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anxious-little-faicye · 6 months

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The FNAF Movie (no spoilers)

So, I just got back from watching the so awaited Five Nights at Freddy's movie, and boy oh boy... I can't even put into words how emotional I am. It was such a wild, crazy, amazing thing to actually be sitting down on a cinema and watch a movie I waited for- what, 8 years? I remember being a child and first learning about the game through ✨youtube✨ (as most of us did let's be honest), and I'm not exaggerating when I say that changed my life forever. I got into gaming and social media because of it, I made some of my best friends because of it (shout out to the gang I used to rp FNAF with on elementary school), I discovered my interests and passions that shaped who I was and who I am, and it all started out because of a silly horror game about haunted animatronics.

And today? Today it wasn't me that went to see that movie. It was the lonely, shy 9 year old girl that got bullied at school because she liked "weird boy stuff" and hanged out with boys because they understood her. It was the 10 year old girl that saw FNAF 3 and 4 come out and discovered she loved to uncover the lore of the franchise and watched about a million theory videos. It was the 11 year old girl that watched lived as two youtubers played Sister Location the day it came out. It was the 15 year old teenager that rediscovered her love for the franchise and found Matpat's channel and started to make her own theories. It was that 16 year old teen that read the first trilogy of FNAF books and from then on took it upon herself to know every single detail about the story, plus finding out about our beloved King Of Five Nights At Freddy's™ and watched his FNAF playlist top to bottom.

It was them.

So I went there- with my crappy Vanny mask I made in 3 days, with the Freddy pushy I've had since I was 11, with my dad' stolen purple shirt, and honestly? I had the time of my life. I was at the edge of my seat the whole movie, screaming and hitting (lovingly /j) my friends every time a very specific detail came out, giggling and kicking my feet once You Know Who appeared or when something that matched the lore perfectly happened. And once me and my friends came out, we were all still yelling and singing our lungs out to FNAF songs. It was more that I could've hoped for.

I won't go into much detail on this post, because I wanna keep it as much spoiler-free as I can, but I'm just gonna say this... This movie was a hug from Scott Cawthon to all fans of the franchise, especially those that have been here from the very beginning. It was his gift. His way of saying 'thank you'. Sure, some plot points were absolute bonkers, and to be fair it lacked a bit of the Spooky Factor and more gore. But overall... I FREAKING LOVED EVERY MOMENT OF IT. I felt the same excitement that when I first discovered the games and started to get into the lore. You can tell that a lot of heart and soul was put into this, and that it wasn't made for a quick cash grab.

Was it worth the wait? Well, that depends on how you wanna see it. Keep in mind that this is planned to be a trilogy, so it has to have some loose plot points in order to set the ground for a second movie- let alone leave stuff out from the games and books. Is wasn't groundbreaking, and no, it doesn't include every single detail about the story. But it was a perfect introduction to the universe, and I think that's all it's set up to be. But I personally thought it was SO worth it and, let's be real, we've waited 8 fucking years for this! Even if it turned out to be a piece of crap (which it isn't), I would still be excited.

Anyway, yeah, was the movie perfect? No. Was a bit weird and confusing at some points? Yes. But it was made for the fans, for those of us that FNAF played a huge role in our lives as kids, and for those of us who just discovered the franchise not so long ago. It was made with love- for the games, for the creator, and for all of us. The fans that have built an amazing community that still stands strong today, a community filled with incredibly talented people like artists, singers, animators, youtubers, theory crafters (you're doing God's Work jsdhsj), cosplayers, editors, writers, the list just goes on and on. It was made with all of us in mind. So as broken and confusing as it might be, is beautiful. What represents is beautiful. And hey, it wouldn't be FNAF if it weren't broken and confusing am I right fellas?

*cries in Theorist*

So I guess my final thoughts are just... Thank you.

Thank you Scott Cawthon for all those years of scares and joy you have given me, thank you for making the game that would shape my life forever, thank you for loving your fans as much as you do, and thank you for not giving up on this movie despite all the things that happened along the way. You might have fucked up big time on some things, but I would be lying to myself if I said I don't appreciate you. Thank you for the best moments of my life.

And thank YOU, Five Nights at Freddy's community for everything you have done these years. If the franchise is what it is today is because it always had an amazing and creative fanbase backing it up and making sure it never died, no matter what sticks and stones came our way. I am so proud to be a part of this, and I hope we'll still be together many years to come.

And thank me, for making it alive and in one piece to the FNAF movie. Damn it took a lot of pain to get here, but I did it... I survived this long. And I can survive even longer.

I hope you can stay alive 5 more nights for this :)

#five nights at freddy's #fnaf #fnaf movie #fnaf movie no spoilers #review #faicye speaks

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jondoe297 · 1 year

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i missed regularly sharing all the toys an junk i get on here. i had fallen off the wagon of doin so an thanks to an all too familiar mix of laziness,procrastination an just puttin off doin somethin even if want to for some reason. i thought i'd get back to it with this post of all the stuff i've gotten so far since this year started. yeah almost no one sees these posts but doin em makes me happy so here we are. most of these are thrifted.

these aren't in order of when i got em but let's start with Superman figures

we got the Mattel DC Multiverse Super Friends Superman. (Mattel's DC Multiverse is the superior one btw. still sour they lost the license. especially with McFarlane bein generally lackluster) i've wanted this one for a long time since they were announced. got im second hand but in the box! he's really classic Superman from Mattel's DC Universe Classics line with Super Friends themed base an packaging. display background comes with part of the Super Friends logo(that you collect the whole wave to form)an a José Luis García-López drawn Superman on the other side! best part is that an the Kenner style cape😍 it's like they made this figure specifically for me lol

also got a Smallville Clark figure! not really the biggest fan of the show but it's pretty nostalgic an a Superman figure is a Superman figure(even if he's just wearin a leather jacket lol)plus these go for bonkers prices online an i got this one for like,9 bucks. Score!

also a cute lil Superman and a Man of Steel cake topper figure. can you believe it's ten years this year since Man of Steel came out?!

Batman figures next

okay so i found not one but TWO toybiz 1989 Batman figs. and on the same day too!! definitely a highlight.

a Battinson bobble head cinema cup topper. i was stoked to find any Battinson in the wild lol.

plus lil New 52 an Rebirth Batman figurines

some Robins. these were found in the same place. makes me wonder if it's from the same person who lost or gave away or sold their Robin collection. makes me pretty bummed tbh :/

i think about this aspect of thrifting a lot. Anyway..

a navy blue variant of the new 'Tooned' '66 Batmobile Hot Wheels. i love it!!

Green Lantern movie ring. was pretty jazzed to find this! movie is.. meh. it's not that bad it's the studio interference that really grinds my gears. toyline is top-notch though i always loved it!

now this is a McFarlane DC Multiverse figure i really wanted to have. ZSJL Cyborg!!

back when it just came out no one where i live got the Cyborg except the version with the helmet thingy for some reason(if there is a reason i have an idea what it might be but anyway)but i got im now an i'm pleasantly surprised how good he is given McFarlane's track record. Very happy❤

and another lil Cyborg. found in flea market but originally from a Kinder egg.

not many Marvel stuff as it happened. but some real fun stuff! especially that gem of a Spidey figure. from the Spider-Man 3 'Webworld Racers' sub-line who came with motorcycles. he has like 14 points of articulation an can fit in the palm of my hand(unintentional reference lol). texture on his suit is bonkers too. like Hasbro didn't have to go that hard for such a small figure but they did. i've also always really really wanted im but the prices for them were ridiculous back in the day so to find im in the wild all these years later.. yeah :')

we also got an Invisible Woman figure from 1997 that is so good you wouldn't believe it was made by KFC. and a Hulk as War,Horseman of Apocalypse from the 'Handful of Heroes' from like 2009-10. always love finding these lil guys an unpainted figures are generally a win for me.

Star Wars stuff

we got a Clone Wars Obi-Wan action figure. seller had a bunch more Clone Wars an other Star Wars figs but i uhh had to hold my hand an only got Obi-Wan.

a 1983 Kenner Chief Chirpa fig,without his headdress thingy. but funny enough,what are the odds,i found another one with his headdress and a 1984 Gamorrean Guard in the same day at another shop! i gave those to someone else i know who loves Star Wars figures.

we also have a Darth Vader keychain,a lil Hologram Palpatine and a few Micro Machines.

now this is the 'other/miscellanious' category

we have a Raph as The Mummy from the TMNT/Universal Monsters crossover toyline Playmates did from 1993 which just.. checks so many boxes for me. he also glows in the dark!

a gorgeous figurine of Obelix with a little dog friend💕

a lil Guile from Street Fighter who looked real nice an probably vintage so i grabbed im. looked it up an apparently he's from 1990 an from a gumball machine. NICE!!

the green fella i grabbed cuz i like alien figures an stuff an he's from '98. later looked im up an he's from a Fisher Price space set. fun stuff!

the lil orange friend is a Chimp from an animal themed sub-set of a line called 'Glyos Bit Figs' that are pixel-styled lil vending machine figures. again,so many boxes checked. i also found another one from the line before,both times with their ball/capsule,so of course i grabbed it.

last but not least that lil car i got from a chips packet lol

thanks for readin me blaberring about toys for a bit if you did. Hope you have a nice day regardless💕

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dweemeister · 1 year

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2022 Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (final)

It is highly recommended you view the direct link to this; the indented bullets are still not fixed on tumblr after a few years now.

Wow. 10 years. Where does the time go? Happy anniversary to this bonkers, wonderful end-of-year blog tradition.

TAGGING: @addaellis, @emilylime5, @halfwaythruthedark, @idontknowmuchaboutmovies, @introspectivemeltdown, @maximiliani, @phendranaedge, @plus-low-overthrow, @rawberry101, @rosymeraki-blog, @shootingstarvenator, and @theybecomestories, @umgeschrieben, @underblackwings, and @yellanimal

OPEN INVITATIONS TO longtime followers, active followers, and previous participants including: @asexual-idiot-ramblings, @biglifehightides, @birdsongvelvet, @chinadoll408, @cinemaocd, @dansmonarbre, @dog-of-ulthar, @exlibrisneh, @machpowervisions, @memetoilet, @metamatar, @myluckyerror, @noelevangilinecarson, @qteeclown, @shadesofhappy, @the-lilac-grove, and @thewolfofelectricavenue. And any other followers who might be interested in helping out here!

A good day to all of you,

After an exciting end to the preliminary round, we arrive at the true business end for 2022's Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song (MOABOS). This is tenth annual edition of MOABOS on this blog, as many of you know, and the ninth with participation from family, friends, and tumblr followers. If you asked me back in 2013 how long this would run, I would never have imagined five editions, let alone ten.

Record-keeping for this year's edition began when I saw All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989) on January 2, 2022. Somehow, that one song I picked out in that movie has survived the entire year to get to this point. Over the rest of 2022, numerous songs from various movies filtered in and out on my master shortlist, culminating into this final round.

INTRODUCTION

For those who have never participated in this before, my classic movie blog traditionally ends the year by honoring some of the best achievements from movies that I saw for the first time that calendar year (the "Movie Odyssey", in which any rewatches do not count) withan Oscar-like ceremony. I choose all the nominees and winners from each category except for this, Best Original Song. Original Song is the only category which does not require you to watch several movies in their entirety. As always, MOABOS is considered a sort of cinematic-musical thank-you for your moral support in various ways over how long I've known you for. In addition, I think it's a fun way to introduce to all of you films and music you may not have otherwise encountered or sought and to give everyone a dose of film and music history. MOABOS is but a foot-deep glimpse into my Movie Odyssey for this last year.

This final will be contested by fifteen songs. But it should (and still could be, unless I can't find it by January 1) be sixteen. Absent from the final round due to the fact I cannot find any video or audio on it is "Nous sommes seuls dans la forêt (We Are Alone in the Forest)” from 1930's Le Million. Unless I (or someone else) can find a video or audio clip of before January 1, this song will have to be considered an honorable mention. One online movie reviewer had a YouTube link to this song, but unfortunately it ran afoul of the Criterion Collection (who handle the film's distribution in North America) some time ago.

COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the film industry. And as such, for the second straight year running, there are zero original songs from movies released this calendar year (I know, some of you are wondering why I didn't see the Top Gun sequel, and that's because I haven't seen the original). There was one entry from 2021 in this year's preliminary, but it was barely eliminated.

Also reflective of how personally difficult this year has been for me, this is a monolingual field for the final. That is a MOABOS first. I've said how much I find this distasteful, that I have no French chansons, Japanese anime songs, Viet Film Fest finds, Indian cinema discoveries (I refuse to watch RRR in any language other than the original Telugu and certainly not the Hindi dub on Netflix), or anything else found their way into the mix. Tracking down a significant amount of non-English language movies I see every year requires a certain amount of effort and time, and I wasn't able to do that as much as I'd like this 2022.

For this year's final, an MGM musical makes a MOABOS bow for the first time since 2017, with one the studio's more iconic songs (albeit not in the form of its most famous rendition). Doris Day, Warner Bros.' principal musical actress in the 1940s and '50s, was featured heavily in last year's edition, but did not end up in the top ten, She returns with three songs in the final this year. This ties a record for a performer - shared by Prince who had three songs for Purple Rain in 2018 and Elvis for three songs in Blue Hawaii and Frankie and Johnny in 2020).

Animation fans might raise their eyebrows with the sort-of rekindling of a rivalry: Disney (with The Rescuers and Oliver & Company) v. Don Bluth (All Dogs Go to Heaven). Meanwhile, the ageless Harry Belafonte makes the final on his MOABOS debut. As does the incredible Alice Faye (who is here twice over for The Gang's All Here). It's shaping up to be an interesting final!

2022's winner will join this company:

2021: “Lullaby in Ragtime” , The Five Pennies (1959) 2020: “Can't Help Falling in Love” , Blue Hawaii (1961) 2019: “I Wish I Didn't Love You So”, The Perils of Pauline (1947) 2018: “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing”, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) 2017: “Remember Me (Recuérdame)”, Coco (2017) 2016: “Stayin’ Alive”, Saturday Night Fever (1977) 2015: “Amhrán Na Farraige”, Song of the Sea (2014) 2014: “Rainbow Connection”, The Muppet Movie (1979) 2013: “The Gold Diggers’ Song (We’re In the Money)”,Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

INSTRUCTIONS

Please rank (#1-15) your choices in order. The top ten songs will receive nominations; all others get "Honorable Mentions". There is no minimum or maximum amount of songs you can rank, but because of the nature of single transferable vote, it is highly recommended to rank as many songs as possible, rather than only one or two. Those who rank fewer songs run a greater risk of their ballots being discarded in the later rounds of tabulation. Again, this is all described in the "read more".

Please consider to the best of your ability (these are only suggestions, not strict guidelines):

How musically interesting the song is (incl. and not limited to musical phrasing and orchestration);

Its lyrics;

Context within the film (contextual blurbs provided for every entry for those who haven't seen the films);

Choreography/dance direction (if applicable);

The song's cultural impact and context/sociopolitical context/life outside the film (if applicable, and, in my opinion, least important factor)

Because of the difficulty to find clean recordings of much of this music, imperfections in audio and video quality may not be used against any song. You are highly encouraged to send in comments and reactions with your rankings - it makes the process more enjoyable for you and myself!

The tabulation method used in the preliminary round (10 points for 1st place, 9 points for 2nd, etc.) is being used for this round. But is used for the final only as the second tiebreaker (the tabulation method that will be used principally for the final – aka "single transferable vote" – is described in the "read more").

The deadline for submission is Saturday, January 7 Sunday, January 15 at 7 PM Pacific Time. That is 5 PM Hawaii/Aleutian Time and 9 PM Central Time / 10 PM Eastern. That deadline is also Monday, January 16 at 3 AM GMT / 4 AM CET / 5 AM EET / 8 AM Pakistan Standard Time / 8:30 AM Indian Standard Time. This deadline – and I really hope we don't have to do this – will be pushed back if there are a large number of people who have not submitted in time.

All of the below songs can also be found in this YouTube playlist (but please note you may not judge the music video of "9 to 5", you must judge the song and how it is used in context).

