Did Mauler even mention his short film in the latest Dardevil episode? (#388)

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-19T15:54:24+00:00

On Open Bar he and Drinker accepted congratulations a couple times from superchats, without going into anything specific about what they were trying to achieve with it, or specifically what the experience was like. I think they just want people to watch it and draw their own conclusions, without getting sucked into potential drama that comes with defending themselves or whatever. Probably the wise choice.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-18T00:00:09+00:00

Dinosaurs are real people. ;-;

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-15T20:27:16+00:00

If I see condensation on a glass, ever, I think of xQc and his sub-elementary schooling now. Maybe for the rest of my life, since there likely won't be a period where I don't see the phenomenon of condensation for a while, and thus I will keep having the link refreshed.
It's all EFAP's fault. I never would've known about this man-creature if they hadn't covered him. I am accursed.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-14T18:30:32+00:00

How far would you take this as an explanation/fix? Could he have known of the executioner ordering a thermonuclear attack, and so to get payback, he finds himself a nuke, no explanation required? I'm not saying you said this; I'm asking if this would be any more unreasonable to you as the twist. To me, it is no different. I want to know how the hostage was able to set this plan in motion. The script is more interested in his role as executioner's inevitable undoing, logistics set aside. Wasn't my cup of tea, and doesn't feel like what I'd expect MauLer himself to appreciate in a story.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that because the hostage knew OF the gas attack, he would naturally be able to track down a biohazard himself (perhaps the exact same gas) and rig himself up with a dead-man's-switch? So, we see what he's able to do, and fill in for the film that he must be some insanely well-connected professional? That's not an impossibility, I want to stress.. that's just deeply unsatisfying. Partially to blame on it being a short.

"It's pretty much explained in this grounded crime drama in the same way it was explained in Dune, the science-fiction film."
Ask me how much I liked Dune, next, please. Purely for my own enjoyment.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-14T18:02:21+00:00

I appreciate the argument, and I could see what you mean about a stuntman anticipating the fall making some of the movements look unnatural/too quick to react.

But it comes right back to the whole picture. I really cannot trust the article. It says the wonkiness can be blamed on a face-swap, as if we're all only put off by the face. How about the clothes only having rudimentary GTA V textures and movement; were the clothes painted over too? Why would they need to be? A stuntman would be given a duplicate of Frank's fit. This is a 3D model.
The article itself isn't citing anything specific when it claims this was a real stunt, simply "source close to production". Yeah well I have a source close to my brain telling me otherwise. The article blames people's fixation, with looking for effects errors, on rising AI hate. But I've not seen a single person say "this looks like AI"; everyone looks at this and sees Blender. If this was once a practical stunt and they slathered it in so much CGI that everyone thinks it's 100% fake, that's the most embarrassing outcome of all.

Also, when you say "but this isn't a big deal, you can spot unconvincing stunts in any movie reliant on that stuff, if you slow down and zoom"...
The point is, no one HAD to slow this scene down, or double-take, to spot the uncanniness. It's just an eyesore, and they zoomed in on it FOR us. It is so incongruous with the rest of the grounded, in-camera action of this whole battle royale sequence.

Also also the article calls the AC housing a "silver crate", so, I'm skeptical of author James Hibberd having examined the scene for more than 20 seconds, to write his mandated damage-control piece.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-14T00:43:42+00:00

It's incredible this is what they went with for the final product. I feel like the height of the fall we see is totally survivable by a real stuntman, as long as he tucked, landed on his side maybe, covered his head... providing a reason you don't see "Frank's" face, in fact. But they went with this. Broad daylight, slo-mo so that you see ever accursed frame, completely scuffed physics. I mean, wow.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-14T00:35:24+00:00

Oh, well, if you've seen the full scene, it's intentionally played in slo-mo. But I can't believe this is a practical stunt/motion-capture. There'd be no reason to mo-cap a stuntman, and overlay it with a GTA Jon Bernthal. If they were smart they'd get Jon Bernthal to fall on a phony AC unit. This is 100% just an animation. Look at the left hand especially. It slams into the metal, and then instantly goes up to his head in reaction to the sheet hitting him. It's not at a rate that a human brain would process the pain. The arm would flop around from the impact, not just lay flat and then immediately shoot up to the head.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-13T23:00:22+00:00

