Darren Aronofsky directs the story of Noah's Ark

And he wants Christian Bale as Noah. This will end well.

Ned I always think of you as someone who loves music and hates movies because they are not music.

I mean this in a good way.

Anyway, I will see and enjoy while feeling weird abt enjoying this Aronofsky debacle.

now it's Russell Crowe as Noah!

then, George Washington?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/apr/18/black-swan-director-george-washington-biopic

fighting for final cut

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24549493

Oof, back to character studies for this guy.

Christian and Jewish audience reactions were said to have been "worrisome".

Last year, screenwriter Brian Godawa obtained a version of the Noah script and posted his summary online, deeming the film "Environmentalist Wacko".

How is this bad news?

the worst news is Anthony Hopkins is in this

good luck CGI animals

How have I not heard of this insane sounding movie?

I can't wait for the scene where Ham sees the nakedness of his father and tells his brethren and Noah curses Ham's son Canaan.

I can't imagine any way a film about Noah's ark would be anything but utterly utterly absurd. Maybe that's what they're going for.

If only Mickey Rourke were Noah.

personally, i am stoked for a CGI raven, maybe flying out over an ocean of unlucky / not-"chosen" animal & human corpses

Trailer leak: http://defamer.gawker.com/heres-a-leaked-trailer-for-paramounts-troubled-biblic-1450381569

Looks gash.

Will there be a scene where he refuses entry to the dinosaurs?

lol at this

Holy shit this looks King of Kings awful.

trailer most likely cut by the studio that's warring with the director is PROB not the best representation

i see, so he totally made a mash up of gladiator and bruce almighty with a lil da$h of waterworld

tbh all this darkly suppressed badness talk makes me want to see it 100x more than earnest studio fanfare

"The most remarkable event in our history!!!" Lol.

Man, there's not even allegory going on in this particular bible story, is there?

the worst news is Anthony Hopkins is in this

good luck CGI animals

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 16 October 2013 17:54 (1 week ago) Bookmark

ray winstone!! as fake oliver reed probably!

yeah the more i read the more i see slocki is right, it was actually totally meant to be ott waterworld but now the trailer looks like gladiator x bruce almighty

they should have just not bothered calling him noah at all and given him a nice ambiguous regular name like idk, how about.... john carter

has anyone seen this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible:_In_the_Beginning

john huston as noah AND the voice of god!

i saw it on TV when i was a kid. at least the Noah segment is about 20 mins.

Scott p good as Abraham.

Schick Sun Classics all the way!

http://www.christianfilmdatabase.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/noahs_ark.jpg

Was sure this would be a joke thread

Stoked for this tbh.

ILM's most expensive shot ever is in this movie.

Hoping for depraved nephilim sex.

(Expensive to render, anyway, computationally, I guess.)

And he wants Christian Bale as Noah. This will end well.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:27 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

God: I have decided to destroy all living creatures, for they have filled the earth with violence. Yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth!

Noah (under his breath): Great. This will end well.

God: What was that?

In the mid 1960s, Dino de Laurentiis planned a series of films based on the Bible, featuring top directors of the day, including Huston, Visconti, Welles and Fellini. When Bresson, slated to direct Genesis, told de Laurentiis that he planned to film it in Hebrew and Aramaic, and wouldn't show any animals on Noah's Ark, only their footprints in the sand, he was fired.

Producer Scott Franklin told Entertainment Weekly, "Noah is a very short section of the Bible with a lot of gaps, so we definitely had to take some creative expression in it. But I think we stayed very true to the story and didn't really deviate from the Bible, despite the six-armed angels."

onion-worthy

looks bad but ray winstones temptin me

Watch this turn out to be a masterpiece

ray winstones a terrible andshit actor

i'll lay you 7-4 he isn't

whats that

http://90minutecynic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Ray_Winstone_large.png

^credits for the brit remake of breaking bad

Nic Cage as Noah, now that would be something.

HOW'D IT GET DROWNED? HOW'D IT GET DROWNED?

KILLING ME WONT BRING BACK YOUR UNICORNS!!!!