Enjoy the music! Feel free to listen as many times as you need, and I hope you discover music and movies you may have never otherwise heard of that you find fascinating. The following is formatted... ("Song title", composer and lyricist, film title):

2022 MOVIE ODYSSEY AWARD FOR BEST ORIGINAL SONG – FINAL ROUND

“Good Morning”, music by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed, Babes in Arms (1939)

Performed by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney

4th in Group A

This song appears early in the first Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musical of several (the two had previously appeared together in the fourth film of the Andy Hardy series) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Here, two vaudeville kids from different families – "Mickey" Moran (Rooney) and Patsy Barton (Garland) – are attempting to sell one of his songs to a musical publishing company. Babes in Arms was released a month after Garland starred in The Wizard of Oz.

If this song sounds familiar, it's because its most famous use was when it was recycled for Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor during Singin' in the Rain (1952) – a movie that recycled many MGM songs to immaculate results (MGM liked to recycle its songs multiple times for some of its musicals).

“I’ll Never Stop Loving You”, music by Nicholas Brodszky, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, Love Me or Leave Me (1955)

Performed by Doris Day

2nd in Group B

(use in film) / (single version)

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Ruth Etting (Day) has left the rough-and-tumble Chicago nightclub scene, thanks to her gangster boyfriend Martin Snyder (James Cagney). Ruth wants to break into the recording industry and, early on that journey, partakes in this early rehearsal with singing coach Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell; whose character falls for Day's).

“Island in the Sun”, music and lyrics by Harry Belafonte and Irving Burgie, Island in the Sun (1957)

Performed by Harry Belafonte

5th in Group A

Played over the opening credits of this romantic drama, complete with aerial footage of the island where the film takes place. Set on a fictional Caribbean island (and shot on location in Barbados and Grenada), Island in the Sun was controversial when it was first released due to its depiction of interracial relationships, adultery, and colonial politics.

Jamaican-American singer and actor Harry Belafonte introduced calypso music to American audiences in the 1950s. The genre, originating in Trinidad and Tobago in the 18th century, is influenced by the storytelling tradition of West African griots and often employs a syncopated 2/4 beat derived from West African musical beats. Calypso is a precursor to ska and reggae.

“Johnny Guitar”, music by Victor Young, lyrics by Peggy Lee, Johnny Guitar (1954)

Performed by Peggy Lee

Advanced directly to the final

Appears in the transition into the end credits of this proto-feminist Western. Victor Young's melody is the centerpiece to his score to this movie, and it is heard throughout. Joan Crawford plays Vienna, a saloonkeeper who has a tumultuous relationship with the locals because of her support for a local railroad project. The locals, led by hotheaded Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) find a pretext to run Vienna out of town for good, but not before the mysterious Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) shows up in town. The film was received cooly upon release, but time has elevated its reputation.

I know certain folks who have played Fallout: New Vegas are going to have a hard time setting aside their animosity for this song, but alas. “Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter.”

“A Journey to a Star”, music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Leo Robin, The Gang's All Here (1943)

Performed by Alice Faye; reprised by film's cast

5th in Group B

(initial performance) / (reprise)

Onboard a ship bound a destination to, erm, somewhere, onboard entertainer Eadie Allen (Alice Faye) starts falling with Andy Mason (James Ellison), who is shortly about to report for duty in the South Pacific. The reprise occurs as a film-ending fantasia, complete with Busby Berkeley's oftentimes kaleidoscopic mass choreography, which he popularized in the 1930s (although they were already out-of-fashion by the time he made The Gang's All Here).

In the days of Old Hollywood, key cast and crewmembers were contracted specifically to the major studios. Some of the major studios had their signature musical stars. Among musical actresses? Judy Garland was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM); Doris Day to Warner Bros; Deanna Durbin for Universal; Ginger Rogers for RKO while partnering with Fred Astaire. Until her being blackballed for a perceived breach of contract, it was Alice Faye who was 20th Century Fox's principal musical actress (she was supplanted by close friend Betty Grable). Faye makes her MOABOS debut, and it won't be the last time we see her.

“A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow”, music and lyrics by Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole, A Mighty Wind (2003)

Performed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara

Advanced directly to the final

(use in film) / (soundtrack version)

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

Christopher Guest's A Mighty Wind is a comedic mockumentary about a folk music reunion that sees three acts reunited for a send-off public TV special. Levy and O'Hara are Mitch & Mickey – once a married couple, but long separated after Mitch had a mental breakdown and never recovered. Mitch is seen having difficulty communicating and concentrating throughout the film, except when playing music. This song is heard in bits and pieces through the film until finally played in its entirety in this final scene. If you like this, I highly recommend watching Levy and O’Hara’s Oscar performance of this song (in character, to boot).

"I know this song. This is that really pretty one." – you better know this one Michael McKean, as you're the one who co-wrote it! Yes, the tall blonde lady is Jane Lynch

“Love Survives”, music and lyrics by Al Kasha, Joel Hirschhorn, Mike Curb, and Michael Lloyd, All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)

Performed by Irene Cara and Freddie Jackson

3rd in Group B

“Love Survives” appears as the first song in the end credits of this animated musical fantasy directed by Don Bluth (1986's An American Tail, 1988's The Land Before Time). To preempt your questions about the YouTube comments in the provided link, it should be noted that this song was dedicated to voice actress Judith Barsi – who plays the human protagonist, Anne-Marie, in this movie (and Ducky in the original Land Before Time) – after she and her mother were both murdered by her father before this film was released.

“A Mighty Wind”, music and lyrics by Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean, A Mighty Wind (2003)

Performed by The Folksmen (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer); Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara); and The New Main Street Singers (John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, Christopher Moynihan, David Blasucci, Mark Nonisa, Steve Pandis, and Patrick Sauber)

6th in Group B

The son (Bob Balaban) of an acclaimed folk music producer tries to put together a memorial concert on public TV to honor his late father, asking the three most famous of his father's acts to participate. After some drama among all three groups, they all come together for the concert, with this number concluding the occasion.

The video provided is from the public television alternative print that was offered as a DVD extra, not how this scene was shot in the movie. I have decided to provide the public TV alternative because the original is not available on YouTube (and also because the public TV version mirrors closely how it was shot in the film).

No apologies for that dirty lyric.

“Never Look Back”, music and lyrics by Chilton Price, Love Me or Leave Me (1955)

Performed by Doris Day

2nd in Group A

Ruth Etting (Day) has left the rough-and-tumble Chicago nightclub scene, thanks to her gangster (and now ex-) boyfriend Martin Snyder (James Cagney in one of his final gangster roles). At this point, Ruth has made it in the recording industry and is now recording a song for a Hollywood movie she just starred in. A jealous Martin watches on in the recording booth.

“9 to 5” , music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, Nine to Five (1980)

Performed by Dolly Parton

Advanced directly to the final

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song

This song is performed over the opening credits to this workplace revenge comedy starring Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dabney Coleman as the three leads' chauvinist boss. “9 to 5” represented Parton's breakthrough into pop music, having previously only been known as a country music star.

NOTE: the above link takes you to a clip of the opening credits. The provided YouTube playlist only has the music video (remember you are judging the song and its use in context, not a music video).

“No Love, No Nothin'”, music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Leo Robin, The Gang's All Here (1943)

Performed by Alice Faye

3rd in Group A

A dinner-and-a-show club is in dress rehearsal for their newest show and, more urgently, a war bond party. Eadie Allen (Alice Faye) is the performer here, with U.S. Army servicemember Andy Mason Jr. (James Ellison; whose character is on a furlough) among the few people permitted to preview the performance. Andy and Eadie had a chance encounter a few years back, with the two clearly interested in each other but nothing transpiring.

“Nous sommes seuls dans la forêt (We Are Alone in the Forest)”, music and lyrics by Armand Bernard, Philippe Parès, and Georges Van Parys, Le Million (1931, France)

This entry is a placeholder. Do not rank unless I find the audio/video to this online somewhere. If I cannot find a video/audio clip by January 1, this song will be considered an "Honorable Mention".

Performed by Constantin Siroesco and Odette Talazac

Lyrics in French

Siroesco and Talazac are two operatic singers at a stage show that is almost interrupted by the heavily indebted Michel (René Lefèvre) and fiancée, Beatrice (Annabella). Michel has won the lottery, but he has misplaced his winning ticket in his jacket. Michel's pursuit of the jacket has taken him to this theater, where he and Beatrice run out on stage at the worst possible time. They crouch behind some scenery, while this song - reflective of their relationship - plays.

“Pillow Talk”, music and lyrics by Buddy Pepper and Inez James, Pillow Talk (1959)

Performed by Doris Day

6th in Group A

This is the title song – played over the opening credits – to this romantic comedy starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson.

This was the first of three groundbreaking romcoms (an informal trilogy) starring Day and Hudson. Tony Randall also starred in all three of these movies in supporting roles. Along with Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964), Pillow Talk was considered risqué for the time and helped to contribute to the demise of the Hays Code (a series of self-censorship guidelines for almost all major Hollywood movies released from 1934-1968). For the classic film buffs out there, Pillow Talk is like a pre-Code picture that just happened to show up in the late '50s.

“Someone's Waiting for You”, music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Carol Connors and Ayn Robbins, The Rescuers (1977)

Performed by Shelby Flint

1st in Group A

Six-year-old orphan Penny (Michelle Stacy) has been kidnapped by the greedy Madame Medusa (Geraldine Page). Medusa has imprisoned Penny in a Louisiana bayou. But the resourceful Penny has sent a message in a bottle that has been received by the Rescue Aid Society, an international mouse organization housed in the U.N. in New York. This song plays non-diegetically as our two mice heroes, Bernard and Ms. Bianca (Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor), arrive.

“Tomorrow is the Song I Sing”, music by Jerry Goldsmith, lyrics by Richard Gillis, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)

Performed by Richard Gillis

4th in Group B

Thumbnail image is slightly NSFW

In this American Western film's opening minutes, Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) has been abandoned in the desert by his two companions. He wanders the Arizona desert, speaking in a folksy demeanor to no one but God as if trying to bargain over his desperate situation. The opening credits play during this song and Cable's exhortations to the Lord. For film score fans: this movie was released one month after Patton (which Jerry Goldsmith also scored).

The Ballad of Cable Hogue was an unusually light-hearted and tender Western by director Sam Peckinpah, best known today for revisionist Westerns that soaked in nihilistic ultraviolence (most notably 1969's The Wild Bunch).

“Why Should I Worry?”, music and lyrics by Dan Hartman and Charlie Midnight, Oliver & Company (1988)

Performed by Billy Joel

1st in Group B

(use in film) / (soundtrack version)

Early in this adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (but where almost all the characters are sassy talking animals), the dog version of Billy Joel, Dodger, reneges on a deal with young orphan cat Oliver (Joey Lawrence) to steal hot dogs from a human vendor.

Have a question or comment about MOABOS's processes? Maybe you would like to know something more about a song or a movie featured in this year's competition? Well, just ask yours truly! If you are having difficulty accessing any of the songs (especially if region-locked) or if there are any errors in the links above or the playlist, please let me know as soon as possible.

Once more to all, my thanks all for your support for the Movie Odyssey, the blog, and for me personally over this last calendar year and beyond. However long you've known me - whether it's been a few months, or, wow, more than half my life, it is a privilege and a pleasure to share all this music and (at least excerpts of) these movies with you. It's my hope you find this entertaining and enlightening about cinema and the music that goes along with it. Do not worry too much about this if you cannot participate, although I will be checking in as the deadlines get close. Happy listening, and I hope you have fun!

The winner is determined by a process distinct from the preliminary round. For the final, the winner is chosen by the process known as single transferable vote (the Academy Awards uses this method to choose a Best Picture winner, visually explained here):

All #1 picks from all voters are tabulated. A song needs more than half of all aggregate votes to win (50% of all votes plus one… i.e. if there are thirty respondents, sixteen #1 votes are needed to win on the first count).

If there is no winner after the first count (as is most likely), the song(s) with the fewest #1 votes or points is/are eliminated. Placement will be determined by the tiebreakers described below. Then, we look at the ballots of those who voted for the most recently-eliminated song(s). Their votes then go to the highest remaining non-eliminated song on their ballot.

The process described in step #2 repeats until one song has secured 50% plus one of all votes. We keep eliminating nominees and transfer votes to the highest-ranked, non-eliminated song on each ballot. A song is declared the winner when it reaches more than fifty percent of all #1 and re-distributed votes.

NOTE: It is possible after several rounds of counting that respondents who did not entirely fill in their ballots will have wasted their votes at the end of the process. For example, if a person voted the second-to-last place song as their #1, ranked no other songs, and the count has exceeded two rounds, their ballot is discarded (lowering the vote threshold needed to win), and they have no say in which song ultimately is the winner.

Tiebreakers: 1) first song to receive 50% plus one of all #1 and transferred votes; 2) total points earned (this was the first tiebreaker in the preliminary round); 3) total #1 votes; 4) average placement on my ballot and my sister’s ballot; 5) tie declared

#Movie Odyssey Award for Best Original Song #2022 Movie Odyssey Awards #MOABOS

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twistedtummies2 · 2 years

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The Devils I Know - Number 11

Welcome to “The Devils I Know!” For this spooky time of year, from now till Halloween, I’ll be counting down My Top 31 Depictions of the Devil, from movies, television, video games, and more! Today’s Devil is an Eggs-asperatingly Evil Fellow. Number 11 is…Vincent Price, from The Story of Mankind.

Yeah, given the actor and how ridiculous this movie is, I could not resist an Egghead reference. XD “The Story of Mankind” is probably one of the more “oddball” entries on the countdown. The film was directed and produced by Irwin Allen, a filmmaker known for his campy, colorful style of storytelling, making movies that were as inexpensive as they were absurd and bright. I know Allen best for his 1985 miniseries version of “Alice in Wonderland,” along with his work on TV shows such as “Lost in Space.” Long before those, however, Allen worked on this 1957 feature, which has become something of a cult classic, mostly due to its star-studded cast. The film takes place in an alternate future where mankind has developed an incredible weapon of war, which has the potential to lead to the destruction of the entire world. A high tribunal of celestial beings is called, as they freeze time and try to determine if they should intervene in some fashion, or potentially allow humanity to destroy itself. To this end, the defense and prosecution alike show the jury moments in humanity’s history to each of their respective ends. The defense focuses on the heroes of humanity, people who did grand and admirable things that everyone will remember forever with fondness, such as Abraham Lincoln and Moses. In contrast, the prosecution presents the villains of humanity: people like the Emperor Nero and Adolf Hitler, who forever despoiled humanity with acts of cruelty and horror unfathomable to this day.

The main issue I have with the film – and keep in mind it has SEVERAL issues – is that it suffers from two particular things: one is a very bonkers sort of tone, and two – which sort of ties into this – is its utterly haphazard casting. I’m sorry, but a movie with Agnes Moorehead throwing everything into playing a dramatic and serious Queen Elizabeth I just does not jive with scenes of the Marx Brothers as Peter Minuit, Sir Isaac Newton, and a Monk. Similarly, Peter Lorre as a particularly schlubby Nero doesn’t really mesh with Dennis Hopper as the world’s most American-sounding Napoleon. The movie can’t decide if it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and the actors largely just seem thrown into the piece with little to no regard as to whether they work in their respective roles or not. One piece of casting works perfectly, however, and that is Vincent Price as the Devil. Here referred to as “Mr. Scratch,” Price’s Devil is the head of the Prosecution, and the main antagonist of the picture. His rival, the defense attorney – known simply as “The Spirit of Man,” and played by Ronald Colman – is our central protagonist, forced to try and prove his case against the Devil’s quick rebuttals. Price plays one of the classiest, smoothest Devils in all of cinema. Dapper in appearance, refined in his manners, and eloquent in his speech, he mixes his sophistication with a roguish charm and fittingly devilish wit. Even though he’s seeking to destroy the planet and gain all of mankind for himself, he clearly has so much fun with what he’s doing, and does it with such style, you are never able to fear nor hate him. Honestly, he’s so entertaining to watch and to listen to, that the Spirit of Man’s examples of goodness and honesty become drab in comparison: a classic case where evil just seems like so much more fun than good, which, come to think of it, may or may not have been the intention. It’s a personal favorite of Vincent’s performances for me, and while the rest of the movie is a total and complete mess, this is the one element where everything truly clicks. If I was told Vincent Price in a fancy suit was the tempter of all sinners, I would have no trouble believing that, and frankly, I’d probably be okay with it.

