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somekindofpoet · 1 year

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Like A Movie

Summary: Reader is a struggling screenwriter but things start looking up when they get a surprise visitor who wants to buy their movie.

Jenna Ortega X Fem! Reader

Word Count: 2.8K

A/N: This takes place 10 years in the future. I’m suffering some serious writers block on my other fic and hopefully this helps. It feels weird to write about a real person, but it came so easily I couldn't waste it.

Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX

You’re an up and coming screenwriter. You just retired after twenty years in the military, and now you’re living in a tiny apartment in LA. You figure you spent your youth doing a job you hated, sacrificing everything and for what? Now you’re going to live out your dream.

The truth is, you’d written page after page and screenplay on screenplay on screenplay and you had nothing to show for it. You sent them all out, hoping and praying for a bite. But now it’s been a year, you’re 38 and the only thing you have to show for your efforts is an apartment full of stacks of haphazardly bound paper and a serious caffeine and nicotine addiction.

Until now. You had written a full feature film, probably the 100th one you’d finished. You stuck it in a drawer months ago, but decided to pull it out and rewrite. You wrote until your fingers ached and your eyes burned. You edited until you felt as if you cut actual pieces of your soul out and threw them away. And finally, you had your final draft. When you printed and bound it, you didn’t think twice about it. You’d figured it would probably end up in the pile of your other stories, gathering dust and resentment.

Your sister came down from Northern California to visit you, and one day while you were out she’d picked up the script and read the entire 120 pages. She was beside herself. She hounded you until you gave in. The compromise was you’d only send it to A24, not even gathering the hope that anyone would read it. And you thought it had been dumped in the trash, until you got a phone call.

You were standing in your kitchen watching your espresso machine spit its sweet lifeblood into your oversized mug when your phone rang. You considered not answering. You hated talking on the phone, and it was an unknown number. But this is Hollywood, so you know you’re obligated to pick up in case it’s an agent.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is this the author of Secessus?” A man’s voice comes through the phone.

“Uh, yes?”

“Are you currently at your apartment?”

You look around, confused. You walk to your kitchen window and look outside, but all you see is the bag lady rummaging through the dumpster.

“Yeah. This is creepy, I’m hanging up.”

Your last sentence fell on a dead line. The person on the other end had already hung up after you had confirmed you were home. You shake your head and pick up your mug, taking one last glance outside.

“Weird.” You say as you shuffle back to your desk. Your computer is open to a new script you’re working on, this one is a spec for tv. You figured you’d try your hand at a multi-episode plot and hope to get picked up for a writers room on another show. If you weren’t going to write something original, at least you’d still get to write something.

You’re about to start tapping away at your keyboard when there’s a soft knocking at your door. You glance at it, then at your phone. None of your friends ever came over unannounced. They knew you hated that. So who the fuck was this?

You get up, and tiptoe to the door. At least if you’re quiet you can look through the peephole and see who it is without alerting them to your presence. This way if it’s someone you don’t want to interact with, you can go back to your desk and pretend you aren’t home. You stand on your tiptoes and close one eye, pressing the other to the small glass window in the door.

All you can make out is a small figure, like really small. They’re wearing a bucket hat but you can see brown hair falling over their shoulders. The person is clearly nervous, and you can see them spinning the rings on their fingers. It’s a girl.

You lower yourself back down, frowning. It was a rare occasion you turned a girl away from your door, but you had no clue who this was. You get back on your tip toes again to get another look. She’s looking right at the peephole, and even waves at it. You can’t tell who it is because she’s wearing massive pittvipers under her hat, effectively covering her face.

You lower yourself again, more confused. You shrug to yourself and figure ‘what’s the worst that could happen? She tries to sell me a bible and I tell her I’m a big fat lesbian. Byeee.’ Before opening the door you look down at yourself. You’re bra-less and wearing a white ribbed tank top (formerly know as a wife beater but now affectionately dubbed a wife pleaser) and gray sweats. You are perfectly aware that you look like shit, but you don’t care. Maybe it’ll scare the girl away.

Another knock raps against your door, this time louder and more frantic.

“Hello? I know you’re in there can you please open up? I really need to talk to you.” The girl says from the other side.

She has a sweet voice, high in pitch but not piercingly so. You sigh in resignation and grab the doorknob. The damn thing wasn’t even locked. You swing the door open and blink at the sudden blast of sunlight in your face.

The girl is there, bouncing on her toes with anxiety. She looks up at you, and you think she looks shockingly familiar. You can’t quite place it though, not with the hat and the sunglasses. She’s wearing a baggy white shirt with a green hem and denim jeans. She’s casual but you can tell that it’s calculated. She’s trying to blend in.

“Uhm, can I help you?”

“Are you y/n?” She asks.

“Yes? Is this a joke? Did you have someone call me?” You’re slightly worried now, and still half blind from the sun shining in your eyes.

“Can I come inside?” She asks, glancing behind her nervously.

“Are you in trouble or something? Am I being roped into like some action movie scenario?”

She laughs, and you can’t help yourself but think it’s a pleasant sound. She still seems so familiar. Maybe if your damned eyes would adjust you could figure out who this woman is.

“I’m not in trouble, I just want to talk to you about your script. And I’m pretty sure there’s a paparazzi in your neighbors trash can.” She says, glancing across the parking lot.

You smile, “Oh no, that’s just Janice. She’s the bag lady.”

The girl looks at you like you’re crazy. At least you think she does, because you can’t see much of her face behind the giant reflective glasses she’s wearing. You find yourself feeling slightly indignant. Who is this girl to look at you crazy when she’s the stranger knocking on your door and asking to come inside?

“So?” She says, still looking up at you.

“Oh, uhm…” you hesitate. Your apartment is a disaster. There were scripts and coffee cups everywhere, and likely a pair of socks or two. “This is about Secessus?”

She nods, raising her eyebrows above her glasses. Is she getting impatient? The stones on this girl. You sigh and relent, stepping to the side and waving your hand inside to usher her in. She hurriedly slides past you, her converse squeaking on your wood floors. You shut the door and turn to her. She’s staring at your living room.

You grimace, “Oof, I wasn’t expecting company so…it’s a mess.”

She approaches a stack of scripts and runs her fingers along the cover page. When she speaks her voice is quiet, almost reverent. Like she’s speaking in a church.

“Are these all screenplays?”

“Yeah- wait, you haven’t even told me your name dude, and you’re in my house. How do you know about Secessus?”

She doesn’t turn around, instead thumbing through the script you know is called Green Ties. You wrote it two months ago and have yet to revise it.

“Because I read it.”

Realization dawns on you, “Oh you’re from A24?”

She hums, “You could say that. Sometimes.”

She takes her glasses off but she’s still turned away from you.

“Sometimes? Are you like an agent or something?” You ask as you move around her into your living room.

She looks up at you and you immediately know who she is. How it took you so long is still a mystery, but now that you can see her of course you know her. Brown eyes, a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the most perfect cupids bow lip.

Jenna motherfucking Ortega.

“That’s me. Except it’s Marie, not motherfucking. Although that would be a pretty dope middle name.” She replies with a shrug.

You hadn’t even realized you said it out loud. Your mouth is hanging open and you’re eternally grateful you set your coffee down or it would be on the floor. Along with your pride. You glance down at yourself now painfully aware that you look like a bum who hadn’t showered in a week.

“Jenna Ortega. In my apartment. Read my script.” You think you may be going into shock. She does too.

“Do you want to sit down?” She’s worried, you can see it on her face.

You nod and gesture toward your dining room table. It’s the only surface that isn’t covered in your manuscripts. You grab your coffee from your desk and sit with it at the table, your hands shaking as Jenna sits down across from you. You set the cup down, mentally kicking yourself

“Would you uh-do you want an espresso?” You’re scrambling now, desperately trying to make this scenario less fucking weird.

She smiles at you and pulls the hat off her head, shaking her hair free. “I’d love one.”

You get up, far too quickly to be considered normal but you figure that ship has sailed now, and make her a cup. As you’re waiting for the machine you begin to gather your senses, willing yourself to be a normal human being for once in your life.

“So, uhm, I just want to apologize. If I had known,” you pause and lean into the counter, looking back at her. “I would have been more…presentable.”

She leans her elbow on your table and rests her head in her hand, still smiling at you. Why is she smiling at you?

“I prefer it this way. It feels more real.”

“Well it feels pretty fuckin unreal to me right now.” You blurt out before you can stop yourself. You grimace at your words but she laughs again. Before you can say anything else the espresso machine chimes telling you Jenna’s coffee is ready. You turn and grab it, quickly setting it down in front of her.

You sit back in your chair, then stand back up when you realize, “Oh shoot do you want anything with it? I have sugar cubes and oat milk, if you’re into that.”

She shakes her head no and blows over the top of the mug, “This is great, thank you.”

You sit back down. You know you’re being a fool. You just can’t get your feet under you. She’s still smiling at you, her eyes shining. She looks exactly like her pictures, maybe even better in person. Her 20s have treated her well and she wears 30 like a goddess. You close your eyes in frustration, seriously what is wrong with you?! Get it together y/n. You take a deep breath and open your eyes again. She’s watching you closely, half hidden amusement on her face.

“So. You’re here about my movie?”

She nods, her face lighting up like she’s just remembered why she’s here too. “Yeah! A24 gave me the script last week and once I picked it up I couldn’t put it down. I’ve read it at least ten times now. I’ve even found myself rehearsing all the lines for all the characters, I’m obsessed.”

You’re dumbfounded. Jenna Ortega is sitting at your kitchen table and she’s obsessed with your script. You briefly wonder if you’ve ascended into an alternate universe.

She takes your silence as an invitation to go on. “So I wanted to come here and meet the person who wrote it. I want to make this movie. If you’ll let me.”

“You. You want to make my movie?”

She nods, sipping her coffee. “I’d like to be in it too, obviously. But A24 would produce it. It’d be my directorial debut. But like, if you’re not cool with that we can hire someone too.”

This whole morning must be a dream. You’re dreaming, you decide. And if this is a dream it doesn’t matter what you say.

“You’ve got to be shitting me right now.”

She laughs again, you feel proud. That’s three times in the span of ten minutes you’ve made Jenna Ortega laugh. But of course this is a dream. So you’re great.

“I’m not shitting you. What do you think?”

“I think I’m dreaming.” You say.

She laughs again. You’re crushing it.

“You’re not dreaming.” She reaches across the table and grabs your hand. You KNOW you’re dreaming now because Jenna Ortega is holding your hand. “See, I’m real. You’re real. And we’re going to make your movie.”

“Holy shit.”

“You haven’t said yes yet.”

You nearly fall out of your chair. “Yes! Yes a million times yes! You can act all the parts, direct it, produce it, burn it to the ground for all I care, are you kidding me?”

Her laughter is quickly becoming the soundtrack to your morning. “I don’t think I can act all the parts, and A24 is on board so we just need to cast the rest.”

You feel like a fish, your mouth is moving but absolutely nothing is coming out. She pulls her hand back and takes another drink of her coffee.

“I’m sure this is sort of overwhelming. But I want you on set with me. And I want you to help me with the cast. If you agree, the studio already has your contract drawn up. They’ll pay you for the script and we’ll start in two months.”

You take a sip of your coffee, then look deep into the cup. Did your sister slip shrooms in the espresso again? You look back to Jenna, she’s patiently waiting for you to answer her.

“I’m sorry,” you say, “I’m trying to get it together right now. But yes. To all of it. Yes.” You run your hands through your hair, a nervous habit.

Jenna grins at you over her mug. She has her fingers interlaced around it and she’s clinking one of her rings against the porcelain. If you didn’t know any better you’d say she was excited. Thrilled even.

“Great!” She says, “I’ll let them know.”

You nod. Thanking the universe she’s already read the script because she would probably think you were an idiot if she didn’t know that you could write. You could not pull it together. This morning was just so WEIRD.

“Do you usually make house calls to writers?” You ask her, attempting to compose yourself.

“No. This one is special. And now that I’ve met you, I know I made the right decision.” She downs the last of her coffee and stands.

You stand with her, and move around the table as she makes her way toward your door. You lean around her when she’s in the entry and open it, letting her out. As she’s about to step outside she turns to you.

“That coffee is incredible by the way. How do you feel about this time tomorrow?”

“How do I feel?”

She nods, pulling her hat and sunglasses back on. “Yeah. Do you mind if I come back by to go over the details? I’d stay longer today but I have to go to a casting call.”

“Uh, of course. I’ll have a cup waiting for you.”

You mentally pat yourself on the back. Good job y/n, so smooth, much rizz.

She grins even wider and turns on her heel, heading down the stairs, leaving you standing in the doorway, awestruck. You watch her as she gets into a town car waiting in the parking lot, and wait till it drives away before you close your door.

“What the fuck.” You say quietly, “wait what the fuck?!” You yell this time.

Excitement pumps through your veins and you can’t help yourself but to dance a little jig around the stacks in your living room. Your script is bought! You’re making a movie! Jenna Ortega is coming back to your apartment tomorrow!

You stop dancing, the realization spreading over you. Jenna is coming back over tomorrow. You look around. You have some work to do before she comes back. You pick up your phone and call your best friend, you’re going to need his help if you’re going to get this place cleaned up.

He picks up after two rings.

“Nando. You are not gonna believe the fucking morning I’ve had. How soon can you get here?”

#jenna ortega x reader #jenna ortega #jenna ortega x y/n #Wednesday #vada cavell #tara carpenter #jenna ortega x fem!reader

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quickcharlie · 1 month

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Denis Villeneuve discussing Dune Part 2 in an interview with the New York Times today, including whether he will be reading any FeydPaul fan fiction lol

He explains why Lady Jessica’s face is so heavily tattooed, whether Paul considers himself the Messiah and what he thinks of those Javier Bardem memes.

This weekend, “Dune: Part Two” muscles back into IMAX theaters with the verve of Timothée Chalamet rodeo- riding a giant sandworm. After nearly two months in theaters, the film is the current champion of this year’s box office race, with a total take of more than $680 million. (It’s also available to rent or buy on some streaming platforms.) The film’s success is thanks in part to audiences that have returned over and over to get lost in the rocky warrens and spiritual reckonings of the planet Arrakis. One admirer reports he’s seen the movie 25 times to date.

That there’s so much to explore in “Dune: Part Two” is a credit to its writer and director, Denis Villeneuve, who boldly reshaped Frank Herbert’s complex and cerebral 1965 novel “Dune.” Villeneuve split the book and its themes into two films: “Dune: Part One,” released in 2021, focused on the political struggles between two families, the Atreides and the Harkonnens. “Part Two” delves into religious fervor as the two surviving Atreides, young Paul (Chalamet) and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), ingratiate themselves with Arrakis’s Indigenous desert tribe, the Fremen, by allowing the locals to believe that Paul is their Messiah — a prophecy that, if it comes to pass, will mean the slaughter of billions of victims across the galaxy.

Villeneuve has yearned to tell this story since he was a in . His devotion is palpable; every frame feels steeped in monkish contemplation. Yet, he’s also a visual dramatist who doesn’t want audiences to get tripped up by too much exposition. His scripts give only passing mention to core concepts like spice, a psychedelic dust that powers everything from space travel to Paul’s clairvoyant hallucinations.

Though Villeneuve doesn’t want to overexplain, he was willing to provide some answers in an interview via video where every question about the film — even silly questions! — was on the table.

Does Chalamet’s Paul Atreides actually believe he’s the Messiah? What’s the meaning of Jessica’s face tattoos? Villeneuve also got into the erotic lives of his desert dwellers and the extra narrative weight he threw behind Paul’s Fremen love interest, Chani, played by Zendaya. As Villeneuve said with a grin, “Chani is my secret weapon.”

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

The last time we spoke, you weren’t sure what to make of the sandworm-shaped “Dune” popcorn bucket. It went on to be so popular that it sold out in cities before opening day and is being resold online for around $175. What do you think of it now?

I thought that the bucket was an insane marketing idea. I laughed so much. It is so out there. I don’t know who designed it, but they’re a bit of a genius. I’m at peace with the bucket.

In this film, Javier Bardem’s character Stilgar is reduced to a guileless follower of Paul Atreides, who Stilgar believes is the new Messiah. His conversion is tragic. But also, Bardem’s awe-face has become a funny meme, and the second time I saw the movie, people laughed at almost every line he spoke. Did that reaction surprise you?

No. I am very happy when you say that he is a tragic figure. For me, he is the most tragic figure of all. The idea to bring humor to Stilgar was to make him lovable, to feel the humanity in that character. He’s not an austere figure, he has a big heart. But his beliefs, his faith, his reactions bring humor — and that is something I love about making a sci-fi film, because I can talk about that without offending people because it’s a fake religion. I designed all the prayers myself, so I know it’s fake. I find Stilgar very funny. And when people laugh, I’m happy because that was the intention.

Someone makes a dig that Stilgar has found a savior again. This is not even his first time? All his life he has been raised with that dream. So I suggest that every time a guy comes from outside with a lot of charisma, he hopes he’s found him. Like in the Bible, we have tons of prophets before Jesus came.

The arc of “Dune: Part Two” is Paul accepting that he must become the Messiah — and get billions of people killed. Does he truly believe that he is the Messiah? Or does he just decide to let the Fremen believe that he is? I don’t think he believes that he is the Messiah. I think he feels the burden of the heritage that the Bene Gesserit [the mystical sisterhood that Jessica belongs to] have laid among the Fremen, and he sees the potential to use that religious power to survive. Paul is warned that no man can survive drinking the spiritual water of life. But as that’s part of the lore of a planet seeded with manipulative propaganda by his own mother, I have to ask: Have other men actually been drinking the water and dying? Have they been scared off from trying? Is the warning just a setup for a magic trick?

There are people that have tried it in the past and died. In Frank Herbert’s world, femininity is a power. I think Herbert was fascinated by motherhood, by the power of creation. I love this idea that the power is held by women. It’s something that was ahead of his time when he wrote it and I tried to put the focus on it. You say so much with Jessica’s costuming. In the first film, her look is immaculate and baroque. This film begins with her in rags, but she finds another path to being dressed and treated like royalty. And she gets a lot of tattoos on her face. Why did she get so many more face tattoos than the outgoing reverend mother?

She’s trying to play on the symbolism that was put in the prophecy. She’s supposed to be the mother of the Messiah, so I wanted to bring the idea that she was like the pope of the reverend mothers on Arrakis. There’s some kind of madness in writing elements of the prophecies on her face. Frankly, I think when you drink the worm poison, it affects your sanity — and the same with Paul. I like the idea that we feel she’s going too far. Jessica is already pregnant when the first movie ends, and she’s still pregnant at the end of this film. Which means you had to condense this massive story into less than nine months because her body is a time clock. The idea was to compress the book so that Paul will feel the pressure to get the Fremens’ trust, to start gearing up — but not to succeed, not to have the time to create a real war. Time is against him.

Because in the book, this takes years. Long enough for Jessica to give birth to a very unnerving daughter, Alia. We glimpse Alia as an adult — she’s played by Anya Taylor-Joy — but you skipped over seeing her murder people as a toddler. Was it hard to decide no “murder toddler”?

I think pregnant women look tremendously powerful. To use that power was very exciting. And usually when you see a pregnant woman onscreen, she’s always giving birth. To avoid that moment, to stay in the state of being pregnant, I thought was very Frank Herbert-like. I was going away from the killer toddler, but I thought that was more fresh and original. Honestly, it’s one of the things that I’m proudest of in the adaptation. Speaking of female power, let’s talk about Chani.

Chani is my secret weapon. Frank Herbert was sad to realize that people saw the book as a celebration of Paul Atreides. He wanted to do a cautionary tale against messianic figures, a warning against blending religion and politics. I wrote the second movie trying to be more faithful to Frank Herbert’s intentions than to the book. In the book, Chani is just a follower. I came up with the idea of her being reluctant. She gives us the critical distance and perspective on Paul’s journey. I wanted to make sure the audience will understand that Paul becomes a dark figure, that his choices are exactly what Chani was afraid of. He becomes the colonizers the Fremen were fighting against. And then the movie becomes the cautionary tale Frank Herbert was wishing for.

Paul makes a choice at the end that will go on to kill billions of people. That’s so large and theoretical that it’s hard to grasp. But you structure your climax so that in that moment of betrayal, he’s also betraying the love of his life — a betrayal we understand.

He betrayed her in many ways. But the big thing for Chani is that it’s not about love. It’s about the fact that he becomes the figure that will keep the Fremen in their mental jail. A leader that is not there to free the Fremen, but to control them. That’s the tragedy of all tragedies. Like the Michael Corleone of sci-fi, he becomes what he wanted to avoid. And he will try to find a way to save his soul in the third part.

But “Dune Messiah,” the book your third film is based on, picks up 12 years later with a reunited Paul and Chani. How far did you feel you could push her anger? Because at some point, she’s going to have to forgive him. That anger is tremendous. I don’t want to reveal what I’m going to do with the third movie. I know exactly what to do. I’m writing it right now. But there’s a lot of firepower there and I’m very excited about that decision. In the spirit of no dumb questions, Chani says that Paul sand-walks like a drunk lizard. Which means Arrakis has booze?

Actually, there is spice beer. In the book, there are Fremen parties, even some orgies involving spice. I didn’t bring that into the movies because it’s PG-13.

Body fluids have significance to the Fremen. Spitting is the giving of water, a sign of respect. But tears and vomit are a waste. So what is kissing?

As long as you don’t lose your humidity, you can kiss. It’s an exchange of fluids — an act of love, when you think about it. Fremens love to kiss.

What about the, um, other romantic fluids? You cannot have sex outside, for sure. But they are very sexual. I suspect that all sexual intercourse happens in environments that are protected from losing moisture. When they are in their sietches [or caves] underground, those are sealed. You don’t need to wear stillsuits inside them. We can deduce from that there is no problem to have sex in a sietch.

By the way, who decided that Fremen was pronounced Freh-men and not Free-men? All the pronunciations, I took them from recordings of Frank Herbert’s voice. Frank Herbert used “Freh-men,” which I love. It makes it less on-the-nose.

You kept two major characters out of the first movie and only introduced them now: the princess Irulan, played by Florence Pugh, and the Baron Harkonnen’s nephew Feyd-Rautha, played by Austin Butler. The princess is the first voice in the books, the first face onscreen in David Lynch’s “Dune” [1984]. What made you sure holding them back was the right move, despite three years of fans asking, “Hey, where are they?” When people ask me what was the biggest challenge in making those movies, it’s writing them. In order to make this adaptation, we have to make big, bold decisions. One was that the first movie should be seen from Paul’s perspective. I wasn’t able to do that entirely because I had to go to the Harkonnens’ side to introduce them so that the story will be clear, but I tried to find an elegant simplicity in the story structure. And I wanted, frankly, to keep some firepower for the second movie.

