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Project Ludovico

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Athene said:
So awkward question time: Does anyone thing that this whole thing is something supportable.

Like say "I enjoy your work and would like to support further endeavors". Not like, say "PAY ME OR NO MORE SCRUBS" but like, capable of attaching a tip jar to. >.>
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Does Roger Ebert's site still hire people? Maybe write to Cracked or some US veteran communication sites?
 
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Winter's Tale: Symptoms of TB include Fatigue, Fever, Night sweats, coughing up blood and ROMANCE
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    • In Which I Try Like Hell To Explain Winters Tale

    First, throw out everything you know about religion and science too while you're at it. Stars in the sky? They're Miracles. Everyone has a Miracle in them, you, me, Donald Trump, everyone. That one miracle that you have within you is promised to one person, and one person only. If you fail to deliver this miracle, you done fucked up now and its gone forever. Every time a Miracle is performed, a new star in the sky is created. The eternal battle between good and evil is about enabling or preventing these miracles from occurring. All religions are wrong and merely attempts to grapple with something so eternal that our basic knowledge of good and evil is described as a very recent way to describe this eternal struggle but don't worry some broad with consumption in NYC knows the real story.

    So in 1895 Peter Lake's parents are denied entry into the United States because they have TB but they build a tiny sailboat for him and launch him from their ocean liner into the city because fuck it, Child Protective Services hasn't been invented yet. Don't worry, this isn't really important as we zoom to him in 2015 bedraggled and suffering from amnesia, as his memory is triggered and he begins to relive the entire movie up to that point in Flashback because why the fuck not.


    "Isn't this grossly irresponsible?"
    "WORST CASE SCENARIO THE SEA RAISES HIM AS ITS OWN!"​

    Now its 1915 and he's on the run from the demon gangster Pearly, played by Russel Crowe. Trapped while cornered, he comes across a white horse that is magical as shit and escapes by flying away as Pearly glares and comments "He's got the god damn horse". End scene, no need to elaborate on that, because we instead have another scene of the love interest Beverly being introduced. She has a terminal case of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Symptoms include dangerous amounts of whimsy, getting men to learn to truly live, knowing the true ways of things and being able to boil an egg on her body because she needs to sleep outside in New York in Winter to stay alive. Its supposed to be Lupus Consumption, because nothing says romance like Consumption! And at this point I'm just going to get breathless trying to explain everything that's happening because I can't slow down or I'll get bogged down in a 70000 word essay about Winter's Tale.

    Pearly and his anti-miracle criminal organization are out for Peter's head and the head of his horse. $500 bucks for Peter and another $500 for the horse.

    "Seems like a lot of money for a horse" says Pearly's number 2 man.
    "its a dog" says Pearly

    Pearly goes to his collection of assorted gems, mixes them up and lets the moonlight stream in, which gives him a 3D holographic map of where Peter is: Grand Central Station

    "Now let's go kill Peter and and while we're at it, let's try to get his horse"
    "But you just said it was a dog" says Romeo before he's cut off by Pearly releasing the slide on his pistol, ending that discussion.


    "Romeo, the movie picture is still exciting technology, I want you to acknowledge my fucking holograms"​

    Peter escapes with the Horse Dog but suddenly the Dog Horse stops in front of Beverley's and won't continue on, so Peter goes and robs the place but Beverley starts playing the piano. He interrupts her playing with a gun while having a meet cute about the floor squeaking and this gun he has and how he's robbing the place but now he's so charmingly in love with her that they start a relationship. WITH ME SO FAR?! I HOPE SO

    Pearly goes to dinner, eating dozens of clams while rambling about how he always wanted wings and how the Other Side wants to make the whole sky full of stars and there's no room in heaven for Pearly. The waiter makes the mistake of not having the Owl Dinnerhe demands and Pearly goes all Demon Face and murders the man, first directly and then probably later with a blistering 2 star Yelp review that will make this establishment quake. Using the mans blood, he draws on the table cloth and tells his men to find the girl in the drawing.


    AND THEY SORT OF DO BECAUSE THAT'S BEVERLY​

    Don't worry, they use it to find Peter through Beverly, because sure, why not. Things just fucking happen in this movie. How did the gem thing work? How did the bullshit with the drawing work? How did they manage to find Beverly with it? How did anything work?! I prefer showing over telling but there are fucking limits guys. Also, we're 30 minutes in and I have been skipping scenes for brevity.

