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jeanjauthor · 5 years

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Resting Writer’s Face

Just shared a post where black men have days & places where Resting Bitch Face is a thing...and it made me think of the fact that Resting Writer’s Face is also a thing, but I did not want to hijack that thread, because it is too important in tone and content, and this is like, veering away and doing a 270 loop to go off in a different direction.

With that said...

Resting Writer’s Face isn’t quite like Resting Bitch Face.

First off, what is Resting Bitch Face? Urban Dictionary and Wikipedia both list it as essentially the expression on a face (usually a female’s) that appears to a particular viewer to be mean, contemptuous, annoyed, irritated, cold-spirited, etc...when in actuality the person (again, the vast majority being female) is actually not feeling any of those emotions, or any other emotion, really.

It’s most commonly seen in females, because of Culturally Widespread Male Expectations™ that women are supposed to smile whenever a man is near, because females are supposed to be (pressured by culture & society) constantly pleasant and be upbeat and deferential and adoring and *gagging noises*...you get the point.

When a male does not receive this “beautification” of his world, he feels robbed of what he views as the “right way” that a woman should behave in his presence, or “the way that things are supposed to be.” And when he sees a culturally beautiful woman NOT smiling, he doubles-down on how “wrong” this feels...because doesn’t everything we consume in entertainment, media, culture, society, fantasy, etc, etc, all demand that Women Exist To Make The World More Beautiful For All (even the vast majority, and thust very mediocre, of) Men? *more gagging noises*

Resting Writer Face is...a little different.

It’s not really resting, for a start.

It can actually get pretty lively, even.

The “resting” part is still valid in the sense of unconsciously doing what it is doing. Because trust me, we writers aren’t always consciously thinking of what our faces are doing when we are, well, thinking.

Specifically, thinking about plots, characters, action sequences, dialogue, and the all important How Would The Character We’re Thinking About React In Such-&-Such Circumstances.

This. Happens. All. The. Time.

It happens at home oodles and lots (I’ll get to that in a moment), but mostly Resting Writer Face is a thing when it’s done in public. Because it happens when we’re out in public, walking around between one errand and the next, between car and work, work and lunch restaurant, work and car, car and dry cleaners, pet food store, whatever, wherever. And it happens simply because we’re thinking about, as I said, plotlines, character actions & reactions, dialogue, etc.

Talking to yourself in public used to be a shameful thing. Nowadays...not so much. So many people are conducting conversations on bluetooth headsets, into their phone at frikkin way too loud volumes that they’d never use to the person standing three feet away, but they use to the person on the other end of the phone three inches from their mouth, blah blah blah...but talking to yourself isn’t automagically a sign of mental health issues.

Besides, we’re usually talking to our characters, reciting bits of dialogue to test how it sounds out loud before committing it to a story, or we’re talking out our plotlines, or we’re poking at said plotlines or a particular scene to see where the holes are and whether or not we can patch them, or finding that perfect bit of clever dialogue that will goad one of the protagonists into slapping the speaker in outrage...

(My absolute favorite of that particular last one was from an old fanfic of mine, wherein one character goaded the other into slapping him by deliberately making their relationship derogatory by calling it nothing more than “a slap and tickle”...and ohhh boy, did she slap him! He honestly did not want to be horrid to her, but needed to get her to avoid him for a while out of pure plot reasons, so it worked very well. But I digress.)

However, even though it’s no longer publicly shamed, talking in public is still somewhat discouraged. So, a lot of us writers will go about our business thinking through the possible thoughts and dialogues and perfect one-liner quips for that dramatic moment in the story arc. We don’t say anything aloud, but we think it.

And that’s when Resting Writer Face comes into play. Because if we’re really invested in trying to find the perfect response, the perfect, “If ___ happens, then I (my character) would react in ___ way.”

And a lot of the time...our faces show those emotions, the grunts and grimaces, the scowls and grins, all in a mental rehearsal of our characters’ physical and emotional actions, reactions, and efforts...showing up unconsciously or subconsciously, or barely consciously, barely cognizantly, on our faces.

When we’re typing in front of a computer screen and another member of the household drops in on us and sees the Sometimes Very Scary Expressions our faces contort into during the mental gymnastics of feeling and thus recording the emotions we’re writing onto the .doc page (non-writers have no idea just how exhausting writing can be, for all it’s often “purely mental” in effort)...well, the first few times can actually be rather alarming for that other person.

I’ve had housemates and family members and friends all ask me if everything was okay, if I was mad at them, or upset at something they had done, and I”ve had to quickly break off what I was writing, give them a quick polite lighthearted expression, and reassure them, “No no, I’m (everything’s) fine! I’m just writing a really intense bit in my story! (No, really!)”

The first few times this has happened, I apparently looked pretty darn scary, and had to reassure them a few times that my Resting Bitch Face scowl or glare or whatever was actually Resting Writer Face, which is an actively emoting thing. That the emotions on my face weren’t my emotions.

