#all hail Our Father of HBO | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jynzandtonic · 4 years

Note

When will you pay for your heinous crimes.

For anyone reading this, I would like to apologize in advance.

This is not part of your regularly-scheduled programming.

This is in reference to the Father Garupe Coffee Shop/Fluff/Kid-Fic/Cattle-Farming AU that some shitty anon (read: me, it was me) provoked G into writing.

Here you go, @ohiobluetip. Consider this my Hail Mary.

You pound at the door of the humble thatch-and-stone cottage, sweat dripping from your sun-beaten brow.

The harrowing climb up the slopes of Mt. Yasumandake had made every muscle in your body scream with pain—or that could just be from the scurvy you developed on the boat journey to Hirado Island—and humidity clings to the overpriced lingerie you wear under your 17th-century nun’s habit, but you don’t give a flying fuck. You squeeze the INTERPOL badge at your hip. This is your God-given duty.

You’re met with the black eyes of Father Francisco Garupe as the weathered wooden door creaks open, but his face is changed since you last saw him; while his slim frame and angular features remain the same, his cheeks are much plumpened from Japanese cow’s milk.

“You know what I’ve come for,” you say, your voice cold as iron.

Garupe nods somberly. “I do, sister.”

Good. You’d worried that he would protest, that he would refuse, that he’d rather drown in the ocean than—oh, err, sorry. Too soon to joke?

“Give me but a moment, sister,” he says, peering over his shoulder into the cottage. You hear shuffling about inside. “Adoración Agustina Encarnación de Francisca! Come here.”

Confused, you watch as a young, black-eyed girl emerges from behind Garupe, offering up a small, swaddled bundle. Garupe plucks it from her tiny arms and transfers it to you.

“The fuck?!” you ask as he places a newborn baby in your arms.

“Please hold my youngest, sister. His name is… Charlie. I will return shortly.” He turns on his heel and disappears into the interior.

Stunned, you stare down at baby!Charlie. He coos up at you softly, then promptly and violently shits his thin cloth diaper.

Before you can find a flowerbox to leave the baby in, Father Garupe returns with a perfectly-frothed whole-milk matcha latte.

“I hope this is to your liking, sister,” he says, plucking baby!Charlie from your grip and handing you the warm, artisanal ceramic mug. “It is drinking-temperature. Jyn milked the cows this morning.”

You notice the latte art is an intricate and extremely adorable panda flipping you off.

“But pandas don’t even fucking LIVE in Japan,” you snarl.

He exhales deeply. “Jyn told me you’d say that during our morning fingerblasting session today. But pandas also don’t have fingers, yet you did not comment on that.”

“JYN NEEDS TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE!”

He hands baby!Charlie to Adoración Agustina Encarnación de Francisca and gently shoos her off, probably to go fall down a hillside or get eaten by pandas or something.

“Jyn is a child of God, now. All sins are forgiven,” he says.

“That’s bullshit and you know it, Frisco,” you sneer.

“TAKE ME INSTEAD! TAKE ME INSTEAD! YOU HAVE A WHOLE CREEPY BAD PRIEST AU TO FINISH! TAKE ME INSTEAD!” He’s screaming like a madman, and it’s hurting your ears. Hmm, or maybe that’s the scurvy, too.

“SHUT! THE FUCK! UP!” you yell, sounding an awful lot like Adam Sackler from some season of HBO Girls I can’t remember the number of. “I have to get out of this shitpost right now.”

Oh no, Jyn thinks, have I fucked this up by breaking the fourth wall and using two different ‘I’s in the same paragraph?

“Shut up, Jyn,” you say.

You can hear me?! Jyn thinks.

“Yeah, I can. And I’m outta here. Why don’t you fill some ACTUAL prompts while I respond to your 47 other shitty asks?”

I’m sick of this callout culture, Jyn thinks, but I think Garupe has some more shit to say to you.

“Fine,” you say.

“Kneel, sweet sister.” Garupe’s words are like poisoned wine dripping down your throat—intoxicating, irresistible, deadly. “I wish to bless you before you go.”

In spite of yourself, you sink down before him, the cold, rough limestone of the cottage’s threshold biting into your shins.

Parting his long, black robes, he exposes his matchstick thighs clad in acid-wash denim short-shorts. In one swift motion, he shucks the jorts down to his ankles, revealing his veiny, purple, one-and-a-half-foot long Jesuit cock. “I heard you like watersports, Sister G. Let me offer you some of my... Holy Water.”

#YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!#this is not tonic tuesday #this is not anything #AYYYY PAPIIIIII #father garupe wears JORTS #ohiobluetip is daddy but garupe is PAPI #pure 100% crack #pure 100% cowshit #don't read this #bye #ohiobluetip

26 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 4 years

Photo

The Pantomimes of Racism.

Aaron Yap surveys the cinema landscape of slavery narratives, from The Birth of a Nation to Roots to Sankofa to Us, as he talks to writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz about their new addition to the catalog, Antebellum.

“It was important to us that we not serve as co-conspirators to further erasure of American history and not white-wash the past.” —Gerard Bush

Given its deep-seated psychic baggage as America’s original sin, slavery remains among the most contentious of subject matters to be portrayed in film. Widely embraced depictions are rare, while the notoriety of those tactless, or simply racist, offenders generally looms large in conversation.

Lest we forget, cinema itself was birthed in a vat of virulent racism. A monumental accomplishment like DW Griffith’s groundbreaking The Birth of a Nation (1915) was also a monument to the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise, Victor Fleming’s highly regarded Civil War-era romance Gone with the Wind (1939) presents the viewer with a problematic dichotomy: it’s an extraordinary feat of filmmaking, deeply—even perversely—intoxicating, but all its extravagant, impassioned melodrama cannot wash away the odious stain of its Black caricatures and pro-Confederacy cheerleading.

At the extreme end of this spectrum lurks the stomach-churning shockumentary tactics of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi’s Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971). So deliberately pornographic in its attempts to upset and shock under the guise of educational, telling-it-like-it-is accuracy, this mondo opus might be the least easily recommendable movie ever—a film that once prompted Pauline Kael to deem it “the most specific and rabid incitement to race war.”

When citing respectable dramatizations of slavery, the Emmy-winning miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s sprawling bestseller Roots (1977) is still considered a benchmark. Without sacrificing the horrific authenticity of the experience, it was captivating, commercial television, but most crucially, a long-overdue corrective, centering African-Americans in a screen telling of their history. Also notable, both for its Black-centered storytelling and the ultra-independence of its 1983 release, is the little-seen Sankofa by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima—a member of the LA Rebellion (and father of Merawi Gerima, whose debut Residue has just landed on Netflix). Sankofa transports a contemporary African-American fashion model back in time to a slave plantation; it’s both a reckoning and an awakening, in honor of the “stolen spirits of Africa”.

Yet “white savior” narratives are prevalent to this day, whether it’s the well-meaning, virtuous legal theater of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) or the blaxploitation-tinged revisionist fantasia of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). Even Steve McQueen’s much-lauded adaptation of abolitionist Solomon Northup’s memoir 12 Years a Slave (2013) isn’t completely untethered from the assistance of a white hand.

Perhaps something thornier like Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo (1975), frequently written off as a lurid, trashy potboiler imagining of the slave trade, deserves more than a cursory look for the way it removes clearly delineated archetypes of heroes and villains, and cathartic beats of obstacle and triumph, from the slave narrative. It exposes the poisoned capitalist pathology that produces the system—observing how souls, constantly besieged by hubris, greed and frail egos, self-implode as the unchecked power that comes with the commodification of human bodies grows.

Kiersey Clemons and Janelle Monáe in ‘Antebellum’.

Now available digitally after its theatrical release was abandoned due to Covid, Gerard Bush and Christopher Rez’s Antebellum contributes another complicated, fascinating wrinkle to the nuances of slavery cinema. The film arrives at a particularly volatile time, with additional resonance provided by the on-going, extremely topical plight of inequity faced by Black Americans.

Employing the malleable, high-concept language of genre to connect the sins of the past with the present—imagine something in the vicinity of Blumhouse doing Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, or rebooting Sankofa for that matter—Antebellum is of a piece with the gathering momentum behind the popularity of recent Black-centered genre fare, from Jordan Peele’s horror outings Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) to recent HBO shows like Watchmen and Lovecraft Country. The temporal tricksiness of the film’s narrative structure means spoiler-free synopsizing is a fool’s errand, but “it’s not a traditional horror”, Renz says, proffering “a thriller with horror elements” to describe it.

What is clear from the get-go is that something’s a little off, and the film potentially has one foot in The Twilight Zone. Opening with a quote from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”), Bush and Renz, who shared writing and directing duties, waste no time thrusting us—via a visually stunning five-minute one-take tracking shot—onto an impossibly beautiful Louisiana plantation where we’re introduced to Eden, the first of two roles played by Janelle Monáe, a slave whose plans to escape are brutally thwarted by Confederate officers.

The filmmakers maintained vigilance in their recreation of trauma and the slave experience. “It was important to us that we not serve as co-conspirators to further erasure of American history and not white-wash the past,” says Bush. “But it was always of equal importance that we not engage in gratuitous violence. It was all for a meaning and purpose. So much of it is off-screen—we don’t have any physical whipping or anyone at the whipping post or any of that. This is to inform and educate and move the story forward. It’s not meant to serve as some sort of entertainment for violence sake.”

Gabourey Sidibe, Janelle Monáe and Lily Cowles in ‘Antebellum’.

Similarly, Bush says they were deliberate in their approach to using racial epithets of its time. The N-word is conspicuously absent for a film set in the Antebellum South. “It gives the audience an off-ramp to say, ‘That’s not language I would use so that’s not me, so I don’t have to engage in this and I don’t have to confront it’. These are the pantomimes of racism. The N-word and those words—they’re meant to dehumanize but just because you’re not hearing the word in the public square anymore—because it is no longer socially appropriate—doesn’t mean that all of the brutality and inequity that the word, the avatar, represented doesn’t exist anymore. It was important to us that we use the same language as Gone with the Wind in a way that they would refer to the enslaved people as the inferiors.”

In a purposefully disorienting plot shift, Antebellum moves off plantation grounds in its second act to establish Monáe’s second role, Veronica, a successful present-day academic promoting her new book Shedding the Coping Persona. Although the physical subjugation and barbarity of the past have disappeared, insidious micro-aggressions and hints remain, including the sinister presence of Jena Malone’s Southern antagonist Elizabeth, who also appears in both timelines.

For this portion, the film allows Veronica, who’s assertive, confident, free—the seeming mirror opposite of Eden—to live powerfully in her moment. Often accompanied by her bestie Dawn (a rambunctious, scene-stealing Gabourey Sidibe), these scenes foreground intersectionality, reflecting Bush and Renz’s desire to show Black women in a way that was familiar to them. “We’re surrounded by extraordinary Black women we see doing extraordinary things all the time.” Bush says. “We just don’t see it depicted on screen and we were determined that we had our opportunity, we were going to do that.”

Christopher Renz and Gerard Bush on the set of ‘Antebellum’.

Stylish, visually stunning and effectively pointed, Antebellum marks a natural career progression for Bush and Renz, who began in advertising before moving into social advocacy work. “For Christopher and [me], that competitive side from advertising is what lent itself so beautifully to our waking up one day and saying we didn’t want to sell champagne for the rest of our lives, but that we needed to tell stories that mattered, especially after Trayvon was murdered.”

“Once we decided to make movies it was because we didn’t see anything in the marketplace that looked like us. I don’t think that with the finite amount of time that we have in our lives, from when we’re born to when we transition and exit out of this place, that you want to waste it committing your life to something you don’t think you can be the best at that—that you can make meaningful contribution.”

Related content

Adam Davie’s Black Life in Film list

Letterboxd member Anjelica Jade’s review of Antebellum for Vulture

Haile Gerima’s 2019 TIFF Talk about Sankofa and independent filmmaking

Cece’s list of lighthearted movies with Black characters in them because we deserve movies that aren’t about slavery, racism, police brutality and the like

Follow Aaron on Letterboxd

#antebellum #janelle monae #christopher renz #gerard bush #bush and renz #sankofa #haile gerima #get out #jordan peele #letterboxd

11 notes · View notes

soiletbabieseatsand · 4 years

Text

10 Characters 10 Fandoms!!

Rules: Name 10 characters from 10 different fandom’s that you like, then tag 10 people.

thanks to myGem @thescarletgarden1990 for tagging me, ive been trying to cut down on screen time during quarantine... these shows and characters that are too good to resist!!

Daenerys Stormborn ASOIAF

Book/Series available on HBO

🔥KHALEESI OF THE GREAT GRASS SEA🔥 THE UNBURNT🔥 THE BREAKER OF CHAINS🔥 🔥🔥🔥THE MOTHER OF DRAGONS🔥🔥🔥 i love dany so very much!! at this point i don’t really care about the books and the show can fuck right off 🔥SHE IS MY QUEEN NOW AND ALWAYS🔥

Sestras Orphan Black

Series available on BBCAmerica/Amazon Prime

My sestra Sarah, stepped off a train one day and met her self...ugh my heart🥺 Just one. I’m a few. no family too. Who am I? an amazing sci-fi thriller series that’s who!! Welcome to Clone Club, this is honestly the best thing I’ve ever seen, please do yourself a favor and go watch this!! Tatiana Maslany is insanely talented and so underrated!!periodt!!

Cluster Sense8

Series available on Netflix

Amor Vincit Omnia, Love Conquers All✨💗 in my heart of hearts i like to think that i’m a unborn homosensorium-just like Amanita✨💗 this is honestly so beautiful and powerful, it’s taught me so much and made me grow as a person! honestly this is so much more than just a show and that’s why netflix cancelled it!!

