hopefully be as impacted by ir as I was. And then there are the reviews where it's just like "Ha! This is stupid. Let's make fun of this direct to TV movie intended for five year olds, lol." This is one of those reviews. A problem I do have with this review other than grammar is that there are several moments where I kinda explain the jokes that are in a movie. And I don't do a very good job at explaining them because I lake the context surrounding the jokes. If I made the review today I probably would wanna cut some of those lines out. The review is also noticeably longer than the others up to this point, so that's something. I never did end up reviewing the sequel like I said I would...at least not YE- Ouran High School Host Club REVIEW: (12-09-16) So for some background here, I started watching the series really early in the year and decided I wanted to review it. However, the series took me a long time to finish, like almost six months from what I can recall. Which is odd because the show only has 26 episodes. But this was a very busy time for me, with me getting my first part time job, my family moving, and having to work on my comics on a weekly schedule. By the time I had finished this show, while I did enjoy the show a lot, I had kinda burned out about the idea of doing a review of it. But I didn't want all the material I had already worked on to go to waste, so I decided to just kinda muscle through it, and I think you can kinda feel that in the review. There are still plenty of jokes in it that I'm proud of, but there are also some flaws with it. I wish I was a bit quicker in terms of summing up the cast, as that takes up almost half of the review itself. I also feel like the review doesn't have the best "flow." to it, if that makes sense. It kinda feels like I'm just jumping from point to point. But it was my first Deviant-cember review, and my first anime review. So two big milestones there! Frosty Returns REVIEW: (12-16-16) The most interesting thing about this review is that it's the to take a MASSIVE jump in total page view. It's weird, like why this one? I guess Frosty Returns is what my audience was secretly clamoring for? I think, this might have been when I started posting my reviews on the Mr. Enter deviant art page, so maybe that could explain it. But I'm not positive. Anyway, as this is another "make fun of something stupid" review and not a deep passion filled analysis. There's not much to really say about it. I really need to stop mentioning the good jokes in reviews like this, they don't translate very well when transcribed from special to script. Also it spoils all the best parts. I'M SORRY FOR SPOILING FROSTY RETURNS, I HOPE YOU ALL CAN FORGIVE ME! Also I remember getting very tired half way through this. It was my first time doing reviews back to back and I was really anticipating the "2016 Year in REVIEW." But I buckled through it regardless. I still need to review T.I and Tiny's Holiday Hustle by the way. Add it to the list! The Legend of Frosty the Snowman REVIEW: (12-23-16) By the time I had starting writing this review I was so tired of writing and so wanting to work on the yearly retrospect that it kinda felt like a chore to write. But like a chore, I'm glad I did it because I think it turned out pretty good. It's a good bit longer than my previous reviews, which was a pain at the time, but there are some good jokes in here. Nothing else really to add, except for the fact that I wanted to use this image in the review, but forgot until after I already published it.

I could give you context on what this image is...but is there any context that would justify it? 2016 Year in REVIEW: Part 1 (12-30-16) 2016 Year in REVIEW: Part 2 (12-31-16) "Getting mad at the year, an abstract concept, just feels...unproductive to me. It seem's like it's the wrong target to be directing all this anger at. Sometimes bad stuff just happens, and there's a good chance that by the end of 2017 we'll hate that year too. Because most of the bad stuff that happened in 2016...probably won't just go away come January 1st."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-VawFj4GRM

