Ran

Saw that as well, was surprisingly effective to just go straight off the transcripts, and Sweeney did a good job with it.

Is this the 2023 film about Reality Winner, or the 2014 French film directed by Quentin Dupieux?

Yulia Navalnya, addressing a security conference hours after word of her husband's death:

RIP Alexei Navalny. Almost exactly a month before the beginning of the Russian elections. The courage it took to voluntarily go back to Russia, knowing what he would face, knowing with a certainty that at the least he'd be given a long prison sentence on trumped-up charges, and would most likely conveniently die while in prison, is just staggering to me.

If McCarty indicates he started the process with guidance, would discuss getting more detailed guidance with them, we then also learn that the local propaganda committee somehow weighed in without the Hugo Admins being made aware of it as far as the leaked e-mails reveals (whether they were informed verbally, or McCarty had separate emails about it not privy to Lacey, who knows), it seems pretty clear that the "silent" Chinese were not, in fact, silent behind the scenes.

From one of the first quoted McCarty emails: Per Lacey, He knew he was screwed regardless, and acting out of the ordinary was doing him no personal favors, so I would take Lacey's report to be an accurate representation of McCarty's actions in relation to the release, which shows he was in fact concerned for the Chinese members of the committee.

The willingness to just suppose the Chinse concom were helpless innocents who left everything to McCarty and co. strikes me as infantilizing and deeming, personally, so I can't indulge in it. I'll take McCarty at his word that his Chinese counterparts (who are certainly also "local fans") were giving him some sort of guidance, but it seems obvious they weren't looped in to these e-mails to distance them from any paper trail. The fact that there was a post from the Sichuan propaganda committee indicating they reviewed the works of shortlisted creators and claimed to have directly seen to the removal of a dozen works with LGBTQ themes seems to strike very strongly against the idea that there was no role of the government in all of this.

I still disagree that the Chinese principals weren't involved. It's one of the very first things McCarty says in the e-mails, that his understanding of finding things having to do with Tibet, Hong Kong, China, etc. was drawn from his Chinese counterparts, and he said he'd get more guidance from them. I find it improbable, at best, that the Chinese Hugo Award Administrators were not in the loop. They weren't on any written communications, at least not that we've seen (we have only seen communications Lacey was privy too, who knows how McCarty back-channeled with them), but I fully expect that they preferred to steer away from written communication precisely to avoid a paper trail to minimize their personal provable involvement in these decisions. I guess it's admirable that the Westerners are falling on their swords so as not to embarrass the Chinese concom and possibly get them in trouble with their government or the CCP, but I think people are being very simplistic in their reading of what we've learned. Yes, none of these people should have continued in the task and should have insisted that the Chinese administrators run everything. Better a complete failure to run the awards than to participate in this deeply tainted award season.

A bad back and then a mild flu put paid to my hopes of watching The Zone of Interest this week, so I saw HBO Max had Sexy Beast and I realized it's been way too long since I've seen it. Honestly, it's as good as I remember it to be -- Kingsley's performance as Don Logan is brilliantly nasty -- but I forgot how much, well, arthouse stuff was in it thanks to the gun-toting anthropomorphic rabbit that appears in dream-like sequences. Ian McShane as Teddy Bass "Mr. Black Magic", was also very good, as (of course) was Ray Winstone as our retired criminal protagonist. I googled a bit and saw that Winstone says his two week "rehearsal" period -- where he went to Spain two weeks before production began to get as tan as possible and to pack on some weight -- was the best "rehearsal" he's ever had. Also, great use of music in the film. It's a very flashy film, in a lot of ways, which makes sense for one of the late 90's best and most innovative music video directors. Going to see if I can find Birth, which I've never seen before.

You know as much as anyone else does. I expect she ultimately will, or will be fired.

I think from reactions people are just taking it that the Westerners made these decisions, but the opening e-mail from McCarty seems to make it pretty plain that he was taking directives from his "Chinese counterparts", and the reason they were being left off the e-mails was to insulate said Chinese counterparts from any blowback from the government and vested business interests if the Hugo Award administrators failed to be sufficiently censorious for their tastes. What a mess. I'm also rather confused as to why slate ballots were being invalidated. The whole point of EPH was that slates were to have a lot less power, so it was fine if people slated works. I suppose it may have been just that in this case the slates were the overwhelming majority and would have swamped EPH (which is really designed to prevent a minority of ballots from having an outsized impact due to an organized slates).

Watched Moneyball for lack of anything better to do. I love the first half more than I love the second half, personally, but it has such great dialog and verve, and Jonah Hill is fantastic. I know Art Howe hated his portrayal in the book and in the film, and that a the book elides a lot of things that make things a lot more complicated... like the fact that two absolutely key players for the 2002 A's were Barry Zito and Miguel Tejada, who respectively won the Cy Young and the AL MVP awards, and were not discovered through Sabermtric-like analysis for "value" players but through straight, traditional scouting. For that matter, most of the people who the A's drafted that year did not make lasting careers in the MLB, and some never even played a single inning. Then rewatched Legends of the Fall, in part because of Ed Zwick's new memoir. An excerpt in Vanity Fair talked a lot about his experience with Pitt on the film. It's a gorgeously-lensed film, James Horner's score is beautifully epic and romantic (but also too dominant -- they could have pulled i back some), and I thought that Hopkins in particular gave a fine performance of the gruff Cornish pater familias. I'd like to read Jim Hopkins's original novella some time.

