Reblogged from filiabelialis
Reblogged from twistingreality
I always think of David’s acting like liquid, I keep using the word liquid about him. It can flow across his face, there are depths underneath. Whatever he’s saying at the moment might not be what he’s actually thinking, and even when he’s silent there’s a hundred things going on under the surface. That’s what you ask for from any actor. - Russell T Davies
Reblogged from fucknodoctorten
I do enjoy all of the Moffat authored episodes during the Davies era, and a handful of others besides.* Blink and the Silence in the Library arc both rank amongst my favorite Doctor Who episodes over the entire series. I honestly think that some of my problems from the Moffat era stem from the fact that the man honestly needs a fucking editor to slap him around whenever he starts a new plot thread, and although I find Davies’ writing to generally be rancid, he did a good job of keeping Moffat’s out of control creative vision from enveloping too much of the show.
*For future reference, the non-Moffat episodes in the RTD era which I approve of are: Dalek, Midnight, Fear Her (I had a troubled childhood and really appreciated it as a piece directed at a child audience) and Turn Left. I also liked the part of Love & Monsters that didn’t involve the ruination of William Graham’s creative genius; the build-up of The Impossible Pit/The Satan Planet before Satan turned out to be made of bad CG and inaccurate prophecies; and all parts of those episodes reintroducing Simm’s Master before the Doctor arose like Tinkerbell on a wave of the audience’s clapping.
Agreed so hard on all of these (minus Love & Monsters). Especially the ones that are ALMOST PERFECT until they smack you with a shitty ending. That said, I am quite a fan of everything after Ten’s Tinkerbell Messiah moment as well; it’s just those thirty seconds of trainwreck right at the climax that bring down an otherwise amazing set of episodes.
Would also add all of Paul Cornell’s episodes, Fires of Pompeii, and Waters of Mars—minus the bizarre anticlimax where Ten finally goes off the deep end, pops right back up without even getting his artfully-gelled hair wet, and paddles over to the side of the pool because the water’s too cold.
Reblogged from brilliant-snark
So many feelings…
Just caught this on TV again last night. FEEEEEEELLLLLLINGS.
This moment. Fuck.
“Just one little bullet, come on, please, REGENERATE!”
(Source: marvelgifs)
Reblogged from thedaisiestdaisy
Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart Photoshoot for Interview Magazine
WHY DIDN’T TWILIGHT STAR CHARLIZE THERON AS EDWARD CULLEN.
REBLOGGING FOR TRUTH.
MOVIES I WOULD WATCH A THOUSAND TIMES
Reblogged from fucknodoctorten
I think the reason that the Moffat era gets more hate for it’s sexism (The racism issue seems different and would require a different rambling post… as it’s more an issue of tokenism/ignorance vs. flat invisibility) is that it takes a different form than the sexism of the Davies era. Since many people came into Series Five having only seen nuWho, their enjoyment of the show under RTD had probably desensitized them somewhat to how problematic his work was, and the stark shift in how everything operated helped to highlight Moffat’s dickery.
I see Moffat’s method of storytelling as being something of a quick sketch method of painting a narrative. Events happen very quickly and there are often unspoken months or years between episodes in which the characters are presumably having emotional reactions and dissecting whatever bullshit the plot has thrown at them. In addition to this, most characters who aren’t the Doctor seem to conform to very simple archetypes. They are fleshed out enough to help them contribute to the labyrinthine narrative, but don’t have a soap-operatic cast of supporting characters and a fully spelled out life history. Their deeper personalities tend to be hinted at, rather than explored explicitly.
Because of this, I personally find Moffat’s blatant in-your-face sexist tropes somewhat more palatable than Davies work. I can see that the man is holding up a bunch of paperdoll characters and that they are going to conform to the pictures from the fairy-tale book he cut them out of, rather than looking like real people. As such, I can sort of brush it off when Amy seems to have limited emotional reactions to her pregnancy or when River seems to spontaneously move from wearing her temptress hat to her loyal wife hat - I can assume that everything has more depth offstage. I understand, however, that there’s still sexist dickbaggery going on and that this method of plotting makes it all the more visible viewers used to a different format.
