The amount of times I could have been that white girl in the horror movie could honestly be a movie in itself and it’s honestly a waste that my entire life isn’t constantly recorded on film because it would be HILARIOUS
1. That one time I decided to see what was past the old gate in the woods, but when got there it had been smashed in half and there was a decapitated sheep head with no skin just off the trail, so instead I just turned around and went home.
2. That time some friends and I went camping and we found a pile of bones wrapped in a garbage bag buried under a log, but the adult supervisor told us it was nothing, so we just put it back and didn’t talk about it again.
3. The time I was getting chased through the woods at night and I realized “wait it’s dark as fuck” so I just held still until the guy gave up and left.
4. The time this dude said he was in love with me and so he was going to cut my head off and dump my body in a lake, so I told him to grow the hell up, but then he got caught stealing girl’s underwear a day later and I never saw him again
5. That one time in college where I was taking a shortcut on my home at night and a car followed me into a dark alley, so I stared directly into the driver’s side of the window and walked towards it to psych them out
6. The night I was out on a walk and this old guy told me he’d locked his keys in his truck and that he needed someone my size to crawl in through the back window for him, so I told him “you know that sounds super suspicious right” and told him where to find a pay phone for a tow truck instead
7. The one time this random guy on the street said he was in love with me and so he was going to follow me home on my bus, so I clapped him on the shoulder and told him that if he got that close to my bus then I was going to throw him under the wheels, but then this really nice homeless man from Nigeria told the guy to fuck off and then checked to make sure he didn’t follow me onboard
8. That big cat with yellow eyes who I found in a well and brought home who used to put rotting meat in my closet and wake me up by chewing on my face, until I put him back outside and never saw him again.
9. My one cousin who used to come over for the summer who kept calling me ‘piñata’ and hitting me with sticks, until he went back home and was sent to juvie cause he finally got caught torturing animals
10. The time I got lost on the way to a meeting and wound up at a circus tent instead, and got followed by a full-out clown for three vacant street blocks
11. The pet hamster I had when I was seven who would scream all night and eventually escaped by ripping a bar out of its cage and wiggling through the hole. My mom caught it and put it back but it lived another year and a half until one night the screaming just stopped
12. The time I was whistling in the woods and something started whistling back, so I went home
13. That one night at summer camp where a group of girls got together to play ‘bloody mary’ in the lavatory and invited me to come with them so I said “no thanks” and stayed with the camp councillors and drank soup instead.
14. The old abandoned house I just moved into with the door that leads into a big empty room full of dirt and empty cooking pots that I just sort of… locked up forever and never go near
15. Once when I was at an ihop I saw a coffee mug do a full 360º spin with nobody touching it, so I said ‘that was neat’ and never ate there again
16. The time I took a photo of a big old raven sitting on the crucifix on top of the old town church cause it was the most goth thing I’d ever seen, right? But then it swooped down towards me, so I apologized immediately for being rude, and I felt a little silly for a while but the car that hit me on the way home didn’t even leave a bruise so idk be nice to birds
Sorry I know I bring this shit up a lot but sometimes im awake at night and I just. keep thinking
I think the secret to survival is to be good to animals, stay away from men, and say “no thanks” to everything else
This is Matrix in a matrix read this shit because it’s talking about how Bandersnatch can be used to create an even more complex user profile depending on how you interacted with the movie, what choices you picked, and how many times you went through a certain path….IM SHOOK
black mirror becomes its worst nightmare
are yall really.. surprised? this is no different than what they normally get just from what you watch, just on a larger scale. and besides yall act like this shit is gonna get you killed or something like.. what?? its not that deep god forbid they look at what you do on THEIR PLATFORM to bring u better content i-
You need to read the article because it explains how it’s a lot different from what they usually learn from your viewing habits and all the different and new applications they could use the interactive data for. Marveling at the advancements in technology and data collection and having apprehension about what such technology could do and be used for(because again the article talks about Netflix’s selling this advanced data to companies like google and Facebook) isn’t stupid. Like it’s not just about bringing a better product to you, of course everyone would love that, it’s just wild that we have gotten to the point where we are literally seeing the world depicted in sci-fi movies coming into reality.
This is a series of posters I made to show how our perception of Dinosaurs and other animals of the mesozoic changed over the years. These and few more are featured in a Youtube video you can watchHERE
this art is available for prints, t-shirts and other goodsHERE
when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.
it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.
the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.
there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.
now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.
as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:
here, also, is a comedy punch:
the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.
i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)
Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That
Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.
Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.
AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.
It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,
“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”
“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”
“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”
“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”
All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.
I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.
Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.
Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)
Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).
There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.”
Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I
t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.
Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.
And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.
Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.
Here’s another example of that.
Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.
The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.
Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.
Three things have changed:
1. Cameras have become much smaller.
2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.
3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.
The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.
It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.
Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.
I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.
Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.
The cameras they were using back in the 1940s-1970s were enormous and heavy. Moving them was a chore, and you had to have track built to move a camera that big. Getting the camera in close to the subject was very difficult.
It was the arrival of the Steadicam in the 1970s that started to change everything. You could hook the camera to an individual person using a harness. For the first time the camera was liberated. Think of the walk & talks on “The West Wing” - that would not have been technologically possible in earlier film and television.
