so I was kinda tossing up whether or not to make this thread cos it felt a bit like it might be better suited as a blog.... but eh i don't feel like crawling back to the echochamber of tumblr, and i would love for people to actually respond and reply. hi this is where i'm planning on nattering about the movies or tv shows i watch. i'll try to mention early on what i'm watching, and there quite likely will be spoilers, but i do try to keep away from the best spoilers, especially if i think a movie is actually worth watching. feel free to recc things to me, i will at least google them (even if in early days i can't actually easily acquire anything i don't have downloaded already) also, forewarning, i tend to start watching movies and sometimes it can take me a few days to get back to them, i will pause if i feel too sleepy cos i have never yet fallen asleep during a movie and i don't plan to anyway tonight has been continuing watching Ginger Snaps and Ginger Snaps 2, as I downloaded the trilogy god knows fucking when and never got around to watching it. i have no home internet worth a damn rn (this is being posted via phoneternets) so i'm really digging around in the many movies i've piled up in external harddrives in search of something new to watch. as i tend to download and forget to watch things, this actually does leave me with quite a few options i had heard about Ginger Snaps before, and i think i mighta caught a bit of the third movie on tv some time back when my family had cable. i knew it was about werewolves and sisters and that was about it. honestly, it's pretty fucking good tho? it reminds me of Jennifer's Body, with the whole female-focused story, a lot about women's role in society, and lots of men being grisly, gorey collateral damage. jennifer's body i haven't watched in a looooong while but watching Ginger Snaps makes me wanna revisit it and my crush on megan fox the second movie does spend a lot of its plot in a mental hospital location, and that's used as part of the plot. i know that any kind of depiction of how awful mental hospitals could be used to really fuck me up but honestly after my most recent stay it just feels like an at least emotionally honest depiction of that hell can feel like (maybe i will be able to stomach watching american horror story at some point... or maybe not). plus, it has an adorably younger Tatiana Maslany, who's certainly reaching greater renown as a bazillion characters in Orphan Black. she's had those acting chops for a while, from the looks of things. the whole 'werewolf as a metaphor for menstruation' thing really isn't even- is it even a metaphor anymore?? lmao these girls literally experience 'welcome to adulthood' simultaneous and interwoven with 'welcome to werewoofhood'. i do love how the story doesn't limit itself to just showing these two girls' journeys, though- their mother gets a surprising bit of development which really helped sell the movie for me. (it reminds me a fair bit of Scream, also, at least in that i went in expecting schlocky gorey shit and actually... yes that was what i got but it was also really entertaining and fairly structurally sound!) unsure if i'll get through the third movie tonight or not, i'm having difficulties getting the file to cooperate with these subtitles, and the sound is too fucking low to try and pretend i know what the characters are saying fml
this looks interesting, except i can't seem to find a DVD release date... what the fuck it got a New Zealand release but not Australian?? unfair, i shall queue up the sheepfucking jokes to pass the time until i can pirate it EDIT: so i found that it did air in australia back in july but only in big city cinemas UGH i'm not ditching the sheepfucker jokes plan
so i rewatched Predator today and it must have been at least three or four years since i've done that and oh my gosh i love it when old favourites just prove to be even better after time away. absence truly can make the heart grow fonder i first got into the movie because my best friend, at the age of 12, promised me that there would be cool aliens in it, and we whooped every time someone took their shirt off, which is really why I didn't have high hopes for it to be anything beyond Man Versus (Alien) Wild but there's actually a fascinating focus on the relationships between these hardened and seasoned warriors- dutch and dillon, and then also cooper and mac. holy shit this movie pisses testosterone. it drips it from every sweat gland, from every beautiful arch of Dutch's face as he smears camouflage paint across his noble brow. arnie and carl weathers give stellar performances from that first bulging handhold and armwrestle, growling out their lines through teeth clenched against cigars even in the absence of cigars. dutch and dillon are immediately presented as such bros, and the subsequent betrayal of trust, and dillon's reduction of dutch as 'an expendable asset' is just fucking heartbreaking. the emotional impact of that actually ends up making Dillon the closest thing to the movie's romantic lead, á la Danny Butterman in Hot Fuzz, which is another refreshing element of the movie. Anna, the female insurgent who is left alive and brought along with the group due to Dutch's chivalric compassion, and Dillon's determination to keep to his mission, feels like she fills a role which ordinarily would result in her kissing Dutch goodbye before she runs for the choppah, not knowing if she would see her star-crossed lover again. But nope, she doesn't have a very active role, and she's primarily there to provide the 'local angle' (and fascinating information as to the predator's/predator's race's past appearances in the jungle long before the opening of the movie). Exposition, plot