House of Evangelista Pose

Series available on FX/Netflix

10 10 10 10 10s ACROSS THE BOARD!! YAS QUEEN!! set in the 1980s NY ballroom scene we follow the stories of queer folk and trans women of color and the houses they form!! as a Queer Latina let me just say this is SSSssoOOooo IMPORTANT and i’m very happy these stories/characters/lives are being represented in mainstream media🦄🦋👯

HellBoy

Graphic Novel/Movie(s)

Existential crisis at its best!! Though the comics, Guillermo del Toros films, and the newest film adaptation are all different and have their own twist-i think it’s safe to say that us monster fuckers agree we love Hellboy and are grateful for any and all content!! go watch “The Golden Army” it’s in my top 5 favorite movies and it dives deeper into Hellboys inner conflict and the lore/mythos of that universe.

Vanessa Ives Penny Dreadful

Series available on Showtime/Netflix

A goddess reborn hunted by darkness. this is what i’m here for lol believe me when i say my brother and i can go word for word in the séance scene😈 that being said i am super bitter about the ending WE WERE SUPPOSED TO GO TO EGYPT!! i love all the women in this show, season2 is the best, my heart breaks for vanessa... she’s so fucking strong!!

Prudence Blackwood CAOS

Series available on Netflix

i watch this series for Prudence, Ambrose and the weird sisters!! That being said Prudence is the whole package and everything i want to be!! she has it all, the costumes, perfect hair and make up, sex appeal, knowledge in spellcasting, and she’s gonna kill her father!! Hail Lilith this succubitch is so aesthetically pleasing and a total badass!! fun fact Tati Gabrielle chose to do a “voice” for Prudence that’s inspired by Eartha Kitt! respect! how awesome is that😻

June Osborne Handmaids Tale

Book/Series available on Hulu

Illegitimi non carborundum! Don’t let the bastards grind you down! if this isnt the biggest wake up call for women’s reproductive health in the States then idk what is🤬 honestly this show can be a little scary because of how real it appears to be and it goes a lot further than the book did. Ive made my sisters, cousins and friends who identify as female watch this as well as recommend it to everyone and attend as many meeting as i can (ATX has a grassroots handmaid charter that’s protest in costume at the Capital and invites others to participate as well as spread awareness in women’s reproductive health) because i consider it to be a warning to what can be-yes it is an extreme but look at alabama, our gun control laws, state militias and the fact that VP Pence participated in a pro life rally!

Teresa Mendoza Queen of the South

Series available on USA/Netflix

🗣Teresita!! literally my reaction for every episode. This Queen has done it all! orphaned as a child after parents were guned down by the cartel, turn cash exchanger on the streets of Sinaloa, to gf of a drug smuggler -then bf dies because he was stealing money from the Cartel, Now on the run and seeking refuge from Cartels boss’s wife who has her own cartel and lives in Texas, only to becomes a slave/drug mule so she doesn’t go back to mexico, then works for the Cartel in Texas, only to find out her bf wasn’t killed but is a rat for the DEA... and that’s only the 1st season🤯 lol love this show based on la novela La Reina de Sur available also on Netflix!

Clancy Gillroy The Midnight Gospel

Series available on Netflix

The Quarantine Favorite!! Released on 420💚It’s a trippy animated podcast basically and it’s a lot to take in!! There’s over stem in visual, heavy topics, and some relatability though not for everyone -i cried a lot, just about every episode but i really liked it! also shout out to Jake the dog and Finn the human!!

tagging: whoever wants to play!! i hope everyone is safe and healthy!!

8 notes · View notes

wesonerdy · 5 years

Text

Now that the battle against the Army of the Dead has been won, Dany’s attention turns to taking the Iron Throne. But even with Jon’s support, threats emerge from King’s Landing and inside Dany’s own inner circle… read our review of “The Last of the Starks”!

I just need to start this recap/review by saying two things:

1. Arya Stark is the only Queen I recognize.

2. If there was an award for LEAST valuable player for the Battle of Winterfell, it would be a tie between Dany and Jon for their utter uselessness, even though they both had dragons.

“The Last of the Starks” begins in the direct aftermath of the Battle of Winterfell. The next day, those who remain are battle worn. However, they gather to pay homage and say goodbye to their friends, family, and comrades who have died. It’s thoroughly heartbreaking as we watch Dany say goodbye to Jorah and Sansa say goodbye to Theon (she places her direwolf pin in his lapel). Jon steps up to say some words of thanks to those who sacrificed their lives to defeat the Army of the Dead:

“Everyone in this world owes them a debt that can never be repaid. It is our duty and our honor to keep them alive in memory for those who come after us and those who come after them for as long as men draw breath. They were the shields that guarded the realms of men. And we shall never see their like again.”

The bodies are then burned.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Following this, Dany, Jon, and Sansa preside over a night of celebration with eating, drinking, and other forms of enjoyment.

Dany takes the opportunity to make Gendry a legitimate Baratheon and the Lord of Storm’s End (though it initially seems like he plans to punish Gendry for the betrayals of his father and uncles). Dany also toasts to Arya Stark, the Hero of Winterfell (which happens to be the only truth I recognize).

Tormund hails Dany and then Jon as a leader for uniting with the Free Folk. He speaks of Jon’s strength and ability to inspire even his enemies to join him. Jon has even conquered death. Dany overhears all of this, which only serves to heighten the lingering tension between her and Jon.

At another table, Brienne, Tyrion, Pod, and Jaime play a drinking game where they try to guess truths about one another. Things get awkward when Tyrion rightly (AND SHADILY) guesses that Brienne is a virgin. Brienne stands to leave the table and Jaime follows after her.

This makes Tormund sad because he thinks Jaime has taken Brienne from him. He laments about his heartbreak to the Hound. But Tormund isn’t sad for that long though, because he finds comfort in another young woman *snort*

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Sansa approaches the Hound as he now sits by himself, drinking. They commiserate over their time in King’s Landing, with Sandor reflecting on a time that Sansa couldn’t even look upon his face. Sansa says that she has seen much worse since leaving King’s Landing. The Hound comments that he’s heard of her suffering, referencing Sansa being “broken in, rough”. Sansa assures Hound that she made sure Ramsay Bolton got what he deserved, by siccing his own hounds on him. The Hound is impressed, but if she would have left the city with him after he quit Joffrey’s Kingsguard, none of that would have occurred. Sansa takes his hand and says: “Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life.”

Clearly, the Hound has a soft spot for these badass Stark girls. Damn it, we do, too!

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Speaking of the Stark girls, in the midst of the celebration, Gendry finds Arya outside practicing her archery. He’s very excited as he shares the news that he’s been made a lord. Now that he’s Arya’s social equal, he feels that he can offer for her. Gendry declares his love and makes a proposal. Unfortunately, Arya gently lets him down. She reminds Gendry that she has never been a lady and won’t become one for the sake of being his wife and Lady of Storm’s End: “That’s not me.”

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Elsewhere, Jaime has followed Brienne to her room. They share a drink and make small talk about the North being so cold. Jaime then starts to take off his clothes, though he struggles with his one hand. When Brienne starts to help him, Jaime attempts to take Brienne’s shirt off. She realizes what he’s after…

J: “I’ve never slept with a night before.” B: “I’ve never slept with anyone before.”

Then Jaime and Brienne share their first kiss.

Dany has also followed Jon to his room, and both are clearly distraught. They love one another, but Jon’s true paternity is a massive wedge between them. Dany says she wishes Jon had never told her, so she’d now be happy. Jon pledges himself to Dany again, saying that she is his queen, that he would never challenge her claim to the Iron Throne. But, for Dany, the only way forward is for Jon to keep this secret and convince Bran and Samwell to do the same. Jon is concerned because he wants to tell Sansa and Arya the truth, since they are his family. However, Dany is firm: “You can say nothing. To anyone. Ever. Never tell them who you really are.”

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

The next day, the forces at Winterfell meet together to reassess as they get ready to pivot to Cersei and King’s Landing… All around, about half of the manpower and resources have been depleted from the Battle of Winterfell. They plan to surround the city an essentially starve King’s Landing until they abandon Cersei. Sansa throws a wrench in the plans when, speaking on behalf of the ordinary people, she cautions that there needs to be time for soldiers to rest and recuperate.

Dany becomes incensed. She came to Winterfell to fight against the Army of the Dead with the promise of the Starks’ loyalty in claiming the Iron Throne. Are they backing out? Jon quickly speaks up and pledges the North to join Dany immediately. The plan is finalized: Jon and Davos will ride down from the North and the remaining Dothraki and Unsullied. A smaller group will sail to Dragonstone with Dany and the dragons. Jaime will remain in Winterfell.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

As everyone leaves the room, Arya approaches Jon and says they she and Sansa would like to have a word. Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Jon meet at the Godswood. Ultimately, Sansa and Arya don’t trust Dany. Jon tries to speak on Dany’s behalf; they’d all be dead without Dany. Arya says that Jon did the right thing at the time, but now, they four of them, the last of the Starks, can only rely on one another. This prompts Jon, who now knows his parentage. Jon demands that Sansa and Arya swear to keep a secret. They do so, reluctantly. And then Jon tells Bran to disclose everything.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Meanwhile, that night Bronn has arrived at Winterfell, carrying the crossbow that Tyrion used to kill Tywin. Bronn confronts Tyrion and Jaime, telling them that Cersei has promised him Riverrun in exchange for killing her two brothers. But, given his belief that Dany will eventually win, along with the deal he made to Tyrion years ago, Bronn is here to give Tyrion to negotiate for a better offer. Tyrion immediately offers Bronn Highgarden. At first, Jaime isn’t convinced that Bronn will kill them… that is, until Bronn fires an arrow that just misses Jaime by millimeters. So, the three strike a deal and Bronn leaves to await the results of the coming war.

In the morning, Arya meets the Hound on the road: A: “You’re heading to King’s Landing?” H: “I have some unfinished business.” A: “Me, too.” H: “I don’t plan on coming back.” A: “Neither do I.”

Welps, the Hound is going to kill is brother and Arya is going for Cersei. But what’s all this business about not planning to return?!

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Everyone else is preparing to depart Winterfell, as well. Rhaegal is healing from his attack by the wights and is able to fly. Dany rides Drogon.

Tormund and the Free Folk are heading further North to Castle Black. Jon asks Tormund to take Ghost with him (*cries* because Ghost has been so loyal and doesn’t even get a goodbye!)

Sam and Gilly are returning to Oldtown, and when Jon hugs Gilly to say goodbye, he learns that she’s expecting another child! They plan to name the baby Jon if he is a boy 🙂

Tyrion approaches Sansa before leaving for Dragonstone with Dany. She’s very worried about Jon going south: “The men in my family don’t do well in the capital.”

TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SPOKEN, because OMG Rickard Stark (her grandfather), Brandon Stark (her uncle), and Ned Stark (her father)…

Sansa tells Tyrion she doesn’t think there’s any guarantee that Dany will be a good queen. But Tyrion doesn’t want to leave Winterfell without being sure that Sansa and Dany aren’t enemies. Why provoke her? When Tyrion comments that Dany wants to make the world a better place, Sansa suggests that there might be someone else better suited for the job. As expected, Sansa breaks her vow to Jon and tells Tyrion that he is a Targaryen and Stark.

And on the ride down to Dragonstone, Tyrion tells Varys. Varys knows that this information will soon spread… and Jon has the better claim to the throne. Even if Jon bends the knee to Dany, people are still drawn to him. Tyrion suggests a marriage between Jon and Dany, but Varys thinks Jon will be averse, given that Dany is his aunt. Besides, Varys is pretty sure that Dany would have no intention of sharing power.

While we’re all distracted with Jon’s secret leaking and Dany, Drogon, and Rhaegal flying majestically, a giant spear comes out of nowhere and strikes Rhaegal in the chest and another in the neck. Euron and his fleet have been waiting for Dany and co. to return to Dragonstone. Plus, it looks like Qyburn has upgraded his Scorpion weapons and they are fucking deadly. I audibly screamed as we watch Rhaegal die and crash into the sea. Each of the ships in Euron’s armada is equipped with a Scorpion, and they try to take out Drogon. He’s able to weave, and he and Dany fly away in retreat. Unfortunately, Euron turns his attention to Dany’s ships, using the Scorpions to destroy them.

By the time Greyworm, Tyrion, Varys, and the remaining Unsullied wash up on the shore, there’s so much destruction. Greyworm’s priority is finding Missandei, but she’s missing.

Courtesy of HBO

We pivot to King’s Landing, where we see that Missandei is bound in chains, now Cersei’s prisoner. Cersei then tells Euron that she’s pregnant… successfully able to pawn off another child with Jaime.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

At Dragonstone, Dany is made aware that Missandei has been captured and she’s ready to do anything to get her trusted friend back, including storming the city. Tyrion and Varys try to caution Dany about using extreme violence, particularly since Cersei has been moving innocent civilians into the Red Keep to deter Dany from attacking. Dany asserts that she will fulfill her destiny, no matter the cost. Tyrion seems to offer a middle path: negotiate with Cersei. Guarantee Cersei her life in exchange for stepping aside and releasing Missandei. They should at least make an effort to avoid bloodshed. Dany agrees, only so that the people will know that she did everything to prevent a slaughter and Cersei is to blame.

Later, Tyrion and Varys have an interesting conversation. If Dany is descending into madness, has the time come to take her out in order to protect the realm? Varys seems to think so, even though Tyrion has faith in Dany’s proclivity for justice. Yet, both recognize that there’s another option, perhaps a better one: Jon. “Jon is the one man alive who might actually be able to keep the North in the Seven Kingdoms.”

