can't fight fire with sparks

I post and reblog anything and everything that strikes my fancy. Mostly movies, tv-shows and book things. Also cats and space (usually not cats in space though). I have a tendency to suddenly get obsessed with things, so be warned.

[marveledits]

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014) dir. Joe and Anthony Russo

[graceking]

I love these comics by Nathan W. Pyle.

[patrickdiomedes]

Here are some more good ones

[the-ali-express]

LET ME ABS O R B

[ultramarineblues]

@diseonfire here have some more

[erdsthenerds]

Perhaps I prefer fewer revolutions and more minerals is a mood

[vo-kopen]

@thefingerfuckingfemalefury there is more

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

THEY CRAVE THOSE MINERALS

Also the next time we watch a horror movie I am totally going to say to my gf “I hope these beings make correct strategic decisions…yet I know they will not”

[vigilantsycamore]

“Imagine pleasant nonsense” is actually good advice

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

It’s the BEST advice! :D

[cidham]

amir khusrow (1253–1325 CE)

[juniqs-blog]

this changed my life

[gaydine-ross]

this was written before the printing press was invented and it still sounds like a modern day shitpost

[okmeghana]

a form of indian poetry, keh (say) mukarni (denial) is an interesting genre of riddles played between two young women, where one of them describes something in a way that it is mistaken by the other girl as her beloved, and finally turns out to be something completely different

[arbitrary-stag]

@sodomymcscurvylegs

[thewonderfullurkerofoz-deactiva]

what is poetry if not the memes for our foremothers

[sapper-in-the-wire-old]

this calligraphy channel is amazing because their cats constantly try to interfere, like these cats are just laser focused on annihilating every project the person tries to do

[cumaeansibyl]

you can certainly enjoy these without sound but the sound effects are killing me

[karadin]

artist is artist and cat is your life getting in the way of said art

[dutchster]

i don’t even need to know the context of this drawing

[xxlove4evaxx]

pussy game so strong it scared the devil

[ohbeckoh]

no but literally that is what is happening, there have been long periods of western history where spirits were said t be frightened by the site of lady business. Sailor’s wives used to flash their husbands ships (mind you this was a time before underwear so you just lifted your petticoats and BAM) in order to scare away the spirits and devils that made storms. A woman could flash her crops to keep away spirits that might ruin them.This was also back when the vagoo was seen as something taboo and horrible so literally looking directly at some labia was thought to be so scary the devil would poop himself. Misogyny so intense it gave the pussy superpowers. 

[mintfox19]

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

PUSSY OUT TO SCARE THE DEVIL AWAY

[proudsharkapologist]

Yup!! It’s called ‘anasyrma’

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anasyrma

[lilithyanstuff]

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

*cackling*

[niuniente]

This is actually part of Finnish folklore, too. Vagina was the strongest thing on the planet, enough so that you could curse someone why flashing your hoo-hoo at them. Even the bear, which was the strongest spiritual being, feared by everyone - so much that saying bear’s name out loud would summon a bear and thus no one still knows what’s a bear in Finnish - ran away in a sigh of lady’s privates.

[oakttree-deactivated20221126]

wait i want to know more about there maybe not being a word for bears in finnish???

[madmaudlingoes]

More like “the original word for bear has been lost because if you say it you might Speak One up.”

This was a general central/northeastern Europe thing. The original Indo-European root for bear seems to be *h2rktos, which gives us ursus in Latin, arktos in Greek, and arth in Welsh. (Plus the name Arthur.)

So you would expect, knowing a thing about the neogrammarian principle, that the Proto-Germanic word ought to be *urhtaz, the Proto-Balto-Slavic word *irktas. But what we actually see is that in Germanic languages, the word for bear derives from the same word as brown; in Baltic languages, a word related to “hairy, shaggy”; and in Slavic, some variation on medu-ed, “honey-eater.”

Meanwhile, the Proto-Finnic word for bear, karhu, is either the PIE *h2rktos borrowed, or a Proto-Uralic word meaning “rough, coarse.” The same is true of other non-PIE languages in the region, like Estonian, Karelian, etc.

In other words, these people were so fucking scared of bears that they didn’t even dare say the word bear. They used euphemisms – “the brown one, the honey-eater, the shaggy boy” – until those euphemisms just because the word for bear, and the original word was lost. (Interestingly, the Sanskirt reflex of *h2rktos is rakshas, so that word itself might’ve been a euphemism – “the Destroyer” – replacing an even older word for bears.)

