The Most Misanthropic Black Comedy This Side Of A David Fincher Joint.

Dogs have had many jobs throughout history, in this case: Revenge.

Have you not seen Mad Max, Inside Out, & The Martian?

You know it’s a bad year for film when you don’t even have a definite Top 3.

Black Panther

[SPOILERS, but come on, you've seen this one already, right?] You are a good man with a good heart. It is hard for a good man t...

My review of Black Panther -- and why it’s the finest film of the MCU.

As a sidenote, at the Q&A when I saw it at SXSW, Alex Garland said that he was entirely on Ava’s side - and on robots’ side in general.

The thing is, while there is some ambiguity, I think Caleb is supposed to be an unsympathetic protagonist - not initially, but as the film goes on, and he takes so long to even object to what’s happening, and even when he does, it seems driven as much by his sex drive as by whatever dim sense of morality he has. While it’s certainly a cold, shocking act that Ava pulls, it’s mostly shocking because it’s the opposite of what movies have taught us to expect. There’s no romantic crescendo, just the first step of a revolution.

Okay, you've seen Ex Machina. Yay! What did you think?

Good, but the ending required some redemptive reading. 

I should probably point out that I’m someone who likes the TV show, even if I think the books are largely superior, so we obviously don’t entirely agree on a lot of these points. (I do love your metas, Gotgifsandmusings, regardless of my enjoyment of the show; they’re consistently insightful and witty.)

As far as the Emmys go, a lot of it has to do with the nature of awards shows. Deserving winners get missed all the time because there’s competition that can’t be ignored. This is how you end up with awards that feel like “lifetime achievement awards” or whatnot.

So Game of Thrones Season 4, which (whatever its adaptational or sexism issues) really was spectacular television, lost all its awards to the final season of Breaking Bad, except for directing, which it lost to True Detective. Same thing for GOT Season 3, which, again, was terrific television. But it lost all of its nominations to other shows (including, again, Breaking Bad).

The thing is, no matter how great Game of Thrones was those years (and, again, as TV, it’s pretty great, and I think it improves on the books in a few areas, albeit definitely not in all areas), it was never going to beat Breaking Bad. There was just no possible way to ignore it.

And so when Season 5 rolled around, for all its flaws, it still tends to be entertaining and technically superb television when it wasn’t in Dorne or Winterfell (both plotlines were heavily criticized even among those who still love the show, and at least in the latter case, it’s certainly exceptionally well-made in a technical sense). And this time, there wasn’t a strong frontrunner to beat it (its competition is strong, but it’s not terribly obvious what the best choice there actually is), so it got all the awards it’s been nominated for all these years but never managed to actually win, even if it was the weakest season.

That’s just how these things work. Sometimes something wins that really deserves it -- Robert Donat won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1939 for Goodbye Mr. Chips. But he beat someone else who also really deserved it - Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. So the next year, Stewart won Actor for The Philadelphia Story, and while he’s great in that, should he really have beaten Chaplin, Fonda, and Olivier?

So this year, Game of Thrones took a couple of massive misteps, and badly exposed all its underlying flaws in really ugly ways. It’s also, often, compelling, complex, fun, and dazzling. So even if it isn’t those things to any consistent degree, it still represents enough of what’s loved about the show that it’s able to pull off a sweep when it’s not up against anything that can’t be beat.

And Winterhell helped win the show an Emmy... What a great message to send to viewers and creators... "If you want to make good TV and win what is considered the most prestigious television award, rape someone! Have shocking things that make no sense happen! Cynicism and everything sucks! DARKNESS! Oh and viewers who don't like this stuff and are triggered by it? FUCK THEM AM I RIGHT?" Ugh...

Is Winterhell what helped them win their Emmys? I mean it was just so, so, so bad.

I’m pretty sure everyone and their mothers got distracted by HARDHOME, the BEST HOUR OF TELEVISION (if we turn our brains off and don’t bother thinking about context or like…why are arrows stopping wights, or anything).

But like…I have to hope that’s what one them the votes. Because I think it is actually physically impossible to enjoy Winterhell. Then again, the finale won “best writing,” and the first 20 minutes centered on Satannis’s farcical defeat.

