Okay, on the whole controversy with Music, the controversy is much bigger than just "ZOMG! THEY CAST A NEUROTYPICAL GIRL TO PLAY AN AUTISTIC GIRL! DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD! DOUBLEPLUSUNMOVIE!" I haven't seen it yet, but I do fully intend to watch it when I can for the Deep Hurting Project. Personally, I have autism, I don't believe it's necessarily bad for a neurotypical person to play someone on the spectrum per se. But I believe that if you go that route, and given that, from what I can recall, Sia wanted to do so all along, since as far back as I can find on Wikipedia's history pages, Maddie Ziegler seems to have been ALWAYS intended for that role, you need to have others who actually are on the spectrum working as consultants to make sure they get it right. And, frankly, I'm not convinced that was the case



Not only am I on the Spectrum, but I've known many others who were (on the higher and lower-functioning ends of the spectrum). And looking at these mannerisms Maddie Ziegler is putting into her dance, frankly, I'm not seeing any of them reflected in it. What I see are two things: 1) the schoolyard bullies who taunted me for being weird for reasons they almost certainly couldn't comprehend, and 2) the Upper-Class Twit of the Year skit from Monty Python.



Of course that one gets a pass from me since that's more about making fun of rich idiots so insulated in their own little worlds they can barely function outside of it, which I think is a worthy goal. When they're doing the exact same shit in what's supposed to be a legitimate drama about autism, it's little short of galling. To be fair, I don't exactly fault Ziegler for this, since there was apparently one point in filming where she broke down in tears because she was afraid what she was doing could be seen as making fun of autistic people. Also, I can't help but notice the flashing lights in that music number, and while I personally don't have photosensitive epilepsy, many on the spectrum do. I'm not even going to touch on the fact that she's a white girl wearing bronzer and headphones that look like cornrows.

Also, did the version you watched include a scene where Music has a meltdown and Zu and Ebo try to calm her by pinning her to the ground? Just for the record, in  real life, that shit is DEADLY. And when I say deadly, I mean that very literally. Here's one case of a boy who died as a direct result of that method. To be fair, Sia couldn't possibly have known about that particular case when it was being shot, since it happened during post-production. But then again, Corey Foster and Faith Finley were two other cases who died the same exact way long before filming started. To be fair, she said she was going to remove that scene, but apparently that didn't happen. 

And, for the record, I actually tend to be a bit more lenient on portrayals of autism in media specifically because I know autism is a stupefyingly broad spectrum that can cover every extreme from the profoundly impaired to even physicists whose contributions to the discipline rival Einstein's, but shit like this is hard to defend, and it doesn't look like when I actually get around to watching it, there'll be some details that totally redeem and justify it, especially since, even if you take out all the shit I talked about, it seems to just be one of those "wild young adult has to learn responsibility by taking care of a disadvantaged/disabled kid and everybody's supposed to be inspired by the story of overcoming it all even if the kid in question has so little  personality they may as well be a housepet" movies.

And speaking of the Deep Hurting Project, I'm off to supplement my recent review of Gallowwalkers with a takedown of Dorbees: Making Decisions.

This week's supplement to  the Deep Hurting Project: Dorbees: Making Decisions, a Veggietales ripoff from the Gaither Brothers. I was going to go into more detail, but I accidentally deleted my progress two-thirds of the way in again and now I have to redo it.

• 0:00: Music by The Caretaker.
  
• 0:30: Oh, I'm sorry, it's just a really lethargic version of Also Sprach Zarathustra
  
• 1:24: Hey, turn the music down, we can't hear what he's saying.
  
• 1:38: And of course, this animation looks hideous.
  
• 1:47: And the big take away they want us to get from the franchise is "why don't they go away?" No wonder it only lasted this one video and Veggietales went on for over two decades.
  
• 2:05: Oh, fuck my cock.
  
• 2:42: I'm a man of wealth and tas- Oh, sorry, wrong franchise.
  
• 3:10:  What the fuck is that thing? And why is Delta as aghast as I am? And how does he manage to change subjects five times in 40 seconds?
  
• 4:22: Are his eyelids going over his eyes?
  
• 5:32: Why do I get the feeling that I would still have no idea what this guy is talking about  if they provided accurate captions?
  
• 5:39: The sum of the sides of a parallelogram is 90 degrees? There's so much wrong in that one statement I'm not even going to bother. That shit should have been in a third
  
• 5:43:
  
  
  
• 6:34: Man, that security system is going haywire with two kids just walking the halls. What if they actually were that sick and needed to leave class early? 
  