This will end well.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/rough-seas-noah-darren-aronofsky-679315

As Aronofsky worked on his version of the film, Paramount set out to make its own cut under the auspices of production president Adam Goodman. Moore says Goodman has demonstrated his talent for working with filmmakers to get the best version of a movie, citing last year's G.I. Joe sequel and World War Z as examples. "Both ended up being hits when they could have easily not been," he says. "When you're in a movie that's over $100 million, there is a level of process you go through because the stakes are so high."

Aronofsky, who went without final cut approval on the film in exchange for Paramount greenlighting a nine-figure budget, says he was confident the studio's efforts would fail. "My guys and I were pretty sure that because of the nature of the film and how we work, there wasn't another version," says Aronofsky. "That's what I told them … the scenes were so interconnected -- if you started unwinding scenes, I just knew there would be holes. I showed it to filmmaker friends, and they said the DNA was set in this film."

My buddy told me years ago that he read Aronofsky's new project was going to be based on the Noah's Ark story. I remember thinking at the time, "how can this be an interesting movie?" -- then I forgot about it until just now reading this thread. Even if Aronofsky had final cut I would have zero interest in seeing this.

Oh god, the trailer for this was hysterical last time I was in a theater but i'd completely forgotten about it already

If I recall it was followed by the Frankenstein trailer. Quite a rollercoaster.

i kinda can't wait to see this, i can't imagine it's gonna be... good... but it's gonna be something to see i'm sure

Yeah if it's gonna be bad at least it won't be generically bad

the commercial during the sb is all ive seen & that looked unbelievably bad

Imagine that all ads for this will be terrible because nobody would see this with accurate advertising, like sex with six-armed nephilim

lol: http://variety.com/2014/film/news/98-of-faith-driven-consumers-dissatisfied-with-noah-survey-shows-1201109347/

“As a Faith Driven Consumer, are you satisfied with a Biblically themed movie – designed to appeal to you – which replaces the Bible’s core message with one created by Hollywood?” asked the survey.

loooooool at this question

"Faith driven consumer" what is this god fuck the stupid marketing industry forever

"As A Faith Driven Consumer, do you agree that sex is natural, sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should?"

another clint 'pop will eat itself' mansell soundtrack.

gotta say for a crappy second rate indie band (that i loved !!) the man has done really well for himself.

His fountain soundtrack with Mogwai and the Kronos quartet was really good

"okay, so the musical concept here is that noah was actually a girl from a chainstore, see?

xxp
Would never have predicted Stourbridge-grebo-bloke would be an esteemed Hollywood soundtrack artiste either!

Has he ever scored any movies outside Aronofsky's though?

Shitloads more.

Anyway, I'm hoping this'll turn out to be an awesome-looking pompous mess like The Fountain. One thing I admire about Aronofsky is that he always seems to take his subject matter extremely seriously, even in the cases where other directors would opt for some nudge-nudge-wink-wink ironic approach. If the subject matter is trite, the result can be awful, like with Requiem for a Dream, but when it's weird and ludicrous, like with The Fountain, at least we get something unique to look at, So I'm hoping this Noah movie falls in the latter camp. (I can't imagine this being one of the cases where the script and his direction are both good, such as with The Black Swan.)

sounds like the stars aren't too happy either

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/17/emma-watson-noah-darren-aronofsky-banned-bottle-water

That's one of the funniest things I've read in days.

Alternate headline: "Emma Watson too stupid to have her assistant or a PA get a refillable sports bottle and keep it filled with water."

And it's not like they were even filming in the middle east desert or whatever. They were in New York!

