maureen:
I like to imagine both Superman and Batman unconsciously emit a sort of “god I wish everyone was wearing hotpants” telepathic vibe that J’onn picked up on.
be the change you want to see in the world
Superman: NEAT
Batman: what THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
i personally prefer to beleive that both bats and supes both want to be wearing booty shorts themselves bc its fucking HOT wearing a damn wetsuit and a cape but bruce has an image to maintain and clark knows that bruce will fuckin end up crouching creepily over his bed in the night whispering “shorts were a mistake”
But they ARE both wearing booty shorts
They’re just wearing it on top of their pants
Martian Manhunter wouldn’t’ve had to read their minds at all
Just look at them
Poor J'onn probably thought this was just how people dressed on earth
Cape and booty shorts
Probably the only reason he didn’t give himself normal eyes is he saw batman’s mask and was like “ok wholly colored eyes are chill here”
Do you think he debated giving himself little bat ears
What about hair. Did he look at Supes’ luscious locks and consider it, but then looked at Batman’s spikey little head and decided on a middle ground
He’s probably like “oh no am I uncanny valley still”
“Maybe there are two types of earthlings just like there are multiple types of Martians”
“Oh no did I mix the two types and look weird now?”
And batman is over there just
“NOPE SHAPESHIFTERS NOPE I HAVE CHILDREN AT HOME NOOOPE”
always figured he based his look on theirs, including that he probably doesn’t know for sure they are wearing pants; their faces could just be a different color from the rest of their skin, after all.
i love the likelihood that he thinks that’s bruce’s real face, since it kinda is.
#superman knows he doesn’t need room to work #batman’s like #UNEXPECTED CONDUCT! #FALL BACK TO BATARANG RANGE! #which is very reasonable and probably why he isn’t dead (via whetstonefires)
I like to imagine both Superman and Batman unconsciously emit a sort of “god I wish everyone was wearing hotpants” telepathic vibe that J’onn picked up on.
be the change you want to see in the world
Superman: NEAT
Batman: what THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
i personally prefer to beleive that both bats and supes both want to be wearing booty shorts themselves bc its fucking HOT wearing a damn wetsuit and a cape but bruce has an image to maintain and clark knows that bruce will fuckin end up crouching creepily over his bed in the night whispering “shorts were a mistake”
But they ARE both wearing booty shorts
They’re just wearing it on top of their pants
Martian Manhunter wouldn’t’ve had to read their minds at all
Just look at them
Poor J'onn probably thought this was just how people dressed on earth
Cape and booty shorts
Probably the only reason he didn’t give himself normal eyes is he saw batman’s mask and was like “ok wholly colored eyes are chill here”
Do you think he debated giving himself little bat ears
What about hair. Did he look at Supes’ luscious locks and consider it, but then looked at Batman’s spikey little head and decided on a middle ground
He’s probably like “oh no am I uncanny valley still”
“Maybe there are two types of earthlings just like there are multiple types of Martians”
“Oh no did I mix the two types and look weird now?”
And batman is over there just
“NOPE SHAPESHIFTERS NOPE I HAVE CHILDREN AT HOME NOOOPE”
always figured he based his look on theirs, including that he probably doesn’t know for sure they are wearing pants; their faces could just be a different color from the rest of their skin, after all.
i love the likelihood that he thinks that’s bruce’s real face, since it kinda is.
#superman knows he doesn’t need room to work #batman’s like #UNEXPECTED CONDUCT! #FALL BACK TO BATARANG RANGE! #which is very reasonable and probably why he isn’t dead (via whetstonefires)
Petition for Chris Evans to put on the captain America outfit and physically fight Donald trump
If you follow his twitter, I think he is like *this close*
Chris Evans: one like and I will personally fist fight Trump while dressed as Captain America
Chris Evans: *likes his own tweet*
Chris Evans: Say no more
Portrait of a Young Woman, Jean-Etienne Liotard
Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer
#they look like theyve been having a chat about u and u just walked in
Fun fact: Cheetahs only attack prey that runs
jesus that is good to know.
Yup, that’s the point you just stay still and let it do whatever the fuck it wants that doesn’t involved you getting eaten.
REALLY FUN FACT for big cats cheetahs are fucking docile as shit
my grandfather ran a cheetah sanctuary in south africa and he’d just lie with them and sleep among them and they’d rub against him and chirp at him they’re big fucking babies
Another Fun Fact: Cheetahs are incredibly nervous animals. One of the (many) reason’s they’re going extinct is that cheetahs are so sensitive and nervous, some of them are literally too nervous to breed. Others will breed, but stress themselves out so much, they’ll lose their cubs.
So zoos with breeding programs had to figure out how to make cheetahs comfortable enough to first of all, get laid and secondly - not spazz themselves into miscarrying.
So what’d they do?
They gave the cheetah’s their very own Service Dogs!
The dogs make them feel safe, protected and secure!
AJHHHHFDDGHH SO PRECIOUS
this post just got so much better
THIS IS OFFICIALLY MY FAVOURITE POST
This is the greatest thing I’ve seen all day.
Dogs are truly angels.
when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.
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.
the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.
there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
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.
i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)
Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That
Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.
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.
I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.
Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.
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.)
Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).
There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.”
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
t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.
Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.
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.
Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.
Here’s another example of that.
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.
It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.
Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.
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.
Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.
Imo the “bad boy who’s only nice secretly/after you get through his layers” trope in media functions as propaganda designed to get you to second guess yourself and your experiences in order to give bad men a chance. Some things need to be taken at face value and if he treats people like shit he is in fact a bad person even if he’s nice to you sometimes. Stop looking for hidden meaning and depth in his actions. He’s not misunderstood he’s just an asshole and it’s not your job to shovel through the shit to get to the disappointing “good” parts
MildlyInteresting dump
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