Tomorrow, we move into the Top 10 of the countdown! HINT: A Uniquely Animated Evil.

#the devils i know #top 31 devils #october special #halloween advent calendar #films #movies #actors #acting #fiction #best #favorites #list #countdown #number 11 #the story of mankind #mr. scratch #vincent price

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britesparc · 1 year

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Weekend Top Ten #574

Top Ten Casting Suggestions for the New DCU

They're rebooting the DC Universe. Perhaps you’ve heard? What used to be known as the “DC Extended Universe” has had rather a rocky time of it in the cinema; this came as a bit of a surprise, really, as for decades it was DC who had the really successful, critically-adored comic book movies. Beginning – as we must – with Superman, and then Batman, and subsequent sequels and reboots – most notably the seismic Dark Knight trilogy – it was the older, classical comic book company that held sway at the global box office and in the hearts and minds of fans of the spectacular across the globe.

Things started to change, a bit slowly, from around the Millennium, after the success of first Blade and then X-Men – hits, for sure, popular films; but not quite the blow-the-doors-off cultural zeitgeist moments that exploded, like a distant planet, in the wake of Richard Donner and Tim Burton’s movies. But then Sam Raimi made Spider-Man, changing the tone, and shortly after came first X2 – the best movie about the X-Men that didn’t just feature Logan looking sad in the desert – and then the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And, yes, in between Christopher Nolan redefined what a superhero movie could look and feel like with the gritty, down-to-earth Dark Knight trilogy, the second of which becoming the first comic book adaptation to clear a billion dollars at the box office; but really that’s an aberration, because the story of the 21st century is all about Marvel.

It's weird, really, that it took DC so long to get its act together on the shared universe front, as all of the characters were right there under the umbrella of Warner Bros. Sure, there were hints - “this is why Superman works alone”, the multiple attempts to get first a World’s Finest and then a proper Justice League movie off the ground – but it was Marvel, the company that saved itself from bankruptcy by selling off its biggest characters to a bunch of different movie studios, who first managed to get crossover superhero movies working properly. The slow build-up of films released from 2008 to 2011 set the stage for 2012’s The Avengers, which just knocked everything and everyone over with the scale of its success. The future belonged to Marvel and the future was now.

Of course both DC and their parent company WB wanted some of that action. It just made total sense to create the Justice League cinematically; fans wanted to see Bruce and Clark and Diana all in one frame. And Warner Bros wanted a billion dollars three times a year.

What happened next is sad, really, because it involved a bunch of really talented people with the best intentions coming together and, well, making a few mistakes but also suffering from tragedy, rotten luck, and bad timing. Zack Snyder’s vision for a united DC universe has fans, of course – enough to persuade Warners to fork out millions of dollars for him to “finish” his Justice League years after he had to walk away – but it’s probably fair to say that most people didn’t really gibe with his view of these beloved characters. Man of Steel presented a grounded, grumpy Superman, which was kinda cool in some respects, but the scale of its destruction and its climactic scenes of death turned off a lot of people. Snyder doubled-down on the misery with the bombastic tragedy of Dawn of Justice, before everything just went horrible both behind and in front of the camera in Justice League. Spin-off movies ranged from the bad to the mediocre – apart from Wonder Woman, which everyone liked – and really only succeeded when they stepped away from notions of a shared continuity and just did their own bonkers thing (Aquaman, Birds of Prey, The Suicide Squad). And all the while there was this dreadful din of backroom shenanigans and bad blood that – outside of claims of racism and mistreatment – probably reached its creative nadir with the decision to burn entire films as tax write-offs.

So yes, of course the universe needed a bit of a spring clean. And now James Gunn and Peter Safran – steady, capable hands who really know what they’re doing and have made some of the best superhero films of the last decade – are in charge. And it’s sad that we’ve lost Henry Cavill, an actor who could have been a great Superman if he’d ever really been given a chance – and possibly even sadder that Ezra Miller might still get to be the Flash despite, well, everything. But the view of this new universe looks like hewing a lot closer to the optimistic, moralistic fable of the DC Universe that I grew up reading. James Gunn keeps referencing Grant Morrison. That is a very good thing. At least one of the newly-announced films seems to be actively adapting a Morrison comic. He thinks Superman should be kind! The fact that that’s a sigh of relief is ridiculous, because that’s literally the first thing Superman should always be, but that’s where we were. Yeesh.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah. I was gonna do Gunn’s job for him by suggesting actors to cast in the new DCU. I've done this before! Back when we knew we were, finally, getting a shared DC movie universe in the first place, I made some suggestions. That list wasn’t very interesting, but hopefully this one will be.

And that’s it! Here are ten actors to play characters in the newly-minted DCU. Do please enjoy!

Boyd Holbrook as Batman: I think people are making some assumptions regarding the new DCU Batman that won’t really pan out. What do we know about the character? We know he’s old enough to have fathered a child who’s now – presumably – 10-12 years old. We know, according to James Gunn, that he’s likely to be “a few years older” than a Superman who has “been around a couple of years” and “is not in his forties”. This all, to me, suggests they’re not looking to cast a guy in his fifties. After all, Bruce is usually depicted as having started his costumed career in his early twenties, so even a 40-year-old Batman could have been jumping off rooftops for a good fifteen years. And so, after much deliberation, I present to you Boyd Holbrook, a good-looking and more than capable actor who can easily put across a brooding sense of menace, who looks tough but scrappy in a Daniel Craig mould; a broadsword with a brain, a henchman with a heart. Assuming The Brave and the Bold is released in 2026, he’ll be 44, the same age Ben Affleck was when Dawn of Justice came out (so, if anything, he might be a touch on the old side!). But, hey, maybe Holbrook can persuade regular collaborator James Mangold to direct the movie, because holy perfect helmsman, a James Mangold Batman movie would be a sight to see, I mean a sight to see.

Austin Butler as Superman: okay, I'll confess straight up: I've still not seen Elvis. But Butler is good in his small role in Hollywood, and the fact that he’s just won a BAFTA and is up for an Oscar suggests that he’s got the chops. And he really does look the part. He's pretty tall, he looks good with dark hair, and technically Clark Kent is from the South so he’s got the accent. I’d wager he needs to build his frame up a bit, but what you’ve got here is a good actor, the right age, the right look, with experience already of playing one of the 20th Century’s biggest pop culture icons. And maybe we can get Perry White to say “Great shades of Elvis”.

Cush Jumbo as Lois Lane: my idealised version of Lois Lane is essentially Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy; a really tough, incredibly fast-talking woman who’s whip-smart and fearless and stands up to men in power. I always imagine scenes in the Daily Planet newsroom as playing out as a screwball comedy written by Aaron Sorkin. So we need someone with experience delivering dense dialogue at a fast pace in a confident fashion, someone used to wrestling knotty topics with a sense of humour. Jumbo excels at that in The Good Wife/Fight. I think she’d be good stood next to/arguing with Austin Butler. And I’d love to see her leading a massive blockbuster, quite frankly. And whilst we’re filling out the Daily Planet offices, let’s have Tom Hanks channelling Ben Bradlee as Perry, and Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo as Jimmy.

Jamie Foxx as Lex Luthor: I'm sticking with Superman Legacy again just to recommend a new Lex. Foxx has a really strong, solid sense of charisma that he could bring to Luthor; enough to make him seem like what he often is, the anti-Clark Kent. You need someone who can do something different to the pantomime villainy of Gene Hackman and the techbro arseholery of Jesse Eisenberg. Foxx would be likeable and funny, but also intense and genuinely threatening. Think of how he played Electro in No Way Home – basically a different, sexier, more confident character than the sadsack of Amazing Spider-Man 2. Not sure if he’d be happy being bald, though; he even had hair as Daddy Warbucks.

Jonathan Groff as Apollo: Groff is a tall, built, good-looking dude who is absolutely superhero material. He can sing and dance, and Mindhunter shows how not only his range but also how he can handle incredibly dark, disturbing material. All this combines to make him a terrific fit for a character who is, in many ways, an analogy for Superman himself, but in a team and a story that hews much darker. And I’ll be completely frank: it’d be nice what’s arguably the first gay lead character of a huge superhero movie actually played by a gay actor. But who to be his gruff, cynical, Batman-esque boyfriend Midnighter? Personally I’d quite fancy Gerard Butler.

Stephanie Beatriz as Catwoman: this might be a bit of a cheat as – technically – we don’t know if Catwoman is actually going to crop up in one of the first lot of films or shows (if it’s not apparent, these characters are otherwise all from the announced productions). But let’s face it, if there’s a Batman there has to be a Catwoman too. And whilst she’s most recently been a beaming Disney Princess, making categorically sure we did not talk about Bruno, Beatriz also has a penchant for steely-faced badassery with her role on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I think Selina Kyle would split the difference; she needs to be funnier and chattier than Rosa Diaz, but I think a good twist for the character – something we’ve not really seen in other film portrayals – would be to emphasise the street-smart, rough and tumble aspects of her character, a woman who grew up poor in the slums of Gotham. I think the edge she gave Diaz would be a cool trait to apply to Catwoman. And whilst she looks about ten years younger, she is basically the same age as Boyd Holbrook.

William Jackson Harper as John Stewart: in another universe Harper would be the perfect Clark Kent. He’s got very, very strong Clark vibes in The Good Place. Whilst he’s probably more famous for playing slightly more nebbish and introverted characters – including in his small role in Quantumania – he’s got the frame to handle a bit of action, too. And John Stewart would be a great fit, because whilst he often seems to be portrayed more as a military man in this day and age, when he was introduced in the comics he was actually an architect. I think Harper would thread that needle expertly, and I think his demeanour would be great when put up against a brash, bombastic, Maverick-esque Hal Jordan in the Lanterns series. Speaking of Jordan, who could play him? Chris Pratt would have been good, but maybe that’s too similar to Peter Quill. I dunno. Bradley Cooper?

Elizabeth Debicki as one of the Amazons: this might be a bit of a cheat as I’ve not listed an actual character, and if I’m honest it’s actually bleeding through from one of my tiny peeves about The Rings of Power on Amazon; that Morfydd Clark – great as she is – is too short to play Galadriel, whereas Debicki is about six-three. Anyway, I’d quite like to see her take on a really cool, strong action role, and the presumed political intrigue in this series would be a good fit too, allowing her to stretch her acting muscles as well as her, er, muscle-muscles. I’ve no idea what this show will end up being like or about, but as, say, a more junior Amazon investigating some conspiracy or the other on Themiscyra, she’d be terrific. And she’s already got the James Gunn connection in Guardians. And then she could wind up somewhere in the present-day timeline. Oh, I dunno, call her “Troia” and make her Donna Troy’s mum or something; she ends the series fleeing Themiscyra, coming to “Man’s World”, and centuries later having a child who inherits some of her powers and, Bob’s your aunt, there’s Wonder Girl. Look, that’s legitimately 2000% more sensible than her actual comic book origin, okay?

Daniel Radcliffe as Swamp Thing: there are three main things going for Radcliffe here in my opinion. Number one, he’s instantly convincing as a frazzled genius scientist; no one would doubt his ability to carry off the Alec Holland part of the character. He can even do an American accent if that’s what they want. But then we all know from his theatre work and his performances in films like Swiss Army Man that he’s incredibly versatile; I can picture him now, channelling his inner plant in a mocap suit to play Swamp Thing. And finally there’s the fact that, huge star as he obviously is, he’s mostly shunned mainstream blockbusters, certainly never having anchored one since Potter. I think he’s one of the few A-List actors who’d gladly spend the majority of a film unrecognisable as a giant talking heap of moss and leaves. And he’d probably be up for the weird sex scene in that one issue too.

Leslie Grace as Batgirl: to be honest I’m torn about this one but I wanted to get her in there. See, I think Grace was really, really done dirty by what happened with the cancellation of Batgirl. I want to see her given her dues and have a shot at that role. But if I’m honest, the way The Brave and the Bold is panning out, I’d actually like it to have something approaching what I consider the platonic ideal of the Bat-Family: that is to say, Batman, Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, and Batgirl. Which means Barbera Gordon has to be in a wheelchair, and in that case I think I’d rather go with someone slightly older and maybe with an identifiable edge or flintiness to them (although to be fair, I’ve not really seen Grace in anything, so maybe she could totally pull that off). How about we split the difference, and introduce Grace as a more “realistic” version of Batgirl, playing Jeffrey Wright’s daughter on The Batman 2? As for the rest of the Bat-Fam, I’d go for Joe Keery as Nightwing, Richard E. Grant as Alfred, and let’s say Russell Crowe for Gordon. If Grace was Oracle not Batgirl, I’d recommend having Cassandra Cain, but I’m not sure the girl from Birds of Prey could play this version of Cassandra, so you’d probably have to recast. And I’ve no Earthly idea who could play Damian Wayne.

Phew! That was hard. I spent a long time whittling this list down and sadly a few people fell off the bottom end (including Zac Efron and Justice Smith as Booster Gold and Ted Kord). I could probably have done separate Top Tens on possible Batman and Superman actors. And then there were tons of characters not included in the announced films and shows – Jason Blood, Zatanna, Poison Ivy, Raven, Professor Pyg, Clayface, Animal Man, Knight and Squire – that I diligently fan-cast. And I’m still annoyed at myself about not being sufficiently well-versed in Central Asian cinema, or knowing enough Asian actresses, because I’d have loved to suggest someone to play Talia al Ghul – almost certain to crop up in The Brave and the Bold – but just as I feel the new Bane actor should be Hispanic, I think whoever plays Ra’s and his daughter should probably be of Middle Eastern descent, as that’s where the character is supposed to be living and – arguably, as his origin is a bit vague – from in the first place. Having a Japanese guy playing a Tibetan guy as a stooge for an Irish guy with a daughter who’s a French woman probably won’t cut it anymore.

Anyway, James, Peter, if you’re listening – you could do worse than this lot.

#top ten #films #movies #dc #dcu #dceu #james gunn #peter safran #batman #superman #justice league

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 3 years

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Michael in the Mainstream: The Dark Knight Trilogy & Its Negative Impact on the Superhero Genre

Superhero movies have come a very long way in the past couple of decades, cementing themselves as a genre unto themselves rather than the odd action movie here or there. Almost every year a few new ones of varying quality pop up that incite equal parts excitement and derision. It’s definitely a genre people feel very strongly about, but even people who tend to not love superhero films will admit that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy is fantastic.

From 2005 until 2012, Nolan reinvisioned Batman in a way that grounded the character in reality. There’s no fantastical elements, there’s no insane science, there’s no superpowers… Everything in these films could happen in the real world. In a post-Batman & Robin world, this was seen as a breath of fresh air, and the critics loved it. In particular, The Dark Knight helped to usher in the modern age of superhero films, releasing the same year the MCU kicked off and widely being hailed as one of the greatest films of all time. That’s right, not even superhero films, films period. These films were impressive, groundbreaking, and… they fundamentally ruined superhero movies for quite a while.

Look, I don’t particularly hate these films. I think all of them are pretty good, in their own ways. But they have a lot of glaring issues that really hamper them a fair bit and yet, somehow, they became the blueprint that studios decided to look at for what they thought a successful superhero movie should be. Nolan’s films are serious, brooding, dark, and lack the whimsy and creative insanity that makes comics such a fun and engaging medium, and I think this right here is what has hurt comic book movies the most over the past decade. These are films that feel absolutely ashamed to be comic book movies, and they desperately want to seem like they’re “mature” and for “adults.” And, unfortunately for the rest of us, this shame translated over into a lot of other films, something we’re only just now recovering from.

Looking at the greatest strength of the trilogy shows this issue pretty well, that being the villains. Nolan’s films gave us truly iconic portrayals of characters like Bane, Joker, and Scarecrow, and you’re not gonna hear me say much bad about them. Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Aaron Eckhart, and Heath Ledger all do fantastic jobs as the insidious rogues of Batman. But the issue I have is that by grounding these characters in a realistic setting like this, it kind of misses the point. Joker isn’t using exploding cakes and laughing gas, Ra’s al Ghul isn’t an immortal warrior, Bane isn’t a drugged-up super soldier… They’re all just Guys. They’re Guys With Gimmicks, yes, but at the end of the day they aren’t what should be looked at as the be-all, end-all of the character’s portrayals.