With Davies, everyone’s emotional reactions and thoughts were explored in wretched high-definition detail, often to the point that somebody’s internal monologue was clumsy pasted over top the already exposition-filled narrative. While this gave his characters some sense of completeness which Moffat’s lack, it also left me understanding that there was virtually nothing to expect of his cast outside of what’s being shown, and what I was shown was woefully lackluster. Whereas I can easily pretend with Moffat that River spends all of her time offscreen graverobbing the treasures of ancient ruins and spreading sedition in corrupt space empires, with Davies I keep being forcibly reminded that Rose thinks her life on earth pre-Doctor was insignificant and the rest of her existence appears to be spent either obsessing about Doctor Ten v. 1.0 or making out with Doctor Ten v 2.0.
I think both show-runners paint caricatured portraits of women and their emotions and that many people overlook Davies doing this because he spends so much time painting in all the sloppy little details of his sexism such as that there’s an illusion of depth… rather than just bluntly stating “This woman is crazy because of her crazy woman uterus!” every episode or so as Moffat tends to do.
Expanding a bit on this, and on some of the replies (not included because they cut the original post, which I want to reproduce):
RTD wants you to experience the characters’ emotional lives from the inside, and one of his more unpleasant tricks for doing that is inviting you to laugh along with them at another character’s expense. More generally, he has an irritating tendency to establish his favorite characters’ worth by comparing them to someone ‘less worthy.’ This doesn’t always involve female/minority/working-class targets—think Adam in The Long Game—and even when it does it’s not always expressed in an overtly sexist or classist way. But sometimes it is, as with Jackie; sometimes, as with Martha’s whole season, he seems oblivious to the glaring unfortunate implications or tries to brush them off as irrelevant; and in general the numbers are pretty disproportionate: the targets are disproportionately minorities, and minority representation is disproportionately negative. Even Martha herself gets established as cool-headed and competent by having Ten insult her fellow (also brown, also female) medical student for losing her head when they’re stuck on the moon without reliable air supply.
On the flip side, RTD’s more in-depth character work usually gives some nuance or redeeming qualities to the slighted characters, at least enough that most of them appear to have some sort of life outside being the butt of a joke. Moffat deals in sketches and archetypes, leaving him open to the accusation that he sees women as NOTHING but mothers, femme fatales, irrational miniskirt-sporting spitfires, or whatever questionable trope fandom has decided to side-eye this week. This is partly justified, since the character types he goes for are overwhelmingly gendered ones, but very few archetypes come without unfavorable and problematic stereotypes attached. IMO fandom is too quick to jump straight to the most unflattering and stereotypical interpretation so they can throw stones at Moffat for it—using the worst tropes to invalidate the whole archetype, then pointing to the very sketchiness and malleability that allowed such interpretations as evidence that he doesn’t respect his characters as people. Perhaps NuWho fandom is just primed to expect RTD-style character exploration for its own sake and doesn’t quite grok what Moffat is trying to do—he is more about crafting interesting pieces that he can push around his chessboard in interesting ways.
The other thing is that RTD’s continual attempts to be all socially relevant and shit often gave his missteps a flavor of truly nasty commentary on real life. Moffat deals in archetypes and fairy tales, which blunts the edge somewhat. Plus his intersectional sins are mainly ones of omission; he tends to forget that not everyone is straight and white, but he means well enough and tries to make up for it when reminded.
(Funnily enough, I do prefer RTD, warts and all; even at his worst he is disastrously compelling, and his characterization porn hooks me like the sucker I am. Moffat provides plenty of cerebral fascination but I am less invested. And yet I end up in this weird devil’s-advocate position where I affectionately slag off on RTD while admitting he’s got me by the balls, and feel compelled to defend Moffat against people who slag off on him one-sidedly and with no affection whatsoever.)
Reblogged from lesmisquestions
How do you actually pronounce Les Misérables? I’ve heard a number of different ways and I want to do it right. I know no French, so I’m pretty horrible at pronunciations. In fact… could we get a pronunciation guide for names? For a long time I was reading Enjolras’s name as though it were Spanish until I realized that was dumb.
MORE PHONOLOGY THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW, COMING RIGHT UP!