Why is Feyd-Rautha’s gladiator scene in black and white? And what are the splats in the sky above the dome?

Frank Herbert explores the impact of ecosystems on cultures, on humans. How it influences the way we evolve — our biology, culture, technology, mythology, religion. The psychology of a tribe is linked with their environment. If you want to know things about the Fremen, you observe the desert. I wanted to have the same approach to the Harkonnens. They killed nature. It’s a plastic planet. One thing left was sunlight, but instead of a sun that reveals color, it kills colors. When you are outside, it’s all black and white. It gives us ideas about how these people perceive reality, politics, violence in a binary world — it brings the idea of fascism. It also gave me the opportunity to bring images that remind us in our memories of World War II and the Nazi regime. So it’s an idea that I had as I was writing. Then I had the idea to have strange fireworks in the sky that will look like Rorschach drawings. It’s a nightmarish celebration. The perception of a dome is not accurate. It’s just that the fireworks reach a certain altitude and then they explode. But it’s true that it looks like a liquid that falls from the sky.

Forgive me if I am not being fair to sadistic, psychopathic Feyd-Rautha. But all of the gladiators were supposed to be drugged for his happy birthday massacre. The one who secretly isn’t puts up a worthy battle. So I assumed that Feyd-Rautha isn’t that great of a fighter. But at the end, he’s the only warrior who is Paul’s equal?

It’s a show. You see that the Harkonnens are very cruel and their society is very paranoiac. His opponent is known in the books as one of the great fighters, Lieutenant Lanville. I tried to show that Feyd is excited to have a real opponent. He has a code of honor, he respects the effort, and he has fun with it. That’s the idea I tried to convey — he’s not a coward.

Audiences might remember that the Bene Gesserit wanted Jessica’s child to be a girl, that Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides was supposed to be female. And they specifically bred Feyd-Rautha to be a male. Were they hoping these youngsters would mate?

Yeah. They are trying to increase the potential of humanity by breeding the best specimen of each tribe or family. A baby between Feyd-Rautha and an Atreides daughter would have brought peace between Harkonnens and the Atreides, and created an über being.

Will you read any of the internet fan fiction spawned by the idea of Timothée and Austin hooking up?

[Laughs] But you know, we approached their fight at the end like some kind of symbolic union. The way their bodies get close to one another, there’s something animalistic, an intimacy, I was looking for.

I rewatched the first film again recently. It opens with a quote in another language: “Dreams are messages from deep.” I love that quote. It feels like how a film resonates, too. But it wasn’t until I had subtitles on at home that I realized who said it. Of all the important characters and cultures to establish, you gave that major moment — the very beginning of your franchise — to an anonymous Sardaukar from the murderous imperial army that we’re cheering to see get killed. Why?

I love your question. The Sardaukar are the dark side of the Fremen. I thought it would be interesting to have a tiny bit of insight that they are not just tremendous warriors, but they have spirituality, philosophical thought. They have substance. Also, their sound was designed by Hans Zimmer. I absolutely loved how it feels like it’s coming from the deep, from the ancient world. Frank Herbert said beginnings are very delicate times. By starting with a Sardaukar priest, I was indicating to the fans that I was taking absolute freedom with this adaptation, that I was hijacking the book. But you also deeply love the book. So when you make these bold changes, do you feel like asking Frank Herbert for forgiveness?

Yes. There’s so many darlings that you kill. An adaptation is an act of violence.

“There’s so many darlings that you kill,” Denis Villeneuve said of filming “Dune,” a book he loved. “An adaptation is an act of violence.”

#dune part 2 #denis villeneuve #timothée chalamet #austin butler #paul atreides #feyd rautha

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bluemoonbeam15 · 3 years

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What If...

What if Pixar had added more bloopers into the end credits?

<><><><><><><><>

"It's a bug-eat-bug world out there, Princess," Hopper guided her to sit on the rock, resting a foot against it. "Now--" a few whistles interrupt him.

Axel nudges the grasshopper beside him, "Ooh," he grins, "Boss layin' it down!"

Hopper pinched the bridge of his nose, "Of all idiots," he mutters. "Can we get through this scene, please?"

"Cut!"

They get back in their original places. "Take two!"

Hopper leans down and guides Atta to sit again, "It's a bug-eat-bug-world out there, Princess--" snickers from the crowd distracts him. He deadpanned at the camera.

"Cut!" John scans over the colony, "Okay, ladies, let's keep this professional here, alright? Gang, don't encourage them."

Axel snickers, "Aw c'mon," he calls out to Hopper, "Show 'em your good side, Boss!"

"Oh my word," Hopper sighs and straightens, face flushing.

Atta holds back her laughter, "Maybe try not doing the foot thing," she suggests.

Hopper mocks her quietly, "'try not doing the foot thing'" He gets back into position.

"Take three!"

"It's a bug-eat-bug-world out there..." he stood awkwardly for a moment, debating on how to approach her differently. Eventually, he puts his hands on his hips and just stares down at her, "Princess-- no, this doesn't feel right."

"Cut!"

Atta can't help but burst out laughing, "Nevermind, just go back to the other way."

Axel snickers and calls out again, "That's how she likes it, Boss!"

"I'm gonna quit," Hopper shakes his head.

_______________________

While all the grasshoppers are in the anthill, Molt kickstarts his wings to shoot through the hole. Unfortunately, he bonks his head against the ceiling and drops to the ground, "Ow!"

"Cut! Molt, make sure you're standing beneath the hole first."

He stood up, holding his head, "Yeah, got it."

"Take two!"

Hopper stared the ants down, "You ants have a nice summer. Let's ride!" He crouched down and shot through the hole. Molt laughed and shut up as well, hitting the ceiling again and landing on his back.

"Dang it! Okay, okay! I can get it right this time, I swear!" Molt staggered onto his feet.

His brother peeked back down in the hole, "When I fly off, that's when you move under the hole, got it?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Molt waved him off.

"Take three!"

"--Let's ride!"

Molt bit his lip a bit, waiting until Hopper vanished before side-stepping and starting his wings. As soon as he pushed off the ground, his foot slipped and he fell face-first on the ground.

Hopper peeked his head through the hole again, deadpanned, "Does he have to be in this movie?" he looked at the directors.

John pinched the bridge of his nose, "He's for comedic relief. Okay, let's just go with the first take and switch it up a bit."

"But I hit my head on that one!"

"It'll be fine, the audience will get a kick out of it."

Hopper sneered down at his brother, "So will the rest of us." Molt huffed.

________________

Flik watched the Circus Bugs convey to him that they were not, in fact, warriors. He gasped and flung the makeshift megaphone to the side, "Your Highness! The warriors have--Ah!" In his effort to crawl over the blade of grass, he slipped on the dewdrop.

"Flik!" Atta kneeled down beside him, "Oh my gosh are you okay?"

He laughed awkwardly, feet hanging over the blade, "Yeah, I'm good."

"Cut!" John rushed over, "You alright, kid?"

"No, no, no, I'm fine." Flik stood back up quickly and brushed himself off. "Can we clear this off before I do that scene?" he pointed a thumb to the dew and petals on the ground.

Francis was doubled over laughing, "No, no, keep it there! I wanna see that again!"

Flik crossed his arms, "Is my pain hilarious to you now?"

The ladybug pointed out one of the cameramen, "Send me that take, I gotta keep that!"

_________________

"I said, even Hopper's afraid of birds," Atta repeated.

Flik blinked before chastely kissing her on the cheek and zooming off, "Thank you!" He rushed to the infirmary and nearly made it to the leaf entrance, "Hopper's--" he fell through the leaves and face-planted the ground.

"Cut!"

Gypsy rushed to help him up, "Oh, sweetie, it's just not your day is it?" She glared at the others who were laughing -- or at the very least trying to contain their laughter.

The ant held up a hand, not moving from where he'd fallen, "Just...give me a moment," he mumbled through the dirt.

_______________

Hopper's eyes hardened at the three grasshopper's, "Well, how 'bout this?" He quickly reached over him to pull the tip of the dispenser off, grunting when it didn't budge. "What the?" He kept trying to pry it open but nothing happened. "What did you guys do to this thing?"

"Cut!" John set the megaphone down and inspected the container, "Alright," he turned to the gang, "Which one of you clowns glued the lid shut?"

Tuck and Roll slowly stepped away from outside the shot, hiding the glue bottle behind their backs.

______________

"You little termites!" The colony turned as Hopper rose into the air with the offering lifted above him. He opened his mouth for the next line but a few whistles and cat-calling stopped him.

One of his gang members shouted teasingly from the side, "You lift bro?"

Hopper pursed his lips and set the offering back down, "Okay, I'm not doing this scene."

"Cut! Hopper, it's in the script," John called.

"Then change the script!"

"Just get through the take, I promise it'll be the last time," John pleaded. He called out to the colony and gang, "And no distractions, ladies! Let's keep it professional here!"

_____________

Hopper wrapped his hands around Flik's neck, "I'll be back next season with more grasshoppers...but you won't."

The ant pretended to struggle a moment before clawing at Hopper's hands desperately, "Hop! Wa--" he coughed and Hopper quickly released him.

"Oh my gosh, was I actually choking you?" He watched Flik struggle for air as he doubled over.

Flik waved it off, "It's fine...just...can't breathe," he gasped out.

"Cut! Okay, let's work on that strength there, Hopper."

Hopper patted Flik on the back, looking a bit sheepish toward the crew, "I'm sorry! Can we change that scene or anything? Maybe I'll just pin him down or something?"

John looked over the script, "I don't know...the writers were pretty keen on choking. Just work on your technique, we went over this yesterday during choreography. The best way to not accidentally choke someone is..."

Hopper gave him a confused look, "To not...try and choke them--"

"No."

"Well, I don't know what you want me to say!" Hopper threw his hands up in defeat.

Flik straightened as he took in a deep breath, "Okay, I'm good now. Everything's great."

"Ready to try another take?" John called.

Flik hesitated, "Just give me a moment," he laughed breathlessly, "I almost died. Gotta process that," he smiled at Hopper.

"I'm sorry!" Hopper flared his arms out, "Your neck is like a toothpick. How can I not accidentally choke you?"

"We practiced it yesterday, Hopper!" John reminded him.

Hopper rounded on the director, "How about I practice it on you?"

"Okay!" Atta decided to step in now, "Why don't we all take five?"

#a bugs life #pixar #atta #flik #hopper #circus bugs #bloopers #fanfiction #what if #this was really fun to imagine XD #poor Flik

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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One Year Anniversary: Top 12 Ducktales Episodes!

Happy anniversary all you happy people! Yes it was one year ago today I started reviewing animation and it’s been a ride to be sure. I’d always WANTED to be a reviewer: I love going on and on about stuff I love, really digging into it and picking it apart... but I could never get started. I tried youtube but I didn’t have the money for the equipment nor a proper shooting space to record, so my efforts.. were not great. And while I TRIED text reviews, my own looming pile of self hatred meant every attempt I made was shot down when it got hard as me not being good enough.

But one year ago I finally got past that. I’d already been reviewing a bit, doing invididual issues of comics... but got way in over my head trying to do the current line of X-Men comics as it came out, and wisely bowed out of that. But that left a gap: I had nothing to cover week to week and with a demanding new job, I drifted into just doing in charcter chats, little fan fictions script styles. Not bad work, I should do some more at some point and I even got a comissoin once in a while, but nothing I could really live on and not what I wanted to do with my life.

Enter Ducktales. I’d always WANTED to review the show.. and when the double premire happened, I decided fuck it, and put up my thoughts. And then decided.. hey maybe I can do this every week.. and slowly.. my work evolved, getting better and better, getting more and more likes. I picked up Amphibia when that came by week to week.

And eventually.. this went from a hobby, if one I was passionate about to a career. Not a largely paying one, as only one person was really intrested in paying me for it, friend of the blog and our fincial backer @weirdkev27, but .. it’s money and i’m now making about 30 dollars a month due to a comination of comissions and patreon. Other contributers are always welcome mind you, my patreon is here if your curious and comissions are 5 dollars an episode, but i’ts just nice to have money coming in. To have gone from simply WANTING to review things and make a living off it.. to simply doing it.

And it’s been one hell of a year.. and not just because 2020 felt like hell or 2021 began with a full on insurrection. I feel like i’ve acomplished a lot in the year i’ve been doing this: I finished what I started with Ducktales season 3, getting better and better as I went. And I didn’t stop there with ducks: I started covering what brought me to Ducks in the first place, the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, and while that retrospective has slid a bit on the schedule, I intend to get it back on track this month. I reviewed a bunch of Darkwing Duck episodes leading up to the Just Us Justice Ducks.. chronologically anyway. The actual airing order reads like someone took 50 issues of a comic, made it rain with them, then just started reading whatever ones they picked up randomly. I also covered some of Duck Master Carl Barks work with the classics Night on Bear Mountain, A Christmas for Shacktown and Back to the Klondike, with more to come.

And the Duck didn’t stop at just reviews I did on my own: Kev comissioned two MASSIVE retrospectives from me: My first for him was Ride of the Three Caballleros where in just a few short months I covered the boys entire televisied careers together from the movie, to house of mouse, to mickey and the roadster racers, to ducktales (again) and finishing with the wonderful Legend of the Three Caballeros. It has probably the worst Daisy imaginable, but otherwise is really excellent and i’m glad I finally watched it. I also covered Don Rosa’s two stories with the boys as part of it. It was a fun ride and I enjoyed every minute of it... okay most of them again Three Cabs Daisy is the worst. And once that finished Kev started up another idea: Shadow Into Light: a look at Lena’s character arc from start to finish that has gone on to be my most popular series on this blog, and that finishes next week. And there’s more to come as after that there’s a short breather with a look at Lilo and Stitch’s crossover episodes.. folllowed by me looking at all three of season 2′s ducktales arcs. And I fully intend to have covered every episode of the series by this time next year, so stay tuned.

Outside of ducks though I didn’t slow down. I restarted my Tom Lucitor retrospective, covering what i feel to be one of Star Vs’ two best characters, tied with eclipsa, and my personal faviorite as he redeemeed himself, found love and I bitched a lot about the horrible directions the series took and probabably will more as that’s still not done yet. I did what I always wanted to do and started looks at some of my faviorite comics ever, starting with Life and Times and adding in New X-Men and Scott PIlgrim. I also threw in the awesome comic Blacksad. I did pride month for the first time and not only came out publicly, but also did two whole arcs i’m proud of with The Saluna episodes of Loud house and the rednid episodes of OK KO, and generally just had myself a good old fashioned time as an out bi man reviewing childrens cartoons.

I started Season 2 of amphibia with it’s lows of an endlesss road trip and highs of adding Marcy to the cast and giving us more of the silky voiced keith david. And finally Patreon wise Kev’s taken me on a hell o fa journey: In addition to the restrospectives i’ve covered some additional darkwing duck, and a simpsons homage to the duck comics... but also got a bit weird and obscure with detours like the lost animnaics sucessor Histeria, the apocalyptic comedy where Santa dosen’t know how doors work Whoops! and the adventures of Santa’s bratty teen daughter jingle belle. In short.. it’s been a long year but damn has it been fun and there’s more to come. I’d like to thank all of you for reading, thank my Patreons Kev and Emma for supporting me, and thank my family for doing the same. So with that out of the way, I figured the best way to celebrate was to do something i’ve been wanting to do for a long time, something honoring the show that gave me this calling in the first place. And with Season 3 sadly being the last, and enough weeks having passed for me to digest it between the finale and today, I could think of nothing better than my top 12 episodes of Ducktales.

Ducktales is one of the best cartoons of the 2010′s. Brilliantly taking EVERYTHING that had come before, the comics, the original cartoon and every bit of duck media period to craft a masterful, unique and wonderful reboot. It was funny, it was insane, and it had damn good character arcs. By the end every member of the main cast along with major supporting cast members like Fenton, Drake and especially Lena, had changed and signifigantly at that. The show was everything I could’ve dreamed of and more and I miss it terribly, hoping DIsney will do a revivial movie at some point. For now though, Frank and Matt’s run on ducktales, as they called it and I do too since i’m a massive comic book nerd, it’s time to look back on my favorite tales of ducks. So grab your sharks, your number one dimes and your friendship cakes with clear gay undertones and join me under the cut as I celebrate one of my faviorite shows and my anniversary in the best way possible.

12. House of the Lucky Gander!

So as i’ve gone on about before and no doubt will again, Donald kinda got the short end of the stick in season 1. While Frank and Matt had good story intentions, keeping Donald away from adventure since he had no interest in it, in practice it meant a beloved Disney Icon who they and disney HEAVILY promoted as part of the series and whose being here this go round was a big draw for fans of the comics.... was only in a quarter of the season and only got TWO plots centered around him in 23 episodes, with only one being the main plot of the episode. The PIlot and Finale both centered around the family more as a whole if your curious how I counted those so while he got plenty of focus in both, it’s still not a day in the limelight sort of thing.

But unusually for Donald, he lucked out as his one big starring role for Season 1 was both one of my faviorites and one of Season 1′s most inventive outings. A lot of the episodes enegy comes from a one two punch of a great guest star and one of the series best settings. The guest star is of course everyone’s faviorite overly lucky himbo Gladstone Gander. The show adapted the prick perfectly: The original Gladstone from the comics.. was the worst asshole imaginable, utterly insufferable. And for a villian, and Donald’s rival, that’s all well and good.. but his super luck meant he RARELY , if ever, suffered any consequences for being just...

The 87 series simply made him nicer, while Going Quackers simply removed his luck. No adaptation really got how to make this fucker work.. until this one. Here Frank split the diffrence: Gladstone is still smug.. but he’s no longer actively malicious. While he is an insensitive prick to Donald in this one, unlike the comics he’s not constantly bragging about his luck or how great he is or actively BAITING Donald to fight with him or trying to ruin his relationship or a million other reasons he sucks and I hate him.

This version by contrast... is generous. He’s not the most empathetic, because he doesn’t get how life works, but he does share the riches of the casnio with everyone and in a cameo appearance in “Treasure of the Found Lamp” gladly offers his nephews some diamonds. He’s got a nice surface level charm to him that makes you understand why people like him.. but it’s also clear ther’es nothing UNDER that of value, making you equally understand why Scrooge and Donald hate him. Gladstone in this reboot is a perfect example of why we need reboots or new adaptations in the first place: Because sometimes the original got something wrong or something can be done much better by the new writers.

He’s perfectly paired with the setting: The House of Lucky Fortune, a mystical casino with an East Asian astatic based in the country of Macaw and provides two great plots. Donald’s really highlights his character: His understandable jealousy at gladstone earning the boys love through nothing while he struggles to make a living for them, and how he feels like a looser and like Gladstone is simply showing that off instead of just not knowing what empathy is. Having Louie be the one to bond with Gladstone was also just pitch pefefct, as is showing some depth for the boy by having himr ealize his hero is an asshole and be the one to help donald in the end.

The other plot is just pure joy though and is where the setting REALLY shines: Scrooge and the rest of the kids try to leave.. but can’t find the exit. This is where the creative part comes in: The Casino simply morphs to keep people trapped, and caters to them, giving them whatever they want to keep them trapped. In the cases of the kids it’s all hilarious and adorably in character: Huey becomes entranced by a fancy water show, in one of his best bits of the season, Dewey gets a pet tiger who sadly did not come home with him and Webby gets to live the dream we’ve all had of stuffing her face directly in a choclate fountain. Scrooge’s escape is likewise clever: He simply prepares to get a room.. then books it as the check in desk is ALWAYS near the front.

We then find out Gladston’es trapped get the whole mystical contest with absolutely gorgeous animation, i’ll talk about it in full some time but this episode is just a treat to watch, has a great arc for donald and had some memorable gags. I can’t help but smile when I watch it.

11. The Dangerous Chemistry of Gandra Dee! As I mentioned before i’m a superhero nerd so naturally Fenton was one of my faviorite parts of the show. Frank and Matt were just damn good at crafting superhero stories, and like gladstone improved fenton turning him from an awkward donald stand in to an awkward peter parker-esque science nerd who just wants to be a good person and the best hero he can be. He got into science not just because he thinks it’s neat, but because he honestly wants to help people and you can’t help but foot for him whenever he pops up. Lin Manuel Miranda is a large reason for that, bringing his incomparable a-game to the character. While we sadly didn’t get a ton of gizmoduck focused episodes, the fatct we got AS MANY as we did and that Lin didn’t drop out for a minute even with his busy schedule was a miracle and I’m acknowledging that.

As for why this one, I feel it builds brilliantly on the previous Fentoncentric episode Who Is Gizmoduck?! which just BARELY didn’t make this list and uses the fact we haven’t seen fenton in a while as both a plot point and to move some things forward without having to spend screentime they clearly didn’t have. By having Fenton be just burnt out on superheroics it finds a way to both explain where he’s been, he’s been busy with his new job, and give us an interesting angle to the old “superhero is tired of the life” thing. He never once complains about saving people or stuff... it’s just like any job it gets tiring after a while. As someone who has his dream job but has struggled with it from time to time, I vastly relate.

Though while I love my boy and Lin is game as always, the episodes real MVP is my other boy Huey. The episode has moved Huey up from being simply Fenton’s fanboy to being his best friend, and adorable as hell relationship. The two clearly respect and appricate each other and Huey is looking out for his buddy the whole episode. His love of love is also just really cute. Added in the mix is Webby, who in one of my faviorite gags of the series, finds out Fenton is Gizmoduck because Huey is incredibly and insanely blatant with his unecessary coverup. But she of course is game to help while Fenton is trying to play it casual. We also just get a waterfall of great gags as everyone overdoes it wingmanning for fenton: Huey sets up an itallian bistro and tries to purposfully create a lady and the tramp situation, and sings opera (With Manny on acordian), the wonderfully 80′s suit from Fenton’s dad his mom gives him to wear, and Launchpad, who gives us a tremendous list of his exes, and plays my favorite song of the series: It’s a Date, a micheal mcdonnel riff.