• 6:57: She pulled that grappling hook out of her body. Why the fuck not?
  
• 7:52: And they're actively trying to kill their students with a steel version of the Raiders of the Lost Ark boulder. What next? Hiring the Terminator?
  
• 8:20: And he turned into a ball for no reason.
  
• 8:30: Why is that guy watching the same video we're watching? And how does Delta enter into this reality?
  
• 9:19: What does this story of a one-and-a-half-handed drummer have to do with anything?
  
• 9:48: An Ah-Nuld impersonator wearing barely anything enters this new place and immediately decides he needs new clothes. Fuck, this is the Terminator, isn't it?
  
• 10:45: Why is Digs about to rape Otto?
  
• 11:54: And the soft-spoken assistent has a more strident voice than Digs.
  
• 12:57: Huggy Bear? Please tell me he's not in this, too. Oh, well, I guess I'll have to wait for them to talk about snake-fucking.
  
• 13:42: The initial render of Silent Hill sure looked like shit, didn't it?
  
• 14:12: No, Jack, in order to remember that, I'd have to know what you're talking about.
  
• 14:22: Why is that pedestal there?
  
• 14:35: Why is there no audio?
  
• 15:50: Well, I'll be damned, this song is actually growing on me. This should have been rewritten and used in something better. Christ, even if it was a musical based on Milk Money and this was the song one of the kids sang to convince his two friends that going into the city to hire a prostitute and pay to see her naked. And, yes, not only was that an actual movie, it's on Amazon Prime.
  
• 16:53: Is her hair merging with her bow?
  
• 16:56: Wow, that was actually funny. It took almost halfway through this shit to eke out a chuckle.
  
• 17:16: So Dorbees are canonically just living balls. Okay.
  
• 18:20: No mention of the squirrel horn section? And what the shit kind of numbering is MCMVIIIX?
  
• 19:27: What's the point of carrying bags of pancakes on his back?
  
• 20:40: Chickens needed to be loved. No, that joke is too easy.
  
• 20:50: So, Mr. Poe and the Announcer have American accents, Dr. Dairy is French, and Yogul sounds like an Indian stereotype (though, given that Germany has a huge Turkish population and a stupefying amount of DOner Kebab restaurants, it may be Turkish). So, why are they German again?
  
• 20:59: Lewinskinating?
  
• 21:30: My God, he's been brainwashed to the point where he actually likes Bye Bye Birdy! And he forgot how to decline articles in German.
  
• 22:04: And now he's reached the Annie phase! Nothing can save him now!
  
• 23:09: I'm a pack rat and I don't carry all this shit around.
  
• 23:41: So your choices are to end world hunger, bring about world peace, and free Yogul. Why the fuck did you save Yogul? How is that making the right decision when you have the choice to keep people from starving to death or dying in wars and you just save your idiot friend? And why does a cartoon villain even have the option to do that?
  
• 24:36: A stun gun?
  
• 24:41: That's deer, idiot!
  
• 24:55: So, it's the light that's stopping him? Why use a car?
  
• 25:29:
  
  
  
• 25:37: Why is there a channel of just a lava lamp? And why is it more appealing than the show we're supposed to be watching? And why do I have to limit myself to 3 videos per post so I can't post one of those long-form videos of lava lamps?
  
• 25:55: And why is that freaky thing from 3 minutes in living in the lamp?
  
• 26:30: I used my "that was pointless" clip far too early.
  
• 27:28: is his Afro static?
  
• 27:35: He was Icelandic all along? And why are any of the clothes he tried on any more ridiculous-looking than what he came in wearing?
  
• 28:09: Also, is he Swedish or Icelandic? Because he can't be both. And that's a good lesson: if you emigrate from another nation, don't bother to try and fit in.
  
• 29:37: So, this sign pointing to Jimmy Hoffa is an astroball? What do those two have to do with each other? I spent 3 1/2 hours on The Irishman and Marty never mentioned that.
  
• 30:04: Fucking Hell, it's back!
  
• 30:43: So, you went into the house to get famous and make something of yourself, but when you need to get help, it's a dead option because everyone else will know you skipped school.
  
• 31:11: They deserved to almost die because they skipped school. A school that was actively teaching them wrong information and trying to kill them.
  
