The NZA

Tuesday at 09:36 AM

April 11

i'm like 25 minutes from an airport, so no worries

also bear in mind i'm back on the graveyard shirt, meaning i'm up all night on nights off as well - may help with aussie scheduling!

April 11

March 28

courtesy of @spiffytee

March 25

March 15

paging axels, and anyone else who enjoys nonsense

March 15

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djSKp_pwmOA

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Bill Skarsgård takes on the iconic role of THE CROW in this modern reimagining of the original graphic novel by James O'Barr.

Soulmates Eric Draven (Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.

hopefully this goes better than the sequels? it's kinda weird seeing so much stuff happy in daylight, but there's definitely a jared leto-y vibe here than i'm hoping the film somehow has less of

i still bump the soundtrack to the original one 30 years later, so i'll always have that

March 15

March 15

March 15

Yes, the Rumors Are True, Sushi Is About to Come to a Costco Near You

Costco CFO Richard Galanti announced that the big box chain would be adding more Kirkland Signature sushi counter locations across the country following the success of its first branch in Issaquah, Washington.

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Following the success of Costco's first continental U.S. sushi counter in its Issaquah, Washington location, CFO Richard Galanti announced on a Q2 earnings call in early March that the big box retailer will be adding more Kirkland Signature sushi counters to some of its stores nationwide.

According to a report by Today, Galanti said that it was not a new concept for the brand: Costco locations in many Asian markets — specifically Japan and South Korea — have been operating sushi counters for several years now. And the same goes for some branches in Hawaii.

"The sushi program has proven to be a category where we can be successful in both quality and price, and we're looking forward to seeing more of that in the future," he said during the call. He also revealed that two new sushi counter locations were already in the works and would open in the "very near future."

Costco started working on its sushi counter concept for the continental U.S. market in October 2022, per the Seattle Times. The chain's culinary team also flew to Japan to study with "rice masters" and tested recipes at its R&D kitchen not far from the Issaquah store. And when Kirkland Signature finally opened in June 2023, it was a near-immediate hit, garnering many fans who took to social media to express their delight. It was reported that "the Issaquah Costco has arguably become the most talked-about restaurant on the Eastside."

As of this writing, it is unclear which Costco branches — or how many of them — will open up sushi-making operations. As the Seattle Times reported last year, operating Kirkland Signature sushi counters requires considerable real estate to make room for a display case, a sushi station, and a rice room. So we can only presume that likely the brand's larger stores will be bestowed with sushi counters.

March 15

just wanted to check in - anyone got fitness goals going here?

i finally got a good gym access after moving, but mid 40's has been an adventure in minor injuries, haha. doing gardening stuff on the same day as deadlifts & other back exercices may not be the best call! nothing max does of ibuprofen & heating pads can't set right, may just box in the meantime

my current line of work has me spending several hours walking & doing rounds, so weight hasn't been the issue it would've been otherwise. hoping to step things up this year!

March 15

should we do a poll here? maybe reach out to rachel and others who might be down to join, but aren't on the forum these days?

i think we can totally manage a small cool group with some planning, and incorporate some video calling for others to join. like, every new years, we're still doing resolutions with lindsay & senshik, we can sort this out and make it work for anyone down to join for an anniversary thing

speaking of: @Master Star just got hitched to @Mr. Sexy Hat so i think we have a better batting average than tinder at this rate

also, @alive she cried just wanted to restate my interest in a video call if i can whenever one goes down!

March 15

been out of the loop with the genre so long, white folks got better at it

also, i love the fuck out of thundercat

*edit let's put some classic shit here too

February 22

‘AVENGERS 5’ will no longer be titled ‘THE KANG DYNASTY’ as Marvel has been making moves to minimize Kang after Quantumania underperformed

THR Article

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Just over a year ago, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was set to take Marvel Studios to the next level. A new villain was going to be introduced, setting the stage for several years' worth of storytelling. And the movie itself was a giant-sizing of a franchise that was previously modest in scope. Instead, the Peyton Reed-directed movie heralded a year's worth of missteps, box office blunders and PR nightmares. It was all uncharted territory for Marvel, which had steadily been generating box office gold for 15 years.