I got the idea to do this review probably half-way-ish through the year, and it was by far the review that I was most excited to work on. And honestly I think the yearly retrospects are, in general, the funnest reviews to work on. And good thing too because if It were any other review, I would probably be to tired and unmotivated to actually work on them. If I have one regret it would be the final ranking of the series. In hindsight I would swap RWBY Chibi and Camp Camp's rankings. Though this may just be a "hindsight is twenty twenty" thing, as I think Camp Camp improved with it's second season, while RWBY Chibi got a bit worse. These reviews where a lot of fun but also an exhausting experience. I had written five reviews, back to back, during the holidays, which each review becoming longer and longer. I was tired and started to feel a bit done by the time I was working on part two. (As originally it wasn't going to be a two parter. It just kinda ended up that way.) Also this was sorta the point where my reviews started getting longer. As righting five reviews in such a short amount of time naturally made me start writing more. Like how when one is put under intense physical training over a short period of time there bodies naturally adapt, and become stronger. It's like that, but with dumb cartoon articles. Top 10 Toonami Ad's of the [adult swim] Era: (03-20-17) As you can see, there was a bit of a gap between reviews here, for obvious reason. After Deviant-cember year one I was DONE with reviews for a long while. I needed a break. This might be one of the funniest reviews to do the research for. I sat down and watched ALL the eligible bumpers and ads in chronological order and it was great! I didn't even care that there where hundreds of ads to look over, I just had a blast! It was also my first top ten list! Top tens and top fives were always something I liked seeing other people do, but not something I often felt very comfortable doing. Not that I'm against them or anything, it's just that I have a hard time making them. I'm the type of guy who's exact opinions on things changes very often, and so it's hard for me to say "this thing is worse than this but better than this." I don't think that I could ever do a "Favorite Show of All Time" list or anything like that. I like so many different things for different reasons...I just don't think my brain is wired to work that way. So that's why whenever I DO make a ranking list, I try not to take the actual ranking that seriously, and just use it as an excuse to show off some stuff I like. However, despite this, there are some things about the review that I would change looking back on it. You can still see my struggles with doing a fully positive review. Like I said earlier, It took me a long while to learn how to do positive reviews without sounding rambly and fanboy-y. Also there's almost no jokes in this one. I don't think the lack of jokes in a review is NECESSARILY a bad thing, but I feel it kinda is in this case. Since I was covering such a niche topic, some humor might have made the review better, and give people who we're uninteresting in bumpers and Toonami something to latch on to. Oh well... Dragon Ball Super: Battle of Gods Arc REVIEW: (05-01-17) The first part of my Dragon Ball Super retrospective series, (Which, with the recent announcement of Super ending will now have a conclusion. I sort of assumed I'd be reviewing Super until I either died or stopped doing reviews, whichever came first.) This review had a lot less recapping than I remember it having and has a good amount of both comedy and analysis. (Probably because I had the whole "compare and contrast" element to it.) Overall a fairly good start to a retrospect. Other than that not much to say though. I'm also really proud of that "Godtube" joke. Like I know I used MS Paint, but I still think it's a really good edit. #humblebrag Samurai Jack Season Five REVIEW: (06-19-17) "In general I tend to be more critical and nit picky about things I like than things I hate." Does anybody else feel this way, or is it just a "me" thing? I'm genuinely curious. If there's something that this review made me realize is how quickly things come and go in the cartoon community. I was on a hiatus at the time the season ended so this review came out about a month later. And by that time it seemed like everybody had moved on from Samurai Jack for the most part. And I don't mean this as a way to complain about a lack of views or comments or anything. On the contrary the amount of views this review got seems to be on par with what they normally are and I think I actually got a bit more comments than I usually do. What I more mean is that while the season was running it was all anybody was talking about, and then once it ended nobody was discussing it. The "buzz" was gone so to speak, and it feels like that's what happens whenever a show isn't currently running or goes on break. The fandom burns bright but dies out fast, and that's kinda a shame. I feel like a lot of great shows don't get talked about as much as they should because there not quote unquote "relevant" and thus end up getting swept under the rug. As for the review part, this is one of my personal favorites. I really wanted to make sure I did the season justice, which is part of the reason it came out almost a month after the season ended. I wanted to let my feelings settle for a bit a see how I felt after I had time to think about it, rather than just having a gut reaction. (Though I'm not saying there isn't a place for stuff like that.) Also my first review with a title card! Title cards where something I always wanted to do but I was always afraid it would just be to time consuming, but now I think it's worth it, as I think it does add a bit of flair to the presentation. Also I've gotten a lot faster at making them. (The title card for this review was done in one evening for instance.) Watamote REVIEW: (Oh, the Cringe!) (08-14-17) This review was easily one of the hardest to make. I started watching the series in preparation for the review in FEBRUARY, and didn't finish it until SUMMER! (I don't have time to watch cartoons! I have cartoon reviews to work on!) At the time I was watching each episode twice, once alone and once with my brother, and I think that's what made me burn out on the series. That time period was also the time where I started my new job as well, so maybe that was also a factor. I guess it makes sense, but considering the show is one of my favorite cartoons of the decade and only TWELVE episodes long, I dunno, I figured I wouldn't have that kind of reaction to it. This review was suppose to be my fourteenth review. Then it was going to be my fifteenth review, until finally it ended up becoming my sixteenth. That's how long it took for me to finish the show episodes! So eventually I just bit the bullet and finished the dang show. Then came the problems of actually writing the show. Like I said before, I have a problem doing positive reviews without ending up ramble-y and fanboy-y, and so I REALLY wanted to make sure that it didn't happen this time. So I wrote THREE drafts of this review (prior to this I only did one draft.) I would go reread it and change things, reread it and change things... And I'm really proud of how it turned out. The beginning part has a few awkward lines, but overall I really am proud of how it turned out. This is really my first positive review that I really loved, and it has given me the confidence to do more reviews like that in the future. You don't need to just make fun of things and review the most bottom of the barrel stuff. You can make a review where you just talk about a series or show or movie that has a special place in you're heart without it being boring. I tend to prefer reviews where their is a balance of jokes and analysis, but you don't always need that. If you're talking about something you're passionate about, that passion will seep through to the viewer. Or at least that's how I feel. Dragon Ball Super: Resurrection 'F' Arc REVIEW: (9-18-17) I typically try to get the Dragon Ball Super reviews to come out roughly as the arcs finish on Toonami, but here I was a bit late, and by the time the review was finished the televised broadcast was already well into the Champa arc. As such, I kinda had to rush this review out in order to not fall even farther behind. And so my heart wasn't really into this review as much as it was with some of my other reviews. I still like how it turned out overall (I wouldn't publish a review if I wasn't proud of it at least a little.) but overall this feels like a review that's just kinda...there. I feel like to much of the review was just recapping the events of the arc, and it could of used more jokes or analysis to make it feel a bit less dry. This is also my first review with a title card drawn in FireAlpaca! That's right, I moved on from MS Paint! (At least with title cards.) Rick and Morty REVIEW: (With MiketheHuman113) (12-01-17) My first colab review! I had wanted to do a collab for a while, and at the time Mike was the person on the site that I knew the most about, and when I saw him post a list of all time favorite characters, and saw Rick as number two, I thought that he would be a good pic. Actually doing the review however was a bit of a challenge. I had to write my segments, send it to him via note, and then get his segments back and paste them into my journal in a way so that it sounded natural. Then I had to rewrite some of the transitions to make it all flow together. Why didn't you just use Google Docs?

...