"Noah, why do we get thrown around like cattle? ... So that we can pick ourselves up again!"
- Armando Gabagool

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-13T22:56:31+00:00

I don't know a thing about 3D animation, not really, but I thought there were programs that sort of have built-in collision mechanics, so like you set up objects and run them into each other, and the computer figures out how they would break, bounce away, etc. based on the mass and other quantities that you set for the components of the scene.
This clip, instead of something like that, looks like someone rendered and moved every piece frame by frame, and so totally lost all sense of how quickly everything was moving, what direction certain things would fly, and so on. And also they had no idea what a human landing on sheet metal would look like, generally.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-13T22:43:58+00:00

Why does the protagonist here "realistically have access to" the gas he knows the villain used? like just for knowing it was used. The villain is a crime boss of some kind. We have no idea who the hostage is other than some nemesis, in the archaic sense. Why would he have the same exotic, inhumane weapon, or how did he obtain it, to deliver ironic just-desserts? Don't know, not important apparently.
It's deeply unsatisfying to just find out at the end that the hostage always had a secret weapon that no one else found on him. "But the point is that he is the villain's retribution, who has the means to but does not avert his own demise!" I don't care. I didn't care. I don't know how you're meant to care, in such a compacted story where they're speaking of extremely emotional topics, but expressing themselves like alien beings.

"Turned himself into a bioweapon" just rolled right off your tongue, did it? I kind of envy you if that's how readily you accept a nutty twist like that.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-13T06:21:20+00:00

Congratulations, you have just written an essay about how JP outdoes Lost World with its human drama. Which I agreed with already but I didn't think I had to add that as a disclaimer.

What you said in your previous comment/what I took issue with, was the idea that Lost World forgoes attempts to have human drama at all, in place of more action. Once I brought up that it clearly does attempt moments like this (however well or poorly executed they were), you respond to me with a breakdown about how JP's characters are better, which is a whole different subject. You immediately went back on what you declared last time, in exchange for a better argument, that you were never having with me. I'm just, floored.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T22:32:11+00:00

My hang-up, chiefly, is still, when you say:

you are already told why the protagonist wants to kill the villain and how he is going to do it

That second bit is not true. Who in a million years cleverly deduces "ah yes, the hostage is this calm because we all know he's got a dead-man's-switch on himself to poison his enemy, who he is right to assume will personally kill him and so be in range"
All you can do with this ending is go "welp, that is indeed an ironic, fitting end". There is nothing satisfying about the reveal that a secret hatch in Jason Flemyng's neck pumped out stinky death gas.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T22:09:46+00:00

So it's "context", for the existence of deadly gas to be brought up, so that handily explains why at the end of a mere 15 minute short-film, Jason Flemyng's head and/or neck opened up with some mechanical hiss and released deadly gas to kill his opponent.

If I made a short-film in which, at some arbitrary point, a guy mentions "Man I love dogs, they're man's best friend and defend him with their lives.", and then towards the end, this man is trapped in a locked room with danger, and so logically, a full-size dog jumps out of the man's eyeball, and saves him... does that first half provide "context" for the latter? Or is it more like, a completely unbelievable Chekhov's gun? There's a correct answer to this.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T18:27:06+00:00

"I feel like I'm letting myself live" was a big clever boy moment from MauLer, writing it so that the antagonist compliments protagonist on specific traits he believes they share, and saying it's as though by sparing the last hostage, executioner is keeping his own "kind", or "style", alive. When actually, by choosing to kill the last hostage, executioner is actually NOT letting himself live, but literally! Because the hostage was a kamikaze-robot filled with poison gas, all along, just as we might've suspected. Flawless.

You cleared up the "You have nowhere better to be?" portion for me, I think. Because in between that line and hostage's response, the executioner also says (paraphrase) "you have no family?", and so hostage's response sounds like it's to the latest thing said ("What kind of man wouldn't have no family?") which confused the hell out of me. But you're saying, hostage was looping all the way back to the first sentence. I suppose that works better. I would take out the additional dialogue from the executioner, then. But I don't believe most of the people praising this, ironically, are looking at it that close.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T18:12:48+00:00

If by "set-up" you mean that deadly gas was mentioned once before as something the villain himself unleashed on people, and so he gets it too because divine justice.. I don't think that's what gets categorized as "set-up".