Bears were fucking scary if you lived in northern Europe, guys.

And vaginas were even scarier.

[thetrashiestoftrash]

Please, I am begging you, visit the official Captain Marvel website

[thetrashiestoftrash]

I would post screenshots but they cannot possibly capture it.

[yogi-bogey-box]

it’s B E A U T I F U L

[glorious-spoon]

oh my god i think my brain melted

i have not seen such glory since the early days of geocities

[homoerotic-ads]

[zforzelma]

You didn’t have to go to all that trouble but I appreciate the gesture.

[enbyofdionysos]

I appreciate the jester.

[emperor-ing-deactivated20191108]

god this ad has aged well

[thatsbelievable]

[squided]

Well that convinced me I DEFINITELY should

[diocletianscabbagefarm]

When Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France in 1815 the official government newspaper Le Moniteur’s headlines read as follows, and you can just feel the gradual process of ‘oh shit’:

9th March, the Anthropophagus (man-eater/cannibal) has quit his den

10th, the Corsican Ogre has landed at Cape Juan

11th, the Tiger has arrived at Gap

12th, the Monster slept at Grenoble

13th, the Tyrant has passed through Lyons

14th, the Usurper is directing his steps towards Dijon, but the brave and loyal Burgundians have risen en masse and surrounded him on all sides

18th, Bonaparte is only sixty leagues from the capital; he has been fortunate enough to escape the hands of his pursuers

19th, Bonaparte is advancing with rapid steps, but he will never enter Paris

20th, Napoleon will, tomorrow, be under our ramparts

21st, the Emperor is at Fontainbleau

22nd, His Imperial and Royal Majesty, yesterday evening, arrived at the Tuileries, amidst the joyful acclamations of his devoted and faithful subjects.

[animals-riding-animals]

cat riding tortoise

[edwhiteandblue]

Whoa guys, I just got a wild idea. I’m just putting this out there…

what if it can fold up to fit inside?

WHOA LOOK AT THAT IT CAN FOLD IN HALF TO FIT INSIDE THE LM AND THEN ALL THEY HAVE TO DO WHEN THEY GET TO THE MOON IS PULL THIS THING TO UNFOLD IT AND GET IT OUT AT THE SAME TIME THIS IS SO CLEVER I’M  S H O O K 

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

yes we can

[capriceandwhimsy]

THERE WAS A SHOW CALLED MOON MACHINES THAT DID AN ENTIRE ONE HOUR EPISODE ON THE LUNAR ROVER! IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO EXIST BUT THEN SOMEONE REALIZED THERE WAS A TINY WEDGE SPACED VOID BETWEEN THE LANDING STRUTS THAT COULD FIT A TINY SOMETHING! A PAIR OF FORD EMPLOYEES FIGURED OUT HOW TO ORIGAMI DECEPTICON A TINY CAR INTO THAT SHIT AND USED A GI JOE TOY TO BUILD A MODEL VERSION THAT THEY RC DROVE INTO WERNER VON BRAUN’S OFFICE!

Sorry for the all caps, but the lunar rover is honestly one of the coolest fucking engineering accomplishments of all time and deserves to be recognized as such.

[gay-jesus-probably]

“We’ve got a tiny space, we might be able to fit something extra in on the descent ship.”

“…Hey, wouldn’t it be fucking sweet if they had a moon go-kart that folded up?”

“IT FUCKING WILL BE SWEET BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NOW”

[tparadox]

I always love how badly moon truthers underestimate the reality of the Apollo program.

[roseverdict]

origami decepticon

[jenniferrpovey]

Reblogging this mostly because *I* didn’t know how they folded up the moon rover, and it’s really neat.

[marithlizard]

Origami Decepticon  = new band name. 

[elodieunderglass]

We have a mini cousin of this, of sorts. It is a strange, lightweight item that looks like a complicated laptop bag with four wheels. You put it over your shoulder with its strap.

Then, when you want to leave a situation quickly, you set it down and give it a quick shake. It immediately stands up, expands, and turns into a toddler’s stroller, with a roomy little shopping basket underneath, and a folding hood to keep the weather off. You click the handlebar into place, clip the toddler in, insert any shopping or bulky items into the basket, and briskly trot away. People gaze after you in open shock. It is apparently fascinating and alarming. I can definitely see how a rover-sized version would upset folk.