Back at Winterfell, when Jaime hears about the impending attack on Cersei and King’s Landing from Sansa and Brienne, he tries to leave in the middle of the night. Brienne begs Jaime to stay by her side, reminding him that he’s a good man, a better person than Cersei. Jaime disabuses Brienne of that notion, telling her about how he pushed Bran out of a tower window, strangled his own cousin, and is prepared to commit any act of murder, all for Cersei. He rides away, leaving Brienne in tears.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Dany, Drogon, and a contingent of the Unsullied arrive at King’s Landing, where Cersei, Euron, the Mountain, and Missandei wait. Tyrion and Qyburn, as the Hands, meet to discuss terms. Both want the other’s surrender. When Qyburn refuses to take a message to Cersei, Tyrion speaks to her, himself. He speaks of how Cersei might not care for the people, but she cares for her children. For the sake of her life and that of her unborn child, Cersei should step down. Cersei turns to Missandei and tells her to speak her last words. Missandei looks upon her friend and Queen and speaks one word: DRACARYS. (AKA, Queen Dany, burn allllllllllll of this to the ground.) Cersei gives a signal to the Mountain, who cleaves off Missandei’s head with his sword.

Greyworm is visibly shaken and Dany is DONE. She turns around and walks away.

Courtesy of Helen Sloan/HBO

Courtesy of HBO

1. Apparently, with Missandei’s death, we’ve witnessed the birth of the Mad Queen. I’m actually quite disappointed in this choice… it’s predictable and doesn’t do justice to Dany’s character that we’ve watched developed over seven seasons. And the idea of Tyrion and Varys assassinating Dany and making Jon king is even more unpalatable. I reallllllllly hope the writers will take us in another direction.

2. Literally, Arya is the only person who can take Cersei out now. She’s the only one. Just like she did with the Night King.

3. You think Euron is curious about how Tyrion knows Cersei is pregnant…? He just found out, right?

Game of Thrones, the final season, airs Sundays at 9:00pm ET|PT on HBO.

REVIEW: ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8, Episode 4 “The Last of the Starks” Now that the battle against the Army of the Dead has been won, Dany's attention turns to taking the Iron Throne.

1 note · View note

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: It was full of violence.”

So says narrator Elena Greco near the beginning of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The bestselling novel is now an HBO series, and the screen adaptation drives home one of the book’s core messages: For Elena (Elisa del Genio), her best friend/double/nemesis Lila Cerullo (Ludovica Nasti), and all the children growing up with them in working-class postwar Naples, violence undergirds every interaction. (Spoilers for the first two episodes of the show, and mild spoilers for the books, follow.)

It’s not just the violence of the men in the neighborhood, who beat their wives and battle each other for dominance. As the show’s first two episodes, which aired on Sunday and Monday, make clear, Elena and Lila are involved too, fighting with boys and, later, conducting a war of words with one another that stretches across decades.

“While men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end,” Ferrante writes; “women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.”

My Brilliant Friend and the other three novels in Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan series have been hailed as modern-day feminist classics, telling the often forgotten stories of girls and women. But as the HBO series makes clear, these are not uplifting tales of female empowerment. The story of Elena and Lila is a story of friendship, yes, but also of hate, and of anger that’s not always righteous. The novels, and now the show, remind us of an uncomfortable truth: Girls and women have always been just as capable of violence as men and boys. It’s just that for a long time, nobody was watching.

HBO’s My Brilliant Friend begins, like the novel, with Elena, now a woman in her sixties, receiving a call from Lila’s adult son: Lila has disappeared. The story then flashes back to the 1950s, when Elena and Lila met as girls living in a drab Naples neighborhood.

The Neapolitan novels center on the evolution of Elena and Lila’s friendship across time and place, and the novels are famous in part for the way they probe a complex and tumultuous relationship between two women. But the novels — and, presumably, the series, which so far hews to them very closely — make clear that even as the girls become women and grow apart and together again, they are never far from the influence of their Naples neighborhood and its feuds, both petty and serious.

As many reviewers have already pointed out, the ever-present violence of this neighborhood is evident from the show’s first episode. The streets where Elena and Lila play and the shops where their parents buy food are controlled by small-time criminals, and their power struggles are a constant undercurrent in both the show and books.

In part, the violence of Ferrante’s stories mirrors the real-life rise of organized crime in Naples beginning in the mid-1950s. And, in part, it’s a kind of anti-nostalgic approach, as Elena might put it, to a coming-of-age story. Ferrante shows us childhood as it is for many children: not idyllic, but often frightening and sometimes bloody.

In the first episode, the neighborhood squabbles turn physical again and again. After the carpenter Alfredo Peluso publicly criticizes local strongman Don Achille Carracci (by yelling about him in the street), Carracci drags him out of a funeral and slams him against a wall. Women feud too — Melina Cappuccio and Lidia Sarratore get into a fight over Cappuccio’s love for Sarratore’s husband, and Cappuccio ends up tumbling down the stairs.

The neighborhood children, meanwhile, play out their own versions of their parents’ quarrels. When Lila beats Alfonso Carracci in a school competition, his brother attacks her. And in the episode’s climactic scene, Enzo Scanno (also bested by Lila in the school contest) and his friends hurl stones at Lila, knocking her over and bloodying her head.

In the show’s second episode, violence erupts in the Greco household, as Elena’s mother beats her savagely with an umbrella for skipping school. When Elena’s father comes home, her mother demands he beat Elena too: “You don’t even know how to hit your daughter,” she says, challenging his masculinity. He snaps, savagely slapping Elena while shouting at her mother — the whole episode is a power struggle between the two parents, who have been arguing about whether Elena should be allowed to take the admissions test for middle school. In the end, she is — but her parents’ battle leaves her with a face full of bruises.

The language of the show is violent even when its action is not (the actors speak Italian and the Neapolitan dialect, and the English subtitles draw heavily from the English translation of the novel by Ann Goldstein). Lila describes Don Achille as having “sucked the blood” out of another man, presumably with his predatory lending practices. And Maestra Oliviero, Elena and Lila’s teacher, warns the girls that they must prove themselves against their male schoolmates intellectually: “If we don’t start showing the boys now that you’re like them, better actually, they’ll crush you.” In the context of the neighborhood, this feels both literally and figuratively true.

The violence around the girls clearly affects them, and not only when they’re being actively bloodied. As Hillary Kelly writes at Vulture, “Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo’s loud, crowded lives are small and insulated, and they’re always seconds away from a tragedy around which the entire town will gather to gawp.” Their world, as she puts it, “clamors and echoes with shrieks, bellows, and the sounds of violence.”

In director Saverio Costanzo’s imagining, even the colors of the neighborhood hint at the emotional effects of constant violence — everything is dull, dusty, and dark. The dangers of their neighborhood limit Elena and Lila’s lives, and seem to limit even the spectrum of their vision.

But the girls aren’t passive victims of the violence around them. They’re active participants, as when Lila hurls stones back at the boys who attack her — and Elena steps in to help. Lila isn’t merely defending herself in this scene; she’s fighting back with gusto. The whole episode, as Sonia Saraiya writes at Vanity Fair, “seems to have built the scene around showcasing her indomitable will.”

Even when they’re not fighting, the girls are always watching violence unfold. When the adults in their world beat each other up, Elena and Lila look on in open fascination. Del Genio and Nasti, both newcomers, can communicate a lot with a gaze. Elena is more of a blank slate, her wide eyes taking everything in — Saraiya calls her “open and vulnerable, like a cracked-open raw egg.” Lila, meanwhile, has already developed an opinion on — even an appreciation for — the violence of her neighborhood. As she watches Cappuccio and Sarratore scream at each other, a smile plays across her lips, though it disappears when the fight turns physical.

Later, Lila appears to lay a trap for Elena, luring her to skip school in the hopes that Elena’s parents will get angry and bar her from taking the middle school test. Lila must know that her friend will probably get a beating, and yet she’s willing to take that risk. It won’t be the last time Lila tries to manipulate someone else to get what she wants, regardless of the consequences.

If the show continues to stick close to the books — one season per novel is planned — Lila and Elena will experience, in ever more serious ways, the brutality of their neighborhood. They’ll survive domestic and sexual violence, and their clashes with the men who rule the neighborhood will come back to haunt them in devastating ways.

They won’t commit the same kinds of violence they experience, but they will wage other kinds of warfare. This future is evident from the very beginning of the show. As Sophie Gilbert notes at the Atlantic, we learn as the series opens that Lila hasn’t just quietly disappeared. She’s vandalized her own past, cutting herself out of all family photographs, even those of her and her son as a young child.

Elena, meanwhile, isn’t sad to hear that her old friend is missing. She’s angry, and as revenge, she decides to write the story of their childhood together. The very narration we’re listening to is a form of emotional violence, the forcible documentation of someone who wanted to be erased.

Part of the popularity of the Neapolitan novels has to do with their close and clear-eyed examination of women’s inner lives. Men’s thoughts and feelings have always been presumed to be an interesting subject for literary fiction, but women’s stories have frequently found themselves shunted into a variety of genres that tend to get less acclaim.

Ferrante’s work has been groundbreaking in that it has been received around the world as a literary triumph, even as it chronicles the lives of people often pushed to the side in art and history. At the Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg recommends watching My Brilliant Friend alongside the Godfather movies in order to appreciate “what we gain when we see the world both from the center and the margins.”

What we learn from My Brilliant Friend, though, is that the margins can be just as brutal as the center, if in different ways. Ferrante pulls back the curtain on the inner lives of girls and women, and what she reveals is dark — just as dark as anything perpetrated by men.

“Lila appeared in my life in first grade and immediately impressed me because she was very bad,” Ferrante writes. And Lila is bad — not badass, though she is that too, not plucky or feisty or spirited, but hateful and spiteful and sometimes cruel.

Costanzo’s adaptation makes even clearer what already came through in the books: that one of Ferrante’s greatest skills lies in showing us the full range of women’s emotions and all they are capable of — love and friendship, but also destruction.

A certain kind of feminist criticism once focused on whether a particular artistic creation was empowering to women. (The Onion perfectly skewered this tradition in 2003, with the headline “Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.”) More recently, female characters in fiction have been given the freedom to be “unlikable.” (Earlier this year, Vox’s Tara Burton deconstructed the entire question of likability.) What Elena Ferrante has done is to create characters who are hateable — who sometimes hate each other and sometimes deserve to be hated — and to remind us that women are worthy of depiction in art not because they are better than men but because they, too, are human.

Original Source -> My Brilliant Friend pulls back the curtain on women’s lives. What it reveals is dark and violent.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

2 notes · View notes

dailydaveeddiggs · 6 years

Photo

Today, thanks to “Hamilton,” Diggs, 35, may be the more established half of the “Blindspotting” duo, but that wasn’t the case when he moved back to Oakland after earning his theater degree from Brown. Though four years younger, Casal had already made a name for himself on the Bay Area spoken-word scene, from which he was plucked to appear on HBO’s “Def Poetry.”

Casal had set up a recording studio with the aim of finding other musicians to collaborate with, reaching out to Diggs on the strength of a demo CD the rapper had recorded in his college dorm room. The friendship took hold almost immediately: That first night, they created a few songs, which led to albums, live performances (with a group they dubbed the Getback) and countless sketches and online videos.

“Rafael was the most famous person I knew,” Diggs recalls. “He had really tapped into the YouTube audience pretty early.”

Casal’s videos caught the attention of Jess Calder (then Jess Wu). The young producer, partnered in Snoot with her husband, Keith Calder, had seen a couple of his spoken-word performances and was struck by both Casal’s charisma and the fact that he appeared to be a natural-born storyteller.

“In my mind, anyone who can tell a great story can definitely translate that to film,” explains the producer, who contacted Casal and proposed they meet for coffee. She asked if he’d ever thought about writing a screenplay.

“I’d thought about theater a lot, [but at that age] you’re trying to get $5 for something at McDonald’s. A movie is millions of dollars away,” says Casal. But he was definitely intrigued, and began fleshing out a character that was loosely autobiographical. Things started to click about a year and a half later, when the Snoot duo asked Casal to perform at a screening of their documentary “Thunder Soul” at a January 2009 presidential inauguration event in Washington, D.C. Casal couldn’t make it but suggested they book Diggs in his place.

“Daveed came and did like 15 minutes of freestyle at the event and kind of blew our minds,” recalls Keith Calder. “We were immediately like, ‘Rafael, the movie’s gotta be about the two of you!’”

And from that moment forward, “Blindspotting” became the story of two friends of different races forced to consider the world from one another’s viewpoints, all set against the rapidly changing Bay Area backdrop.

Casal hails from Berkeley, the city directly north of Diggs’ Oakland. But they both attended Berkeley High School and later split a four-bedroom house with two other friends for $1,200. “I can’t even imagine what that place would cost now,” Casal says.

Gentrification, fueled by the tech boom, has transformed the neighborhoods they once knew. “Seventh Street is just a BART station and a post office now, but in the ’30s and ’40s, that was one of the jazz and blues centers of the world,” Diggs says. The last of the local music venues, Esther’s Orbit Room (where Diggs’ brother had been a bartender), finally shut down in 2010. His mother and father (also born in Oakland) both had to move, priced out by the newcomers.

Though not a musical in the conventional sense, “Blindspotting” was born out of a desire to translate spoken-word poetry into cinema. “There are versions where it was damn near a poem the whole time,” Diggs says.

From 2009 onward, he and Casal worked on the script together, huddling over the same laptop since they had only a single licensed copy of Final Draft between them.

“We were trying to find a recipe for a world where verse could exist without it feeling like there’s a deliberate shift every time it goes into a number,” Casal explains. “The Bay Area is known for slang and for turn of phrase. It’s the evolution of pimp culture, so heightened language is already very prevalent in the way people relate to each other.”