This episode also wisely ups Mark’s Beaks game as Fenton’s arch enemy, still keeping him hilaroius, with the guy acting like a bored teenager and guzzling so much nanite jucie he turns into a hulk, as well as said hulk mode leading to a ton of great gags from kidnapping the children (”I got your kids.. are they your kids? I don’t know how this family works), to “take that coach dad” to eating a pie with tins and all and wondering about said tins. But he’s an actual threat now, taking on fenton in one hell of a fight, and having an utterly transcendent scene where he hacks his way past gyro’s security while dancing.. and dabbing because of course he does. It’s a fun, well done character piece that’s mostly here for i’ts laugh but Fenton’s struggle with Gizmo overtaking his life, and finding out someone he truly hit it off iwth only wanted him for that.. it’s really good stuff and Lin’s delivery after Fenton finds out, the pure pain and betryal in his voice, is just excellent. Also that opera scene is poetry.

10. Quack Pack!

One of the episodes that started my career naturally landed here. Not for that reason though: Quack Pack is a fun riff on sitcoms, specifically the tgif ones of the 90′s that Disney Afternoon Kids no doubt also watched, the kinds Disney Channel still makes today, and most importanly the kind the Disney Afternoon itself made like Goof Troop and well... Quack Pack.

Riffs on sitcoms are nothing new and the last year has been FULL of them. 2020 gave us this episode, Beef House and the wonderful “The Perfect House” episode of Close Enough, and this year gave us WandaVision, my second favorite MCU project so far, right behind Black Panther, which used the sitcom deconstruction to create one hell of a character study.

So you’d think with a year having passed and this concept happening as an entire mini series would dull this one.. but no. it’s still damn funny, having fun at the cliches while, again like WandaVision, having one of the main cast be responsible by accident but go along with it. The episode pivots from glorious affectionate parody of cheesy sitcoms, to that plus horrifying “Humans”, and a character piece for Donald. This brings Donald’s hatred and fed up ness with adventure to a head revealing his fondest wish is just to have a normal life and not loose anyone again.

It takes one of his best friends to snap him out of it. Look Goofy is my second faviorite of the sensational seven, an episode with him was already an easy sell for me.. but the episode uses him really well. First for laughs as he’s gentically dispositioned to be a perfect sitcom neighbor.. but also for heart. With his family preoccupied and a bit hurt, i’ts Goofy who cuts to the heart of the issue, pointing out NO ONE is normal and even his normal domestic life raising Max, who we see go to prom with roxanne eeeeee, has all sorts of chaos. Normal is what you make of it and pining for some ideal that will never happen was just tearing donald apart piece by piece and by letting go of that.. he finally begins to grow as a person throughout the season. It’s also a great thematic tie in to the season’s overall plot with Bradford and what Makes donald, despite also disliking the chaos his family gets into, different. Donald accepted it and grew as a person.. Bradford clung to his hate and it ate him alive. Or turned him into a non-sapient kind of vulture. Before I close this part out Jaleel White is also excellent and I wish eh’d get back into voice acting. He’s so freaking good at it. Seriously man i’d love to see him and ben in a sonic property together as a mythology gag. Same with Jims cummings and carey. Just think about it whoever owns the sonic movies.. think about it.

9. The Last Adventure!

Look I knew this was coming, you knew this was coming. But it had to be on here. The Last Adventure is not perfect: The lack of a build up episode like the previous two finales had really hurt this one: even at about 70 minutes, it still feels rushed in places and Huey, one of hte main characters of the season, dosen’t feel like he has a full payoff to his character like Dewey and Louie got.

But despite those flaws.. this episode is just a damn good ending. Almost everyone gets a big moment paying off their character arc, everyone in the party that comes to rescue webby and huey, along with the two themselves, gets a moment to show off, and everything comes together to give us one last epic sendoff. There’s just moment stacked on moment stacked on moment from Launchpads heroic second wind and donning of the gizmoduck armor, to Webby’s tearful confrontation with Beakley, to Huey using the greatest adventure of all line to foil bradford in one of the most deligfhully nuts moments of the series, I could go on for days with just how triumphant this finale felt. While it left a lot of doors open.. that feels like part of the design. It’s the end of the fight with FOWL.. but our heroes will never stop adventuring, never stop going and never stop being in our hearts and the curtain call at the end is now my faviorite bit of end credits ever, perfectly giving the main cast and friends one last chance to take a bow in their own unique ways. I will always miss this show but I will never be disapointed by the note it went out on.

8. The 87 Cent Solution!

Look some episodes are show stoppers, some are heartfelt tearjerkers, some are all this and more.. and some episodes are just clever and hilarious. The 87 Solution is the second funniest episode of Ducktales with me and my go to episode when watching the show. It’s just pure fun and with a clever premise: Scrooge notices 87 cents have gone missing, and already coming down with a cold, goes mad with paranoia as the kids slowly don face masks, something that has become even eeerier given everything, one by one realizing he needs to stop.

While David Tennant is an EXCELLENT dramatic actor, his comedy timing is really something that shoudln’t be ignored and i’ts on full display here as his performance gets more and more deranged, to thep oint he thinks an 8th dimensional imp is repsonsible. He nicely balances the disturbing side of Scrooge’s paranoia, his distancing from his family, with plenty of great gags about it too, the standout being when he offers 2 million dollars to whoever took the money like he’s publicly appeasing kidnappers. It’s fucking brilliant.

But while David is awesome as ever what really, truly makes the episode is my boy, one of my faviorite characters on the show if not my single faviriote FLINTHEART GLOMGOLD. Keith Ferguson is ALWAYS a dream as the character but this is his best performance by far. Part of this is the addition of Zan Owlson, Kev who I mentioned earlier’s faviorite Ducktales character. She’s not only throughly likeable in her own right, but provides the one thing Flinty was missing; a straight man.. or woman in this case. Scrooge wasn’t TERRIBLE in the roll, but can easily step away from his shit or foil it. Owlson has to put up with Glomgold’s nonsense while desperatly trying to stop him from undoing all her hard work with sheer force of jackass. The two jut play off each other brilliantly, Glomgold not getting sh’es not his employee but his equal and Owlson constnatly snarking at him.

And of course both things hit their peak in the climax with the family staging a fake funeral (Though no one told donald it was fake), and we get the funniest scene in the entire fucking show as Glomgold burts in in a white suit, money shades and full dance number to “All I Do Is Win’, which when first watching this I was convinced the song was somehow accidnetly on in the background but nope. They got it after using it in the test phase and the scene is better for it. Glomgold twerking on Scrooge’s casket, trying to get on it to dance, and having to be placated like ac hild is the icing on this very rich cake

And the reveal scene is also gold as Glomgold gets into a YEARLONG staring contest with a baby, fails to steal more than the 87 cents and, in my faviorite touch, put on an imp costume just to make scrooge seem crazier... then keeps the damn thing on the rest of the time for no explicable reason. The episode is the show at it’s comedic peak while giving Glomgold a chance to be a genuine threat and that’s Glomgood.

7. Let’s Get Dangerous!

Frank’s Rebooted Version of Darkwing Duck is probably his greatest achivment with the show. While this show is a team effort, something I slowly realized as I reviewed the show, it’s very clear from the way he talks, how well he knows the show and how much effort was put into porting Darkwing into the reboot that this was his baby. While redefining ducktales for the 2010′s was clearly a huge dream of his... doing the same for the master of suprise was an even bigger goal. And as a huge fan of superheroes i’ve seen my fair share of half assed takes on laired and complex characters. The XCU alone is one giant grab bag of missed opportunities for me.

So i’ts no exageration when I tell you Frank.. nailed it. In one of the most brilliant moves i’ve seen for a superhero work Frank worked his love of the show into the reboot.. by having Darkwing have been a show, one Launchpad loved.. and so did Drake, who was inspried by the show to become an inspriation himself and while his attempt to do that through a zack snydery reboot failed, Launchpad encouraged him to do it for real. Drake was still himself, but the meta aspect and the toning down of some of darkwing’s more obnoxious traits that didn’t work in a universe that, while patently rediciulous still took it’s characters seriously, he made a BETTER version of the character.

This is where all that comes to it’s peak, and hoppefully convinced Disney to let Frank , and possibly matt, run the reboot. And no, even if Point Grey is producing that dosen’t stop that: Thanks to Invincible i’ve now realized that Seth and his friend Evan producing the show dosen’t mean it’ll be RAN by them, nor unrelated to this. It just means their helping make it and if anything given how lush and gorgeous invincible’s animation is, it’s a VERY good sign their helping out with it if it’s true.

But wether this versoin continues or not, Frank gave it his best shot. Part of his diffrent angle is having Drake as a rookie here and as such here we see him truly struggle: he’s had his origin, he ahs the cape, he has the gadgets (in a brilliant turn thanks to fenton, who he actually likes... but is so far the ONLY person to not get he’s Gizmoduck), and the city.. but no crime to fight and no real idea how to go about his lifelong dream. The events of the episode slowly shape him: WHile he already had the spirit for darkwing, never giving up, looking good in a cape etc, this episode gives him the heart the same way it gave his original it: With Gosalyn. Dimantopolis and Beatriz just play off each other perfectly, as the two go from neimies to slowly bonding as Drake realizes this kid needs him and that he needs to fight for more than just filing the ohle inside, and goes to hell and back to help her get her grandpa back, with one of the best moments of the episode to me being when Launchpad helps her realize how hard he’s been working at it, an exausted drake refusing to acccept that he can’t get her grandpa back because he promised. He grows from simply trying to live the dream.. to surpassing the original. We also see more from Launchpad, who grows into his new family and helps push his boyfriend and newa dopted daughter in the right directions. The episode really evolves these characters from the simple disney afternoon versions, who while awesome were made into fully fleshed out characters. Gosalyn still has her edge but now has a hard lesson to learn about doing the right thing, forced to give up someone she loves for the greater good but finding a new family in the process.

Part of what makes the episode work though as while it is funcitonally one big darkwing duck reboot pilot that’s awesome, heartrending and a joy to watch... it’s still a ducktales episode in parts without either part hurting each other. Huey plays a vital role, figuring the ramrod is too good to be true.. and discovering just how it is, then when captured, slowly unravling why Bradford’s there and being at least in part responsible for outing him as a FOWL agent. While this is largely Drakes story the rest of the cast is still vital to it: Scrooge trusting in huey, Louie serving as his logical counter and Dewey meanwhile bonding with team darkwing and helping Gosalyn, knowing exactly where she’s been and providing a nice foil. The episode is just one long and impressive love letter to the original show while creating it’s own thing and that’s really this reboot in a nutshell. It also has some of the best fights of the series, with the first fight between darkwing and bulba, where our hero, unlike his original counterpart, easily troucnes bulba using his speed and skill, is the standout.

6. Woo-Ooo!

I covered this one recently so I won’t go on for too long.. but I will say I hold this one up as the gold standard for first episodes. In one hour, hell even in jus the first half we get a sense of the whole cast, the tone of the show, and the world we’ve been thrust into. It gets all the table setting out of the way by weaving it into a compelling story of Scrooge getting back in the game, finding a reason to get back to what he does best in those he loves most and setting up the season long arc effortlessly in the process. The worst I can say about the episode is it sets the bar a bit high for Season 1 and a lot of the first half really struggled to reach these heights. This episode is a masterwork and the perfect showcase for what the series would be at it’s height.

5. Moonvasion!

Speaking of Golden Standards, Moonvasion is one of the best season finale’s i’ve seen. it’s not THE best.. but that’s a really high bar to clear and that spots currently taken in my heart by “The Crossroads of Destiny” from Avatar the Last Airbender. But while not the best of it’s kind, it’s sitll the best the series put out and is an utterly satisfying epic that ties up season 2.

While I love the Last Adventure, it had a LOT to tie up and was really hampered by having to do all of that with no direct lead in. Moonvasion by contrast hits the ground running with the Moonlanders arriving on earth and all hell breaking loose, and the episode itself breaking into two stellar plots. Scrooge leading an army of every ally he has against the invaders, and Della seemingly going for reinforcements.. but really just trying to keep the kids safe from it, to their anger once they find out.

Both sides end up going badly: Scrooge looses most of his army as Lunaris was one step ahead of him and is left iwth Beakly and Launchpad, while Della ends up marooned.. and finds Donald. The reunion between the two is the highlight of the special, as the two argue as you’d expect (And Dewey cutting in seemingly to stop it.. only to rant at Donald for costing him “ten years of turbo” is the best gag of the episode), before embracing.

Our heroes naturally find ways to bounce back though. Louie, capping off his growth for the season, convinces his mom they can’t just hide.. and in the second best scene of the episode sings the lullabye she wrote.. one Donald sung them every night

And no sooner than Della gets her step back and realizes that dangerous or not she and her newly reunited family have to get back in there, do the cousins show up on Fethry’s giant shrimp/girlfriend Mitzi, and our heroes head back.

Scrooge’s plot hits i’ts peak though as he’s forced to accept the help of an unlikely and unwelcome ally: Glomgold, who turns out to be exactly what they need: While his plan is as stupid, short sighted and insane as you’d expect, complete with forcing Scrooge to dress up as santa just to piss him off and dressing his sharks in parkas (”I call them sharkas”), the sheer lonacy throws Lunaris off as he dosen’t know how to deal with this and Glomgold not only gets the better of him but gets his company back as part of his scheme. “You were prepared for our best but not our dumbest!” “And i’m the dumbest theirs ever been! Muahahahaha! Wait...”

And of course our other heroes arrive just in time to save things.. and the episode still manages to pull off what many works struggle to, something tha’ts very hard to: a SECOND climax. Lunaris decides to just say fuck it and blow up the earth and i’ts up to our core family to kick his ass in space. Epic space battles, Della’s girlfriend meeting the family and more insues and an emotoinal, action packed and fully satisfying finale is had by all... and it’s all topped with one of the best sequel hooks i’ve ever seen as FOWL makes themselves known to us.. and prepares to strike.

4. How Santa Stole Christmas! This one will also be short as i’ve talked about this one.. a lottttt. The initial review, my best christmas specials list and my best of 2020 list. I stand by all of that: this is a unique and wonderful christmas special, i’ll be watching it every year, and i’ts full of charm, humor and gay subtext. In short it’s this series but on christmas footing.

3. Last Crash of the Sunchaser!

Another one I covered very recently, this episode is a master piece of suspense, slowly building tension as our heroes get closer and closer to the truth about Della.. and to death, the simple but deadly stakes making this an absolute nailbiter from start to finish. This is some of the series best pacing bar none... but what seals it is the ending: the masterful flashback finally explaning whatever happened to Della duck, our heroes lashing out at each other.. all cumilating in the best Scene of the show. I said it might be in the review but no I can confirm: Scrooge bitterly ruminating over things while we find out just how much he’s lost... ending with him tearfully and angrily sitting once again alone in one hell of a powerful shot echoing Scrooge’s first apperance. Damn fine stuff.

2. Escape from The Impossbin Only one episode not only matches Last Crash in mounting tension and atmosphere but suprasses it. With FOWL and Bradford’s true nature now out in the wind, this episode uses that to create tension and rattles it’s two most unshakable characters: SCrooge’s normal boundless confidence is shot, not sure he can win this time against an opponent who knows him as well as he knows himself while Beakly slowly unravels, pitting Webby against the boys.. and pitting herself against Webby when Webby sees her terroizing them is only dividing them. Both plots start out funny enough but slowly escalate in tension and stakes until by the end your on the edge of your seat. The Beakly plot is the standout of the two, giving Bentina the starring role she badly needed, having gotten even better in light of the finale. Everyone is at the top of their game and everything builds up to one hell of a twist ending and one hell of a badass boast from our heroes: Their down.. but their far from out and this is far from over.

1. Nightmare On Kimotor Hill!

I”ll be reviewing this episode in full later this week as part of my Lena retrospective, but I stand by putting it up top. This episode is ducktales in it’s purest form and focuses on it’s best original character as Lena grapples with her self hatred and her past. That core helps anchor an amazing concept: going into the Kid’s dreams and finding out their greatest desires. The results.. are all gloriously rediclous and are easily the best gags of hte series as a whole: Dewey’s high school musical santa claus is going ot high school nonsense from getting a’s in Dewology to running away from the abstract concept of a love intrest, to not getting the sybolism of himself crying a moon made of his own tears. Louie quite literally becoming garfield, and my faviorite scene of the show: Huey, wanting to be the tall older brother..g iving himself horrifcly long leg. While everyone else is just understandably baffled, what makes the scene is the banter between Dewey and Huey, with Schwartz and Pudi at their best as Dewey first freaks out and then asks what the hell man, while Huey defends his weird decision (”I”m not good at imagination stuff okay!”), and then tries to get a jar of pickles. Each dream is just so oddly and wonderfully specific to each kid and each one of the triplests dreams, as well as violets being color coded down tot he backgrounds is a very nice touch. The visuals here are just peak ducktales, using the setting for all it’s worth and the climax is utterly emotoinal and heartbreaking... and Lena’s break from her abuser, finally realizing she has the power now is not only a wonderful metaphor... but also just so damn cathartic. And that’s why this one’s the best to me personally: it just packs so much into 20 minutes: some of the series best and most creative jokes, a gripping emtoinal arc, and so much more. It’s just that damn good and tha’ts why it’s the best... that and starting Huelet for me. Seriously that LIbrary scene is so fucking cute.

Thank you all for reading. If you liked this artcle, join my patreon and help me get to my stretch goal for monthly darkwing duck reviews, a review of super ducktales and more after! Until the next rainbow... it’s been a pleasure.

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writingtoforgetreality · 4 years

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“Who is she?” (Alexander Calvert x Reader)

Request: I would like to ask for something where Alex and the reader are dating and the two are part of the Supernatural cast, and they fake a fight in front of Jensen, Jared and Misha, but it ends in a cute moment. That's it lol. (by anonymous), [Actors-Masterlist]

Summary: You could not find the script you needed for an important upcoming audition. Still, you had to start practicing or you would not perform well. Luckily, Alex was always there to help you with your lines. But what would happen if things got out of hand?

Words: 1,937

Warnings: language, mentions of cheating, argument, protective!Jensen, fluff, (Y/E/C) = your eye color

If you like my work & wanna support me: a coffee would be highly appreciated ❤

“Alex?” you were currently in your shared apartment in Vancouver. Searching for a very important script, you slowly started to go insane. You could have sworn you put it right on top of the coffee table. Why was it not there anymore? Maybe Alex had seen it.

“Yeah?” his scruffy voice made you look up. He came straight out of the shower, only a towel hanging low on his waist. On every other day, this sight would have been an invitation for you but you had to find this damn script.

“Have you seen my script? I put it right there.” you pointed to the place where you last saw it.

“Um, I don´t know...Are you sure you left it there?” Alex got closer to you and started helping you. First the living room, then the kitchen. Soon after, it felt like you searched through your entire apartment, without luck.

“(Y/N), it´s time to head out. We´ll be late.” he disappeared in the bedroom and came out seconds later in a black hoodie and gray sweatpants. Why bother wearing anything else when you had to change as soon as you were on set?

“Ugh, okay. I´m coming.” it did not make sense to you. You needed that script. There was a very important audition coming up. A big movie with TOM CRUISE. Yes, you heard that right. An action film where you would portray his love interest. This would be your chance to really start at Hollywood. Your role in Supernatural was the first start and the fans loved you a lot. Just like Alex, you came around for the 13th season. At first, you were only meant to stick around for a few episodes. Just some girl who was saved by Jack and brought back to the bunker. The fans seemed to like you and they almost immediately caught up on the chemistry Alex and you shared. When you started dating, the writers decided to make your character Jack´s love interest. Now, the last few episodes were about to air and you still had not found your next job.

Of course you worked on it to change that. Supernatural was your first acting job, you were not the most famous in this industry. Jared had already found his next role: Texas Ranger. Jensen will be a part of the third season of The Boys. You were incredibly happy for them but it also scared the shit out of you. If it took them this long to be cast in another project, how long would it take you? That was something you should not be thinking about during your ride to the set of Supernatural. You should start preparing for the upcoming scenes.

The first half of the day was very productive. Ever since the thought of shooting the LAST episodes has sunken in, the crew really wanted to bring the best out of every scene. Still, Jensen, Jared and Misha loved to mess with Alex and you. There had to be enough scenes for the gag reel, right?

As the director called for lunch break, all of you made your way over to the catering area. You were not hungry, thoughts still with your lost script. Maybe you should just give them a call to let them know that you needed another script. No, that would not leave a good impression.

“When do we continue filming today?” Jensen asked.

“Uhhh, around 3 pm, I think?” Jared´s answer was not really helpful. Most days he had no idea about your schedule. One of the reasons that made you love him even more.

“For once you´re right.” Misha threw in.

Everyone headed back to their trailers, wanting to prepare for the next few scenes and relax a bit.

“Can you practice with me?” you asked Alex as you were walking towards your trailers. You did not share those because they were very small to begin with.

“Practice what? We rehearsed our shared scenes, like, a hundred times last night.” he chuckled, amused by your uncertainty. He knew how you barely ever forgot your lines or broke character yet you still wanted to keep on running through your lines.

“Nooo, I mean for the audition. It´s next week and if I don´t start going through it now I´ll be even more nervous.” you came to a halt, waiting for his reaction.

“I thought you lost the script?” Alex turned around to look at you.

“Misplaced. Anyway, I know the story more or less. We could just improvise. Please?” your big (Y/E/C) looked at him in a way you knew he could never resist.

“In my trailer or-”

“Actually, I think right here, outside, would be perfectly fine.” your smile grew. You loved acting alongside Alex. This role was not meant to be his but he was always happy to help you with auditions. You did the same for him. Recalling what was written on the script, you tried your best to explain the story to him. It was easy, really, your character found emails from another woman, arranging meetings that go way back, like seven months. The scene you had to prepare for the audition was you confronting “Tom Cruise” which ended in a big fight.

“Got it?” you watched Alex´ face closely, looking for any misunderstandings. A nod from his head made you get into character.

“Hey, honey, I´m home.” your back faced Alex, your body language seemingly tense. He moved closer to you as you did not answer him. A hand was held out to touch your shoulder but as soon as it came in contact with you, you brushed it off angrily. Turning around with tears in your eyes, Alex was impressed by how fast you could make this role alive, without even saying a word. You truly were magnificent.

“DO NOT call me honey!” you managed to keep the tears at bay, thinking it would be better to let them spill a bit later.

“What´s wrong?” Alex gave you space, getting the sign of you not wanting to be touched by him.

“Oh, so you don´t have anything to tell me?” your arms crossed in front of your chest, your eyebrows raising, waiting for him to answer you.

