I rewatched Punch-Drunk Love yesterday because streaming services are putting up PT Anderson movies right now. (I have the DVD of it, but it's easier to watch on streaming sometimes.) I've seen it a few times before, but every time I think, "This can't be as good as I remember it," and then it's even better.
Maybe it's got something to do with it being a romcom starring Adam Sandler. Anyway, it seems to be on US Netflix right now, so just FYI, in case anyone else is not watching it because of that, I can't promise you'd like it, but I can promise it's not what you would imagine it is if you think of "a romcom starring Adam Sandler."
While waiting for Mrs. Reasons to come home from work today, I watched Netflix's weirdly marketed movie, Mute.
It's about a mute Amish bartender who goes on a tear after his lover goes missing.
Directed by Duncan Jones, it's a smallish science fiction movie with a noirish feel. It's set in a near future Berlin which has flying cars and drone delivery and hedonism and gangsters.
The best supporting actor is Paul Rudd's mustache.
I rewatched Punch-Drunk Love yesterday because streaming services are putting up PT Anderson movies right now. (I have the DVD of it, but it's easier to watch on streaming sometimes.) I've seen it a few times before, but every time I think, "This can't be as good as I remember it," and then it's even better.
Maybe it's got something to do with it being a romcom starring Adam Sandler. Anyway, it seems to be on US Netflix right now, so just FYI, in case anyone else is not watching it because of that, I can't promise you'd like it, but I can promise it's not what you would imagine it is if you think of "a romcom starring Adam Sandler."
I thought it was the best movie containing Adam Sandler ever.
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Sleep - the most beautiful experience in life - except drink.--W.C. Fields
The other night, I wanted to watch a movie, but the first one I started to watch (it might have been Mudbound, maybe, but I don't remember for sure) had someone killing chickens, and I was like, "I don't feel like watching chickens getting killed right now," so I put on On Body and Soul, and surprise! it was set in a slaughterhouse and they were killing cows, so I was like, "No, also not this, but I will compromise and watch people killing fish, I guess," so I watched Leviathan (this one, because there are a bunch of movies called that).
Ah, thank you. I probably should have powered through, and it's not a hard rule I have or anything. I just wasn't up to it right then. I had just watched Wake in Fright a couple days earlier, which has brutal and REAL kangaroo slaughter and please don't anyone watch it even though it is a good movie, and I was just like, "No. Not again. Not yet." I'll probably watch On Body and Soul before long too.
I'm OK with any and all people-killing, as long as it's fake.
there is a scene of torture, which I generally find more discomforting than just killings per se.
I can handle that, but I would probably avoid most things considered "body horror". Particularly if that's, like, the main genre. Like Black Swan was fine...
But yeah, the scene with the chicken only goes for like less than a minute. Then you're in the clear.
I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of the original movie but man-oh-man is the new one great and gorgeous! I loved it.
Synchronicity is weird. I wrote a long thing about this film a few days ago for Wonkette, but since it was buried in an hours-old comment in a really crowded comment section, I doubt many people saw it. I'll repost it here so it doesn't go entirely to waste.
(I saw the film shortly after release, but I've been really bad about writing up reactions to films recently - I guess after writing as much as I have about Moonlight, writing a few paragraphs about a film seems woefully inadequate.)
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All right, so. I think Blade Runner 2049 may have run up against the same obstacle that its source material did: it took an essentially journalistic approach to depicting its subject matter, and a lot of people expect science fiction to explicitly spell out its message. This sort of subtlety works for drama - I'd point to The Wire and Moonlight as exemplars of this storytelling style, both of which have been some of the most acclaimed works in their respective media in the last couple of decades - but it often leads to misinterpretations in works of science fiction, because I think our culture trains people to expect sci-fi to deliver a sort of Star Trek or Twilight Zone-like summation of the message at the end.
This isn't a knock on Serling or Roddenberry, both of whom were some of the finest storytellers of their generation. It's simply a different approach to writing. But for whatever reason, sci-fi often runs up against readers utterly failing to pick up on an author's subtle messaging.
(Spoiler warning for a few works, I guess. Specifically, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Slaughterhouse-Five - I don't think I discuss anything from either Blade Runner film that really qualifies as a spoiler.)