By the fifth or sixth time I was getting interrupted...the other person usually just blinked, thought a moment, and asked “Writing hard?” and that was that, because yes, I was...and I’d usually stop and chat, or say, “Gimme a few moments” as I tried to get the thoughts in my head onto the page...which could sometimes stretch on to several minutes and I’d have to type some keywords to help me remember, or they’d say they’d come back later, and once I got it all out of me, I’d have to go look for them to find out what they wanted.

But that’s at home at the computer...so it’s obvious that I was writing. (clicketyclacking of the keyboard keys, etc, etc...)

When writers are out in public and our minds are busy with Writing Thoughts...we get Resting Writer Face. And by that, I mean Resting in the sense of relaxing our usual vigilance about Conforming To Cultural/Societal Expectations For Facial Expression Matching Publicly Acceptable Moods.

I’ve scared people by having Resting Writer’s Face about some fight scene, verbal or physical, while walking past those poor folks in public. Most of the times when I notice I’m scaring folks, I just quickly assume a more pleasant expression, or even say something along the lines of, “I’m not actually angry; I’m just thinking about something in a story I’m writing.” Which either gets me a “Ohhh, cool!” expression of relief or the Dubious Side-Eye of “Oookaaay, Weirdo” as they move quickly on their way.

...On the bright side, when I’m in dubious surroundings (catcalling males, or dimly lit sidewalks in less than safe areas, mostly), I will adopt a cross between Resting Bitch Face and Resting Writer Face. I will deliberately think about my protagonists being tough and badass and competently dangerous...and let those emotions and facial expressions take over. Not just my face, but the way I walk, the way I stand, the way I carry and present myself in a particular space. (I’ve actually even managed to get men to move out of my path by Doing This One Weird Trick.™ (lol))

I’ve also caught myself doing this to quell anxiety about things, like “What if a car crashes in front of me? How would I react to that?” or “what if someone tries to rob the bank while I’m in it?” or “What if someone at a nearby table in this restaurant starts choking? What is the Heimlich Maneuver again?” so on and so forth. These things are the stuff that isn’t even going to go into a book, but we’re still thinking it through.

Actually, a lot of people do this last one, not just writers...but I’ve found it’s most prevalent as part of what it’s like being a writer. And I’d definitely say the one group of people who are guaranteed todo it far more often than even writers do are actors. Because that’s their job, as actors.

So. Resting Writer Face. What it is, why it happens, how it differs from Resting Bitch Face, etc, etc.

Just remember that most of the time, we writers aren’t even aware that we’re doing it. We’re too caught up in the stories in our heads, both in trying to make them, and in testing how they play out, to see if any changes need to be made. And that’s not a bad thing!

I mean, if we’re working out a troublesome plot point (”How does my male protagonist get the female to ignore him for a month, so that the bad guys don’t try to kill her because of her interest in me? ...ooh, how about he makes her slap him, very publicly??”(or for whatever reason)), then it means we’re trying to make the story better.

And that’s a great thing for our readers...even if we make people a little wary of us at times during the story creation stages. At least, until they get used to the Writer Things™ we do.

...Also, this is why writing isn’t just what we do when we’re physically writing out the story. A lot of writing takes place in our heads before the words ever hit the page.

And because nobody pays us what everyone assumes writers get paid (not even 10% of what people assume, tbh), we usually are stuck doing all this hard mental word whenever we have a moment to spare...which includes when we’re out and about in public, doing our day job, running errands, buying groceries, you name it.

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rey-kryze · 6 years

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When night time folds around our bed.

a modern reylo fic : chapter one.

pairing : rey x kylo ren / ben solo / reylo.

rating : explicit ( it will be , its only chapter one , lads ).

word count : 2628

read on ao3.

Her alarm's freakish screams jar her out of bed , hard enough that she falls onto the floor, where a pile of textbooks dig into her ribs.

its celtic music , calming --- Finn had insisted , that her usual go-to of Nineties' one hit wonders , weren't going to help her start her day on the right foot . Rey, currently , only wanted to stomp defiantly on his . Her roommate's newfound love of this hippy-dippy nu-age crap was the least of her concerns, as she stares at the red numbers from this angle she's suddenly aware that there's an eleven o'clock , where there should have been a nine. She slept through her class .

The class that cost her ... Fuck, a lot of zeroes .

Rey thinks in numbers , and , while her friends mock her for it , left brain crap makes more sense to her than just about anything else -- maybe if her wake up call was in binary, she'd actually have woken up .

She huffs, as if by sheer an abject defiance, she can will time to turn back, and give her the strength to power down to a lecture that had absolutely nothing to do with aerospace design , but was a weird sidelined requirement in the engineering part of her degree . Whatever . Rose took that class, Rose , whose notes were a verbatim recount of what their fossilized professor would have spewed over the last two hours. Rey smiles to herself , realizing that she'd never actually made it off the ground.