Also filming through the 1950s was mostly done on sets. A few directors like John Ford would go shoot on location for parts of their movies, but most films were made on sets because it was cheaper and easier. When the studio system began to break down in the 1960s, and cameras started becoming lighter, you saw a shift to location shooting, which reduced the proscenium staging of older movies.
ALSO, going back to how they just Talked like that in movies in the 30s and 40s. That weird accent, kind of British, but not. Think Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. It was a specifically created form of speech, created by Edith Skinner, for performers and public speakers, as the ELEGANT way For Important People to talk. It was called the Skinner Dialect, and in classical acting training FOR YEARS, it was mandatory. Which is why you see it in such bastions of the golden era of cinema, like cary grant and katherine Hepburn. It was also how your tutors taught your rich well educated babies to speak, especially in the new England states. IN FACT: the sort of “no accent” accent that most newscasters have is a watered down descendant of the Skinber Dialect.
2) why does he look like mustacheod Mads Mikkelson
III) what is happen
?) ARE THEY BOYFRIENDS?????
AHEM! *dons his lore cape*
This is Biggs Darklighter, Luke’s best buddy growing up on Tatooine. There was a big chunk of story cut from A New Hope where Luke looks up at the sky, sees the Star Destroyer and Princess Leia’s ship shooting at each other in orbit, and jumps in his landspeeder to tell his friends like an excited puppy.
He arrives at Tosche Station (from the infamous line “But I was gonna go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!”) and is surprised to find Biggs there, who had just gotten his certification from the Imperial Academy (mentioned in the line “That’s what you said when Biggs and Tank left” when Luke was trying to coax Uncle Owen into applying). Luke drags everyone outside to look but by that time the two ships have stopped shooting, so they write it off as Excitable Dumbass Luke getting his dumb hopes up again and go back inside.
It’s worth noting that Biggs takes the first look through Luke’s binoculars and says it’s probably just a freighter refueling. Having been to the Imperial Academy he’d know damn well what a Star Destroyer looks like and that having one in orbit over Tatooine means Srs Bsns is afoot. But he doesn’t mention this and lies, probably in an effort to keep Luke from going “ZOMG ADVENTURE!” and trying to get involved.
When everyone else inside, Biggs and Luke go for a walk and Biggs lets Luke in on a secret: he and a bunch of other Academy grads are going to mutiny and defect to the Rebel Alliance the first chance they get. Luke basically goes “GEE WHIZ!” and Biggs shuts him up. He explains that this is stupidly dangerous and is going to make him a wanted man if he survives, so this is the last time the two are probably ever going to see each other. Luke still doesn’t Get It yet and is mostly envious of all the excitement and adventure Biggs is about to embark on.
Fast forward past: Luke discovering real and innocent people get murdered by the Empire (courtesy of Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru’s smoking remains), finding out that dashing rogues can really just be selfish, trigger-happy assholes thanks to Han Solo, and watching the man who opened his eyes to a bigger universe get killed by the monster who Luke thinks murdered his father. His boyish naivety has taken quite the beating. But as he gears up to help attack the Death Star, who should he run into but his best buddy Biggs! How bad can war be when your best friend is at your side?
… oh.
Biggs gave his life to protect Luke, physically blocking Vader from shooting his best friend for as long as he possibly could. Between that, the reassuring words of Obi-Wan, and the timely return of Han (who Chewie threatened to tear the arms off of if they didn’t go back), Luke learned a critical truth: the universe was a lot darker than he ever realized, but no matter what there is always hope.
Why the fuck did they cut that?
They cut it because the first cut of Star Wars was a hot mess and the first act needed to shed a lot of weight:
Stop motion from the 1970s. Ancient and all knowing in his jerky movements and wildly spinning.eyes. Orphaned under mysterious circumstances, raised by elves in the woods. Unfamiliar with human customs. Pure of heart.
6/10 Santas
2. Nightmare Before Christmas Santa
Needs a fucking vacation. Takes no shit. May never trust children again. Will bitch slap a skeleton if needed and invite his gf to tea.
11/10 Santas
3. Netflix’s Christmas Chronicles Santa (or, Kurt Russell Santa)
Potent sexual energy, more than any santa should ever have. Has the ugliest elves ever, all of them disturbing crosses of a cat, Gremlin, and rodent-like creature. Historically, if this santa doesn’t do his job, wars literally happen as a result (remember WWI? Apparently this guy didn’t finish his deliveries all 4 years). Does crime and kidnaps children and actually ends up in jail.
3/10 Santas
4. Rise of the Guardians Santa
The most powerful Santa, but also the most vulnerable. Can snap Kurt Russell Santa over his knee. Is Russian. Carries two literal scimitars to cut a bitch down to size. But must rely on children believing in him to stay alive.
10/10 Santas
5. Tim Allen Santa
The most lethal santa of all, murdered his way to the top. committed the egregious sin of being played by tim allen
That’s ONE millionaire. Imagine what all millionaires and billionaires could do for this country if they actually put their obscene wealth to practical use.