NNNHHHHGGGGUUUUUU!!!!! Anyway, this was a topic that I wanted to get off my chest for the longest time, so I was very happy to finally do so. I do have some problems with the review though (None of which where on Mike's end BTW, just to be clear he was awesome.) I feel like there's a lot of jumping around with the points, and the review's overall flow suffers as a result. I also wished I hadn't jumped around so much from spoiler to non spoilers as much as I did, and if I were to redo the review now I think I would want to make them review more general and less focused on specific moments and episodes. That way it be easier to follow if you hadn't seen the show. I also wish that maybe it was a little shorter. It was my first time doing a collab, and I figured it be easier because I would only have to do half the work. But what ended up happening (and I blame my own workaholic-ness for this.) Is that I made a full length review, and then stuck Mike's contributions on top of it. So not only was the review long, but it wasn't any easier than a normal review. in fact it was probably harder. But I'm glad I did it. I was fun and I'd love to do more collabs in the future. However given the previously mentioned difficulty it'll probably only be a "once a year-ish" thing. But y'never know. Who do you think I should collab with? This was also the first time I made art for a review outside of the title card. In this case the Super Smash Bros style intro I did for Mike. I want to make those for everybody I do a collab with. Also I noticed that after this review, I began to be more noticed in the DA review community. Probably because Mike's in it, so I could leach off his audience. However, oddly enough, the views for this review are bellow average, so who knows. Dragon Ball Super: Champa Arc REVIEW: (12-08-17) HEY KIDS AT HOME, COUNT THE AMOUNT OF TIME I SAY THE WORD "MISSTEP" "OPPORTUNITY" AND OR "WASTE." I'LL GIVE YOU A HINT, IT'S WAY TO FRICKIN' MUCH!- There's also more spelling errors than normal. Overall I just blame the rush of Deviant-cember, and the fact that like in 2016, my heart was really set on the yearly recap instead of this. The review as a whole however, ironically, is kinda like the arc itself. It starts out kinda slow, with mostly recapping events. But as the review goes on it's get's a lot better, with more jokes and insightful analysis. Not much else to say about this one. Top 5 Obscure Christmas Specials You Should Watch: (12-15-17) I feel like there were some unprofessional moments in this review, mostly as a result o a time crunch to finish the review before the deadline. From not rewatching Nestor to tracing the Hawkmoth logo it feels a bit sloppy to me. (Even though I'm sure these are things that won't bother most other people.) I was in a bit of a rush for this part of deviant-cember as work and the holidays in general gave me less time to work on the reviews, in addition to the stuff that I was posting on Mondays. I wanted to succeed in my goal of doing two uploads a week during Deviant-cember since I failed to do so in 2016. However, I am glad that I was able to talk about so many weird specials, and I don't think that review suffers to much from the rush. When I was writing the review, I felt burnt out from reviews and just wanted to move on to the yearly recap, but looking back on it now, the review isn't really that bad. There are some good jokes in it and I love recommending obscure stuff to people. Maybe one day I'll do a part two. OH! And it turns out that "A Cranberry Christmas" IS lost media! It's the first piece of lost media that I watched before it got lost! WE NEED TO FIND THIS, GUYS! 2017 Year in REVIEW: Part 1 (12-22-17) 2017 Year in REVIEW: Part 2 (12-29-17) Most of the things that I said about my 2016 year in review could be said about these reviews, so I don't have much to add. Have I mentioned that I hate the "This year sucks" meme yet? It such a stupid thing, to hate on a year. And I worry that with our cynical society we live in that the "This year is awful" thing will go on until the end of time itself. 2017 was fine. 2016 was fine. Y'wanna know what year was really a dumpster fire. 1942. That's the year we entered the second World War, segregation was still a thing, and all the meme's sucked that year! It was awful! My only real regret about this review was using the word "hate boner" when talking about Castlevania's views on religion. I think the term "hate boner" is really dumb sounding and at the time of writing the review I didn't realize that people used the term so unironically. (No offense to people who do use the term. It' just a term I really don't like, personally. Just use the term "bias.") And that's it. ALL 22 of my reviews reviewed! Do I recommend...me? Well personally this JoyofCrimeArt guy does have his fair share of problems. He can come off as a bit fanboy-y and ramble-y at times. His reviews sometimes have weird pacing issues, jumping from point to point. While I enjoy how in-depth he can SOMETIMES be, they can be a bit long at points. Also he has a lot of unpopular opinions, and sometimes I wonder if he's just being contrarian. Not the mention the fact that, since the idiot thought that having THREE web comics running simultaneity at the same time was a good idea, he doesn't actually post reviews very often when compared to some of his reviewing counterparts. On the other hand though...there are some positives to the guy. He seems very passionate about the topics he talks about. He has an okay balance of analysis and comedy. And I also like how he talks about a variety of different stuff. From popular series, obscure series, anime, web series, direct to DVD movies, bumpers, HIS OWN REVIEWS. You never know what you're going to get. Is he the best reviewer on DA. Probably not. Heck, he's probably not even in the top fifteenth. But if you're willing to devote a half hour of you're time to reading one of his overly long reviews, who knows, you might just enjoy yourself. Or not. I dunno. So that was my review of my reviews. What are your thoughts about my thoughts about my thoughts. Leave those thoughts in the comments down below. I would love to exchange thoughts even if we don't have the same thoughts. Do you have a favorite or least favorite review of mine? I'd be genuinely curious to know. Please fav, follow, and comment if you like the review and have a great day. (I do not own any of the images or videos in this review all credit goes to there original owners.)

https://www.deviantart.com/joyofcrimeart/journal/All-My-REVIEWS-REVIEW-2016-and-2017-739596421 DA Link

#Reviews #cartoon reviews #animation reviews #meta #cartoon

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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Home Entertainment Consumer Guide: November 29, 2018

7 NEW TO NETFLIX

"Buybust" "De Palma" "Green Room" "Into the Forest" "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" "Krisha" "The Workshop"

7 NEW TO BLU-RAY/DVD

"2001" (4K)

For a very long time, it felt like if you had a DVD player, it was required that you also owned two films, The Wachowskis' "The Matrix" and Stanley Kubrick's "2001." Now the tide is slowly shifting from standard HD Blu-rays to 4K ones and a legion of great, essential films are being remastered for the new format. Some of the 4K remasters feel almost like afterthoughts. You could barely tell the difference between an upscaled Blu-ray and the 4K release, so why bother the double dip into your wallet? However, there are some titles that simply look made for 4K, and one of those films is "2001," now available with the best technical presentation it's ever received. The depth of the field and the complexity of the audio mix have never popped quite like this, and that's coming from someone who has covered this film on DVD, Blu-ray, and seen it in a theater. This is the best it's ever looked.

Buy it here

Special Features Audio Commentary from Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood Remastered Blu-ray with Commentary from Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood The Making of a Myth Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001 Vision of a Future Passed: The Prophecy of 2001 2001: A Space Odyssey – A Look Behind the Future What Is Out There? 2001: FX and Early Conceptual Artwork Look: Stanley Kubrick! 11/27/66 Interview with Stanley Kubrick [Audio Only] Original Theatrical Trailer Premium Booklet Art Cards

"The Big Lebowski"

It may not have the visual depth of field as "2001," but another one of Roger's Great Movies hit 4K this month, likely to coincide with the launch of Joel and Ethan Coen's "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" on Netflix. And while you probably remember most of the memorable lines from the "The Big Lebowski," you might have forgotten how much this film pops visually, making it a great addition to a 4K collection.