Aronofsky, who went without final cut approval on the film in exchange for Paramount greenlighting a nine-figure budget, says he was confident the studio's efforts would fail. "My guys and I were pretty sure that because of the nature of the film and how we work, there wasn't another version," says Aronofsky. "That's what I told them … the scenes were so interconnected -- if you started unwinding scenes, I just knew there would be holes. I showed it to filmmaker friends, and they said the DNA was set in this film."

he seems incredibly naïve

I dunno. Sounds like a strategic dick move, which lots of directors do. If you lean hard on, say, master shots, it's hard for studios to mess with what you've done without totally breaking the movie. Which still happens!

actually i've heard of directors specifically not doing master shots to make it harder to cut any way but the way they want

You mean like it's so linear or something that there's only one way to tell the story? Maybe that's what he's talking about.

but he's not talking about the shooting of individual scenes, he's talking about scenes being "interconnected." maybe he means there are lots of scene-to-scene hooks. b/c if he thinks his narrative is airtight and thus unfuckwithable, i suspect he has another think coming.

though honestly wtf do i care he's a hack who makes terrible movies

That's a misuse of the word "hack". Even if you don't like his movies (and I don't like all of them either, IMO RfaD was horribly preachy and The Fountain aims higher than it can reach), you have to admite they're pretty idiosyncratic and visually unique, not hackish at all.

apparently they're releasing his version anyway because the recut versions didnt test well either

there's still time to rework it from the ground up and rebrand it as Noah's Bark, the charming tale of an adorable black labrador puppy who just can't seem to stay awake long enough to finish his din din

I just hope he's faithful to the original text, because word of god and stuff.

there's no way they can top that tv miniseries where f murray abraham's Lot shows up after the flood as a pirate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah%27s_Ark_%281999_film%29

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/steven-greydanus/chill-out-about-noah

what are the best examples of a studio re-cutting a film? The Magnificent Ambersons, Brazil and Heaven's Gate come to mind. I'm sure there are more obvious and classic examples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramax

lol

once upon a time in america

Man, Idiocracy. You can totally tell a frustrated Mike Judge just said "here, you have it," and the studio fucked it all up and tied it together with voiceover.

Miramax is pretty notorious, but off the top of my head I want to say Miramax has done more harm by sitting on movies than by cutting them, as much as I'd prefer they didn't cut them. There's was always this weird dissonance in how the studio got that reputation at the same time it was shepherding directors like Tarantino, Kevin Smith and whomever. Like, when you see a list of films they released in the '90s, it doesn't exactly look like a graveyard of cutting room floor victims.

World War Z went from being an inevitable bomb to earning $540 million on a $190 million budget, after extensive recuts/reshoots.

world war z was lucky in that apparently the problems were all in the last third of the film, and while it's still a little muted and abrupt, the opening half of the film is straight-up awesome in a manner that makes any closing wonkiness easy to forgive, especially in a movie about fighting zombies. So even though, yeah, Noah, could be a hit, it looks like their problems might go beyond "we spent a ton on this zombie movie before deciding how to end it".

i'm guessing noah will do fine internationally either way - Crowe's Robin Hood made 2/3rds of its money overseas

visually unique

re black swan and the wrestler, if borrowing the dardennes' camera style wholesale = "visually unique" then, yeah.

i do think he is one of the most perplexingly "rated" (by increasingly few, I'll admit) american big-name directors of the last decade or so

big profile in the New Yorker (sub only)

still sounds like 1 to def avoid

first reviews....NOAH: imagine the serious philosophical and faith explorations of LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST with a LORD OF THE RINGS sheen.
this is going to be lol

yeah hopefully this is psychotic and stupid and not Fountain-boring

"I don't give a fuck about the test scores. My films are outside the scores."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/11/darren-aronofsky-noah_n_4941318.html

hope there's a big boss battle between Noah and God

I just read the graphic novel adaptation and it's crazy amazeballs. Now I NEED to see the movie.

god does not exist

he would not have made such a boring "visionary" filmmaker

I saw the long trailer for this last week

My only takeaway was 'Noah has a daughter?'

this may be a total mess but i'm excited to see it. aronofsky gets a ton of shit but i like him so hey. i like that he's honing on how completely fucked up it would be to wipe out almost all of humanity, the absolute terror of that. wiiiiith 6-armed violent vengeful angel beasts battling russell crowe's drunken crew in a raging, literally apocalytpic, battle as the water descends. apparently the idea for the ark comes to noah after he partakes in a psychedelic substance. how are people not pumped for this? full disclosure i liked pi, requiem, the fountain, and black swan (didn't see the wrestler), so i have no idea what i'm talking about

I don't have any real hate for Aronofsky but I thought Black Swan was superior genre filmmaking.