And yet everyone acts like no one should ever play Joker again, because Heath Ledger’s Joker was just so good, guys! And he was good, but I don’t think Ledger’s Joker should be the absolute final Joker ever. Quite frankly, I prefer Phoenix’s Joker, because even if that version is also in a rather grounded film missing the overt weirdness of comics for the most part, he still dresses in a colorful costume, acts weird, tells jokes, and is in general more Jokery. Out of all of these villains, I think Bane and Scarecrow at least come within the ballpark of being close to how they should be, but Scarecrow is horribly underutilized and Bane is given a rather undignified sendoff.

Then there are the bigger issues. Batman himself is really downplayed throughout the trilogy, getting fairly little screentime compared to villains and side characters. This was a huge point of contention when The Dark Knight Rises came out, with most of the film featuring Bruce Wayne, and in hindsight it highlights how unwilling Nolan was to engage with the comic book trappings of what he was adapting. I like Christian Bale a lot, he’s a great actor, but I don’t think he really carries any of the films; in fact, it’s usually the villains carrying the movies. Bale is certainly not as bad as Val Kilmer in the role of Wayne/Batman, but he’s no Keaton, he’s no Clooney, he’s not even an Affleck. A lot of the time, he also just feels like… a Guy. And Batman should not ever, ever just be a Guy.

But perhaps the most egregious fault of the films is what it did to Gotham City itself. In Burton’s films, you really get a feel for the Gothic atmosphere of the city with how it’s designed, and this goes for Batman: The Animated Series too. And even the more cartoonish, colorful Gotham of Schumacher’s films pops and leaves an impact. But Nolan’s Gotham? It’s very much just a City. There is nothing distinct about Nolan’s Gotham, it’s literally just a generic city, and if you even have the faintest knowledge of Batman you will know that Gotham is not just a city. Gotham is pretty much a character itself, a dark, imposing landscape in which Batman does battle with his costumed foes. Every other adaptation I can think of knows to make Gotham feel unique and distinct, but this one just absolutely drops the ball. You might as well just have the city be New York if you’re going to put no effort into giving it personality.

And that all brings me to this: every reviled superhero movie of the past decade, from F4ntastic to The Amazing Spider-Man to Dawn of Justice, all have their genesis in Nolan’s trilogy. He laid the groundwork for these films to exist, and a large majority of the blame needs to be put on Nolan for sapping the fun out of comic book movies. Now, to be totally fair to Nolan, he’s not entirely responsible for what happened to the comic book film landscape; prior to him, the X-Men film series was giving all of the heroes dark costumes and being a bit more serious. But despite those films playing a bit of a part, there’s one major reason I don’t fault them nearly as much: The X-Men films never once felt ashamed to be comic book movies.

You have to understand, people loved grit and edginess in the 90s and had just violently rejected Batman & Robin a few years prior to the original X-Men film, so it’s hard to really fault it for wanting to avoid being too campy. But much like Blade, the films never tried to act like they weren’t still crazy comic book films. Scott still has eye lasers, Mystique is still blue, Nightcrawler looks like a demon, there are Sentinels and Apocalypse and even Dazzler shows up at one point! The X-Men franchise wasn’t always good, but it managed to balance between being silly and taking itself seriously pretty well for the most part. Magneto is still a Holocaust survivor, his relationship with Xavier still has impact, there are still emotional moments here and there, but then you also have Deadpool movies and the multiple comic book style retcons to the timeline that leave the continuity a mess, and something about that just feels right. And all that makes Logan less egregious despite being the sort of brooding, angsty superhero drama Nolan would make, because even if it is those things, it still centers around a dude with metal claws coming out of his hands trying to stop his best friend from wiping out everyone with psychic seizures. Nolan could never make this superhero film.

Nolan’s films, on the other hand, did. These films did not feel like they wanted to be comic book movies, they felt like they wanted to be serious crime films but Nolan was stuck with Batman so he just mashed the two together. And honestly, I’d probably be more forgiving if it weren’t for the hugely negative impact these films and their critical success had on the superhero genre even until this day. The first decade of superhero films as a major contender in cinema were colored by these films. People outright balked at silliness in superhero movies for quite some time, with a lot of criticism levied at the early phases of the MCU for being too goofy; in fact, at times it seemed as if the MCU was going a bit too far in the goofy direction without striking the proper balance, with films like Age of Ultron having most of its tension defused by constant wisecracks. And on the DC side, Nolan’s grounded approach lead to Zack Snyder’s flaccid filmmaking with dark coloration, moody atmosphere, and not a shred of joy to be found. Nolan is essentially the peak of dark, grounded superhero films, and Snyder is the nadir, but Snyder’s awful DC films wouldn’t exist if not for Nolan.

It was a slow crawl getting to what superhero movies should be. Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man were films tossed out only when Marvel was certain they could take risks, because absurd concepts like those would just not have been able to survive if not for years of good will beforehand. That’s not even getting into some of the more bonkers elements of later films, such as Ego the Living Planet and basically everything about Doctor Strange. In fact, Doctor Strange, for all its issues, is still a massive step forward for a genre that outright rejected magic for a long time, instead for a time turning Thor and his costars into a cast of hyper-advanced aliens, with later films having to clarify that there is magic and zombies and so on. The recent WandaVision was able to further clarify this by making Wanda unambiguously magic and not an evil Nazi science experiment.

Superhero animation didn’t suffer quite so much, but that’s mostly because, much like comics, animation is still seen as “kid’s stuff” by way too many people. And even then, they didn’t escape the shadow of Nolan totally unscathed; one need only look into the infamous Bat Embargo, which limited Batman villains so there could only be one given incarnation of said character in media. For instance, the Scarecrow being in Batman Begins meant he could not appear in the animated series The Batman. This lead to such things as no Batman characters appearing in Justice League Unlimited. It was truly a stupidly frustrating time to be a Batman fan when some of his most iconic foes were relegated to only certain appearances because it “might confuse kids.”

Let me again clarify this: I mostly like the Nolan films. I usually like Nolan, though he has become unbearably, obnoxiously pretentious these days. I think a lot of elements of them are great, I feel like they mostly have strong villains, and I don’t disagree that The Dark Knight is a fantastic film. But the thing is these are only good as AU stories, as their own thing; they should not be the template every superhero movie should follow, or any superhero movie for that matter, because they lack the ability to engage with the things that make people love comics in the first place. People love wacky, off-the-wall concepts, superpowered aliens, magic, talking animals, evil living planets, alcoholic ducks, and all that fun stuff.

People desperately want the fun, camp, and wacky stuff back in comic book films, as the success of the goofier DC films like Aquaman, Shazam, and Birds of Prey as well as the success of shows like Doom Patrol in comparison to the critical and audience revulsion of Snyder’s films, with Shazam in particular giving us such bonkers concepts as an entire family of superpowered children and Mr. Mind, the evil alien caterpillar. Thor: Ragnarok and the Guardians of the Galaxy films have become some of the most beloved MCU movies despite being weird, wacky, and wholly embracing the joy of comics to the point the latter films feature Howard the Duck and the aforementioned Ego alongside bizarre characters like Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and Taserface. And the thing with all of these films is that they’re able to balance the weirdness and wackiness of comics without losing sight of human emotion, moving storytelling, and drama. They’re both fun and deep, goofy and yet meaningful. This is what comics are, and what they should be, and anyone who thinks comics should be grim and gritty really needs to think about why they think an entire genre needs to be colored in with only the dullest colors.

I think what I’m trying to say here is this: Make a Detective Chimp movie, you cowards.

#Michael in the Mainstream #mitm #review #movie review #the dark knight trilog #the dark knight #batman begin #the dark knight rises #superhero movie #christopher nolan #DC

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bewitching-elizabeth-olsen · 3 years

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Press/Gallery/Video: Not Your Mother’s Suburbs

The Marvel Cinematic Universe comes to television with WandaVision the new Disney+ series that places a super-powered Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in the suburbs of classic sitcoms.

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EMMY – When you wish upon a luxurious star, you just might land at Club 33 in Disneyland.

Tucked away above New Orleans Square and decorated with historic flourishes (the harpsichord at reception belonged to Walt Disney’s wife, Lillian), it’s a pricey, ultra-exclusive club for members and VIPS. On August 25, 2019, Marvel Studios president and chief creative officer Kevin Feige, joined by producer-director Matt Shakman, enjoyed lunch and swapped stories there with Dick Van Dyke and his wife, Arlene.

“It was unbelievable!” Feige recalls. “You sit down and don’t know what to say because you’re so starstruck.” Shakman is more succinct: “It was the best afternoon of my life.”

They weren’t there just to catch up with a 93-year-old legend. They were about to start production on an innovative Disney+ series called WandaVision — which Shakman will only describe as a “love letter to television” — and they wanted to hear about the star’s experiences on his groundbreaking 1960s sitcom, The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Van Dyke waxed about his fellow actor and the show creator, Carl Reiner, who mined real-life anecdotes for the episodes, as well as his own delight at filming in front of live studio audiences.

In turn, Feige talked about the new series he was executive-producing with Shakman, among others. “I tried to explain how there was this robot and a witch and how she had to kill him because Thanos reversed time,” he says with a laugh. “I’m thinking, ‘He doesn’t need to hear this!'”

With the premiere of WandaVision on January 15, it will all click. Set after the events of the 2019 blockbuster Avengers: Endgame, the weekly series — which is patterned on prototypical sitcoms of various eras — explores the adventures of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her love, an android named Vision (Paul Bettany).

Yes, Vision died when the Mind Stone was ripped from his forehead in the 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War, and he is still dead. But rules can be malleable when one of the two main characters is also known as Scarlet Witch.

“What I love about Wanda in the comic books, and what drew me to her originally,” Olsen says, “is what we get to explore in a beautiful way.” To that end, even a witch couldn’t have manipulated the series’ timing any better.

When Disney+ launched in November 2019, it did so with the promise that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would soon unveil new series based on some of its lower-profile action heroes. At last, fans of the gazillion-grossing, 23-movie Infinity Saga would enjoy extensive and exclusive insights into the likes of Falcon, the Winter Soldier, Wanda, Vision, Loki and others, all in episodic installments.

But the global pandemic wreaked havoc on production schedules. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier — which required a complex, multi-city shoot and was set to lead the charge — got pushed to 2021. That left WandaVision, which aims to change the future of the medium by paying homage to its past.

“The show is complicated,” explains co-executive producer Mary Livanos, “because we’re incorporating the rules of the MCU and narrowing in on suburban family sitcoms — but not all the episodes are structurally similar.

“What’s fun about it is that it leads the audience to ask questions about when this takes place or whether this is a social experiment and if this is an alternative reality and an unraveling of the mystery. We’re excited that the Disney+ platform allows us the creative space to play around.”

Indeed, with revenues from cruises, theme parks and cinema down sharply due to the pandemic, Disney+ emerged as the clear winner in the Disney portfolio, signing more than 73 million global members in just 11 months. (The company had initially set its five-year goal at 60 million to 90 million.)

Meanwhile, the Star Wars series The Mandalorian nabbed an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series — and seven awards in crafts categories — and the MCU has expanded into the freshly minted series She-Hulk, Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.

Those successes led to a major announcement this fall from new chief executive Bob Chapek: Disney would realign its business divisions to focus future creative efforts squarely on Disney+.

Feige admits to growing up with “a near-unhealthy love and obsession” for some of the characters on his favorite shows, like Alice and Little House on the Prairie, and he’s just as committed now to his behemoth production studio.

“Streaming is 100 percent the future and where consumers want to watch things,” he says. “And hopefully they’ll want to watch our longform narrative series. An experience like WandaVision is something you can’t get in a movie. You go to movies for things you can’t get on streaming, and you go to streaming for things you can’t get in a theater. And of course, everything in a theater goes to streaming eventually.”

It was back in the days of yore — ahem, early 2018 — when then–Disney CEO Bob Iger approached Feige about extending the MCU for what would be a new Disney streaming service. At the time, Feige, who started at Marvel Studios as a producer in 2000 and became president of production in 2007, was wrapping up the 10-year-long Infinity Saga storyline.

“My team and I were wondering internally about where to go from here, and what would be the next step that was equally challenging and unexpected,” he relates. The notion of extending the brand to television “was an adrenaline boost.” Looking to showcase MCU characters who hadn’t yet reached their potential in terms of screen time, he zeroed in on Wanda and Vision and their romantic but doomed love story.

“Elizabeth and Paul were these amazing actors — who had done amazing things in four movies — but never had a chance to dominate the narrative because there was so much else going on,” he explains. “It felt fun to finally give them a platform to showcase their astounding talent.”

Bettany, for one, assumed that his run as Vision had ended with his death in Infinity War. “I was called in to see Kevin and [Marvel copresident] Louis D’Esposito and was convinced that they were going to be gentlemen and say, ‘It’s been a great ride; thank you for your work and good luck,'” he recalls. Instead, they pitched him what he describes as an “exciting and bonkers” idea for the character’s return. “Of course, I said I was in.”

During Olsen’s meeting? “Kevin told me he wanted to merge two different comic series as inspiration. He explained the series would show how Wanda is originally from an Eastern European country and grew up on American black-market products like television,” she says, then cuts herself off to avoid revealing spoilers.

At first, she says, “I was a little bit nervous about Marvel doing something on television, because what does that mean and how could it possibly intertwine? But I got so excited when I heard that nugget of the idea.”

That nugget grew into a fleshed-out narrative in early 2019 after Livanos, who is also director of production and development at Marvel Studios, tapped screenwriter Jac Schaeffer (Captain Marvel, Black Widow) as head writer. “We envisioned Wanda and Vision in this sitcom setting but didn’t know what that meant until Jac came on,” Livanos says.

Schaeffer remembers: “I got wind of this percolating crazy notion of this project and told myself that I needed to get in on that!” …

Press/Gallery/Video: Not Your Mother’s Suburbs was originally published on Elizabeth Olsen Source • Your source for everything Elizabeth Olsen

#Elizabeth Olsen #WandaVision #Avengers #Scarlet Witch #Wanda Maximoff #Sorry For Your Loss #Avengers Infinity War #Avengers Age of Ultron #Captain America Civil War #Ingrid Goes West #Godzilla

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Lance Henriksen on His Career: ‘Every Job I’ve Ever Gotten Was a Gift’

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Lance Henriksen has been one of the screen’s most distinctive character actors and overall badasses for going on 50 years. A genuine working actor who always seems to be showing up in a film or TV show, the New York-born Henriksen’s early film career featured small roles in some of the most iconic films of the 1970s, including Dog Day Afternoon, Network and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even though his long and varied run on the big and small screen was just getting underway, he managed to work with directors like Sidney Lumet and Steven Spielberg.

He also didn’t have a clue at the time that those films would endure decades later as classics of their era.

“I had no idea,” he says while speaking to us on the phone about his latest film, Falling. “I was just grateful to have a job and do my best and try. It was a gift. Every job I’ve ever gotten, I feel it was a gift. I don’t make any bones about that. It’s just a lot of luck.”

Now at the age of 80, Henriksen is a statesman of cinema in Falling, Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut. However, the older actor wasn’t always sure luck was going to come his come his way. His father was a merchant sailor who was away at sea most of the time. His mother, who worked as a dance instructor, a model, and a waitress, divorced Henriksen’s father when her son was just two and struggled to raise both Lance and his brother on her own. Stints in foster care and abuse at the hands of other family members followed, with Henriksen out of school after first grade and out of his home for good at 12. He didn’t learn to read until he was nearly 30 years old.

It was around that time that he began working in theater, first in set design and then eventually on the sets themselves as an actor. His first film appearance came in 1972, in the long-forgotten It Ain’t Easy for director (and future Star Trek: The Next Generation producer/writer) Maurice Hurley. Three years later, he was an FBI agent in Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, which got him a call from Spielberg, the red-hot young director of Jaws who was then prepping his alien contact epic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

In that film, Henriksen played one of the many scientists and technicians on hand for the arrival of the alien mothership and its crew.