I'm too young for this , bitterly, as her joints pop and crackle , a protest of her having moved at all -- least, when she's stretching towards the stucco ceiling that's got a concerning number of tac-mark holes in it , and she's never looked up long enough to notice them until now . She'd add it to her to-do list, buy some Spackle .

Stumbling , Rey's arms only come down when she yawns, and nearly trips over herself on the way to the kitchen - the smell of coffee was , to the bleary eyed college student, a siren's song for which she'd brave the storm of her housemates . All of whom , have been up for hours .

" Rey , no offense , but you look like crap . " Poe , who is currently side-eyeing Finn's choice in late-morning beverage ( something green and thick -- couldn't he have the common decency to pour it into something that wasn't transparent ? ) , was always the one for honesty , except , apparently , when it came to his partner's dietary habits. He simply raises his brows, and resumes drinking his coffee , " You okay ?" After a moment has passed and Rey, usually quick on her wit, hadn't said a word.

" Huh ? Yeah of course ! I'm just peachy ." Deadpanned , she's still glaring at Finn who has made a point to read a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal. Rey's half inclined to pour his kale-something-or-other all over it, she doesn't, and fishes around for a clean mug while grumbling , " I overslept. Missed my only class for the day, and with Spring Break around the corner i'm running out of things to do . Too much free time ."

" You're the only person in the world who is mad that classes are out for two weeks , " Finn , finally choosing to speak , levels at her. They've mastered the art of copacetic trash talking and it unnerved anyone who didn't understand just how much these two cared for each other. ( its a lot , a lot a lot , and if he wasn't with Poe , people might have thought it was puppy love ).

He's not wrong , but that doesn't mean Rey's any less annoyed with him for saying it . " Hey . " A snap , " Us scholarship kids have to pull our weight around here. Idle hands are the devil's play things , or however the adage goes ." She's slowly lost any heat to her words, lulled into a caffeine-induced complacency as she nurses her first of many cups of coffee . It was the only way she could balance her usual routine, but , with classes winding down, and her almost done with her degree three years in advance ( how it'd back fired, overlaying as many credits as she had ) , its bringing too much to light. Like the things she doesn't have, or what she never does .

Poe, who has an apparent death wish,( alongside psychic abilities ) quips , " If your hands had something to play with maybe you wouldn't be so tightly wound ." Finn chokes on his drink, and Rose, who'd just come in with a smile, frowns .

" You know Rey." Her voice is happy. How is she literally always happy ? The arch of Rey's brow , normally wilting, isn't even enough to stop her now , " He's got a point. You never even go out with us . You visit skeevy bars , but never take anyone home --- " Finn clearing his throat is a saving grace that's got Rey forgiving the panflutes from earlier in a heart beat . Rose concludes quickly , " It just might do you some good to have some er --- human contact ! Not that the engine of a 747 doesn't get you plenty hot ."

Its a bad joke. The group collectively groans .

" I date ." She corrects, but when all eyes turn on her , the burn of her cheeks is telling , " -- I mean, its not that I haven't been asked. I'm just not interested in ... college boys." Yes, that's believable . Let them think you're into older men, or something . Rey's internal dialogue is more convincing than her outer one, as they continue to stare at her in growing disbelief , " Get off my case ." Is all she can manage through the thicket of their laughter . Her blush recedes, and she's left with a certain begrudged fondness for the ragtag group of people that were her friends .

Its only two p.m , and Rey's run out of things to do . It's stupid , really, how a friendly jibe could unearth so many truths that she'd worked hard to keep at bay. There's a reason she focuses on numbers instead of letters , on equations instead of poetry . Math and physics didn't call on that certain romantic quality that always, always found its way into any art she'd dared be interested in . Romance is crap. All of it is just ... crap.

Or maybe it isn't.

Crap.

She knows herself well enough that this nagging thought wont go away on its own . Its not that Rey's a virgin , or that she'd silently sworn herself to celibacy . More or less .. her feelings were baseless . She'd never known intimacy in a way that made her seek it out . It felt forced, uncomfortable , too-tight and too .. much . Rey knows Dr. Kanata and her had worked through a lot of her ' intimacy issues ' but that didn't make it an overnight fix ( A decade of therapy didn't qualify, evidently ). She' had boyfriends, but nothing that she could make sick . Ninety percent of the time , Rey got tired of them , bored with the compulsory tenderness and saying shit that she did not , in earnest , feel. It was all to fit in , and placate herself more than anyone else .

Crap.

Her legs are bouncing with nervous energy, sitting on the edge of her bed with her beat up phone in her lap - Rey frowns at the screen like it'd insulted her . She still can't believe that her own two fingers , in a flurry of doubt and defiance ( that'll prove them wrong is never sound reasoning ) have pulled up the app store , and typed in six letters , in that specific sequence , no less.