“Um, I´m not su-”

“BULLSHIT! Bullshit.” the second part was barely above a whisper, showing that, despite everything you saw, you still cared for him. Loved him, even. Alex just stood there, knowing what your next words would be like.

“How long has this been going on?” your gaze was focused on the floor, not wanting him to see your tears that now started spilling.

“She doesn´t mean anything to me. You are the on-” but once again, Alex was cut off by your screaming.

“Did you fuck her?” your voice was small, not wanting to ask this question but desperate for the answer.

“Sweetheart, I-”

“DID YOU FUCK HER?” this time you screamed at his face. Your emotions were all over the place.

What neither Alex nor you noticed was Jensen, Jared and Misha storming out of their trailers due to hearing screams. When they saw the scene in front of them, they came to a fast stop. Did they just hear that Alex had cheated on their (Y/N)? Someone who was like a little sister to them? Jensen made himself ready to storm to you, wanting nothing more than to punch Alex. Jared and Misha, though, held him back.

“Yes.” Alex sighed. “But it´s not like she means anything to me.” he once again came closer to you. This time you did not protest. You were too exhausted to react to it.

“Who is she?” scared of what the answer would be, you took a step back but looked straight into his eyes.

“Cassie.” you read Alex´ face as regret but as soon as you heard him say the name you could have thrown up.

“CASSIE?! MY BEST FRIEND CASSIE?!” you lunged towards him and started punching his chest, too weak to do any damage, but you were angry and did not know what else to do.

That was too much for Jensen. He ripped himself free and ran towards you, Jared and Misha following close behind. A shove from the side made Alex and you separate. Suddenly you were pulled back by two strong arms. As you looked behind, you saw Jared holding you close to him. As you focused your gaze back to Alex, you were shocked to see him in Jensen´s grasp. You did not quite understand what Jensen was saying but it did not sound good at all.

“Jensen, stop!” you wiggled yourself out of Jared´s arms and ran to save Alex. You tried pulling Jensen away but he was too strong. Even Alex could not free himself.

“IT WAS JUST ACTING!” your scream erupted which made Jensen stop in his tracks. Slowly, he let go of Alex who coughed a few times.

“What?!” the confusion was written all over Jensen´s face.

“Alex and I were just practicing for my audition next week. You know, the one with Tom Cruise? I told you about that.” your heart was racing, your breathing too fast. Jared and Misha were already at Alex´ side, making sure he was not hurt.

“Shit, I´m sorry. Alex, are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, all good.” he waved it off as if it was nothing. Typical Alex, you thought.

Suddenly you started laughing, replaying the scene in your head. Everyone looked at you weirdly but copied your actions soon after.

“Alex, he almost killed you.” by now tears were streaming down your face because you were laughing so hard.

“Hey, I didn´t even touch him.” Jensen complained.

“Oh yeah? Tell that my throat.” Alex stated sarcastically.

“That was acting?” Jared asked to which Alex and you only nodded.

“If you don´t get the job I´ll make sure to sue them, just so you know.” this time it was Misha who spoke up. This only made all of you laugh even more.

“Everyone back on set, please!” you could hear the director yell. Jared, Misha and you walked over, chatting and laughing about everything that just happened. Alex and Jensen, though, were a bit behind.

“Sorry again, kid. I really thought y´all were fighting. It sounded so real. You sure you´re okay?” he finished his sentence with a light chuckle, still somewhat ashamed of throwing himself at Alex like that.

“I´m fine, Jensen, really.” Alex laughed lightly. “Besides, now I know what happens if I ever hurt (Y/N) in any way.”

“You better take care of her and treat her like a princess. I´m serious.” Jensen had a stern look on his face but smiled anyway. You meant a lot to him and he could not bare the thought of anyone hurting you.

“I will. I promise.”

“Y´all coming or what?” you screamed at them from the other end of the set, waiting for the two of them so you could finally continue filming.

“On our way.” Alex said back, beginning to walk towards where you were standing. As he kept walking he thought about you again. How it was so easy for you to act out such a hard scene. Your talent amazed him. He really hoped you would land that role. From what he had seen so far, you were perfect for it. God, he loved you. It still had not sunken in that you were his. What did he ever do to deserve you? He knew he could not live without you and he would keep on reminding you of his love for you every single day.

Published (09/10/2020) by Cathy

Tags: @kalasyrtiaan, @blairrrose (thanks for your support <3)

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insomniac-dot-ink · 4 years

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Just Beyond the City

Genre: wlw urban fantasy

Summary: a young woman moves to a new city where she begins exploring fresh hiking trails, only to hear of something strange in the woods there. Something ancient and dark and that doesn’t belong.

The hiker starts seeing a witch in the woods and wandering closer and closer to whatever this malevolent presence is. A story in three parts.

PART ONE

I liked hiking. I liked it since I was a kid and my mom had to tighten the laces of my boots with both hands and my baseball cap flopped right over my eyes. I liked following her bright purple backpack up the trails with the sound of my shoes crunching on the rocky path. I liked slathering sunscreen on my arms in large creamy dollops. I liked pushing my body up and up and up and feeling those small complaints in my muscles telling me I was moving. I was here. I was living.

Most of all, I liked how inexplicable things were. My mom raised me by herself and I was not an easy kid. I often talked so quickly I bit my own tongue and then cried about it. I was well-liked, but if anyone even looked at me wrong I would come home in tears. I hated being apart from her and the school nurse would often call in the middle of the day saying I demanded her come pick me up. I asked a thousand questions wherever we went: why did the movie end like that? Why does that woman carry her dog that way? Why can’t I be wheeled around in a chair like that person?

I was overly curious. I was sensitive. I was over dramatic. I was clingy. Very few things made sense to me. The outdoors didn’t make sense either, but they did so in a way that was enchanting.

I liked the sounds of birds trilling to each other in a language I couldn’t possibly fathom. I liked the way the wind blew in directions I would never be able to follow. I liked how the trees knew things I never would and how the roots went in thousands of directions at once that I would never fully grasp.

In those mountains, in the trees and the dense forests, and in everything else, I was okay with not knowing.

When I was 26 I moved away from my trees and my mountains and my snow and I found myself on the outskirts of a sprawling metropolis. Normally, people move to LA to try and become starlets or script-writers or big-time directors. I had never dreamed of being an actress since I threw-up if too many people looked at me at once and definitely didn’t think I was pretty enough. I simply went because the Franklin Law Firm was the first one that offered me a position.

There were plenty of lawsuits in California, enough that even a small-town girl from Montana could find work right out of law school. It took their bar exam. I passed. I applied. It was a change.

The sky was piercingly blue and the air thick with smog and people all moving and chatting and absolutely littered everywhere. It reminded me of watching ants troop back and forth on their hills, making lines, and zig-zags, and following invisible cross-walks. Things were busy.

I felt it in my veins and through my head and just underneath my tongue, like a metallic aftertaste, as I drove through the slow-moving traffic. That “busy” was everywhere. The streets were sun-soaked and warm with thumping feet. The wind carried noises of dogs barking and music playing and life going on. I had to take deep breaths until I took a right and started driving away from the “busy.”

I was so grateful that instant for being a hiker. My mom had suggested it, she had always been my beacon to follow, and I took an apartment almost forty-five minutes away from my work on her advice. The commute wasn’t going to be fun.

However, it was worth it. Away from the thick smoggy crowds of buildings and youthful men in cut-off jean shorts and beautiful women in shirts that showed off their flat bellies. I passed residential neighborhoods with immigrant families and struggling playwrights and then up past gated communities with green cut lawns and paychecks that looked like lucky numbers on fortune cookies.

Finally, I passed right up toward a ridge outside the city. I would bite off my own tongue before I’d call it a mountain (as some people there did), but it was luckily a little bigger than a hill.

I exhaled as I got closer to the hiking trails and there were finally bigger gaps between the houses. I was so grateful I chose this over convenience. It was different of course, the bushes were dusty and barren, and the trees were squat and barely greened. But it was outside the business of the city.

I smiled at the trails as I pulled up to a grey apartment building with concrete balconies and four stories just below it. I got out of my little Nissan and peered up toward my new home. It would have to do. I got out the keys I had received earlier that day and found my way inside to the fourth floor.

It was a decent modern building with air-conditioning on high and big mirrors in the elevator with shiny metal panels on the sides. I found my way to my room where I opened it to find the same modern aesthetic with a sleek silver refrigerator and a simple metal bed frame left behind from the last tenants. I wondered around the boxy rooms each with one or two windows and bare floors. It had the feeling a bit of pre-packaged meals, neat, and tidy, and underwhelming, but it would do the trick.

I went back outside and started unpacking.

I heaving up boxes from the trunk of my car and it was only on my second trip up that I realized someone was watching me. He was outside on the sidewalk and stood perfectly still as I got out my next box. He had a strong jawline thick with stubble across his face and neck. I looked to either side of me to check that he was staring at me and not some other girl in a bikini standing behind me.

“Need some help there, new neighbor?” He finally called out with a wave. “Uh,” I fumbled with the box for a moment and tried to come up with an excuse to shake him off.

“Don’t worry.” He smiled. “Not a stalker. I just knew I’d be getting someone new across the hall from me. I was just checking to see if you needed anything.” “Uh,” I repeated again elegantly. I was definitely a lawyer. “Sure.” I said after a long pause. “Always nice to meet... neighbors.” He came over and helped me with another box. I wondered if the stranger danger alarms in my head should start going off at that point, but they never seemed to. He was wearing North face gear and smelled like the ocean and was relatively benign.

He just took a box and started chatting, “yeah, I can tell you about all the good restaurants you have to drive thirty-minutes to in order to reach from here.” “Ah,” I said as he slowly made our way back inside. “I thought it’d be pretty far away from things. Yeah.” “You come in for Hollywood?” He said with interest.

I just snorted. “Not even.” We talked about work and the price of gas and the area for another few minutes. His name was Doug and he had lived there for three years and was still a waiter/aspiring actor himself. He liked my leather bracelets.

“So,” I finally brought up what I really wanted to talk about. “How’s the hiking around here?” “Dunno.” Doug shrugged. “I wouldn’t go near the stuff nearby. Like I said, most good things are a thirty-minute drive at least.” I furrowed my brow and looked over my shoulder at him. “You don’t go up Timber Ridge? Online said it had some nice views.”

He looked away and waved a hand through the air. “Nah.”

“Why not?” I asked a little too hastily.

“I mean,” his eyes darted left and right. “Look, I’m not superstitious or anything, but...” “But?” I gave him a focused look.

He shrugged again, “I’ve heard some weird stuff about it.” His eyes darted back and forth, “weird even for this place I mean.” I made a face, “should I be worried about a serial killer on the loose?” One of my mom’s new favorite hobbies was reminding me about all the serial killers that came from California. “No. I mean like,” he placed my box down outside my new apartment door. His brow bent innards and he whispered slowly. “They’ve been finding... stuff.”

I bounced my eyebrows up and down, I tried not to smirk, “monster stuff?” “Bloody rags.” He said solemnly, “rocks with strange symbols, plants that shouldn’t be here, bones, and I dunno... bad vibes.” He cleared his voice and leaned forward so much so that the air hummed with his discomfort. “They say it’s a witch.” “A witch?” I tried not to laugh.

Doug sniffed, “just saying.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Though I’d rather be eaten by her than take the interstate 405 again.” He changed the subject back to complaining about traffic after that and I let him.

---------------------------

I didn’t see any witches the first time I went up Timber Ridge. I didn’t see much of anything actually.

The path was dusty instead of crunchy, the bushes were low to the ground and mostly leaf-less and dry, the trees were tiny and hid nothing from the eye. If my tall forests back home were thick with greenery and secrets, LA nature was brittle and easy to digest.

There weren’t that many bird sounds, but even from that high up sometimes I still heard honking and sirens and voices from someone’s open window. I still wasn’t that far from the city.

I ached from sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag because I hadn’t bought a new bed yet. I had also for some reason given Doug my number and he kept texting me-- which felt like a game of jeopardy I accidentally entered where I didn’t know any of the right answers. I was sore and not particularly impressed with my new living situation. I missed my mom. I missed my dog.

I missed my mountains.

I frowned at it all as I climbed. The path was long at least and for moments at a time dipped down far enough that the city itself disappeared. After an hour I finally climbed up far enough that I reached the top of the ridge and I did have to stand there in awe.

My mouth fell open gently and the weight in my chest shrunk to nothing. It was probably because it was dawn and there was always something selfless about dawn: it gave and it gave and it gave.

The sun shimmered in long pink and orange streaks behind me and just beyond the city was an expanse of ocean that ate up my vision. An ocean vast and smooth and heart-stoppingly creamy blue. I had gone to the ocean once when I was a kid, but it had been cold and unfriendly and the waves were too big. Now, it was the backdrop to something that made my eyes water.

I sniffled and wiped at my tears as they fell. It was probably because I missed my mom and my dog and hated my new city, but that didn’t stop me from wiping at my cheeks and tasting salt. I cried at that sunset on the first day.

Finally, I turned around and something flitted dark and swift in the corner of my vision. I jerked my head around and there was something on the ground. It was transparent and yet tangible, like clothe. Dark. It was something I could only call a “shadow” that lingered long and twisted across the ground. It seemed to dance across the path with no end for a long second. I looked up quickly to try and catch it’s source, but nothing but the small trees and dusty bushes remained.

“Hello?” I said, but nothing responded.

I touched my left elbow and turned around in tight circles. When I stopped I got one last look at it slipping away. There was a shadow staring back at me: hollow eyes and hollow mouth and a gaping frozen expression caught in some unknowable stomach-clenching emotion. I gasped lowly, took a step back, and when I blinked again it was gone.

I hurried away from that spot. I chalked up the strange vision to too much crying and not enough breakfast that morning.

I didn’t see a witch on the ridge that first day or at least or, at least, I didn’t think I did.

------------

part 2 coming soon!

So all of my hours were cut at my job bc of coronavirus, if you enjoyed my writing please, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi or becoming a patron I could really use the help!

#wlw #witches #sapphic #writing #femslash #f/f #short story #girls love #Just Beyond the City #story in 3 parts #it ended up being 15k so I decided to split it up this time

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krreader · 5 years

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blurred lines.

pairing: choi minho x actress + foreign!reader fandom: shinee warnings: / genre: fluff

summary: his character fell in love with your character, but it wasn’t just the characters that fell in love with each other throughout the shooting of this k-drama.

a/n: do you even know how happy this request made me???? like babe, I love minho so much sdfghjkl thank you for the request!!!

When you first started your acting career, you never would have thought you'd end up here.

But after you had starred in that movie with a Korean actor and after you and him had become friends, he must have dropped a few hints here and there about your talent and.. well, here you were now, about to shoot your first scene for the K-Drama that you'd be the main character of.

The plot was actually a really sweet one, that's probably why you had agreed to do it, despite you having to work with a language specialist who had helped you with learning Korean.

Your character was a foreigner, obviously, but your Korean wasn't half bad (which was a pain in the ass for you, because prior to this drama, you could barely say a word in Korean and it was a lot of work to learn so much in such a short amount of time). She's working as a doctor and falls for this really rich and popular Korean guy. Problem was, he was the first-born of this really prestigious, old-fashioned family and they wouldn't allow him to date a foreigner. A whole lot of drama goes down in the middle, a lot of tears, but at the end, just when you want to leave and go back home, he manages to convince his family that the only way he'd find happiness in life would be if he went after you. And so like the cliché, he runs after you in the pouring rain as you walk up to the plane, you kiss, happy ending.

Why you were probably so interested in the role was because it threw a light on a problem that you thought was really important. The fact that first-born men were supposed to marry only Koreans, at least according to families that wanted to live by the old way.

Love shouldn't have restrictions like that and you, as well as the writer, director and producer all agreed on that. That's why you were all making this drama.

Oh, and that's why your co-star agreed to do the drama.

“(Y/N)?” a knock on your trailer door made you get up with a smile and when you opened it you were greeted with the most handsome face you had ever seen – and you had worked with a lot of handsome actors before.

Choi Minho, not just a singer, but an actor as well. And a really good one, to be honest.

He was perfect for this role, was able to portray the character and his feelings so overwhelmingly good that you couldn't wait for people to finally see it.

“You're early,” you smiled brightly and let him inside, before closing the door again.

“I thought you might want some coffee. Early shoots and all that,” he handed you the Starbucks cup and chuckled when you became excited.

“You know me too well.”

And that was actually really interesting.

You've been shooting with each other for a little over three months now and it felt like you've known him for all your life. There was just this undeniable chemistry between you two that the casting directors probably noticed the day you two had first interacted with each other. Maybe that's why they were so determined to have both you and him be the main stars of this drama.

“Did you sleep well?” he sat down with you on the couch of your trailer and smiled as he took in your appearance.

Neither of you had gotten their make-up done yet, so that meant you were sitting in front of him in your PJ's, messy hair and no make-up at all.

And he loved it so much when he saw you like this..

“I did, getting up was the hard part,” you laughed, taking a sip from your coffee, “Can't believe we're shooting the airport scene tonight.”

“Right? Seems like yesterday when we did the basic shoots in the hospital,” Minho chuckled, rubbing his thumbs over his cup, maybe even a bit nervously.

The airport scene meant that you and him would have to kiss each other tonight.

And yes, true, this was just a show and you both knew that, but the developing feelings between you two as yourselves and not as your characters were very real.

And you both knew that a kiss, even if it was for a drama, would change a lot of things between you two.

“I really hope people are going to like it,” are going to like me.

“They're going to love you, (Y/N),” see, how could you not fall for him? He always knew what you were really thinking. He was so caring and kind and this really could not have ended any differently than you falling for him, “You worked so hard for this and people will see that.”

“Thanks, I just.. I really hope you're right,” you looked up from your cup into his eyes, taken aback a bit by the beauty of them.

“I am. Trust me,” your co-star reached out to put his hand over yours, letting it linger there for a couple of seconds and watching your fingers immediately reacting to his touch.

And before he knew it, your fingers were interlinked.

You weren't the only one who fell hard for the other one. Minho knew it the first time you walked into the room that this would be difficult for him, because the first time you smiled at him, he was done for.

You were so different from anyone else he had ever worked with and he just loved you for it. He loved you for the way you acted around him and tried not to be anyone but yourself. He loved you for your talent, a talent that he hadn't seen in any of his previous co-stars and he loved you for the passion you put into your work.

But he wanted to see this show come to an end before he would – maybe – act on his feelings. Because just in case you didn't reciprocate his feelings – which he doubted at this point, because otherwise you wouldn't look at him like you looked at him now – he didn't want to make things awkward between you two on set.

Another knock on your door, a staff member saying: “(Y/N)? It's time for your make-up,” which made you sigh and reluctantly let go of Minho's hand, both of you getting up.

“Let's do this, then,” you grinned excitedly.

It was a tiring day, without a doubt.

One shoot followed the next, you had to go to several locations, had to change into several outfits and had to study your lines again and again to make sure that you really were prepared for everything.

And if you weren't so damn excited for the next scene, you probably would have wanted to take a nap.

But your adrenaline kept you going, knowing that this scene that you were shooting right now would come up.

“Okay, here's what I want,” the director walked up to you and Minho, “(Y/N), I want you to walk to the plane with your umbrella, Minho, I want you to yell her name two times, but don't turn around then, (Y/N). Only at the third time, I want you to turn. You guys will say your lines, then you'll kiss and during the kiss, I want you to slowly let go of the umbrella. A kissing scene in rain will be the perfect ending.”

“Alright,” you nodded, going over each step in your head again, before you walked over to your starting position.

“You okay?” Minho had apparently followed you while they were still setting up the lights and cameras.

“Sure. I'm.. really good,” nervous as hell, but good.

“Good,” he nodded, “That's good.”

He didn't let you see it, but he was just as nervous as you were.

He's had the shoot with his 'parent's beforehand, so this was really the finale for the both of you.

Your make-up artists made sure that you were ready and then, finally: “Action!”

The first shot would be from your perspective, so you had to make sure that your facial expressions were on point. For the first few seconds, you completely stopped thinking about what happened afterwards and just focused on yourself and giving the best performance possible.

You heard Minho shout your characters’ name once, twice and then finally the third time.

That's when you turned around.

He was completely soaked, out of breath from how he 'ran' here.

“What are you doing here?” you asked with furrowed eyebrows.

“I want to say something before you go..”

“Listen, we've been over this, there is no way..-”

“I love you,” he said. And for a second you thought you saw Minho, not the character he was playing, say it to you, not the character you were playing, “And I don't care if the entire world is against it, I will still love you. I will always love you. You, nobody else. It's just you.”

“Your family..-”

“..saw how unhappy I was when I was without you. They can't force me to fall in love with someone. This is the one thing I have to decide for myself. And my heart knows what it wants and that's you. Only you.”

You blinked at him for a couple of seconds, waited like the script said you should, before Minho finally took a step forward under the umbrella with you, grabbed your face and pulled you towards him until his lips crashed against yours.

And then your brain just completely shut off.

You didn't think about anything anymore in that moment, besides Minho and yourself. The sparks that the kiss created flew through your body and without you even noticing it, you dropped the umbrella like the director wanted you to, then you wrapped your arms around his neck to be even closer to him.

And even if the director had already yelled cut, neither of you stopped.

Because this wasn't your characters kissing anymore.

This was you and Minho kissing.

“Uh.. guys? I said.. cut?” the director tried again, but neither of you seemed to care. He turned around to the staff members who were all chuckling and shook his head with a smile, “Just.. give them a moment, I guess. Set up the cameras for the next angle in the meantime.”

You really needed that moment.

You completely forgot where you even were, didn't notice the staff around you working.

Only a few minutes later did Minho finally pull back a little to lean his forehead against yours.

“(Y/N)?”

“Hm?” your eyes were still closed, your fingers brushing through his wet hair at the back of his head.

“Would you.. want to go out with me sometime?”

A chuckle escaped your throat and you leaned back a bit to finally look at him, smiling just as brightly as he was.

“Yeah.. I would really like that.”

#shinee imagine #shinee x reader #choi minho x reader #choi minho imagine #minho imagine #minho x reader #shinee #choi minho #reader #requests

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hunterbahamut · 4 years

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Today’s story is one I’m calling ‘Transformer’.

There’s more to this than meets the eye. I hope you enjoy!

Zech stood in front of the time chamber nervously, feeling the power radiating from his gauntlet. This was it, it was time for his final trip back through time. He would never be able to save his father from the errors of his ancestors.