Yeah I was impressed with Black Swan, especially since I hated The Rassler

i have liked many of his movies, never did see the fountain

I don't have any real hate for Aronofsky but I thought Black Swan was superior genre filmmaking.

― Insane Prince of False Binaries (Gukbe), Saturday, March 22, 2014 9:52 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah, the "dumb and obvious, with hectoring style" genre :)

My only takeaway was 'Noah has a daughter?'

not his daughters-in-law? he has three in the book iirc

dumb and obvious was part of the fun of Black Swan imo! xpost

xpost - not a son in sight in the trailer, just a young doubting Emma Watson *shrug*

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/entry/view/id/255241

Noah review with some plot details that are like WOAH

http://m.hollywoodreporter.com/entry/view/id/255241

jeez, some major spoilers in there regarding the watchers (the 6-armed fallen angels, iirc)! in the new yorker article it left the watchers' motives and actions up in the air a little bit, but the article just goes ahead and says what they do at the end!

Spoiler alert but I heard Noah survives, there's some bullshit deus ex machina with a bird finding a mountaintop at the last minute, fuuuuuck that, no way wd anyone survive such a flood

http://i.imgur.com/vNs05QM.jpg
It's been a long roaaaaaaad, getting from there to herrrre

imo think that spoiler is a red herring, this film more closely examines the secret backchanneling between God and Noah to end the flood early as long as Noah didn't flash his balls to his son again

i hope that he kept the christian rock song at the end, though, that was a stroke of genius

Audio Adrenaline needs work in 2014

"drowning (in a sea of jesus)" IIRC

this was hands down the funniest vegetarian propaganda film ever A+++

Is there a scene where Noah tries to eat two of every animal, fails at his mission, and then God shows up and says "see?"

spoilers i guess but noah and company apparently eat nothing but kashi or some other trader joes breakfast cereal wrapped in linen.

it isn't a very good movie but i liked it so much more than that awful robocop reboot and the superman reboot, too.

can't wait for the bible reboot, aronofsky has had his chance w/ the franchise imo

(modest spoilers fyi, but honestly if you're going to see this you're better off knowing everything or nothing - in which case you shouldn't be on this thread)

man this movie was something else. I don't know if I've ever seen a movie so admirably ambitious and potentially subversive while being rock stupid at the same time. I mean, making a big bible epic into a eco-survivalist Zardoz would be impressive enough, but then having it turn into a theatrical chamber piece about putting faith first? But then there's lots of cheats in the climax, and so much silly distracting shit like the evolution of Noah's hair (long and brown, then a buzzcut, then michael mcdonald)...it feels like a movie that's begging to be both dismissed and overrated. Defining "have your cake and eat it too" moment might be when they showed evolution over Noah telling the creation story (even a glimpse of dinosaurs!) but then cut to Adam and Eve afterward. Also being all "oh my god! daughters! humanity will live!" well yeah only if they fuck their uncles.

was happy to hear one loud "WHAT?" in the theater over the reveal of The Watchers...talk about the Nephilim being in the bible all you want, a nice slice of the audience pie will not be ready for that shit.

since we're going spoiler, lemme just say that the diluvial EPT iis the loudest I have actually laughed in a theater since maybe ben stiller's balls in the zipper

wow now I want to see this.

apologies for those who have an afternoon they don't want to waste but I bestow upon you this hilarious thread: http://www.city-data.com/forum/christianity/2022329-noahs-ark-has-been-found-4.html

i kinda dug it

This is one of those rare movies where somehow everything I hear about it, no matter how negative in tone, makes it sound awesome.

it's worth seeing for sure.