• 32:01: And now it's The Wiz?
  
• 33:02: Why does that monstrosity get to warp the laws of reality?
  
• 33:22: So, his name is Fleg?
  
• 33:37: So, for this Christian series, there's a surprising lack of Christianity. Just some token references to God.
  
• 34:18: They have three accordionists working with them and they can't even spell "accordion"?
  

(March 4, 2021 at 11:31 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: Okay, on the whole controversy with Music, the controversy is much bigger than just "ZOMG! THEY CAST A NEUROTYPICAL GIRL TO PLAY AN AUTISTIC GIRL! DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD! DOUBLEPLUSUNMOVIE!" I haven't seen it yet, but I do fully intend to watch it when I can for the Deep Hurting Project. Personally, I have autism, I don't believe it's necessarily bad for a neurotypical person to play someone on the spectrum per se. But I believe that if you go that route, and given that, from what I can recall, Sia wanted to do so all along, since as far back as I can find on Wikipedia's history pages, Maddie Ziegler seems to have been ALWAYS intended for that role, you need to have others who actually are on the spectrum working as consultants to make sure they get it right. And, frankly, I'm not convinced that was the case



Not only am I on the Spectrum, but I've known many others who were (on the higher and lower-functioning ends of the spectrum). And looking at these mannerisms Maddie Ziegler is putting into her dance, frankly, I'm not seeing any of them reflected in it. What I see are two things: 1) the schoolyard bullies who taunted me for being weird for reasons they almost certainly couldn't comprehend, and 2) the Upper-Class Twit of the Year skit from Monty Python.



Of course that one gets a pass from me since that's more about making fun of rich idiots so insulated in their own little worlds they can barely function outside of it, which I think is a worthy goal. When they're doing the exact same shit in what's supposed to be a legitimate drama about autism, it's little short of galling. To be fair, I don't exactly fault Ziegler for this, since there was apparently one point in filming where she broke down in tears because she was afraid what she was doing could be seen as making fun of autistic people. Also, I can't help but notice the flashing lights in that music number, and while I personally don't have photosensitive epilepsy, many on the spectrum do. I'm not even going to touch on the fact that she's a white girl wearing bronzer and headphones that look like cornrows.

Also, did the version you watched include a scene where Music has a meltdown and Zu and Ebo try to calm her by pinning her to the ground? Just for the record, in  real life, that shit is DEADLY. And when I say deadly, I mean that very literally. Here's one case of a boy who died as a direct result of that method. To be fair, Sia couldn't possibly have known about that particular case when it was being shot, since it happened during post-production. But then again, Corey Foster and Faith Finley were two other cases who died the same exact way long before filming started. To be fair, she said she was going to remove that scene, but apparently that didn't happen. 

And, for the record, I actually tend to be a bit more lenient on portrayals of autism in media specifically because I know autism is a stupefyingly broad spectrum that can cover every extreme from the profoundly impaired to even physicists whose contributions to the discipline rival Einstein's, but shit like this is hard to defend, and it doesn't look like when I actually get around to watching it, there'll be some details that totally redeem and justify it, especially since, even if you take out all the shit I talked about, it seems to just be one of those "wild young adult has to learn responsibility by taking care of a disadvantaged/disabled kid and everybody's supposed to be inspired by the story of overcoming it all even if the kid in question has so little  personality they may as well be a housepet" movies.

And speaking of the Deep Hurting Project, I'm off to supplement my recent review of Gallowwalkers with a takedown of Dorbees: Making Decisions.

Yes, the role of Music was specifically written for Maddie. Whether Sia acknowledges that or not, it's obvious. This isn't a jobs program for autistic people. This is a business. Anyone else doing those dances and faces would just be seen as a cheap knock off of Maddie because that's been her gimmick for 6 years now. That dance with those faces you posted was when the character Music was sleeping. In her sleep she is not super autistic. She moves and dances and is free. The faces don't really represent autism I don't think. She's just doing her gimmick like she's done the past 6 years in Sia videos by making weird artistic faces. It's just her thing. Sia got 2.3 billion views in her Chandelier video by casting Maddie to make funny faces, so clearly it's a formula that works so she's kept using Maddie doing a variation of the same thing over the years.