In that moment, a familiar voice boomed from his head. "My son, are you ready to enter the time chamber?"

"Yes, yes... I'm glad you're here, Eblan."

"I would like to have a word with you before you enter. When we last left, you were more than ready to enter the time chamber. However, you overlooked one crucial fact. The Destiny Ascension Program is now complete.”

Zech frowned and let out a sigh of frustration. "That's exactly the problem, the program was never meant to be." He looked down, "How many lives did we loose already? They were never meant to be involved, and you know it."

"Let them out, Zel, it's not like the Volturi will know what hit them. "

Zech held his hands out, "I don't want any more suffering, not from this place, not from our soldiers either."

Zesh rolled his eyes. "There's nothing to be done about this, as long as we don't find any more information, this place won't respond in kind to the Volturi."

"Yeah. I know. We've just been trapped in this cycle for so long now." He sighed out, "I want things to go back to the way they were before. I miss them all, especially Nova." He shook his head, "You can't change my mind, I have to go back."

"I know." The nurse on duty got up and passed a small red pouch to the Wasp. "Thanks Nova." She bowed to the Wasp, then turned to the beaten Martian and rested her hand on his shoulder. "Don't let them get you down, buddy." The Martian nodded to her. "She's right."

Now that the doctor had gone, Nova had begun to really notice the problems. Oh. It was definitely her fault.

Everything was going just fine until another explosion rocked the building.

As the dust settled Zech and Lon chose a shortcut, heading back to the lobby. They quickly noticed that Harry had disappeared and Lon collapsed to the floor, shaking. He looked at the cage, thinking it was the most likely explanation. Zech stepped outside, looking for his friend. Things were getting worse, it was hard to keep any thing coherent; Nova, Lon, Harry, Sparks, so many people he thought he knew only to be forgotten or disappearing. This was getting worse, and he knew he had to fix it. And to fix that, he had to find either the team or Ezskar.

"This has to stop!" Jobe said, upset, but trying not to look so hopeless. "A lot of people are putting a lot of trust in you, but I want to know you're going to keep your word. I have done some research, I don't know what you're doing, but you have to know that you're hurting a lot of people if you've let something like this happen."

"I know..." Zech said, "Too many people have been hurt by all of this." He looked back to Jobe, "You know that I've always kept my word. I am going to fix this, one way or another. You just have to trust me. I have to find find Wart or Ezskar first before Trask or the others do."

Rody thought about this for a moment, "I suppose, but I hope you don't give up."

Zech shook his head, "No, not yet, boss."

Rody chuckled, "Well, we'll see."

--Chapter 7--

"What are you doing, Zech?"

"Looking for Ezskar." He said, checking his scanner. "He's close, but so is Nova, Trask -and- Sparks. He let out a sigh, "This is getting out of hand, if I don't get that time device back, then nothing will make sense anymore!"

With a flick of his wrist, Jayne's X-COM helmet twitched, and he smiled. "Oxygen converter." he said, showing it to McCoy. "Alright, this ought to be good enough." He turned around and pointed his knife at the scanner. "Auspex locator." he said, and waved the device over. The device beeped, and Jayne pulled back his hood.

Zech blinked in confusion for a moment. "Uh, yeah...something like that." He sighed, "Alright, you guys take care of that, I'm going in after the pink terror." He didn't wait for any kind of response, instead he just threw his arm out, teleporting out of the room and into the street; what was left of Union main square. If he remembered it right, this was the epicenter of it all. Nodding to himself, he simply charged forward through the center of the square, where his tail extended forward and lowered to touch a street lamp. As it closed in on him, all the signals for the various Villagers came to life.

"Great, the supposed hero appears." The all-too-familiar voice of the pink mutant sneered. Ezskar stood on the remains of the central monument and looked over to Zech. "How many more times must we go through this? How many more times will you be plucked out of time to face me here?"

"As many times as it takes!" Zech shot back, "You don't know what kind of damage you're doing!"

Ezskar attacked, causing a shimmering sphere of energy to form and began firing a laser array at Zech. It was only a matter of time before Zech's energy shield was cut off and he was done for.

Zech charged into laser, pushing his shield out as much as he could before he broke and dashed to the side, letting the laser explode behind him. He threw his arm out, teleporting closer to Ezskar before firing a bolt of magical energy. "This ends now!" He shouted, "Give up!" He picked up a bladed weapon and slammed it into Ezskar's shield. "Great!" As the two charged, Zech flicked his wrist and the laser disappeared. He was quick and nimble. Ezskar couldn't use his weapon while his shield was up, and he would just get slammed into the wall if he tried.

"You time-hopping freak!" Ezskar yelled out before he fell back, dropping the shield and raising the weapon up, aiming for the hybrid. This was his chance; Zech teleported out of view, reappearing behind Ezskar and raising his gauntlet up, energy charging up before he released it.

He felt the blast pass through the back of his shield. With a loud crack, Ezskar's armor and his core began to cool as the drones assimilated his form. Ezskar screamed as he felt a bright beam fly towards his head and slice open his helmet, leaving him with his other eye showing. Ezskar fell to his knees and gasped in pain.

Zech raised his gauntlet and aimed it at the weapon, unleashing an energy tether to grab hold and yank it back to him. "Got it!" He cried out, "Now to put an end to it once and for all!" He reached into the weapon's core and yanked out a blue crystal as it glowed and sparked with very familiar energy. He had to destroy it, and hopefully this will all be put to an end. The mysterious energy caused his blood to heat up and he started to sweat. The jet black suit looked as if it was coated with at least thirty years of ash, and the single pale finger on the right hand was similar to the fading image of Darkstalker- whatever he was.

Zech held the crystal in his gauntlet and started to charge up his own energy; causing the ground and air around him the shake and vibrate. Time energy creating a paradox like this was dangerous, and he had no way of knowing if this would restore everything, or destroy everything. But it had to be better than this. As Time energy, he summoned up the holographic arms, showing himself pulling on each one of them, changing their material form as he went, until he finally got a long metallic straight line stretching from where the crystal should be to his hand. Time broke into three pieces in his hand. He flipped the crystal, leaving it in the air. Suddenly, the ground began to tear apart and come to life; energy spilled out from the cracks as the time shards began to reform. Everything around the hybrid began to distort and fade away as the timeline was reforged. He felt the pain shoot through him as he started to become consumed into the distortion wave as well.

"God..." he gasped with his voice as he continued to be dragged into the past. God's eyes widened as the myriad of terrible thoughts crossed his mind. The most haunting thing about being a Time Lord is the moment you realize how far behind you are in time. I could've sworn they were slowing down by the second. "Dumbledore." God breathed heavily, his thin lips wriggling with sadism. "The universe is a pain."

There was a heavy amount of silence for a few moments before Phineas spoke up. "What the hell was that?!"

The video ended and the lights came back on. The members of the team had the most confused, flabbergasted or concerned looks on their faces.

"What the hell was that?!" Phineas said again, "What kind of bizarre trash was this? 'Based on a true story' my aching ass!"

Nix sighed, "I was willing to give them some slack, this feels like it was written by a bad AI program or something."

Sparks looked flustered, the end of his smoothie straw all crunched up from his chewing. "They got me all wrong! I don't act like that! That's not what I'm like! And I'm not a woman!"

"They make me look totally stiff and humorless." Tero said with his arms crossed.

"Actually, I think that actor's pretty spot on." Phin snorted, "But the script writers thinks I'm an idiot who tells bad jokes about meat all the time!"

Tero shot him a glare. "You tell bad jokes about plenty of other topics."

"I know!"

Nix shook her had, "Can you imagine how Wart or Ezskar would react if they would see this?"

Phineas couldn't help but let out a laugh, "I'd actually pay good money to see that!"

Zech meanwhile was sunk down in his seat, his hood covering his head as he wished he could sneak out of there. This was embarrassing to say the least. "That...wasn't a good movie."

Nix sighed. "I'll say."

"No kidding." Phin grumbled.

Tero snorted. "Horrible."

"But the effects were decent!" Sparks said.

ATUHOR’S NOSE: Hey everyone, Happy April Fools!

So this was a very strange idea I had and wanted to play with. Some of this story was written by me, but the rest was written using ‘Talk to Transformer’, a kind of computer AI network that finished story prompts you put in. After watching the madness from Vinny and Joel of Vinesauce when they played with it, I thought this would be perfect for an April Fools story.

As for the ending...yeah, it’s from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It only seemed appropriate.

As ever with these, the story is not in canon with Team Prototype or the AU stories of mine. This was just a little experiment in some madness.

#bahamut writing #zech #ezskar #time travel #team prototype #yarkwark #transformer #talk to transformer #madness #april fools

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redroverrider · 4 years

Text

My thoughts on Star Wars Episode IX. Posted this on my Insta and realized I never posted it here

Ok, I know people are going to disagree no matter what I say so there’s no use lying about it, so I’ll tell you how I honestly feel about it.

Also, THERE ARE SPOILERS in this review

There’s really no easy way to put it, because I both loved it and didn’t like it at the same time. There were parts that I really liked, parts that I didn’t like at all, and parts that I have very mixed feelings over.

Least favorite things:

Rey and Poe’s interactions between the two of them. I was excited to see how they would be portrayed as friends and how the writers would have them relate to each other, but they didn’t seem to have that much chemistry together.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but the interactions between Rey, Finn, and Poe all together didn’t feel very convincing or entertaining. Individually, I thought Finn and Rey and Finn and Poe were great. But as a trio, they just seemed really off. And I was really excited to see how they would be as trio together for the first time.

Hux being the spy made no sense at all to me, and the idea of why there needed to be a spy within the First Order didn’t make much sense either. (I’m going to cover this specific gripe more in depth in another post.)

I was expecting Kaydel Ko Connix (Billie Lourd) to be given a bit more of a role in this movie, particularly since Lourd’s mother Carrie Fisher has passed away and because she was shown to be on board with Poe’s mutiny in The Last Jedi. I thought this movie would have been a great opportunity to flesh out her character more, but it seemed like all she did was pop up now and then to deliver a line or two.

Finn’s connection with Rose just seemed completely forgotten about. Like, the two of them spend more than half of the last movie together, and in the next film they barely say 5 sentences to each other? And we’re not really even given a reason why they pretty much just stopped interacting with each other either.

The very ending of the movie didn’t seem like a very proper conclusion to the Skywalker Saga. I might express my feeling on this in another post as well.

Favorite things:

Pretty much every actor did an amazing job at their role.

Kylo/Ben’s conversation with Han Solo was an incredible scene. Seeing how Ben’s changed, given everything he’s been through since he last saw him, and now he knows that his light side is unavoidable, that there is definitely good in him, and how he must accept that. It was so heartbreaking and so heartwarming at the same time, and I loved watching every second of it. (Especially when he calls Han Solo “dad”? Ugh. Tears.)

The lightsaber duel between Rey and Kylo on the remains of the second Death Star was incredible. Probably not my favorite out of the whole series, but its definitely up there.

There interactions between Finn and Rey and between Finn and Poe were really nice to see

The way that Rey hears the voice of all the past Jedi was great.

The space battle at the end was incredible

I was getting doubtful if it would happen as the movie went on, but Wedge Antilles’ cameo near the end was super satisfying to see.

Ben Solo literally running to fight alongside Rey, and then coming back to hold her? Yes, yes, yes.

Mixed Opinions

The Knights of Ren. It was cool to see them finally, and seeing the turn against Ben and fight him before he got to Rey was great, but I felt that there was so much more they could have done, and at one or two points they didn’t seem super necessary in their scenes. It’s almost like, at those points, they could have just been replaced by some kind of Special Ops Stormtrooper squad. (Kinda like the Death Troopers in Rogue One and Rebels)

Rey being the granddaughter of Palpatine. On one hand, it did make sense, and on the other hand, at the same time, it didn’t. Like part of me feels “Wow. This is so interesting and intriguing and it explains so much” and the other part of me feels like “This seems like an idea they threw in on the last day of writing the script just to see what would happen.” (The idea of Finn being Force-sensitive feels a little like this too, but maybe that’s a discussion for a different day.)

The Reylo kiss. Yes, they went there. And yes, I am forever grateful that it happened. Reylo is canon, everybody! We won. But Ben dies giving his life force to Rey? Not sure how I feel about that. Seeing someone sacrifice their life to make sure their loved one can live? That’s amazing. But at the same time…why? Like why did Ben Solo dying have to be the ending that was written? He’s finally been redeemed, and now that means he has to die? And we’ll never see anything else Ben and Rey get to do together, with their bond and their power? Like I said, very mixed feelings *sigh*

So where do we go from here? (Or, what do us Reylo shippers do now?) Do we accept that Ben is dead and that’s the final note on Reylo? Do we get angry at J.J. Abrams & co. for killing him? Do we realize that this is fiction and we can therefore interpret, view, and enjoy it in any way that we like?

Well I don’t know exactly how to feel about this. But I do know that I am still a huge Reylo shipper and I probably always will be. It’s my number 1 OTP. So I will still be posting Reylo stuff and being on here with you guys as often as I can for as long as I can.

For the people that have decided not to continue now that Ben is dead, that’s your decision, so I won’t try and talk you out of it. If you change your mind, great, and if not, thats perfectly fine too. Just know that I will miss you and we do hope you come back sometime.

This goes without saying, but all of these are only my personal opinion and I’m not saying anyone is wrong for thinking otherwise. If you want to disagree or debate, please do so respectfully and I’ll try and do the same.

Happy New Year, my friends. May you all have a great year, and may we continue to have fun here together. :)

#episode 9 #episodeix #episode ix spoilers #star wars #the rise of skywalker #reylo #kylo ren #rey #ben solo #bendemption

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byebyebyler · 5 years

Text

A Stupid Fight - Byler

They were in the middle of a stupid fight. They both wanted to forget about it as soon as it had started, but instead, it ended with Will slamming the door to their apartment as hard as his small body could manage.

Mike sighed, running a hand through his wild curls. He looked blankly at the pieces of paper in front of him, scribbled with ideas that his mind formulated in the middle of long nights, making him jolt wide awake and wake Will in the process.

Will.

“It was supposed to be good news,” Mike mumbled to himself, “Not the start of a fucking argument.”

Mike had gotten an offer that he couldn’t pass up. The couple’s comic series has been pitched to be turned into a full blown Hollywood series of movies. He was super excited about it, and he was especially excited to tell Will since it was both of theirs, Will being the illustrator.

He was hoping Will would be as happy as he was. Obviously nothing was set in stone, but he wanted to answer the movie company as quickly as possible to ensure it could still happen.

They could pick up their entire life and shift it across the country. It was an exciting new stage of Mike’s life, and he wanted to share all of it with Will.

Will, on the other hand, wasn’t leaping at the idea. Living even in New York City, it was too far away from Indiana for Will. He was very family oriented and liked visiting his mother and Hopper over breaks from work and holidays. Mike totally understood that, but he couldn’t and didn’t want to move without Will.

“We’ll still see them on holidays and stuff! We can call!” Mike had assured him enthusiastically, smiling widely at his boyfriend.

“Mike, it’s not that easy. My mom needs me to be close, she doesn’t want anything to happen like... before,” Will whispered the last word, reluctantly looking up at Mike’s worried eyes.

“Will, I’ll be with you every single day. Nothing will happen, alright?” Mike promised him softly, holding Will’s hand to comfort him. Mike pressed a soft kiss to his lips, pulling away to smile gently at Will. “Think of it: we could buy an actual house, that’d be awesome. It’ll be way better than this shitty apartment, and we can maybe get a cute dog or something. We’ll have a office to share, you can have a place for all your fancy art things-“

“Mike, what if I don’t want that?” Will said so quietly that Mike could hardly hear him.

“I get that you don’t wanna move, Will, but I don’t wanna-“

“No. What I mean is... what if I don’t want this huge Hollywood success. It’s our work together, I don’t want our names or work to be associated with a horrible movie. Then, horrible sequels too.”

Mike furrowed his eyes, looking at Will with confusion on his face. “I’m sure we’ll have a say in everything concerning the movie-“

“How much say? Will we see the script, will we not? Will we be able to have a say in costumes, outfits, or sets? Will they even fucking let us because we’re together?” Will asked, his voice shaking but getting louder with every question.

“Will,” Mike said, trying to calm him down with a soft voice. “Things are better in California, you know. There’s always gonna be people like that in life-“

Will scoffed, shaking his head. “So, you’re just telling me to accept that?!” He challenged Mike with a look of disbelief on his face. “Really? After everything I’ve been through- after everything we’ve been through?”

Will went over to the kitchen, grabbing his jacket violently off of the counter. He put it on quickly, looking utterly frustrated and upset. “You know what, Mike? I’m sorry I have to ruin your big Hollywood dreams, but I can see the reality in some of these things. I’m not gonna work with anyone who thinks that our relationship is gross or disgusting so much so that they don’t want us to be involved in making our work become a reality.” He reaches the door, watching Mike stay put near the couch. “I’m gonna go take a walk,” he finally said, slamming the door before Mike could respond.

Mike shook his head, playing out the previous events on a loop in his mind. He felt horrible. He felt guilty that he hadn’t listened to Will the way a boyfriend of years should’ve. He sighed again, lifting himself off of the couch.

He knew Will needed space, and he wanted to give him that, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how things ended.

He walked over to their shared office, smiling at the rough sketches along with finished pieces scattered all over Will’s desk. Mike could list thousands of good qualities of Will’s but neatness wasn’t one of them.

Mike opened his own desk’s drawer that they had named the Drawer of Everything Needed at Some Point when they had first moved into their apartment. He smiled, picking up the small velvet box he kept hidden in there. He had bought it on a whim one day several months ago. A simple silver band that he knew would suit Will. He had only glanced at it a few times since purchasing it, but this time it was the most meaningful.

He was waiting for the right moment. But, as his thumbs stroked the velvet material of the box, he was fearing it would never come. Especially not after the way this fight left them.

Sighing, Mike shoved the box far back into the drawer like he had done so many months ago.

Will, instead of being cuddled up close to Mike, was out in the brisk cold air of Central Park. Him and Mike didn’t live too far away from the park, but it seemed miles away that February night.

He was stuck in his thoughts. He didn’t want to be disagreeable, but he wanted to ensure that moving across the country would be worth it. Will wanted a say in everything, he wanted a say since he was the one who designed Mike’s characters. He felt like that was only necessary.

But, he also felt that if the actors or people working on the movie figured out him and Mike were together, it would destroy everything. The comics wouldn’t sell, the movie would be gone, everything would shatter.

“A gay comic book writer and his boyfriend who draws the pictures,” Will mumbled to himself, kicking some slushy snow into the street.

Once in the park, he sat on one of the benches. It was freezing cold, and that only made Will miss Mike more. Mike was basically a human furnace, heat radiated off of him.

After contemplating the long walk back to their apartment, Will waved down a taxi which brought him to his building a lot faster than he wanted to be. I should’ve walked. What if Mike’s upset? I basically crushed his dreams, should I walk around the block until midnight? I could do that...

He generously paid the taxi driver, wondering if the man could be bribed into driving Will to Jersey. Maybe Indiana if he was up for it. Anything to avoid Mike’s hurt gaze that Will worried about the entire cab ride. Too soon, the taxi was gone, and Will was left to either freeze his ass off outside or go inside and possibly be broken up with Mike.

He hoped for the best, that Mike would just be mad for the night, and ran up the stairs. He didn’t bother waiting for the elevator, and instead took the stairs two at a time.

He reached the apartment quickly, digging into his pocket for the keys. After moments of panicking, Will found them and slowly unlocked the door.

All of the lights were still on, and Mike was sitting on the couch. His head turned when the door opened, and he couldn’t help but smile widely.

“Will,” Mike said, walking over to the door to stand in front of his boyfriend. “You’re freezing.” His smile melted into a frown, taking his jacket quickly.

“I love you,” Will told him, smiling and happy that he wasn’t upset. “I’m sorry,” he said once Mike had him wrapped tightly in a hug. “I’m sorry. I totally overreacted. I should be happy that your work is possibly going to be a movie. That’s amazing.”

Mike stepped back and leaned down to kiss Will. “It’s /our/ work. You worked as hard as me on your famous drawings-“

“I’m not famous,” Will quickly corrected him, ducking his head as a blush formed on his cheeks. “I love you, dork.”

“I love you more,” Mike responded, holding onto Will’s hand while trying unsuccessfully to hang up Will’s jacket in their closet. After failing multiple times, he threw it onto the counter, Will rolling his eyes at him. “And, I’m not mad, if anything I wasn’t listening to what you were saying. I’m sorry about that, and I should’ve asked all of the questions you had. They’re important. They’re important to you, that makes them important to me.”

Mike continued on, walking them over to the couch. “And, honestly,” he sunk into the couch cushion, smiling as Will instinctively curled up into his side, “they should be important to me nonetheless. I never want to put you in a situation where either of us could be hurt in that way. And, obviously I want my boyfriend on set at all times. I want to be able to hold his hand while we watch actors mess up lines all day long. Besides, you’re the creative genius behind all of the illustrations, so you especially should be the one watching from behind the camera.”

Will interlaced their fingers together, squeezing Mike’s hand. “I don’t want you to be hurt either. Or us. Or the movie because of some anti-gay writers or producers or directors trying to keep everything from us.”

“I’ll call them first thing tomorrow. Everything will be figured out for us I’m sure. If that’s what you want... you know, if you wanna go to California.”

Will shot him an uneasy glance, relaxing as he felt Mike’s hand squeeze his. “I’m still not sure about that... I don’t mean to be like that — all disagreeable and stuff — but I’m sorry-“

Mike pressed a kiss against the top of Will’s head. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I want you to feel as comfortable as possible. I wasn’t listening, and we both know I do that a lot. I’ll ask about relocating the filming locations, how about that?”

Will smiled, wrapping an arm tighter around Mike’s torso. “And, we can always get a dog here in our shitty apartment, right?”

Mike laughed into Will’s hair, nodding along to his words. “Yup, our shitty little apartment.”

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itsblosseybitch · 4 years

Text

The Reel Dunne (Griffin Dunne interview from INTERVIEW magazine, October 1988

Hollywood Wunderkind Griffin Dunne eloped at 18, produced a movie at 23, and has been acting all along. Victoria Hamburg stopped by to catch up.

