#phantomviola

Also your Toby Stephens appreciation is on point.

Ahhh hi! You are currently witnessing the continuation of what I've been calling my Gay Pirate Summer, which has now become a Gay Pirate Winter. After Our Flag Means Death (thanks for showing it to me @phantomviola) reminded me just how much I love pirate media, I decided to rewatch a few things.

Now for years I have been telling people that the best show I ever watched was Black Sails, even though I had only seen it once. I started my rewatch, remembered a lot of big moments but not necessarily how we got there, and by the finale I was proven right - it is the best show I have ever seen.

I was left reeling, my mind blown all over again, these characters infecting my brain with their amazingness, and made it a full two weeks before I just had to watch the whole thing through again. (@user-din had started watching and I just got really excited.) I loved it again.

And now @phantomviola has started watching it and I'm going to watch it all again, for the third time in as many months, and I'm excited for it again. This show, this show...

Awards shows are a farce and all but where is Toby's Emmy? Where is it!? (Dear Emmy people: have you seen Toby Stephens in Black Sails. Have you seen him?)

No Time to Die - Billie Eilish

no surprise there she’s my #2 artist (followed by tswift… am I basic?)

here’s 4 albums i do not have sexual relations with

Hiiiii ❤️

Well well let's see...

Not My Type | Alright | Cute | Adorable | Pretty | Gorgeous | LORD HAVE MERCY

He's a gorgeous, gorgeous (and very deadly) man 💜💜

YOUR TAGS ASTRID ARE THE BEST 😁😁

Thank you very much :))) 

thank you so much, mari!!!! 

and oh, you mean THIS MASTERPIECE???

This trailer perfectly demonstrates why it's important to think of trailers as short films in their own right, and how thinking of them in that way pushes the creation of a trailer into something more meaningful than an advertisement. 

The use of the cover of Creep by the Belgian girls' choir sets the tone immaculately as we’re greeted with a montage of Facebook interactions, which immediately tells the audience why this film could matter to them because everyone knows without being told what that site is. This film is about Facebook, but there is something about the music that tells the audience it's going to be a story as epic as a fable about a God fallen from grace because it is, but the song choice is deliberate in signalling what kind of figure this story centres on. 

After almost a minute of if this unearthly rendition of Creep, we fade onto the man himself and its arresting after this sort of hymn-like build up. Just a 20 something on a laptop, whinging to a girl about how much he wants to be accepted and what he’ll create to get it, and the visuals don’t stop. 

They build and build and keep coming, never lingering long enough to give anything away, cut after cut building up the themes of conflict with snippets of dialogue, and the stakes getting higher and higher as the music keeps building and building. It's chilling the way this film and this trailer have only gotten more relevant, but you bet this still felt chilling even at the time. 

The trailer ends with one single sequence, the only dialogue scene shown without being cut, where Mark insists he deserves recognition from the board for crashing the servers, “I don’t understand?” the woman says. Mark snides, “Which part?” and BANG the title, in the Facebook font as the choir ends its song. 

It tells the audience EXACTLY why they need to see this film, why they should want to understand the men who created Facebook and what it cost, and why the film is worth seeing in terms of performances/technical brilliance and it does all this without giving away the details, but not being so vague that you don’t know what the film’s about. a perfect balance