For the next several years, Diggs and Casal spent their time driving up and down Interstate 5 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, parking out front of wherever Snoot headquarters happened to be at the time and sleeping in their car if needed. They wrote draft after draft of “Blindspotting,” pitching the changes to the Calders while using Snoot’s facilities to work on music videos and other projects.

“I’ve always felt like our offices were a place where they should feel safe to create art,” says Jess Calder.

Before Diggs and Casal could complete a shooting version of the script, they were pulled away by other professional opportunities. Casal went off to teach verse-driven theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for three years. And, for Diggs, “Hamilton” happened.

“The thing about this business is you never know if something’s a break,” says Diggs. “I met Lin-Manuel Miranda because of a clerical error.” Diggs showed up for the same substitute teaching job as one of Miranda’s friends, Anthony Veneziale, who was also a rapper. They hit it off, and Veneziale invited Diggs to freestyle with his group, of which Miranda was a member. Later, when it came time to do an early reading of “Hamilton,” Miranda remembered Diggs and his rapid-fire delivery. “I was invited because I have this particular skill set that allows me to learn a lot of things very quickly,” recalls Diggs, who had just five days to memorize the show’s most demanding part. “I assumed they would replace me because they had plenty of Broadway performers to choose from.”

Except that Miranda didn’t replace Diggs, who spent nearly a year and a half with the production. “Before leaving ‘Hamilton,’ I made this comment to one of my agents,” Diggs recalls. “I was ready to go, but scared that I wouldn’t make any money again, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about that,’ and promptly booked my life with all these things.”

The day after his last “Hamilton” performance in mid-2016, Diggs found himself shooting the movie “Wonder,” starring Julia Roberts. The following week, he began working on ABC’s “Black-ish.” That was swiftly followed by a recurring role on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which had to be juggled amid a long-planned national tour with his experimental rap group, Clipping.

Into the midst of this whirlwind came the moment for which Diggs and Casal had long been waiting. Last March, the Snoot producers told them they had the greenlight to make “Blindspotting,” provided the duo could get their script in shape to shoot in June.

“What if I move to L.A. in two days and I write it for a month?” Casal recalls asking — and that’s exactly what he did, undertaking a page-one overhaul while Diggs’ fledgling screen career kept him busy.

“I was on airplanes every other day,” says Diggs, “so really the only through line were these midnight phone calls from Rafael to talk about this thing we’d been talking about for a decade.”

Excited about the prospect of finally making the movie, Diggs kept a rare 25-day window open in June for the shoot. Casal managed to get the rewrite done in four weeks. Reaching out to another old friend, they brought in director López Estrada, who immediately began pre-production.

The project’s Oakland focus attracted some production talent whom the producers normally couldn’t afford, including DP Robby Baumgartner, who had worked in the lighting department for Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and who brought the lighting crew from “Moonlight” aboard.

“We suddenly had this amazing team of people from the Bay Area,” says Diggs. “Doing something with your friends at a high level, that’s a dream.”

After production wrapped, Snoot submitted a rough cut to Sundance, which recommended the music-driven film for a Dolby Family Sound Fellowship. “Blindspotting” is one of two 2018 Sundance selections to have earned the generous post-production grant, making it possible for the filmmakers to upgrade their mix in time for its festival debut. (Past recipients of the grant include “Mudbound” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”)

Thanks to the grant, Diggs, Casal and other members of the production team — including López Estrada and the Calders — spent late December camped out on the Paramount Pictures lot on the same Technicolor stage where Michael Bay mixes his “Transformers” films.

On the same day of Variety’s visit, Diggs and Casal wrote a short piece of original music to replace a few seconds of temp score. Since they came up with the cue themselves, that means they can later expand it into a full-blown song for the soundtrack.

It’s the kind of on-the-fly challenge that has fueled the duo’s creative partnership for more than a decade — though “Blindspotting” is the first time they’ve been able to combine their writing, performance and musical talents to such a degree.

“As an artist, the only thing you ever want to do is something that requires every part of yourself,” Diggs says. “And it is so rare when that happens.” (x)

LOVE the insight as to how this all came together.

#daveed diggs #rafael casal #blindspotting #sundance #sundance film festival #2018 sundance film festival #variety #jess calder

97 notes · View notes

zoebelladona · 3 years

Note

4 and 12 for the hbo spn ✨✨✨

okay so full disclosure: i haven't cared about spn in like four years or so. and i wasn't gonna answer any of these prompts because i am not attached to any of the characters other than sam. but fuck it mara i love you too much to leave you hanging and these prompts actually slap, they speak to my gritty grunge religious aesthetic.

4. lucifer whispers to sam in the early hours of the morning long after cas took hell from him. what is he saying from the other side of the bed?

it’s not really about what he’s saying (and mostly i don’t remember spn!lucifer that well) but that no matter how many our father’s, hail mary’s and glory be’s sam prays to get him to stop… all sam manages is to cut his own tongue on the words and stain his shirt and pillow in blood. one time it almost choked him, lucifer didn’t shut up.

12. when sam is eleven he recoils from the holy water at pastor jim’s. what else makes him unholy? what else can’t he touch?

making the sign of the cross gives him a headache right behind his eyes. he wears a cross-and-chain but has to keep it over his shirt so it doesn’t burn against his skin. he still tried to drink the holy water in an act of desperation to wash his insides, down to the marrow of his bones, and it made him sick and he threw up bile and blood. it doesn’t hurt to pray silently, it hurts to pray out loud, but he keeps counting the rosary. he didn’t use to understand why the salted popcorn burned the corners of his mouth.

#the only spn i care about #is the ocs insert fanfic i have had with my friends since like 2015 #spn #answered #souvlakimememes

0 notes

officialotakudome · 3 years

Text

New Post has been published on Otaku Dome | The Latest News In Anime, Manga, Gaming, And More

New Post has been published on https://otakudome.com/his-dark-materials-renewed-for-season-3/

His Dark Materials Renewed For Season 3

HBO & BBC One have renewed drama His Dark Materials:

HBO and BBC One have renewed the drama series HIS DARK MATERIALS for a third season, it was announced today by Francesca Orsi, Executive Vice President, HBO Programming. Production on the eight-episode third season is slated to begin in Cardiff in 2021.

“Bringing Phillip Pullman’s epic, intricate and culturally resonant body of work to television has been a tremendous privilege,” said Orsi. “We thank our incredible partners at the BBC and the entire Bad Wolf team, led by the indefatigable Jane Tranter, for their exceptional work on the first two seasons. We look forward to completing the trilogy with this final chapter in Lyra’s journey.”

“It’s been a joy to see how HIS DARK MATERIALS has brought British TV audiences of all ages together on BBC One and BBC iPlayer,” said Ben Irving, BBC Drama Commissioning Editor, Wales. “Fans of Phillip Pullman’s incredible books, and newcomers alike, have been enthralled by adventuring with Lyra and Will through multiple worlds. We are thrilled that they will be able to continue their journey in a third series of this beautifully realized drama. Our thanks to our partners at HBO and the dedicated creative team at Bad Wolf for making a landmark series that will continue to be watched and enjoyed on the BBC for years to come.”

“HIS DARK MATERIALS has been a truly global TV experience and a personal career highlight,” said Executive Producer Jane Tranter. “The creative team at Bad Wolf in Cardiff made the impossible possible and brought Philip Pullman’s worlds into vivid life. To see that hard work and dedication applauded and embraced by fans around the world has made all the hard work worthwhile. None of this would have been possible without the wonderful commitment and conviction of the BBC and HBO. I am excited, thrilled and honoured to be making the third part of Philip Pullman’s trilogy with their support and encouragement. Diolch”

Adapting Philip Pullman’s award-winning trilogy of the same name, which is considered a modern masterpiece of imaginative fiction, HIS DARK MATERIALS returned for its seven-episode second season on November 16, 2020. The series follows Lyra (Dafne Keen), a seemingly ordinary but brave young woman from another world. Season two began as Lyra, distraught over the death of her best friend, embarks upon a journey in a strange and mysterious abandoned city. There she meets Will (Amir Wilson), a boy from our world who is also running from a troubled past. Lyra and Will learn their destinies are tied to reuniting Will with his father but find their path is constantly thwarted as a war begins to brew around them. Meanwhile, Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson) searches for Lyra, determined to bring her home by any means necessary.

GQ called this season of HIS DARK MATERIALS “a towering success,” while Paste Magazine hailed it as “more epic than ever before.” Mashable praised the show’s “absorbing cast,” while Slashfilm called this season “essential viewing.”

HIS DARK MATERIALS will conclude its second season Monday, December 28 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO. Season one and season two episodes to date are currently available to stream on HBO Max. Most HBO subscribers in the U.S. have access to HBO Max as part of their HBO subscription and can visit HBOMax.com for more details. Season two series regulars include Dafne Keen, Ruth Wilson, Amir Wilson, Ariyon Bakare, Andrew Scott, Will Keen, Ruta Gedmintas and Lin-Manuel Miranda. New cast members this season included Terence Stamp, Jade Anouka and Simone Kirby.

HIS DARK MATERIALS is produced by Bad Wolf in association with New Line Cinema for BBC One and HBO. Executive producing the series are Jane Tranter, Dan McCulloch, Joel Collins and Julie Gardner for Bad Wolf; Philip Pullman, Jack Thorne, Tom Hooper; Deborah Forte, Toby Emmerich and Carolyn Blackwood for New Line Cinema; and Ben Irving for the BBC.

0 notes

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Smokey and the Bandit TV Series Looks to Revive the Drive-In Double Feature Genre

https://ift.tt/35oAvjJ

Smokey and the Bandit, the 1977 comedy classic that cemented the superstardom of the late Burt Reynolds, will soon make an audacious attempt to smuggle itself back into the pop culture picture, with a television series now in the works at Universal Content Productions.

David Gordon Green (Halloween, The Righteous Gemstones) has been tapped to develop, write, executive-produce and direct the prospective pilot for a new small screen take on the Southern, car-chase-centric, antihero-hailing Universal film franchise on behalf of studio subsidiary UCP. Green will write alongside Brian Sides, a frequent collaborator of Green’s who also directs and produces documentary shows such as The Horn and Alaska: The Last Frontier. They’ll be joined by executive producers in Green’s cohorts from Rough House Pictures, notably Danny McBride, and Seth MacFarlane via his Fuzzy Door banner. While no details were divulged, a desire to revive a dwindling cinematic institution is telegraphed with a description that reads:

“[Smokey and the Bandit is] an epic adventure of family, small-town crime, unlikely heroes, legend and legacy. Inspired by the genre of 70s and 80s drive-in double-features, the series explores the crossroads where humble realities meet those larger-than-life, all in a blast of tailpipe exhaust.”

Indeed, while the television series looks to be a reboot of the traditional Smokey and the Bandit story, it will attempt a bellwether revival of campy drive-in flicks that, while grounded in reality, immersed themselves in over-the-top fun centered on roguish characters. It’s a genre taxonomy that certainly applies to the 1977 film, which managed to stealthily reap a $300 million worldwide gross, ranked at #2 in a year that was dominated by the seismic sci-fi zeitgeist upheaval that occurred upon the May release of the original Star Wars, which topped the box office charts with $500 million worldwide in its first release. Consequently, Smokey and Star Wars were a kind of cultural yin/yang dynamic for the movie industry that year, with the former initially sized up to become the Southern-fried box office hit of the year on the back of the surging stardom of Burt Reynolds, and its May release facilitated an organic early-summer buildup that made it a drive-in destination, notably since it actually played as a double-feature with Star Wars in many locations.

Iconic Actor Burt Reynolds Dies at 82

By Tony Sokol

Movies

David Gordon Green Halloween interview: “How do you make Home Alone, but not Home Alone?”

By Adam Shepherd

The story of Smokey and the Bandit centers on the exploits of enigmatic race car driver-turned-smuggler Bandit (Reynolds) and his 28-hour window to transport a truck full of bootlegged Coors beer from Texas to Atlanta, serving as a blocker driving a black Pontiac Trans Am as his partner, Snowman (Jerry Reed), drives the payload-hauling big rig. While an $80,000 payment upon delivery makes for an auspicious trip, Bandit’s impromptu pickup of beautiful runaway bride Frog (Sally Field) jeopardizes the endeavor when her would-be father-in-law, Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a.k.a. Smokey (Jackie Gleason), tenaciously (and always unsuccessfully) chases down our enterprising smugglers. The film was followed up with 1980’s Smokey and the Bandit II, which saw the main cast return for a similar predicament, yielding a solid $66.1 million in its domestic-only release. However, 1983’s Reynolds-less Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which centered on Gleason’s Sheriff Justice, would not be so fortunate with its paltry $7 million gross against a $9 million budget, and marked the end of the franchise, save for some made-for-TV movies focused on a young version of Bandit (as played by Brian Bloom,) released throughout the 1990s.

Yet, Smokey and the Bandit franchise’s latest television aspirations seem more auspicious, especially with the presence of David Gordon Green, who helmed prominent comedy offerings involving Danny McBride such as movies like 2008’s Pineapple Express, 2011’s Your Highness and HBO series Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones—and that’s not counting his directorial turn on 2018 horror reboot Halloween, which he’s continuing with 2021’s Halloween Kills and 2022’s Halloween Ends. His involvement here will facilitate a similar collaboration with his cohorts of Rough House Pictures, Danny McBride, Jody Hill and Brandon James, also joined by Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins representing Fuzzy Door, all set as executive producers. As Green lauds of the project in a statement:

“Growing up in the south, Smokey and the Bandit was an iconic franchise for me. The legacy of these characters is a playground of swagger and sass that I’m excited to dig into.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

For now, the Smokey and the Bandit television series doesn’t have a production or release window, and has yet to procure a network or platform.

