The Meg (2018) is really fun. I didn’t talk about it much after I saw it in theaters, so here are some thoughts from my blu-ray viewing.
I love that the shark isn’t just a giant white shark- they made it unique, a kaiju shark. Gave it grizzly mottled brown skin. Extra gills. Jiggly. Really agile and ferocious too.
I like that there’s no real human antagonist. Even Rainn Wilson’s character, the greedy cowardly business man prioritizes human lives over making money. The movie shoves aside the human conflicts so the cast can focus on the big conflict: the bigass shark. Gives the team a real sense of unity and the human squabbles don’t detract from the sharks threat. Lets the shark be the antagonist.
I also like the characters in general. The cast is made up of these huge personalities. Especially Statham who is finally allowed to be something that’s not mean muscle man. I really like that he doesn’t get back with his ex-wife AND that she doesn’t interfere with the budding romance between Statham and Bingbing. I really love the bond between the three Zhangs too, father to daughter to granddaughter.
Something I love about science fiction (and horror) is that because they aren’t considered “academic genres” they aren’t taken quite as seriously by professional critics. Because of this, they’re free to experiment with social dynamics without much worry of social backlash because most people already write it off as a dumb sci fi movie about a big shark. (Though I wish that would change. Sci-fi especially is such a magnificent media for complex story telling.)
The romance subplot, the 50% POC cast including a WOC lead who is (to my admittedly untrained eye) treated with respect, an interracial couple, so much Chinese dialogue… A lot of this was probably demanded by the Wanda producers to help the film in the Chinese market, but honestly this film does a lot that other films don’t have the gumption to do.
The Meg isn’t the shining perfect movie of 2018 but its definitely a movie I kind’ve love. I’m glad I bought it on bluray, if for no other reason that to have a new, serious shark attack movie.
Serious here meaning its not a ducking sci fi original like Ghost Sharknado 7: this one has the Ghost of Kurt Cobaine fighting Cobra Commando
if u kill a bug that’s cool, i kill bugs all the time, but if a person says, “hey, i am going to be upset if you kill that bug, please let me take it outside,” and u respond by killing the bug just to hurt and ridicule them, i’ve got some bad news for you
ur a fucking asshole
this is it. this is the most controversial post i’ve ever made on tumblr dot com. i’m getting actual hate for this. people are arguing with this.
literally all i said was “don’t be purposefully malicious to hurt another person’s feelings, because if you do, that person will think you’re an asshole.” this is some grade school shit right here. this is kindergarten. god, this is pre-school. if you’re purposefully mean to people? you’re an asshole. you’re the bad guy. i get that you think you’re edgy and interesting, but actually you’re the most boring person on the planet.
i fucking hate all of you. you think you’re intellectually superior because you’re rude, but actually, you’re just rude. congratulations on letting everyone know that you’re a rude annoying asshole. god. you’re all four years old. i literally feel like i’m explaining the concept of ‘bullying’ to a class of four year olds right now.
“Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil’s rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355.”
You know what pisses me off about every adaptation and reference to The Shadow Over Innsmouth?
They all involve the horror of ‘Dirty sub-humans want to fuck our women,’ but that wasn’t even in the original Lovecraft.
Like, I freely acknowledge that Lovecraft was a screaming racist, but the whole ‘They are preying on our women’ aspect is an interpolation by later authors! The only two relationships with Deep Ones mentioned in any detail, the Narrator’s ancestors and Zadok Allen’s refusal to take a fish wife) are both human man and Deep One woman! The misogyny is from later authors.
Also, the borderline blackface interpretation of various cover illustrations is also the work of artists not reading the text, as Lovecraft specifically mentions that the ‘Innsmouth look’ doesn’t resemble any known human ethnicity, and they were probably Welsh stand ins…
You have to work pretty hard to ADD bigotry to Lovecraft, ffs. His works are riddled with racism and xenophobia, and people go out of their way to make it worse.
I’ve actually been thinking similar things for years, about the “want our women”, and why I was so dissapointed in Cthulhutech (you know, even before all the other messe)
I sadly never realized the correlation with “blackface” being from later artists.
Howveer, looking around the net, I’ve found edits of “postmortem photos” (photos taken of posed corpses, which used to be athing) to possbily be a better source of inspiration for visualizing the look.
Conspiracy theory: the reason the tone of Andrew Hussie’s communications following the Viz buyout have been so drastically different is that he didn’t just sell the rights to Homestuck: he also sold the rights to the identity of Andrew Hussie. The “Andrew Hussie” we’ve been hearing from since October of 2017 is a character played by a paid actor, while the original Andrew Hussie – deprived of his legal name – is bussing tables in Atlantic City under the assumed identity of a French-Canadian expatriate who suffered total retrograde amnesia following a catastrophic head injury in early 2009.
One of my hobbies is to read the meta of a fandom and see how far off my idea of the source material is once I get around to actually experiencing it.
In the case of Homestruck, it’s taking a while cause I haven’t yet articulated any idea of what Homestruck actually is.
I love Christmas episodes of tokusatsu! Last year, I did a writeup of the the Christmas episode of my favorite Super Sentai series, Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. This year, I wanted to do another and sort of start a tradition of doing a fun little review of weird Holiday episodes. I think I found the perfect one.
