Cats are like “I know a place” and then take you the scenic route to their food bowl
“Being able to speak freely is the lifeblood of love.” — Satoshi Kon youtube.com/@honeycuttvideos
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Cats are like “I know a place” and then take you the scenic route to their food bowl
Between Bidens cognitive decline and Trumps chronic venous insufficiency, we need to have a serious discussion about never voting for an 70+ year old president again.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer season four and Angel season five are some of the best media that stands in opposition to Marvel’s stance on intelligence agencies and institutions in general.
I’m going to talk about Far From Home later in this thread, but first I want to talk briefly about why the glamorization of the surveillance state in the Avengers movie is the result of Marvel’s goals, not Joss Whedon’s.
please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please
here's the thing, don't feel bad about enjoying this moment because if he is still alive, he is now watching literally the entirety of the english speaking globe celebrating and laughing at the thought of him dying, and THAT is worth it alone
DENNIS MUREN AND JOHN KNOLL ARE BEING EDITED TO DO A RASHOMON OVER WHETHER OR NOT THEY TRICKED GEORGE INTO MAKING JAR JAR BINKS COMPLETELY CGI
It’s sooooo satisfying to hear John Knoll and Doug Chiang recount that infamous storyboard meeting and corroborate my exact assessment of it, which flatly contradicts Mike Stoklasa’s interpetation, oh my god!
I spent a good bit of time in my first Star Wars video documenting his strengths, but like, watch S2E1 and you’ll see footage of him being the strongest voice of reason in the room in footage of the SAME INTERVIEWS that Stoklasa and Jessie Gender and other folks use when calling him a “yes man!”
McCallum was willing to be as strong-willed as needed when dealing with people and doing whatever was needed to keep the productions as cost-effective. He was the complete antithesis of Gary Kurtz — which is why some OT fans think so little of him.
Started season two of Light and Magic and it’s sooooo gratifying to see the positivity for Rick McCallum. He earned a reputation for being a “1,000 pound gorilla” as one person puts it, and was absolutely ruthless about being economically-minded as the producer of the prequels.
They’ve collaborated on quite a few MCU flicks, but funnily enough they didn’t sponsor the first Avengers movie. It’s immensely funny to me that they had more creative control on Beer Bad than they did on Avengers 😂
Bad news, folks…
It’s been brought to my attention that my suggesting that the MCU has any connection to the military industrial complex is “tin foil hat shit.” So to avoid the risk of misleading anyone, I’ll rewatch a few of the movies to see if I truly am wrong. I’ll start with Iron Man and Captain America.
Everyone who attends this “Wizard of Oz in the Sphere” shit should be embarrassed. Genuinely, it should come with a huge aura of cringe and shame.
Singers don’t make diss tracks like “Fourth Time Around” anymore.
I’ll never not be angry that they took the most visibly working class superhero and turned him into a billionaire’s pet violent union buster
Oh yeah, gonna rant about that in a bit when I talk about Far From Home
Evergreen
It’s become so widely accepted by the public that I basically never see people talk about it in reviews of these movies. Make no mistake about it. One of the most damaging effects of the MCU project has been desensitizing mass audiences to invasions of their own civil liberties.
Tony Stark’s and SHIELD’s surveillance tech is basically a 1:1 fictional version of what Edward Snowden blew the whistle on in 2013, and yet four years after that, Spider-Man is using this technology on the regular, without any moral quandries at all.
Then just a few years later in 2012, SHIELD is casually spying on any computer or phone that’s connected to the internet to find and apprehend an alien. And there’s no discussion whatsoever about what a massive violation of privacy this is.
Batman says he’s not the hero his city deserves. But what kind of hero DO we deserve?
The audience is encouraged to consider what it says about our culture that we would even consider this as a necessary evil* for the greater good. *😉
Lucius: “Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.” “This is too much power for one person.” “Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.”
When Batman used surveillance technology in The Dark Knight, it was explicitly framed as wrong. Lucius Fox calls it unethical and resigns from Wayne Enterprises after being strong-armed into using it.