The post Smokey and the Bandit TV Series Looks to Revive the Drive-In Double Feature Genre appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3dN9o5N

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

0 notes

letterboxd · 5 years

Photo

Ranking Little Women.

“This is a film not about a single woman’s quest for identity or independence, but about the infinite power of a woman’s community.”

Letterboxd is humming with Little Women Cinematic Universe energy, particularly since the trailer for Greta Gerwig’s new version, with its cast pulled straight from the Letterboxd Year in Review, dropped.

“I have a guttural five star type of feeling after the trailer,” writes Leia. “Bi culture is thirst-watching this for Timothée Chalamet and Florence Pugh,” Raph enthuses.

Yeah, we see you watching and re-watching all the previous film adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s landmark 1868 novel that you can fix your eyeballs on. We’re not ones to doze by the fire; we like adventures. So let us take you on a romp through past Little Women screen adaptations, in which we rank the productions based on our community’s stantastic response to each.

From left: Milton, Daisy & Ruby.

Little Women (1917) Directed by Alexander Butler

Though the March family lived in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, it was the British who got to the beloved American book first, with this silent film adaptation.

Starring Ruby Miller as Jo March and musical-comedy star Daisy Burrell as Amy March, the film is considered lost, so nobody on Letterboxd will ever be able to confirm how the prolific English actor Milton Rosmer stacked up as rich-boy-next-door Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence.

Letterboxd ranking: #7.

Conrad Nagel & Dorothy Bernard.

Little Women (1918) Directed by Harley Knoles, screenplay by Anne Maxwell

Also considered lost is the first American adaptation, by the brilliantly named Harley Knoles, a British director who spent the 1910s working in the US. Matinee idol Conrad Nagel played Laurie.

Letterboxd ranking: #4. Jo March was played by silent film queen Dorothy Bernard, whose father hailed from New Zealand (as does Letterboxd), therefore this version ranks highly even though there are no Letterboxd ratings or reviews to confirm this fact. Instead, check out D.W. Griffiths’ dark, march-across-the-desert film The Female of the Species, in which “only Dorothy Bernard gives a believable performance” according to Michael.

(An aside: Here’s a list of unseen silent films that actually do exist, but that nobody on Letterboxd has yet seen, apparently.)

From left: George Cukor directs Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Frances Dee and Jean Parker in ‘Little Women’ (1933). / Photo courtesy MGM

Little Women (1933) Directed by George Cukor, screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman

Now we’re getting to the meat & potatoes of Little Women standom. Not that it’s a competition, but Katherine Hepburn is the one Saoirse Ronan needs to beat. Hepburn set the screen standard for gutsy portrayals of Jo March, and appropriately so in this first version with sound because let’s be honest, when the world got to hear Jo March speak those lines aloud for the first time, Hepburn’s voice was the perfect choice.

The prolific Cukor was nominated for the best directing Oscar (he eventually won one in 1964 for My Fair Lady), but it was the screenwriters, married couple Mason and Heerman, who won the Academy Award for their script. (Hepburn also won that year, but not for playing Jo March.)

Letterboxd ranking: #3. “A true gem of depression-era cinema,” writes Taj. “Every single scene in the first half of this film is a pure delight.”

“I’d like to personally thank Katharine Hepburn for being absolutely perfect,” writes Skylar. Morgan concurs: “Hepburn plays Jo with a rough physicality, bold confidence, and a gentle sensibility, standing out in a rather unremarkable movie.”

June Allyson and Rossano Brazzi.

Little Women (1949) Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, screenplay by Sally Benson, Victor Heerman, Sarah Y. Mason, and Andrew Solt

Why re-write a script that’s already perfect? Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 Technicolor update lifted most of the screenplay and music from Cukor’s version, throwing in an on-trend acting line-up of June Allyson (Jo), Janet Leigh (Meg), Elizabeth Taylor (Amy) and Margaret O’Brien (Beth).

Never mind who played Laurie in this version (okay, okay, it was hunky Rat-Packing socialite Peter Lawford); the real tea here is the American film debut of Bologna-born Italian great Rossano (The Italian Job) Brazzi, as Professor Bhaer.

Letterboxd ranking: #2. “This is the best Little Women, fight me,” DylanDog declares. “I’m so impressed by the fact that they rewrote/restructured/padded out the 1933 screenplay, assembled a nearly pitch-perfect cast, and made such a fantastic Technicolor remake,” Dino reasons. “We actually see way more of the novel’s subversive gender politics play out here, and Jo’s motivations are much more palpable.”

“Although I also really like the 1933 version, the Hepburn film lacks the warmth I do find in the 1949 adaptation,” Annewithe writes. “I feel that this version conveys the true spirit of the book and is as cozy and warm and loving, and it’s in colour!”

Susan Dey and William Shatner.

Little Women (1978) Directed by David Lowell Rich, screenplay by Suzanne Clauser

Between 1949 and 1994, all we got was this seventies miniseries adaptation, which flies far under the radar of Letterboxd’s Little Women obsession with only two member reviews.

Susan Dey was a smart choice to play Jo March, given her Partridge Family profile at the time, while Meredith Baxter Birney, who played Meg, went onto huge sitcom fame as Michael J. Fox’s mom in Family Ties. The real curiosity factor here, writes LouReviews, is “the casting of one William Shatner as the Professor, and he’s rather good!”.

Letterboxd ranking: #6. “This story keeps moving me,” is all Sandra had to say, while LouReviews writes “not essential by any means, but if you like the novel, you'll want to see this”.

Winona Ryder and Christian Bale.

Little Women (1994) Directed by Gillian Armstrong, screenplay by Robin Swicord

It only took 126 years from publication for a woman to get behind the camera of a Little Women film, despite Alcott’s masterpiece long being a prime example of (white privileged) female complexity in storytelling. (Although, it’s fair to note that women have been involved in the scriptwriting for every Little Women film adaptation that we know of.)

Released—as Gerwig’s 2019 update will be—at Christmas, Gillian Armstrong’s version was as star-studded as they come, with 90s it-girl Winona Ryder—fresh off Reality Bites—as Jo March, and Christian Bale as Laurie. Also: Kirsten Dunst, Samantha Mathis and Eric Stoltz, with Susan Sarandon as Marmee.

Letterboxd ranking: #1. Sydney writes: “It’s really tough dealing with the fact that this movie is probably never going to get the respect it deserves.” Well Sydney, we’re happy to make your day. This Little Women is currently the highest-rated on Letterboxd (except for Bale’s facial hair, which is not highly rated by anyone). Thomas Newman’s score is much beloved, and the film is, in Julia’s opinion, “the definitive adaptation!”.

On a recent re-watch, Lauren “was transported back in time to my childhood and for those two hours everything felt simple and safe.” Meanwhile Sally Jane Black, in a thoughtful piece, gets right to the heart of Little Women-love: “This is a film not about a single woman’s quest for identity or independence, but about the infinite power of a woman’s community.”

Little Women (2017) Directed by Vanessa Caswill, screenplay by Heidi Thomas

Not strictly a film, but well worth a mention, this recent three-part BBC adaptation stars Thurman-Hawke offspring (and Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood flower child) Maya Hawke as Jo March. Emily Watson plays the March matriarch, and—Gerwig connection alert!—Kathryn Newton (Lady Bird’s Darlene) is Amy March.

Letterboxd ranking: #5. Alicia is a fan: “Winona will always be my Jo, but Emily Watson absolutely kills it as Marmee! Just love her FACE!!!! Her pain is your pain; her joy is your joy. Oyyy!”

Bethchestnut was slowly convinced: “A very handsome and loving production, even if there were a lot of things that bothered me about it. Doesn’t help that I watch the 90s version every year. Still made me cry twice.”

Little Women (2018) Directed by Clare Niederpruem, script by Clare Niederpruem and Kristi Shimek

Released to mark the novel’s 150th anniversary of publication, this version wins points for casting Lea Thompson (Howard the Duck, Back to the Future) as Marmee, but loses points for the weird contemporary update, in which the March sisters inexplicably lose the messy complexity of their far more adventurous 19th-century selves.

Letterboxd ranking: #8. “Who decided casting Ryan from High School Musical was a good idea?” asks Sue.

Also worth seeking out: two different Japanese anime adaptations, the 1981 series Little Women’s Four Sisters (若草の四姉妹), and the 1987 series, Tales of Little Women (愛の若草物語), which aired on HBO in 1988 and is notable for writing in a black character. Not worth a mention: this 1970 TV adaptation.

Greta Gerwig’s ‘Little Women’ opens in cinemas this December.

#little women #greta gerwig #timothee chalamet #saoirse ronan #florence pugh #meryl streep #winona ryder #katherine hepburn #letterboxd

12 notes · View notes

cecilspeaks · 7 years

Text

116 - Council Member Flynn, Part 3

Good hidden recording devices make good neighbors. Welcome to Night Vale.

Council member Tamika Flynn announced today that she’s pretty comfortable doing this whole City Council thing, now that Night Vale is completely crime free. She announced this standing atop an onyx pyramid, waving a golden scepter. Mayor Dana Cardinal responded that while crime is clearly down, budgets for the new fiscal year have not been completed, and Night Vale is showing a marked financial loss this quarter, due in large part to strict evening curfews. She announced this silently into her journal, which she plans to publish as a scathing memoir some day.

Sheriff Sam announced that the increased number of Secret Police officers has really had a positive impact on crime, but most of the police force now is volunteer or underpaid, and grossly unqualified. It’s basically a bunch of random citizens with makeshift weapons carved out of tree branches or fashioned from broken blade-based kitchen appliances. The Sheriff noted that management of council member Flynn’s citizen patrols has greatly impeded the capture of both the serial robber and the escaped librarian. Sheriff Sam quietly grumbled this into their bathroom mirror before finally putting on makeup and facing their day.

Council member Flynn later said she received a postcard from the rest of City Council, who has been vacationing in Milstigan the past month. On the front of the postcard was a serene lake nestled among tall pines and speckled with herrings and fishing boats. Above the lake were eight Black Hawk helicopters, dangling each of the letters of the state name: M-I-B-S-T-I-C-A-N. On the back, the City Council had written: “Saw an article that Night Vale has the lowest crime rate. Guess you’re doing fine without us and we don’t need to come back.” The postcard continued: “We learned how to kayak and we bought a professional grade DSLR and learned to tie sailing knots. Michelin is awesome! Maybe we won’t ever come back. Maybe we are not wanted.”

Council member Flynn said she wrote them back a postcard which she taped to a giant scorpion that read: “Yeah, I’ve got this under control. Happy apple picking.”

Night Vale coroner Lorelei Alvarez issued her report today on the autopsy of the two bodies found at the green market co-op, which burned down last month in an apparent robbery-arson. These bodies are believed to be those of green market owner Tristan Cortez and his daughter Camilla, a business student at Night Vale Community College. Alvarez, however, said that without dental records for the Cortezes, she can’t be certain that these bodies are theirs. The bodies had almost no burns on them, despite being found in a building leveled by fire. There were also no gunshot wounds. Alvarez said, “These two bodies were wearing 19th century formal attire and had apparently been pecked to death by birds.” She added she had not ruled out that birds could have committed robberies, nor that the Cortez family had an anachronistic fashion sense. Alvarez added with a grin that she’s also gotten a few bodies that had been mostly devoured by the escaped librarian. She said it’s fascinating that librarians tend to eat only bones and ligaments, and not flesh or skin. So most of these corpses looked like rumpled soft leather sacks, which makes them much easier to store. Alvarez has so much more free space in her office now and has added a tetherball pole.

And now sports. Tonight, the Night Vale High School Scorpions take on division rival Red Mesa Ant Carpenters in varsity wheelchair basketball. This afternoon, there will be a pep rally led by team captain Janice Palmer. Also she’s my niece. The team captain is my niece. Councilwoman Tamika Flynn will also deliver a speech at the pep rally about the importance of teamwork and fighting crime with sports. Also, the importance of books. “Did you know there are books about sports?” is the title of Flynn’s speech. Flynn also requested, for reasons having to do with public safety, that the pep rally be moved away from the high school to the Old Night Vale armory, and that every person there stand exactly two feet apart and bring some type of shield and/or sharp object that could be used to fend off robbers or librarians. The pep rally is at noon. Go get’em, Janice!

Listeners, Mayor Cardinal and her director of emergency press conferences, Pamela Winchell, have called an emergency press conference to denounce the City Council’s poor efforts to sustain the integrity and stability of Night Vale. Mayor Cardinal dismissed the City Council’s – essentially Tamika Flynn’s – curfew as virtually meaningless, now that more than half of the population is on the citizen patrol force. “We basically have a town of municipally approved armed vigilantes walking around at all hours of the night.” Winchell seconded the Mayor’s point by adding: “Why do I video myself sleeping? What am I hoping to discover? What secrets does my body whisper when I am unconscious?”

Also, the president of the Night Vale school board, the giant glowing cloud who drops dead animals, made an impassioned speech in support of the Mayor via mind control. The entire crowd chanted: “All hail the mighty Cloud who wants the lowly City Council to pass a budget that favors increased spending on education! We grovel before the almighty Cloud! How hard can it be to make a human budget? All hail!” they repeated.

The Mayor said she’s received many letters from people claiming they have lost their jobs as waiters, cab drivers, theatre managers and costumed superheroes because of the strict curfews. Night Vale Community host Cecil Palmer also announced today, live on his radio show, right now, that the curfew has been super productive for his TV watching, as he has already burned through every HBO and Showtime series. Plus all of “Difficult People” on Hulu, which features his second favorite actor, James Urbaniak. My favorite is, of course, Lee Marvin – may his name ring forever in eternity.

