The opening to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a very efficient and emotionally charged piece of story, but it bears remarking that it also is the single most french thing I have ever experienced. Like we have barely had any time to get to know our dreamy-but-sullen tousled-hair protagonist before he meets up with his young... ward(?) who is dressed in the frenchest outfit I've ever seen, and they go to meet an ex of his who is going to die in a fatalistically bleak but beautiful way, and she is somehow dressed even frencher. Tears of beauty and sorrow are shed and he then immediately goes to Fantasy "War Is Hell" Normandy.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
It is entirely too early where I currently am, but a strange mania have gripped me after checking the results of the 98th Academy Awards, and now I must make it everyone's problem. Overall, it seems to me that Sinners got shafted pretty badly, which shouldn't surprise me as movies about the experience of being Black in the US tends to wig The Academy out, as well as the well-documented distaste for Horror as a genre. What I want to talk about, specifically, happened in the Best Original Song category.
Before I proceed with this, I want to add the context that I am a HUGE KPop Demon Hunter fan. This animated musical has grabbed my heart, my soul and my creative instincts to boot. About 80 percent of the fanfiction I write is about this thing, and while I have some notes on a storytelling level, a lot of it is structural and probably a factor of budget moreso than creative decision. It is a well-deserved Best Animated Picture winner, is what I am saying.
With all that said, I like to think that I have a mostly coherent understanding about what is good and what is kind of mediocre about the media I enjoy, and I think it does a work no good to be praised for that which it is merely doing OK at. So, with all this said
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN "GOLDEN" WON BEST SONG? Golden isn't even the best song in fucking Kpop Demon Hunters, never mind the year 2025. It is, to my ears, painfully mediocre for how ostentatious it is, it's vaguely inspirational-sounding Prestige Pop with nothing much to say once it has your attention.
Now, this isn't a strike against the movie I would say, Golden isn't Huntrix at their best as much as it is them at their most exemplary. It is them being what they think they must be to succeed. The entire movie is about how they aren't Golden untouchable Pop Icons, it's about how they find together not despite but because of their flaws, how what makes them unusual makes them unique. It is about the Synthesis of the Thesis of Golden (Golden Untouchable Pop Icons) and the Antithesis of what internal strife and the Saja Boys' machinations make them (Quite frankly a mess.) For such a journey to take place, of course, one has to have a false idea about what succeeding sounds like and looks like, and Golden serves quite admirable at that, with its challenging vocal performance being the first sign things aren't all all right in the House of Huntrix.
Now, as it may have become clear to you, I had a different favorite for Original Song this year, and it should come as little surprise to frequent readers of my post that it is "I lied to you" from Sinners. It's a very ambitious song, taking on the task of supporting the movie's ideas about how black culture grew as an answer to slavery and pressure to assimilate, part expression of deep soulful humanity that not even the cruel absurdity of Slavery and Jim Crow can extinguish, and in part as a continuation of Black African Culture, preserved in the ways that it can through the aforementioned cruel absurdity. What starts out like a typical Blues jam evolves rapidly into an all-encompassing feeling moreso than a mere song, and by the time elements from both the past, as rhythms and themes from African tribal music weaves in and out, and the future, rock, hip-hop, even 808s and heartbreak-esque vocoder soulfulness intertwine to create this timeless thesis piece that seizes the listener with such force that when the camera pulls up to show the roof litterally being on fire you go "yeah that's about right." Sammie's jam figuratively burns the house down, leaving a few ominous notes to introduce the piece's villains. It is as is said earlier in the movie by Sammie's disapproving father, You keep dancing with the devil… one day he's gonna follow you home.
It's almost frustrating to talk about I Lied To You because it is so confident and effortlessly true-feeling that using words to describe it feels like dancing about algebra. It's a powerful piece of visual and auditory storytelling that includes a wider gamut of Black American Music than a story more concerned with respectability would. Yes, Black Americans gave us The Blues, which in turn inspired what would become Rock, Sinners says, and if you think it stops there, or that more modern "Black Music" is in some way less artful or laudable or connected to its cultural roots, you're plain not paying attention. It's all connected, from the humble bluesman to the braggadocious rap artist, from steel guitars to vocoders. It's all music even The White Man likes, even though he doesn't, as Delta Slim points out, care particularly much for the people who make it. Or to paraphrase youtuber Lil Bill "White people love everything about Black People, except for Black People."