First, a bit of setup before we get into the episode proper. Space Sheriff Shaider is the third show in the Metal Heroes series, it is also the third and last of the Space Sheriff series following both Space Sheriff Gavan from 1982 and Space Sheriff Sharivan from 1983. It tells the tale of intergalactic lawman Shaider (real name Dai Sawamura) and his partner Annie as they attempt to thwart the evil ambitions of the Fushigi World Fuuma, an evil cult that worships the giant Golden Head of Great Emperor Kublai.
These guys.
As in most tokusatsu shows, the Fuuma go about their business by creating a monster to carry out their wicked plans. In Shaider, these monsters of the week come from an egg created by an energy orb spit out by the head on a wall that leads the villains that then falls into a small pool of blood before emerging as an egg that hatches into the monster of the week.
I’ve begun referring to this weekly plot device as the Incredible Inevitable Egg (and if you get that reference you know some old advertisements like I do).
In episode 29, The monster of the week is this guy, SataSata who is created to use the joyous holiday season to warp and corrupt the children of Japan.
Of course he can’t go around looking like a fanged monster, nope, he needs to take on a more ‘normal form’ so he become Satan Claus the Black Santa!
And what does Satan Claus do? Let’s let the giant head explain.
Cut to our heroes, who are helping a pet store owner get ready to deliver presents to a bunch of his clients. Um… why are they wrapping up live animals and sticking them in a sack?! That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me!
Shaider gets asked to help deliver one special present (a finch in a cage) to a pair of kids but he has to do it in properly Santaesque fashion. Apparently Japanese Santa doesn’t use the chimney and just comes in through any available window.
Yeah, hiring strange men to walk into your children’s’ room to leave presents sound totally safe and legit! Oh well, it could be worse and it gets worse. As soon as Shaider leaves the cage, Satan Claus makes his move and brings his true gift… a really bad LSD Trip!
No, he actually swaps out the kids’ finch for a cage full of Fuuma monsters. His intent is to turn all of the kids in Japan against the real Santa by giving them crappy, scary gifts. I bet these days doing that would just get him a massive merchandising deal with Hot Topic.
Somehow this works and the kids gather to commiserate while Shaider’s pet store owner friend complains he’s ruined because now he has to give refunds to all of his customers for the bad gifts. Or maybe the pets just died because you wrapped them in packages without air holes you dork!
The children who now aren’t so thrilled with Santa hear strange music and see cloaked figures in black dancing.
Entranced by the music, they fall into line and are soon lead to the a strange altar in the woods where Satan Claus is holding some kind of a religious service.
Oh God, is that a Santa Claus crucified upside down?!
Um…. yes. Yes, it is. Wow, here I thought Santa was supposed to be Saint Nicholas, not Saint Peter. Japanese kids’ shows, traumatizing the youth since at least 1971!
The ceremony goes on with the kids joining a weird, haunting chorus and being turned into black clad, facelessly masked figures as well. Fortunately, Shaider arrives to break up the party and rescues the kids! The next morning he even returns them to their families.
Only it’s all part of Satan Claus’ plot and the kids, with no memory of their parents, turn into black-clad cultists once more and gather in swarms to cause mayhem and destroy things!
This, of course leads to the final battle between Shaider and SataSata who sheds his Satan Claus disguise to utilize his full, monstrous powers in taking on the lawman.
This being Space Sheriff Shaider’s show and not Fushigi Monster Satan Claus the series (which I would totally watch!), the outcome is pretty inevitable and the evil Santa impostor is destroyed!
All of the children are saved and returned to normal. They then gather on the steps of a Church clad in white and sing an actually rather beautiful version of ‘Joy to the World’ in Japanese.
Thank you Space Sheriff Shaider! Thank you Annie! Christmas is saved and we’ll be sending the producers of your show the therapy bills for our children!
As far as WEIRD Christmas episodes go, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat. I’ve never seen anything so dark come out of a Holiday offering that wasn’t intended for adults. The villainous plot was a glorious twisted perversion of the holidays with some hopefully unintentionally borderline blasphemous imagery for any Christian viewers. Had this been on American TV, I can see a massive backlash.
Thank Great Emperor Kublai it wasn’t!
This is actually the first episode of Space Sheriff Shaider I have ever seen. Now, I want more. If any of the other episodes have this kind of out-there feel and look to them, I have to see them for myself!
Before I go, one more shot of that messed up Satan Claus ritual scene. Seriously… I might make this my Christmas Card next year for my weirder friends.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
Reblogging this and being very sad because I lost my copy of this episode and I can’t seem to get it back. For a while, this was my go to Christmas episode to weird people out with.
I always knew AfterEllen.com was cryptoTERF trash but looks like they’re really showing where they stand now.
I don’t know how long this has been in the works but the last week of their Twitter profile is enough:
As well as supporting meghan murphy they are really pushing the idea of trans women as male predators. Miranda Yardley is an English trans woman who repeats TERF talking points for them and was very well received for opposing updating the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. The reference to Stonewall UK also suggests that the new staff are completely in bed with English TERFs, who have links to US Evangelical funding.
Stop supporting After Ellen, the name has essentially been bought out to promote a fascist agenda which wants to remove all trans people from existence and then work on doing the same to the rest of the LGBT community (whether individual contributors admit it or not).
Concept: vampire overlord proves unable to stamp out concept of religion, falls back on engineering society so that all accepted holy symbols are incredibly inconvenient to wield.
no tiny crucifixes allowed, the only accepted depictions of the cross are the life sized ones you can actually kill someone on
Monsters and Stuff 