“[Spielberg] was getting ready to shoot the mothership leaving, with all the little creatures and all the astronauts going up onto the machine,” the actor recalls now. “And I ran over and said, ‘Hey, listen, Steven, I’ve got an idea. What if I take my coat, throw it over one of these little creatures, and run into the Porta-Potties with it, so we’ve got proof, because this thing’s going to take off and disappear.’ And he looked at me and goes, ‘Lance, listen to me, that’s a different movie.’”

Following that mid-1970s run, which also included the 1978 horror sequel, Damien: Omen II, and the truly bonkers sci-fi cult film The Visitor, with John Huston and Glenn Ford, Henriksen wouldn’t see his next big break until 1982. That’s when a first-time director named James Cameron cast him in Piranha 2: The Spawning, which Cameron was shooting for exploitation producer Ovidio G. Assonitis.

“I like Jim,” says Henriksen of the man who would later go on to make game-changing, record-breaking blockbusters like Titanic and Avatar. “I met him on Piranha 2. Neither one of us liked that movie, but we did it. We had to do that movie. We weren’t supported very much by the producers…And then when the movie was done, we all went home and I remember they fired Jim the last day of shooting so that they could edit and control the movie.”

According to Henriksen, the producers of Piranha 2 took the film out of Cameron’s hands and presented their own edit to distributor Columbia Pictures, which rejected it.

Says Henriksen, “Jim took the same footage that they showed Columbia. He re-edited it and brought it back to [the studio]. And that’s the cut that released. It’s a great story. I hope it’s true.”

Cameron cast Henriksen in his next two movies, both of which turned into sci-fi/action classics: 1984’s The Terminator and 1986’s Aliens. It was in the latter film that Henriksen created the first of several iconic performances by playing the enigmatic and ultimately heroic android Bishop. Other 1980s standouts for Henriksen included Prince of the City, The Right Stuff, and Jagged Edge, while the latter half of that decade yielded lead roles in two horror cult classics, Pumpkinhead and Near Dark.

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Although Henriksen continued to work steadily in movies throughout the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, it was a TV show that yielded perhaps his most famous character after Bishop: ex-FBI profiler and serial killer hunter Frank Black in creator Chris Carter’s nightmarish thriller series Millennium. The series was Carter’s follow-up to The X-Files and it ran for three seasons and 67 episodes on Fox from 1996 to 1999.

“I think the thing that I admired the most was when I was offered the role, I didn’t right away know it was television,” says Henriksen, who also admits that the show’s oppressive nature and the tormented psyche of his character wore on him during its three-year run. “I got to a restaurant with Chris Carter and the director. I said, ‘Let me ask you something. This is so dark. A lot of serial killers. A lot of bad people. Where’s the light going to come from?’ And all Chris Carter said to me was, ‘The yellow house.’ And then I got it right away. It was about [Black’s] family and I agreed to do it.”

Henriksen adds, “Occasionally it sucked me in,” referring to Millennium’s relentlessly grim atmosphere. “But it was a tough show. It wasn’t an easy one. It was also kind of a groundbreaker at the time, I think.” Henriksen has been quoted as saying that it took him “a year” to get out of the head of Frank Black after the show was cancelled, and has often noted that he finds it difficult to detach himself from a character after the project has finished shooting.

When it came to Falling, Henriksen says he was actually leery at first of playing Willis Peterson, the conservative and homophobic father of a middle-aged gay man named John (Mortensen, who also wrote and scored the movie). Nearing the end of his life, perpetually angry and having pushed two wives and his children away from him, Willis is perhaps the most complex role of Henriksen’s career but one which he says was exhausting to play.

“I have to tell you the minute we were wrapped and we finished the movie, I said, ‘Viggo, I’m going to disappear for a while. I got to get myself back,’” Henriksen explains. “I was a little afraid to do it. I got so deep into some of it that I got a little afraid that I’m going to get a form of Alzheimer’s of some kind–I won’t be able to shake it. But I was able to shake it. But anyway, it was intense. It really was, the stakes were very high. And we had a short time to do it. We shot it in five weeks.”

Henriksen’s relationship with Mortensen–best known to genre fans as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings–stretches back to the 2008 Western Appaloosa, in which both men starred alongside Ed Harris. “We both love Westerns and we all enjoyed it,” says Henriksen of his first collaboration with Mortensen. “All three of us: Ed loves Westerns. He knows how to ride, he knows how to do it. It was nice to meet Viggo. He’s as good a guy as I’ve ever met. I liked him right away, really good guy.”

Nevertheless, Henriksen–a graduate of the Actors Studio and a practitioner of method acting–still wasn’t sure he wanted to play Willis when Mortensen sent him the Falling script. “It scared me,” he admits. “He said, ‘Would you do it?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’m scared, but I’ll do it.’ And then we lost the original backing and it took two years to finally get new backing, and he said, ‘You still want to do it?’ And I went, ‘Yeah.’ And he goes, ‘That didn’t sound very enthusiastic, Lance.’ I said to him, ‘The truth is, I’m going to have to visit some real dark places from my youth, my childhood, all of that, and I’m nervous.’”

In Falling, John brings Willis home to Los Angeles with him to stay with his family, including husband Eric (Terry Chen) and their adopted daughter Monica (Gabby Velis) while they look for a new home for Willis closer to John and his sister Sarah (Laura Linney). But Willis is resolutely against leaving his rural farm in heartland America, determined to stick to his sheltered lifestyle even as the onset of dementia begins to blur the past and the present in his mind.

Despite his anxiety about delving into Willis’ tortured, embittered psyche, Henriksen now imparts that participating in the film became an instant highlight of his career. “It was the best experience I’ve ever had as an actor,” he says. “The support to do it and [Mortensen’s] appreciation level and all of those things were everything that I hoped for… I have nothing but gratitude. This is maybe the best role I’ve gotten in my lifetime. I really think that.”

Those are strong words coming from an actor who has appeared in many of the definitive films of the last five decades, but Falling may well feature some of the most emotionally raw work he’s done during his lifetime in the business. “I’m grateful to be an actor,” Lance Henriksen says with sincerity. “I’m an apprentice to every new subject. It’s been my education. I’m a lucky guy, I really am.”

Falling is out in theaters, on digital, and on demand now.

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The post Lance Henriksen on His Career: ‘Every Job I’ve Ever Gotten Was a Gift’ appeared first on Den of Geek.

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discovisiondreams · 3 years

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Top 15 First Watches of 2020

I’ve never been good at staying current on pop culture, and that became especially pronounced in 2020. A year where most of the anticipated theatrical releases were pushed to VOD (and the price nearly tripled) meant that a lot of flicks I was excited for got added to the end of the “Maybe Someday” watchlist.

But in this strange year, I did manage to watch 245 movies- and 195 of those were first-time watches. Some were new, only available on the (virtual) festival circuit. Some were Criterion mainstays, films I’m horrified to admit I hadn’t seen before. But this year, when movies cemented themself as my biggest joy, I began to really track what I watched- including a “top 5 first watches of the month” roundup for every month. These top 5s weren’t ranked, and weren’t even based on technical ability, strength of dialogue, or critical acclaim. They were just the 5 I loved the best.

So without further ado, here are my top 15 of the year- one selected from the top 5 of each month, with some bonus entries thrown in as well. As a general rule, I only included features on this list- I was fortunate enough to catch shorts that streamed at Chattanooga Film Fest, Celebration of Fantastic Fest, and more, but to add them to the running would have made writing this listicle absolutely impossible.

HONORABLE Honorable Mention: The Holiday. Inspired by the fine folks at Super Yaki, I finally watched this Nancy Meyers classic. Why is it two and a half hours long?! Why is that two and a half hours so significantly lacking in Jack Black?! The scenes that Black is in, though, really shine. This one is going to be a Christmas mainstay in the Disco household (and not just because I spent money on the DVD).

15: The Love Witch (Honorable Mention, April). This one came highly recommended to me by friends of all sorts, and like most of my 2020 first watches, I’m deeply embarrassed that it took me this long to get to it. Upon finally watching it, on a rainy Sunday, I described the movie in general (and the color palette, specifically) as “sumptuous,” which is one of the most complimentary visual descriptors I can bestow upon a movie. The plot felt a little convoluted at times, but I still found The Love Witch incredibly enjoyable and am hoping to explore more of writer-director Anna Biller’s filmography in 2021.

14: The Guest (Honorable Mention, October). The Guest is one of the few movies I watched multiple times this year- and the only one I watched twice in one week. From the sultry industrial soundtrack selections to the numerous visual nods to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The guest was Extremely My Shit. The casting here is truly tremendous- especially Maika Monroe, who was similarly brilliant in It Follows. Also of note: Lance Reddick, one of my current favourite character actors.

13: The Fast and The Furious (Honorable Mention, May). 2 Fast 2 Furious (and its bespoke theme song, Act A Fool, by Ludacris) came out when I was in the 6th grade. Do you remember the music and movies that entered the world when you were in 6th grade? Do you have an inexplicable zealous love for them? 2F2F was the only film in the Fast Cinematic Universe I had seen for a long, long time. Then I saw Fate of the Furious. Then I bought the series box set, as a joke?? And then, slowly but then also all at once, I genuinely started to love this franchise. Some of them are truly ridiculous. Some of them are genuinely bad. But the first one? The Fast and The Furious (2001)? Timeless. Point Break updated and adapted for the early-aughts, The Fast and the Furious walked so The Italian Job (2003) could run. Without The Fast and The Furious, Paul Walker would just be “the guy from Tammy and The T-Rex” to millions of casual cinemagoers. The cultural impact of The Fast and The Furious simply cannot be denied!!

12: Come to Daddy (Top 5, July). Honestly, this is the exact flavor of bonkers bullshit I’ve grown to expect from Elijah Wood, and that is not an indictment. Wood’s genuine love for genre film is evident here, in what can only be described as an uncomfortable film of family, reunion, and redemption. The tense and abrasive first half gives way to a surprisingly relieving wave of violence and exposition in this critically-acclaimed flick.

11: The Stylist (Top 5, September). The feature-length debut of writer-director Jill Gevargizian, based off her short of the same name, is female-led horror that pays homage to genre mainstays like Maniac and Psycho while still being decidedly singular. Not only shot in Kansas City, but set in Kansas City, The Stylist made my midwestern heart happy. This is one that I really, really would have loved to see in a crowded theater auditorium, were this year a different one.

10: In The Mouth of Madness (Top 5, March). Despite being the beginning of pandemic awareness, March was a slow month for me, movie-wise (even though it’s not like I had anything else going on??). But I finally made time for this Carpenter classic, and I’m so happy I did. I’ve long been fascinated by stories about stories, and the people who find themselves trapped within those stories, and this one is truly, in the most basic sense of the word, horrifying. Sam Neill proves that he belongs in horror here, making his role in Event Horizon seem like a natural fit. Also a highlight: noted character actor David Warner, best known (to me) as “Billy Zane’s bodyguard guy in Titanic,” who never ever fails to be unsettling.

9: Profondo Rosso (Top 5, April). Before this year, my only Argento exposure was Suspiria (which is phenomenal), but Deep Red goes off the deep end in all the best ways. The score (by frequent Argento collaborators Goblin) is truly groovy. The number of twists and turns the plot takes is kind of mind-boggling, but also delightful. Daria Nicolodi (RIP) is at the top of her acting game here. This quickly became one of my beloved background movies- if I opened Shudder and Profondo Rosso was playing on one of their live-streaming channels, it stayed on while I was cleaning or cooking or paying bills. Profondo Rosso is a must-watch for those hoping to get into giallo.

8: Crimson Peak (Top 5, November). This one was definitely not what I was expecting, but it was GORGEOUS. I loved the world immediately (a Del Toro trademark, to be honest). As a longtime Pacific Rim stan, it made my heart happy to see Charlie Hunnam and Burn Gorman reunited under Guillermo Del Toro’s vision.

7: Palm Springs (Top 5, August). I am not typically a time-travel movie enthusiast- but I am a sucker for witty repartee and Andy Samberg. This one made me ugly-cry, which I should probably be a bit more ashamed to admit. August had a lot of really great first watches, but the Hulu exclusive takes the cake due to its novel premise, some truly heart-wrenching reveals, and the amazing casting (is there anything JK Simmons cant do?).

6: Scare Package (Top 5, May). Is there any format I love more than the horror anthology? While there have been so many over the years (Creepshow, All the Creatures Were Stirring), Scare Package might be my favourite of them all. A variety of fun and inventive stories combined with a genre-lovers dream of an overarching narrative make this one a must-see- in fact, it was the whole reason I bought a pass to this year’s online version of Chattanooga Film Fest. There’s a cameo here that absolutely knocked my socks off (and continued to do so even on repeat viewings). While the scares here are honestly minimal, Scare Package is a great love letter to the genre at large.

5: Do The Right Thing (Top 5, June). Yes, it took me until 2020 to watch Do The Right Thing for the first time. The palpable tension, the interwoven stories of Bed-Stuy’s residents, all seem timeless. Giancarlo Esposito is, as always, a joy to watch.

4: Knives Out (Top 5, February). “It’s a Rian Johnson whodunnit, duh,” states the SuperYaki! T-shirt famously worn by Jamie Lee Curtis, star of Knives Out (2019). This one has received worlds of critical acclaim, I truly do not know what I could even hope to add to the conversation. I want more old-school murder mystery cinema.

3: The VelociPastor (Top 5, January). It should be testimonial enough that The VelociPastor beat out Miss Americana, Netflix’s Taylor Swift documentary, as the top pick for January- but in case it isn’t, let me end 2020 the way I began it; by evangelizing the HECK out of this movie. Written and directed by up-and-coming triple-threat (Director/songwriter/prolific cat-photo-poster) Brendan Steere, The VelociPastor is a true love letter to genre cinema, complete with a big wink to the criminally underloved Miami Connection. Alyssa Kempinski shines as Carol, a doctor/lawyer/hooker with a heart of gold. The VelociPastor premiered in 2019 but gained tons of attention in 2020 (thanks in part to YouTube sensation Cody Ko)- attention that it truly deserves. A sequel is rumored to be in the works, but mark my words, anything to come from the imagination of Brendan Steere will be worth a watch.

2: Dinner in America (Top 5, October). I genuinely feel sorry for the other movies I watched in October (there were a lot) (they were all SO GOOD). Dinner in America, which I caught during the Nightstream hybrid festival, was not at all what I was expecting. While the other features were all very solidly genre flicks, this was…. A comedy? A modern love story?? I’mn honestly still not exactly sure, but I do know I loved every second of it. I laughed. I cried. I threw my hands up in the air exuberantly (in front of my laptop, looking like a true fool). I did not shut up about this movie online for weeks. I told anyone and everyone that Kyle Gallner is the most underrated actor of my generation and I still believe it! Dinner in America, the story of a punk band frontman who unwittingly takes refuge from the police in the home of his biggest fan, was an unexpectedly heartwarming tale of family, young love, and arson. Watch it as soon as you can.

1: Promising Young Woman (Top 5, December). This last-minute debut from Emerald Fennell, originally scheduled to hit theaters in April of this year, finally made its way to the big screen on Christmas Day, and became the 2020 entry on my annual “Christmas Day Trip to the Theater” list.* Carey Mulligan is an icon and deserves all of the awards for this. The soundtrack is sublime. The casting choices are truly incredible. While I have no doubt that the general themes of the movie will be polarizing, I absolutely loved this one- I sat in my car in the theater parking lot for a WHILE, considering just buying a ticket for the next showtime- that’s how badly I felt like I needed to see it again immediately. I look forward to writing its inevitable Criterion essay.

*Nobody else in rural iowa was interested in seeing this movie at noon on Christmas Day. I’m shocked.

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popwasabi · 4 years

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Lockdown Lookback: Catching up on the past months’ Pop Culture

Aaaaannnd we’re back!

It’s amazing what a little pandemic can do to shake you out of your creative cobwebs but if we’re all going to die, I want to make sure all my pop cultural hot takes are up to date at least.

Many of us are already on lockdown and many major movies including “007,” “Black Widow” and ummm I guess “Mulan” are all getting pushed to the backburner as no one is leaving their God damn homes unless they’re told to!

(Didn’t realize the thing I wish I had more of in the apocalypse would be sweatpants...)