Buy it here

Special Features U-Control: Scene Companion U-Control: Mark It, Dude U-Control: The Music of The Big Lebowski Worthy Adversaries: What's My Line Trivia The Dude's Life The Dude Abides: The Big Lebowski Ten Years Later Making of The Big Lebowski The Lebowski Fest: An Achiever's Story Flying Carpets and Bowling Pin Dreams: The Dream Sequences of The Dude Interactive Map Jeff Bridges Photo Book Photo Gallery An Introduction No Kid Hungry PSA

"Blindspotting"

As the year comes to a close, there have been a number of Sundance hits popping up on year-end lists like "Leave No Trace" and "Sorry to Bother You," both winners at Gotham, National Board of Review, and the Independent Spirit Awards. One of the forgotten films appears to be the Opening Night film from this year's Park City event, Daveed Diggs' and Rafael Casal's excellent dramedy about a young man in Oakland who witnesses a police-involved shooting. Although that description doesn't really get at what this film accomplishes. It's smart, hysterical, and emotionally raw. A decade from now, Daveed Diggs is going to be HUGE, and people will look back at this film like they look at "Do the Right Thing" (a clear inspiration) now. And they'll wonder why more people weren't talking about it in 2018.

Buy it here

Special Features Audio Commentary with Director Carlos López Estrada Audio Commentary with Writers/Actors Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal Deleted Scenes Straight from the Town: Making Blindspotting Featurette Carlos López Estrada: A Director's Featurette

"Candyman"

The way the internet and my odd career works, I've ended up writing about "Candyman" several times in the last few weeks, assisted by this excellent new release from Scream Factory. It's one of the best horror movie Special Editions of the year, with tons of special features, including new interviews with the cast and crew, but it's the movie itself that will startle you. I'll admit that the teenage me had kind of blown it off as just another boogeyman movie, but there's a lot going on here regarding race and urban legends, elements that I virtually guarantee you the Jordan Peele-produced sequel announced this week will emphasize. This is the best thing you could be the horror fan on your holiday list.

Buy it here

Special Features BRAND NEW NEW 2K RESTORATION from a new 4K scan of the original negative, supervised and approve by writer/director Bernard Rose and director of photography Anthony B. Richmond NEW audio commentary with writer-director Bernard Rose and actor Tony Todd NEW audio commentary with Stephen Jones and Kim Newman Audio Commentary with director Bernard Rose, author Clive Barker, producer Alan Poul and actors Tony Todd, Virginia Madsen and Kasi Lemmons Audio Commentary with director Bernard Rose, from The Movie Crypt Podcast hosted by filmmakers Adam Green and Joe Lynch Sweets to the Sweet: The Candyman Mythos featuring interviews with director Bernard Rose, producer Alan Poul, executive producer Clive Barker, actors Virginia Madsen, Tony Todd and Kasi Lemmons Clive Barker: Raising Hell – an interview with author/artist/filmmaker Clive Barker Interview with actor Tony Todd (2014) Bernard Rose's Storyboards Theatrical Trailer TV Spots Still Gallery Screenplay (BD-Rom)

DISC TWO - UNRATED CUT BRAND NEW 2K RESTORATION from a new 4K scan of the original negative with high definition inserts for the uncut footage from an archival film print NEW Be My Victim – an interview with Tony Todd NEW It Was Always You, Helen – an interview with Virginia Madsen NEW Reflection in the Mirror – an interview with Kasi Lemmons NEW A Kid in Candyman – an interview with actor DeJuan Guy NEW The Writing on the Wall: The Production Design of Candyman – an interview with production designer Jane Ann Stewart NEW Forbidden Flesh: The Makeup FX of Candyman – including interviews with special makeup effects artists Bob Keen, Gary J. Tunnicliffe and Mark Coulier NEW A Story to Tell: Clive Barker's "The Forbidden" – writer Douglas E. Winter on Clive Barker's seminal Books of Blood and Candyman's source story, "The Forbidden" NEW "Urban Legend: Unwrapping Candyman" – A Critical Analysis Of The Film With Writers Tananarive Due And Steven Barnes

"Crazy Rich Asians"

There are scant few actual movie phenomenons any more. Most of the movies that make a fortune at the box office are more product than art. Don't get me wrong, I love "Black Panther" and "Incredibles 2" but their box office success was as guaranteed as the sun coming up tomorrow. A film that truly exceeds all pre-buzz is rare. We got "A Quiet Place" early in the year, but the real box office story of 2018 is probably "Crazy Rich Asians," a film so successful that it's even being predicted for some guild citations and maybe even an Oscar nomination or two. As if there was any question as to whether or not an Asian ensemble could anchor a blockbuster, it's been answered with over $220 million worldwide and counting. People love this movie and it's been encouraging to feel like that love is more than just a calculated response to a known commodity and more of an embracing of a previously-unheard voice reaching a mass audience.

Buy it here

Special Features Audio Commentary by Director Jon M. Chu and Novelist Kevin Kwan Crazy Rich Fun Gag Reel Deleted Scenes

"The Meg"

Oh how I wish I could wholeheartedly recommend "The Meg." As a fan of the Statham Era of the "Fast and Furious" movies and someone who considers "Jaws" one of the best movies ever made, the idea of "Transporter vs. Shark" had me pumped from the minute I first saw the preview. But this is a half-hearted "Sure, if you have nothing else to do" more than a strong thumbs up. The more I think about it, the more stunned I am how often this movie goes wrong. First, it takes itself WAY too seriously. A movie like this needs to be tongue-in-cheek, allowing Statham to show how he can blend action and humor like has in the "Fast" movies and "Spy." There's arguably no one better than him and combining the two, and yet "The Meg" rarely allows him to do so. By the time the shark is getting to beach goers, you'll be bored. And I never thought a movie about a giant shark that starred Jason Statham could be boring.

Buy it here

Special Features Chomp On This: The Making Of The Meg Creating The Beast Optional English, Latin Spanish, Parisian French, and Brazilian Portuguese subtitles for the main feature

"Pixar Short Film Collection, Vol. 3"

The third edition of short films created by the geniuses at Pixar should make for a great gift this holiday season...but only for people who already have the first two. This is easily the weakest collection overall, even if it does have a few highlights like the gorgeous "Piper" and "Lou," the two best on here by some stretch. As someone who loves Pixar and short films, my family has watched all three volumes, and this is the first one that they almost checked out of. It doesn't help that a LOT of the ones included here aren't the theatrical kind (like "Bao" or the dreadful "Lava") but mini-movies included on Blu-ray releases, quick tie-ins to films like "Inside Out," "Monsters University," and "Cars 3," which Disney collectors almost certainly already own.

