BLUESNARK

Chris Evans: *likes his own tweet*

Portrait of a Young Woman, Jean-Etienne Liotard 

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

Or…

The corrosion on this water tap looks like a map

This spectrum of eggs from my mom’s chickens.

The chain of Starburst wrappers I’ve been building for three years

My friend’s smoked cauliflower looks like an explosion.

I took a photograph at the exact same time this photographer took hers - and caught her flash lightning the scene.

Fan looks like it’s missing a blade

My friend’s cat was recently put down, and the vet gave him this paw print of his cat that is full of flower seeds to be planted

This half dollar cut out by hand

The apple’s skin I cut looks like from a low-poly game

My friends bathroom is also the entrance to his basement

These horses have tail lights

This airport has free arcade games to help pass the time

My roommate painted ornaments of everyone in our house.

Photo I took of a lake through the lense of binoculars looks like a planet.

The snow/ice in this pic looks like the ocean

This can of paint looks like a cat.

This tiny plant growing in my car window

The pole in this picture makes it look like two different pictures.

The way this dead cactus decomposed, leaving only the spines behind

My mom found a baby owl on the porch behind the firewood

This moss covered boot found in the woods.

My school’s library has noise-level guides that change colour when it gets too loud

The way this snow stayed in place when the trunk was opened/closed

friend: actually yeah i would

me:

Being aware of our own indicators can give back a little control when our mental health feels all consuming. Preparing for a bad patch can feel like we’re ‘willing’ it to happen, but this isn’t the case. A list of steps to take, general care tips - lists can help when you’re not in the right frame of mind to think clearly.

In a recent interview with The Sunday Times, the actor was asked if it’s hard to be a man in Hollywood now due to the #MeToo movement, which has led to a broader reckoning against sexual misconduct. Plenty of actors have been asked something similar, and many have responded with statements that ended up necessitating apologies—from Matt Damon to Henry Cavill.

But Elba? He had this to say in response: “It’s only difficult if you’re a man with something to hide.”

Star Wars Role Reversal