But there’s still plenty to talk about from the previous months and other hot topics I have been meaning to write about but just hadn’t found the time or energy for. Life has been hard I think for just about all of us these days thanks in no small part to this pandemic. For me personally, I’ve had two different vacations canceled because of the virus and currently working understaffed at my job which is considered essential. Not to mention my therapist is on call only at this time and both my martial arts schools have been suspended, so I can neither talk nor punch my feelings out of my system.

So, I might be just a LITTLE on edge at the moment.

(My internal monologue for most of these past few weeks, more broadly years...)

Anyways, I digress, you come here because you like to read my highly unprofessional takes on pop culture and genuinely to those who have cheered me on from the beginning thanks, you guys are my prime motivators. But anyways let’s talk about all the shit I was supposed to write about these last two and a half months.

“Birds of Prey” was a hot, but needed, mess

Earlier last month I got to see the sort of sequel to the much-maligned “Suicide Squad” in “Birds of Prey and the…waaaay too long of a title for me write here.” I had cautious optimism for it because it looked strange and off the beaten path of most comic book movies and seemed to promise at the very least a fun time at the theater but it’s still also a DCEU movie so the floor was pretty low on its possible quality as well.

In the end, the movie is kind of bit of everything; the best and worst parts of the DCEU.

In terms of the good, it’s definitely outside the box, a sort of fem Deadpool first person story as told frenetically by Harley herself. Margot Robbie is, of course, still quite great at this role and you can tell she’s having a blast as this character. The humor is mostly good and visually the bright colors and cinematography pops on each screen and on that front there isn’t much to complain about.

But as a DCEU movie it does suffer from some narrative imbalance partially due to it’s psycho storyteller but mostly, and more than likely, due to corporate editing that probably axed an entire dance number that I was honestly looking forward to from the trailers.

(Seriously, I actually wanted to see the full unedited version of whatever hell this ended up being.)

It’s definitely in the “could’ve been better” camp of comic book movies but you know what? I’m still glad it exists. You know why? Because comic book movies dominate our blockbuster culture right now and if the genre wants to survive, at least artistically, it needs some outside the box films like this. I HATED “Joker” but I appreciate that it opened the door for stranger, more unique takes on a genre that is getting increasingly more stale. This movie falls into that unique category too.

(Also, to all the faux-intellectuals and alt-right nerds making a culture war out of “Sonic” vs “Birds of Prey” *kindly* reevaluate your lives please...)

We’re at the point now where comic book movies should be getting weirder, not more formulaic, and that means swinging for the fences even if a couple don’t quite make it out of the ballpark. If it takes a few not so stellar takes on the genre for Hollywood to greenlight a truly fantastic one I’m all for it.

In any case “Birds of Prey” doesn’t quite end nor continue the DCEU’s recent hot streak but it is enjoyable enough to where I would be more than open to a sequel. It’s worth a watch.

The Mandalorian and The Witcher: Two shows about violent mercenaries and fatherhood

Both these shows are old news at this point, but I did want to talk a little about both for a bit if you would have me.

First, “The Mandalorian” which was Disney+’s flagship production to begin its streaming chapter late last year is definitely a more than welcome addition to the galaxy far, far away. It’s pretty easy to feel fairly jaded about Star Wars these days given how flat the new trilogy ended but for what it’s worth “The Mandalorian” was a good mix of nostalgia bait and something new and interesting for fans to chew on. Its production value is obviously top-notch, no doubt because of all the Disney money pumped into it, it’s well-acted and thrilling and fun from start to finish. It plays heavily on the genres that influenced the series, primarily westerns and old samurai flicks, and fans of those will certainly enjoy the homages to them all.

The series was something of a coming out party for Deborah Chow who directed two of the season 1’s best episodes. Her steady hand, eye for details and tributes to Asian cinema throughout really gave the series an extra kick at times and showed how Star Wars can evolve still. Chow is set to helm the upcoming “Kenobi” series and one can only hope that she *really* leans into the samurai genre for that show.

(Hopefully, there are some “Yojimbo” vibes in there somewhere...)

The Mandalorian’s best and worst parts though are its semi episodic nature making each episode easy to digest as a one-off but also lacking some narrative tension between each. It plays kind of like a Saturday Morning cartoon to both its benefit and detriment with bite-size easy to digest plots and dialogue for the viewers but not offering a ton of depth beyond that.

The Mandalorian himself is also kind of a Gary Stu. His armor is basically impenetrable and far and away the best killer onscreen typically, making more than a few action scenes lack real stakes and tension. Baby Yoda certainly helps at times to make him more vulnerable and puts him in precarious positions plenty of times but outside a few moments (mainly episode 2 and to a lesser extend the final episode) he’s just a little too overpowered to be a more interesting character.

But this show and frankly the Star Wars series as a whole is meant for kids, no matter what the neckbeards try to tell you (violence =/= adult), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. Plenty of kids productions can be both great and even sophisticated and while I wouldn’t say “The Mandalorian” is either of those it’s a good and fun kids show for the fans.

(And yes I’m aware that the books, some comics, and games have touched on more adult stuff, you weirdos. But how would you describe the overall tone and presumptive audience of the movies and TV series as a whole, guys??)

As far as “The Witcher” goes it also has a bit of an episodic style to it as well with an overarching, albeit, convoluted story that runs parallel to it. The first 3-4ish episodes can be classified as a quasi “Game of Thrones” clone leaning perhaps a little too heavily into the tropes of that series. Once the series finally starts leaning into its real identity, a dry-witted hack and slash fantasy, the series is much more consistent both tonally and narratively.

Henry Cavil is solid as Geralt of Rivia and the supporting cast of Joey Batey as Jaskier, Freya Allen as Ciri and even more so Anya Chalotra as Yennefer are all great in their respective roles delivering some great moments throughout the season.

(And lest you forget this earworm...)

“The Witcher’s” early season struggles keep it from being as tonally or narratively consistent as “The Mandalorian” but where the monster slayer beats the bounty hunter is that it has overall more compelling drama and has more to say, leaning much more heavily into the thematic greys of the plot. There are tons of problems with “The Witcher” on a story-telling level but you can definitely say it cares more about adding some depth in between the more pulpy aspects of the story which is something you can’t say as much for in “The Mandalorian.”

Of course, I’m partially overselling “The Witcher” a bit here, it’s not anywhere near “Game of Thrones” best (yet at least), and on the flipside one could argue that “The Mandalorian’s” more subtle sense of story-telling does its themes better. But when it comes down to these two shows you get somewhat similar story-telling ideas, mostly involving both characters and their smaller counterparts, in two very different genres with equally diverging conclusions to their respective seasons.

(🎵 Toss an “Oof” to your Witcher...🎵)

All in all, they’re both good and worth a watch and I think they deserve a chance to evolve and hopefully showcase more of what they have to offer moving forward.

“Parasite” wins Best Picture! Many people have some hot takes, including the president...

Last month one of my favorite films of 2019 “Parasite” won Best Picture at the Oscars. It’s a movie that is becoming increasingly relevant as elites and celebrities alike are getting front of the line testing despite being asymptomatic in the middle of pandemic and think they can assuage our concerns and dread by poorly singing “Imagine” together within the comfort of their McMansions.

It’s about as a good time as any to revisit this movie, I mean where else are you going to go during this timeline, and at a later date I’ll write something more extensive about it eventually (hopefully) but first here’s a helpful video on one particular thing that came out after director Bong Joon Ho took home the night’s top honors:

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“Cats” is still a fever dream of madness

Back in late December, I watched “Cats” for science, as I had AMC A-List and a friend crazy enough to join me. I figured it would be bonkers and unlike anything I had seen before in the worst way but even then, I don’t think I was truly prepared for what I ended up seeing that fateful night.

I remember quite vividly going to the bar inside the theater and ordering a stiff drink beforehand to numb the pain and the bartender asking “So what are y’all watching tonight?” and beginning to laugh manically like an insane asylum patient at the innocuousness of the question. Walking into the theater was like that feeling you get before getting on a particularly scary-looking rollercoaster at Six Flags but instead of the pre-ride jitters eventually subsiding to the eventual fun and joy of the ride, only a deep sense of existential dread built up and sustained itself through what felt like six hours of the most baffling thing put to screen in front of my eyes ever.

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(The music that played in my head as I exited the theater...)

Have any of you watched the Stanley Kubrick movie “Eyes Wide Shut” before? You know the scene when Tom Cruise is walking around in his mask observing the strange occult sex orgy going on around him at the mansion? That’s kind of what “Cats” felt like except way more terrifying, somehow MORE sexual, and definitely crazier.

(Is...this some type of...intepretative dance to summon an eldritch horror??)

There’s a voyeuristic terror that comes from sitting in that theater room as you watch bipedal humanoid looking felines dance to confusing songs about “Jelicle” cats (whatever the fuck that means) and all other manner of things that should NOT take human form throughout it’s near-endless runtime. A lot was made about Rebel Wilson and the disgusting roach people she consumes but NO ONE warned me about the frankly HORRIFYING mice children in the same scene!

(I am not perusing the internet to find that image again for y’all. I have enough nightmares each night...)

The saddest thing about the whole movie is everyone, save for Ian Mckellen who seemed to be acting as if a gun was pointing at him offscreen and Judi Dench who looked 100 percent like a geriatric in her digi fur, was giving the movie their fullest effort in what can only be described as a Titanic-sized level of hubris by all parties involved. This movie really needed a “Chaostician” involved in evaluating the production for studio heads and shareholders because there were definitely NOT enough people on this project wondering whether or not this film SHOULD exist...

(Dr. Ian Malcolm coming to Universal Pictures to access the film.)

What has “Cats” wrought upon this world? The universe has been clearly out of balance since this movie came out and while I’m not saying it’s director Tom Hooper’s fault, I’m not saying it isn’t either.

“Cats” is one of those things, much like The Matrix that cannot be simply described but must be seen to believe. It’s one of the worst things I have ever seen onscreen but with the right group of people and a few stiff drinks it’s certainly an experience you won’t forget. Consider it for your next Google Hangout during this apocalypse.

Anyways, that about wraps up my thoughts on the last few months. Going to try to be more consistent going forward especially given how much more time I have now to write, for better and worse. But more importantly, just want to say stay safe y’all. It’s going to be a process to get through this and while things are more likely to get worse before they get better there will be a day when this all ends and some normalcy may yet return to our life but in order for us to get there we need to remain vigilant.

So stay at home, wash your hands, and if you want to watch movies just order it online for now and we’ll just wait until aaaallll this blows over…hopefully.

Don’t panic...

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letterboxd · 5 years

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Demented Suburbia.

Greener Grass writer-director-stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe share their favorite films while pontificating on extreme politeness, John Waters and The Swimmer.

New indie comedy Greener Grass is not the Netflix marijuana documentary Grass is Greener, but you could be forgiven for making that mistake after the directors of the former gave out free marijuana at a recent outdoor screening, according to their friend Jim Cummings (who makes a cameo in the film, and lurks on Letterboxd).

It’s been a case of watch-and-learn for other up-and-coming filmmakers, as Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe have stormed the 2019 festival scene with their utterly weird and wonderfully bonkers debut feature. Nobody is doing red carpet lewks like them, nobody else is handing out free weed (that we know of), and nobody else has made a film quite like theirs. Attracting comparisons to the films of David Lynch, Anna Biller and Tim Burton, but utterly at home in its own creepily perfect world, Greener Grass is the WTF-is-up-with-white-people film America deserves right now.

And it’s the culmination of years of creative growth for DeBoer and Luebbe, friends and Upright Citizens Brigade veterans, whose suburban moms Jill and Lisa first appeared in the Paul Briganti-directed short of the same name (for which they won the 2016 SXSW Special Jury Award for Recognition for Writing). DeBoer and Luebbe stepped into the directing chairs for The Arrival, another short exploring demented suburbia, while developing Greener Grass for television.

When a series failed to eventuate, they spun Jill and Lisa’s world into the feature film, landing on the unforgettable location of Peachtree City, Alabama, a real town built for the golf-cart lifestyle. Greener Grass hit the spot for many Letterboxd members at its Sundance premiere: “Just what I needed after seeing so many dark films!” was Alicia Malone’s reaction. “Unlike anything I've ever seen but … tackles ideas I have never been more familiar with,” wrote Karsten.

The story kicks off when Lisa compliments Jill on her newest baby and Jill, following suburban rules of politeness, hands the baby over to Lisa to raise. This is far from the strangest thing that will happen to a child in Greener Grass.

We needed to know where this wild duo get their filmmaking inspiration from. When we spoke with DeBoer and Luebbe they were in “high heaven”, having just held the LA premiere of Greener Grass.

Lisa, Dennis, their son Bob, their adopted daughter Madison (now Paige), and their newborn soccer ball, in a family portrait from ‘Greener Grass’.

What were some of the real-life ‘greener grass’ moments that inspired your film? Dawn Luebbe: There’s one story which Jocelyn tells about her aunt who was at a dinner party one night. She was in the kitchen talking to the host and complimented them on her apron—“that’s a cute apron!”—and the host took it off and said it “you must have it, take my apron.” At once she was like, “oh no, I just like it, I don’t need it,” and the host insisted and wouldn’t drop it. So that night Jocelyn’s aunt left with that apron. Of course, that’s just a very small example of politeness taken to the extreme. We took that general vibe and added to it and really blew it out.

Jocelyn DeBoer: I feel like we experience this at restaurants too. Dawn and I are from the Midwest, so we have a problem where no-one ever really wants to eat the last bite of something that’s shared. I do remember one experience where I was on a double-date with some acquaintances I didn’t know so well and we were eating sushi. Someone had those crispy rice things that have some spicy tuna on top and when the waiter brought it out, one of them fell to the floor. Our friend just picked it up and said “10 second rule!”. The waiter felt bad and offered to bring new ones and we were saying, “Yes, get the new sushi. Don’t eat that one off the floor!” But the person didn’t want to make the waiter feel bad and ate it right in front of them. I thought, ‘this is a Greener Grass moment for sure!’.

You’ve said elsewhere that you tried to avoid referencing other films in the development of yours, but can you tell us some films that you love, that peddle in the same story area of ‘demented suburbia’? JD: We always admit that we were watching Twin Peaks together at the time we were making our short, so there’s no denying that David Lynch is an inspiration to us. Mulholland Drive, of course. Blue Velvet, too. The two of us just love John Waters, he rocks.

DL: We love how John Waters satirizes suburbia but he also clearly has such love and adoration for it too. It’s our dream to strike the same balance.

JD: Yeah, we’re laughing with the people we grew up with, not just at them.

DL: I would say also Edward Scissorhands was another movie that was a point of reference in terms of the bright pastel color-block world, with this element of darkness filtering in.

JD: We love satires like Brazil, the visual comedy especially. We both loved that surreal world. Luis Buñuel, of course, with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, has the sketch-like aspects in a narrative film we wanted to do. We could just go on!

Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Marriott (Janicza Bravoin) in a scene from ‘Greener Grass’.

Greener Grass technically has a lot in common with great horror films—one of our members, Sara, writes: “This reminded me so much of Halloween with the use of voyeurism and the John Carpenter-esque score… Suburban moms are ten times scarier than Michael Myers”. So since it’s Hallowe’en, tell us your favorite, go-to horror films. JD: I don’t know if this counts as a Hallowe’en movie but I love Rosemary’s Baby. That and The Shining come to mind first.

DL: Those two very much for me too. You know, I have to admit that maybe until about five years ago, I thought I was not a fan of horror. I feel a little not in the best position to speak to that. I tried very much to cram in what I can and then I discovered I actually love horror movies.

JD: The funny thing is that no-one loves true crime more than Dawn!

DL: Yes, true crime is my greatest passion.

Which film turned you onto horror, Dawn? DL: I actually think it was Rosemary’s Baby. I saw that and thought ‘this is very scary and I love it’. This is more recent, but Get Out, too. I found the marriage of comedy and horror to just be incredible and the visuals in that movie, to have such a sense of cinematic comedy-horror, just blew my mind.