Buy it here

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toraonice · 8 years

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Yuri on Ice interview translation - PASH! 2017/03 (p10-11)

The second part of the episode commentary by Mitsurou Kubo! I have now fixed it with all the italic & bold parts as in the magazine (in the magazine they are actually bold & bolder). If you have any questions please send me a private message and I’ll reply when I have some time.

You can find the first commentary about episodes 1-6 here.

Just a note: when she quotes lines from the episodes I’m not using any of the “official” English translations, I’m translating them as I would translate them myself, so they might not be like you are used to hear them, but I think you will understand which lines they are anyway.

The translation is under the cut because it’s long.

***If you wish to share this translation please do it by reblogging or posting a link to it***  ***Re-translating into other languages is ok but please mention that this post is the source***

Story Maker Mitsurou Kubo complete commentary - Second half Once again we have interviewed Mitsurou Kubo-san, who created the original plan, manga storyboard and character plan for the story! This is the sequel of the episode commentary whose first part was published on the Dec. 2016 issue of PASH! and covers from the second part of the China tournament in episode 7 up to the last episode. Here you can find her detailed comments for the 6 episodes!

Episode 7 “Kaimaku Grand Prix Series Yacchaina!! Chuugoku Taikai FS”

-In episode 7 I wanted to portay Victor’s inexperience as a coach and how this causes Yuuri to fall into his worst possible psychological condition, but also how Yuuri manages to get out of it. In the course of the story Yuuri necessarily had to experience a series of setbacks, however not as deep as to become fatal injuries, plus we needed them to be solved within the same episode and still in the same episode I also wanted to show him regain his strength without any grudges. That’s why in this episode, that is about halfway through the story, we had him “break”.

-The ones like Victor, who are more skilled than others, tend to wonder why others cannot do the things they can do, and probably have trouble finding the right words to say to people who can’t do what they can. The fact that “excellent athletes do not necessarily become excellent coaches” is also something I wanted to depict in the story. However, that is also the reason he and Yuuri are able to confront each other baring their souls, and when I drew the scene I was sure that they would be able to make up without any long-term effects.

-In every episode, when I drew Yuuri I was always careful to “make him act in ways Victor would never even imagine”. That’s why he pushes the whorl of hair on the top of his head before the FS. It was Yuuri Katsuki’s way to loosen up the atmosphere. He came up with an idea to ease the tension and just acted it out, then looking at Victor’s surprised face made him even more relaxed when he started the FS. How can Yuuri Katsuki skate with a new state of mind? That is something Yuuri himself is thinking about, and Victor is too. I wanted to show this in the GP Series, and I think episode 7 is where it became concrete.

-There are so many young skaters in the China tournament that Yuuri and Chris automatically look like veterans, even though they are still young too (LOL). In all this I wanted to show Chris’ charm as someone who looks at things from a different perspective than the younger skaters. In the anime his charm was just explosive. I love Yasumoto-san’s Chris! It was also wonderful how the animation expressed his sexiness, which is slightly different than Yuuri’s.

-Regarding Yuuri and Victor’s scene after the FS, I was fine with it being interpreted in any way. However this is the part that had more response from overseas, I was even directly asked “which one it was”. And then I heard from Japanese people too that some had an argument with their friends over whether they kissed or not, or they just hugged. I was surprised that people would want to know the truth. Up until then I had always thought that people wanted to be able to interpret fiction how they preferred. But seeing the reactions that this episode received, I realized that even if it’s fiction, inside people’s mind this series exists as a world of its own and so they believe that there must be a correct truth, an exact answer somewhere. Episode 8 “Yuuri vs Yuri Osoroshia!! Russia Taikai SP”

-Victor is asked whether he would like to fight Yuuri as an athlete, but he really doesn’t think that. Actually many people were expecting to see Victor and Yuuri confront each other in a match eventually, however Yuuri is also “trying to win to prove Victor’s skating”. The director and I shared this same opinion when we wrote the series.

-As opposed to the China tournament, the Russia tournament has a completely different atmosphere and is more like a bloodbath (LOL). We had already decided which skaters would participate in which tournament and the results 1 year before the broadcast, but fleshing out the story we realized that the atmosphere was somewhat more tense than in the China tournament and we decided to emphasize this. Yuuri already knows Michele and Sara from last year’s GP Final, but they didn’t really make friends. By the way, I think that if Phichit-kun is the sun of Southeast Asia, Emil is the sun of Europe. And JJ is just on a whole different dimension than the sun (LOL).

-This is the tournament where Yuuri skates his best SP. He gets more heated up when he’s in an unfamiliar situation, which means that on the contrary he probably tends to feel the pressure more easily when he’s being cheered on. And just when you think that you’re going to see a confrontation between this Yuuri and Yurio… JJ arrives and paints everything in his own color. “Ahh, everything has turned into JJ color…” I was a little excited at the JJ shock (LOL).

-Yurio is unable to give his best performance because here I still wanted to show him “incomplete”. It actually happens often that real Russian athletes cannot achieve good results in their home country. Also, to show the difference between the episode 8 SP where all the ones supporting Yurio are not present yet and the episode 9 FS where they are there, and to create a development where he still isn’t able to win even with that, I decided that his grandpa, who is also his agape, would be unable to come to this tournament. But it’s not like he lost because his grandpa wasn’t there. He doesn’t physically go to watch all his matches, after all.

-JJ’s song was so perfect and amazing that I thought I wouldn’t need to put too much effort in my storyboard, as the song would probably be enough (LOL). His line “JJ will never stop~~~” is something I came up with from an early stage, to put in in the script used in the seiyuu audition, but he really became a character that would say such a line. Treating Yurio as a lady is JJ’s idea of a joke. He doesn’t mean to be offensive. Maybe he thought that Yurio would relax. By the way, he makes a joke in episode 10 too, but I have the feeling that neither JJ nor the others understand how much of it is a joke and how much is not (LOL). In the Russia tournament the entrance to the rink is also the exit, therefore I took advantage of it to show some exchanges between skaters who have just finished their performance and skaters about to start. Episode 9 “Yuuri vs Yuri Osoroshia!! Russia Taikai FS”

-By having Victor temporarily part from Yuuri Katsuki as a coach, here I inserted a mainstream kind of development where “to grow, the protagonist loses something important”. I’m really sorry for Makkachin, but I didn’t have any intention of killing him off of course. I wanted to depict more clearly what Yuuri Katsuki himself wants to do.