The concept of “Foldy thing turned into wheely thing” and the reverse are apparently so incredible that sometimes, when we collapse the thing to put it in a car or under a seat or something, strangers ask us to do it again. I have no problem believing that conspiracy theorists struggle with the concept. I mean, it’s a common item that most people with small babies will have, and every baby-wheel item manufactured since the early 2000s is designed explicitly to collapse so it can fit into cars, but why let common household design interfere with a good theory?

SO ELODIE CAN YOU EXPLAIN HOW YOU PULLED A SMALL PERAMBULATOR OUT FROM UNDER A CHAIR?

No. I refuse to explain anything. Fake news

[vmohlere]

Excellent post is excellent.

[writing-prompt-s]

A dating service where matching is based on people’s search history exists. You’re a serial killer. You go on a date with a writer.

[endreams-s]

Serial Killer: metaphorically, if you were to kill someone, how would you do it?

Writer: Air shot between the toes, it’ll look like a heart attack.

Serial Killer who is obviously in love already: *sucks in a breath* ok

[honeypressed]

Writer: how long would it take to die if you were to potentially stab someone in the guts

Serial killer: anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes

Writer, already bringing a ring out: *shaking* thanks

[moonreflectioninthefragglepond]

A++ addition

[tetsuskitten]

Writer: *shows the serial killer the murder scene they’re writing* babe, i’m not sure if this would actually work?

Serial killer: *kisses writer on the forehead and leaves, comes back later, a suspicious scent of blood coming off them* it works baby, you’re doing great

[tigerliliesandcherryblossoms]

I LOVE THIS

[vmohlere]

Oh no, murder comedy is my jam

[laziestofthedreamers]

I love this, I love all of this, but quick question, does the author know? Like are they aware that their significant other is a serial killer or do they just think that they have a morbid sense of humor? It’d be even funnier if the author had no fucking clue, like how Aurthur Conan Doyle was apparently stupidly gullible, and on top of it they’re a horror or crime novelist. Like the serial killer works at a butcher shop or something so it’s completely normal for them to come home smelling like blood, no murders going on here, no sirey. Just my darling coming back home from a long day at work.

Now fast forward a bit and the author has managed to get their first book published, with loving support from the serial killer who helped them fine tune all the murder scenes, and it’s a big hit. Enough so that a detective with the local police department has noticed some disturbing similarities to several active cases, including details that were never released to the press. Obviously he brings this up to his superior and convinces him that there’s something to the theory, but it’s all circumstantial right now. He stakes out the author’s home and is super convinced that the author is the murderer, but they don’t seem to do anything??? Like they literally are at the house all day, that’s it. Most they do is leave for groceries.

So you get this dynamic of the serial killer mining the author for creative murder schemes, the author being lovingly encouraged by the serial killer, and finally the detective who is just so sure that the author is the killer and that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll FINALLY have proof.

[pamgkrthwrites]

Plot twist, The serial killer and detective use to go out so it gets sub what personal. 

“You need to stop seeing them. I think they are a serial killer.”

Serial killer breaths in. “Look-”

[ladyhavilliard]

…perfect

[outerspacekake]

I don’t like actual murder mysteries, but this is perfect

[animalwoonz]

[princesshamlet-deactivated20210]

shakespeare is not pretentious. fans of shakespeare are pretentious. shakespeare is twelve hundred dirty jokes strung together by increasingly ridiculous plotlines and increasingly homosexual characters. don’t let the archaic language fool you

[kitfoxart]

I’ve just discovered my new favorite painter, Vittorio Reggianini - those smarter than myself probably already know of him as an Italian painter from the 1800s who made satin look even satiny-er than satin. I just cannot get over how much he loved painting women who were NOT. HAVING. A. MAN’S. SHIT. 

But there was one hottie that everyone seemed to like, and I can’t blame them…

Vittorio knows what the ladies like. 

[chainsaw-to-the-heart]

I’m pretty sure that the women in the background of the third picture are looking at a “lewd” painting. They were sometimes kept by upper class homes in the 1800s. They were kept hidden behind a curtain and only viewed for *ahem* “recreational purposes”. So basically, those ladies are looking at porn while their friend blithely humours Bouffant McShinypants.

[pandavalkyrie]

This dude was an art god at 2 things:

1. Satin

1. Ladies leaning on a chair making a “can you believe this shit?” face

and I’m here to admire both

[sailor-kat]

This looks like the same group of ladies who are constantly chilling laughing at men I love it

[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.

[drst]

The cameras they were using back in the 1940s-1970s were enormous and heavy. Moving them was a chore, and you had to have track built to move a camera that big. Getting the camera in close to the subject was very difficult.