When Griffin Dunne was 23 and managing a concession stand at Radio City Music Hall, he followed the cultural cues of his native L.A. and, with a couple of close friends, optioned a story for a movie. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary for a Hollywood-wise L.A. youth. What was not ordinary, however, was that the story--Ann Beattie’s novel Chilly Scenes of Winter--was actually made into a film, starring John Heard, and released by United Artists.

Chilly Scenes of Winter marked the emergence of the young Griffin Dunne as an actor and leading producer of American films. Son of writer Dominick Dunne (and brother of the tragically murdered Dominique Dunne), Griffin moved to Manhattan after high school to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Over the years, his film credits have grown to include An American Werewolf in London, Johnny Dangerously, Almost You, After Hours, and Who’s That Girl, and in his role as a producer, he has been equally canny. Along with his longtime partner, Amy Robinson, he has produced John Sayles’ Baby It’s You and co-produced Martin Scorsese’s After Hours.

This season, Dunne’s dual career is in full swing. He produced Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty, which was released in September, and is currently producing Lasse Hallstrom’s (My Life As A Dog) first American film, Once Around. He stars in Dorris Dorrie’s controversial second film, Me and Him, playing the part of a middle-aged man with two problems--a midlife crisis and a penis that talks (distributors have decided the film is too controversial for America, and it is being released in Europe this month). Dunne will also appear in the HBO movie Lip Service alongside Paul Dooley.

Dunne is as funny and charming off-screen as he is on. Dark, intense, and boyishly handsome, he is a natural storyteller, whose enthusiasm is contagious. Victoria Hamburg found him at home, in his West Village penthouse overlooking the Hudson. The apartment is airy and sunlit, with oversize windows, a fireplace for the winter, and a terrace with real grass for the summer. It is the perfect refuge from the hustle of the city streets and the madness of the entertainment world on which Griffin Dunne clearly thrives.

VICTORIA HAMBURG: I’ve been having my own private Griffin Dunne Film Festival. I looked at After Hours, An American Werewolf in London, Almost You, and Who’s That Girl. The movies that you’ve produced have more social commentary and a greater basis in reality than the movies you star in. The ones you act in are more like myths or fables about the dilemmas of modern man.

GRIFFIN DUNNE: It’s funny--as a producer, you think about material for material’s sake. You look for really rich characters and movies that have something to say. It’s much easier for me to find movies to produce than to act in. You have more control over material, and there are wider choices.

VH: What’s this film you were doing in Boston?

GD: It’s called Lip Service. It was just a great piece of writing by a guy named Howard Porter. He wrote Boy’s Life. It was on Broadway a while ago. David Mamet executive-produced this film and asked me if I’d be in it with Paul Dooley. William H. Macy, who’s an actor, directed it. [OP NOTE: There’s a misprint in this article, where’s he’s referred to as W.C. Macy. Or maybe Griffin was trying to be funny and make a reference to W.C. Fields]. It’s his first film. He did an incredible job, and it was great to work with a director who was an actor. It’s about these two talk-show hosts on one of those morning shows like Hey, Wake Up, L.A. It’s called Sunny Side Up. It’s been run for ten years by a kind of boring, staid broadcaster who’s like a Walter Cronkite of the morning circuit. They want to spruce up the ratings, so they bring in a sort of Regis Philbin type, and that’s me. It’s Regis and Walter on this morning show, and they’re two very different people. I idolize him, but he hates me. I’m always trying to get him to be my friend. There’s something very touching about it. It’s also very sad, because the public taste being what it is, I blow him out of the water. I’m so filled with energy and kooky ideas. I’m always looking for the lowest common denominator in human behavior, and people love it. They just lap it up. Dooley’s character gets fired.

Anyway, in this movie, for the first time I play a guy who is completely happy. He has a vicious mean streak, and then it’s gone, and he’s the happiest person on earth. I had a great time, because I usually play people with a tremendous number of problems. This guy hasn’t a clue of the problems he has, because he never listens. He never hears a word he’s saying. Somebody will be talking to him and he’ll interrupt them to ask, “How’s my hair? Do you think I’m attractive?” or some terribly vain question.

VH: Do you think that it takes being oblivious like that to be a happy guy?

GD: Yeah, basically, I mean, to not have a clue about anybody else’s suffering or even what color shirt they’re wearing is a different version of happiness. I’ve seen people without any sort of self-doubt. They just amaze me.

VH: When you were talking earlier, I was thinking you sound like somebody who doesn’t suffer from self-doubt.

GD: Who doesn’t have self-doubt at some point?

VH: Well, I know, but it doesn’t seem to paralyze you in any way.

GD: No, it doesn’t paralyze me. It’s a fleeting thought, but it was nice to play somebody so completely confident and ebullient in everything that he’s doing. The guy I played just had no problem offending somebody, because he had no idea he was offending them. Terrible hurt would cross someone’s face and he would just go right on talking. It was endlessly interesting.

VH: It seems as if we’ve reached a point where there’s a new Hollywood. There are people who are our age, in their late twenties, mid-thirties, who are now in a position of making decisions in the studios. Are they doing it differently? Is something going to happen that’s different from the way that people have been making movies in the past?

GD: Probably not. Even though movies are making more money than ever, they are still based on the star system. And the star system is getting stronger and stronger. Having name value is becoming more and more important. People are taking fewer and fewer chances. What I’ve noticed is that it’s getting to be taken for granted that this is the way to go. Even the smaller outfits have now figured out ways to hire major stars with name value. I think part of the problem with film is that the good movies--with interesting stories and actors--are not huge weekend movies. They’re competing against star vehicles with rotten scripts and one charismatic star that make the big kill for two or three weekends and then gradually dwindle away. The movies that don’t fall into that category are racing quicker than ever for the video stores. All this means that they’ve yet to figure out long-run releases. And the attitude is getting to be more and more--even among my peers--”I’ll wait for it on cable.” People look at small or interesting or intimate movies as the kind they’d prefer to see at home on their television sets rather than at a theater. Movies are considered failures much sooner than ever before. The failure rate has really sped up, and the success rate is much further down the line because now you have to look at the videocassette sales and rentals.

VH: I think it’s incredibly frustrating for all the people who go out and kill themselves for six years to get a project to finally happen, who risk everything they’ve got and go out on a limb for it, and then, even if it’s reasonably successful, it’ll probably run for only two or three weeks and end up in the video store, and who’s ever going to look at it then?

GD: It’s extremely frustrating. It’s like they spend six years to make the videocassette.

VH: Right. Whereas if you’re writing a book, even if nobody buys it, it will still be there somehow in a more lasting way.

GD: You notice how books and videocassettes are almost the same size...

VH: How did you feel when you were making Who’s That Girl and people kept calling it “the Madonna movie”?

GD: I assumed they would. She is an extraordinarily huge star, and a great deal of commotion happens around her when she’s out in public.

VH: How did the filming go?

GD: It was pretty wild. I guess I didn’t really expect it to be. I remember there was a marathon race on a Sunday. We were shooting in Manhattan. Here are these people who are nearing the end of a twenty-six-mile run. They could have placed respectably, but they pulled over to the side to watch the shooting and let the other runners go on. By the time they got to where we were shooting on Fifth Avenue, they had been running twenty miles. They took a breather to watch the shooting, to watch Madonna getting in and out of a cab. They just threw it all away to watch this. Everybody had a camera when we were working on that picture. Cabs would drive by, and little old ladies would pull out lenses longer than their entire frames and just whack off a few pictures. It was a bit of a carnival atmosphere.

VH: Which do you prefer, acting or producing?

GD: I don’t know. Acting is what I originally wanted to do. That’s really what I’m supposed to be doing. Unfortunately, the business of being an actor is a lot more disheartening than the business of being a producer. As an actor, you’re beholden to the material and the taste of other people who are developing projects that you may or may not get in. As a producer, you come up with the idea. Everything that my partner, Amy Robinson, and I have done, we’ve thought of and developed. The script for After Hours came from a student at Columbia University.

VH: You get offered a lot of roles that you turn down--if you kept getting parts that you wanted to do, would you end up acting instead of producing?

GD: It depends how far along I am in the producing. I’ve lately had a painful decision to make. I’ve turned down work because I’ve been too far into producing a picture. It wasn’t easy to do.

VH: Do you feel you naturally lean toward acting?

GD: I’ve always leaned toward acting. I’m very good at working on stories, casting, and crewing up, but when the movie’s being shot, there’s always the frustration I feel watching other actors working. That goes away once the film’s finished shooting. It’s almost the reverse of what I feel as an actor. There’s a certain relief that, once I’ve finished shooting, I can be in the editing room or in the screening room, watching the rough cuts develop and watching the picture just get better and better.

VH: Have you ever wanted to direct?

GD: Yeah, I think about that more and more.

VH: The relationships between an actor and a director and between a producer and a director are very different.

GD: The relationship between an actor and a producer is, in fact, one of total opposites. As producer--particularly during shooting--your job is to worry and to predict what horrible things will happen. You worry about time, scheduling, and logistics. You have to fall into a certain logic that does not come to me naturally.

VH: I always think it’s a combination of being the baby sitter, the whip-cracker, and the pacifier. In a way, all the things that you do make you feel like you have no control. On the other hand, you realize that ultimately you do have the control.

GD: What you’re doing is watching other people create and have a fantastic time. Amy and I have always worked with directors who have respected our opinion and relied on us heavily for story development, casting, and the creative part. But once the movie is going, it’s just this big monster rolling along that you have to keep in check. It’s much less creative. I mean, you can look at dailies and say, “Gee, it looks a little dark in that scene” and “Why does she have that expression on her face?” but it’s pretty much out of your control, with the exception of the ultimate ability to slow down or speed up the process. And sometimes even that’s questionable. But as an actor, your entire job is not to worry. Your job is to help others, create an atmosphere where you can be totally spontaneous, get lost in the part, and develop intense relationships with people. When I’m acting and things are going well, I have an extremely good time.

VH: It sounds like the acting and producing provide a perfect balance for you.

GD: Yes. Absolutely. I remember when I produced my first movie, Chilly Scenes of Winter. I was a desperately hungry actor who lived and died by my last audition and what people thought of me as I walked out of an office. That’s what most people think when they’re starting out. It’s an unnatural environment when you go in and read and show your personality to someone and they say yes or no. It takes awhile to get the hang of that. I was not good at it. I would clam up and freeze at auditions. I could not be free. So producing a movie was entirely liberating. There I was, in a casting room, auditioning actors whom I not only admired but envied, wishing I was in their position. I was 23 at the time, and I remember being in this office in Los Angeles, in Culver City, pre-screening the actors before the director, Joan Micklin Silver, met them. Bringing in all these actors I’ve admired my whole life and interviewing them, I thought, This is crazy. They thought it was pretty crazy, too. They thought, How old is he? But I did see how the audition process worked, and I thought, This is not so threatening.

VH: I’ve always thought of you as the boy wonder. I mean, there you were, producing a feature film. That’s not easy, but you were at the point where you and Amy could convince somebody to give you the money to do it. How did you manage that?

GD: We also had a third partner, Mark Metcalf. All three of us were actors. Mark was probably the most successful of the three of us, because he had produced Animal House [He also played Niedermeyer in the film]. We had a really good book by Ann Beattie, and people wanted it.

VH: How did you convince Joan that she should let you guys do it?

GD: She came to us. She wanted to make the movie.

VH: But you didn’t know anything about line-producing, right?

GD: No. For a year before we actually got it off the ground, we interviewed everyone. We called people right up out of the DGA [Directors’ Guild of America] book and said, “We’re doing this movie. Would you talk to us? Will you tell us about line-producing? Will you tell us what this means? Will you tell us what gross and net are?” We knew nothing, but we found that complete strangers were willing to share their knowledge and expertise with us. So we learned a certain amount the year before we actually met Joan. All we knew was that we wanted to make this movie, and we had the material. Several times, people said, “We’ll make this movie, but you three have to go.” And we said, “No, we come with it and you’ll have to go.” We pulled it off, and they let us do it. We had a production manager, a man named Paul Helmick, who was close to 70 years old [laughs]; he was Howard Hawks’ first assistant director, and he had incredible stories about the movie business. We learned a lot from him. We were the producers, but he knew the nuts and bolts--who to get on the crew and what the hourly wages were and all that.

VH: What would you say was the most important thing that you learned from doing the movie?

GD: Well, because I was so young, I sort of learned how the world works. I learned how decisions were made and business was run. The business section of the newspaper became interesting to me: why people were fired and hired. Just the decision-making process, and people taking responsibility for their decisions.

VH: You grew up in Los Angeles, didn’t you?

GD: Yes.

VH: So you must have had some sense of how it all worked. Your father was in the business.

GD: Yeah. I knew my movies. I loved movies. But I didn’t know anything about the details of making a movie. Casting was an instinctual process to me. Amy and Mark weren’t from the movie business. They grew up loving movies, and that’s what the three of us had in common. Being from Los Angeles and having parents in the business was not really helpful. I could talk to my father about what I was doing and the problems I was having, and he would understand what I was saying, but he wasn’t in production then. He was extremely supportive of me, just as Amy’s and Mark’s parents were supportive of them.

VH: Did you ever have moments where you were totally terrified because you didn’t know what you were doing?

GD: You know, I really didn’t. I was having such a good time. Nobody ever once said, “You’re a fraud. You’re 23 years old. Who are you to tell me this?” I knew the material. I knew I had a tremendous love and conviction for this book and for the script that Joan wrote and for Joan as a director. I didn’t really have any doubt in my ability.

VH: You and Amy have been producing together for such a long time. How does that work? Is there a role that she plays and a role that you play?

GD: I guess so. We bounce off each other very well. Whoever calls us knows they’re going to get both of us on the phone, and we’ve figured out how to talk without talking at the same time, so that we build on each other’s thoughts. We finish each other’s sentences.

VH: Do you do good cop/bad cop?

GD: Yeah. It depends who the person is. There are certain people she gets along better with and others I get along better with. People get treated well, so there hasn’t been any real tension on our sets coming from the production. Basically we’re both good cops. But we use that good cop/bad cop routine.

VH: How does she feel when you go off to be in a movie? Does she produce things without you?

GD: The day-to-day stuff is a lot of phone work, you know. Producing is all about talking on the phone. When I’m off acting, Amy is doing the day-to-day work in the office. We talk every day. It’s like I’m in foreign land, acting with complete strangers. I’ll call her, and she’ll fill me in on what’s going on. Then, if I have a few hours left in me, I’ll knock off about eight or nine phone calls. So I’m still doing my work. I never fall out of contact.

VH: You sound driven.

GD: Well, it is a driven thing. Amy is a very driven person, and sometimes I have to work hard to catch up with her if I’m doing two jobs. It’s a lot of work. I’m getting tired just talking about it. [laughs]

VH: I’m always interested in people who are able to make movies in New York. Do you and Amy feel pressure to do something in L.A.? Sometimes L.A. seems like a private club to me: you have to do time there or you have to have been a member.

GD: No, I don’t think so. I mean, the reason we’re doing well is because of the material. We choose to live in New York. We have to go to Los Angeles an awful lot for any number of reasons--to meet writers or talk to the studio about financing--but there’s been no pressure on us to move to Los Angeles. In fact, I think it would be a little stifling, because we could fall into that club atmosphere you’re talking about. A good deal of the time there is spent talking about “Have you read this script that was just submitted that all the agencies are reading? Did you get on top of this? Did you get on top of that?” And it’s a cyclical effect. You start buying something based on word of mouth and who’s attached to it--basically for all the wrong reasons. I think this distance gives us a little perspective on what the story is.

VH: How did you find the script for Running on Empty?

GD: Amy and I had been interested in radicals--the real hardened ones, the ones who had been living underground and thought that they were still fighting a revolution, who surfaced only to kill a bunch of people for a political idea that grew out of the ‘60s and had somehow gone terribly wrong. I had absolutely no sympathy for them. I understood where their politics originated, but I felt that they were in a complete dream world. They were the same criminals that sell drugs, or blow away cops to rob a bank, for no political reason. The idea that they thought there would be some kind of public uprising over killing a couple of security guards was delusion at its highest. We talked about making a movie on this subject, and then we came across an article about the custody procedure involving kids whose parents were radicals--two boys, 11 and 9. They were younger than the characters in our movie. Their parents were found with a cache of weapons, fighting to overthrow the government so that we would all be free. They were a lot harder than the characters in our film, but we were struck by the family aspect of the story. We went to Naomi Phoner [author of Running on Empty] with the article and talked about the origins of the parents and their political beliefs. We concentrated on the case of blowing up a napalm plant in the early ‘70s. Their pictures were plastered in every post office in the United States and they were on the Ten Most Wanted list. What effect would that have on their children?

VH: When I read articles about these people, there’s always something about them that makes you feel as if they could have been friends of yours in college. There’s something very ordinary about the people who did those things.

GD: Yes, but living on the run for so long, living underground where there’s a network of people that can help you--that’s got to warp your idea of society, because you have ostensibly left society to lead this kind of life. The society you’re trying to overthrow is very different from the one you have in mind once you’ve been underground for a few years.

VH: Did you actually try to contact people who were underground?

GD: Yeah, we spoke to a few people--they were hardly on anyone’s Ten Most Wanted list, but they had a lot to hide from. Naomi had some friends from college, in fact--former SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] higher-ups who were no longer wanted by the law.

VH: How did Sidney Lumet become the director?

GD: He read the script. We were at Lorimar, and Sidney had a contract at Lorimar. We had thought of Sidney quite a bit before we seriously approached directors. He read it and contacted us and told us how much he loved it.

VH: It seems like a good time to make a movie like Running On Empty. Here we are, with the Presidential elections before us...[laughs]

GD: When we were testing Running on Empty, we would show it to college kids. Researchers would ask them about their knowledge of ‘60s radicals, and they would talk about Jane Fonda. I guess they thought she was an SDS student or something and that she lived in the underground. There was very little awareness about the people who were trying to end the Vietnam War.

VH: How much does giving people something to think about have to do with your decisions about what movies you produce?

GD: We assume that other people will be interested in thinking about what we think about. What initially attracted us to Running On Empty was not so much making a political statement. What really drew us to the story were the family and the conflicts in the family. The movie is a sort of extreme exaggeration of what happens to boys or girls when they hit a certain age, when they look at their parents and they’re not parents anymore. They’re human beings with a lot of problems, and they become aware of what it took to raise them. It’s the first feeling that a kid might have of compassion toward his parents, of a sense of even feeling wiser somehow. That’s what attracted me to Running On Empty. It’s that story of looking at your parents and feeling in a funny way stronger than them. You suddenly have this knowledge that the decisions you make can hurt them. If you don’t want to hurt them, you make the proper adjustments. The alternative is to grow up and hurt them because you’ve got to live your own life. This movie is about all the complexities that go on in a family. Maybe there will be disappointment for a lot of politically minded people who think they might find an answer in this movie. It comes out in a much more family-oriented way.

VH: Your parents are remarkable people. I remember reading the story that your father wrote about your sister’s death and the murder trial that followed it. I particularly remember the description of your mother. I’ve always thought that she was unbelievably courageous.

GD: My mother’s an extraordinary person. She’s the strongest person I know.

[Ellen Griffin Dunne founded Justice for Homicide Victims in 1984 to support victims of homicide with legal and financial assistance, as well as counseling and referrals. In 1989, a year after this interview was conducted, Ellen was recognized for her advocacy work by then-President George H.W. Bush. Ellen also suffered from multiple sclerosis starting in the early ‘80s. She passed away in 1997. Justice for Homicide Victims is still operating today.]

VH: Do you think being raised by people like that allows you to try things that other people wouldn’t ordinarily try?

GD: It sure helps. I grew up in a very supportive environment. My parents were not easily shocked by the decisions I made. I was sort of a handful; I got into a lot of trouble when I was growing up. They never succumbed to total despair when I fucked up. I think that’s an important lesson for parents. I grew up with the confidence of knowing that my parents always thought I was going to come out O.K. They always thought I was going to make it, whatever I did.

VH: Did you have any heroes?

GD: I grew up idolizing people all the time. It’s harder and harder to find idols, but for as long as I can remember, I was always a worshiper of other people.

VH: Who?

GD: I was only 9 years old, but I had this obsession with John F. Kennedy. I was convinced I would someday know this guy and we’d become really good friends. [laughs] I called his wife Mrs. Kennedy, and I’d call him Mr. Kennedy whenever I talked about him. I used to write him letters--nothing very political, just to tell him that it was my birthday last week, and my brother did this, and that things kind of stank around the house but that I’d work it out. I would get letters back from his secretary saying that Mr. Kennedy had received my letter, and that was perfectly fine. I remember we used to go to church every Sunday, one day I just put my foot down and refused to go. I just said “I’m not going.” Big fights. They went to church and left me locked in my room. When they came back, my brother and sister and the whole family were glowing. John F. Kennedy and his wife had gone to church that day, and they sat right behind my parents!

VH: Don’t you think they made it up?

GD: Well, even as I’m telling you, I find it just incredible.

VH: Were you a gullible child?

GD: I was always gullible. But I can’t believe they’d be that cruel. I used to lie for years afterward--with the conviction of a total liar who believed it--about the time I went to church and John and Jackie were sitting behind me. Even telling you this, the lie seems true. I turned around, saying, “Hi, Mr. Kennedy, I’m Griffin Dunne. I wrote you these letters.” “Oh yes, Griffin. Oh yes, I got your letters. Just wait until after the service. We’ll talk.” And then as soon as the service was over, he tapped me on the shoulder, and I climbed over the pew. I’m between him and Jackie, and he says, “Have you met my wife?” “Oh, hi, Mrs. Kennedy. Nice to meet you.” He says, “Go on, about those letters.” And we were talking as we were walking outside, and we became friends in that moment. Anyway, he was my major hero. It’s been downhill ever since.

VH: Were you raised a Catholic?

GD: Yes.

VH: Has that had any lasting effect on you?

GD: Well, I think there’s something very Catholic about that fantasy. I was raised a Catholic, and it helped me in being an actor in plenty of ways. I hated church. I always thought those priests gave rather weak performances. I think that’s sort of how I became an actor--an early fantasy was if I were a priest, I’d do a much better job. When I became an altar boy, I became the church-clown altar boy and would bring the priest the wrong vestments.

VH: On purpose?

GD: No, it just worked out that way, but I got laughs.

VH: I’m half Catholic and half Jewish. I think that what I get from being Catholic is that I’m always guilty about something I did that I shouldn’t have done. And what I get from being Jewish is that I’m always guilty about something I should have done that I didn’t do. I heard the other day that the movie you were in that Doris Dorrie directed was banned in this country. I have a feeling this isn’t true, but this movie has a controversial reputation. What’s going on here?