The only things she'd had downloaded to her phone besides the generic , standard set were : uber , youtube , a scientific calculator ( have you seen how expensive those things are ? this was free ) , a moon tracking bit , and something meant to organize her routine .

Now , this garish gradient of pink and orange is sitting dead-center on her home page . She hadn't dragged it into a group , yet , but it certainly didn't belong with any pre-existing thing . The whole ordeal is stressing her out when it was meant to provide the exact opposite. She nearly deletes. Nearly. but Poe's voice of all thing echoes , and then Rose's ... They'd sounded so ... pitying . Rey hates pity. And its with that intent -- to never see them look at her like that again, that she lets it download in full.

Her phone pings , and a groan runs through her at the sight of the notification that , really, only further cemented the fact that Rey at only twenty one years of age, was desperate to get laid. Tinder had downloaded successfully.

Turns out, Rey's got a fascination with setting up profiles .

She'd spent nearly two hours filling out the respective boxes , her interests , while minimal , had been gone into great detail - though , if this was solely for finding a quick lay, she can't imagine anyone would get past her profile picture ( a rather flattering one ) -- Rey'd never been any good with selfies, but Poe snapped a candid when they'd all gone out for a boozy brunch . Her smile takes up too much of her face, but her freckles glimmer under the nascent sun , a filter provided by the oversized red umbrella that kept their table in the shade , highlights her tan ( long lost to the unforgiving winter ) beautifully. All in all , with her hair in its standard ' space buns ', as Finn called them, ( the first astronaut with style , Rose had amended ) , she could call herself an attractive girl. Attractive enough to warrant a swipe , god , that felt silly, even just to think.

She smiles . Its been a long time since she'd felt this way.

Unfortunately , she forgot about her pending beaus within the hour , busying herself with repairing the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink. Despite having warned her friends to stop shoving all their leftovers down its gullet, it was broken after only a two week lapse since she'd last fixed it. More than once , she'd threatened to charge them for her services, but they all knew that Rey took mundane delight in doing things like this , her hands and mind preoccupied was just the way she liked it . She's smiling to herself , almost absurdly , as she hums along with the music trickling out from her phone's warped speaker -- the music's interrupted by a sound she doesn't recognize -- everything , every app , every reminder had been set to a certain Morse notification , this one was shrill and annoying and gave her a brief flashback to this morning's unfortunate Celtic incident.

She cleans her hands off with a dish towel, and pulls it out of her coverall's front pocket . ' congratulations ! you have a match ! ' bloody hell . Funneling embarrassment, and regret, she slides her phone open -- expecting a frat boy with a Ralph Lauren polo , or maybe some older 'gentleman' whose picture looked like a grayed big toe.

Her assumptions had been ( mercifully ) wrong .

'Ben Solo' , a name that was vaguely familiar , but in that sort of way you half-remember a dream, she shrugs it off - Ben wasn't uncommon , and being ' solo ' had become something of a plague . She shouldn't chuckle at her own pun that was at the expense of a man that, apparently, thought she was someone he'd sleep with .

He's handsome. Startlingly so . But not at all in any traditional fashion . Rey finds herself flipping through his pictures over and over, smiling when he did , which was only in one of the ten images he'd uploaded. Its enough , she's sold , her hearts beating frantically and her stomachs probably in her shoes, but she's riding the high that came with being .. wanted. However impersonally, through an app she'd trashed for months now , no less.

' Hi !' Crap . is that too impersonal? She adds a smiley face emoji a minute later , feeling out of practice and , quite frankly , ridiculous for having been so eager to message him - she'd only gotten the notif moments before. What if he thinks she's some girlish little waif who has been waiting, tragically , by her phone for him to match with her ?

' Hello .' Oh . He's formal too, Rey worries her lip a bit before replying,

' I'm Rey !' ... that's spelled out for him above, dummy. She'd already hit send though, no going back. Typing bubbles appear before she can ad to that.

' I see that . ' Was he being rude ? Or playful ? For whatever reason, she feels like he smiled to himself when he sent it. Her toes curl a little.

She takes a deep breath -- better to be honest with it , if he didn't like her forward nature, this wouldn't work to begin with.

' ive never done this I mean you can see that too I figure I'm not sure ... the protocol for these things . er .' a.k.a How do I ask for casual sex even if that's the primary directive here ?

He's kind, when he answers , about ten minutes after -- The whole time Rey's spent , still crouched under the kitchen sink , using the light of her phone to go by, but not accomplishing any actual work while she waits.

' Ah. I'm new to this , too .' He's being oddly formal. Punctuation , capitalization -- Rey's immediately aware that she hadn't checked his age, she'd been so enticed by his images and the prospect of scratching a newly - woken itch . She scrolls back over to his profile, and sighs with relief. He's only thirty. Which is only nine years her elder . Her friends had dated professors twice that age -- oh , a new message.