But the Disney division is in the midst of a pretty darn good February, all things considered, despite the general gloom that surrounds the superhero genre as of late. The Super Bowl trailer for Deadpool & Wolverine became the most watched trailer of all time, with 365 million views in 24 hours. Yes, Disney's math includes the 123 million people who tuned in for the game, which included just 30 seconds of the trailer, but Super Bowl fudging or not, the clip's reach was an encouraging number for a studio whose last movie, The Marvels, became the lowest-grossing in the MCU's 33-film run, hitting just $206 million globally.

Next came the Valentine's Day unveiling of the cast of Fantastic Four — Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Joseph Quinn, coupled with retro art teasing a 1960s setting for the movie. (The Fantastic Four are a cornerstone of the Marvel mythos, with writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby introducing the team in 1961's Fantastic Four No. 1, the comic that would initiate the Marvel Universe, so the symbolic launch of the new team carries a lot of weight for the film division. This will be the third incarnation of the Fantastic Four to hit the big screen, not counting the infamous Roger Corman version.)

A day later, Marvel launched the trailer for X-Men '97, a revival of the 1990s cartoon that debuts in March. The trailer set an internal Disney record as the biggest launch for an animated series on Disney+, ahead of other Marvel shows such as What If …? and any animated Star Wars series.

These public-facing moves come as studio boss Kevin Feige recalibrates the creative direction behind the scenes. Early in February, the company completed reshoots for Agatha: Darkhold Diaries, the WandaVision spinoff starring Kathryn Hahn that is expected to hit Disney+ this fall. The company usually budgets five days of reshoots into the schedule, but the studio completed the work in just one, fueling a sunny outlook around the show internally, according to sources associated with the series.

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The studio also quietly hired Eric Pearson to polish the script for Fantastic Four, which will shoot this summer in London. Pearson is a company stalwart who worked on Thor: Ragnarok and Black Widow and has a reputation for taking projects over the finish line. The stakes for that movie are high, as the studio is still searching for characters and actors who can carry its universe forward after the exits of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans.

Marvel also hired Joanna Calo, the showrunner of acclaimed FX series The Bear, to work on the script for Thunderbolts, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The film will begin shooting in March in Atlanta. Her hiring adds a flair of prestige to the project, which stars Florence Pugh and — according to a source who has read previous drafts of the script — centers on villains and antiheroes going on a mission that was supposed to end with their deaths

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Marvel is also cleaning up the creative mess left in the wake of Jonathan Majors, the once-rising actor cast to play the lynchpin villain role in the next Avengers movies but who in December was found guilty of reckless assault in the third degree and harassment in a Manhattan court after a domestic incident with his ex-partner, a movement coach he met while working on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Marvel dropped Majors hours after the conviction and is rewriting those movies, which will now either minimize the character or excise him entirely. The first of the new Avengers movies, due out in 2026, was initially titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty but will be getting a new title to remove the character's name, though sources say that even before Majors' conviction, the studio was making moves to minimize the character after Quantumania underperformed, grossing $476 million.

On the TV side, Marvel has been reorganizing its operations to allow for greater control from showrunners, a move made after the critical failure of the expensive Samuel L. Jackson spy series Secret Invasion, which sidelined executive producer Kyle Bradstreet after a year, with various creative factions vying for influence in his wake. The show had about 2.5 billion minutes of viewing over its six-week run, per Nielsen, in the bottom third of Marvel's live-action Disney+ offerings so far.

"The focus is internal this year," says one insider of all the tinkering going on behind the scenes.

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Execs are not calling it a reboot, not even a soft one, but more of a creative retooling. It's no secret that since the 2019 Avengers: Endgame, the company was asked to scale up in an unprecedented way to feed its fledgling streaming service, Disney+, then a top priority for Disney, which was in the thick of the streaming wars. First under the direction of Disney CEO Bob Iger and, later, his short-lived successor, Bob Chapek, Marvel expanded into TV series and animation, with the goal of the MCU becoming a place with a seemingly endless procession of year-round releases. It was an ask that proved too unwieldy to sustain.

"Some of our studios lost a little focus. So the first step that we've taken is that we've reduced volume," Iger said on a Feb. 7 earnings call. "We've reduced output, particularly at Marvel," in order to ensure "the films you're making can be even better."

February 21

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Before we pitched, they warned us "there is absolutely no way we can do a 𝘉𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 movie", but they loved our enthusiasm. We pitched the outline for the entire film, and what started as a 'never' turned into a 'maybe'. In the time since, we've been pitching our way up the company hoping to get to James Gunn. But for now, here's a taste of what we've been cooking.

