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.
That’s why it’s so interesting to see really talented actors like Clara Bow or Buster Keaton because today their films feel a LOT less dated than say Harold Lloyd’s. They’ve got all the subtlety and nuance down and Keaton’s films in particular are shot in really inventive ways so they don’t feel particularly dated that way either.
“Ever wonder why people in American movies from the 1930s and 1940s have that distinct quasi-British accent? It’s called the Transatlantic (or Mid-Atlantic) Accent, and has an interesting history.”
a six year old idea that i’m still apparently into: au where it was the water tribe who attacked, katara and sokka still found aang in the iceberg 100 years later, but then, kind of tried to kill him. luckily aang escaped in time to team up with a pair of plucky young fire nation siblings who ought to have inherited the throne, you know, if the water tribe hadn’t laid waste to their country. mostly, i just like drawing katara in military gear, and enjoy thinking about the political intrigue of two ruling branches of the water tribe.
You know I bet the reason found family stories are so popular with aros is because we all subconsciously want to vicariously live out the fantasy of having a group of people who are committed to supporting and spending time with us
Bitch get some friends
Bitch you volunteering?
To clarify further: This post isn’t about not having friends. This is about the fact that there’s a certain level of commitment and intimacy that, in our society, people rarely apply to friendships. There’s a reason the trope is called found family and not found friends.
A friend might be a classmate you get along well with, or someone you met at an event who has the same favorite TV show as you, or your buddy you swap memes with, or the guys in your anime club. And that’s nice and all, but the relationship doesn’t often go much deeper than that.
Potentially living together, sharing your deepest thoughts and insecurities, supporting each other closely when you’re sick or hurting, sticking together no matter what even if someone changes interests or stops attending an event… Those are things that people generally reserve only for romantic partners, or in some cases immediate family members. Friendships only very rarely get these kinds of relationships, and for aromantics, that can be really damaging.
Yes, believe it or not, I have friends. A lot of aros do. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t lonely, or don’t feel like we’re missing something in our lives, because it’s absolutely not just a simple matter of “make some friends lol”. Found family stories represent an idealized life that many of us may never get to have, and it’s pretty rude and dismissive to make fun of that.
It makes me so happy that I find stuff like this floating around now, however rare. I’m not used to actually seeing stuff on romance/relationships that’s relatable w/o it being pushed as a joke, and I’ve literally had my mind set on a found family dynamic for my life since I was like 12. It was poorly formulated in my head back then, and it makes me painfully introspective at times, but now I’m finding words for it. So thanks~ 👏🏻
I’ve had people ask me about QP relationships and what sets them apart from friendships and romantic relationships. This post sums it up pretty well.
Fun fact: she left Yahoo citing the staggering incompetence of management and development teams. She was brought in to salvage Yahoo and they proceeded to ignore her and belittle her every chance she got.
Sounds pretty classic. Bring in a woman to save the day, ignore her and continue to fuck it up. Then try to lay the blame on her when it fails.
We learnt about this concept in class, it’s called The Glass Precipice, also sometimes known as The Glass Cliff.
Women are often promoted in failing companies or risky CEO positions, that way, when something fails, they receive the blame. In these positions, they are often not listened to, belittled, and ignored, They also face more media attention for their failures than male counterparts.
Originally arrested for Insurance Fraud, he met the love of his life Phillip Morris in prison
He got out before Phillip, so he proceeded to GET PHILLIP OUT OF PRISON
He wanted to give Phillip a glamourous life, so he got a big-name job, and then started embezzling funds
he was arrested and then broke out TWICE MORE and kept busting out
then he was arrested again, and the above happened
while he was on the run from this, he was determined to get Phillip (who was in trouble for harboring him) out of prison so he pretended to be a lawyer and hit up Phillip’s jail 24/7. He tried to get Phillip moved to a prison closer to where he was hiding so he couLD VISIT HIM
AND THEN he made a fake identity and tried to get a 75k loan, and was arrested AGAIN, but he FAKED A HEART ATTACK AND LEFT BEFORE HE WAS EVEN PLACED IN PRISON AGAIN
There’s a movie about his life called “I love you, phillip morris” Starring Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor
He made it with filmmaker and BLM activist Sol Guy and you wouldn’t know from the title, but it’s actually a short film, not a documentary, about Darren Wilson being a fucking liar.
Tumblr completely erasing the work of a Black activist/artist while simultaneously finding ways to slander an LGBTQ Jewish person at the same time due to literally not bothering to find out what the film was about in the first place? I’m shocked.
You know when you feel hot and you try to take a selfie but turns out you’re a hideous goblin? Cause same
sorry I saw in your tag it’s cause you saw in the mirror you were great looking, don’t change that opinion cause of the camera, keep that opinion, it’s true. not cause I’m complimenting but because the camera is actually lying. I just wanted to say something because a lot of people on here feel they’re actually good looking when they look in the mirror but when they take a selfie it’s always ugly. there was a very popular post that replied to someone that said they look good in the mirror but ugly in selfies that it’s because the mirror is flipped, and that you look actually really look like you look in your selfies, and not the mirror, because that’s how people see you in real life “unflipped”. and everyone left it at that, and mad people felt completely sad, even though it was like 99% wrong. The 1% truth about it is that yes it is flip (but even the flip changes nothing and you can just flip it back around), but the 99% false thing about it is that you don’t actually look like you do in your selfies. At all. Not a little bit. Selfies are close to the face, and they distort how you look EXTREMELY. Even the people you see who take Beautiful selfies faces are distorted, they’re just lucky it was distorted in a way that makes them look better. Some people may look very beautiful in real life, but are unlucky on how a selfie chooses to distort their face. (Because the selfie is close) and does barrel distortion and does multiple different types of others distortions
Example of the distortion:
You’ll never notice it because you never question it, because you think it’s just giving you what you supposed to look like. But selfies/cameras actually change your whole entire face. The majority of people will even notice that their ears disappear during a selfie. And yes, this is every single selfie, again some people are lucky their face can be distorted into something good. Another example:
You may not have noticed, but that’s why most people who take selfies turn their heads to the side to try and find some kind of angle (that angle is still distorted, it’s just the distortion they subconsciously find best)
(That’s why I don’t take selfies and always tell people I swear I look better/different than my selfies).
Again, when people say “I’m not photogenic”, that’s actually a completely real/backed word. The camera affects different faces differently.
So yes, the way you look in the mirror really IS how good you look. It may be flipped but that’s literally it.
If you want your face not distorted, youll notice you look better when it’s someone else taking your picture standing further away. Some people even like the distortion because the distortion makes them look better. If it’s not for you all you have to do is do what professionals do, easily have someone take your picture from a further away (or set it further away, and then zoom in/crop to whatever you want)
Remember that even then there are distortions, rely on your mirror, despite what was said before, your selfies are not what you look like to people irl, if you look good in the mirror, you good.
hello my friends, i just wanted u all to know that the way Discord has stylized their logo text makes the letter “D” look like the letter “פ” in hebrew, which is called “pe” and is pronounced sort of like “p”
in conclusion: pisscorp
thank you for coming to my ted talk
My friend’s husband works for Discord. I had to show her this, and she had to show it to her husband. His reponse? The CEO is Jewish. He knew exactly what he was doing. “They don’t exactly take themselves too seriously.”
god bless
[image caption: it’s a screenshot of discord in the discord font, but the info is covered in the first post]
SliceOSunshine 