Now, I feel I don't have to speculate what went down with the Academy here. Sure, I lied to you is a more challenging song (and, I would argue, reaches higher artistic heights precisely because of it, which is exactly something you'd expect a bunch of semipretentious artists would appreciate but I digress) and Golden has been fucking EVERYWHERE. Hell, I even saw it in my equal parts fascinated and disgusted watching of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade last year. There has been, I think it's safe to say, a considerable push for golden from the KPDH producer/distributor side, as is often the case. It's all Inside Baseball stuff, but it is, I would argue, worth mentioning that being nominated for an oscar usually is the result of a concerted effort from the producer side of things, so it's not like the Academy heard Golden and went "we like this one."
I mean, I could believe that the Academy did such a thing because, again, not to hate on Golden all that much, but it is with some ease the most "nothing" song on the soundtrack. How It's Done has our protagonist' de facto introductions and statement of purpose (they're gorgeous, they're strong and they are stone cold pop divas, also they fight demons.) Takedown is a catty masterpiece of the sort Taylor Swift keeps wishing she could Make Happen. Your Idol is a Villain Song of a quality I didn't think we made any more, rocketing the otherwise perfectly forgettable Saja Boys from "Who's that?" to legitimate threat even if things WEREN'T particularly fucked in the plot at the time. Finally, What it Sounds Like is what Golden was supposed to be. It's Huntrix showing their true faces to the world. They're not flawless, they never will be, but their music comes from a place that is true, real, and inasmuch as art can be it, honest. Now there ARE more songs, like that kind of forgettable Rumi/Jinu duet and of course the scourge that is "Soda Pop," but Soda Pop, at least is SUPPOSED to be infuriating one hit wonder garbage. Well made and charismatically performed one hit wonder garbage, granted, but pop garbage nonetheless.
What kind of gets my goat about Golden is that it very much feels like Huntrix' answer to Soda Pop. It's full of things that makes one think it is something important and good, like the impressive vocal performances and the general tone of the thing, but it... actually isn't. It doesn't say anything deeper about the people who perform it or who they truly are, and while the movie seems to grasp that, what with Rumi's voice problems being revealed to be mostly psychosomatic and solved with her throwing herself face-first into a new interesting problem to hang all her troubles on in "saving" Jinu. There's no triumphant moment when Rumi claims her power back and actually sings Golden in the movie, and while that might be a time or budget constraint, heaven knows the movie have plenty of those already, I also think the movie is stronger for it. Golden is a victory march over problems that aren't solved as much as painted over, so much so that it's tempting to conclude it should be titeled GIlded instead.
With all of this said, it is a nasty habit of entertainment journalists to try to draw longer lines of cultural relevance from what is essentially the subjective artistic preferences slash popularity contest among a bunch of SoCal cinema dorks. That said, it is hard to not see this as kind of a thematic runback on the infamous 2016 Best Picture controversy, where a mixup of envelopes led to the indulgent musical La La Land being briefly pronounced winner for a few delirious minutes before the correction came, live on stage, that it was the more challenging Moonlight, a story about black identity and sexuality, that had actually won (a fascinating case that has happened exactly once in almost a century of awards, I should write something on it one day.) This time around, La La Land actually did win. The more digestible and feelgood entry came out on top, and while there is considerably less prestige in a Best Original Song win, the category itself being kind of infamous for odd picks and nonsensical snubs, it is none the less dismaying.
But hey, all of this said, please check out I Lied To You. It's one hell of a song.
The King In Yellow continues to be my favorite Eldritch Horror Entity. That is to say the play about the enigmatic regent of Lost Carcosa, not necessarily the monarch himself. There's just something so juicy about this play that even casual browsing will forever change whomever reads it. Not into blind raving madness, usually, but it will change things. A bauble will seem like a crown of great import, the dead may return to the land of the living, the ravings of a madman might seem very reasonable, time shifting around to bring the past into direct contact with the present. There's a certain logic tying it all together, but like the exact goings on in Cryptic Carcosa, it's ephemeral and dreamlike, rhyming in the Lucasian "these concepts interact although I can't actually explain to you why" sense of the word.
I got into this in the tags of a different post on Sinners, but now I am kind of stuck on the idea. It is fucking WEIRD to me that Wunmi Mosaku isn't credited higher in that movie, but to explain why we have to get into some Inside Baseball Bullshit, so bear with me for a second.
What spot any one actor or member of the crew gets in the credits (the order of which IMDB copies for their cast listings) is based on the contract of the individual, with higher spots generally being considered more important as people generally don't sit through more credits than they need to unless they're heinous movie dorks (like I am.) There's also variations such as "introducing" or "featuring" and "also featuring" meant to attract a certain level of extra attention to the actor in question, usually as a concession for them not appearing higher on the billing order or getting a less favorable pay deal. For all the shit Hollywood spews to justify people working for free, getting your name out there is important.