Source: From Writer/Director Patrick Harpin (𝘔𝘺 𝘋𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘺 𝘏𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳) & Production Designer/Producer Yuhki Demers (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳-𝘔𝘢𝘯: 𝘈𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳-𝘝𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦)

god, please let this happen

February 7

minus one was so good! tempted to see it again in black & white

Fascinating two articles that just dropped on Godzilla Minus One's development from director Yamazaki himself. Delves into the challenges Shirogumi faced while working on the movie, the VFX industry in Japan and what Hollywood could learn from the film's success. There was a lot of talk about the miracle they pulled off with Minus One's miniscule VFX budget when the movie came out so I thought this would be worth sharing. Way, way more in the links below.

How Godzilla Minus One Pulled Off Oscar-Nominated VFX for Less Than $15 Million

The director of the Oscar-nominated Japanese kaiju epic on the workflows that kept his effects-heavy movie under $15 million.

I'll just get right to it: How were you able to make Godzilla Minus One look this incredible on such a small budget?
This is the office. As you can see, I already have my staff members around me. They are all pretty much here. There's no downtime or waiting time. On top of that, if I'm the director and also the VFX supervisor, I'm the one who has the vision in my head. It is very efficient because there's no gap between what the director is thinking or asking for and the work that is being brought to me. The effectiveness of me being one mind and one body, and then having my staff around me, has helped accelerate the process of working together well.

In Japan, film budgets —and in particular when we talk about how much of a film budget is reserved for VFX — they're not that large. So, we have been educated to work within the constraints of a small budget when it comes to VFX. For example, in terms of the destruction effect. We had worked on something called Godzilla: The Ride, which is in a theme park. We knew that there were some assets that we might be able to reuse or recycle, or perhaps we could use it as a reference. So we have ways that we come up with to save on costs to make it work.

Marvel movies, for instance, use a lot of third-party VFX companies and they tend to waste time having to redo things. Are you saying that's not what Minus One's workflow was like?
Outsourcing to a third party is going to take time and money. We tend to keep it in-house. That's just the most efficient and effective way to work. But that doesn't mean we don't have some external resources that we use. For example, the matte artists or miniature artists. We also have project-based freelance artists who have worked with us for many years. I would say, in this case, maybe one-third of the end-team-member count was freelance folks. We don't always have 35 full-time employees in this office.

Vulture has done lots of reporting on working conditions in the American VFX industry. How are the conditions in Japan? I've read that they're tough for animators — long hours and not especially high pay.
In Japan, we literally call a company "white" or "black." "White" is a company that doesn't exploit its employees and "black" is one that makes you work overnight at all hours and really doesn't pay you well. Our studio name is Shirogumi ("white team"), so we want to believe we are setting up standards and an environment that is very workable for all the artists and everyone who is with us here today. As a creative myself but also an employer of creatives, I feel like what they make is so beautiful, and I hope and wish I would be able to pay our staff members better, at some point.

Sure, it might be challenging at times when we're in a crunch or postproduction and need to get our work done. We try not to do late nights. We have all of our weekends off. A lot of us have families. A lot of us are also not at the age anymore where we can pull off all-nighters. So, we don't let that happen. I also think that our teammates really work in harmony and they work very fast, very quickly. The output is great and that works to our advantage, that everyone is here working together.

What could Hollywood blockbusters learn from Godzilla Minus One's success?
I don't even know if I'm in a position to say. We have learned so much from Hollywood that I don't know if there is anything in return that Hollywood can learn from us. If I were to maybe point out one thing — without really having any concrete basis to back this up — it's that if there is a solid vision throughout the process of making a single film, then I think there is a way to cut down on costs. Yes, there are trial-and-error costs, and bouncing ideas off each other is necessary to a certain extent. But, if you can clearly communicate that vision, then maybe there is no need to do a lot of experimenting on the side that eats up a lot of cost and time. Perhaps that's it, but I don't think that's anything that Hollywood would be learning from us.