It was the arrival of the Steadicam in the 1970s that started to change everything. You could hook the camera to an individual person using a harness. For the first time the camera was liberated. Think of the walk & talks on “The West Wing” - that would not have been technologically possible in earlier film and television.

Also filming through the 1950s was mostly done on sets. A few directors like John Ford would go shoot on location for parts of their movies, but most films were made on sets because it was cheaper and easier. When the studio system began to break down in the 1960s, and cameras started becoming lighter, you saw a shift to location shooting, which reduced the proscenium staging of older movies.

[slipintosomthinnerdy]

ALSO, going back to how they just Talked like that in movies in the 30s and 40s. That weird accent, kind of British, but not. Think Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. It was a specifically created form of speech, created by Edith Skinner, for performers and public speakers, as the ELEGANT way For Important People to talk. It was called the Skinner Dialect, and in classical acting training FOR YEARS, it was mandatory. Which is why you see it in such bastions of the golden era of cinema, like cary grant and katherine Hepburn. It was also how your tutors taught your rich well educated babies to speak, especially in the new England states. IN FACT: the sort of “no accent” accent that most newscasters have is a watered down descendant of the Skinber Dialect.

[formulatedphrases]

It’s late and I’m tired, so someone may need to back me up on this, but back to the camera movement thing: I’d also like to mention how the introduction of talking pictures delayed the evolution of camera work/camera movement in a way.

Body mics were unwieldy (see that one really excellent scene in Singin’ in the Rain where they’re trying to wire Lina Lamont for sound, just *chef kiss*). When all your actors need to be within range of a large, static microphone, it sort of limits your camera options.

I could not tell you where it was from, but I distinctly remember a film class where we were shown a clip from the late 20s/early 30s as an example of this. The actors are clearly directing their speech in the general direction of a vase of flowers in the middle of the frame, which presumably has a microphone in it.

In some ways, sound tech had to develop before camera work could even think about getting more interesting.

[olderthannetfic]

Yes. That’s correct. Film was moving towards a developed visual language during the silent era. People were trying innovative, artsy things with the camera… And then everything got put on hold to deal with the technical challenges of sound.

We didn’t move back to long-ass silent reaction shots or sticking the camera in the place that most captured a particular character’s subjective experience for a couple of decades. A lot of the cinematic conventions we take for granted now were developed very early, dropped, and then came back.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

I’m so glad someone mentioned Skinner because that was what I was thinking of. Another good example of how people talked in that heightened dialect is actually The Man from UNCLE (2015). If you notice, Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo doesn’t speak the same sort of dialect that we do nowadays and neither does his CIA boss. Cavill and his boss (played by Jared Harris–incidentally both men are Brits playing Americans) have a slightly toned down version so it’s not too startling to the modern audience but it’s still pretty damn authentic and it works because of the rest of the film. TMFU does a good job with setting up the entire world of the 1960s and so when you hear Napoleon’s voice it’s like hearing a French accent in a film set in Paris–you know it’s an accent, but it fits the world.

[olderthannetfic]

Oh god, the reactions to that accent made me so ANGRY. It was flawless. I have rarely heard such a good send-up of the accents from media of that era. The only time I think he slipped was one line as they’re about to enter the park bathroom. It’s literally one word out of the whole film. And yet all of the reactions were “LOL, he fucked up the American accent.” ARRRRRRGH!

Jared Harris saying ‘nazis’ the way Americans do in old movies was priceless! It’s one of my favorite details.

[cesperanza]

All of this except I just have to add that realism is itself a style. That “olde-timey” acting isn’t simply failed modern acting, it actually values very different things. Acting was a species of rhetoric, and also of dance; vocally, it had more in common with, say, black gospel preaching (think of MLK’s affected phrases: we will GO to the mountain!) than with today’s realist microexpressions; physically, its closer to dance (think of Keaton or Chaplin.) To say acting of this period is realist is almost like complaining that ballet isn’t realist–of course not, we’ve come to see people perform! And personally, I like it - e.g. I still like what Shatner is doing (which is treating Trek like Shakespeare) 1000% more than if he were being realist; in fact I think TOS is amazing because it’s NOT realist.

[alwaysbewoke]

UNMUTE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!! #intears #lmao 

[sweetcribs]

alkjfaslkjalskdjald!!!!

[drgrlfriend]

Reblogging this with the tag australian dog because I spent HOURS searching for it one day…