    Peter goes to talk to some guy that apparently raised him for relationship advice and he's given some exposition about Miracles and how the horse is Athanzor, The Dog of The East (Who sometimes is a white horse) but Beverly is menaced by Pearly and Peter saves her and they leave the city on the flying dog Horse. Pearly can't pursue them because after an unexplained incident, he was restricted to never leaving the city proper (Like any good New Yorker) and so he must see the single best character in order to get permission to go after him, but we don't have time for that, we need to have Wooing.

    Peter is grilled by Beverleys father as to his intentions, where he gives a speech asking if its possible to love someone so much they can never die. Spoiler Alert: Yes. The scene works but I am edging up on a thousand words already and there are a million things happening. The wooing works in a generic way, its plenty romantic and cotton candy lovey dovey. And I'm going to spoil you right now: It doesn't matter, his miracle isn't for her. The person everyone has been drawing? Isn't her, its a red herring, the movie is deliberately wasting your time and this entire love story is a gotcha so that I can tearfully go "SHE WASN'T HIS MIRACLE, HE WAS HERS".


    Theirs is a love that will last about 40 minutes​

    BUT! WE HAVE LUCIFER! The single best character, played by Will Smith. Lucifer is introduced wearing a sports jacket over a Jimmi Hendrix shirt, reading A Brief History of Time in a pitch black room. He's The Judge, and the one who limits Pearly to New York City. Pearly demands access to up North in the wild and savage lands outside the City of New York but Lucifer shoots him down, pointing out the red headed virgin he drew could be literally anyone and Lucifer is of course spot on. He dresses down Pearly for his temporal linearity (Lucifer apparently exists simultaneously across the ages) and for daring to lecture him on Time.

    But meanwhile lovey dovey. Peter woos her father to his side by fixing the boiler but meanwhile Pearly is calling in a favor by getting an Angel that owes him a debt to slip her a spiritual poison that will kill her if she gets excited and so when the hot dickings are delivered (allowable via Peter's skill at fixing a boiler, obviously), he unintentionally turns his dick into a murder weapon. Also as a random aside, the movies implications about her core temperature are so overdone that I think she could cook a turkey in her cooch. If he wore a rubber he would sous vide his dick.


    "OH NO, IT HAPPENED AGAIN."​


    So she's dead and they bury her and Peter returns to New York where's ambushed by Pearly and his men. He sends off his horse dog so that it can't be killed because that would be a huge hit to the miracle business and Peter is a swell guy after all despite having been raised by a demon to be his thief. Peter is headbutted off the bridge by Pearly but that's not the end of things, oh no.

    Peter is immortal now because Beverleys love for him was so strong, he can never die but he can get amnesia, and he wanders around until 2015, constantly drawing pictures of the girl in the visions until suddenly she runs into him one day. He begins to regain his memories and Pearly rushes over to his gems which tell him that Peter is alive still. Are we ever going to get an explanation for how anything works? NOOOPE.

    Pearly starts assembling his troops to take down Peter as he learns more about his past from Beverleys younger sister who is now well over a hundred now but brushes off Peter being alive still as "Shit happens" because fuck it, this movie has no brakes, full speed ahead! So, in brief: Peter's miracle is to save this random little girl from her cancer and Beverleys miracle was to save him so that he could save her. Lucifer explains all this to Pearly, who demands to be able to kill Peter and Lucifer allows him to but the rules state he must become mortal to do so because uh, alright, we need a way to kill Pearly. Lucifer tries to talk Pearly out of this and Pearly ignores the non linear time dude's advice because fuck why not, we need this movie to end in a satisfying way right?

    So realizing that his Miracle is to save this little girl dying of cancer and that makes her a target of Pearly, Peter rushes her and her mother off to the previously established set of the house up north where a final battle between good, evil and a dog who is also a horse will take place. Who will win? The cute guy who brought an angel horse dog, obviously.


    "I will end you" -Dog    ​


    (Catches her breath)

    So Winters Tale! Its a movie that's 3 hours long but stuffed into 2 hours of runtime, like someone insisting this wedding dress still fits Martha you bitch. The hows and whys feel like they ended up on the cutting room floor and its a love story that ends 50 minutes before the credits roll. Their love is eternal but her place in the movie is slightly over half the run time. She's his manic pixie dream girl so he can go save some entirely unrelated girl and so despite stuff still flying at the camera at a random pace, the second half of the movie draaags because the emotional climax already happened. I haven't read the book its based on so I can only judge the movie on its own merits and those merits say "Axe the second half". Things need to be expanded upon, we need to have a better grasp of why things are happening, remove story bits that don't make sense because they're underdeveloped (The horse being a dog but also a horse, just make it a fucking horse) and rework the main emotional core of the story.