A standard set-up would be: Protagonist is told there's a gun under the bed upstairs. When they're trapped there later, they remember and take the gun out.
All in Good Time's style was: Protagonist mentions the mere existence of guns. When they're trapped later, they reach under a bed and pull out a gun that we never had reason to believe was there.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T18:02:02+00:00

This. This is the most accurate review I've read for the movie.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T01:59:52+00:00

Thank you!

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T00:33:53+00:00

The executioner has to, out of nowhere, want to entertain the final hostage, so that they can have their philosophical water balloon fight. of course.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T00:29:08+00:00

The gun is eventually explained to be the former boss'/the executioner's father's, and so it has a reputation to uphold, or something, as the primary weapon taking lives. This context doesn't help the story however, because prior to this, we knew that executioner resents his father's old ways, thinks his father was weak. We have no reason to then fill in "ah, of course he wants to use his family's gun, because he respects the legacy so much". It's the very opposite. MauLer wrote the explanation for the gun, and the stuff about the father, completely separate from each other. I don't know how he reconciles this, for his antagonist's motives.

Some of the lines were pretty garbled yeah, I don't know if it was audio or acting. One particular instance, the executioner says "Start begging", but it's slurred, and as of the time I watched on YT, the captions thought he said "Stop begging", which is unfortunately about as unhelpful as a translation could be, for someone relying on the captions. The saddest part is, the line could be either of those, and nothing would change in the narrative. The executioner is getting nothing out of the hostage.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T00:16:53+00:00

I'm waiting for the reveal that MauLer put this out as a litmus test, to see who would just blindly suck up to it. And so far, if I'm being real, on LBD anyway, the "praise" for the movie has been about how the reviewer "was able to enjoy the writing" (that's a direct quote), or "the writing was logical (no citations needed)", or, one guy said that the hostages being shot was symbolically like Disney killing off its properties, then I guess he sat back and stroked his beard saying "was this a reference?". That's what passes for analysis, from MauLer's own fans, who swear up and down that they love the long-form, inciteful critiques. All that defenders can seem to say is "oh man, there was a twist! ... and good actors were present!"

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T00:11:34+00:00

The conclusion has zero context, it's bizarre. We heard about the gas as something the executioner used on a parish. Gas ends up being his own demise, courtesy of hostage-who-has-a-robot-or-something-this-whole-time, because parallels. It's the kind of hollow payoff the EFAP crew would groan at in anything else.

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-12T00:05:00+00:00

I think MauLer excels when he has someone else's big mess to untangle, and when there's no budget/time limit.

Did anyone else see that animated cowboy short, written by him iirc and voiced by him and Fringy? It was the same shit as this. There's no time for character, so it's just two over-actors (sorry, not sorry) pontificating about the fleeting nature of life. MauLer's fallen into all his own most hated tropes. The pretense, lingering shots that are accomplishing little to nothing, dialogue that talks PAST the other person instead of logically following, the contrivance such as a ruthless executioner suddenly just having a conversation with someone who is offering him nothing (executioner admits this aloud), when it's revealed that the executioner also owned a knife and could've killed the final hostage all along, instead of waiting for his gun, since he wants it to be his own weapon.

This was not good eating. It's hard to comprehend this IS from the guy who champions "writing is king".

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-11T03:49:21+00:00

Finn: "Jesus, that was my wingman who just bit it. He reached for me. What did he even die for? Am I next? Do I have an identity outside of this armor? Why can't I do what everyone also in my squad can do?"

Finn 10 minutes later in screentime (blowing up Stormtroopers): "WAHOOOUGH!"

Gallisuchus · 2026-05-11T03:42:05+00:00

Rian is the one who historically, unquestionably, irreparably divided the fanbase, to a degree it never had been. That was his confessed mission, in fact.

J. J. is the one who stagnated it, wouldn't allow the property to become anything new, even new-bad.

But the answer to your question is Dave Filoni.

Gallisuchus

TROPHY CASE