' To be frank , I'm finding it hard to believe you're real . It isn't often a woman of your caliber resorts to using a dating app . Not that I myself have extensive familiarity with them. ' Okay .. He wasn't actually getting anywhere with this , and its edging dangerously close to a real conversation . Usually, now's when Rey's attention would be thrown sharply and wholly into whatever she'd been doing before -- but she can't seem to stop herself when she replies,

' A woman of my caliber ?' Rey adopts his cadence , its easier to feel less like a messy child by comparison .

' Yes. You're beautiful, and educated . Did you run out of characters in your bio ? I felt that it ended abruptly. ' She had, but that he'd noticed makes her blush furiously. Its so hard to confine a person to two thousand words or less -- she'd had that same issue in her papers , enough so that her teachers have given her a page limit in contrast to her classmate's minimum .

' I did.' She pauses. ' I didn't think people payed that much attention to the girls they're trying to sleep with . ' Its crass, and she hopes it wouldn't chase him off. He's typing for a long while , a long ... long while ... oh no is he going to lecture her ?

' You're not just any girl, though. Are you ?' All that time an that's what he said ? He must've deleted and re-written that message a half dozen times ; she wonders at his first drafts of it , and then she's wondering at her wondering, and ....

' I would like to take you out to a nice place. We can take an uber, so you're not trapped in my car with me, a public setting. Nothing too intimate or personal . But I think you are someone I'd rather like to hear speak before commencing in other activities.' did he just make hooking up sound eloquent ? Damn . Damn . Damn. Crap.

Rey smiles again, for the fiftieth fucking time , in the half hour she'd been messaging him - he had a way with words, that's how she justifies this conductive energy spiraling through her limbs .

' Tonight ? I'm free around seven .' Which gave her ... two and a half hours to fashion herself into a human being .

' Absolutely. I'll message you the address , one moment.'

She did it . She had a date -- or whatever this qualified as.

Wait. Rey had a date. Crap .

' Hey peanut we're home !'

#reylo #reylo fic #reylo fam #reylo trash #ao3fic #*my writing.#m*3 #*wnfaob

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sambinnie · 4 years

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How are you? I wish I had something more incisive to greet you with, but the speed with which everything occurs means it would be irrelevant, distasteful or a viral punchline a few hours later.

I have been to the cinema for the first time in six months, and continued my regular habit exactly where I’d left it by attending a first-thing-in-the-morning screening of Tenet with only one other person in the cinema, sitting miles away and also on their own (the only way to watch a film, I say). Fucking Tenet, though. I mean, I have really missed going to the cinema, partly because I love films and partly because there’s such a small-scale decadence to occasionally going there solo at 10am on a Tuesday morning, and those tiny pleasures (which, of course, are currently no longer tiny) are just the things to keep me going.

But the film. Oh god, the film. I wish… I wish I could collate my thoughts into something which doesn’t just rapidly descend into a frustrated scream. I wish success didn’t mean people couldn’t say no to you. I wish I liked Nolan’s Batman films, for a start, since so many seem to get so much from them (see also: Breaking Bad, Killing Eve and Line of Duty), but I’ve always found them silly, really dumbly written, and badly made — I can’t hear much of the dialogue, and the action sequences are frequently shot with so many cuts and movement that’s it’s impossible to follow, something George Miller could teach him about so beautifully — and they’re so bloody solemn. Gotham is a grim place, but there’s a boring pomposity in fetishing that one-note grimness, and Nolan has it nailed. Having a character genuinely laugh at something doesn’t render your film light-weight; it creates contrast, and human engagement, something these serious (but sci-fi)/serious (but fantasy)/serious (but adult man dresses in a cape) films too often lack, as if a strained, one-note way of speaking will cancel out the frivolous, actually enjoyable genre aspect of the film.

That lack of humanity is shared by Tenet. After a certain point, I simply don’t care. Is the nuke going to explode before Batman can something something something? *shrugs* Will the Tenet team manage to stop some sort of bad thing happening? Yes? No? Don’t mind, fine either way. Is Tenet nice to look at? Yes, but in a sort of “Christ, are we still holding up billionaire oligarch lifestyles as an aspirational thing at the moment?” very pre-2020 mood. Does it make sense? No, but that alone doesn’t mean it isn’t good — some great films, and some great Nolan films, take several goes to fully enjoy, and some are more enjoyable with every watch. Do I give a single fig about the outcome of the film or for any character after 20 minutes? Nope.

One major issue is that Nolan has made Inception, a masterpiece of film-making meta-commentary. How, once you’ve watched Cobb and Ariadne discuss the leaping-about way of conversations in films/dreams (stopping and starting in completely new locations) can you take the same thing seriously between Neil (Neil. Neil.) and The Protagonist? (I would like to see how many women read this screenplay along the way and just gave a small, inner sigh at the main character being named 'The Protagonist’.) As their boring expositional chats chop between pavement and public transport and plaza, one can’t help remembering how well Nolan previously pointed this out, yet has reverted to that self-conscious device to no benefit at all. It’s like he’s never seen his own films.