That said, there's also an underlying assumptions that it's not all agent jockeying. The main character generally goes first unless the credits go in order of appearance which is a way some productions wash their hands of the entire process, and if an important role like, say the villain or the love interest isn't within the first couple of names in a "traditionally" ordered set of movie credits that's generally not a great sign for the estimated quality of that character.
With all of this in mind, I understand Wunmi's name not being on the top. She's a supporting character to Smoke, who despite being a very important character to the plot isn't, I would argue, the main character. Sammie is the main character, and his relationship with the smokestack twins IS important, but they are in support of his story, and Wunmi is in support of theirs, so I get that we're getting a bit separated from the core here at least on paper.
Ok, so she is quite important to the plot. Then what do I think is happening here? I think we have to look to intersectionality to answer this one. It would be strange if it's a race thing, considering the rest of the cast, and it's probably not a gender thing either. It could, however, be a branch of what POC feminists call misogynoir. I am not going to proclaim myself an expert on this by a long shot, but I AM speculating that the reason Wunmi goes so far down on the credits is thanks to a combination of ideas on Race, Gender, and Body Shape. Body shape is one of the many things that is policed more strictly for WOC than it is for just about any other demographic, and it is further complicated with negative stereotypes connected to physically larger WOC. In ways that are comparable, I think, but way more severe to the way that fat men must hyperperform masculinity, WOC women must hyperperform femninity and also skinniness (with the possible exception of "having junk in one of the three trunks one is ever allowed to carry anything in" depending on the fashion at the time) or functionally not be allowed to participate in life, or culture as anything other than an unflattering stereotype.
Honestly I feel bad for even bringing this up, because the movie Sinners itself, on a pure "what happens on screen" level, is very decent, I would say, to Wunmi as Annie. Yes, she is tall and large, but she is also, and this is true, a beautiful woman, and the relationship with Smoke is unmistakably also sexual in nature. These two want to fuck each other in between the bickering about Black Capitalism and spirituality vs materialism, and frankly who can blame them. Now to be clear, I'm not favoring a "beauty is inherently linked with goodness" type thing here, after all the Mediocre White Man Vampire is also decently good looking and boy howdy are there botfly larvae a'plenty in his soul. No, it's more that Sinners seem to have its heart in the right place, and has made a character that could so, so easily have been a flat stereotype into an exciting, engaging character played by a very skilled actress who gives it her all, and in a rare case of not everything being terrible all the time, the Academy seems to agree.
It is a shame then, that even in the movie that treats her so well as a character and, at least from what I can glean from BTS stuff, as an actor, Wunmi Mosaku is still not rated as one of the... what, 18 most important actors in Sinners, by the Producer/Agent side of this movie. I'm not here to call for a witch hunt or anything, I'm just bummed out. The movie would absolutely not be the same without Annie, and it would not, I wager, work as well as it did with the role in the hand of a lesser actress. No good deed, as they say, goes unpunished.
I will say this for Wake Up, Dead Man, it is probably the Blanc movie that comes the closest to a David Suchet Poirot adaptation. This is both in the favorable sense in that it keeps adding baroque elements to an uncomplicated but difficult crime riddle, and is heavy on empathy. On the less flattering side it is perhaps a touch too long
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Watching Person Of Interest in the year 2026 is darkly humorous in many ways. Not only because it features the mythical beast known as a Good Tech Billionaire, but also the base premise. Oh sure, we say, world-weary on a level that borders on diagnosable mental illness, the Govt wouldn't use a massive surveillance machine built to combat terrorism to also absolutely stomp all over regular crime (and also any political movement they didn't like,) there's simply no way they'd stoop so low. We then roll our eyes in the dust-dry bone sockets of our skulls.
Hello Tumblr. Today is Norwegian Liberation Day (liberation, that is, from Nazi occupation in WW2, liberation from our once-overlords of Denmark and Sweden is celebrated a bit later this month) and for the occasion I want to tell you about one of my favorite monuments.
Now I'm not much of a monuments guy just in general, a whole lot of them are celebrating guys (and it usually is guys) that I don't know if I think need to be celebrated that much. There are, of course exceptions. Let me tell you about Crush Nazism.
Crush Nazism here is displayed in Oslo city center, next to the former eastern central train station (now made into a top 5 Bougiest Oslo City Malls of course,) a tourist hot spot that also sees high foot traffic by locals as the center of Oslo public transport, Jernbanetorget, is just adjacent to it.