How VFX updates take Godzilla back to its nuclear roots

Minus One’ director Takashi Yamazaki, who earned a visual effects nomination, has tricked out Japan’s iconic kaiju and added some unique details.

www.latimes.com

Yamazaki definitely has a knack for self-control. "Minus One's" rich, gorgeous visual effects, seen in two-thirds of the unusually emotional, 38th Godzilla movie, cost between a quarter and a third of the film's bargain-basement budget (less than $15 million). There were no limits to his formal ambitions, though. "In terms of polygon counts, we're talking millions that went into creating Godzilla this time," says Yamazaki, who did initial drawings and sculpture software models that were then refined by artist Kosuke Taguchi with optimized computer graphics data. "In terms of the skin texture, there was a dinosaur origin, but when it's wounded, a regeneration happens and there's a different texture, like you would see on any wound. We wanted a mix, brought in new layers that would make the look very unique."

Since Godzilla grew out of Japan's atomic bombing trauma, his destruction of Tokyo's Ginza district and assorted ships culminate in terrible — but gorgeous — mushroom clouds. Trouble was, the look Yamazaki craved was too big to simulate in CG. An old-fashioned technique saved the day for the otherwise computer-generated spectacle. "We had a matte artist who did 2-D that had a little bit of movement," the director says. "Once we found that that switch was actually working, we were like, 'Oh, my gosh, we spent so much time with CG that couldn't get it, but now we have this really cool trick to get the mushroom clouds in there!'"

Simulating water also takes up reams of CG space. But thanks to young compositing artist Tatsuji Nojima — who was elected by the whole VFX crew to share Japan's first nomination in the category with supervisor Yamazaki, effects director Kiyoko Shibuya and CG team leader Masaki Takahashi, more seagoing shots became doable than initially planned. "He was very much into water simulation," Yamazaki says of Nojima. "He had built his own super computer at home and was like, 'Can you please take a look at what I've built out here?' We were so blown away that we added more water scenes into the scenario. In the end, I think we went a little overboard!

"Building water simulation is very data-heavy. You can't easily create that and assume that everything is going to work. One simulation would take an average of a week; we'd build one, use it, then basically have to empty the drive of data to build the next one. The entirety of the water simulation tallied up to one petabyte, which is 1,000 terabytes."

The trawlers and decommissioned Imperial Navy ships that confront Godzilla were all digitally built from the single practical vessel the production could afford to photograph. Yamazaki's computer crew got so accustomed to labor-intensive work that, when it came time to rerelease the movie in black and white, still more VFX were added.

February 7

we're so back, baby

February 7

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis Unveils First Teaser Image

The director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now has finally made his long-gestating sci-fi epic. Read more at Empire.

www.empireonline.com

Throughout his career, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola has made many a masterpiece. The Godfather and its sequel. Apocalypse Now. The Conversation. His place in the cinematic pantheon is secure. But at the age of 84, he's not resting on his laurels. He's finally made his long-held passion project Megalopolis – a science-fiction epic he originally started writing back in the '80s, and which has rumbled around in his consciousness ever since. And he's reportedly put $120 million of his own money into making it, an independent film on a gigantic scale with a sprawling cast to boot. It's hard to believe that the film is actually real at this point – but it's reportedly hitting our screens later in 2024, and Coppola has shared a tantalising teaser image on his Instagram.

Even from a single image, there's plenty to look at here – a sense of crumbling empires, though a setting that reads as contemporary New York; the eeriness of those abandoned apartments and broken doors; that ominous broken statue; the grandiosity (and sci-fi leanings) of that title treatment. Consider us almightily intrigued. The film stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire, and Kathryn Hunter, to name but a fraction of the cast. And it's both written and directed by Coppola himself.

Stay tuned for more imagery on the film as it moves through post-production – and, fingers crossed, we may see the full thing before the year is through. Here's hoping it proves worth the wait.

February 2

@tewibewi has been on a big rumiko takahasi kick since we were revisiting ranma 1/2 last year, lots of urusei yatsura and recently started maison ikkoku. i love this stuff, there's such a vibe to the specific comedy here. the music & art feel timeless too

February 2

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January 30

march 22nd! between this & sonic 3, gonna be a busy oscar season

January 30

don't know why this bit was cut (or why i'd not seen it yet?) but this was good

January 24

having been dating the former president of the FIU anime club (real early to mid aughts celebrity shit around here!) i've been watching a lot of retro anime this last year or so, thought this was pretty applicable to a community founded before this was so widely available (and thank god it is, nothing about the 3 subtitled episode $40 vhs era needs to come back )