I like that they often dressed exactly like modern day americans except with more exposed stitching.

http://latino-review.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/7293312_171012-russell-crowe-emma-watson-jennifer-connolly-noah-4.jpg

i have no idea if there's some historical accuracy or not, if people really were making frankenstein t-shirts out scraps like that, great.

lol can't be worse than daenarys's jeggings in game of thrones

should have had one scene where he just wore a 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts t-shirt inside out

noah's hair journey was also made impressive by the fact that his kids had different but consistent haircuts throughout - if shem and the youngest always had it long and pretty, and ham always kept it cropped, noah's relative variety must have just been aesthetic uncertainty. "think i'll let it grow out again".

should have had one scene where he just wore a 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts t-shirt inside out

30 Odd Foot Of Grunt, you fucking philistine

serious spoilers dude, they don't show up until the post-credit scene, kinda shitty FX on goliath IMO

30 Odd Foot Of Grunt, you fucking philistine

O RLY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Odd_Foot_of_Grunts

wait - THE ORDINARY FEAR OF GOD?

30 odd minutes worth of grunts comprise a lot of this movies dialog actually

does Noah say "Put THAT in your Pentateuch, bitch" to Moses?

Where does the paul bettany angel/priest duo fit in here

wait - THE ORDINARY FEAR OF GOD?

He'd already had all his road cases spraypainted with TOFOG.

omg i didn't even put two and two together there

god sometimes i'll think 'man russell crowe, what a shame, it'd be nice if he could come back', and then you're reminded of just what he is

tbf i can't imagine anyone pulling this off better than he does - guy's still got serious screen presence

Thats a nice weigh of putting it

god i hate to give credence to bill simmons' pop culture writing but he wrote this action star championship belt thing that i enjoyed the hell out of despite my better judgment and then he was talking about it on his podcast w/ wesley morris (who is, by far, the best pop culture writer he has at grantland and russell crowe came up and that really feels like an unexplored avenue for him, they were mentioning it in the context of gladiator but i was thinking of him in l.a. confidential where he's that kind of violent yet righteous and witty psychopath. feel like a few years ago someone could've really done a couple of guys a favor and also entertained the world by having kevin spacey pre-house of cards comeback play the 'i want him and his family DEAD!' villain and crowe as the force of nature 'hero', at the very least he would've made a better jack reacher than tom cruise.

plus as much as i did enjoy this schmuck getting taken down a peg, it was like kevin costner all over again, i'm still sad i didn't get the several master and commander sequels i really really wanted.

Given five mins warmup and the right socks, i'm a better jack reacher than tom cruise tbf

Anyway, I will see and enjoy while feeling weird abt enjoying this Aronofsky debacle.

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 12:14 AM

So rrrobyn predicted the future there, based on all the reactions.

Wow, I just saw this. It was pretty insane. Lots of stuff thrown in for Hollywood effect that really didn't need to be there. Entertaining at the very least for being totally batshit crazy. Radiating rainbows of God at the end was very funny. Enjoyed the rock monster angels. Didn't enjoy the stowaway subplot.

I'm going to have to go back and look at the Bible but I don't recall Noah throwing an axe 30 feet into the chest of a would-be Ark usurper.

noah's arc

Anthony Hopkins always gets the best roles. First Van Helsing and now Methuselah.

what were the audiences like at these showings? are ppl getting rowdy for this flick

Hah it was a Sunday so it was lots of families and stuff. Someone clapped at the end but nobody really joined in, cos by the end of the movie you kind of hate Noah.

Also, after sitting through previews for Transformers 4 and Spider Man 2, I was more than ready to see humanity wiped from the face of the earth.

$44 million

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2014/03/30/box-office-report-noah/

charming as ever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lAsw5UYGvk

studios are really good at not letting a movie BOMB out of the gate now unless they kind of want it to - like, Evan Almighty and Green Lantern both made over 100m at the US box office, but thanks to expensive ad campaigns over already massive budgets that guarantee the film's unprofitability. The difference between a turkey and a movie that merely underperforms is usually up to the studio - something like The Postman or that last James L Brooks movie got the "You broke my heart" death kiss and debuted at #7, but Russell's still enough of a foreign draw that they'll at least drum up a strong first weekend even it's getting bad bad bad polling from audiences and I don't see it being a love/hate thing like Wolf Of Wall Street.

it's funny, Crowe and leo are two of the bigger "we'll make up the difference in Asia!" actors out there, but the one time they've worked together (in a Ridley Scott film!) the movie stiffed everywhere. Granted, both were wearing fat if not fat-suits, and it was like the 80th "war on terrorism" flop (a genre that does not make up the difference in Asia).