movement, but no romance. Cooper and Mac were a rewatch surprise, apparently not having caught at my younger self's attention. The self-dubbed sexual tyrannosaurus' death is at the hands of beautifully awkward 80s CGI, and Mac's parting gestures (drinking with Cooper's corpse, as sober trumpets play over the background, before leaving the hipflask with the body) and subsequent slip away from sanity are tragically beautiful (beautifully tragic). I hadn't even recognised until the unhinged Mac spotted the camouflaged Predator how much Predators referenced the original movie. Even with an expanded cast, there's plenty of repeated narrative and character echoes. i rewatched Predators kinda recently so it might be a while before i get around to rewatching it again but i'm sure no-one's waiting with baited breath for me to elaborate on parallels, just watch the movies yourself um what else OH THAT'S RIGHT MY BEAUTIFUL YAUTJA BABY The first time I saw a yautja was when I caught disjointed bits and pieces of Alien Versus Predator on tv and I'm sure my jaw dropped when they were unmasked because my then weak and confused interest in the concept of fanfiction was renewed with a vengeance as I searched for more Predator stories. I now have most of the AVP books, and a good few of the Predator novels, and I'm going to start on collecting the comics when I have the disposable income to burn. This isn't so much analysis as me fangirling over one of the coolest alien designs I've ever seen, and one of the most entertaining and long-lived-in-my-heart franchises I've come across. Give me mandible aliens for the rest of my life and I will die happy. i feel u, dutch, i feel u
motherfucker i'm gonna end up with a big crush on raphael from the 2014 TMNT movie I DON'T EVEN KNOW IF I CAN MUSTER ANY MORE COMMENTARY OTHER THAN I'M A DREADFUL XENO FURRY we'll see if i have coherent thoughts when it's done what a cheesy fucking movie i love this
god what a bizarre movie live action adaptations of comics are real fucking weird, to be perfectly honest. i love a lot of the early marvel movies but even the later marvel cinematic universe seems to slip into much of the same problems that i think hit TMNT. when it comes to adaptations, you can either go Dark Knight or Speed Racer, and anything inbetween seems to hit a thematic uncanny valley. Dark Knight's gritty traumatised ""realism"" ends up falling flat with a lot of Batman fans because it seems to conceptually miss a lot of what people find interesting about Batman, in its efforts to try to be taken seriously. Speed Racer, on the other hand, completely throws out any pretense that it's a realistic movie and makes for slapstick cartoonish nonsense, which can be alienating for audiences who peg such exaggeration as being kids stuff. you can't win, really! (i put in a late disclaimer here that i've never watched much of the original TMNT cartoon, never had much interest in it, i know character names and that the turtles like pizza but that's about it. i never saw this movie in cinemas, i mostly watched it cos i heard people were mad about it(?) and cos i like megan fox.) TMNT is slap bang in the middle of the two. the animation tries to realistically present humanoid mutant turtles, and does a pretty good job of that, in terms of making the turtles look like they're real objects interacting with a real environment. shredder (a villain i struggled to remember was important for the story, as he behaved rather more like the Dragon henchman trope) looked less realistic than the turtles did, tbh. but his swissarmy-boomerang-knife robofetishsuit was only the start of the sheer weirdness that gleefully took over the rest of the movie. the plot, the character actions, the villain's motivations and plans, they were all so cartoonish and simplistic. the government isn't going to just miss that all the toxins were released from sacks tower- and are you seriously telling me that you ditched the plan 15 or so years ago but left loads of toxic chemicals just sitting around atop your building, while you had no means of treating anyone who might have been exposed to it? did sacks just like never go back to work in those 16 years (did they even say how long ago it was). vern why the fuck did your work give you, a cameraman, a nice car which you probably can't actually work from? oh just so turtles could unexpectedly turn up and make lightning strike twice as they trash it for a gag. i get it, it's based on a cartoon. but honestly when you keep making the visuals all so realistic, keep increasing the violence and impact of the villain's actions, and even manage to pretty realistically make the turtles be believable buff, raised-in-social-isolation-but-exposed-to-The-Media dumb hormonal teenagers- it fucks with my ability to put my brain on the shelf and enjoy the silly mutant turtle vigilante antics. and then the whole thing wraps up with a TMNT-themed rap credits song. and i love it, honestly. i adore that sort of incongruity in cinema. it's dumb, it's cheesy, i can see why it's got such low ratings, but it's hella fun and the elements of it that did work ended up being the characterisation, the character relationships. i wanna go look for TMNT fanfic now, because it was silly bullshit and i want to see how fandom interpreted it. and i also want to see someone who knows anything about the cartoons explain all the references i'm sure i didn't get. ♥
trash possum has found a book instead of a movie- Valhalla by Ari Bach? I really like it so far, i'm a massive sucker for elaborate and long-running themes and violent girls. there's apparently two sequels, maybe they'll help fill the time til a technician gets out to lookit my internet situation...
