Reblogged miyku
Reblogged patema-introverted
The explicitly pornographic ads paired with porn bans to appeal to advertisers is really aggravating, but I also want to take a moment to complain about really disgusting ads. Cartoon person with disturbingly photorealistic boils and shit, getting giant worms pulled out of their bodies, body horror shit like that. What the fuck is this supposed to be advertising? Why would you show this? Why can't I block it? It always pops up when I'm trying to eat, too. Why is this allowed? Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU
Reblogged blackholesandhyperfixations
why aren’t we in the bill and ted timeline? why are we not being excellent to each other and partying on? i want answers
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The reactionary backlash to media analysis is a natural part of the wider "fascists hate anything intellectual" phenomenon, btw.
Wanting you to ignore the politics of Star Wars comes from the same exact place that wants you to substitute the germ theory of disease with the 'sickness comes from failure to be a good christian and most people who claim to be sick are just faking anyway' myth.
To take a quote from Dan Olson:
They don't want these complexities to exist, and by talking about them, you make them exist. It's a form of magical thought. Talking about police brutality wills police brutality into existence. A disruption of the status quo is seen as a disruption of the natural order. The problem they see is that no-one has made those people shut up. That is what they want: someone to come in and make those people shut up and go away, to put things back "where they belong." [...] Their will is a hammer that they are using to beat reality itself into a shape of their choosing, a simple world where reality is exactly what it looks like through their eyes, devoid of complexity, devoid of change, where they are right and their enemies are silent. They are trying to build a flat earth.
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I don't love that every time a famous artist turns out to be a fucking disgusting piece of trash loser evil shitstain that everyone always scrambles to say WELL THEIR ART WAS ALWAYS MID AND BAD ANYWAY. like dude just reckon with the fact you can't judge someone's moral fiber based on the art they make or the clothes they wear or the way they speak or fucking anything anything at all
said it before and i'll say it again: this behavior is victim blaming under the thinnest coat of weakass paint
it's "I saw it coming a mile away, why didn't you?"
Sometimes bad people make good art, sometimes very good people make absolutely dogshit art. In order to live in the world, we have to learn to reconcile those things.
There is no magic that makes a good artist a good person, just the same as there is no piece of art so good that it can turn a person from an abuser to an angel. Plenty of Nazis grew up shouting along to Rage Against The Machine, and some of the kindest people you may ever meet can have been raised on conservative talk radio and megachurch media. People are complicated.
Reblogged patema-introverted
holyyy shit Nolan's Odyssey looks bad as fuck. So bad it's almost comical. Has this man ever seen the Mediterranean? Or at least a picture of it? Does he perhaps simply hate the very concepts of colour and saturation? Why does this look like it's Vikings but with excruciatingly awful helmets? THOSE ARMORS?
I have to rant AGAIN because it's making me so mad haha I've been to Ithaca on a sailboat once, it was many years ago but the sea when you're sailing on a small-ish boat is something I will never forget: it's unfathomably, blindingly blue; then at dawn and dusk it looks like quicksilver, this infinite moving mass stretching as far as the eye can see. It's the most beautiful thing. It's frightening. It's the perfect subject to build a a visual poetic from. It can contain everything.
But I guess for Nolan the struggle of Man can only be portrayed or represented in the color grading one would use to replicate Manchester, as he is a SERIOUS director making a SERIOUS movie about serious men and DIRT is the colour of serious manly men or something like that so
my ex was a CGI artist on this film and told me the lead costume designer used ChatGPT to design the costumes so I'm gonna boycott this movie for that reason alone if nothing else!
@elf-trash oh my god I was bitching about the armor design and how odd it all looks to friends and I quite literally said
So this proves that GenAI is truly revolutionary! For example, before it was invented, we could not have armor that can inflict psychic damage when you look at it
you guys are aware that he's not making a fucking documentary about ancient greece right? costumes exist to tell a story, not to serve as museum exhibits to teach you about history? is it possible that he's using dark, sad colors to tell a story about a man who keeps being separated from his family for a fucking reason???? i'm sorry that this movie isn't going to be like, smart kid's guide to ancient greece or fucking whatever
Oh no you don't say! Yeah I'm so dumbdumb :( a real dumb fuck! I need dark colours to understand when the director is trying to portray angst and torment and homesickness. I am visually illiterate, I would not understand otherwise, themes are just lost on me if anything on the screen is not in a shade of brown! And the Odyssey really needed to be made a more universal tale by this incredible genial vision and daring stylistic choice noone has done before, it wasn't enough of a universal tale without removing every trace of its cultural heritage :(
bruh i'm not even saying that dark colors are the only choice to portray these moods or even that you have to like them or that i like them, but the idea that this is not a valid choice because it's not accurate to what the Mediterranean landscape looks like or what historical armor looks like is patently silly and zooms right past the fact that the director's prerogative is to tell the story he wants to tell, not produce a historical document. that is what a movie is. one may note that matt damon was not present at the sacking of troy in real life. homer did not have access to an imax camera. what do you think a movie is for?