Carpet for UK premiere:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BkEZ92TIcAAZp0A.jpg

hey this was alright! really enjoyed parts of it, though I consider the fact that there was no long "animals making their way to the ark" sequence scored to beethoven's 6th a major flaw. how do you leave the animals in the margins in a cinematic version of this story? also not sure I buy emma watson's theological argument which turns noah around at the end but I'll have to mull it over more.

did you want odinthuselah to sneak into the ark and ride a napalm-spraying dragon into the sunset with noah protesting, "she's the last of her kind!"

i did.

The bleakest box office hit in years?

So 250 million years ago homo sapiens were dominating a Pangea type continent with the help of their angel rock giants. None of the monsters from the Pangean fossil record present, just Flinstones style stone-age dogs and every other creature from the Holocene epoch. Lol and God loves vegetarians.

Yeah well I bet the Netherlands don't have a FOOTBALL CHICKEN

http://i412.photobucket.com/albums/pp201/sharonjoy666/D299423F-38CC-45FC-9655-226335635B43_zpsdqfpls1x.jpg

oops lol wrong thread

not enough room for on the ark for football chickens of multiple nationalities

best revive of the day

Saw opening bits from this today. Looked admiringly trippy for a AAA blockbuster-type

Man this was....something

I kinda dug it. I'd watch Aronofsky do some more old testament shit

I mean it's obviously going to be a million times more interesting than whatever Ridley Scott does with Moses

Suprised how restrained this was for an Aronofsky film. He didnt indulge in too many of his usual tropes. Also liked the touch of having everyone speak in their regular accents, which made Ray Winstone's bit kinda comical to me.

Wasnt sure I really liked it a whole heap but it wasnt as insanely terrible as I'd been expecting.

His best movie.

Watched this on the plane today, and was trying to figure out how much was Aronofsky's stuff, and how much was a sop to hollywood genre standards. the battle scene, for example.

Also, from that Noah Arc movie ad clipping, I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sellier

his filmography is a thing of wonder

On the one hand, I liked some of the weird things he brought to the story - the start of the film, the Genesis sequence, even the silly rock monsters and the vigilante vegetarianism. On the other, there was very little of this story that begged literal big-screen transition. Like Jonah, it's pretty straight forward. Rain, boat - simple. No confusion there, and nothing he did can do justice to the tale. The battle scenes, all white people with British accents and stuff of that nature, on the other hand, detract from his telling, degrading his glimmers of inspiration by drowning it in boilerplate. For some reason I kept thinking Peter Weir could have made something great out of this.

Also, the score sucked. If ever something called for the exotic grandeur of "Passion," it was this.

Man, this was really something!

as kingfish once said

Did anyone else see this in 3D?

wowie what a mess this movie is. kind of admirably, willfully disinterested in giving anybody what they want though. i mean when i think "biblical epic" and "story of noah" i really don't think i would ever arrive at horny teenagers, rock monster transformers, noah as apocalyptic religious nut, generic swarthy barbarian hordes, magic glowing rocks casually strewn all over Creation, a pre-flood "industrial civilization" never mentioned or seen past the opening narration, and an adaptation of the climactic final keep-away battle from warcraft 3. meanwhile, of the things you do expect, you get about four total shots of animals entering the ark and doing things there (counting their heads being bitten off). i love the scene jammed in of them drugging the birds, as if to say "we sure don't want any animals disrupting this noah's ark movie." also love how apparently noah never once, in forty days and forty nights, goes through the ark on an inspection tour of the animals since he never notices any sign of ray winstone being holed up in there (god what a dumb plot). anyway then there's about three or four shots of noah visibly doing any ark-assembling himself - actually most of the construction we skip right over; wouldn't have been too interesting anyway i guess since apparently the rock monsters did all the work. the dove and mount ararat at least show up but they're obligatory throw-aways.

ask any kid raised in the ~judeo-christian tradition~, what does noah do? he builds an ark and leads the animals in two by two. nope, not in this movie! it's too bad it never actually feels as batshit as that would seem to suggest.