emma_in_dream

Months after everyone else, I have watched *Jurassic Park*. I hope the surviving guests sue the corporation forever. Imagine having a system of command and control which is entirely dependent on the presence of one person and on the day things go wrong she goes off to rescue a subset of two of the thousands of people there.

I did like the mad scientist though. Unusually he had very neat hair and I believe he has survived since the first movie. Kudos.

So I got Netflix to work and watched *Dare Devil*. However, there's nothing else in there that tempts me so I have turned off my membership until there's something else I want to watch.

I have just realised that Donald Trump looks *exactly* like the evil Biff Tanen in the evil 2015 version of *Back to the Future*. I mean, exactly! And their policies are not dissimilar.


I see now that we are living in the not-so-nice alternate future.

Anyone interested in providing improving feedback on my very odd Bucky Barnes vid?

I am all excited about making a Captain America songvid. At first I planned to do a romantic Stucky vid to a Florence and the Machine song, and then I figured that this has been done before. And better.


So I am working on a Bucky-centred vid, using footage from his POV. There are some tiny scraps of the movies which are shot from his POV, usually when he was being tortured. Naked. And oiled.


So much fanfic and so many fanvids assume that Bucky’s life story is an add-on to Steve’s and that he is the sidekick in his own life. Which I get, because the source material you have to work with generally follows Steve.


But I was thinking that while Steve spent seventy years sleeping, Bucky’s experience was being tortured, brainwashed, killing people, and being frozen (and repeat).


So I have been working on a vid which uses the approximately 45 seconds from Bucky’s perspective in *Winter Soldier* which show him being tortured and brainwashed. And then I’ve set it in the historical context that the graphic novels use. Which is a fancy way of showing him causing unrest and assassinating people under the Soviets and for Hydra. So lots of activities in the early 50s, the late 60s and the 80s as the Soviets tried to kill their way into retaining control. Also, the notorious part where he went off the grid in 1973 and wound up back in Brooklyn unsure what year it was. Steve was under the ice but he could have run into his mother at that point. God, the heart break.


Then he spent the 90s on ice, in a storage area until some enterprising General realised what he was and sold him outright to Hydra. Plenty of activity in the 2000s as Hydra aim to destabilise the world.


Making this has been a challenge. I began by thinking I would collect historical footage of major world events – the Vietnam war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan. But this was problematic because 1, I did not want to show identifiable people, 2, I did not want to show real people dead 3, the film qualities varied so enormously with the historical footage that I could not make it all fit together, and 4, almost all the footage available online is of Western events which seems unbalanced for a global war.


So then I decided to use footage from historical movies. This means I don’t have to worry about showing actual violence or dead people and the film quality is consistent. There’s still a bias towards the West, but I’ve done what I can with footage from movies set in Pakistan, Rwanda and Uganda, so as to imply a global sphere of activities. Though the biases in my own historical knowledge are clear – I knew the dates for Bloody Sunday, the Kennedy assassination, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnam war off the top of my head. I’ve had to look up when anti-colonialist and other wars took place in the African continent.


However, it’s still interestingly challenging as I need to show him being a competent assassin but can’t show even distant footage of him in hand to hand or with a knife because of his mechanical arm. Also because Sebastian Stan has a very characteristic swaying walk, which is hard to find emulated. So I’ve wound up with a lot of shots of explosions (I’m going with these as disguised assassinations) and various battle grounds (I assume he was there picking off key peacemakers so as to escalate tensions).


I’ve set it to the most tragic music I know – Tchaikovsky’s *Swan Lake*.


I have been fiddling and fiddling with this. Especially as I can’t afford decent software so I am doing it in clunky old IMovie which is not really suitable.


And I’ve just found Lim’s vid which totally goes over the same ground, only better and in a compact way. You should all look at this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj-2bpF7XJM


But also, when I finish it, you should look at my vid.

Do you remember that scene at the beginning of The Winter Soldier when Sam Wilson asks Steve how he finds the 21st century. He clearly expects a grumpy old man the grass was greener in the past answer, but gets a really positive answer. One of my favourite insights into Steve’s radical nature.


So a while back at church the Minister asked the congregation to talk about whether things were better now or worse than in the 1950s. I was mentally shuddering because the average age in the congregation is like the far side of 75 and I expected a fairly conservative response. I am one of the young ones and I’m in my mid-40s. I expected a whole lot of talk about how much better things were in the mythical 1950s in which there was vast economic prosperity and everyone knew their place.


But! The very first person said how wonderful the eradication of polio was. Like that was the top of mind comparison to the past for someone who remembered that disease. And the next person said how brilliant immunisation is and how children don’t die now of diseases which used to kill. Bear in mind that these people certainly saw their siblings and friends die and probably their children too.


Then there was an outpouring of positive statements. Nowadays women don’t have to quit work when they get married! They earn a lot more than they used to when jobs were listed separately! Aboriginal people are citizens (though obviously there are still problems there)! One of the most amazing statements was from a man who said ‘remember the excitement’ of the 1970s when almost every day a new nation appeared, with people seeking freedom in Africa and Asia (although also still problems there)!


My take away – people are basically nice! And also, eradicating polio is a really big deal!

Lots of Captain America graphic novels and a very interesting book about the American civil war. I want to know more about what people thought they were fighting for.


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It has something for the marxist feminist – They are (literally) pursued by the embodiments of the military, patriarchal religion and big business, converging on them in three war parties. And they defeat the patriarchy through the actions of all the pursued working together.


For the psychoanalytical feminist – The entire movie is about precious bodily fluids and the need to radically centralise the female body.


For the liberal feminist – They free themselves by cutting off the chastity belts. And then the same bolt cutters are used to (literally) unfetter the men from the chains of the patriarchy.


All this, and it also has explosions! And car chases! And a guy egging on the warriors while flames actually jet out of his guitar! Truly this movie has something for everyone!


Many thanks to Short_Black for taking me to see it.

I just watched it for the first time - an amazing movie. I loved every part of it. Except for Barbara Stanwyck's insane blond wig.

The good.... incredibly diverse cast, mostly women, all kinds of races, ages and body types. Really good acting and back stories for all of them. Strong cast. Lots of different stories woven together.

The bad... the point-of-view character, the white lady, is so annoying that I am now fast forwarding over anything with her in it. I cannot justify buying it. Perhaps time to figure out how to use Netflix?