meteorMedia

On the DVDs for S1, the order is: 1.) The Nigerian Job 2.) The Homecoming Job 3.) The Wedding Job 4.) The Snow Job 5.) The Mile High Job 6.) The Miracle Job 7.) The Two Horse Job 8.) The Bank Shot Job 9.) The Stork Job 10.) The Juror #6 Job 11.) The 12 Step Job 12.) The First David Job 13.) The Second David Job 

This is confirmed by John Rogers as the intended order.

THIS LITERALLY SOLVES HALF MY TROUBLES W SEASON ONE DEVELOPMENT ????

ALSO MAKES WAY MORE FUCKING SENSE FOR STERLING TO SHOW UP SO MUCH LATER

1. I was always confused by Sophie’s seemingly random meltdown over “where we’re at” in The Wedding Job. But Nate comes on REALLY strong in the first episode and it LOOKS like they’re going to get together right away, so it makes SENSE that she would demand some kind of definitive answer they’ve done a couple jobs together and don’t seem to be moving forward after all. It DOESN’T make sense if they go on for half a season before she does that.

2. The Two Horse Job is a WILD episode to have put so close to the beginning because it CHANGES THINGS. We suddenly have breaking news about both Nate and Eliot’s pasts, and we have our first real antagonist arrive on the scene. Both of these are things that SHOULD happen later on in the order. It makes no sense for it to go 1. Premiere 2. Regular Job 3. Job that turns everything on its head. We need a few more Regular Jobs before we can start to shake things up! Which is what THIS order does.

3. Oh right, also The Two Horse Job makes more sense later on because of the line about how Eliot’s found his family. Like sure the audience knows that’s what’s happening right from the beginning, but it’s a little weird for somebody to say to Eliot in Episode 3. Makes a lot more sense after half a season.

There are two different versions of the Nigerian job!!

The one that aired on television, which is significantly shorter and does not include the hospital scene, and the original which you will find on DVD’s (it’s like 10 minutes longer)

I got the original from the downloadinhd twitter account (thank you sm!!) and I have the television one as well.

Tagging a couple well known leverage blogs because idk if this is just a well known secret but I found out about it recently from my own rewatches + the commentary in the Nigerian Job

poem by Mikko Harvey

Zuko, trying not yell out of anger and confusion:

He actually can’t, at this point, fight without yelling if he’s using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he’s been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he’s drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven’t checked that personally but it does seem accurate.

Seems like something he must have picked up after his exile, but he’s so prideful and so obsessed with “proving himself” to Ozai, I can’t imagine he’d dare to experiment with that on his own. Maybe Iroh introduced it to him? Practicing sword forms or sparring would have been a good way for him to build back muscle after what had to be a long convalescence from the burn, but without the trauma of firebending again so soon.

https://www.tumblr.com/atlaculture/718240438095593472/cultural-weapons-fire-nation-swords-pt-2?source=share

The consequence of them basically being the McDonalds of swords is that they were popular with all different kinds of poor people. The most interesting ones being… theatre troupes! Because these swords were relatively affordable, they were often used for stage and street performances. (And because the tropes of theatre carry into modern cinema and TV, you also see the niuweidao overrepresented in most kung fu-inspired media as well.)

Anyways, I bring this up because Zuko is very much a theatre kid, so maybe his sword skills actually come from observing actors using the sword and imitating them? Better yet, maybe his mother secretly taught him to use the niuweidao to boost his self-esteem? After all, she is a former theatre actress, according to the comics. It would certainly explain why it’s a skill he possesses but not Azula/Ozai/Iroh.

(For those who are about to ask, it’s called Throne of Blood in English but its actual name is Spiderweb Castle and some Shakespeare scholars are big mad about it because other Shakespeare scholars consider it the best film adaptation of Macbeth ever made and we can’t have that)

THE ARCHERS DIDN’T KNOW MIFUNE’S BLOCKING. Every time you see him fling out an arm he’s actually signaling to the archers which way he’s about to go. That’s it, that’s what they had to go on. And they were shooting on location on Mount Fuji, which Akira Kurosawa had chosen SPECIFICALLY FOR ITS DENSE FOG.

However, BECAUSE this was Akira Kurosawa—if you don’t know that name think “Stanley Kubrick but earlier and Japanese and not quite as much of an asshole to his actors”—and he was insane, Mifune is also wearing real 19th-century feudal lord armor, in the sense that while it’s a modern reproduction it is completely functional. A feudal lord from the early 1800s could have been resurrected in the 1950s when this was filmed, handed this armor, and would have gone “yeah, that’s correct.” There are actually a couple of shots where you see arrows hit his torso and bounce off, or stick in the armor but they’ve very clearly only just barely stuck rather than going through.