    Two men united in passion over fixing a boiler?​

    But we don't have that hypothetical movie so we have this glorious mess of a movie that has a certain charm because of how inexplicable it all is. Horse suddenly appears, he rides off on the horse and a dude goes "HE GOT THE HORSE". Lucifer shows up and steals the scene with his non linear temporal voodoo and starts chewing the scenery. We have Colin Ferrel standing there with a gun sheepishly admitting to a woman he's there to rob the place but he's having second thoughts now and sorry about all this. We have Pearly doing literally anything Pearly does, because nothing he does makes a lick of sense without further explanation. How can he suddenly get holograms sometimes but not other times? How did he get the fugue state? How did his men find Beverly, she's not even the right person.

    We managed to miss the exact manner in which Beverly died and so we quite literally thought that he had dicked her to death with his asbestos cock the first time we watched this movie. You can watch this movie and the emotional resonance is pretty good but its empty calories like cotton candy. Its not going to be some great...whatever it is it wants to be because its a hot mess. This review is probably going to be a mess too because you have to start explaining things but most of what happens is pretty inexplicable and all sorts of random things are happening. If was just shooting the shit with you about this movie you'd be stopping me every couple of minutes to demand clarification.

    "The horse is a dog?"
    "Yes but he's also a horse."
    "How did he get the dog horse?"
    "It shows up when its needed, no explanation is ever given but its a spirit animal that guides people to miracles."
    "So everyone has a Miracle?"
    "yes but Pearly and his gang run the city and have cut the number of miracles by half, more if you count Brooklyn"
    "But uh, so they're demons?"
    "No only Pearly is a Demon but Demon is just a very recent term for agents of chaos, this fight has been going on since before there were stars in the sky"
    "But he works for Lucifer?"
    "Yes but no, he's a knight of Lucifer but Lucifer is only the Judge, who keeps the peace for the Demons to prevent Chaos."
    "But they're agents of chaos?"
    "Yes, but they don't want chaos, they want Chaos. What they want is to prevent additional stars from being formed by miracles, if the Angels fill the sky with stars they win"
    "But Lucifer doesn't help out? isn't he a fallen angel?"
    "He's implied to be a fallen angel but that's only our recent western and Christian interpretation of this eternal conflict. Lucifer exists outside of conventional time, that's why he can see the past, present and future because he exists at all points in time"
    "But he's on the side of Chaos?"
    "He's the Judge for Chaos and other demons swear loyalty to him"
    "But he doesn't interfere and actively hinders his Knights by not giving the information needed to prevent literally all miracles from happening?"
    "No, because he's also implied to be a neutral arbitrator that enforces the rules."
    "I-Wha-"
    "Also he likes Hendrix."

    So I'm sorry if this review seems scattershot, I was trying to condense a movie that's too short for its content into an even shorter medium while also trying to explain what in the fuck we just watched.
     
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    • I like how you can just keep looking at this movie and only get more questions.

    Pearly is the Warden of the Five Burroughs?! I also forgot the black dude was supposed to be a guardian spirit because what does he even do?!
     
    Also again, if anyone has any support they can give The Project, it would be

    Going to use the dead name account again, still need to set up something more permanent going forward.

    Thank you for any support anyone would wish to give.
     
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    ......

    That is quite the thing.

    Also:
    Athene said:
    She has a terminal case of Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Symptoms include dangerous amounts of whimsy, getting men to learn to truly live, knowing the true ways of things and being able to boil an egg on her body because she needs to sleep outside in New York in Winter to stay alive.
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    I had to tell it I was in the US, not Kuwait. Then it wor... no, then it didn't work. Then I had to remember what my bloody PayPal password was. ...fuck.

    Ok, now it works. That review was worth it. :D
     
    I was most confused when King Leontes didn't show up.

    A bit of searching reveals this was based on an 800-page book, so it's perhaps no surprise that it's as confusing as it is.

    Bravo, Athene.
     
    Captain Orsai said:
    They are hella different films (personally, I like both, but Dredd more - then, I am admittedly a massive sucker for Karl Urban getting his badass on).
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    Athene said:
    Oh I know, Dredd is Hella better and the original has...problems.

    Lots of problems.
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    I really like Dredd, but I have a certain fondness for the Stallone movie. I admit, that may be largely because of Alan SIlvestri's score, because I am someone who will also say "Well the Wing Commander movie wasn't that bad, it has a good score."
     
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