Metaphorical Elephants in Hypothetical Rooms

I reblog cute animals, musicals, things I find funny, the normal spiel. (Previously brianrosenlemur)

[catasters]

[hmpygssy]

I’m so excited because I’m gonna go to the High School of Performing Arts! I mean, I was dying to be a serious actress. Anyway, it’s the first day acting class- and we’re in the auditorium and the teacher,

[twoofcups]

gordon ramsey: is the food good here?

underpaid server: 

[b0ggyb1tch]

[dadmech]

[twinky-dinky-doo]

[solarpunkopossum]

Fleetwood Mac is the moon energy to ABBA’s sun energy.

[unfolllowed-deactivated20130301]

[jeszing-deactivated20130302]

son these grades are unacceptable

[45-70govt-deactivated-4958439-d]

well maybe if you’d stop eating my fucking homework dad

[memescomedy]

[gahdamnpunk]

DEAADDDDDT

[beaky-peartree]

that’s not even a mouse, it’s a gerbil

[dankmemeuniversity]

[bgm05]

top music artists in 2020

Lil Gravy

Ryan S.

Haeyleeh

The Whistlers

[roxilalonde-deactivated20251105]

there’s a line in twilight that goes “there was nothing more beautiful than Edward in his khakis and pale beige pullover” and i think about that every day of my life

[roxilalonde-deactivated20251105]

like stephanie meyer really did go “hmm. what’s the absolute sexiest garment i can think of. the most gorgeous clothes imaginable. how do i communicate how absolutely fucking fine edward looks at all times” and then 0.5 seconds later she went “oh, of course. khakis”

[sunfortune]

this reminds me of her emphasis on the cullens car that she constantly described with such awe and admiration and it always had me WEAK bc she tells you it’s a volvo s40 but then Describes it as if Edwards ass was pulling into the high school parking lot in a lamborghini or something and not literally a regular grey sedan

[kishibashiing-deactivated202212]

skdjfhalkfjhgakhfjgahlkjajdhdkgjfs

[gxnya]

[foulserpent]

mii channel theme playing while my dead body floats down a river

[homoquartz]

idk who might be interested but it looks like borderlands 2 and all of its dlc are on sale 97% off on Steam, so like instead of $200 it’s $6

[bullysquadess]

…..yo

[peppermintmonster]

In Washington State killing Bigfoot is a felony but in Texas Bigfoot is considered an invasive species and can be hunted at will.

This sounds like one of those cutesy funny cryptid posts but that is actually the legal status of Bigfoot in those two states, you can look it up.

[ernmark]

I’m running a pre-bought campaign in a sci-fi setting

Totally not-shady NPC: I’ll need you to retrieve my secret cargo from the abandoned spaceship, but it’s very private, so don’t look inside–

Player: Is it a girl in a box?

NPC: …What?

Player: This is a sci-fi story, and there’s a box you don’t want us to look into. There’s only ever one way that ends, and it’s always with a girl stuffed into a box.

Other Player: Hey, we don’t even know how big it is. It could just be a cigar box.

First Player: Okay, you’re right. It could be a bunch of sex toys. How big is the box?

NPC: It’s… uh… six feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep…

First Player: Ugh. Okay, fine. Somebody pack a crowbar and a spare set of women’s clothing. We need to go get this girl out of her box.

[terror-billie]

[nabulos]

uhhhhhhh…….

[pulmonary-poultry]

One day I’m going to run a sci-fi campaign of some kind and there will inevitably be a girl-sized box that the players are not allowed to open

And when they open it instead of a girl there will be 12 possums that immediately escape and create possum-related mischief until they can be put back in the box.

[opossummypossum]

i want to be invited.

[jumpingjacktrash]

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’.

[lostsometime]

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.

[jumpingjacktrash]

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.

[jumpingjacktrash]

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!

[honey-wine-and-time]

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)

[mudkippey]

Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That

[garrettauthor]

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.

[arcadiaego]

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).

[tzikeh]

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.

[niqaeli]

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.

[jenniferrpovey]

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.

[finnglas]

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.

[nyctosaurid]

are those two dudes from supernatural ok? it’s been like 14 years. there’s high schoolers younger than their contract. i don’t think i’ve ever seen them in any other shows. are they allowed to leave? do they feed them?

[nyctosaurid]

Hey whats going on on the set of supernatural

[odyssey420]

Glasses belonging to the Mormon preacher Hyrum Smith, 1844

[limpnode-deactivated20240418]

haters will see me in my Hyrums and say they fake

[stump-chunkman-deactivated20181]

this is like a hard and very specific flex for 1844