Finished as well, and agree that there's a bit of a dip right after the mid-point, but OTOH it played a big role in setting up the ending which I felt was very strong. Regarding your spoilers:

Funny, I too have started Mr. And Mrs. Smith, and was kind of swept away with the feel and style of the first episode. Just finished the 5th episode, so 3 left. Donald Glover is, IMO, a generational talent, and Maya Erskine's chemistry with him is terrific. And yeah, the fact that she's also the voice of Mizu.. pretty cool! I don't really know her from anything else, but I saw an interview with her discussing that she created and wrote PEN15, which I gather was rather well-received as a comedy. Lets see... also watched The Devil Wears Prada for the first time, it was all right as typical formulaic workplace comedy where a lot hangs on the leads, and it worked all right.

Back in 2016, Disney had re-acquired the rights to Prydain, and in 2020 there was a rumor that they were considering doing a live action Black Cauldron, but obviously nothing seems to have come of it. And with the enormous failure, alas, that was Willow -- did so poorly they chose to turn it into a write-off by removing it from their service -- I'm dubious they'll try again any time soon.

I watched The Black Cauldron in the movie theater as a kid. I have no idea why exactly my parents decided to go to that one, but anyways, my memories of it are rather fond but I have not seen it since... well, approachin 40 years ago now. That said, the Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander are actually quite wonderful YA, steeped in Welsh myth and folklore with Alexander's particular style. The Black Cauldron was a Newbery Honor book, and the last in the series (The High King) actually won the Newbery Medal. For whatever reason, of the books I rememberTaran Wanderer best. They didn't miss, the Newberys, back in the day -- it's how I was also introduced to Robin McKinley and The Blue Sword.

Episode 5 is probably the best episode since episode 1, but at the same time there's some real issues. Why, for example

There is an interesting piece about exactly this question, asking animation production designers to discuss their role and its similarities and differences to live action production design.

Folks, you are allowed to put people on ignore if you don't find their contributions useful.

You're right. Abolitionism is not something really attested to in history until, maybe the Middle Ages, depending on how you see Lous X's outlawing of slavery in France in the early 14th century (a rule that was not applied, later, to colonies of France). Most examples of abolitionism are better dated to the late 18th century and onward. This doesn't mean people didn't decry being slaves. But for most of human history, and in most regions of the world, slavery was a very normal and accepted institution that was not broadly questioned in any significant way. Slave revolts were about ending personal slavery, generally, and almost never lead to an end of slavery as an institution even when successful (e.g. the Mameluke Sultanate). The only exception I know of would be the Haitian Revolution, which joined the general spirit of late 18th/early 19th century abolitionism. Personally, I don't tend to think that most people in history were actually "shitty people". They lived in the manner that their ancestors lived and in the manner they believed their descendants would live. Many of them lived in manners that, as Hobbes said, were "poor, nasty, brutish, and short", but by their lights they were just living as best they could under the circumstances that they lived under, within the framework of the mores of their time and place, and most people tried to act in ways that strengthened their place in society which generally meant very much not being a "shitty person" by the lights of your peers (who may have some very different opinions from us, today, about what actually constituted "shitty" behavior.)

Sienna has him at 14. Do we really think most of the presidents were shitty people? Weird thought.

Clinton's in the upper half of presidents, IMO, and in the estimates of most presidential historians. #14 according to the latest survey, seems pretty fair.

Tokyo Vice returns for its second (and very probably last, reading the tea leaves) season, opening with the first two episodes. Maybe in the US HBO Max had a recapper of some sort, but here in Sweden they did not, so I had to quickly refresh myself with random wikis and articles and a few skips around last season's episodes to get caught up (particularly on what happened to Sato at the end of the first season). So far, pretty solid, but still doesn't really rise to the promise of that first, Michael Mann-directed episode. Also rewatched Jackie Brown, easily my second favorite Tarantino film. That soundtrack, the world-weariness of RObert Forster and Pam Grier... perfection. Most of the way through a rewatch of The Favourite, after recently seeing Poor Things. Totally forgot that he did the first extended loopy dance sequence in this film, that he then makes a real centerpiece of the latest film. And thinking about the dancing in The Great, I'm guessing this is more a McNamara thing that Lanthimos likes to indulge.

Still going to go to films with the best ensembles. It's fine, good to recognize casting directors specifically, but it's the same thing. Best ensemble is just a casting director award, if you look at it that way.

Feels like a sneaky way to do an ensemble award without calling it an ensemble award.