-Victor said “if you are in trouble hug Yakov and he will help you”, but looking at how the episode developed, well, no, it doesn’t help at all! (LOL) However, it’s pretty common in manga as well that remembering someone’s words will help you when you are in trouble or help you get out of a difficult situation. In this case, those words said by Victor didn’t really help Yuuri (that’s also because I’m a bit mean), but I still wanted him to leave Yuuri with something before going away.

-Yurio’s FS is still incomplete, but I wanted to show how he was able to obtain a new strength and elegance thanks to the presence of Lilia, Yakov, his grandpa and JJ as a rival. I also depicted his aggressive side when he changes the composition of the program to win, and the fact that he still isn’t able to win against JJ, which is another trial that he needs to overcome.

-In a meeting with the director I asked her a very basic question: “Why does Yuuri want to win?”, and she replied “Well, he has never won a gold medal so far, of course he wants to win!”. I thought that made sense. Yuuri, who has never won an international competition, wants to win a gold medal before retiring. The “origin” of his desire to win is in fact pretty simple. He has been able to work hard so far because he wants to win a gold medal and is confident that he is good enough to succeed. I inserted that monologue because, even though Yuuri might look weak, he actually has been fighting the whole time.

-In the end the person Yurio most wanted to eat a katsudon pirozhki is Yuuri. I thought that this was probably the last time Yuuri and Yurio could have a conversation alone, so even if the scene itself is short in the anime, I hope they talked about lots of things here.

-I was told that the words “please take care of me until I retire” are actually something that real skaters say when they ask someone to be their coach. When I heard that, I thought that this was the perfect timing for Yuuri to tell Victor. At this time, Victor doesn’t take these words in the sense Yuuri really means, which is “until the end of this season”. He left Yuuri fighting alone in a tournament, so I think he was very torn about whether he should apologize and about what he should tell him when they met again. But then Yuuri told him “until I retire”, and I think Victor was probably really happy because it meant that Yuuri still needed him even when he was far away. Victor didn’t think that Yuuri would retire after the end of the GP Final, and he didn’t clearly decide until when he would continue being Yuuri’s coach, therefore I believe that he was happy to hear Yuuri’s feelings, to know that Yuuri too wanted him to be his coach until the end. Episode 10 “Chou Ganbaranba! Grand Prix Final Chokuzen Special”

-Otabek finally shows up. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to show how his friendship with Yurio developed, but I wanted Yurio to think “the wind is finally blowing my way!” (LOL). Yuuri and Yurio kind of had something missing as rivals, so I started to consider Otabek’s role as the one that would steal the position as Yurio’s rival.

-What Yuuri bought is pair rings. When I looked it up I found out that buying a pair was cheaper (LOL), and I also thought that if they were going to wear something matching this would be good. There are actually many real skaters who wear accessories as “omamori”, protective charms. More importantly, Yuuri has been giving Victor fresh surprises until now, and I wanted him to get a new item, a weapon to fight in the final match. When I suggested the rings to the director she was like “Yes, that!!” (LOL). We were like, “yeah, a cornered athlete would do something like that!” More than implicating something like a wedding, it’s similar to members of the same circle deciding to have a matching item.

-Victor is surprised by Yuuri’s action but understands him, so he makes a wish upon the ring telling him “show me the skating that you like the most”. In the China tournament he said things as if he was testing Yuuri, he “broke” his heart, so here he finally vows to the ring that “he will completely trust what Yuuri decides” and is determined to do what he can as a coach.

-Before the GP Final Yuuri and Victor’s relationship deepened yet again, therefore I wanted Yurio and Victor’s relationship to change a little too, hence I inserted the scene by the sea. I’m glad that I did, because after this point there was no time to show them talk alone again. Like in episode 9 Yuuri and Yurio share a moment together, Yurio and Victor do too, and in their case what they have in common is the memories of Hasetsu, and what changed from that time, which is what I wanted to show here.

-There’s also a moment where Yurio thought Victor was smirking looking at the ring. Like Yurio says in this scene, people tend to believe that athletes “die as competitors” when they stop and “become stable”. But I think that Victor, more than anyone else, is sensitive to this topic and is worried that people will say that about him, or that he will actually become like that. In this scene Victor wasn’t smirking, he was starting to think about his future.

-The fact that in last year’s banquet Yuuri told Victor “be my coach” is something that we had already decided as a “hidden setting”. But we didn’t know whether there was time to add that scene somewhere in only one cour. Eventually we decided to cram this episode with amusing scenes from the beginning to the end, so we added a special ED and C part. Since there were no skating matches we inserted a lot of crazy stuff and there’s plenty of information. Episode 11 “Chou Chou Ganbaranba!! Grand Prix Final SP”

-Yuuri makes an attempt at adding a quadruple flip in his SP, but actually in the beginning I wasn’t planning to have him jump so many quads. The increasing level of real life competitions prompted me to add a realistic feeling by showing how you can’t win if you don’t have multiple quads in your programs. The reason Victor jumps a quad flip together with Yuuri during his performance is, more than something he does as a coach, something that comes from his feelings as an athlete.

-At this time Victor still hasn’t decided how to use the experience earned in the GP Final to contribute to Yuuri’s future, and also hasn’t decided what to do about himself as an athlete. He used to think that new surprises and impressive feats is something that he needed to create himself, however after becoming Yuuri’s coach his world broadened, he realized that it’s not necessarily that way and this changed him.

-The reason Yurio could pull off his best performance is that many elements like his experience and the environment surrounding him all blended together perfectly right at this time. From an external point of view young and strong athletes somehow tend to look like they are “destined to win”, like they are performing a program prepared to win. However, every single second of their performance is the result of their efforts. I wanted to show this with Yurio’s SP.