It’s actually kind of majorly frightening to observe how quickly the MCU was able to desensitize audiences to the surveillance state.
Bro made nearly a hundred million dollars from Avatar 2 www.businessinsider.com/james-camero...
Compare Spider-Man 3 to Spider-Man: No Way Home, and answer for yourself which one's special effects will age the best when we're as removed from No Way Home as we are from Spider-Man 3.
Adherence to these principles is why series like Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy and the Star Wars prequels largely remain the gold standard for modern VFX-heavy blockbuster production.
These are variants of the same principles that apply to good leadership in any field, but we often fail to recognize that when talking about the VFX industry, because most people don't understand the details of what work the artists do.
Ask most VFX artists what the key tenets are to making great VFX at a reasonable cost, and they generally speak of the same things: shot design, good communication, adhering to a clear vision for the movie, and reasonable workload in relation to the production's timeline and budget.
More broadly, VFX bloat is at least 90% a result of poor planning, poor management , and execs/leads generallu treating artists and studios like a black box they email to receive infinite executions, revisions and costly minor variations around the clock and on demand
Aunt May finds out Peter is Spider-Man because he... forgot to close the door to his room before putting it on. What a genius. I can't believe he wasn't accepted to MIT.
Adrian (cont.): "We build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything, but they don’t care about us. We have to pick up after ‘em. We have to eat their table scraps. That’s how it is. I know you know what I’m talking about, Peter." Peter: "Why are you telling me this? r/whoosh
Adrian: "How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower? Or any of his little toys? Those people, Pete, those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me, they don’t care about us."
Peter doesn't see Tony Stark as the civil liberties-violating monster that he is even after Tony flat admits that he installed surveillance technology into Peter's suit that allows him to monitor Peter's every move. Again, the reason why Peter still idolizes Tony after this is because he's stupid.
And just to be as clear as possible in regards to my "idiot plot" criticism, I do think that prioritizing a bank's money in situations like this is a sign of unintelligence.
In Homecoming, we have no clue what the bad guys need money for, but Spider-Man demolishes several buildings and his favorite bodega to protect *checks notes* a bank.
The audience was encouraged to reconcile with the irony that Peter had to protect the civilians in the bank AND try to stop Octavius from stealing their money, right after that very bank denied Aunt May a loan to refinance her house.
In Spider-Man 2's bank robbery sequence, Octavius incites the conflict by putting civilians in harm's way. And he was stealing money to rebuild a machine that would destroy half of New York.
Shortly after this, he sees some people trying to rob an ATM, and escalates the situation to the point that he causes a city block to blow up.
And if you think that the film is intentionally trying to portray Spidey as flawed here for these errors, put a pin in that. We'll get back to it in No Way Home.
Spidey's first big "hero" montage in Homecoming consists of him roughing up someone for stealing a bike, but has zero plans to find the owner. He beats up a guy for seemingly trying to break into a car, not realizing that it's the guy's own car.
Every major action Peter takes in Homecoming is motivated by his belief that Tony Stark, a tech bro billionaire, actually cares about him.
All three of the MCU Spider-Man movies suffer from really, really bad cases of idiot plot. Starting with Homecoming 🧵
Listen, if the team of racist hicks that still does the tomahawk chop wants to set themselves up for catastrophic failure and further damage their reputation with terrible tactical decisions, I say let them!
This is the original skeet, which OP disconnected: bsky.app/profile/cine...
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Indeed they don’t
God, the Red Letter Media guys are such scumbags
And honestly, I find that pathetic. I already don't think highly of Stoklasa, but deliberately altering someone else's video like this just to make their defense of the prequels seem slightly less credible is a new low for him.
So I actually don't blame Ant for missing the context that made it harder to tell this part was a joke. Stoklasa deliberately made it more difficult for Ant and anyone else in the audience to figure that out.
Stoklasa didn't just misunderstand that SWI66S was doing the same bit as him. He altered the onscreen footage to remove the visuals that would help signal to the viewer that SWI66S was mispronouncing it on purpose for comedy.