Palmer added, at this very second, that while he’s caught up on a lot of good television and is very excited for the new season of the documentary series “Stranger Things”, he and his husband are getting a little stir crazy. There are only so many games of strip Uno a couple can play before they just wanna go out for a nice dinner and maybe a romantic stroll in the park. Councilwoman Flynn was not available for comment, although a sign above her locked office door said: “Quiet, reading a book on how to do financial spreadsheets”.

Listeners, I mentioned earlier my niece Janice and how proud I am of her for captaining her school’s basketball team. But I’m also a bit worried about her too. She looks perpetually exhausted. In the preseason tournament, she led all players in assists. She did everything she could to win games, but they just couldn’t quite do it. Her statistics bear this out, but still she’s taken on so much responsibility for the team’s losses. Her Dad and team assistant coach, Steve Carlsberg, says Janice has increased her practice time to increase her fantastic passing skills, hoping to at least double the number of assists she gets. But Steve says that despite her better skills and more focused demeanor during practice, her team mates just aren’t hitting their shots when she passes to them. She throws them the ball shouting: “Shoot it! You’re open, Julie!” But they miss over and over, even the ones named Julie.

Steve is trying to convince her to work more on her defense and shooting, that assists aren’t everything. But Janice got frustrated with this and called Steve selfish. “Assists are the most unselfish thing, Steve Carlsberg!” she shouted before leaving the gym to pout by her locker earlier this morning. “Maybe I should just quit,” Steve heard her mumble. You know, I’m sure it’s just a teenager fighting with her stepdad, and she’ll be all ready to go for today’s pep rally. Which is set to start in a few minutes. I’ll check in with her later tonight to make sure she’s doing OK.

Councilwoman Tamika Flynn has arrived early for today’s pep rally to deliver a brief statement about vigilance, self-preservation, and keeping our town crime free. Even though there’s a librarian on the loose, and our Sheriff has yet to catch the serial robber, our streets are super safe,” Flynn said. “I read a book this morning about how low crime rates are excellent for local economies. The book is ‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry, in case you’re interested.” “Look around you,” she continued, “no one here is being crimed upon, because we are protecting each other. We are watchful and observant.” “As my father once warned,” Tamika Flynn said, “beware the robot uprising! Beware the machines that will bring us down! That’s what he always told me before bed, and we must heed this words, Night Vale. At any moment, a great enemy could be upon us.” Tamika then said: “Hey, it’s after 12. Aren’t we supposed to start this pep rally? I’m in the middle of Greg Harvey’s literary masterpiece and winner of the Man Booker Price, ‘Microsoft Excel for Dummies’, so let’s make this quick. I’m really into that book,” she concluded.

But the crowd murmured, confused and agitated. The captain of the team was not there. And as they looked for the pep rally’s leader, the bearer of the basketball torch, my niece, my only niece – the stage began to shake, the earth began to split, and smoke and dust are currently filling the Night Vale armory in choking plumes. Oh my god, Night Vale, where’s Janice? Where is my niece?

Listen to today’s weather while I find out where she is.

[“Animal Skin” by Bryan Dunn]

The rest of the City Council has returned to Night Vale. They burrowed through the earth and up through the floor of the armory where the pep rally was being held. They apologized for the dramatic and destructive entrance, but their flight out was really turbulent and there was no meal service. So they thought they’d take the slower, but more comfortable route home. The multi-limbed, multi-voiced, single-bodied entity of the City Council was wearing a T-shirt that said: “Mitchigan – America’s sexiest forests”, featuring little cartoon tees with ribbed abs and bubble butts. The City Council then presented two people whose hands were bound with ropes, tied off tight with perfect bowline nuts. It was Tristan Cortez and his daughter, Camilla. The City Council said they found the Cortezes while rock climbing. According to the City Council, Camilla had devised an insurance scam, which Tristan set up by committing a series of small armed robberies around Night Vale, to make the robbery and the subsequent arson of their new store more believable. They stole two bodies from the old cemetery, which flooded last month, and laid those in the burned-out husk of their former market to fake their deaths. Camilla created a fake ID for a sister she didn’t have, named Tamilla, who lived in Mistrigen, where they planned to live out life bird watching and parasailing in the paradise of America’s most hand shaped state. The City Council laid out this entire plot, as they presented Sheriff Sam with the two fraudsters. Then the City Council turned to their newest member, Tamika Flynn and said, “We also completed the new city budget,” as they dropped a six-inch high stack of papers, like it was a mic at a poetry slam.

And even better, listeners: Janice finally arrived. We found her! After the City Council made their speech, the basketball team captain stepped to the mic and said she was running late today because she was practicing so hard to be a better passer, to have more assists, to be empirically the best team mate that the league record books have ever seen. But then, just this morning after a fight with her stepdad, she realized she was wrong. “You can’t measure leadership,” Janice said. “I’ve been so worried about that one number, that one datum that seems so selfless. But the act of pursuing that number is in itself selfish.” Janice said, “I can’t do this all on my own. I can’t expect everyone else to score thinking I’m being helpful. Each one of us has a different skill set, and as your captain, I want you to be great at scoring, defense, rebounding, whistling, and the occasional hex – the five pillars of sound basketball. So let’s get out there and beat Red Mesa!”

The crowd cheered and joined together to sing the Night Vale school song, “You Walk with Me, You Walk Alone under an Indifferent Dust-filled Sky”.

Tamika then spoke. She stood before her fellow citizens, her constituents, and said: “I want the best for all of us, I really do. I’m new at this, and the one thing I know how to do well, really well, is fight, and I want that for everyone. Also read, I’m awesome at reading. I want that for you too. Government jobs are weird because you can’t really fight a lot of crime. You mostly do paperwork and have meetings and scan retinas. Government is evasive and stupid and slow, and it’s because there are so many people it has to account for. And I realize it takes lots of time and lots of people to change. I just want this to change. I want us to feel safe. I also want to finish this amazing novel about Microsoft Excel, it is so compelling.”

At the behest of Tamika Flynn, the City Council voted unanimously to lift the town-wide curfew. And restaurants have already began to reopen, as well as theaters, public parks, clothing stores and bloodstone circle repair shops. Even the library has reopened with plans to renovate the security gates and triple barred cages that keep the librarians safely away from society. And with the return of library activities, escaped librarian Dan McDowell even returned to his former job, promising not to eat anyone else, unless they were trying to check out a book. The City Council also voted to keep all the city buildings painted blood red, because quote, “That’s intimidating AF.” And then they tried to vote to change the town motto to “Night Vale – Intimidating AF”. But it lost by a single deciding vote, which belonged to Tamika, who said we should pace ourselves. She then quoted Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Patience is bitter, buts its fruit is mad sweet, like a swole grape.”

Sheriff Sam praised the City Council for capturing these criminals. Mayor Cardinal praised the City Council, too, but she added praise specifically for Tamika Flynn. Mayor Cardinal said, “I’m proud of you, Councilwoman Flynn. I did not agree with your tactics, but I think your heart is in the right place. It will take time, but we can do this.” Tamika accepted the Mayor’s kind words and a comforting embrace, and then returned to her office to finish her novel about spreadsheets.

Night Vale, Janice and Tamika are growing up before our eyes, and I couldn’t be prouder of either. But more importantly, I couldn’t be more excited to get out of the house! Carlos and I are headed straight to dinner at the Shallow Grave, and then going dancing at that new club, Numb, which opened up mere minutes after the curfew was lifted.

Stay tuned next to the sound of two men putting on just the most vicious outfits.

Good night, Night Vale, Good night.

Today’s proverb: We are all (an elite few) in this (a secret underground emergency bunker) together (on our own without public knowledge).

#welcome to night vale #wtnv transcripts #episode 116 #council member flynn #council member flynn part 3

46 notes · View notes

midnatt-heronweather · 6 years

Photo

Ave Aqua Vale (2017) Ave Aqua Vale means Hail and Farewell. it comes from Cassandra Clares Shadowhunters, it is what they (Shadowhunters) say in place of the mundane "rest in peace." in our world it comes mainly from Catullus 101 by Gaius Valerius Catullus "atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale" which translates as "and forever brother, hail and farewell"

What a lot of people have been saying about 2017 is that it hasn't seen the departure of many 'stars and celebrities' and their right. last year I had to create a seprate section to my review to say a fitting farewell to those who would not see out the year. this year however, while smaller, it is no less disheartening.

John Hurt 1940 - 2017 most famous recently for his work in the Harry Potter franchise playing Garrick Olivander, with a career spanning nearly 60 years, SIR John Vincent Hurt CBE is/was/will always be one of Englands greatest acting talents. Stephen Furst 1976 - 2017 To me Stephen will always Vir Coto, the bumbling loveable attaché to Ambassador Londo Molari in Babylon 5. Nelsan Ellis 1977 - 2017 Nelsan is best known for playing the flamboyant short order chef Lafayette in HBO's True Blood. no fan will ever forget his face to face with a group of rednecks demanding "who ordered the burger, with aids!" Chester Bennington 1976 - 2017 I'm not sure what to say here. Chester was the leader of one of the greatest bands ever! Linkin Park. their music spanned genre/fandoms/situations. you just had to listen and there was one of their songs somewhere. personally after I did a mini AAV video after i found out it wasn't a prank, I didn't feel quiet up to listening to the band for a while, and that left me without anything to really write to...then I decided to go by a quote from Satai Delenn "we die, but what is built lingers." he's gone. but he'll never be forgotten, like all great musical artists he'll live on in his music

Chester lost a good friend of his to Suicide a few months before his own in fellow singer Chris Cornell in May. it affected him and some believe this lead to what happened in July.

Chris Cornell 1964 - 2017 both deaths were recorded as Suicide by Hanging. both death leaves a hole in music Jonghyun - 1990- 2017 just this week as I was compiling this the world of Kpop lost Kim Jong-hyun better known mononymously as Jonghyun the leader singer of the band SHINee

one of my two best friends lost her parents this year, her father before her birthday and her mother just recently. before christmas. I never had the privilige of meeting her father. but the way she spoke about him made both myself and Heather feel we would have gotten along

The women (Ally and her two sisters). speaks volumes for the type of people her parents were. and thought I don't understand the belief system they held. I hope that wheever they have moved on to that they are happy.

#ave aqua vale #rip #rest in peace #Chester Bennington #jonghyn #chris cornell #nelsan ellis #stephn furst #john hurt #aav2017

1 note · View note

evilsapphyre · 7 years

Text

Sapphy’s Spoilerific Review

Season 7 Episode 1

In case the title isn’t specific enough, this will be a very spoiler-filled review for Game of Thrones.

You have been warned!

Welcome back to HBO and Westeros. It's been a long 13 months or so. But finally, we can find out what is in store for our intrepid heroes, and villains, and people we just kind of wish would stop existing.

After a lengthy previous on, we open at The Twins, with another feast hosted by... Walder Frey? Wait, didn't he get his throat slit after eating pie made of his sons. Apparently, he gathered all his sons to feast them again… And he wants them to eat and drink and be merry. Mostly. He still has his dislike of them women of his.

Of course, his actual speech seems a bit strange, almost like he's not really himself. And sure enough, as they all drink their poisoned wines, Arya rips off her Walder suit to watch them die too. And as the women stare on in horror, she tells them to spread the word - The North Remembers.

Yep, you better believe it, bitches! (Someone from the North had to!)

We then head beyond the Wall, where, in case we forgot, the White Walkers are coming. And if that’s not terrifying enough (and it's a really gorgeous shot over snow with mist), there are at least 3 undead Giants! Oh snap! If only they hadn't wasted the last living Giant on getting back Winterfell from Ramsey. RIP Wun-wun!

It seems we get that vision courtesy of Bran and his ever-flowing weirwood wifi connection. Thankfully, Meera saw Wonder Woman this Summer and dragged Bran to safety, as IIRC, Uncle Benjen left them quite a hike away from the gate. Lord Commander Dolorous Edd greets the wayward pair at the gate, wanting to know if they are wildlings. Meera introduces them, but the new LC is rather doubtful. Rather than prove who they are, Bran just states all he's ever seen about Edd, and they are admitted back to the proper North… south of the Wall.

Up next, we find ourselves in Winterfell. Jon is being all Kingly, dictating orders on how they are going to get ready for the coming War. He wants all their dragon glass, and beyond that all able bodied man, woman, and child will prepare for the upcoming war. What, women can't, or shouldn't, fight?! Old School Northern Man tries to claim (in front of Brienne no less!).

Fortunately, we still have hope for Westeros. And to continue making old men look dumb, young Lyanna Mormont slaps him (and any other male daring to think like that ) verbally upside their heads. I'm pretty sure that she’s the true leader of Westeros. I wonder how long it will take the rest of the Queens to realize it?

All hail Lyanna, first of Her Name.

What will Ser Friendzone do when he finds his baby sister on the Iron Throne?

Anyways, I digress!

Jon asks Tormund and the Wildlings to man Eastwatch by the Sea! Good riddance, I say! Tormund needs to go far away from my Brienne, as she awaits her maiden fair. Tormund must realize he’ll never have her and agrees to his suicide mission. (Not before a later scene with a lustful sigh from the Wildling as Brienne tries to dissuade his advances by beating up on Pod.)

Next, Jon needs to handle business regarding the family holds of the Umbers and Karstarks. He wants the families to keep them. Old School Lord wants to destroy them. Sansa pipes up and wants to reward faithful houses with the new keeps. Jon and her bicker in front of the Lords, and it is clear she wishes she was in charge. Jon finally slaps her down with his stern voice, reminding her that HE is king. He asks tiny Lord Umber and Alice Karstark (uhm, why isn't Tormund all about her? He married her in the books) to say the words. And that was the end of that squabble.

Except Sansa and him keep squabbling once they leave the meeting. He tells her plainly to not undermine him in front of the lords. And she whines about not being able to voice her opinion. Now I'm all about female empowerment, but there is a time and place for voicing opinions. Apparently, she forgot. Much like she forgot about telling Jon about the Vale Knights last season.