could there in fact be utility in the idea that the costume designer prioritized instant legibility for audiences, creating costumes that iterate on other hollywood depictions of ancient greek stories rather than reality, in order to immediately establish a groundwork for audiences so that they can better understand the world they are in and the story that world was built to tell them? or is it easier just to be like boo no it's brown fuck you
Yes great essay, have you considered that what is being contested is exactly that so far it seems to be failing catastrophically at all of that, as the place where the story is supposed to be set is all but unrecognisable, or do you seriously think we just hate the color brown
right so the place where the story is set is not real. even if greece is a real place and there is really a Mediterranean on our earth, this movie is set in an entirely constructed landscape designed to express an idea. it is not a historical nor a contemporary travelog. it is a movie
So according to you the costume designer iterated (or tried to do so) on previous representations of greek armor to favour the instant legibility of a certain setting and world for a story that you now claim is not meant to be set in Greece at all, but rather in a "constructed landscape" that is supposed to convey "an idea" (what idea? And which setting then?!) - which, breaking news, is what everything does whether by choice or accident, visual semiotics, yadda yadda, all that boring shit /s. Since the movie is called Odyssey, we can assume that the context we can use as framework for interpretation is that of the Odyssey, which is the whole point of making a movie called the Odyssey, with some vague Greek visual signifiers, about...Odysseus, and not the story of some man that goes through something that mirrors Odysseus without being Odysseus. Since it is universally known that the Odyssey is set in a real geographical region and you can visit the places that might have inspired some of its episodes irl, forgive us plebs for finding many choices as bizarre and puzzling as it would be to film an episode from the Ragnarok using the notorious Mexico filter on every scene.
So is it Greece? Then why does it look like Not Greece? Is it not? Then why use some half baked visual signifiers of Greece? Would 'the idea' be lessened by using correct cultural markers in Nolan's opinion? How so?
The choice to replace or hybridise these signifiers with other signifiers - what cultural background are these new aesthetic signifiers from? What is their meaning? What meaning do they take on in juxtaposition with each other and in the context of the whole operation? What cultural meaning does it all have in the end? Does it seem to make sense?
Are we running with the idea that the gods aren't real? Then why is there batman? Doesn't this premise imply more realism and adherence to history if anything? If it's all some psychological portrayal, is it specifically tailored to the anglo-american cultural and visual codexes then? Is this why Matt Damon is the protagonist? Why colour or decoration are equaled to a lack of seriousness and must not be present? How would such a movie and retelling be culturally relevant in a significant way nowadays?
Which brings back to why use any (poorly executed) resemblance of greekness at all - oh right, because it is a greek tale and a cultural cornerstone at that, and tales are shaped by the cultures that created them, so much so that entire passages would be unintelligible without that context: a context that is embodied in places, sounds, in the material culture, in the web of meanings the tale contains and the one it created; its historical survival both as heritage and something that is subject to re-elaboration in time.
You really can't do anything decent with it without this awareness and the effort to understand it, you also can't throw this all away and superimpose your very culturally charged "vision" without , at least, having to commit to the harder, riskier, less ' hollywood blockbuster ' task of an actual radically transformative retelling, and to commit fully. I'm not saying you must be Joyce, but a thimble wouldn't hurt.
The trailer makes it feel like he tried to do both THE Odyssey and a retelling and got none, and this is why everything seems out of place and vaguely incoherent. Maybe it's just the worst trailer ever and fails at its job of vaguely telling me what the hell he was thinking.
'it's not that deep' - yeah probably, so I can just say it looks like shit and walk away! It's my worthless opinion. But since Nolan definitely wants to be taken seriously and not as some run of the mill entertainment cinema director, I will dissect this shit for fun; if we're employing structuralist sounding terms, then let's commit to the bit, even of we're on Tumblr.com
Reblogged tbposting
I love the amount of hatred the 2021 car is drawn with. because I agree
Reblogged patema-introverted
the christian veneration of the lamb has always been terrifying to me in ways i can’t explain
here’s this figure that is vulnerable and easily abused and what’s admirable about it is that it doesn’t fight back and it doesn’t try to defend itself and it’s suffering is noble because it just sits there and takes it. pain is beautiful when you surrender to pain, suffering is godly when you don’t question or try to protect yourself and survival is ugly… like it is just me or is anybody else’s fucking skin crawling rn!!
Reblogged tbposting
If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.
Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn't said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.
Reblogged hailstonenumbers
I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.
And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There's no new study that shows that it's unsafe, there's no replacement that's better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.
Reblogged blackholesandhyperfixations