Now here's the clip from SWI66S original video, "The Romance of the Prequels Is Good, Actually." Notice the difference? He cuts from the Wikipedia page to stills of cartoon characters that visually match each syllable of his mispronunciation. Timestamp is 1:54. youtu.be/4hhfEzgfvZ8?...
Here's the clip from Stoklasa's vid. When SWI66S says "oh-eddie-pus," what's on screen is just the Wikipedia page on the Oedipus complex. Here's the link to Stoklasa's video if you want to check yourself. The timestamp is 4:44. youtu.be/0xeMak4RqJA?...
So actually, on the topic of the visuals being shown when SWI66S says "oh-eddie-pus," I went back and watched both Stoklasa's and Star Wars In 66 Seconds' videos again, and folks, it's so much more dishonest than I originally thought 🧵
Watches Spock die and processes his final words, struggles to maintain his composure while giving a beautiful eulogy at the memorial, connects with his son for the first time and discusses how he’d never faced death until now, and then remembers the wisdom that Spock was giving him on his birthday.
I guess YMMV on what you consider “realistic,” but if we’re talking about realism as a synonym for believability — in that how a character expresses grief is realistic to what we understand about them — I’m unsure what, if anything, is unbelievable about how Kirk grieves Spock’s death in TWOK.
An oh-eddie-pus complex? They gave him an oh-eddie-pus complex? They had the BALLS to give one of the greatest movie villains of all time an OH-EDDIE-PUS COMPLEX!?
Because I can’t think of any other reason why that’s worth this much derision, but pronouncing protagonist as “proda-GON-ess” is fair game.
So dumb, in fact, that can’t even pronounce “Oedipus.” Stands to reason, eh? I have to believe that he and everyone else in RLM’s comments section who is complaining about this just really don’t remember the Plinkett reviews all that specifically.
He says “Just remember, next time you’re online, and you’re arguing with someone on Reddit or whatever, and they say ‘Oh, the Star Wars prequels are so good 🤓’ just remember, oh-eddie-pus.” The implication being that those who appreciate the PT because of their mythological underpinningd are dumb.
At 58:15 in this this Ant guy’s video, he starts crashing out about Star Wars In 66 Seconds’ “oh-eddie-pus” pronunciation joke. I still don’t get why everyone is missing that it’s riffing on Plinkett himself mispronouncing words on purpose.
That’s a great phrase there, imma steal that
The kind of quest that Rey, Finn, and Poe go on together, you mean? That that would have been part of Lucas’ early ideas for TFA?
AND she actually started her own fire, while Jake needed a shitty refabrication of the Yoda puppet to do it for him!
And she doesn’t just renounce the Jedi out of misplaced fear of her own proximity to the dark side, as Jake did (if you steelman RJ’s film). She was brought to that place by actually doing what Jake only imagined himself doing: murdering Kyle.
6. One more thing I love about TROS is how Rey basically goes through the same arc Jake takes the entirety of TLJ to go through, but in a single scene. Further calling attention to how much of TLJ was pointless filler.
These have been five incredibly important things I learned from my least favorite Star War, and I find them to be very positive takeaways.
5. And lastly, I like how the films showed that you can plagiarize the iconography of Lucas’ films all you want, but if you can’t match the quality of his scriptwriting and directing, some people in the audience will walk out with a sick, empty feeling inside.
I like how moments like this reveal how self-conscious Abrams is as a director in comparison to Lucas, since that principle of “If it’s amazing, they’ll know” clearly isn’t at play in Abrams’ style. It really shows how little faith he has in his audience.
4. Iain McCaig, a concept artist for the prequels, once said that Lucas told him, “I don't want something to be special because of how it's filmed, but because of what it is. Just put the camera on it and let it play out in front of the audience. If it's amazing, they'll know.”