Speaking briefly on what the monument is, it's a construction of three separate objects. The plinth is meant to represent the Norwegian bedrock (or "grunnfjell" which refers to how it's mountains around here mostly.) Then comes two symbolic objects in stainless steel. First, a fractured swastika placed horizontally on the stone, which isn't super visible in pictures, but once you see the thing in three dimensions it's pretty clear what kind of thing it is. Then, as I should hope is relatively clear, is the fuckoff big sledgehammer crushing the hate symbol against the bedrock. In metal lettering on the side facing us here it says "It was worth it to fight for freedom - for all countries, for every class, and for every human" quoting Norwegian resistance fighter Asbjørn "Osvald" Sunde who led a Soviet-backed resistance group during the Nazi occupation of Norway during WW2. On the right side of the monument there's mounted two memorial plaques, one for the members of Sunde's resistance group and one, I believe, for various other resistance fighters who perished during the ocupation.
Now, why do I love this thing, apart from it being titled very well? Oh there's a bunch of reasons. For one, I do love the way it uses the symbol of the Swastika. It's a stand-in for the force that occupied the country, yes, but it's offered no power, no reverence. It has fallen. Even if it wasn't being pounded into the fucking ground by the power of labor, it's not standing tall and strong. Then there is the sledgehammer itself. I think this is a good choice because while it does allude to the soviet union, it isn't an explicitly soviet symbol. In the work it is used, I believe, to symbolize the laborers that built the Norwegian railroads, and the union network that formed the backbone of much Norwegian resistance against the occupying nazis and their various collaborators. I also love the spatial composition of the sledgehammer. While the swastika is reduced in visual importance, the sledge is accentuated, frozen near the terminus of its swing, the handle protruding in a way one could definitely call Boner-Like if one were in that kind of mood.
Crush Nazism is a triumphant type of monument, and as such it probably could be considered to not be a very accurate representation of the conflict it actually celebrates. Nazism in Norway wasn't crushed on the unflinching bedrock as old as the rings of Jupiter by the might of the worker, as such. It was resisted in a million ways, introducing friction in occupant and collaborator-controlled workplaces, befuddling and disrupting the bureaucracy of persecution, very pointedly Not Seeing shit and Not Hearing shit, distributing intel and coordination from sympathetic forces abroad, and the occasional more dramatic act of resistance such as the sabotage of Norwegian Heavy Water production. That said, monuments aren't created to communicate nuance, exactly, and I for one am OK with foregoing nuance for a more powerful message, at least one I support as wholeheartedly as this one.
That message is, tidily enough, delivered in metal letters. Granted, the quote refers to WW2 resistance specifically, but it is also, I think, still true. It IS worth it. It IS worth it to fight for freedom for everyone, for every class, for every human being, and while the situation during WW2 isn't exactly replicated anywhere just at the moment, there certainly are plenty of places who could do with a dose of the same medicine, if you catch my drift.
So to everyone who feels hopeless under the heel of authoritarian tyrants on this Norwegian Liberation Day, I want to extend this statement of support. Every tyranny starts the same way, and god willing they will all end the same way. Help it along in that regard in whatever way you can. Reach out to what networks you have. Organize in whatever way you can. Every bit of friction one can induce to the machinery of tyranny is a tiny step towards its destruction. There is power in a union, and together we can, I believe, create something that is good. Happy 8th of May, and fucking CRUSH NAZISM wherever it may pop up.
It is kind of funny how consistently Nobles are just the biggest pain in the ass in Paradox games. Like in Vic 3 they're a pain because they actively oppose industrialization, give few good bonuses and generally just throw a shitfit and rebel if you change anything away from wildly favoring them. Fair enough, old money isn't great for innovation I get it, but those fucks are also a pain in EU5. industrialization and modernization isn't much of a concern, but the same old "if you as much as look at that 'give the nobles slightly less power' button I'm going to burn this fucking country to the ground" business very much goes on and the best Nobles can do for you that other estates can't is that it's almost acceptable for a royal person to marry a noble, unlike the huge humiliation it apparently is to marry a regular person. Now you'd think nobles would be better in CK3, since the feudal system kind of relies on them, and in a way that's true. Except one little thing, your noble subjects aren't your friends, not by a long shot. Those scheming weasles will fuck with you at just about every opportunity. Oops, forgot to pay my taxes, oh dang those reinforcements must've gotten lost in bueraucracy, rest assured my liege I am not plotting against your life or the life of anyone important to you (Lying,) and so that's just the kind of shit they'll get up to when they don't actively dislike you.