-When Victor is watching Yurio’s performance we cannot see his expression because I myself haven’t decided what the truth is, like whether he is frustrated because Yurio beat his record, or he wants to surpass him again, or what else. However, when Yuuri sees Victor like that he becomes anxious because it looks to him like Victor wants to go back to the ice, and he himself wants him to go back, but at the same time he doesn’t… so he wavers. That eventually piles up and leads to the last scene of this episode.

-I think that Victor and Chris have been in the Olympics and in ice shows together until now. Chris is probably the one that was closer to Victor in his career, and I think that Victor does genuinely like Chris’ skating. Maybe Chris also did his best in his own style because Victor was a different type than him. The screen looks really vibrant when they are together, and I believe they are good comrades.

-We finally see Otabek skate. I like his song, it’s cool. While I was the one who created his setting, I wasn’t sure how to represent him as a “soldier” on the ice, and in the end I decided to emphasize his thirst for victory.

-JJ was overwhelmed by Otabek’s ex-delinquent-like spirit. I saw lots of comments from people who came to like JJ in this episode. It’s definitely his highest point as a character. However, it also looked like “JJ can overcome this” (LOL). JJ calls himself the “king”, but if you think about it as long as Victor was around he could only really become the king in the World Junior Championships or the Four Continents Champsionships… I realized that JJ is only saying that to motivate himself and in fact he is not a real king, he is just behaving like he is because it’s his goal, and fans are cheering on him for that… and in a way that moved me. In the end I’m really portraying every character thinking that I want them to win, and especially in JJ’s case, he has a power that makes you want him to win. Last episode “Chou Chou Chou Ganbaranba!!! Grand Prix Final FS”

-In the storyboard I drew the scene where Victor cries, but then I couldn’t come up with a good line for him to say and rewrote it many times. In the end I chose the line “I didn’t think Yuuri Katsuki was such a selfish person” and then I also got the idea for Yuuri’s reply. In the part where he pushes aside Victor’s hair like a curtain, I thought “even in such a situation Yuuri still manages to surprise Victor”. After completing this scene I could finally start writing the final episode.

-What Victor told Yuuri right before he starts is performance, more than something that he really thinks deep down, is what he came up with when thinking about what could encourage Yuuri Katsuki the most, so basically it’s “Victor playing the role of Victor as Yuuri expects him”.

-The part that I like the most in this episode is Yuuri’s monologue before he skates: “My name is Yuuri Katsuki. I’m just an ordinary figure skater, 24 years old.” This is the same line he said in episode 1, so it’s like he is going back to his origin, and I think it’s the moment where he finally accepts himself. I cried writing the storyboard.

-The director said that he wanted Yuuri, that has spent half of his life with Victor as his goal, to try his hand at a program with the same difficulty as Victor’s, and I agreed. The development where Yuuri gets his best score and wins against Yurio in the FS is something we had decided from the start. Since not having a perfect ending is what spurs him to continue, we aimed for a conclusion that is not too nice, therefore we made it so that Yurio wins but is not completely satisfied with the result.

-Regarding the scene where Victor hugs Yurio before the competition, he didn’t do it because he was begging for his help to stop Yuuri from retiring, or because he was asking him something. He just wanted Yurio to skate at his best, it was his genuine feelings of support for him, as if he was saying “go and do your best!”. After all, until this scene we never really saw Victor support Yurio. It’s an action that cannot be explained with logic.

-I believe Yurio thought “no way you can call it quits now!”. And I agree with him. I think what he had in mind while he was performing his program was something like “I know that whether to retire or not is someting the person concerned should decide, but I’ll still say my opinion”. The reason he cries after finishing is also not something logical. But I think it was probably because he could skate at its best, and because of the sense of fulfillment caused by being able to skate that well despite a few mistakes. I’m sure he himself didn’t really understand his own feelings at that time.

-I really wanted to draw the scene of Yuuri and Victor skating the exhibition together. In the original setting Victor was meant to join in as a surprise, but in the anime they were wearing perfectly matching costumes and I was the one surprised (LOL). They were doing lifts as if it’s nothing, but Yuuri’s exhibition program for this season was “Hanarezu ni Soba ni Ite”, so maybe they just tried it out while fooling around during practice.

-I was told “we can have a C part, though only about 30 seconds!”, and thinking about what could fit I decided to show an ending that would give hope for the future, with Yuuri in St.Petersburg. I was told that the last episode had a number of scenes that was about twice a normal anime episode, and beside that they even had to add those 30 seconds. I’m sure the staff must have had a really hard time.

-The selfish decision ultimately taken by the selfish Yuuri Katsuki is to continue competitive skating. I think there were many reasons that led to this conclusion. Not only what Victor gave him, but Yurio’s performance in the FS also managed to pull Yuuri back to the ice, and maybe he was influenced by the other athletes’ performances too. However, Yurio definitely wanted to see more of Yuuri’s skating, and Victor wanted as well. I guess Yuuri might be finally realizing how much things have changed from one year ago, when he almost decided to quit, and how now he’s on a completely different path.

#YOI #Yuri on ice #interview #translation #commentary #kubo mitsurou #pash #magazine

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kyukurator-blog · 7 years

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BLUM FOR THE BUCK

Frequent readers may have noticed that here at The Thread we tend to crush on first films. Our knee-jerk opinion is that it’s the low budgets. We’re using this forum to personally appeal to President Trump for an executive order capping feature budgets at $5 million.

Or, he could just appoint Jason Blum Secretary of Movie Distribution.

Blum’s company, Blumhouse, is on a roll; which Blum modestly describes as just that – a run of good luck, enhanced by his training at the knee of Harvey Weinstein in that bad boy’s Miramax heyday.

The Blumhouse money machine spits out low budget genre flicks that seldom lose money and regularly yield huge returns on modest budgets. Par exemple, the incredibly profitable Paranormal Activity franchise, or this year’s M. Night Shyamalan resuscitation, Split; tracking at $275 million and counting.

In 2014 he launched BH Tilt, as a production machine for even lower cost films. But under that monicker he’s also produced and distributed artier indies, like Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Jordan Peele’s recent humor/horror behemoth Get Out, and, via Sundance, J.D. Dillard’s Sleight, which is out in limited release.