You gave some of the best lines to the child actors in Greener Grass. What was your approach to working with them to capture the absurd spirit of the film? DL: That’s so nice! We absolutely love Julian Hilliard, who plays Julian, and Asher Miles Fallica, who plays Bob. From the second we saw their audition tape, they so got the tone, the characters, and they just jumped off the screen for us. They’re so mature in a way. They understood the comedy and the tone in a way we did not anticipate.

JD: They took their roles so seriously. One story we love about Julian is how he had to fall in the pool and we shot that very early on. We told him we want him to fall just like a plank and we’re showing him YouTube videos of planking so he was practising it in the hotel pool. We went on the day to shoot that scene, and the take that’s in the movie is our first and only take. He just nailed it perfectly. A couple weeks later, we went to shoot the first scene of the movie, which is when he falls in the soccer field. We go to shoot it and Julian starts to fall in a hard plank, just like he did in the pool but on the grass. We were like, “wait, no no no, you don’t have to fall like that!” and he just looked at us and went, “but that’s how Julian falls!”

What streaming platform is Kids with Knives on? Seriously: we’re fans of films that build a complete world within, including the fake shows and commercials you see playing on television sets. Can you tell us some inside stories of developing those? JD: Those were so much fun for us to work on.

DL: These kids were just so incredibly enthusiastic and Jocelyn had them circle round and asked them what kind of gymnastics can you do, let’s see what you got. And then one after the other they were doing the splits, back-handstands… We thought, ‘this is great—Gymnastics and Knives!’ We should have been filming that.

We’ve really enjoyed showing your trailer to people for that ‘what-the-fuck’ reaction. What’s a bizarre film that you love to recommend to people? (We asked this same question to Daniel Scheinert who directed Swiss Army Man and The Death of Dick Long and he said Greener Grass.) JD: Wait, are you kidding?! That’s so nice, oh my gosh! The first film that came to mind is Dogtooth. I’m always curious to talk to people about that one. Dawn, what about The Swimmer? Have you seen The Swimmer? You have to. It’s the Burt Lancaster vehicle.

DL: It’s about a man who crosses his county by swimming across every swimming pool. I’ll just say: what you think the movie is in the beginning turns out to be very different to what the movie is. The protagonist changes quite a bit.

JD: One of the coolest things about how we’re travelling the world promoting Greener Grass is how we get to talk to people afterwards and they go, “Oh the movie reminds me of this, it reminds me of that.” It was the director of Fantastic Fest who told us we have to watch The Swimmer. We watched it on the plane and there is a scene where a man is kind of obsessed with the filtration system in his pool. Everyone is talking about how great their pools are the whole movie, so yes, this is like our movie, thank you.

DL: There’s also a passionate monologue about a hot-dog wagon that’s the best thing that ever happened in cinema.

JD: It’s fantastic!

What are your go-to comfort movies? How many times do you think you’ve seen them? DL: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory I’ve probably seen 500 times.

JD: I really love Dumb & Dumber. I’m also a big comfort watcher of the Sex and the City TV show but I don’t recommend the movies!

What’s a film you wish you had made? JD: I want to say Roma, but that movie couldn’t be more different from Greener Grass. I loved it.

DL: For me, I’ll say Waiting for Guffman. It has such a special place in my heart. I just remember when I was probably fifteen or sixteen seeing that movie in Nebraska and laughing so hard my stomach hurt and thinking, ‘wow, movies can be like this?’

What’s a beloved movie you couldn’t get into? JD: Now I just feel bad talking about other films in a bad way. I’m really glad this film exists—but personally I had trouble getting into the Wonder Woman movie. I think there’s a lot of cool things about it. Maybe I’m just over superhero movies.

Dennis and Jill share an extra-marital kiss in ‘Greener Grass’.

You told a journalist at Sundance that you “did have one storyline that you pulled late in the game in fear that it might be taking something too far. We still fight about that decision and Dawn is wrong”. Are you prepared to tell us that twist now?! JD: I don’t know why I said that because we just set ourselves up to be asked that all the time. We are not going to tell you what it is, but we can tell you one storyline that Dawn and I actually loved that we ended up cutting before going into production. In a previous draft of ours, Buck, Kim Ann’s husband, who she divorces and he starts to become a cowboy, shows up at a kid’s birthday party with a new girlfriend and all the women are gossiping about, “Oh no, did you hear Buck has a new girlfriend, her name is Pamela,” and, well, she’s just hair. It turns out when we meet Pamela, she is just a very large, floating blowout. At this time Buck was also trying to sell a jet-ski because Pamela can’t do wind. It was a favorite bit of ours.

We did a few script readings with our comedy writer friends and paid attention to what people laughed at and what people talked about afterwards. No-one ever mentioned Pamela. They didn’t say she was confusing, they didn’t say they liked her nor that they didn’t like her. And we were, like, for just a character who’s all hair to not be spoken about at all, it’s not a good sign and we should lose her. Since then, we had people who read those scripts and [said]: “Why is Pamela not in the movie?!” and we’re now “Well, damn. We don’t know!”

DL: Maybe we’ll make a movie about Pamela one day.

You were working with such a great cast of improvisers. How did you strike a balance between what you had on the page, and what they could bring on set; in what ways did they surprise and delight you? Not only your actors, but for the artists on set such as your costume and production designers. DL: We were just so blessed to work with these incredible improvisers; Mary Holland (Kim Ann), D’Arcy Carden (the school-teacher, Miss Human), Neil Casey (Lisa’s husband, Dennis) and Beck Bennett (Jill’s husband, Nick). It was such a gift. I would say the movie is probably 95% scripted, so it was pretty close to the script. There were a number of improv moments in the final cut that we absolutely loved. One of my favorite lines in the movie is when Kim Ann is sitting on her porch and Jill arrives and hands her a taco dip and Kim Ann asks “is it seven layers?” and Jill admits it’s only five and Kim Ann says “put it on the floor!” That line is totally improv’d by Mary in the moment. She’s just a dream.

JD: It’s true, our designers added so many things. It was something that we talked about from the very beginning, that we want there to be comedy in every frame of the movie. We love having Easter eggs. We found one after the SXSW screening. Dennis tells a joke at the soccer field and everyone laughs way too hard and he fancies himself a comedian. In the scene in Lisa’s living room when the kids are watching Kids with Knives and Dennis is sleeping, we found that the production designer Leigh Poindexter added a VHS tape that’s sitting on the coffee table that’s just labeled ‘Comedy’, as if Dennis has been studying comedy for his joke, which we thought was so funny.

Our costume designer Lauren Oppelt added so many little touches, but one we really loved: Nick is always wearing our family’s color, pink, and a very gender-normative blue. After Nick and Jill get divorced, he shows up in all beige to go get more pool water, but for the little logo on his polo Lauren embroidered a sad face. It was so funny. We loved that touch.

Finally, a question we’ve been asking filmmakers all year: which film made you want to become filmmakers? JD: It’s so, so long ago but I think for me it was Memento. I saw that when it first came out in the theater, with my Dad. I was just a child then but it blew my mind.

DL: Welcome to the Dollhouse. That was the first true dark comedy I saw where I was deeply disturbed by how much I was laughing. I want to make something like that too.

Related Letterboxd Lists

Sinister Suburbia: what’s really going on in that neighborhood?

Creepy Teenage Suburbia: “settings not limited to but including: high school hallways, proms, corn fields, religious dictatorships, convenience stores, football pitches, family compounds, back gardens.”

Films Directed by Women: Vanessa’s comprehensive—and growing—list of films directed by women.

‘Greener Grass’ is an IFC Midnight release. The film is out now in selected US cinemas and on streaming platforms. All production stills courtesy IFC Films.

#greener grass #ucb #upright citizens brigade #dawn luebbe #jocelyn deboer #jim cummings #indie comedy #indie film #directed by women #female directors #improv #peachtree city #letterboxd

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matchbox-fighting-furies · 4 years

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Introducing the Fighting Furies action figures!

In 1973 the British toy company Lesney Products & Co. Ltd began planning what would be their first foray into the burgeoning and lucrative market of boy’s posable action figures and accessories. Principally known for their celebrated Matchbox brand of small replica die-cast cars and extensive range of collectable vehicles, their Fighting Furies action figures would also employ the ‘Matchbox’ trademark, launching first in the U.S.A in 1974 and then shortly afterwards in the U.K and Europe the following year. European trade buyers could instantly order directly from stock and the products promptly began to appear in retail stores around the world, including Canada and as far afield as Australia. Standing at 21.5cms (8.5”) – but occasionally described by Lesney as being 23cms – they lasted for a run of 5 years in total in Europe and the UK, but soon petered out after only 2 in the U.S.

The two primary figures – Captain Peg-leg Pete (aka Captain Peg-leg) and Hook – were generic and exotic 18th century pirates whose aliases were somewhat insensitive epithets of their physical disabilities, but in the world of 1970s toys, amputees seemingly enjoyed positive discrimination for the job of pirate. Clearly either health and safety standards on-board their respective ships weren’t what they should’ve been, or the joys of lawless buccaneering came with their own perils of the job. It’s unknown whether the recipients of these action figures drew any lessons from the apparent physical dangers of being a high seas pirate but presumably the spoils of violently attacking trade route ships and other vessels in order to extricate them of their possessions so as to boost one’s own personal wealth were sufficient to offset the risks and exciting enough for the protagonists to be considered adventure heroes! Their wayward life of fighting, deceitful disguises and testosterone charged camaraderie were clearly sufficient for children to be wilfully shanghaied into “set the mail-sail” escapades! (And, as for the pirates, this was a time before HMRC, or the IRS, so we can turn a sailor’s patched blind eye to their somewhat carefree enterprise for instant wealth creation and general disorderly antics).

“While cruising in the Caribbean, Peg Leg Pete’s ship ‘The Sea Fury’ is attacked by the rival pirates led by Hook. As the two leaders battle around the deck the other Pirates marvel at the strength and ferocity of the struggle. Finally, both Peg Leg and Hook burst into laughter, grasp each other’s hand and vow to fight together to capture treasure… The fighting Furies are formed!!” [sic]

The full adventure story from the adventure Booklets/Leaflets included with the Peg-leg and Hook Figures.

The figures featured several innovative features, most famously incorporating the igneous ability to throw a knife or repeatedly slash away with a cutlass via releasing the figure’s spring-action right arm or by repeatedly pumping the button discreetly embedded on their side, under the left arm. Impressively this core feature happily continues to perform in virtually all vintage “played-with” examples and undoubtedly justifies their assertion for fighting furiously. The products also put heavy emphasis upon promoting their design for “Action-Flex” bodies, which allowed for impressively agile poses – although they were susceptible to eventual loosening after heavy use – and the Lesney company had duly applied for patent protection. Furthermore, the Peg-Leg figure imaginatively incorporated into his (bottom of the range) prosthetic leg a “secret” map tightly rolled and hidden inside, which could be removed by unplugging the leg’s stopper! This now lovingly renowned feature typically ensured that every map was destined to be lost as it was notoriously difficult to return once unrolled. (Although the idea was always an ill-considered precaution whenever peg-legged pirates went for a paddle).

Adorned in period style dress the figures were clearly inspired by caricatures established by Hollywood’s portrayals of historic swashbuckling antics and by the Boys Adventure literature of a previous era, but historic sea-fairing adventures, such as those featuring Jason and his Argonauts, continued to be popular in cinemas throughout much of the 1970s. Curiously, Peg-Leg in particular appears to be a cultural hybrid mixing the physical icons of clichéd European pirate folklore with the handsome persona of a ‘leading man’, while both seemingly representing exotic origins and not the stylised Cornish or British influences which might have been expected for pirates produced by a British company. Peg-Leg’s enigma was suitably ambiguous, and the designs sought to be internationally relatable with universal market appeal while clearly careful to avoid any inadvertent copyright conflicts with facets and appearances identifiable as any famous onscreen properties.

Going by the adventures, which were provided throughout the pair’s accessory packs, it’s clear that the handsome Peg-leg, with his thick slick locks of Hollywood hair (and, as were the rules of the time, his more European appearance) was the leading man, with Hook occupying the traditional and period device of the faithful sidekick established by, among others, Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and Tonto (in an ill thought through contradiction to his ‘Lone’ claim), the Green Hornet and Kato and even Robinson and his companion Friday. Regular references throughout the product line to the Spanish Main, pinpoint their adventures to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and indirectly indicates that Captain Peg-leg, with his dark features and skin tone, might have been the only Spaniard named ‘Pete’?

The Pirate figures and their default outfits:

Described as “savage” in official Matchbox literature, perhaps disconcertingly they were both weaponised with their own cutlass and a hand dagger. Being avid sword fighters, it was easy to press their buttons: literally! Tucked away on their side, under their left arm, was the all-important button which raised and released their spring-action right arm for “Fantastic press action sword fighting!” This could also be deployed manually for “Fabulous knife throwing action”; helpfully speeding up the process of losing these little accessories.

While the typical loss of the hidden map from the Peg-leg figure is notorious and it rarely survives in situ, many vintage “played with” examples do at least manage to retain the leg’s end plug (if not the figure’s small knife) but less well recognised is the fact that every loose and played with example of both Hook and Peg-leg will inevitably no longer be sporting their tiny “gold” plastic ring (unduly added to the independent little finger of their sword fighting hand). These usually forgotten and overlooked micro-accessories – which weren’t transparent, or skin toned, but were golden yellow with a bulge on the outer side and representative of the typical bling such characters would wear - are only ever to be found on mint boxed examples and even then, they may already have fallen off and are languishing somewhere within the packaging. Ironically however, you just might be forgiven for suspecting that their primary purpose was to ensure that the cutlass remained securely held in the figure’s hand while still displayed in the product’s corner window packaging (and for rapid sword fights), as they were fitted to the finger after the sabre and its hand guard were embedded into and over the toy’s grasp, helping to keep it in place.

Both figures were kitted out in colourful period piece attire, although which period exactly is anyone’s guess, but a loose placement might point to the late 18th century. Their default outfits are satisfyingly vague enough for their mystique to allow imaginations to run unhindered and they generally rustle up the spirit of non-specific exotic south seas tailoring. Hook sports his own pair of striped European style socks and colonial style buckle shoes while Peg-leg could seemingly afford more luxurious knee length swashbuckling boots – only without any buckles - as he only needed the one for his left foot. Both sport natty gold braid waistcoats – although Peg-leg insists upon wearing an undershirt as he’s the leader and is clearly less barbarous - and presumably in the interests of keeping in touch with their more fashion-conscious sensibilities both wear bewilderingly bonkers long and flowing silk like sashes around their midriffs of bright yellow and a vivid orange. Owing more to the 1970s, these cost-effective adornments added a flourish to their appearance although they look too synthetic or invented when compared to their optional accessorised outfits which were sold separately.

The figures themselves were exceptionally well designed, articulated and unusually poseable with sharply detailed sculpting in the faces; although Hook can appear half asleep depending upon his eyeliner paint job and appears to be perpetually staring at your shoes. Such was the effort, originality and pride taken in these new action figure designs the product packaging boasted Patent Pending status and the ‘Pat. Pend.’ logo was prominently shown.

Captain Hook evidently paid pleasing and careful attention to his appearance, sporting a huge purple chest tattoo and presumably regularly spending hours carefully shaving his scalp and leaving only one rigorous side-of-the-head patch to grow lusciously long? And after grooming his moustache he seems to have still found time to apply some very effecting eye mascara; careful to look his best for any pirating escapades. (This would also save time if heading straight out after work on a Friday). Hook’s enigma is aided by a general complexion indicating the character’s potential east Asian origin – making him the only one of the team destined to convincingly sport the optional Kungfu Warrior outfit - while his default garbs allude to western Asia; all happily helping to underpin his ‘of no fixed abode’ elusiveness.

Although seemingly planned alongside the original two pirate figures, children would have to wait until 1976 for the additional action figure of The Ghost of Cap’n Kidd to join the range along with his inventive harnessing of the luminous glow-in-the-dark fascination bestowed upon all children of the 1970s. No doubt in clear support of unadulterated spookiness Cap’n Kidd’s ghost figure would actually glow in the dark, recreating the only spectre of ghostly goings-on acceptable to young minds and his loose, semi-transparent, pale remnants of perished clothing would work harmoniously with his underlying skeleton as it glowed. Physically the figure followed the same established build as the others but was made entirely in a light lime-green coloured plastic with the all-important luminous paint providing his USP ingeniously and selectively applied to the body and face in stripes and blobs to rather convincingly create the appearance of a glowing skeleton after lights-out! He had the same sword slashing “action arm” but his outfit and accessories were decidedly minimal with only a weatherworn skimpy shirt and frayed pants, a hat and one miserly sword. Even his boots had been spirited away; although his tricornered hat and cutlass did glow-in-the-dark in their own right.