GD: Well, I think it’s probably a “European” movie in that it’s going to open in Europe.

VH: What’s this movie about?

GD: It’s a sensitive tale. It’s about this guy whose penis starts talking to him and it just totally freaks him out. You never see it, so I don’t know why it’s banned. It’s based on a book called Two by Alberto Moravia. It’s a very typical tale, about this guy who’s an architect. He’s at the brink of having some kind of boredom breakdown--he’s married and he has a kid and feels trapped. His penis starts talking to him, screaming at him to wake up and enjoy life. You never see it. It’s all in his mind. It’s basically me talking to myself the whole movie and talking to women and the people in my office. I’m a very ambitious guy in the movie who starts to get ahead through the power of the seduction. He’s a philanderer, very Italian, both cocky and confused at the same time. He has all these desires of getting ahead and finding the perfect woman. I thought the part had a certain kind of charm to it. It might be banned because the movie turns out to look like one of those Ralph Steadman drawings with the back of people’s heads blown out, you know, like a shotgun went off in their mouth. Everybody’s totally distorted, and weird shit is coming out of their mouths. Everybody is very unattractive in a funny way. It’s not as funny as people thought it would be. It’s a much harder movie.

[This last part is interesting to read, because as someone who has watched Me and Him, there’s no animation in the movie whatsoever. I wonder if that was the original plan for the film but it got scrapped for the final product for whatever reason, probably due to budget constraints. I know there’s a ‘70s film based on Moravia’s book as well. My friends over at The Projection Booth did a podcast on this movie, and Doris Dorrie was interviewed and I don’t remember a word being breathed about any animation sequences, so this is the first I’ve heard about this. Griffin is not a big fan of this movie (neither am I) so he hasn’t talked much about it since, and he said he didn’t want to be interviewed about it for the podcast.]

VH: Her other movie, Men, seemed to be about how people of the opposite sex don’t really like each other.

GD: Yeah. I hadn’t thought that at the time, but I definitely think that now. It’s a battle of the sexes, but it’s a battle over which is the uglier sex. There’s nothing terribly crude about it, sexually. Emotionally, it’s very crude. But being directed by a woman on something as intimate as this is a little like playing the part of a dog and being directed by a cat about how you’d feel about being a fire hydrant. You know, the dog’s going to look at this cat and go, “What the fuck do you know about a fire hydrant?” How would you know how I’d feel about sex? Both of us sort of drew a blank. We had no idea what the other was talking about. It was a totally non-communicative experience. I did my job and she did her job. There really weren’t many ways we could help each other out.

VH: Do you think that people genuinely believe that the sexes basically don’t like each other?

GD: No, I think they do like each other, and I think that was what we disagreed on. As much as we would verbalize it and have many discussions, it always boiled down to the point that cruelty between the sexes was different. We disagreed on that. The movie is about how the two sexes dislike each other intensely, which was not, I felt, in the script.

VH: What are you doing next?

GD: Starting a movie with Lasse Hallstrom, who did My Life As A Dog. Amy and I are going to produce a movie. I’m going to be in it. Small part. Nice part. It’s a story, set in Massachusetts, about an Italian-American from a big, close family, whose sisters have all been married. She’s the eldest and the last one to get married. Everybody’s encouraging her to finally get married to this guy she’s been with for six years, and this guy turns out to be a real wimp. He finally admits to her, “I’m never going to marry you.” She’s devastated, and she goes off.

VH: That’s not you, is it?

GD: Hell, no. That is a wimp. So she goes off, and she meets a man who’s close to her father’s age. He’s a very outgoing, tough businessman, who is rich. He sort of tries to buy his way into the family emotionally and financially. While they’re happy for the daughter, the family doesn’t like the man. It’s a battle of the patriarchs and how the man gets caught in the middle. The family never can quite let the husband into their hearts. It’s very painful and it’s very funny. It’s a brilliant script. It’s written from the heart by a woman named Malia Scotch Marmont [This is a misprint. Her name is Malia Scotch Marmo, and she’s also been credited as a writer for Hook and Madeline], who was at a Columbia student. We found the script through the Sundance Institute.

VH: What do you play?

GD: I play the brother-in-law. He’s a guy who is heavily influenced by this very outgoing businessman and starts to take on his mannerisms, much to the discomfort of his wife, who dislikes him. I’m the only one who thinks he’s a pretty good guy. It’s going to be a great movie. I’ve been in Boston with Lasse. He’s from Sweden. I’m showing him the difference between Italian-Americans from Massachusetts and Italian-Americans from New York.

[The movie that Dunne is talking about would be released as Once Around in 1991, starring Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfuss as the leads. Interestingly enough, Dunne would end up playing that very wimp boyfriend in the movie. The brother-in-law would be played by Tim Guinee].

VH: What’s the difference?

GD: Well, as far as I can tell, the Italian-Americans from Massachusetts are more Yankee at heart. They really are closer to the family, the Mayflower, and they sort of cling to that. They feel a little more American than the New York Italians, like they got there first. The dialects are obviously very different. But we’re trying to make those differences clear to Lasse.

VH: This is his first movie in English?

GD: Yeah. It’s set in a very particular region of the United States. We can help him with the research and the regional differences, but when it comes to the matter of the heart, that’s his job and that’s where he will shine.

VH: If you could do anything you want, what would you do?

GD: I would have the kind of life where I could bury myself in work for an intense period of a year and then leave work for six months and travel somewhere, maybe live in a completely different area of the world and soak up whatever differences and experiences I might gather there and revitalize myself, then do it all over again. I’d have the kind of control of being able to walk away from something I’ve created that will be there when I get back.

VH: When we were talking about family and relationships, I wondered how come you’ve never been married.

GD: Oh, I have been. I have been. I’ve never mentioned it. Everybody who knows me knows that I’ve been married, but I’ve never talked about it before. It hardly deserves this sort of melancholy face I have on right now.

VH: You’re smiling. [laughs]

GD: Yeah. That kind of melancholy. I was married, when I was 18, to a girl who was maybe 19, whom I had met in high school. She was the daughter of the--at the time--head of a film studio. She was very, very beautiful and probably still is. I have no idea. I haven’t seen her since.

VH: Since you married her?

GD: Yeah, I married her and then I never saw her again. [laughs] Didn’t work out. We got married in Tijuana sort of on a dare. When I was 17 we crossed the border to go to Tijuana, and the highway patrol pulled us over, and they knew for some reason we were going to get married. They brought us into the office and tried to talk us out of it. It was a humiliating experience because she was older and the highway patrol cop was sort of hitting on her. I mean, she was really gorgeous--there was just something about her; she exuded a real intense sexuality. I was madly in love with her, as anyone who ever laid eyes on her was. So the highway patrolman is hitting on my wife-to-be, and the other guy has got me in a room, telling me that I should hold off and not marry that piece in the other room for a couple of years, until I know what I’m doing. I was in such a rage that when I turned 18--on my birthday--we got in a car and went right back to Tijuana and got married.

VH: And how long were you married?

GD: A whopping one year. I came back to--we were going to keep it a secret--the apartment we had gotten. I carried her across the threshold of this apartment that had no furniture in it and the phone was ringing, so I dropped her on the wood floor and got the phone--

VH: What a guy.

GD: Well, you see, she was voluptuous, so she weighed a ton. I got the phone, and it was my father, and he was saying “So, how are you?” I said, “Fine.” “Anything new?” I went, “No, no.” He said, “I just came back from the most beautiful wedding I think I’ve ever been in my whole life. This boy--Oh, God, he must have been your age, maybe a little older. But he and that bride, my God. You know the parents--very dear old friends. Your mother and I, when you get married, that’s how we want to do it. Everything was done just right.” And I thought, Why is he telling me this? Why did he happen to go to this beautiful wedding of a peer of mine, and why is he telling me about it? He must know. This is a sign. So I just murmured, “Well, it’s a little late for that.” He said, “What?” I said, “We just married this afternoon in Tijuana.” He roared with laughter. And I was silent. And he said, “Now wait a minute.” He had this kind of chilly tone. “I can’t tell if you’re joking with me now or what.” I said, “No, no. We really did.” And he said, in the coolest voice I have ever heard, “I think you had better come over here right now.” We went over, and both he and my mother were freaked out. I finally got a divorce--not because of that but because it didn’t work out.

VH: Did she get remarried to an aluminum-siding salesman and have six kids and end up living in Kansas?

GD: No, actually she is married to Fabian. I haven’t been married since then. It will happen. But when it does, the highway patrol won’t be involved. It will be a simple, private family affair.

[All evidence indicates that Griffin’s first wife was Kate Netter Forte. I actually read about this on the website whodatedwho but since that website is a dubious source, I mentally filed that under the ‘Unsubstantiated’ category and didn’t look into it any further. Kate’s father was producer Douglas Netter, and it’s reported that she met the former teen idol Fabian on the set of the film Disco Fever, where she played a character named Jill. She’s in about the halfway point of the film. Forte was married to Fabian from 1980 to 1990. She was the president of Harpo films for 18 years before being let go in 2013. Some of the films she helped produce include Tuesdays with Morrie and The Great Debaters.]

[Victoria Hamburg is a producer who helped produce the Keanu Reeves film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), directed by Robert Longo]

#griffin dunne #long read #long reads #interview magazine #1980s #vintage magazine #victoria hamburg #an american werewolf in london #after hours 1985 #this is us #chilly scenes of winter #baby it's you #running on empty

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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The Incredible Petrified World

When choosing episodes that never were, it is always tempting to just pick crap movies I enjoy watching, like Lady Frankenstein or The Giant Claw, and ignore the unwatchable bilge – but this blog is about films that were or should have been on MST3K, and they riffed their way through quite a bit of unwatchable bilge over the years, from The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy to dreary dubbed Hamlet. I would therefore be sadly remiss if I neglected truly wretched movies entirely, and so we come to The Incredible Petrified World. It’s a Jerry Warren movie that serves very well to emphasize that Teenage Zombies might be his best work, and it stars John Carradine from The Unearthly and Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA. It’s also one of the most difficult movies I’ve ever had to sit through, right up there with Invasion of the Neptune Men, so brace yourselves because this is gonna hurt.

A Dr. Wyman (evidently this is before the Blood Beast ate his brain) has invented a special deep-diving bell, and it’s time for its first test in the Caribbean. The expedition consists of three scientists and a reporter – the former are two identical-faced men and a brunette, and the latter is a blonde. Don’t expect me to remember their names. Halfway down, the cable snaps and they plummet to the seafloor… but when they come to, they realize there’s light in the windows. They’ve somehow entered a series of underwater caverns, which are inexplicably full of air and light! After wandering around eating up time I could have spent watching a better movie, they encounter a man in a fake beard who says he’s been down there for fourteen years. For some reason this guy decides to kill them all, but at the last minute a volcano erupts, squashing him so everybody else can be rescued.

Interspersed with all this are scenes of Wyman’s brother and his collaborators, helping in the search for the missing scientists and building their own diving bell for a follow-up mission. These parts seemed weirdly disconnected from the rest of the movie, and I wondered if they were shot and added later because somebody thought the movie was going to be too short. But then at the end, all these characters appear together on the rescue boat. I guess the writing just sucked.

Oh, man, fuck this movie. It really is the dumbest, dullest thing imaginable. The whole thing is just a bunch of scenes that wander across the screen but never amount to much, so in that spirit I’m going to make a bunch of observations and not worry about whether they add up to a review. Here goes.

The actual beginning of the movie is some footage of an octopus fighting a shark, while a narrator tells us that the sea is the wildest and most hostile place on earth… although his words aren’t nearly so poetic. In fact, the narrator sounds like he’s reading the script aloud for the first time, while wondering if he remembered to lock his car. He drones on and on about the things that lurk in the depths while we see dull footage of fish swimming around for nearly four minutes. I already want to turn this off and go do something fun, like sweep the floor. Even worse, none of this has a crumb to do with the rest of the movie, which is set not at the seafloor, but in a cave, where there are no sharks or octopodes.

The diving bell looks about as solid as a beach ball and is significantly bigger on the inside than the outside. Everything in it is controlled by two switches on the wall and an oscilloscope. The dialogue is at pains to note that the second bell, the one built by Wyman’s brother, is identical to the first. This means they can use the same set.

All these undersea caverns have nice level floors for the characters to walk on, which is good because the women wore heels for their descent into the murky abyss. At one point they encounter an Australian perentie lizard, which is only seen in a cutaway because it’s stock footage from the other side of the world. I don’t know how long they’re supposed to have spent wandering around in the caves but since the search was eventually called off it must have been a couple of weeks at least. Despite this, nobody’s clothes get dirty. The women’s hair and makeup always look perfect, and the men never need to shave. Come to think of it, how does Beard Guy know he’s been down there for fourteen years? He’s in a fucking cave. There’s no day or night to pass the time, and he doesn’t wear a watch.

Beard Guy apparently tells the characters that he and Mysterious Skeleton were sailors on a ship that sank, and that’s how they ended up in here. The two men suspect that he isn’t telling the truth. It turns out Beard Guy is the one who killed Mysterious Skeleton, although it never tells us why – maybe he’s just crazy, or maybe he got really hungry one day. If there’s a dark truth to how he ended up in this place, however, the audience never learns what it is.

Much of what we see is just filling time. One of the guys says they can make fishing spears out of some of the equipment they had in the diving bell, and then we have to watch them do it. There’s a bit where a guy back on land is driving somewhere, and we hear a news broadcast on the search, which is fine, but then we also have to listen to the weather report as well. Characters wander through rocks, and then wander back through the same rocks shot from a slightly different angle.

There is an attempt at subplots. The blonde woman is the bitchy one and the brunette is the nice one. The former has just broken up with her boyfriend and threw his engagement ring into the ocean. One of the men confesses his love to the latter. Both of these ideas come out of nowhere, are given three or four lines, and vanish into the mist, never to be heard from again. Beard Guy, whose ‘beard’ looks more like a stuffed animal glued to his face, tries to rape the blonde while the men are gone. Since the movie was made in the fifties he doesn’t get very far before he is buried by falling rocks. If this had happened so the men could heroically save her, it would have annoyed me, but the utter pointlessness of the scene we did get is worse.

The erupting volcano is exactly like the erupting volcano in The Land that Time Forgot, in that the volcano only exists to end the movie at an arbitrary point. At least it’s not here to steal the happy ending this time. Footage of the actual eruption is upside-down for some reason, maybe because we’re under the ground. What sense does that make? Did the writer think the earth is hollow and volcanoes on its inner surface point down instead?

The dialogue is unsalvageable. There’s an entire conversation between John Carradine and some other guy about why the cable broke on the first diving bell, and not only is everything they say nonsense, they can’t even make it sound like anything but. Characters on Star Trek talk complete bullshit all the time, but at least they mostly sound like they believe in it. John Carradine and his co-star have absolutely no idea what they’re saying, and don’t care enough to try. Something about making the diving bell too strong.

It pretty much goes without saying that The Incredible Petrified World doesn’t have anything to say. The entire story, insofar as it goes, is completely without point or plot. It barely even has a premise. Various characters take turns moaning and wailing about how they’re gonna be down here for the rest of their lives, but then they recover and get on with things after all. The men discuss survival strategies and the women complain. Nothing develops. The blonde supposedly has an arc, in that at the end she says “my life will be changed from here on out”, but this is the most told and least shown character development of any movie ever.

It’s a complete mystery to me why anyone bothered making this movie. Most movies have something going on: they want to tell a story, to examine an idea, to showcase an actor, to sell soundtrack albums, to leech money from nostalgic fans of an old cartoon… sometimes these ambitions are cynical but they’re still there. Even really, really, legendarily bad movies have goals. Foodfight wants you to buy name-brand instead of generic. Manos: the Hands of Fate wants to prove it’s not as difficult or expensive to make a movie as Hollywood would have you believe. The Hottie and the Nottie wants to convince you that Paris Hilton can act. All these movies are miserable fucking failures but you can tell what they were going for.

The Incredible Petrified World isn’t even going for anything. It just takes some bad actors, stands them in front of the camera for a few minutes, and then lets them go home. There is literally nothing beneath the surface, and the surface is so insubstantial it barely counts. It’s movie dark matter, adding to the mass of the universe but otherwise completely fucking inert.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the incredible petrified world #poor john carradine #fuck this movie #60s #non hamlet reviews that mention hamlet

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barnesbabes · 5 years

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Casting Call

gif creds to: @mrbenhardys

pairing: Joe Mazzello x Male!Reader

word count: 2.4K

request: @writingsthegame-dylansthename ”Well in that case, could you please write a fic where Joe Mazzello does a movie with the reader and then they accidentally fall in love. (Male reader of course)”

A/N: so excited to write this!

For the last month, you waited by your phone for hours. Ever since you left the audition room, you didn’t stop thinking about it. Mark, your manager insisted you got the job. He felt that you could portray the character the best. You fit the description that the casting directors wanted. You felt confident about it. That was until walked into the agency and found a room of your clones. They didn’t look exactly like you, but the similarities were clear. Your audition went good in your eyes, you gave your lines and they seemed really impressed by you. They smiled and told you,

“We’ll give you a call when we make a decision.”

You felt confident leaving that audition. But you didn’t get a call for weeks. You tried to think positively, your friends tried to encourage you. They’d gush about how prepared you were. You were surprised Mark didn’t quit, you called or text him at least once a day. He tried to calm you down. You had roles in TV shows before but this was a movie, a big project. This would get your name out there to more opportunities so you tried to wait patiently.

Nearly a month had gone by and you began to lose hope. They never posted who the cast was so maybe they were still looking? You began to blame everything that led up to that moment. You felt that you were plagued with bad luck. You wanted to blame the barista who said ‘good luck!’ instead of ‘break a leg!’. Okay, maybe you were overreacting.

Mark called you that day, he didn’t even wait for you to say hello before speaking. You groaned into your pillow, wallowing in self-pity.

“Y/N, are you sitting down?”

“Laying down actually.”

He laughed, you could basically see his smirk through the phone.

“Even better. Remember that audition you went in for, the super big movie?”

You hopped up, leaning on your elbows. The sound in his voice made you hopeful. You hummed in agreement.

“You got the job! They are having me forward the script to you later tonight! First read through in first of next month.”

That was only 5 days away. Holy shit. You laughed, thankfully he couldn’t see the tears pricking your eyes. You squealed with joy and listened to him tell you more about it. Once the call ended you fell back onto your bed and cried. You were excited, nervous and felt like all the weight was finally lifted from your shoulders. You stayed up until you finished the script. Your character seemed to totally have feelings for his longtime best friend. It was never addressed but you were sure to play the part to the best of your ability. You just wondered who the rest of the cast consisted of.

You finally figure out what you were wearing, your closet thrown around the floor. You made sure to get to the office early. You arrive and smile at the director. He threw his arm over your shoulder and smiles, knocking you off your balance.

“We are so happy to have you on this project, Y/N. Did you get the script?”

“Yes, it was amazing!”

You want to gush about it but you refrain so you wouldn’t annoy him. The secretary leans her head the conference room, pulling the director out of the room. You wipe your sweaty hands onto your pants and pour yourself a glass of water from the table of refreshments. You could hear the most adorable laugher outside the door. The director opens the door, a man follows behind him. God, he’s beautiful. The ginger hair that shined from the morning sunlight. The beautiful eyes that glistened. The smile tugging on his lips when he saw you. The beautiful laughter belonged to a beautiful man. He pushes his hand into yours and shook lightly. You had to try not to get lost in his eyes.

“Hey, I’m Joe Mazzello. You must be Y/N Y/L/N.”

You were astounded that he knew your name. You could only nod and smile. That’s all you did the whole time while the other actors showed up. You step back, reveling in how grateful you felt in that moment. Joe crept behind you, placing a hand onto your shoulder.

“A little overwhelmed?”

His voice was soft and sympathetic. Even through all the loud conversions in the room, you felt alone with him. You laugh softly and nod.

“Yeah, a little.”

He shakes his head and leans back into the table.

“Don’t be. I watched some of your work. They made the right decision.”

He had seen some of your shows. Holy crap. You felt like you could die right there and be happy. You made a mental note to yourself to look up his filmography.

You sat beside him as you began to read through the script. Everyone introduced themselves and their characters. It was your turn next.

“Hi, I’m Y/N Y/L/N. And I’m playing Issac.”

Everyone said hello and waved, making your nerves fall. You felt more comfortable as time grew. As you stop speaking it struck that you never asked Joe who he was playing.

“Hello everyone, I’m Joesph Mazzello. And I’ll be playing Sam.”

Sam and Issac were the two best friends in the movie. You remember reading the interactions between the two of them. It seemed that your character had deeper feelings for Sam. Yeah, it wasn’t going to be hard to act like you fancied Joe. The reading began and you couldn’t help but smile at Joe when you weren’t reading.

Your night was spent watching anything Joe had been in. You never realized that he was Tim Murphy from Jurassic Park, a movie you never shut up about after it came out. You watched an episode of The Pacific, holy crap he was adorable. You admired him as an actor even more now. He was able to play such different characters and looks adorable while doing so.

Three months had gone by since the first read through. You basically had seen Joe every day, not complaining though. In between scenes, Joe would strike up a conversation with you. As time went by, both of you would bring the other a coffee in the morning. Joe would saunter over to you, a smile tugging on his lips. He was quick to learn your coffee order. You’d giggle and cradle the drink your hands, thanking him.

“You’re addicted.”

He jokes as you punch his elbow. He sat beside you while you got your hair and makeup done. Joe began telling you about this girl he met at the bar a couple nights back. You try to act happy for him, responding the way any guy would to his friend having feelings for someone. But you were any guy to him, you had feelings for him and he never seemed to reciprocate them back. As the makeup artist left, a soft silence filled your trailer. He shifts in the seat across from you. You smile towards him as he finally comes up with a topic of conversation.

“We’re filming our fight today. You ready?”

You nod and glance over to your script. The fight was a turning point for your characters. Your character was going to finally reveal his feelings to Joe’s. Hell, it felt like you were going to. Of course, you’d run over the scene with him. Before any take, you two would go over it until it was perfect.

One night he even invited you to dinner. He showed you supposedly the “best pizza” place ever. You had to admit, it was really good. The plan was to have a bite to eat and then run over the scenes of the next day. Instead, you talked about each other's filmography. You swear that you can listen to his past acting experiences for hours. He mentioned how much he admired you in one of your more difficult roles. You could feel how warm your face was as he rolled out endless compliments to you. He walked you back to your apartment and gave you a hug, his hand lingering on your waist. You could still feel his hand there once you finally got upstairs. But somehow your feelings were oblivious to him.