So his torso is protected, and there’s a railing in front of him that provides some protection to his legs, and yes, this means THE MOST VULNERABLE PART OF HIM WAS ALSO THE ONLY PART THAT WOULD DEFINITELY KILL HIM: his face. I’m sure it was of very little comfort to him that the archers also weren’t very powerful shots.

Oh, and his character dies by taking an arrow through the neck. You can tell that one is a trick shot because it’s the only shot filmed from that specific angle, but I can imagine Mifune was none too eager to do it after all this.

Another fascinating snippet:

"Lady Asaji" (the Lady MacBeth equivalent) never blinks while the camera is on her. Not once.

It's not easily noticed unless forewarned and looking, but it does contribute to an uncanny-valley feeling that there's something not-quite-right about the character.

I can't remember if the actress (Isuzu Yamada) went all the way with her court makeup and blackened her teeth as this one has done.

Probably not, or there would definitely be comments about it on-line.

I've seen on-line claims that the makeup is based on Kabuki theatre.

Noh, it isn't. :->

It's actually period-correct for a noblewoman of the Heian period (794-1185) and IIRC preceded - also may have inspired - that "female" style of Noh mask.

Here the makeup's being worn by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote "The Tale of Genji" about 1000 years ago.

If interested in this period and its customs, both very different to the later, better-known Tokugawa-period samurai stuff, "The World of the Shining Prince" by Ivan Morris is a fascinating read.

*****

More method acting with projectile weapons:

James Cagney was shot at with a REAL Thompson submachine gun during the making of both "Public Enemy" (1931) and "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938).

I blogged about it years ago here, a long-ish post about safety vs realism in movie fights.

Here's Cagney talking about the Public Enemy one.

christmas special: sherlock goes on a bender where he hallucinates a victorian-era case, the episode ends with moriarty seemingly returning via social media and mycroft making a cryptic reference to “the other one.” oh, also any consequences from sherlock committing murder are immediately negated.

series 4: HOO BOY.

episode 1: mary is killed due to her assassin past, but no one really cares since she’s only been in the show for all of four episodes. she keeps coming back as a recorded voice/hallucination.

episode 2: john goes to a new grief counseler. also he keeps hallucinating mary. sherlock is told to solve a murder by the murderer’s daughter, but it turns out that while the murderer has a daughter, it’s not the woman who gave him the case to solve! eurus, sherlock and mycroft’s sister, has simultaneously masqueraded as john’s grief counseler and the murderer’s daughter and a random woman who keeps following sherlock because she’s a master of disguise! (to be fair, this is a legitimately cool reveal and I genuinely didn’t see it coming)

episode 3: HOO. FUCKING. BOY. eurus is sherlock and mycroft’s sister who’s been in a prison for the criminally insane for decades. mycroft has withheld this knowledge from both sherlock and their parents by claiming she died in a fire she started. turns out she’s able to hypnotize people with ???? her superior intellect ???????? and so even talking to her makes people want to do things for her like commit murder ????????? and so she’s somehow able to do things like escape from her scary island prison and then take herself back, blow up baker street, kidnap multiple people, and then pull Saw-esque morality problems on Mycroft and Sherlock and John where she just murders people for funsies with no apparent motive. IT IS DURING THIS SEQUENCE THAT IT IS REVEALED THAT SHERLOCK HAD A HUMAN BEST FRIEND THAT EURUS MURDERED BUT REWROTE HIS OWN MEMORIES TO IMAGINE IT WAS A PET DOG WHO DIED.

1. I wish I was you.

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.

Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.

And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.

And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.

When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.

Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.

“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”

And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:

And you can FEEL her pride.

“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.

“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”

Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”

Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.

Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”

On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”

“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”

Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.

“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.

“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.

“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”

Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”

it was formative for modern society, too.

there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.

we’re all just people.

“It was all about accepting my ethnicity in it. I had my face done really light all the time. I have family members who have issues with self-hate and race and so their skin will be five times lighter than the color of their neck, and that always tripped me out, so I wanted to put a little bit of that into it,” he said. “At the end of the movie, my neck and my face matched. My face is much darker. So that was the arc. Chi Chi becomes polished but accepting of herself, mature, romantically grows. Instead of a taker, she becomes a giver.”

boccs

monzterzack

Dec 16, 2023

And there’s my queer ass being like literally none of you get it. this isn’t about power, this is about love and alienation and acceptance. you dumbasses, I’m the monster. this isn’t a metaphor for your shitty boyfriend, this is a metaphor for my own alienation from a society that tells me a the way i am and the way I love are grotesque. this is a fantasy of love free of judgement, separate from societal standards that I’ll never live up to anyway. that ghoul doesn’t care if I’m fat, they think it’s hot that I eat well. that immortal fae creature doesn’t care if the gender on my birth certificate matches the one I use now, they barely have a concept of gender in the first place. that tentacle monster doesn’t care if I shave, they don’t have eyes