Many will report that there were only ever three official figures formally created for the Fighting Furies Pirate line, but wait, was there a fourth!? There is also the Falcon bird of prey figure included in the Hooded Falcon Adventure pack, but regrettably it wasn’t equipped with the same press-button sword fighting action.

*** Find out more about the Fighting Furies Adventure packs or checkout all 9 Fighting Furies posts! ***

#fightingfuries #actionfigures #vintageactionfigures #vintagetoycollector #matchboxfightingfuries

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iamcinema · 5 years

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IAC Reviews: #008: AGONi (2015)

In a previous review, I tackled the long awaited short film THE TAMiNG OF PATTiCAKES by Ryan Logsdon, a prequel to his debut film AGONi. The film was a buzz in the underground horror community upon its release and screening at Slaughter in Syracuse, with a now private video from a Q&A panel with Logsdon and nearly a dozen other independent and underground filmmakers talking about their work, thought process, inspiration, future plans, and advice to bestow on aspiring filmmakers - including Logsdon talking about his personal fears and insight about the making of the film.

I’ve been wanting to review this for nearly two years, and now that I have a copy that was gifted to me, it’s time to cross another one off my list.

AGONi in One Gif:

Wow, that ending though.

Okay, so what is AGONi about? The film centers on that of Maxwell Edison, a thrill or lust killer, depending on how you look at things, and the companions he makes along the way. It’s very much inspired by Fred Vogel’s infamous August Underground series as a found footage snuff film, and it’s framed as video evidence being held by the Agoni County District Attorney’s Office - as displayed in the corner of the screen throughout the duration of the film.

One of the stark differences between the two is that the violence is suppressed quite a bit. In the August Underground trilogy, they don’t hold back any of the punches or shy away from showing you a total massacre and the absolute lack of hope for the victims. With AGONi, this isn’t the case, but not in a bad way. Much of the violence and graphic content is held back, cutting away just before you see the bloodshed take place - leading you to need your imagination to picture what happens next. Some may say they feel cheated by this, but I feel it helps and it adds to the concept that what you don’t see is often scarier - especially with the sequences that we get around the final act.

Maxwell and his unnamed accomplice are also an interesting mirror to Peter and Crusty, respectively; specifically in Mordum and Penance. While Peter and Crusty are batshit bonkers and off the rails, these two are dark in their own right that isn’t extremely hot tempered and I’m not sure if their cool-headed demeanor makes things darker or not. Similar to the August Underground trilogy, the film has it’s slower moments and it can slog on just a bit. However, when one of those aforementioned sequences comes up, it can feel a bit like whiplash because you didn’t expect it to go that far. By far the most shocking moment comes in the wake of one of the murders, which was brought up during the Q&A panel. It’s an unremorseful shade of darkness that I haven’t seen in quite a while, and it’s twisted in all the best ways that you’d look for in an underground film. On a final note regarding parallels, the film ends just like each of the August Underground films do, which is on an abrupt note during an uncomfortable moment - like slamming on the brakes of your car.

It’s unclear as to what happens to Maxwell and his accomplice from here, but if Ryan decides to pick up the series again (beyond PATTiCAKES), maybe we’ll get our answer. The film isn’t perfect, but what microbudget horror film is? If you’re a fan of underground cinema or just the very niche sub-genre of pseudo snuff films, I’d say to take a look at this sometime if you can track down a copy of the film. It clocks in at roughly 67 minutes, so it’s not very long at all.

RATING: 6.8/10

#agoni #film #horror #iac reviews #horror review #2010s horror #2010's horror #horror movie #horror movies #horror film #underground horror #extreme horror #rvl #ryan logsdon

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sophie-turner-fan · 5 years

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The Female Stars Of Game Of Thrones Tell Vogue What To Expect From Season 8

In leafy Dulwich, south London, four stars from Game of Thrones convene in a Georgian house for Vogue. With the sky outside a washed-out grey, the jewel-like colours of their Balenciaga and Givenchy gowns are almost obscenely bright. In the fictional world of Westeros, a mighty gathering such as this would be a prelude to war. After all, these women play four of the strongest characters on the blockbuster HBO series that helped revitalise the TV landscape, launched a thousand water-cooler conversations, won 47 Emmys and turned a generation of British talent, including this foursome, into bankable global stars.

If Game of Thrones proves anything, it’s that it requires full commitment – to gore, intricate plotting and gargantuan world-building – to craft a cultural phenomenon. Same-day viewers quadrupled since the first season, in 2011; cross-platform numbers for the seventh season averaged 30.6 million viewers per episode – more than the populations of Greece and Belgium combined; and for seven consecutive years it was the world’s most pirated TV show. Fans breathlessly pore over every last detail that emerges from the notoriously tight-lipped set, right down to the size of the green screens being used or the choice of crown deployed for each character. The series has dispelled the idea that fantasy is solely for male dweebs. It’s no understatement to say that the forthcoming eighth season – the show’s final six instalments – is the most exciting TV comeback of the year.

Lena Headey, 45, who plays merciless Queen Cersei, arrives first on set in a shaggy faux fur-trimmed Acne coat – a post-Christmas gift to herself, she tells me. Gwendoline Christie, whose 6ft 3in frame led to her casting as noble warrior Brienne, appears in a necklace and dressing gown. “There she is! The lady of the day!” Headey cries. Christie, 40, puts on her best fashion-assistant voice: “When you’re ready,” she demurs, as if about to usher Headey on set. They burst into laughter.

The atmosphere is less Red Wedding massacre, more congenial college reunion. The actors have been working together for almost a decade. Thrones is a “big chunk of my existence”, Christie says. Or, as Headey has it even more directly, it’s been long enough for “two children and a divorce”.

Williams and Turner were only 12 and 13 when they were cast respectively as sisters Arya and Sansa Stark, the former a tomboy turned assassin, the latter the brat who matured into the queenly Lady Stark of Winterfell. Their lives have changed in real life, too, of course. Filming aside, Turner is engaged to the musician Joe Jonas, while Williams has launched Daisie, a social networking platform for creatives. “The older ones of us always go, ‘Look, it’s f**king killed us!’” Headey laughs. “Then you watch Maisie, who arrived as a baby, and Soph, who are now these incredible women. It’s just bonkers.”

It’s easy to forget this TV goliath was once a risky proposition. Game of Thrones arrived in 2011, a decidedly unmagical time in entertainment. The Lord of the Rings trilogy had been and gone; the Harry Potter films had just wrapped. Critics turned up their noses at the idea of a fantasy series that combined CGI dragons with Tarantino-style violence and West Wing-level political machinations. “None of us knew,” Headey says. “You do your audition, you get a job and then you think, ‘Will anyone watch this?’”

But they did. After a slow-burning first season, executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss set the ratings on fire when they killed off their seeming central lead, Sean Bean’s ill-fated patriarch Ned Stark. Audiences were thrilled to know that nobody on the show was safe – a fact confirmed by subsequent deaths in their multitudes. Beloved characters have been poisoned, stabbed, blown up, eaten by dogs, shot with arrows, starved, beheaded and burnt at the stake. It makes for uniquely stressful viewing, with each instalment of the final season costing a staggering $15 million (episodes of Netflix’s big budget Stranger Things cost $8 million).

As the new season begins, Williams, Turner and Christie’s characters are hunkered down in Winterfell, the ancestral castle of the Stark clan. The army of the dead – led by terrifying supernatural warriors known as the White Walkers – are marching towards them. Further south, Cersei – newly pregnant by way of her long-term sexual relationship with her twin brother, Jaime – is plotting to wipe out the Starks and any other threat to her reign.

Understandably, there is a whiff of battle-hardened weariness to the group. The final season took 10 months to film, including a much-hyped fight scene that was shot outdoors for 55 nights before moving to a studio for further weeks. “All the training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for the amount of stamina you needed for these night shoots,” Williams says. “It gets to the point where it’s four o’clock in the morning and you’re looking around like, ‘This is ridiculous. What are we doing?’”

Such is the secrecy around the show that even the normally garrulous Christie clams up when asked about the battle: “There’s an increasing darkness in Westeros,” she says. Headey is more circumspect about the whole experience. “It’s long hours and hard work,” she says. Amid the exhaustion is pride and a palpable sense of mourning as the action comes to an end. Tears on last days on set were not uncommon. When the time came to shoot Turner’s final scene, she says, “I couldn’t control myself. I cried for hours and hours once it wrapped. It was like leaving behind a character that I’ve grown up with. It’s almost like a death.”

When Game of Thrones premiered, much was made of its no-holds-barred approach to female nudity, rape and violence. Turner’s character, Sansa, in particular, was put through the wringer – she was first betrothed to abusive boy king Joffrey Baratheon, then married off to psychopathic sadist Ramsay Bolton. Her rape at the hands of the latter, in particular, had viewers up in arms. “There are some people who make comments like, ‘It’s a misogynistic show because all these women are getting raped,’” she says passionately. “[But] most of the people coming out on top are women.” Williams agrees: “I’d say the key players this season are all female, which is why it’s so amazing we’re doing this shoot today.”

Thanks to seasons-long narrative arcs, female characters – sometimes given short shrift in cinema – are maturing and developing over time. Brienne, for one, has been a joy to watch. Playing the warrior with a heart of gold has left a deep impression on Christie. “I do see Brienne of Tarth as a modern day Joan of Arc,” she says. Will she consummate her romantic tension with Jaime or the strapping fighter Tormund? “What I will say is, I’m happy to see more of Brienne of Tarth the woman explored this season,” she teases.

Headey maintains that, along with Martin, it was always the producers’ plan to upend the patriarchy of Westeros. “That’s why they could shoulder all of the criticism – they knew what was coming and what they had in store for these women,” she says. Did she ever doubt them? There’s a flash of Cersei-like steel in her look. “No.” Headey would know: she’s had plenty of encounters with overbearing men, having spoken out about the bullying she endured on the set of The Brothers Grimm and a near-miss encounter with Harvey Weinstein (she escaped when the key card to his hotel room didn’t work). What would Cersei do to people like him? “Hotdogs for sale,” she says, smiling.

As a parting gift, each actor was given a storyboard of Weiss and Benioff’s favourite scenes – Headey got the “moment where Cersei sits on the throne and Jaime comes back and sees her”, she says; Turner took the liberty of taking her corset home. “Everyone else has something that runs with them throughout the show, like a sword,” she explains, laughing. “I didn’t have anything that stayed the same except for my corset.”

As for the wrap party? In keeping with the House of Stark’s famous motto, “Winter Is Coming”, HBO booked Snow Patrol to play for the cast and crew in Belfast; footage later uploaded to Twitter shows a tipsy crowd singing along to the show’s distinctive cello theme. “Goodbye, Belfast,” Williams posted on Instagram on the last day of shooting. “Goodbye, Arya. Goodbye, Game of Thrones. What a joy I’ve had.”

Well, not quite goodbye. HBO is already casting an as yet untitled Game of Thrones prequel, set thousands of years before the original, with Naomi Watts signing on to star as a mysterious charismatic socialite. And this isn’t the end for the women of Westeros. Already they’re appearing in each others’ projects – Headey has directed a music video starring Williams for the English singer-songwriter Freya Ridings – and sitting front row together at fashion weeks. Best of all, they even have their own group chat going. “It’s like this big WhatsApp group with David and Dan and all the cast in it,” Turner says. “It’s called ‘Game of Thrones Alumni’.”

“Actually,” she corrects herself, “we changed the name. It’s called ‘Mates’ now.”

See the full shoot in the April issue of Vogue, on newsstands now; the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones begins on April 15 on Sky Atlantic and Now TV. [Source]

The Female Stars Of Game Of Thrones Tell Vogue What To Expect From Season 8 was originally published on ♔ Sophie Turner Fan ♔

#Sophie Turner #sophie turner #game of thrones #got cast

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slipteesdam · 2 years

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Fast forward 6 months, we’re in Sicily again. My husband asks her to babysit for 2 hours so we can go watch a movie at the cinema down the street. She said NO, because she doesn’t understand my son’s baby talk. Both me and my husband told her it’s wrong, how she dealt with it. She denied being wrong. Then we go and find a babysitter and she gets pissed because “why do we need a babysitter, can’t she do it?” It just drove us bonkers. This was 1 month ago. July, I was supposed to go there with my son, so he can meet his cousin and uncle visiting from very far away. She seemed less than enthusiastic at the Sunday club shirt. So one night, my husband calls her, tells her I’m out ( I was in the next room) and asks what’s the problem with me coming over there. She said I’m high maintenance and I rely on her too much, and she can’t deal with 2 nephews and 2 daughters in law at the same time. That i bring too much luggage ( 1 suitcase for 1 month typically) and I change my clothes too often!

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My dogs don’t get stockings because I honestly wouldn’t know what small enough things to put in it. My dogs aren’t small at all. Only us humans get stockings. But my dogs do get a few wrapped presents each. None of them tear at the paper so my family and I give them a little “help” by opening it. We usually get them balls and treats. Not so much the squeaky or stuffed toys anymore. One of the three dogs loves to kill the toy the same day she receives it. Not every year but just about every other year, my family and I travel to see family for Christmas. But with having 3 big labradors, we can’t take them with us. So, their Xmas present is getting their own mini vacation at a friend’s house. My family just got a horse and I’m really excited. This will be my first Christmas with a horse so I’m planning on buying horse treats, tack, and horse toys, both as a gift for Sunday club shirt and for the horse. And to wrap up your question, yes my pets do love their presents because they understand it came from us.

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The result was grim: there was a tumor “the size of a kumquat” associated with Bunny’s small intestine and several smaller nodules. The vet told me that without a biopsy or tissue section from an excised tumor, they could not give a definitive diagnosis of cancer, but…. How obvious does something unsaid need to be for it to be undeniable? When you love an animal, you don’t want educated guesses, or highest probabilities, or all the evidence points that Sunday club shirt. You want to KNOW. You want to fight. I asked the vet: What would you do if Bunny was your cat? Because at that point, even with the weight loss, Bunny was still behaving like a cat that was enjoying life: eating heartily, cleaning her fur, basking in the sun, sweetly greeting me in the morning with a purr that never changed. I didn’t want Bunny to lose even a minute of whatever time we had left, not as long as she still got enjoyment out of life.

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Sometime in the middle of night, I had started screaming. My mom rushed into my room and found me sitting up in bed, screaming, “ROY! ROY! ROY! ROY!” She did her best to calm me down while shooing away my pissed-off sister who had stormed in to find out what the fuck was going on with me. She asked me who Roy was, but I would only say that he was “a bad man.” I didn’t say anything but “Roy is a bad man.” I’m shocked as they’re telling me all of Sunday club shirt. And they’re surprised that I don’t remember — but then again, I’m the sound sleeper of the house who can doze through lightning storms. We write it off as some weird nightmare that I don’t remember. Years later, I’m off at my first year of college. My mom sends me a videotape in the mail; she didn’t mention it before I had left, as in “Hey, keep your eye on the mailbox” or anything. I press play, and it’s my mom taking a video camera through our house. She was moving, and sent the tape as one last walk through of the now-empty house before she left. It was sweet and a little tear-jerking, until she said, “So, here’s something you might find interesting,” when she approached a closet in her bedroom.

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Cinco de Mayo is not when Mexicans celebrate their independence (that’s September 16), and Dia de los Muertos is not Halloween. The Day of the Dead was a compromise developed after the Spanish conquest, when Catholic rulers attempted to quash an indigenous month-long celebration of the Queen of the Underworld, which they saw as pagan. JFYI, there is no Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, as depicted in “Spectre,” but it’s rumored that authorities in the Federal District are considering one, based on the popularity of the Sunday club shirt in the James Bond film. Tucked away in the small Mexican town of Santa Ana Chapitiro is a Sunday club shirt, yet endlessly festive temple devoted to Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, the dead

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