Similarly, the much-lauded aeroplane scene is completely without the necessary ingredient of tension because we’ve already been shown what happens, not just in other films but in this one, about fifteen minutes before. It’s like Bill & Ted promising they’d do whatever it was they needed right now, but in the future, and their momentary problem being solved by a loose sense of timey-wimey future self-ness. There’s nothing at stake at the airport, and between us being shown what happens and the scene beginning, nothing has happened for us to even hope the mission isn’t completed. It felt like the criminally underused Himesh Patel was in an instructional video for fuss-free plane-borrowing; compare it to the similar scene in Casino Royale (perhaps the only modern Bond film worth bothering with) and the flatness and mechanical nature of Tenet is all too apparent. The twists of the film, such as they are, are likewise foreseeable for even the least Pauline Kael among us. Who could it be under the mask? WHO COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?

The Prestige, an earlier film of Nolan’s, is such a contrast to this that I’m stunned I didn’t watch it the moment I came home to clear my brain out. It’s smart, logical, moving, tense, engaging, and if there are plot holes (probably) I didn’t care because a) I really, really cared about what happened to each person, each of whom spoke and behaved like humans, not AI script-bots, and b) it gave this household a v useful shorthand nickname for anyone who wanted something one day but completely inexplicably changed their mind or denied it the next. I recommend it. I do not recommend Tenet.

Of course, I feel guilty for caring so much about this, and writing about some fucking multi-squillion-dollar film with everything else happening. I am feeling extremely, crushingly ineffectual presently, and have completely come off all social media which from time to time would remind me of the efficacy of protest, of letter-writing and petition-signing and contacting one’s MP, so change feels hopeless and November’s blows seem inevitable. I am trying to knit my mind back together before then with small acts of body-work: cooking and running, drawing and swimming. I worry that I will drown in guilt and fear if I stop for a moment. It is pathetic, but I am still breathing, for now.

My cynicism-filter is also at its finest mesh, because it cannot cope with the reality of our leaders and the UK’s political discourse: only small-fry stuff gets through, the Sali Hugheses and Jack Monroes, small-time fantasists who manipulate and virtue-signal to build lives of back-slapping consumerist celebration and Twitter Power Leader Boards. I’ve listened again to The Purity Spiral, and also to Desperately Seeking Sympathy, and wondered how many intelligent, kind-hearted people waste time supporting these innocent, victimised mini-Trumps just because they use the right buzzwords and also appear to hate the Tories.

I wish I could give you some of the lights in my heart that keep me going — the occasional pure moon-eating delight of the people I live with — but here are more feasible treats instead.

Mike Birbiglia’s podcast Working It Out is a treasure, particularly the first episode with Ira Glass, which I think everyone who works in a creative field will listen to and wish they had an Ira Glass to critique their work. I like the idea of documenting works in progress, and not carrying any shame when things don’t work yet.

The Rose Matafeo episode of The Horne Section podcast, because I love her and I love stupid and brilliant songs. Several housemates have discovered Taskmaster too, which makes this a nice bridge.

Sarah & Duck, the BBC programme for tiny children. We never really used kids’ TV when they were little, but this now functions as a salve for when we’ve watched something truly terrifying like Poirot or a Marvel film, and besides the fact that Duck is absolutely fucking hilarious, the animation is staggeringly beautiful. The Islamic geometric patterns of the garden hedge; the soft blue-green hum of the “glow” section of the library, filled with lamps and luminescent books; the motes of dust caught in the sun-rays of Scarf Lady’s window. It’s a balm.

Thanks to two housemates becoming great cooks over lockdown, I’ve rediscovered lots of my cookbooks and found 2015’s Simply Nigella to be a real corker. The rice with sprouts, chilli and pineapple, the drunken noodles and the Thai noodles with cinnamon and prawn are worth the entry fee alone. It’s quite chicken- and pomegranate seed-heavy, but even if you don’t like those, it’s extremely nice to be eating something that isn’t on our usual five-meal rota (and is also extremely delicious).

I was solo for some of the summer, and managed to watch a few excellent films, including BlacKkKlansman, The Peanut Butter Falcon and Love & Friendship. Cannot recommend these highly enough (*whispers* particularly the latter because it’s as painfully sharp as Austen should be, and we’d made the mistake of watching Emma. and I’m still so cross I’m not sure I’m ready to discuss everything that was wrong with it publicly yet).

I read Esther Williams’ memoir, The Million Dollar Mermaid. Perfect for anyone who loves that period of Hollywood, and full of juicy (as well as some pretty traumatic) episodes from the swimmer and actress’s amazing life. To give you a sense of it, chapter one is called “Esther Williams, Cary Grant, and LSD”. Super good.