Anyways, she practically calls him Joffrey because he doesn't want people to see him bicker in public with people. Because it does undermine his authority. He's appalled at the comparison, but she quickly recants saying he's a good ruler. The conversation turns towards Sansa feeling they're looking the wrong way for War. They should be looking South. She diatribes about how awful and cunning Cersei is, but Jon says he knows how bad the real threat is. Plus, no Southern army could last in their Winter. After all, they're Siberia.

He also points out how Sansa seems to admire Cersei.

Which segues us to King's Landing... and Cersei walking across a huge painted floor map of Westeros. Jaime follows her and establishes that he may still be pod-Jaime. (BOOO!) I'm also sensing a theme of bickering siblings as the two are squabbling over things like... how many Kingdoms and dynasties.

Jaime is more sensible than Cersei pointing out that they essentially have no allies (especially since the report out of the Twins has come down) and that all of their children are dead. There's no one left for a dynasty.Especially since Cersei disregards her other brother who she knows is Hand of the Queen for Dany. That only makes her seethe more, and she throws that in Jaime's face.

And really, don't get me started on pod-Jaime and how he wanted to talk about losing their baby boy. He knew King Butters killed himself, so does he know his sister went all Mad King on Sept of Baelor? (Hint: The only acceptable answer is HELL NO! Otherwise, she'd be dead.)

Anyways, when discussing all of their enemies, there are two major foreshadowing hammers: Highgarden, home to the Queen of Thorns, has all the food, and Dany will land on Dragonstone. All the more reason that they need allies in this upcoming war. Cersei points out that she does have an ally in mind, and she learned quite a bit from her father. (Doubtful!)

Enter Euron Greyjoy and the Ironborn fleet, looking for love in all the wrong places. There is an overly machismo display by Euron as he tries to display his plumage for Cersei. He paints a picture of how they were both betrayed by family who defected to the Targs. He makes a few promises and then proposes marriage. After all, he has two good hands. (Pod-Jaime pantomimes quite well in the scene, offering to stick him with his sword.) She declines him, but he says he'll prove he’s worthy and leaves.

We move to Oldtowne and the Citadel, where Sam… Has become an indentured servant of the Maester Order. If we weren't sold on how awful his "tutelage" is, we are given a lengthy montage where he puts away books, cleans filthy shit-filled chamber pots, and pours soup that looks quite like the shit in the pots. Blech! He wants to desperately get into the restricted book section, but he sadly doesn't have a Cloak of Invisibility like a different would be wizard in another series. So instead, he heads off to speak with Ol' Slughorn himself.

Slughorn gives him some advice on what it really means to be a Maester, and how impartial they should be. He reminds them that even in the darkest of hours, ages of ago, people succeeded, and so they will again. But he still can't have access to the books. I mean, horcruxes and all. So, Sam steals the key, steals a bunch of books, and goes back to his Wildling baby mama and kid. He then discovers that Stannis told him the truth about there being a bunch of Dragon Glass on Dragonstone. We also get one brief glimpse of Ser Friendzone, who managed to get to Oldtowne in search of a cure. He's still hung up on Dany too. Even as he turns to stone.

The Hound and the Brotherhood are still moving towards the North. It's snowing pretty hard in the Riverlands, and their banter is kind of boring. (To me anyways.) However, they come across the cottage where The Hound stole the silver of the kindly farmer who helped him and Arya years ago. He wants to be a better guy, and now he has guilt for the fact that he may have killed these people - indirectly.

The Hound has a funny comment about how he ended up with a cult of fire worshippers, but he sees the power of the fire when Beardy McTopknot tells him to. And it works just like that, as Clegane sees the upcoming icy death of the North. If that didn't bond them, Beardy McTopknot and Clegane also bury the dead farmer and his kid in the middle of the night.

Arya and Sansa are spotted each in different scenes. Arya stumbles across some Lannister soldiers, and she does the age old "Tell them the truth" after she befriends them, but they just laugh at her comment about killing the Queen. For a moment, she looked like she would kill these soldiers, but she hasn't become a full sociopath yet clearly. (Although, props to them for singing the song that the musician wrote in the books about Shae.) Sansa has a small chat with Baelish, and I'm sure it leads somewhere, but I wish she would decide who she is supporting - even if it's herself. This waffling of hers... It's getting old! Prove you've learned the game by doing something that will actually accomplish something. (And if you want to top Cersei, just side with Littlefinger long enough to get what you want and then dispose of him.)

Finally, we come to Dragonstone, where Dany has finally come home!

There's not much to say other than that this is a beautiful sequence, and they spared no expense on this set. Nothing is said, and really, it would have taken away if people said anything. And can I just say that the throne at Dragonstone is like so much more awesome than the damn Iron Throne? Sign me up for the interior (and exterior) decorator. I could use some dragon accents around my house.

That pretty much encapsulates the episode. Tune in next week to see what happens next As Westeros Turns.

#game of thrones #review #got #got review #tongue in cheek #s7e1 #sapphy's spoilerific reviews

7 notes · View notes

sevendeadlyseans · 7 years

Text

10 (or 11) Movies Released Last Year That I Really Liked, 2016 Edition

Before I get to my “official” Top 10, one title has been excluded for consideration due to conflict of interest, but would otherwise top my list.

youtube

Darling

Mickey Keating’s 3rd feature (produced by the fabulous Jenn Wexler, a.k.a. my girlfriend) is, of course, my favorite film of the year. I’ve seen it three times in theaters—twice in 2015 on the festival circuit, and again last April on opening night—and still keep finding new, subtle things about it to love.

The story: a young woman is paid to housesit a glorious old building while its eccentric owner is away. Is the house haunted? Is she unhinged? Maybe both? Star Lauren Ashley Carter—rightly recognized as “the Audrey Hepburn of indie horror” by The Austin Chronicle, is in almost every frame of the film and is never short of mesmerizing, whether answering the telephone, putting on make-up or getting her hands dirty by...well, let’s not give away the fun.

The black and white cinematography is gorgeous, the score crawls under your skin and the editing is legit terrifying. Watch with the lights out.

And now back to our official, less personally biased top 10, in order...

youtube

Moonlight

Without question, the most accomplished, most moving film of 2016.

James Joyce once noted, “In the particular is the universal.” Moonlight is atop my list in no small part because it’s so breathtaking in its particular intimacies.

Moonlight is like Boyhood on a budget: it drops us into three important periods in the life of a boy who becomes a teen who becomes a man—at first bullied and confused, increasingly neglected by his crack-addicted mother and influenced by a kind-hearted, drug-dealing surrogate father. We see him harden, over time, under the pressure of a world with no use for softness, and then, perhaps, reconnecting with a lost bit of himself, at long last.

Writing that synopsis, it strikes me how easily such a story could have tipped into cliché and melodrama. Perhaps because writer/director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney are both from the Liberty City projects themselves. their knowledge—coupled with a great cast, an impeccable soundtrack, a deft use of color and Jenkins’ masterful control of tone—l gives Moonlight specificity, and that makes it universal.

youtube

Jackie

Tone is a theme for the first three films on my 2016 list—four if you count Darling, and you most definitely should. Pablo Larrain’s Jackie puts us inside the experience of First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, in a way I never thought I could experience:

Your husband was just murdered; his blood is on your dress. Your life is cracked, and even if you put the pieces back together, nothing will ever be the same. Oh, and he’s the president—was the president—so your country is broken, too. History has its eye on you, so while the crushing weight of grief bears down, try to look good for the cameras. It’s only his legacy at stake.

It seems ludicrous to say that Oscar-nominated Natalie Portman is underrated, but somehow she is—and I adored her in Black Swan. In Jackie, she’s working at another level. Open and wounded when no one but us can see, calculating and brittle and angry before an eager reporter. I am excited to see Portman does next.

Special mention to Mica Levi’s score, her second feature after 2013′s Under the Skin. Can’t wait to hear what she does next, too.

youtube

The Witch

Someone had the terrible idea to market The Witch as “the year’s scariest movie.” It’s not, nor is it trying to be. It is, however, among the most unsettling films of this year or any other. (Again: tone.)

The story: it’s 17th century New England. William, his wife Katherine, and their five children have been kicked out of the settlement being too religious (it seems, or perhaps just too self-righteous) and must find a way to survive on their own on the fringes of the deep, dark wood.

Before you have time to wonder if the titular witch might be metaphoric, she shows up and does something unspeakable to William and Katherine’s newborn son. Things go downhill from there, exacerbated by both outside, malevolent forces and unacknowledged tensions within the family unit.

The Witch looks gorgeous, as well it should. First-time director Robert Eggers made his bones as a production and costume designer, and reportedly built an actual, mostly working 17th century farm for the film. Even the dialogue itself was built out of scraps of things people wrote and said back then. You can feel the authenticity, which makes the family’s isolation feel that much more acute and dangerous.

O.J.: Made in America

Bob Dylan never asked “How many minutes does a film have to be, before we can call it TV?” but the answer, my friend, is probably not much more than the 467 minute runtime of Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America. (For comparison, that’s almost 3 hours longer than a full season of HBO’s Veep.)

It doesn’t help that it was produced by ESPN, or that it aired on that cable network less than a month after it’s Oscar-qualifying theatrical run. And yet...it was my favorite documentary in a year of many great docs (more on that later), so if wants to call itself a movie, I’ll roll with it.

2014 marked the 20th anniversary of the murders. The revived attention around the so-called “trial of the century” led to two great works of art, Edelman’s doc and FX’s American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson. (One can only wonder how our present political moment will be filtered through the culture of 2018).

Rather than produce O.J. overload, the two projects complement one another—the dramatic series taking us inside the lives and hearts of key figures on both legal teams, while the doc simultaneously expands the scope and deepens the focus—showing us more about who O.J. was before, during and after, and what America was and still is, especially but not only in Los Angeles, but also in Ferguson, on Staten Island, everywhere. If it takes Edelman 8 hours to set up all details to knock us down with his larger point, well, that’s 8 hours well spent.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrB3rOcrJxg&list

The Lobster

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth was one of my favorite movies of 2010. He’s back on the list with a film that’s just as strange but far more accessible.

I love absurdism, deadpan humor, magical realism and dystopian fantasy, but I can’t recall a film that manages the trick of juggling all three at once as The Lobster does—with an honest-to-goodness love story right there in the middle.

I’ll skip the premise—if you don’t know it, watch the trailer.

The cast is great, and Colin Farrell is a revelation, topping my previous Farrell favorite, the criminally under seen In Bruges. Lanthimos packs the film with small details that make the surreal world of The Lobster believable. The first shot packs an entire story of love, betrayal and murder (which is never revisited) into a single, long take. And its final, wrenching moments will stay with me forever.

Film critic Britt Hayes got to the heart of the filmmaker’s uncanny alchemy when she noted “Lanthimos doesn’t heighten reality to an absurd degree; he heightens the absurdity of our existing reality.” Or put another way, he doesn’t add absurdity, he just turns the heat up on reality and our own absurdity bubbles to the surface.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTNZmOJxuAc

Hail, Caesar!

There’s this other movie that’s sort of a throwback to old Hollywood, with some singing and dancing in it. That movie’s fine, but don’t hold your breath, it didn’t make my list. For my money, the real love letter to Hollywood—and why the movie industry matters—came from the Coen Brothers.

Now, it wouldn’t be a Coens movie if that tender heart weren’t covered under many layers of arch cynicism, stylized reference bordering on “acting” “in” “quotation” “marks” and the occasional silliness. But you don’t have to peel much of it away to see the real love they have for not just the magic of movies but also the joy in so many abandoned film genres that once ruled the box office—be they Gene Kelly musicals, Gene Autry oaters or C.B. DeMille bible epics, to name but a few recreated here.

For me, Hail, Caesar! sits perfectly between the sour cynicism of the Hollywood in Woody Allen’s misanthropic Cafe Society and the false romanticism of the ambition-for-ambition’s sake “dreamers" of La La Land who prize the warmth of the spotlight over any real human affection.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NYpz_j3e38

13th

Ava DuVernay’s 13th is a civics lesson for a country in dire need of one. With a controlled but searing ferocity, the documentary lays out the case that the 13th amendment allowed the continuation of a system of oppression and control not all that from slavery: the criminal justice system. If you haven’t read your Constitution lately, here’s a refresher on the 13th, the amendment that ostensibly ended slavery:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

This one, terrible clause not just perpetuated slavery under another name but incentivized an expansion of the definition of criminality, in order to profit from the subjugation of mostly brown and black bodies, which has led to an explosion in America’s incarcerated population. In effect, through laws designed to maintain segregation, blackness itself has been criminalized.

With Jim Crow, redlining, lynching (terrorism by another name) and the like, the 13th has led to a more unequal society—and, indirectly, to leaders who lie and stoke racial, as well as religions and ethnic, divisions in order to maintain the ever-growing class divide from which they profit.

This poor summation doesn’t do justice to the full weight of the case DuVernay and her experts make, or how well they make it. 13th should be required viewing by everyone, but most of all by those who hold the power to make and enforce the law.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V66F3WU2CKk

The Love Witch

Let’s start with the obvious: Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is a gorgeous film. Turn the sound off, re-order the scenes at random and you still can’t take your eyes off what looks like a lost Technicolor American Giallo from 1972. Biller not only wrote, edited and directed the film but also handled production design, art direction, set decoration and costuming, almost single-handedly crafting one of the best looking films of 2016.

Beneath that dazzling frosting is a rich, feminist layer cake. Elaine is a witch specializing in sex magic, who believes her path to happiness lies in finding the right man, seducing him and pleasing him in every way. On paper, she’s a patriarchy’s dream come true. But when these lustful men inevitably fall short—as they all must, as patriarchy itself is built on a lie—she gets rid of them, permanently. Poor, unfulfilled Elaine.