3. I like how the movies reveal how much imagination and creativity there was in Lucas’ saga by taking us back to Mustafar and showing us how Abrams and co. envisioned this iconic world. That they did this right at the start of the movie is just the icing on the cake.
2. I like how the heroes spend most of the movie together, as a team, on a grand team-building adventure… for the first time in the entire trilogy. It really highlights how little focus the entire trilogy has on actually developing these characters and getting the audience to care about their bond
That would the the first place that anyone with a working brain would think to look, making everyone in the film look absolutely idiotic for not thinking of it. This can help us understand how important it is to not waste the audience’s time when you’re telling a story.
1. I like how an hour and a half of the movie is spent traveling from planet to planet trying to find a clue to a dagger that has the coordinates to a mysterious triangle that will lead the heroes to Sheev… and they find the triangle in Sheev’s office.
And if a frog had wings…
The way every single one of them is hotter than Sydney Sweeney lmaooo
Tiny brain: Lucas was doing Kurosawa and westerns Big Brain: Lucas was doing Flash Gordon Giant Brain: Lucas was doing Vietnam and Nixon Galaxy Brain: The emperor is the Wizard, C-3PO is literally a tin man. Chewbacca is the lion and ewoks might as well have been singing Ding Dong The Witch is Dead
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"Nebula Original" is such a cursed pair of words
So I’ll be interested to see if there’s a correlation between a YouTuber-turned-filmmaker gaining some more humility and actually making a good movie.
That’s part of why I’m curious about Chris Stuckmann’s “Shelby Oaks.” He was one of the loudest RLM copycats ten years ago, but has since mellowed out quite a bit and softened up on the prequels in particular.
The greatest video essay ever made, Jessie and Aranock’s “Decaying Monomyth of Star Wars,” includes the claim that the prequels have “unnecessary usage of CGI.” Their own video has, by Aranock’s count, 17 minutes of animation.
There’s quite a few cases of YouTube video essayists who are aspiring filmmakers, and who also make video essays bashing George Lucas’ films and claim to know more about filmmaking than he does. And their films always prove them wrong.
We're at the point where it is a news story that a company which sells articles of clothing is not refusing to cater to certain categories of people who need those articles of clothing. The transphobic moral panic not just evil, it is objectively insane.
“Without mitochondria, life could not exist. When you learn to quiet your mind, you will hear them speaking to you.”
Genuinely what the hell is wrong with Sam Altman? Like as a person? The blatant disregard for human life is astounding.
Mikes prequel punditry is interesting with 15+ years of hindsight. First he tried to ignore it (Jim Raynor) Next he suggested it was a corporate psyop (Ring Theory) And now he’s suggesting it’s people not interrogating their preferences (Essays) It gets to a certain point lol.
I think this is my worst spelling error yet. I’m an embarrassment.
“Was Joseph Campbell’s mentee.”
Typo. I meant “Joseph Campbell’s mentee” or “was mentored by Joseph Campbell.”
I want you to tell me who the main character of Avatar The Last Airbender is. I can tell you it's not Katara, 'cause she is just some boring Waterbender. Now you might think it's Aang, but we don't meet him until 5 minutes into the first episode.
DM me at any point if you want to chat about them or such. I'm always glad to help contribute toward positive shifts in the fandom
Sure thing, here we are!! There's a lot I'm critical of in this video nowadays and would do differently now (that's the case with a lot of my work), but even so, a lot of folks responded positively to it and appreciated what I had to share. youtu.be/OkW035f_hZ8?...
Have you seen the vid I made on them last year? Only asking because in case you haven't, I'd be glad to link it for you if it might help you in your process of making your vid!!
Precisely, and all the more critical reviews I read of Weathering said that they didn't like it quite as much as the director's prior film, Your Name. And then I watched that one, loved it, and picked up on a lot of the DNA he took from that one into Weathering.
A major reason for the backlash is because a lot of fans went into the theater expecting a Hollywood blockbuster, forgetting that the writer-director is an indie filmmaker who never wanted anything to do with Hollywood, and was only begrudgingly including things like characters and plot.