SLEIGHT (2017)

Charming newcomer Jacob Latimore plays a street magician who stepped in to care for his little sister after their parents passed. He supplements his income by dealing drugs for a local dealer played, in a surprising dark turn by good boy Dule Hill (of West Wing and Psyche).

When things inevitably go wrong his sister is kidnapped and he’s forced reveal some extraordinary talents that he’s tried to keep hidden.

Sleight is actually not Dillard’s first movie; like Chazelle and Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins, his first film sank – but in Dillard’s case, really deep. We couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, like Chazelle, he sharpened his story chops by bumming around Hollywood as a writer and eventually came up with a genre mashup that leverages the attractiveness of its leading man into an entertaining confection.

WHIPLASH (2014)

Whiplash was a surprising addition to the Blumhouse slate – a lone drama punctuating a long list of mostly horror genre films. The commonality is exploiting a savvy knowledge of genre conventions.

When it came time to make Whiplash, Chazelle had already taken a shot at his heart’s desire in the form of his student musical feature Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench – which got a lot of praise, but no distribution. He cannily constructed Whiplash as a picture-perfect breakout first feature – based on personal experience and tailored to a tight budget, an into-the-crucible story of artistic coming of age.

He succeeded rather brilliantly, starting out with a short feature at Sundance 2013, which secured funding for the feature.

If you don’t know the story: an ambitious young jazz drummer goes to an elite music school where he falls under the influence of a teacher who is either sadistic, brilliant, or both.

It’s a short, satisfying entertainment served up with an aroma of highbrow aspiration. It’s a very well-wrought film, but its awards success is a tribute to how much we love the myth of the first film, as well as our hunger for the one thing that the studio system has trouble producing – small, well-told stories.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009)

Split may be Blumhouse’s most profitable film, but in terms of budget multiples, it’s doubtful anything is ever going to beat Paranormal Activity. This first film was produced on a budget of $15,000 and went on to gross $193m – not to mention spinning off six sequels. We’ll spare you the math – that’s a return of almost 13,000 times its budget, versus a measly 30x for Split.

Paranormal Activity is an indoors Blair Witch Project – it very successfully pretends to be found footage, shot by the couple in the film, or often, eerily, caught by a locked-off camera trained on them as they sleep. The pace is glacial (by horror film standards), the special effects minimal, and yet it’s utterly terrifying.

A young couple has moved into an apartment and the woman senses that the place is haunted — or, more accurately, possessed. Well, that’s kind of true, but that’s only part of the story. The man becomes obsessed with capturing what’s happening on a new video camera – and ends up being sorry that he did.

This was a first film for director Oren Peli. Jason Blum discovered it, loved it, sold the remake rights to Paramount, then convinced them not to remake it but to release the film very much as it was. Like the creators of Blair Witch, Peli has never quite replicated the chemistry of his singular first film.

THE SIXTH SENSE (2014)

This year, Blumhouse released what may be its highest box office film ever, Split. It’s a split personality film from M. Night Shyamalan, set in the same fictional universe as Unbreakable. The budget was relatively high for Blumhouse – $9 million. But it was a gamble that paid off – three months in, the film is tracking at $275 million, and Shyamalan is working on another script.

Shyamalan had already directed two films when he came up with the film that seems like his first, Sixth Sense. His student film was Pray With Anger, about a young Hindu American man going back to India. It was not until after a second religion-themed film that he saw dead people and sold his spec script for $3m and the right to direct.

Sixth Sense is not a Blumhouse film; we bring it up as the exception that proves the rule. With Willis in the lead, the budget went to $60 million – but it made it all back and more. And here’s the thing about sophomore slump – or in his case, senior slump, since his first two films were financed by his doctor parents and their friends. Shyamalan conceived the script at a moment when he wasn’t sure if he’d ever direct a third film. So even tho he’s done some great work, and some kind of crappy work that made a lot of money, he’s never done anything quite as elegantly effective as Sixth Sense.

And if you’re curious about Shyamalan’s low budget return to form with Blumhouse, Split is recently available on video.

THE PURGE (2013)

Blumhouse has monkeyed with the traditional mathematics of the movie business: make enough hits pay for the flops. Small budget genre films keep flop loss to a minimum. And the hits can penetrate the stratosphere. When that happens, you crank out the sequels.

There’s a kernel of social commentary imbedded at the heart of The Purge — in a post-meltdown America, the ruling party creates one day a year when all laws and public services are suspended, allowing the populace to vent their pent-up rage in a Second Amendment Dionysian frenzy.

Another piece of the puzzle is to hire promising up-and-coming directors. In this case, James DeMonaco, a seasoned writer who was just coming off his first directing gig, a short-lived crime drama called Staten Island. DeMonaco was recommended for the Purge job by one of the stars One of the stars of Staten Island — Ethan Hawke.

The movie cost $3m and made $89m. DeMonaco has directed two Purge sequels.

IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE (2016)

Blum sometimes makes missteps – but even then, they tend to be colorful.

As it turns out, the meister of horror once ran a theater company with Ethan Hawke, and was finally able to lure his old pal over to play a true crime writer who finds a nasty box of home movies in Sinister. The film was directed by Scott Derrickson (coming off The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Day The World Stood Still and heading for Dr. Strange). The budget was $3m, the boxoffice was $78m, and everybody made a lot of money.

After The Purge, Hawke really wanted to make a western, and in a year or so Blum found him one. To direct it, he hired prolific horror director Ti West, who invested it with a laconic sense of genre and a sly sense of humor, which, along with the casting of John Travolta as a corrupt sheriff renders it very enjoyable – and a bit campy.

Hawke is a drifter who rolls into town. His very presence provokes the town bully, who Hawke then proceeds to humiliate. The bully also happens to be Travolta’s son. Even though Hawke leaves town when suggested, the son seeks revenge, which then sets off a satisfying cycle of moral retribution and karmic balancing. Maybe we should put “satisfying” in quotes, but it is a western.

Overall, critics liked it: but audiences stayed away in droves and it flopped as flat as a French pancake.

It all ends happily. Ti West went on to join Shyamalan on Wayward Pines, Hawke is finishing up as writer/director on Blaze, his film about country singer Blaze Foley.

And Jason Blum is well on his way to a jillion dollars, small budget by small budget.

BLUM FOR THE BUCK was originally published on FollowTheThread

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