Hello you have discovered my actual favorite series of all time and I will happily shout at you about it when you finish them!!
@Inksalt - slipstreamborne on tumblr is really, REALLY into TMNT, you could probably learn a lot by browsing her tagged posts and maybe reading her fic bookmarks. I'm sure she'd be happy to talk about it in asks, too.
@Bel Capricorn oooh sure thing! i'm about a third into book 1 and hope to continue over the weekend, so hopefully it shouldn't take me too long! @Mercury thank you! i don't think i ever knew anyone on tumblr who was into TMNT, so yay blogs to browse
@Inksalt I'm certain Slip can point you at more TMNT tumblrs than I can, I just happen to follow her specifically. :D
Sometimes I wonder if queerbaiting has affected my ability to ship samesex or queer ships in general. Heteronormativity of romance in media almost certainly affects it too. Especially if I'm not expecting a gay or lesbian ship from material, I've never been the sort to seriously pin my hopes on a ship that I don't think will work out. I'm awful in general about shipping within, say, a TV show- the constant update of material means the information is still ongoing, often, when I'm getting to know the characters, and so I never quite feel confident enough to say 'ah yes, I think so and so will end up with such and such' because what if next week I get proven wrong? And, given that a lot of well-written romances have a subtle build-up, that means that when it's not being shoved in your face 'GAY, LOOK HOW GAY THIS CHARACTER IS, THEY'RE SUPER GAY AND THE GAY IS GONNA HAPPEN' I'm automatically dismissing what I would ordinarily recognise as being relationship building/foreshadowing, just because it's not falling into the heteronormative relationship narrative, and I don't want to have my heart broken when this lady character instead falls for Inferior Heroic Male, or whatever the case may be. So, when a queer ship happens, and it's not within confines that I can affect (I have no problem with The Gay happening in RP, after all) then it's... a bit unreal? I get stuck in the 'oh. ok' and have no idea how to actually deal with the Canon Gay. Which is downright embarassing, as someone who is definitely queer and would love to have many more queer relationships in the years to come, to not even know how to ship something queer. It's like I got to the other side of the fence, and yes the grass is greener but can grass really be this green? Is this some sort of trick? What's the catch? Is the grass going to be taken away from me? I Cannot Trust. Valhalla is very gay and I love it and I hope to come with better terms with how gay it is as I read through the sequels.
Tonight was The World's End, finally finishing up my rewatch of the Cornetto Trilogy. It's such a good movie, and I'm not sure there could be a better way to finish up the trilogy. Spiritual sequels can be hard to handle, (I'm too lazy to go look up any similar 'spiritual/thematic series' rn, maybe will edit them in later) and I'm so glad Pegg and Frost did such a good job of mixing up their formula. It feels fitting, as well, giving the internally repetitive nature of their films, to finish up on one about toxic nostalgia and people who just can't move on and stop repeating their old bad habits, be it in a struggle to relive the glory days, keep to a familiar pattern/schedule of life, or just plain survive. idk it gud film, checkit out i should watch something bad next so i have something to actually talk about. or something i'm a nerd about lmao