I hope you all keep well, pals x

#film #influencers #podcasts #TV #food #books #recommendations

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nightmareonfilmstreet · 6 years

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[Fantasia Review] PARALLEL Exposes the Dangers of Exploring Alternate Dimensions

Do you ever wonder what your life would be like if you made different decisions? Do you think there’s another reality where your decisions led you to success, or to your ultimate demise? Will you even the same person in that parallel universe? All ideas worth exploring in the new science-fiction thriller Parallel.

Parallel follows four housemates trying to develop a smartphone app that allows users to buy and trade parking spaces. They’ve successfully pitched the concept to investors, but when they’re given four days to come up with a beta model, they’re hopes are crushed. Developing a working app within such a short time-frame is practically impossible. The four friends – Josh, Noel, Devan and Leena—declare their project dead and instead go out drinking to mourn all the months they wasted coding. They return home, drunk and discouraged. An argument escalates and objects are thrown in anger. A resulting hole in the wall reveals a secret staircase leading to a mysterious room. Inside this room, the friends discover a portal inside of an old mirror.

“For a while everything is going great, but it’s only a matter of time before things goes horribly wrong.”

On the other side of the mirror, there’s a parallel universe where the housemates never found the secret room. Fifteen minutes inside the mirror is only five seconds in the home dimension. The friends realize they can use the time discrepancy to finish the beta for their app. In two days, they’re able to complete a month’s worth of work. The investors are impressed with their progress and pay handsomely for the completed product.

The possibilities with the portal are endless. The friends become rich by stealing the wallets from their alt-dimension selves. Since the time resets every time they enter the mirror, the money is always there for the taking. When exploring the parallel dimension, Josh comes across a DVD copy of Frankenstein starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Nothing of the sort exists in their home dimension. The discovery shows that each dimension has a slight variation, especially in the creative field. The friends use this new information for their own personal benefit. Leena advances her art career by plagiarizing paintings that don’t exist in her dimension. Noel becomes a billionaire by stealing tech ideas. Josh collects information on women to manipulate them into sleeping with him. Devan, for a change, just wants to find a dimension where his father didn’t commit suicide.

For a while everything is going great, but it’s only a matter of time before things goes horribly wrong. The first half of Parallel can be considered a comedy, as the friends explore different ways to exploit the mirror to their advantage. There are a few great laugh-out-loud moments, courtesy of Mark O’Brien as Josh. Aml Ameen as Devan provides balance with some more emotionally sensitive scenes. But once blood is drawn, the tone becomes darker and the consequences of warping reality become apparent. It goes to show that such power should not be trusted in the hands of mortals.

Parallel scratches the surface of theories of time and space without getting too complicated. Think Primer with a bigger budget and less dense dialogue. If you’ve been bitten by the Rick and Morty bug, then you’re probably fascinated with the concept of the multiverse, and Parallel will gladly indulge you without boring you with complex equations. The film also makes a brief reference to the “Mandela Effect”, when Josh claims he remembers a childhood book having a different title, a clever nod to the Berenstain/Berenstein Bears debate. I’m sure there must be a few holes in Parallel’s science, but to the average viewer with an average education, it all appears logical. As logical as time-travel can be.

“[…] in some other dimension, there might be an entirely different movie going around.”

Director Isaac Ezban adds his spice by playing around with different camera angles and lighting. The time lapse sequences are superbly executed and the film does a lot with its limited special effects, especially with the futuristic tech Noel brings back from other realities. With a film like this, there’s a lot of room for different outcomes, and in some other dimension, there might be an entirely different movie going around. I personally would have liked to see what would happen if one of the characters accidentally bumped into their double in another dimension. But at least in this reality, the existing version of Parallel is thoroughly enjoyable.

3/4 eberts

Parallel celebrated its North American premiere on July 22nd at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Check out more of Nightmare on Film Street’s Fantasia Fest Coverage here, and be sure to sound off with your thoughts over on Twitter and in our Facebook Group!

The post [Fantasia Review] PARALLEL Exposes the Dangers of Exploring Alternate Dimensions appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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fitzandthebigread · 7 years

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Chapter 86: A Sequence of Accidents

Justice. You cannot be an American citizen these days and not run into this concept at least twice before noon. It’s become a part of the national dialogue, no matter what side of the aisle you happen to align with. Justice for victims of police brutality. Justice for police officers just trying to do their jobs. Justice for women sexually assaulted and abused for decades by powerful men. Justice for the wrongfully-accused, the victims of the “witch hunt” that has spread from social media to Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Justice for millions of American voters potentially misled by foreign powers in the last election. Justice for the Trump administration, trying to “make America great again” in the midst of endless partisan squabbles. Social justice. Economic justice. Political justice. One thing we can all agree on: our society as it stands right now is not a just one. America is a nation trying desperately to put things right in the face of overwhelming inequality. The problem is, we’re not sure which way is right, which solution is the most just.