One of my favourite examples for this is Slaughterhouse-Five. A reader who takes it at face value will read it as a broadside against the existence of free will. This is, in fact, Billy Pilgrim's point of view. Because the novel matter-of-factly reports everything that Pilgrim says happens to him, readers frequently assume quietism is also Vonnegut's point of view. In point of fact, several subtle clues in the novel suggest that his is the exact opposite. The most telling clue for me is a remark in the first chapter, which is, apart from a brief aside in the final chapter, the only part of the novel Vonnegut writes from his own perspective. Vonnegut mentions to a friend that he is writing an antiwar novel, and the friend, endorsing a fatalist perspective, says that he might as well write an anti-glacier novel, because it would do as much to stop glaciers as an antiwar novel would do to fight wars. Despite this, Vonnegut still wrote and published his antiwar novel.
There are several other clues in the novel that suggest that Pilgrim's stance is not to be taken at face value; indeed, an alternative interpretation is that Pilgrim is dealing with PTSD and all the sci-fi elements of the novel are really just coping mechanisms. His time travel back to the war is all PTSD flashbacks, and his glimpses of the future, of aliens, of meeting with porn stars, and so on are all just in his head. There are aspects of his story that aren't internally consistent, and there are aspects that suggest that he's internalising details of things he sees in real life and crafting narratives about them (the narrative mentions that Montana Wildhack went missing, and then he shows up in an alien zoo with her). His account of his supposed death in the future also contradicts his fatalist stance - if he knows what could occur to him, then surely he has every chance to alter his actions and avert it, but he never takes any of these - and perhaps most importantly, Vonnegut describes Tralfamadorians as having blown up the universe at some indeterminate point in the future, which isn't the sort of thing an author sympathetic to their perspective would be likely to do.
This brings us to the source of Blade Runner 2049 (and its predecessor), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick himself explicitly stated that he deliberately wrote the novel as an examination of the forms of dehumanisation that led to the Holocaust. It is a story, in many ways, about the banality of evil - about the subtle ways society others people.
But none of this is explicitly spelt out in the novel, and many people, coming at it from Blade Runner without having read any of Dick's previous works, will lack familiarity with his style and assume that the narration of his characters is reliable. In fact, there are several points in the novel that suggest that society's entire belief system about androids - specifically, that they lack and are incapable of learning empathy - is completely false.
One of two key points in the narrative comes with the revelation that androids have four-year lifespans. This is not used as a plot twist in the film (and to be fair, not all replicants in Blade Runner's universe have such lifespans), but it is not revealed until well past the halfway point of the novel. Most people don't even pick up on it, but it casts the androids' behaviour in a wholly different light.
There's a scene where one of the androids (I think it's either Pris or Rachael; I haven't read the whole novel in awhile) casually mentions that she has a habit of seducing men in order to manipulate them. The thing is, though, she mentions this to one of these men, which completely undoes the manipulation - she's made him aware of it. But she's not capable of understanding this.
The seduction, obviously, isn't at all childlike, but the rest of it - that's exactly what a child would do. They don't possess the understanding of human nature to understand that telling someone about your ulterior motives makes them aware of those motives. They're just proud of their actions and want to tell someone, and they don't realise that who they tell makes a difference.
Humanity, throughout the novel, makes a big point of treating androids as soulless, as irreparable dangers to humanity. But the thing is, it's also using androids as slave labour offworld (which is exactly why they want to escape) and humanity's painstaking care for animals (who admittedly are extremely rare thanks to what is referred to as "World War Terminus") is directly contrasted with its treatment of androids.
But androids do frequently come across as cruel. There is a passage near the end of the novel where three androids are tormenting a spider in order to mess with J. R. Isidore, a human who is brain damaged from World War Terminus. (The humans who remain on Earth, it may be noted, are implied to suffer some brain damage from the fallout, which is another reason we can't simply rely on what the human characters tell us, or even on what they observe. Again, the unreliable narrator is a favourite technique of PKD, almost as much as it is of Christie.) But then Isidore has a major emotional freakout, and the android Irmgard Baty explicitly says that this makes her "terribly upset", and says by means of reassurance, "Don't look like that". If that isn't actually empathy, it's certainly a really solid impression of it.
But all of this is beneath the surface, so a lot of readers don't pick up on it. Some readers have argued that it's an anti-AI tract. It's not. Society in the novel is anti-AI, but Dick's perspective is not society's. The novel is, at its core, an examination of the processes that lead to dehumanisation - even when those being dehumanised aren't technically human.
Blade Runner 2049 takes the same approach: it is not necessarily endorsing what it depicts. Director Denis Villeneuve explicitly spelt out his intentions with the movie's gender politics in an interview: "Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it's about today. And I'm sorry, but the world is not kind on women." The novel's depiction of women has been strongly criticised from some quarters, but I feel Rachael Kaines of Moviepilot has the right of it: "The movie is about secondary citizens. Replicants. Orphans. Women. Slaves. Just by depicting these secondary citizens in subjugation doesn't mean that it is supportive of these depictions – they are a condemnation." Helen Lewis' review in the New Statesman also touches on another of the film's major themes: a man's rage that women can do something that he cannot (childbirth).
In short, I see Villeneuve as essentially taking the same approach with his film that Dick did with his novel (and, for that matter, as Ridley Scott did in the original film): clinically looking at an oppressive society and subtly examining the factors that cause its oppression. This isn't to say that every aspect of it works (in particular, the sex scene comes across as bizarrely awkward and unsexual, though that may have been the point), but I think it's a superb film and I can't wait to re-watch it.
Now, some Oscar reactions: I wasn't really surprised by any of the winners in any of the categories most people care about, nor was I particularly disappointed on the whole, though a few of the choices felt rather safe. But the Academy could've done way worse.
I'll say right out the bat that the fact that people tried to make Del Toro versus Peele for Best Director etc. an issue of racism is one of the most ludicrous hot takes I've seen this year; you're literally talking about a Mexican immigrant and an African-American. (Del Toro commendably defended immigrants in his Best Director acceptance speech.) The outcome (Peele getting Best Original Screenplay and Del Toro getting Best Director and Best Picture) was exactly what I expected; Best Original Screenplay is often used by the Academy to honour great up-and-coming directors, and Best Picture/Best Director are often almost as much lifetime achievement awards as they are honours of one film in and of itself. Which is fine. In some cases there isn't a clear standout, which I kind of felt was the case for the Best Picture category this year (admittedly there are still several I haven't seen), and in that case honouring the biggest and best overall body of work that hasn't yet received a Best Picture/Director nod is fine to me.
Best Director was perhaps the least surprising outcome in that category since I really started paying attention to the awards - the Academy loves honouring auteurish films with Best Director, and if there was a more auteurish film last year than The Shape of Water, I haven't seen it, and it really was a gorgeously directed film in every aspect. In fact, I called "Del Toro is getting Best Director next year" basically as soon as I left the cinema, and I had a pretty strong hunch that it would get Best Picture as well. (Disclaimer: I still haven't seen Get Out, though I plan to. I tend not to enjoy horror on the whole, but I'm pretty sure this film would be an exception, particularly since I've greatly enjoyed Jordan Peele's overall body of work. Also, my objection to the genre tends to be more than anything to its frequent gratuitous gore and employment of cheap tricks like jump scares, and I get the impression Get Out doesn't rely heavily/at all on these. As for films I have seen, Blade Runner 2049 may have been as auteurish, but the sci-fi ghetto is still a thing. And yes, a romance featuring a fish-man is fantasy, but the Academy has historically been more willing to honour fantasy.) I do find it kind of unusual that two years in a row the Best Picture winner has been a romantic drama
with a mostly happy ending
- such films are rare in Hollywood, much less as Best Picture winners. (I remarked on that possibility after leaving the cinema as well.)
Oldman getting Best Actor and the makeup crew winning that category were two more I called right after leaving the cinema. Again, probably a lifetime achievement award for Oldman as much as anything, but I frequently had a difficult time believing I wasn't actually watching Churchill.
I haven't seen I, Tonya yet, but I called Janney winning long before I even knew who the nominees were. The woman is a fucking force of nature.
I have some issues with Three Billboards overall, but I can't argue too much with either of its cast members winning. Perhaps my only moderate surprise for either category was that Harrelson and Rockwell didn't cancel out each other's votes. That's happened several times. I get the impression that the Academy may use a different voting system now than it used to, partially with the aim of preventing this, but I haven't actually researched it. (My overall issue with the film was its ambiguous redemption arc for Rockwell's character - I suspect McDonagh may not have thought through all its implications. The overall message of the film - "Violence begets more violence" - is one I have difficulty taking issue with on the whole; my only other concern is that less perceptive viewers may not get that this is what the film is trying to say, even though the script explicitly spells it out towards the end of the film, and in exactly those words.)
I do think The Shape of Water was snubbed in these categories, though, especially Doug Jones, who wasn't even fucking nominated. The fact that Jones and Sally Hawkins manage to make a romance between a woman and a fish-creature seem plausible without either of them ever saying a fucking word is an astonishing achievement in dramatic performance, particularly since Jones had to act beneath all the practical effects. Both of them say more with their eyes than many actors say using their entire bodies.
Haven't seen any of the documentaries, short films, foreign-language films, or animated films, but I understand Coco was odds-on favourite to win and considered by some measure the best. This shouldn't surprise anyone; Pixar doesn't have many duds.
I haven't seen Phantom Thread, but I felt The Shape of Water was the best score of last year by some margin. Desplat is certainly one of the finest composers in Hollywood right now.
The sound categories were the only ones where I strenuously disagreed with the Academy. Dunkirk was just too fucking loud when I saw it in cinemas (which was one of two major complaints I had with the film - its downplaying/erasure of women/minorities' contributions to the evacuation was the other). I'm not how much of this was the sound crew's fault and how much was the theatre's, though my understanding is that the film crew wanted it to be loud. And I get what they were going for - war is loud - but there's such a thing as too much. I would've given (at least one of) the nods to Baby Driver - the way the action was synchronised with the music was a minor miracle. I'm not particularly surprised at the Academy's choice, though; I'd figured one or the other would win going in, but I had no idea which. (I actually half-expected the Academy to split the categories between the two films, which I think I'd have been happy with.)
Best Cinematography for Deakins was long overdue, and Blade Runner was by some margin the most beautiful film made last year - even against The Shape of Water. I can't really argue with the latter getting Best Production Design though; its sets were absolutely phenomenal. Blade Runner also deserved the visual effects award. And I can't really argue with the film editing award for Dunkirk; the vast number of scene transitions in that film were deftly handled. Finally, Phantom Thread winning for costume design may be the least surprising result of the entire evening - is anyone really surprised that a film about clothes design wins the costume design category? I could tell just from the trailer that the clothes were gorgeous.
Maybe I'll write some more detailed reactions to a few of these films later. I'll admit to having a bias towards Del Toro overall because Pan's Labyrinth is my second favourite film ever (only last year's Best Picture winner has supplanted it), but The Shape of Water is probably the second best thing he's made ("probably" because there are still a few works in his oeuvre that I haven't seen yet) and I have little issue with it getting recognised.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
The Sword and Laser book club of Northern Seattle did its first outing to see this movie. The podcast selected the book for February in anticipation of the release. The timing worked out just about right for the group because 3/5 of the regulars were going to ECCC on our normal meetup day.
Overall, the group was relatively pleased with the movie - relatively. Opinions were mixed. I think this is right on the border of a good movie. Some good parts, some bad, and it made for an overall decent movie.
The good parts:
- Holy shit were the kids actors great. Storm Reid and Deric McCabe, playing Meg and Charles Wallace just nailed the parts. The adult actors were good, too.
- It's visually stunning, with good reinterpretations of places in the book.
- Ava DuVernay adds her own spin on some of the themes of love and acceptance by making the the family diverse, and added in specific positive images for people of color.
- They manage to get the creepy parts creepy, just about right for a kid's movie.
- They cut back on the overt anti-communism and anti-technology stance of the book.
The not-so-good parts:
- It's really safe reinterpretation of the book. Think of it more like Harry Potter 1&2 compared to 3.
- There's some pacing problems, they didn't fix the book's lulls.
- They removed or elided things that gave the characters more depths. The witches were ciphers, even more so than the books. In the book, we learn a bit of their history. In the movie, they are just supernatural beings here to help.
- The book is a Christian fantasy and they completely avoided it. Someone from our book club noted that Jesus was specifically not mentioned in a scene that was otherwise identical to the book. It makes me wonder if they make the other books how they'll handle it.
Basically, the source material is both a blessing and a curse for this movie. I think the book is a children's classic with some problems, and the movie reminded me why I both kind of liked the book and was annoyed by it.
I think if you have fond memories if the book, it's totally worth it to see.
Edge of Tomorrow. I thought the premise sounded cool and I had heard good things, so it was bound to happen. Now it's on HBO so voila!
I liked it. It was a good length, not too long, and it was well-paced and kept me guessing.
I really liked watching his transition from douchey pantywaist of an officer to a hardened warrior. Also Tom Cruise's charisma and whatnot as he gets super personal with everyone from J squad to the British general's secretary, and everybody's "erm, we just met..." reaction to him. :lol
I swear Tom Cruise is barely older than when he was Maverick and I was just a wee babby ensign, and he just kills it as an action star and leading man.
Finally got around to watching this movie, and enjoyed it quite a bit.
Game Night was entertaining. It's borderline for this vs. the meh movie thread. The character played by Jesse Plemons (Todd from Breaking Bad) was pretty funny tho.
The Shape of Water was good, but I think it probably shouldn't have won Best Picture. I like Del Toro, but this wasn't nearly as good as Pan's Labyrinth IMO. I would say I also thought Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone was better. I haven't seen most of the other nominees though, only Get Out and Dunkirk. If I were going to guess, I'd say that Get Out is more likely to be seen as the one that should've won years from now.
At some point I'd like to watch Cronos and Crimson Peak...
The Handmaiden aka 아가씨... This is like a mystery thriller, about Korean Sook-hee, who is working for a conman to help him seduce a wealthy Japanese heiress during the Japanese occupation of Korea. It gets more complicated from there.
The cinematography/production design/costumes were excellent, and the story was interesting. There were some aspects I didn't enjoy (the sex scenes were a bit too male-gaze-y).
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Originally Posted by Stormlight
Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)
It's an Argentinian movie nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award. It's actually 6 short stories revolving around revenge. It's dark (very, very dark), brutal, funny and so very good! A must see!
I actually saw this a couple years ago but then watched it again over Christmas with my family because I knew they would like it (and they did). And I realized I hadn't mentioned it here.
I agree with Stormlight: it is very good. Dark and funny. If you haven't, I highly suggest you watch it.
Based on the book about the making of The Room. You don't have to love (or love to hate) the original, but it helps.
It's mostly about two friends struggling for success in Hollywood, and decide to make their own movie. The problem is that the person with the money, determination and ego to drive the project is Tommy Wiseau. Tommy writes, produces, directs, and stars in the movie, but he doesn't have the skill or the emotional intelligence to do any of it.
If you haven't seen The Room, you might not believe that the scenes shown in the movie are real, so they actually take some scenes from the original and place them next to the remade scenes, just to show with how much loving care this movie reproduced them.
Why would you watch this movie? It's a mostly true story of a strangely fascinating person who pursues a dream and then fails so resoundingly that it turns into a minor success. It's also a bit about the struggling underclass of unknown actors.
Why wouldn't you want to watch it? Tommy is driven almost entirely by ego, so that's a bit unpleasant at times. He's treated as lovingly as possible, but he's not a good person. If you don't want to watch a strange rich white man falling upward, this is not the movie for you. There's also something wrong with Tommy, and it feels kind of cruel to make jokes at his expense, even if it's sort of punching up.
I liked it a lot, but I'm familiar with the original movie and the book, so I'm biased.
Oh, I wanted to update that I did eventually watch On Body and Soul, and I really liked it. It has a whole lot of very graphic slaughterhouse scenes, though, in the first half hour or so.
It was good. I loved it. Thanos kicked ass. Brolin managed to act under/through the cgi. I liked some of the pairings that occurred throughout the film.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but I loved the movie. I’m thinking of watching it again tomorrow. The movie is a spectacle of course. I saw it in 3D.
peter Dinklage is fun as a gigantic Space Dwarf Blacksmith.
At one point the bad guy says something like "Oh giant robots, that's original" right as he enacts his plan to merge giant Kaiju into an even bigger Kaiju. Which kinda emphasizes my one issue with the plot. We're all really just here to see giant robots fight each other and giant monsters so why dumb down the plot so much? I would love to see some wacky or complex sci-fi plots with telepathic like aliens and drifting into brains to control robots, this could easily have some Ghost in the Shell section 9 complexity and questions of what is life when you have Kaiju brain drifting with AI systems designed to drift with humans on the opposite side of the world. Etc.
With all that complaining out of the way, this was easily better robot fighting than every transformers movies combined. A pure popcorn flick where you can actually tell what's going on.
Ready Player One.
A decent romp that gets the action of video games. The quest is a kinda old school D&D 'solve these riddles three and bring the mcguffin to me.' with some Willy Wonka Choclate factory added in. But since this is basically a love letter to 80s, 90s, 00s and '10s nostalgia it can be forgiven. I especially liked that many of the background references were just that, background references. They didn't turn them into jokes "We know who tracer is, and you know who tracer is, isn't that funny?! Please laugh..." or try to explain them, you just see Tracer skipping through portals, or the Ninja turtles kicking ass, and if you know who they are, cool, if not, well it's a cool looking character blowing things up, woo!"
The fighting is great too, it's generally comprehensible while at the same time there are scenes that are purposefully giant action blurry insanity, as if you just dropped into a hot zone in a video game. In that same way the kong race at the beginning really feels like an arcade racer.
One of the few issues I had was TJ Miller as a comic relief bounty hunter 'I-R0k' who gives a poor mans Jack Black impression that always made me think of a dude in a recording booth who thinks "ugh am I done yet, I want to go get drunk now" after every line.
Another big issue was I didn't know how seriously to take the real world agents (especially with a killjoy playing the head agent). After awhile it seemed obvious that they were more along the line of kids film baddies and not cold blooded trained assassins.
While there are tons of holes in the world building (do people not in immersion rigs playing on the streets see a combination overlay so they don't wander into traffic or... what) it's fast paced enough you only have a few moments to contemplate it before they move on.
Amusingly my first thought once we see the whole team was 'there's way too many main characters, I bet one of them will die. Which turns out to be quite true in the book where they kill Samurai armor guy, but they chose to keep everyone alive, which I was happy about because the kick ass girl character Art3mis was a prime "kill the more interesting character to give purpose and pathos to your boring main dude" all over her.
Converting all the hacking he does in the book to seeing the guys password on a sticky note probably rubs some the wrong way but I thought it was a great way around dealing with the always bad hacking scenes in movies, as well as gave me a laugh as I keep partial passwords on paper (if you have access to the paper they are on, I have way bigger issues than you knowing half of my password)
My brother is here, so we rewatched Inland Empire last night. I love that movie, and we both felt like rewatching it. (I'd only seen it once before, but my brother said some years back, he rewatched it like four or five times in a short period.)
David Lynch makes the most rewatchable movies ever, and many of the best. You have to watch them more than once just to sort out the main narrative, but it never gets tedious, because you notice all these other little details every time too. Like there's this little record skipping effect that happens as the story repeats in different manifestations. And the changes in the focus and slight changes in speech patterns depending on which version of reality something's happening in. (Also, did you know that Terry Crews is in it? I hadn't noticed before because I probably didn't know who he was, but this time, I was like, "HEY.")
And nobody can do eerie like David Lynch. I mean nobody nobody ever. I look for creepy, eerie stuff all the time, and nobody else comes close.
Digression, not spoiler:
Like think about that dumpster scene from the dream in Mulholland Drive, which is like the opposite of a jump scare, and actually creepy and scary instead of just startling. They explain what you're about to see, they approach slowly, you see the figure behind the dumpster as they approach, then it comes out slowly and you see it. I had a professor once who said that Milton ended pastoral elegies when he wrote Lycidas, because nothing could measure up after that. That Mulholland Drive scene should have killed jump scares.
I should make a David Lynch thrad and see if there are enough people around that I can fight to defend his honor. David Lynch is a genius, and his work is pretty near perfect, so you can not like him and that's fine, but if you don't think he's great, you're just wrong.
Re: Seen Any Good Movies...?
It was a good length, not too long, and it was well-paced and kept me guessing.
Linear Mode