Honestly? It depends on how French you want to sound. The full-on ‘correct’ pronunciation would sound so weird in the middle of an English sentence that even people with excellent French (i.e. me and most of the other French-capable fans I know) will Anglicize it somewhat, shifting vowels and French ‘r’s towards sounds that actually exist in English, to preserve the flow of speech and remain somewhat comprehensible.
So an approximation with reasonable concessions to English phonology would be ‘lay miz-air-AH-b(l),’ with the vowel in ‘miz’ tending more towards ‘fee’ than towards ‘fit.’ Go ahead and tack on tiny schwa to the end if you need it to pronounce the ‘bl,’ as long as it doesn’t turn into ‘bluuhhh.’ French ‘ay’ sounds aren’t diphthongs, they’re more like the interjection ‘eh?’, but there’s no need to be rigorous about this (in fact it sounds a bit unnatural in English), just don’t let it stray too far towards ‘laaeeyyy.’
As for ‘Enjolras’… oh boy. Roughly? ‘on-zhol-rahss,’ with ‘zh’ as in ‘vision.’ The stress is weakly on the first syllable, or on the third if convenient, but NOT on the second as would seem most natural to English speakers. (Stress is a tricky subject, as French is a syllable-timed language; sticking it at the beginning is the best way to keep the whole word from getting lost in the stress-timed depths of an English sentence.) If you wanna get fancy, try pronouncing the ‘n’ without letting the tip of your tongue touch the ridge behind your teeth, to approximate French’s crazy nasal vowels. The same trick also works for, say, ‘Jean Valjean.’
(Source: lesmisquestions)
Reblogged from filiabelialis
ELEVEN GETS A WAISTCOAT. AND A FROCK COAT. HOT DAMN.
Also, in bizarre fandom crossover news, Ruthie Henshall will be putting in an appearance as a minor character this season. Which means any prospective ‘six degrees of separation’ games will no longer have to go through the RSC to get from Doctor Who to Les Mis!
Reblogged from twistingreality
most accurate definition ever
LOLMG PERFECTION
I’ve watched like… half a season of Torchwood in aggregate? It was pitched to me as “like Doctor Who only amusingly terrible and with more buttsex.” If it had been that, I would’ve eaten it up with a spoon. Unfortunately, Russell T Davies’ idea of “for adults” isn’t so much “now with added buttsex” as “Idealism and wonder? Those are for kiddies. If the Doctor doesn’t come for you, the real world is a steaming pile of shit, filth, incompetence, and existential bleakness. Also morally-dubious buttsex.”
If anyone can honestly tell me my assessment was premature and Torchwood does not in fact represent the triumph of brute force and cynicism over romance and intellect, recommend me some episodes to change my mind and I will happily give it another shot. I don’t WANT to dislike it, it just rubbed me the wrong way—it seemed like it was not just ignoring but actively taking a dump on everything I like about its parent show.
(Full disclosure: I was drunk and in sarcastic company for most of the episodes I watched. Then again, this seems to be universally recommended as the best way to watch Torchwood.)
(Source: schlampig)
Reblogged from francescadarimini
Hey y’all complaining about Les Mis “spoilers”:
The novel has been out for over 150 years.
It’s not like SPOILER ALERT SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE anymore.
That was so 1862.
SPOILER ALERT: The horse is full of Greeks!
Reblogged from fucknodoctorten
While I could possibly buy some argument somewhere that a guy wearing the world’s most fabulous velvet frock coat as he stalks a man across space and time might be heterosexual, I can’t think of that many straight guys I know who spend their time luring hard-bodied, pink-a-shirt-wearing young men from local wrestling clubs to a place where they can “give into their primal desires” and realize their potential as anthropomorphic cheetah men.
Reblogged from maverek
Oops?
I don’t ship it in the sense of thinking there’s any romantic possibility there whatsoever…
…but shipping it in the sense of wanting MOAR INTERACTION, preferably with more fucked-up sexual manipulation on both sides? Move over, East India Company, you’ve got competition!
(Then again, I also sorta ship Ten/Martha/Master in the same way, so I am in fact a horrible person and nobody should listen to me ever.)