Justice also permeates every aspect of Rohinton Mistry’s exquisite novel, A Fine Balance. Set primarily during the Indian Emergency in 1984, A Fine Balance examines the lives of four unlikely housemates from various religious and economic backgrounds, and explores the extent to which their destinies are their own. Mistry’s prose is so matter-of-fact that it’s easy to miss the enormity of the injustices the characters face until it’s a wave that threatens to overwhelm. It took me a long time to read this work - partly because of how busy I suddenly became this fall - but I’m glad that it did. As Mistry’s book unfolded, so did the #MeToo Campaign, and the investigation into Russian interference in the election, and the (sometimes forced) resignations of many politically and culturally powerful men due to accusations of sexual misconduct. It made me more acutely aware when reading of the ways in which justice functions, not only in Mistry’s novel, but in our society. The final message is ambiguous, but bleak. In Mistry’s novel, the rich get richer and the poor get (spoiler alert) double amputation of their legs due to blood poisoning because of forced vasectomies, or castrated by their fathers’ vengeful enemies, or kicked out of their homes after their husbands die, or the urge to jump in front of oncoming trains. (Flippant side note: the BBC seems to really like novels in which characters get squished by trains.) However, sometimes the rich in Mistry’s novel get (more spoilers) stabbed by frail old men, and rarely do they have very much to say. By focusing his novel on the have-nots, Mistry suggests that it is they who are the heart and soul of the country, and their love for each other that will transcend all injustice. The poor might get poorer, but they also keep going, even in the face of insurmountable odds.

One character, an adaptable man who manages to avoid the jaws of defeat through diversification of his skills, remarks toward the end of the novel that life is merely “a series of accidents,” a “string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life” (554). While his words are positioned so as to be almost the thesis statement of the work, they seem to me to be contradictory. We have no control over accidents; accidents happen to us. Choices, however, whether casual or deliberate, are entirely within our power to control. But when I think of the plot points in the book, and trace each character’s fortune back, I can find no choice at the beginning, no tragic flaw, nothing they could have done or said differently that would have changed the outcome.

The plot point that hit me the hardest because it was the most brutally unjust was the castration of Omprakash and his uncle Ishvar’s subsequent double-amputation. Om and Ishvar are tailors, men of the lowest caste who travel to the city from their village in search of work and a better life. There is a darker side to their move as well; Om’s father made enemies with a powerful political figure in their village, which resulted in the father being brutally murdered at a voting station, and the rest of Om’s family being burned alive inside their home by this same politician. Om and Ishvar suffer many things in the city; they’re forced to move into a shack they can’t quite afford in a slum, then the slum is bulldozed to the ground and the inhabitants sent to a work camp. They’re rescued from the work camp, but can’t find a place to live, so they sleep on the street where beggars are murdered nightly. Eventually, they move in (illegally) with their employer, Dina, whose landlord then harasses her and sends men to trash her house and beat her and her housemates. Luckily, they’ve made friends with a Beggarmaster, who protects them through undisclosed but probably shady means, and they decide it’s time for Om to get married. When they return to their village, Om attracts the attention of the old politician, who immediately recognizes him. Om and Ishvar are rounded up for forced sterilizations (which happens a lot in this book and seems repulsive, especially for Om who was on the brink of marriage and, presumably, fatherhood), and when the politician notices Om recovering, he orders the doctors to castrate him under the guise of removing a tumor. So they do, and Ishvar loses his legs a few weeks later because his vasectomy was performed hastily with half-clean instruments. At the end of the novel, the tailors are begging on the street, the poorest of the poor, worse off than when they first arrived, jobless and homeless, in the city.

It’s human nature, I think, to try to order the universe. To try to trace events back to their source, to identify the wellspring moment from which all subsequent moments flow. “If Om hadn’t caught the politician’s attention,” I thought as I read, “he wouldn’t have been castrated.” And then I realized how easily I had slipped into victim-blaming, so I tried to change tracks. “If the politician weren’t corrupt, Om’s father wouldn’t have been murdered.” Which quickly turned into, “If there weren’t money, we’d all be a lot happier,” which is a thought I have had before, but seems a little radical. The fact is that the wellspring isn’t a moment, it’s a system of oppression. In the India of Mistry’s novel, it’s the caste system that ensures that there’s little opportunity for people to rise up. In America, we pay a lot of lip service to the American Dream, but our country is crippled by systemic racism that acts in a similar way to India’s caste system. It’s not as overt, but it is every bit as insidious. And therefore (here’s the ambiguous bleak conclusion of Mistry’s novel) it doesn’t matter how much we strive for justice. Unless the system in which injustice is allowed to thrive changes, there can be no justice. It simply won’t exist, because the choices we make to move toward a more equitable future will just be met by that sequence of accidents that stretches back long before we were born.

As Arundhati Roy would say, “History walking the dog.”

PAGE COUNT: 35,082

BOOK COUNT: 86/100

#365 project #essays #Rohinton Mistry #A Fine Balance #India #justice #me too campaign #America #politics

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