Maddie's skin is darker than the average white girl thanks to being part Italian, and so what if they put some makeup on her to match better with the orange outfit? What the hell? That's what makeup is for, right? It changes your appearance. They weren't trying to portray her as being black or half black. White people can have whatever hair style they want. No one owns hair styles and that's an incredibly silly idea, and it's anti-feminist to tell women how they can and can not present themselves fashion wise. I don't have an issue with the strobe lights either. If that was Sia's vision in her head, I can understand her not wanting to sacrifice her vision to make everyone happy. She had a vision about what she wanted to do and she stayed true to it.

Some extremely autistic people do make the faces that Maddie makes in the film (when she's awake and not dancing in her dream world). If people have a problem with that being portrayed, it says more about them than Sia. Why do autistic faces make them uncomfortable? Are they uncomfortable with how extremely autistic people act in real life? Is that what's really making them uncomfortable?

I don't really care if the restraint thing is not the best way to go in real life. It was filmed several years ago so I don't think they could have just taken it out and filmed new scenes in its' place. What is the real harm done anyways by keeping it in? It's neither here nor there to the average person watching the film how extremely autistic people are to be dealt with during a freak out. If someone is a caretaker for a person like that, they will have been trained how to handle those situations better and are likely not going to be relying on this movie for training, so I don't see actual harm being done in the real world here.

I don't care any more about what autistic people have to say about the movie than what anyone else has to say. Unless they are extremely autistic, they don't really have much of anything in common with the character in the movie. I'm autistic myself, but I don't relate to the character just because she also has autism.

The songs were all fantastic and the choreography was top notch as you would expect from a Sia and Maddie project. If you want everything to be 100 percent realistic, good luck getting that with any film ever made. If people want complete realism, maybe watching a documentary would be better suited for them.

(March 5, 2021 at 2:40 am)Irreligious Atheist Wrote: The songs were all fantastic and the choreography was top notch as you would expect from a Sia and Maddie project. If you want everything to be 100 percent realistic, good luck getting that with any film ever made. If people want complete realism, maybe watching a documentary would be better suited for them.

You do know there's a middle ground between Music and a documentary about autism, right? There's a few films that do a far better portrayal of autism than Music. Some examples:

• Adam
  
• Jane Wants a Boyfriend
  
• Keep the Change
  
• Mary and Max
  
• Mozart and the Whale
  
• Please Stand By
  
• Snow Cake
  
• Story of Luke
  
• Temple Grandin
  
• Honorable Mention: while Taxi Driver was written before autism was known as anything but an obscure childhood disorder, the more I watch it, the harder it becomes for me to not see Travis as having an ASD (especially noticeable in the scenes where he's trying to woo Betsy), even if it is clearly one complicated by PTSD he got in 'Nam. And that's not even the only fictional character I've headcanoned as being on the spectrum. Here's an incomplete list of movies I've seen where a protagonist really seems to be on the spectrum:
  

And Rain Man, for all its many flaws, at least does a good job of portraying a lower-functioning  autistic person, and if you were making these arguments about that movie, it'd be easier to sympathise with your POV.

Sometimes I stop on TCM because it has no annoying bugs or commercials.

Just got done watching an old B/W movie about a guy who ends up on death row falsely convicted, and of course found innocent at the last second.

"We Who Are About To Die."

The funny part was at the end when the warden informed him he was framed and they would release him. The character turned to the priest and said, "Prayer does work". Of course I rolled my eyes and wanted to barf.

(March 5, 2021 at 4:35 pm)Brian37 Wrote: The funny part was at the end when the warden informed him he was framed and they would release him. The character turned to the priest and said, "Prayer does work". Of course I rolled my eyes and wanted to barf.

"I prayed that I wouldn't be arrested for a crime I didn't commit. God said 'no'."

"I prayed that I wouldn't be convicted for a crime I didn't commit. God said 'no'."

"I prayed that I wouldn't be incarcerated for a crime I didn't commit. God said 'no'."

"I prayed that I wouldn't be gang raped in prison for a crime I didn't commit. God said 'no'."

"I prayed that I wouldn't be executed for a crime I didn't commit. God said 'why the fuck didn't you ask me sooner?'."

Avengers Endgame.

Why didn't they give the gauntlet to Captain Marbles? She's clearly stronger than Tony. He's all gimmicks, she's got pure power.

Marbles, lol.

(March 6, 2021 at 11:44 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Why didn't they give the gauntlet to Captain Marbles? She's clearly stronger than Tony. He's all gimmicks, she's got pure power.

Because RDJ is a bigger star than Brie Larson.

Boru