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[Interview] Inside ‘Deadpool 2’s Monster Battles and Comedy Fights

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Deadpool 2 is not your typical superhero movie. It’s full of R-rated gore and language, plus all sorts of mutant mayhem. One of the film’s climactic battles has Colossus vs. another CGI character who will make X-Men fans happy. Even though it’s two CGI characters, director David Leitch of John Wick fame still got to choreograph them.

“That was really an interesting experience for me,” Leitch said. “As a fight choreographer and a stunt coordinator coming up in the business, I like to work with real stunt guys and choreograph that way. That’s how we approached that fight in the third act. There’s a lot of analog rehearsals with stunt people. We did some motion capture. We had the animators help and take over from there but it is fun and liberating in the CG world because you can literally do anything. It’s fun that way.”

Another striking fight scene features a full speed Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) dispatching henchmen, while his target runs away in slow motion. Leitch explained how they did it.

“That shot in the meth lab, there is a technical achievement,” Leitch said. “It’s a motion control shot. The camera rig shoots two passes of the action, one at one frame rate and one at normal frame rate. So we did a pass with Sergei first at 48 frames. Then we do a pass with the background action and then we line up the two takes together. It’s a real tricky logistical puzzle to get everything on stacks and working and timed and comping those two layers together. That shot took an entire day of rehearsals and photography.”

Deadpool movies can also have fights that don’t need to be badass. Leitch said it’s a similar exercise crafting a comedy fight.

“You’re building a rhythm and a timing,” Leitch said. “It’s often like telling a joke. You’re building up rhythm and you’re finding that perfect beat to pull the rug out. That’s what’s fun about Deadpool. We can have fight scenes that don’t have to be over the top and so bombastic and violent, but then we can also have them. I think the tone of Deadpool can literally go anywhere, and then you can always bring it back to this core emotional story that he’s going through. It’s so fun in a Deadpool movie how many tones you get to work with, how many palettes you get to work with.”

You might think that because Deadpool wears a mask, they can add lots of jokes with ADR. Leitch said most of the masked dialogue sticks to the script.

“No, the script came in and it was so strong, we often had a hard time beating it with alts or improv,” Leitch said. “There are moments of things that we changed that actually moved the needle in a positive way, but man, there’s a lot of the original. Look, I love the mask and it was fun in post to find those moments that heightened it, but I can’t stress enough how strong the original material was. We’d always go back to it, like man, it’s hard to beat that joke.”

One addition to the script was a title sequence that spoofs the animated titles of James Bond movies.

“That was something that wasn’t in the script,” Leitch said. “There’s a moment where we kind of needed to have a moment for the audience to breathe. As I put the movie together, you feel like we need a breath here. It felt like a late title sequence might work for that. I had worked in some storyboards and pitched a sequence that could land there, and then we looked for a thematic song in the spirit of a Bond movie that worked for the arc of our characters.”

Deadpool 2 opens May 18.

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[Review] Graphic Novel ‘Tender’ Is Brilliant Feminist Body Horror That Will Make You Squirm & Scream

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Tender Beth Hetland Graphic Novel

Beth Hetland’s debut graphic novel, ‘Tender,’ is a modern tale of love, validation, and self-destruction by way of brutal body horror with a feminist edge.

“I’ve wanted this more than anything.”

Men so often dominate the body horror subgenre, which makes it so rare and insightful whenever women tackle this space. This makes Beth Hetland’s Tender such a refreshing change of pace. It’s earnest, honest, and impossibly exposed. Tender takes the body horror subgenre and brilliantly and subversively mixes it together with a narrative that’s steeped in the societal expectations that women face on a daily basis, whether it comes to empowerment, family, or sexuality. It single-handedly beats other 2023 and ‘24 feminine horror texts like American Horror Story: Delicate, Sick, Lisa Frankenstein, and Immaculate at their own game.

Hetland’s Tender is American Psycho meets Rosemary’s Baby meets Swallow. It’s also absolutely not for the faint of heart.

Right from the jump, Tender grabs hold of its audience and doesn’t let go. Carolanne’s quest for romantic fulfillment, validation, and a grander purpose is easy to empathize with and an effective framework for this woeful saga. Carolanne’s wounds cut so deep simply because they’re so incredibly commonplace. Everybody wants to feel wanted.

Tender is full of beautiful, gross, expressive artwork that makes the reader squirm in their seat and itch. Hetland’s drawings are simultaneously minimalist and comprehensively layered. They’re  reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Hole, in the best way possible. There’s consistently inspired and striking use of spot coloring that elevates Hetland’s story whenever it’s incorporated, invading Tender’s muted world.

Hetland employs effective, economical storytelling that makes clever use of panels and scene construction so that Tender can breeze through exposition and get to the story’s gooey, aching heart. There’s an excellent page that depicts Carolanne’s menial domestic tasks where the repetitive panels grow increasingly smaller to illustrate the formulaic rut that her life has become. It’s magical. Tender is full of creative devices like this that further let the reader into Carolanne’s mind without ever getting clunky or explicit on the matter. The graphic novel is bookended with a simple moment that shifts from sweet to suffocating.

Tender gives the audience a proper sense of who Carolanne is right away. Hetland adeptly defines her protagonist so that readers are immediately on her side, praying that she gets her “happily ever after,” and makes it out of this sick story alive…And then they’re rapidly wishing for the opposite and utterly aghast over this chameleon. There’s also some creative experimentation with non-linear storytelling that gets to the root of Carolanne and continually recontextualizes who she is and what she wants out of life so that the audience is kept on guard.

Tender casually transforms from a picture-perfect rom-com, right down to the visual style, into a haunting horror story. There’s such a natural quality to how Tender presents the melancholy manner in which a relationship — and life — can decay. Once the horror elements hit, they hit hard, like a jackhammer, and don’t relent. It’s hard not to wince and grimace through Tender’s terrifying images. They’re reminiscent of the nightmarish dadaist visuals from The Ring’s cursed videotape, distilled to blunt comic panels that the reader is forced to confront and digest, rather than something that simply flickers through their mind and is gone a moment later. Tender makes its audience marinate in its mania and incubates its horror as if it’s a gestating fetus in their womb.

Tender tells a powerful, emotional, disturbing story, but its secret weapon may be its sublime pacing. Hetland paces Tender in such an exceptional manner, so that it takes its time, sneaks up on the reader, and gets under their skin until they’re dreading where the story will go next. Tender pushes the audience right up to the edge so that they’re practically begging that Carolanne won’t do the things that she does, yet the other shoe always drops in the most devastating manner. Audiences will read Tender with clenched fists that make it a struggle to turn each page, although they won’t be able to stop. Tender isn’t a short story, at more than 160 pages, but readers will want to take their time and relish each page so that this macabre story lasts for as long as possible before it cascades to its tragic conclusion. 

Tender is an accomplished and uncomfortable debut graphic novel from Hetland that reveals a strong, unflinching voice that’s the perfect fit for horror. Tender indulges in heightened flights of fancy and toes the line with the supernatural. However, Tender is so successful at what it does because it’s so grounded in reality and presents a horror story that’s all too common in society. It’s a heartbreaking meditation on loneliness and codependency that’s one of 2024’s must-read horror graphic novels.

‘Tender,’ by Beth Hetland and published by Fantagraphics, is now available.

4 out of 5 skulls

Tender graphic novel review

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