You glance around the set, it was supposed to resemble the apartment of Joe’s character. Joe was sat on the couch, his hands clasp together. He tries to get into character before he shot something. He now likes to say that “it was hard to pretend to hate.” You stood outside the fake door, moving around to get your energy up, the coffee helped with that. You were given a thumbs up from one of the lighting people. You nod to him and take a deep breath. The slap board clap followed by the director calling to everyone.

“Rolling!”

Issac slammed his fist into the door, calling for Sam to open it. He stands up from his place on the couch and trudges over to the door. He lets himself into the apartment and turns on his heels, facing his friend angrily.

“Why have you been so M.I.A recently, Sam? You haven’t answered any of my calls.”

He threw his hands up, defeated by his friend's action. Sam rolled his eyes and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He tried to muster up the words in a more polite way but couldn’t.

“Have you ever realized that you’ve been kind of a dick lately?”

Issac glared up at him. Of course, the two friends always called each other things like that, but never with such anger.

“Dude, ever since I started seeing Amy you’ve been a total dick.”

Issac rolls his eyes even though he knows his friend is right. He tries to think of something to say but Sam stops him.

“Issac, I know it sucks being single. But you’ll fin-”

“Stop! I’m not pissed about being single.”

Sam leans into the back of the couch, waiting for him to continue.”

“I’m pissed about the person I love not loving me back.”

Issac felt his heart sink. He had never planned to tell Sam his true feelings, let alone acting on them. He wrung his hands together and sighed.

“Do you like Amy or something? Is that why you’ve been such an ass?”

Sam retorted.

Suddenly, you weren’t acting anymore. You quickly responded, still in character.

“I spend all my time with this person! They bring me things, remember things but still are oblivious! They hold me, acting like it’s nothing! It means the world to me!”

The writer quickly stood when he noticed you going off the script. Joe didn’t look confused by your sudden change. He was listening to what you said, feeling at fault. Before the writer could cut in, the director stopped him. He leans forward to watch your performance.

“God, I love them. And it hurts. It hurts because they go one with their day fine, and I’m left wishing I could hold them! I wish I could kiss them, anything. They are fucking perfect. I do anything, hell I’m obvious about it but still, nothing is returned!”

Sam searched his head for something to say.

“Issac, I understand what you mea-”

“No, you don’t. Because I’m in love with you and that scares the hell outta me.”

Not only was there tension in this scene but it filled the room. People shared looks with each other, utterly impressed with your acting. Your chest heaves after yelling out your frustrations. The director calls cut and claps, walking over to you. You stare at Joe, not sure of what to say. It was clear that the line had some sort of truth behind it. You tried to leave the room as fast as you could, Joe races after you. He calls your name but you couldn’t face him.

You close the door to your trailer and flop into your chair. You push your face into your hands, groaning. You try to push back your tears. You wallow in the silence until you hear someone patter at your door. You take a deep breath before moving to the door, pulling it open. Joe stands there, panting softly. You open your mouth to speak but Joe kisses you softly. You start off taken back, not disappointed. He parts and carcasses your jawline.

“That story I told you earlier? Total lie. Y/N, I am utterly in love with you.”

You quickly pull him back into your lips, kissing him with all the passion you could muster.

Tonight was the premiere of the movie, your nerves running high. It wasn’t the first premiere you had been to, but one of the most important. But Joe had promised to stay by your side for the whole night. His hand rests on your inner thigh, your hand holding his. He presses a kiss to your temple, sensing how nervous you were. The car slowed down and the door swung open. Joe climbs out and waits for you, smiling brightly as you step onto the asphalt.

“Ready, love?”

Your cheeks feel warm as he whispers to you, his hand rests on the small of your back. You nod and wave to all the people trying to get your attention. Interviewers fix their fancy clothes and rush through the questions in their head, waiting till you reached them. You stopped and took some photos with people, they gushed about how handsome you looked in your suit. You laugh and thank them before rushing off to step onto the main carpet.

Joe holds an arm for you, smiling as you rush into it. The cameras flash and you can hear people calling for you both to look to them. You can’t help but smile at Joe. Through all the chaos you felt alone with him. The relationship was public, only to your family and friends. One of the photographers must have picked up on the intimacy between your exchange and called.

“Give him a kiss, Mazzello!”

What a prick, you thought. You didn’t have a second to respond before Joe pressed a wet kiss to your cheek, laughing. His nose presses against your cheekbone. People whistled and hollered, camera clicking and flashing around you. You hit his chest lightly and laugh as he pulls away. Throughout the rest of the night, his hand rests on yours. This was worth all the waiting.

#joe mazzello #joe mazello x reader #joe mazzello x male reader #joe mazzello x male!reader #x reader #x male reader #x male!reader #joe mazzello fic #joe mazzello fluff #my writing #barnesbabes #bohemian rhapsody #bohemian rhapsody cast #Queen

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douxreviews · 5 years

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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - ‘Inescapable’ Review

Fitz: "You are one sick, twisted piece of work." Simmons: "I should strangle you right now."

What a fantastic episode. Fitzsimmons are constantly referred to as one person, as if they only had one mind. What an inspired idea, then, to have an episode in which their minds literally become one.

The set up is simple and straightforward: the Chronicoms connect Fitz's and Simmons' brains because they believe that the duo can invent time travel more quickly if their brains are combined. The Chronicoms' agenda is nothing but a plot device, though, for inventing time travel is completely ignored in favor of exploring Fitzsimmons' memories, darker sides and relationship.

After Atarah tells them what they should do and leaves them alone, Fitz's first move is to propose, which was also the first thing his other self did when he met Jemma in the future. That's a great Fitzsimmons' moment, first because of Fitz's unwavering intention and also because of Simmons' reaction: she doesn't blink an eye and accepts. There is no pain about reliving this moment, no thoughts given to what she lived with the other Fitz and lost. She has this Fitz and that's all she cares about.

Perhaps the most evident character trait of Jemma's is how down to business she is. Way back in the sixth episode of the series, she was ready to sacrifice herself to save the team without giving it a second thought. She knows what must be done and so she does it. But this episode reveals the flip side to that aspect of her personality. She deals with difficult situations in such a matter-of-fact way because she represses whatever complicated feelings she might have. That's also why she threw herself so quickly into the search for the second Fitz: she can't grieve Fitz if he's still alive somewhere.

When Fitz keeps asking what happened during his absence, Simmons is so eager not to tell that she devolves to her seven year old self and hides in her bed. We learn later in the episode that Simmons returned to that specific age because that was when her father taught her to keep her troubles and bad feelings contained in a little box so they wouldn't keep her up at night. The problem with that method is that it ended up creating a monster version of Jemma that she keeps locked in the deepest, darkest areas of her mind. I thought that approach to Simmons' evil side was rather simplistic and the only thing in the episode that didn't work for me.

We've known for awhile that Simmons can be extremely cold and detached when necessary. Whereas Fitz literally had an evil version of himself inserted in his mind, Simmons always had a darker side. So if you have an episode where Simmons and Fitz are wandering in each other's brains, it's a given that The Doctor is going to show up and I understand why the writers also wanted an Evil Jemma around. But why is that side of Jemma represented by a horror movie version of herself? It's so random and not the best representation they could have come up with. I'd expect Simmons' dark side to be a counterpart to Fitz's The Doctor, albeit not as cruel but certainly colder.

Maybe it's a matter of expectations, really. I'd rather have the focus be on Simmons' cold nature, the writers focused on her suppressed feelings. Still, "this character had a horror monster inside their mind all this time" is something that comes out of left field, so much so that the script has Simmons explain twice what the thing inside the box is. Ringu Jemma is not a complete fail, though, if only because of the way Fitz, Simmons and even The Doctor react to her. It's hilarious.

Before the episode explores the devils of Fitzsimmons, it devotes some time to update Fitz on what he missed. Simmons wanted to keep it all from him, or at least not dump everything on him so quickly, but after her brief return to childhood land, she can't stop her memories from manifesting themselves. "Please, not this memory," she asks, but it's of no use. Thus, we visit the moment after the battle of Chicago when they brought Fitz's body in. We haven't seen this scene before, so it's a chance for us to see how the group as a whole reacted to Fitz's death. Simmons was wrecked, but she had already told the others that there was a second Fitz. Mack wasn't buying it, but he was very respectful, as were May and Yo-Yo. Daisy put all her differences with Fitzsimmons aside and was there to give Simmons some solace. Daisy truly is the best friend ever.

Understandably, Fitz's mind is sent on a loop when he sees his dead body. He does the time travel math quickly, and his reaction is quite intriguing. First, he is truly devastated that his other self died. Then, when he learns that the other Fitz married Simmons, his reaction is "I missed my own wedding," except that it wasn't his wedding, as Simmons tries to explain. I expected him to wonder and worry about what would have happened to him if the other Fitz hadn't died. But he doesn't perceive that Fitz as another, and therefore questions such as "would Jemma have ever come after me?" never arise.

Simmons' memories come to an emotional conclusion when Coulson enters the room. From the way everyone is acting around him, Fitz knows something is off. Iain DeCaestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge shine throughout the entire episode, but this scene in particular is a showcase of their acting abilities. DeCaestecker's silent reaction to the news of Coulson's death is so good, his eyes carrying so much emotion, and Henstridge alternates between reliving the memory and narrating it to Fitz. It's brilliant. I also loved the chance to see Coulson yet again, and I loved even more that he was the first one to believe in Simmons and encourage her to go after Fitz. Damn it, what a great father figure.

We get another great scene with Coulson when we visit a shared memory of Simmons and Fitz: the day they met him and were recruited to his team! Their reaction to the proposal is so on point. Simmons is immediately on board, but Fitz wants to think about it before making a decision. Now he traces back all the trauma and pain they went through to that moment when they decided to become field agents.

Fitz's remark is enough to bring Ringu Jemma to their presence, and Fitz and Simmons are separated from one another by their evil selves. It's a moment that once again shows how random Ringu Jemma is. The interaction between Simmons and The Doctor is amazing, especially how she just ignores his attacks and coldly calls him a psychopath. On the other hand, I didn't understand why Ringu Jemma wanted to torture Fitz, even if she gave an explanation for it ("you cause pain, my turn"). It's hard to believe she ever had this type of feelings about Fitz, even if repressed.

Nonetheless, it all leads to a terrific clash between the regular Simmons and Fitz. Locked inside the containment module (it's a containment module, Jemma!), they let it all out in the best climax this episode could have had. There have been many instances in movies and TV shows where a couple fights and screams and ends up declaring their love for one another, but damn it if it doesn't work like a charm here, and it's all because of good writing and acting. Fitz and Simmons' discussion is a recap of everything the writers have thrown at them, and therefore it's a great way to honor their story together. It's instantly a Fitzsimmons's classic scene.

At first, I wasn't in love with the resolution for The Doctor and Ringu Jemma. Simmons had said earlier that he was only part of Fitz's pain to be controlled, and I wanted that to be the resolution: Fitz and Simmons realizing that their evil selves were part of their troubled personalities and needed to be controlled. Instead, they leave the containment module to find the Doctor and Ringu Jemma... making out. Would the Doctor, a very polished man, ever feel attracted to a horror movie monster? I doubt it. But by the third time I watched the episode (I really loved it), I got a kick out of the scene, especially of how Ringu Jemma subdued The Doctor.

All in all, this was a special episode. I wasn't happy with the direction the writers took Fitzsimmons last season, but "Inescapable" course-corrected it. If anything, it showed that Fitzsimmons can't escape from one another, and we can't escape from them.

Intel and Assets

- Enoch for the win! I knew he would come through for Fitz and Simmons.

- In one of Simmons' memories, we learn that Daisy wanted Yo-Yo to be part of the Space Team. Yo-Yo declined because, even though she and Mack had already broken up, she wanted to be there for him.

- Fitz and Simmons conjured their best friends to help them beat The Doctor and Ringu Jemma. Simmons' was Daisy and Fitz's was Mack. Sorry, Hunter and Enoch.

- To force Simmons to return to her grownup version, Fitz threatened to bring Aida to their presence. That was savage, I loved it.

- Young Jemma was seven (and a half) years old, but the actress who played her looked older. And she certainly isn't English.

- I might not have loved Ringu Jemma, but Elizabeth Henstridge clearly had lots of fun playing her. I did like the attention to detail in the design of the character: she wore clothes similar to the ones that Simmons wore on Maveth, and she had gold makeup on her forehead, just like Simmons did under Kasius' rule in the future.

- The book that young Simmons asked Fitz to read turned out to be the Darkhold. That was a nice callback to season four.

- Nice bit of acting by Elizabeth Henstridge: the way Simmons touches her wedding ring when Daisy gives her Fitz's.

- Nice bit of acting by Iain DeCaestecker: the child-like way he asks "what's wrong with Coulson?"

- So many good line deliveries in this episode. I liked Henstridge's "he is trapped inside your mind and now we are trapped inside your mind with him," she really conveyed a sense of danger there. And DeCaestecker's body language and delivery of "I don't know what I did to deserve that horror movie" were amazing. Nothing beats Joel Stoffer's "I have taken bold action," though. He made that line so perfect.

Quotes

Fitz (re: the Darkhold): "That's not a good book, that's a bad book. Bad story, very poorly written."

Fitz: "Well, it looks like someone's only gonna have two Ph.Ds by the time they're 17, doesn't it?"

Simmons: "For an organized person, your thoughts are a bloody mess."

Simmons: "I would remind you that we came in here because your Hydra fascist shadow was trying to kill us." Fitz: "Oh, so you unleashed the bloody Ringu Monster that you keep in a box. I don't hold a candle to you, psycho!"

Fitz: "You need therapy. You have some deep, deep, pent-up issues." Simmons: "It's been a rough year."

Fitz: "I had no idea you were holding on to all that." Simmons: "What's the point? Don't let anyone know, that's the whole idea." Fitz: "You are so English."

Fitz: "There's no better place to lay low than Strategic Homeland Intervention..." Simmons: "Yeah, it's an awful acronym."

Coulson: "Fitzsimmons, the brain, topped out of your class after being the two youngest ever enrolled." Simmons (proudly): "Well, there can only be one youngest, sir."

Fitz: "Then you get taken away by some rock, only to fall in love with some bloody astronaut..." Simmons: "I was alone on a desert planet." Fitz: "... who turned out to be Hive, by the way. Oh, and also, are we sure that that happened after you slept with him? Because, hey, the jury's still out on that one." Simmons: "Oh, you wanna go there? At least he was a person!"

Simmons: "The Framework revealed the truth. It's all ego." Fitz: "Oh, ego? I would love to deal with ego." Simmons: "Would you?" Fitz: "Guess why." Simmos: "Why?" Fitz: "'Cause your id's out there chewing Mack's head off." Clever bit of dialogue.

Fitz: "If it was you in the Framework, the place would look like Night of the Living Dead."

Fitz: "Didn't know you liked that." Simmons: "Didn't know you'd do that."

Mack: "Their entire planet was laid waste. And the ones who did it, they're..." Daisy: "They're here?" Mack: "Here, yeah. Yeah, they... You kind of stepped on my moment there, but yeah."

Even if I didn't love Ringu Jemma, I thought this was great. Flawed, but marvelous, four out of four music boxes.

---

Lamounier

#Agents of SHIELD #Jemma Simmons #Leo Fitz #Fitzsimmons #AoS #Marvel #MCU #agents of s.h.i.e.l.d.#Agents of SHIELD Reviews #Doux Reviews #TV Reviews

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letterboxd · 5 years

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Play Fright.

“It’s fun-scary, as opposed to you feeling scared because it's disgusting or something.”

We talk to Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark and Troll Hunter director André Øvredal about working with Guillermo del Toro, finding the line with tween-friendly horror, and the good-and-bad of anthology films. (And, yes, we threw in a few Troll Hunter questions.)

Produced by Oscar-winner Guillermo del Toro, who also has a Screen Story credit on the film, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is a new PG-13 horror adapted from the three-book series of the same name first published between 1981 and 1991.

Prefiguring the likes of Goosebumps and its many imitators, the original Scary Stories books, written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell, presented short horror tales aimed at a young-adult readership. Many of the stories were inspired by (or perhaps the source of) widely known urban myths.

Despite the stated target audience, the stories—with assistance from some deeply disturbing illustrations (see below)—struck a nerve and traumatized readers of all ages. They were controversial to the point where there was, briefly, a minor movement to have the books removed from schools.

A movie adaptation would seemingly point to a classic horror anthology film, but del Toro and his collaborators have instead constructed a singular narrative around a group of young teenagers in 1968.

After learning the tragic story of a girl who was murdered in their sleepy little town many years earlier, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) and her friends start encountering supernatural events that allow for various Scary Stories to come to life on screen.

The film’s director is Norwegian filmmaker André Øvredal, the man behind 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, and the inventive 2011 found-footage fantasy epic (and Letterboxd community favorite) Troll Hunter.

Guillermo del Toro, star Zoe Margaret Colletti, and director André Øvredal on the set of ‘Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark’.

What was your relationship to Guillermo del Toro before you worked together on this film? André Øvredal: I was a big fan of his from when I went to film school, because I used to live with a Mexican friend and he showed me Cronos when it came out. I was floored by the beauty of that film. Mimic terrified me, I loved it. Even though I know there is a tough history behind that film and the cut that came out, I still found it terrifying. And then Blade II was just one of those amazing sequels that stood out beyond the original.

That didn’t really happen very often back in those days, that the sequel was better than the original. And on and on with Pan’s Labyrinth and one great movie after another, culminating with The Shape of Water. But our relationship started on Twitter; he tweeted about The Autopsy of Jane Doe, that he enjoyed it. And we had a Twitter exchange about that.

Had he seen Troll Hunter? It seems like it would be right up his alley. Yeah he had, and he liked it. Obviously I’m sure he’s paid attention to other people’s love for monsters and creatures.

Illustrated by Stephen Gammell, ‘The Pale Lady’—from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark story ‘The Dream’—is a favorite of both Øvredal and del Toro.

So how did you end up getting this job? He was supposed to direct Scary Stories himself. It was supposed to be his next movie after The Shape of Water, and then he decided not to make it his next movie and they decided, well, let’s find another director. He proposed me to the other producers on the film, Sean Daniel and J. Miles Dale, and they all agreed that I would be a good fit.

They offered me the script to read and of course I fell in love with it immediately. It’s the kind of movie I grew up loving, like an Amblin-esque movie, but the idea being to do it with a horror sensibility and make it really scary. I thought it would be a great movie for me to be able to make. And speaking of the PG-13 audience, it was what I grew up with as well. When I was a kid in my teens, those were the movies I got to see. So I felt very close to this movie through the whole process.

There is indeed a nice Amblin vibe informing this movie. How would you describe that vibe, if you had to put it into words? There is a sense of humor. It’s out to entertain more than it’s out to hurt you as a horror movie. It’s not an existential horror. It’s not out to grind you down. It’s out to use horror as fun; there’s a playfulness. It’s oftentimes several characters, a group of friends, that these movies are about. It has a high energy and it can go from intense, suspenseful, or in this case very scary and horrible, to playful banter between friends. I think that broad range creates a feeling of real life.

All the characters in those movies back then were very grounded; even though they were fun and had a lot of energy, they also had real issues in life, they also came from a background where there were serious things they were dealing with. I found that very interesting, especially about the character of Stella, who has a lot of things in her life that are profoundly affecting her. And how that also relates to the life of the antagonist, Sarah Bellows. And in some ways how it feeds into today. I think the social commentary thing is clear in Amblin films as well.

How challenging was it to make this good ’n scary without it ever spilling over into being too ‘adult’? It’s about playing with the audience. The audience should know that they should enjoy being… tormented, if you will. So it’s kind of trying to communicate both ways. So I’m like, setting something up, I’m always thinking of the audience, shot-by-shot-by-shot. How does the audience feel? If we put the camera here, what will the audience feel then? If we put it up here, how will the audience react then? And if we cut from there to there? It’s all about communication. I’m trying to imagine how it’s going to make the audience feel, so it’s about back and forth. I think that creates a playful tone. It’s fun-scary, as opposed to you feeling scared because it’s disgusting or something.

What do you think this film gained from tying together the various short stories into a single narrative, as opposed to having them play out in the traditional anthology format? Guillermo has said something that is kinda true about anthology films, which is that they’re never as good as the best [story], and they’re always as bad as the worst [story]. So you always have one story that isn’t great, and it kind of deflates the whole experience. In a way, [a traditional anthology movie] isn’t a whole experience because you never get to engage in characters for a long time and feel all their dilemmas, because as soon as you’re out of [each story], you’re on the next one. And that can work, but I’m not attracted to that as a storytelling form, it’s just a personal thing. Many other people are, and thank god for that, because then we get a diverse set of movies.

I love a full narrative. When I received the script for Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, I thought it was an anthology, so when I opened it, I was so happy when it wasn’t, because by page ten I was in love with the characters and then I saw that I was going to follow them all the way.

An image from André Øvredal’s ‘Troll Hunter’.

We’re massive fans of Troll Hunter at Letterboxd. That’s fantastic, that’s great. It’s a great site. I go there a lot to see people talking about the movies.

What kind of life has that film had since it was released? Everyone who sees it loves it, but it deserved a much bigger audience. Was a remake or sequel ever considered? There was talk of a remake. Chris Columbus [writer of Gremlins and The Goonies, and director of Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter films], and a company called CJ Entertainment, bought the rights for it years ago. So I was in awe—one of the heroes of my youth, Chris Columbus. So I was sorry to see that that never came through. We talked about a sequel of course, but I feel like I told the story of this world, and anything else would just be more trolls. The way you used scale in that film was amazing. No blockbusters made since have come close to how effectively you conveyed the gargantuan size of the creatures. That’s great to hear. I don’t know how other people shoot movies but it was shot so much in reality. I mean, we CGI-ed in the creatures, but everything else was so grounded and real with a hand-held camera. We were just running around in the wilderness shooting it for real. So we naturally had to position it, physically, in some natural way, a very simple natural way, and maybe that helped.

‘Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark’ is in US theaters now, and rolling out globally over the next few months. Comments have been edited for clarity.

#troll hunters #scary films #horror #anthology #gdt #guillermo del toro #andré Øvredal #letterboxd

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