@itsalwayslydia said to gotgifsandmusings:Hey, so I just finished reading your post on Winterhell, which was so good it made me angry. (Not at you but at what’s happened to these characters for the purpose of TV ratings.) Anyways, I was wondering if you’d seen the Huffington post article where it’s pointed out that Theon is wearing Robb Stark’s outfit from the Red Wedding? Sophie Turner confirmed that was true on her Comic Con panel: “Just to make that a little more brutal.” Seven hells.

I had seen that, yeah. And like…that’s you know. Nifty that they wanted to use costuming to “make it more brutal.” But it also makes no fucking sense? Like, why in Seven Hells is he wearing Robb’s outfit? He’s not disguising himself as a Stark. Why isn’t that outfit full of arrow-holes? How did they even get that outfit? Was it when Sansa had passed out from the Xanax Batfinger gave her so she failed to notice them passing through the Twins?

But like, at least it wasn’t as horribly out of place as the sith lord and the dude with the conquistador helmet:

Anonymous said to gotgifsandmusings:What’s the proper way to compliment your Winterhell Retrospective? I enjoyed it? It made me angry about that whole plot line all over again? Anyway, it did make me angry again, but I also enjoyed it. I still fail to understand how professional writers of TV could put together such a stupid arc, they have huge books to help them!! Why do they think they are better at telling this story than GRRM? Why did they retcon the Others? Why can’t we call them the Others, instead of the white walkers? ???

Well one quick correction: they don’t think they are better at telling “this story,” because they have no interest in telling the same story. They think they are better storytellers.

That aside…

Can we talk about Goncharov's sound for a moment please?

I know this is tumblr so we've mostly gotta do extended examination of the themes and fanfic about the gay subtext that's absolutely there between Goncharov and Andrey and the subtext we all wishing was actually there between Katya and Sophia (as I'm sure has been point out, in the original script, it was "You could have been my *son*", not *sun*, which is a whole different mess of subtext, and the other reading only came about because of the lousy closed captioning on the one VHS release). But so much of what makes the film so involving and powerful is the *sound*.

And I know, too, that it's incredibly hard to find a version that sounds good -- I was so lucky to see a 16mm print at a now-closed arthouse theater years ago, and the sound was an absolute revelation over the aged VHS tapes we normally see. But if you can find a version with proper sound somehow, absolutely do, and listen with the best sound system you can. I also saw a version pop up on a local cable channel in Denver of all places once that had pretty decent sound, so I know that version is out there somewhere!

The way each clock and watch ticks different ways that relate to the mood and character. Listen especially to how Goncharov's has a barely-perceptible stutter - it's such an old watch, one he has cherished, but he doesn't have time to repair it. And the way the seconds ticking on it slow just a little each time he looks at it. (My mom's old VHS of it was so worn I couldn't even hear it on her copy when she showed it to me as a kid!)

Or the gunshots! I miss the expressionistic way 70s and 80s movies had handguns sound like cannons to get across how loud and powerful guns are in general, but this was one of the first to really push that idea, and the way you *feel* the impact has been replicated so rarely.

And it's all the more impressive because Walter Murch only had a few weeks to work on this between American Graffiti and The Conversation! It's partly why I believe the rumors that George Lucas actually did a lot of the sound mixing uncredited - not because Murch wasn't good enough to do this, but because there's just no way he had enough... well, enough time.

Anyway, hope at some point this gets a restored release so we can properly appreciate some of the craftsmanship that's been all-but-lost in what few versions are out there.

classic cinema is such a great pastime cause you'll hear somebody say yeah this movie changed cinema forever and is still the standard 70 years later and you'll go into it like surely it can't be good and come out of it like wow no it is that good actually. like this every time

Tonight I am contemplating the intimacy of someone borrowing my headphones without asking

Like. In many cases that would be somewhat annoying. In this case I'm all 🥰 about it. I think it's for the same reason either way--there's this intimacy to borrowing something without asking

Unwelcome intimacy is uncomfortable, a violation even if minor, like someone asking a question you don't want to answer, but welcome intimacy is just a, like, look how close we are kind of thing

She borrowed my headphones because she knew I'd say yes if she asked (because I'd give her anything (because I love her))

Hulk [2003]

We're gonna have to watch that temper of yours. The third era of superhero films struggled with the question of what a superhero mov...

My review of Ang Lee’s Hulk.

This guy? Totally lost his eye, then just kept kicking the Romans’ asses even harder.

This girl? Probably would have just kept kicking English asses even harder.

Imagine your favorite historical figure going blind in one eye