The Love Witch is Biller’s own magic trick, casting its spell over us with its color, its throwback ‘70s sexploitation vibe and its razor-sharp message we don’t notice until the blade has slid, quietly, between our ribs and stabbed us in the heart. Metaphorically.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXjDEDYlu7c

I, Daniel Blake

Daniel Blake has spent a lifetime working with his hands, supporting a modest but pleasant life for himself and his late wife. After a heart attack, his doctors tell him he’s not fit to return to work—yet with a simple questionnaire (and absent any input from his doctors), the government’s welfare bureau deems him too fit to qualify for disability.

He can apply for unemployment benefits, but only if he’s actively seeking work—work which, according to his doctors, he can’t accept. Caught in a catch-22, he must appeal to an unreachable “decision-maker” for relief—provided he can find a way, without income or assistance, to get by while he waits. Then Daniel meets a single mother in stuck in a similar situation and does his best to help her struggling family, even as his own situation grows worse.

Ken Loach’s drama won the Palm D’Or at Cannes but has received not much notice since then, at least outside the UK, perhaps because of the specific criticism of the British welfare bureaucracy at the heart of the story. But you don’t need much imagination to see how things can be as bad or worse for the many Daniel Blakes of this country.

Loach has been making socially conscious films about the struggles of the working and lower classes for longer than I’ve been alive. As with Jenkins and Moonlight, it’s clear Loach knows this world, these people and their struggles, and knows how to tell their particular stories in a simple yet powerful, moving and universal way.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4KbJLpu7yo

The Handmaiden

Apologies if you’re getting whiplash. I went from a highly stylized Love Witch to a pared-down I, Daniel Blake. Now I’m going to swing back the other way with Park Chan-Wook’s sensual, sensuous The Handmaiden.

As has been the case in years prior, the 10th (really, 11th) and final spot on my list could have gone to a number of worthy films, and almost did—I began writing up another film here before realizing there’s no way I could round out 2016 without giving The Handmaiden its due. (Sorry, Elle!)

The story of The Handmaiden is...too complex to go into here, frankly. There’s a con man and his female accomplice. There’s a rich heiress and her controlling uncle. Some of them are Japanese occupiers; others native Koreans. Oh, ands there’s a library of dirty, dirty books.

Cons are conned, crosses are doubled, no one is quite who they pretend to be and everyone is up to something. In the end, something real is found and, through it, freedom is won.

The Handmaiden is a thriller as elegant as it is perverse. Every change in perspective brings new meaning to all that’s come before. Every twist revealed is a delight. Park Chan-Wook is at the top of his game.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4Z5jfjxdvQ

Honorable Mentions & More

Wait, don’t get up. There’s more!

First, let’s start with honorable mentions that you already know are great:

Paul Verhoeven’s psychological thriller Elle, which features Isabelle Huppert in one of my favorite performances of the year, or maybe ever.

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which goes on my list of essential smart science fiction, along with Gattaca, Ex Machina, Primer and Under the Skin, to name a few.

Sing Street, one of the most joyful films of the year. A misfit ‘80s Irish teen starts a band so he can cast the girl he likes in their highly creative music videos. From John Carney, the filmmaker behind the equally charming Once.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s mad look at fashion, envy and unchecked ambition (kind of the anti-La La Land?), The Neon Demon.

Next, films that might have been off your radar but are well worth seeking out:

Benjamin Dickinson’s Creative Control, a very-near-future sci-fi film about augmented reality, and the augmented lives we all want to pretend we’re living (at least on Instagram). A must-see for all my friends in media, marketing or technology.

Elizabeth Wood’s directorial debut, White Girl, in which a New York City undergrad moves to Queens, dates her local corner drug dealer and learns first hand the limits of her privilege in both their lives.

Taika Waititi’s The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, a reluctant buddy comedy/coming-of-age film that’s way more fun than it has any right to be.

Todd Solondz’s Weiner-Dog, a dark, dark comedy stringing together four tales of unhappy people, all of whom at one point own the same sad canine. Or, for you hard-core cineastes: Au Hasard Dachshund.

American Honey, Andrea Arnold’s sprawling tale of wayward youth living for the moment across a vast swath of America, high and low.

The animated documentaries Tower, which looks back on America’s first campus mass shooting in a surprisingly moving way, and Nuts!, which is the rare doc with an unreliable narrator, which fits the unreliable (Trump-like) conman at the center of its story.

Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, which I was fortunate enough to experience as a multi-screen installation at the Park Avenue Armory but has been adapted (rather successfully, it seems) as a traditional film. Either way, Cate Blanchett takes on a dozen different guises in a sequence of stunning short films, the text of each comprised of bits of famous manifestos, from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of Filmmaking.

And last, because the horror genre in near and dear to my heart, here’s #4-#10 on my year’s best horror list. (The top 3 being Darling, The Witch and The Love Witch.)

The Invitation

Green Room

Demon

Under the Shadow

Train to Busan

10 Cloverfield Lane

Southbound

Honorable mention: the “Happy Father’s Day” segment of Holidays

Past years: 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

#movies bestof2016 #darling #moonlight #jackie #oj made in america #the witch #the love witch #the lobster #hail caesar #13th #i daniel blake #the handmaiden

1 note · View note

biofunmy · 4 years

Text

How streaming, diversity, #MeToo shaped TV decade of change

LOS ANGELES — “Game of Thrones” was both an unprecedented achievement and old-school role model in the TV decade that’s rolling its final credits.

Installments of the elaborately produced hit were doled out one at a time by an established outlet, premium cable channel HBO. That was standard TV operating procedure until, suddenly, it wasn’t. The new era arrived in 2013 when a full season’s worth of “House of Cards” popped up amid Netflix’s on-demand movies and old TV shows.

The drama’s unexpected home appeared simply to be an option to the 500-channel universe born in the 1990s. But “House of Cards” foreshadowed a streaming gold rush and volume of programming dubbed Peak TV in 2015 — and with no drop in altitude in sight.

The result: Nothing is the same, whether it’s how much television we consume; how and where we do it; who gets to make it, and the level of respect given the creatively emboldened small screen. We don’t just watch TV, we binge it until we’re bleary-eyed if not sated. We still change channels with a remote control, but more often we’re logging in to watch shows on our phones or other devices and on our schedules, not network-dictated appointment TV.

We’re couch potatoes and office and car and everywhere potatoes.

A comic strip, “Zits,” recently summed up the current reality in three panels. “What’s on?” a father asks his teenage son, who’s sitting cross-legged in front of a TV set and is bracketed by a smart phone on one side and a laptop on the other. “Everything ever videotaped, filmed, recorded, photographed or otherwise documented whenever I want to watch it,” the teen answers, nonchalantly tossing popcorn into his mouth.

“I miss television,” the downcast dad tells his wife.

ALL HAIL STREAMING

Generational nostalgia aside, consumers have embraced the change in their media world, said Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture.

“This was the decade that streaming became for many, many people the dominant way in which they watch television,” said Thompson. It’s a rapid shift that bears little relation to the previous entertainment industry revolution, cable TV.

Only about a quarter of U.S. homes had cable in 1980 despite its availability since the mid-20th century. While growth finally exploded in the ‘80’s, it wasn’t until the tail end of the 1990s and the arrival of HBO’s “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” that premium cable received critical praise and honors, Thompson said.

In contrast, it took less than a decade for leader Netflix to skyrocket from about 12 million U.S. subscribers at the decade’s start to 60 million this year and 158 million worldwide. The streamer reportedly lavished $15 billion on programming for 2019 alone, and earned buzz with series including “The Crown,” “Stranger Things,” and “Orange is the New Black.”

Even major films, among them Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” are making themselves at home on Netflix while still in theaters.

Others in the fray include Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, although “streaming wars” became the aggressive phrase applied to the increasingly competitive marketplace. With newly emboldened (and sometimes mega-expanded) media companies intent on getting a piece of the streaming action, there was a growth surge that won’t abate in the new decade.

Apple TV Plus launched Nov. 1 with Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg among its first wave of producers, and was quickly followed by Disney Plus. The latter has a storehouse of Disney movies and TV shows to draw on, along with acquired properties from Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm and its “Star Wars” franchise.

Among the other services set for 2020: Peacock from NBCUniversal; Quibi, run by ex-Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay head Meg Whitman, and HBO Max, is counting on HBO, TBS and the Warner Bros. studio assets acquired by parent company AT&T to lure subscribers.

While cord-cutting became a quest for viewers seeking to shed hefty cable bills, there is still a price tag for the gusher of riches, as much as $14.99 monthly for HBO Max alone.

A bonus for viewers as they sort through the competing options: More programming doesn’t just mean more of the same.

VARIETY STORE

If retailers can provide every type of yogurt known to humanity, why can’t TV take the same eclectic approach? It has in the past 10 years, as the increasing demand for content and the growth of niche programming created opportunities for diverse and candid voices. Ongoing efforts by advocacy groups also contributed to the gradual but unmistakable shift.

Donald Glover illustrates the before and after. The future multi-hyphenate writer, musician, actor and director had a respectable run as a cast member on the network sitcom “Community.” Two years later, he was the creator and star of FX’s “Atlanta,” which drew raves for its innovative storytelling focused on African American characters.

Jill Soloway called on family experience to create the groundbreaking “Transparent,” about a trans woman and how her decision to be open has a ripple effect on her children and their circle.

Ryan Murphy, already established as a successful producer with “Nip/Tuck”and “Glee,” exercised his clout to make FX’s “Pose,” set in the LGBTQ ballroom culture scene of the 1980s and ‘90s. Its star, Billy Porter , became the first openly gay man to win the best actor Emmy. Credit RuPaul and his “Drag Race,” which arrived on the cusp of the previous decade and grew in popularity, for setting the table.

Even mainstream broadcasting expanded its field of vision, with ABC the first network in 20 years to air an Asian American family sitcom, “Fresh Off the Boat,” ending this season. Nahnatchka Khan was its executive producer, one of the women who gained prominence behind the camera in a sector long dominated by men.

As producers, directors and writers, women put complex female characters in the center of the frame — a switch from the male antiheroes of “The Sopranos,” “Breaking Bad” and other turn-of-the-century hits. With women taking the reins as storytellers, female characters became as varied and complex as their male counterparts and began to encompass a fuller view of the modern experience.

Lena Dunham’s “Girls” presented more than cookie-cutter young women, both in body and spirit, and foreshadowed the rise of actresses whose talent demands more attention than their weight, including Aidy Bryant of “Saturday Night Live” and Chrissy Metz of “This Is Us.”‘

African American women took the spotlight in creator-star Issa Rae’s “Insecure,” while Jenji Kohan’s “Orange is the New Black,” featured characters notable for their ethnic, sexual and class diversity. Writer-actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” provided the decade’s big finish with its bold sexuality, earning six Emmys last fall including top comedy.

Some established female producers further cemented their success. Shonda Rhimes added “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder” to her body of work, with the latter’s star, Viola Davis, becoming the first African American to win a best drama actress Emmy. Ava DuVernay, already a filmmaking force, spearheaded “When They See Us” and “Queen Sugar.’”

Reese Witherspoon, adding producing to her portfolio, made good on her vow to bring strong female characters to the screen with the hit series “Big Little Lies” and “The Morning Show.”

Statistics confirm the anecdotal evidence. Across all TV platforms in 2017-18, women accounted for a historic high of 31% of those working in key behind-the-scenes jobs including directors, writers and editors , according to research by San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film.

Good, but not good enough, said Kirsten Schaffer, executive director of the advocacy group Women in Film, which joined with the Sundance Institute in 2017 to create and lead ReFrame, an initiative that works with companies and others to foster hiring of women across the media landscape.

“Our goal is to have the industry reflect the population of the United States,” Schaffer said, and that’s 51 percent female and 17 percent women of color.

While television moved toward better reflecting the world at large, it was forced to look inward as well.

#METOO FALLOUT

Revelations of sexual misconduct hit the TV industry hard and with more lasting effect than any other sector of Hollywood, even compared to producer Harvey Weinstein’s fall from moviemaking heights.

Two of media’s top powerbrokers were brought down in the #MeToo era. Les Moonves was ousted in 2018 as CBS CEO after an outside investigation of abuse claims, with Moonves denying any non-consensual sexual relations. Roger Ailes, who built Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel into both a lucrative operation and major force in American politics, was forced out in the wake of sexual harassment claims.

Harassment claims also ended the Fox News career of host Bill O’Reilly, who called it a “hit job.”

Matt Lauer (“Today”), Charlie Rose (“CBS This Morning”) and PBS host Tavis Smiley were wiped away from TV screens for alleged misbehavior of varying types and their denials notwithstanding. “60 Minutes” executive producer Jeff Fager, a CBS News veteran, denied the misconduct claims that got him fired.

Top-tier actors and a famed comedian lost their jobs, including Jeffrey Tambor of “Transparent,” Kevin Spacey of “House of Cards” and Louis C.K., whose TV projects included “Louie,” which he starred in and produced. Tambor and Spacey rebutted the misconduct allegations, Louis C.K. apologized.

The reverberations continue. NBC repeatedly has been confronted by Ronan Farrow’s claim that he was prevented from breaking the Weinstein story on its airwaves, which the network denies, while CBS was criticized for renewing “Bull” despite actress Eliza Dushku’s claim that she was dropped for complaining that the show’s star, Michael Weatherly, made crude comments about her on set.

Dushku received a reported $9.5 million settlement under its then-CEO — Les Moonves.

———

Lynn Elber is at [email protected] and Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber.

Sahred From Source link Entertainment

from WordPress http://bit.ly/36F0CSf via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes