Tag: sharks
From the frontlines of Cardiff’s police force to tracking down 80-year-old loan sharks
EVE Online’s far-future boardroom sharks are using their powers for good with an in-game charity drive
Best Of 2022: Card Shark’s Take On Historical Gender Is Both Playful And Enlightening
There is a woman at this party. Slight and dainty, she’s the niece of a posh lord. She hides her jawline beneath a fan, smiles with glittering power as she is invited to the card table. Her hands are always bad and her grasp of the rules seems tenuous. Forgetting her knife-sharp grin, you settle into a wine-fuelled haze. Only when the night is over do you count your coins, realize how much you’ve lost, and think again of that shining smile.
In its broad survey of French aristocracy, Card Shark allows players to explore crossdressing and queerness. The game’s tangible relationship to history is playful, broad, and particular (as I’ve written about before). Card Shark freely borrows tricksters and cheats from throughout history but also shows off the unique class-bridging function of card playing in the specific time period. Card Shark’s France is broiling with class friction, as a rising bourgeoisie has increasing power but is also isolated from the immense wealth of the ruling aristocracy. Underneath it all, Romani caravans avoid persecution and the revolution brews. Player character Eugene and his mentor, the Comte de Saint Germain, will explore all this through cheating at the aforementioned card games, amassing wealth, and discovering a mystery at the heart of the French monarchy. While the story told is largely fiction, a combination of The Three Musketeers and a satirical comedy of manners, the social circumstances of the characters are grounded in a material history. That extends to Card Shark’s depiction of crossdressing, gender nonconformity, and transness.
Before we dig into Card Shark’s relationship to gender, I want to start on a brief note on pronouns and how to discuss the potential tranness of historical figures. I am going to use he/him pronouns and the name Eugene for Card Shark’s protagonist. This is, in no way, meant to undermine the potential to understand him as queer. It is tempting and not always incorrect to label historical figures as gay or lesbian or trans. However, it should be emphasized that these are relatively modern labels that are unevenly and sometimes unfairly layered over an infinite variety of individuals and identities. These labels are not untarnished truths that we can now use to interpret history purely. Rather they broadly identify experiences and social norms, against which people of all kinds judge and understand themselves. I particularly like the phrasing of Kit Heyam’s recent history of gender’s title: “Before We Were Trans.” The implication is that past gender-non-confirming people share a common heritage, and many identities, with current trans people, but that the particular label of “trans” is relatively new.
Dear Sharks, Steven Spielberg Is Sorry About What ‘Jaws’ Did to You – CNET
‘I was suicidal’: Predatory loan sharks pose as friends to trap victims
Scientists make major marine discovery thanks to tiger sharks
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin were part of the team that helped discover the world’s largest seagrass ecosystem.
Read more: Scientists make major marine discovery thanks to tiger sharks
Ancient ‘sharks’ may have appeared 15m years earlier than previously thought
Teeth belonging to a newly discovered species, thought to be from the Silurian era, were found in China.
Read more: Ancient ‘sharks’ may have appeared 15m years earlier than previously thought
‘Fall’ review: Vultures are the sharks of the sky in wobbly thriller
From the producers of 47 Meters Down comes another horror movie that urges audiences to feel smugly superior for choosing channel surfing over extreme sports.
This time, our pair of plucky heroines aren’t swimming with sharks. They’re scaling a dilapidated 2,000-foot tall radio tower. Why? Oh, there’s plenty of backstory. But come on now — you don’t come to Fall for the pathos. You come for the scares, suspense, and sheer stupidity of human intrepidness. Fall delivers on some of these things.
As a devoted indoor kid, there’s nothing in this whole world that would convince me to scale a massive pole with nothing but a rusty ladder and a pushy bestie to help me. But such instant aversion is what makers of movies like 47 Meters Down, The Shallows, Adrift, and even The Descent expect of much of their audiences. We’re not meant to relate to the gutsiness or hubris of the heroes who dare to swim with sharks, set sail, or spelunk. We’re meant to be wide-eyed with tension, drop-jawed with terror as these models of beauty and athleticism chuck themselves toward the brink of death, while bleeding out sob stories.
Fall is a high-stakes movie about besties in extreme sports horror.
Credit: Lionsgate
In Fall, accomplished climber Becky’s (Grace Caroline Currey) sob story begins with a rockface climb where her handsome husband makes an abrupt and deadly descent. Cut to a year later, Becky’s lawman father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan in a brief Hopper-like appearance) begs her to put down the endless bottles of booze and find something else to cling to besides her departed partner’s cremains. Enter bestie Hunter (Virginia Gardner), an ever-plucky and impetuous blonde whose climbing exploits have made her a fairly famous Youtube vlogger. Naturally, she insists that the best way to move through the overwhelming grief is to climb something stupidly tall and dump the husband’s ashes from it. Let him be memorialized as he died, falling from a great height!
‘Stranger Things’ is almost back, so here’s your reminder that Hopper should have stayed dead
Though earnestly performed by a grit-toothed cast, the emotional setup is a chore, as no one choosing a movie called Fall is looking for poignant drama. Soon enough, the girls are skittering up to scary heights, and yep, the ladder falls and they’re stuck atop a platform with no phone reception, no tools, and circling vultures. Screenwriters Jonathan Frank and Scott Mann (who also directs) attempt to flesh out the thin concept with a creeping conflict between the besties, the source of which is painfully predictable. Also tiresome are the tedious archetypes of femininity presented by the not-so-dynamic duo of serious, good-hearted brunette and selfish, fun-chasing, sexy blonde.
How does Fall compare to 47 Meters Down?
Credit: Lionsgate
Look, 47 Meters Down may have been a movie of cheap thrills. But the vibrant sisterly bond — plus fully game performances from its leading ladies — made the movie’s emotional stakes cut as ferociously as shark teeth. Fall falls short of recreating that sense of sorority, in part because Hunter is clearly out for herself on some level from the start. But moreover, Mann’s direction seems to have left Currey stranded in a performance that is one-noted sadness or screaming. Gardner has more fun with the role of the risk-taker, brandishing a reckless charm that’s glancingly reminiscent of the chaotic whimsy of Florence Pugh. So, when the film finally reaches its third act, it’s Gardner and her performance that comes out on top, even if the script fails them both.
To the script’s credit, however, Frank and Mann do find a surprising amount of ways to make “stuck on top of a tower” more than meets the eye. Scrambles for falling equipment, desperate attempts to signal for help, and a surprisingly frenzied battle with a vulture deliver the kind of ghoulish and suspenseful thrills these kinds of movies are made for. Amid the miseries these embattled buddies endure, you might begin to wonder, would you rather fall to your death? Die of exposure? Or be eaten alive by a bird of prey? Fall gives you plenty of time to ponder that. But the most bonkers bits are the third act call-backs, where formerly flawed escape plans are given a new, more dramatic, or downright gruesome twist.
In the end, Fall is a movie that’s emotionally shallow, but more clever than it needs to be, and as grisly as your dark heart is likely hoping. This is not a good movie. But it is a movie that made me cry out, “Oh good god!” And that’s something.
Fall is now in theaters.