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roonil-wazlib-at-221b · 4 years

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Inferno: Part 3

Pairing: Peter Parker x Reader

God I love Peter Parker so much. Anyways, he’s a dork even when he’s Spiderman. This is so fluffy I’m gonna get cavities. I have so many great ideas for next chapter! Also, I lied; there’s gonna be at least 5 parts.

You’re thankful for your fans. You really are. A good majority of them are sweet, caring individuals completely appalled at the blatant lies the American government sent out as a reason for your arrest. It’s nice to see people promoting positivity.

Unfortunately, being rich and having fans can sometimes lead people to hate you for no other reasons. You’re not saying there are rich people that don’t deserve to be loathed. Of course not. And maybe you do deserve to be hated. You’ve certainly done enough questionable stuff.

But at this point scrolling through your notifications feels like playing Russian Roulette with every chamber loaded.

cap2n/merica: Hey @Y/N_Stark, just do us all a favor and turn yourself into the authorities before you start melting people again.

bigbossbitch: @Y/N_Stark is another case of gross celebrity misconduct. Yes, her jail time was wrong, but now that she’s been released she’s just another spoiled celeb kid born with a silver spoon in her mouth. She gets away with murder just like her father does because of their wealth and it’s a sign of the American government’s (1/2)

You don’t feel like finding the second part of that tweet.

givemebackmymeat: @Y/N_Stark is an ice bitch

Stacey-Toland: yeah it’s great and all that New York gets Spiderman and @Y/N_Stark , but if they really cared about people they would branch out and help people in cities with a lot more crime. New York doesn’t need the Avengers, Spiderman, AND Inferno!

just-a-dumbass: y’all Inferno is the dumbest superhero name i’ve heard in a long time @Y/N_Stark

With a sigh, you turn your phone off. The public outcry will quiet down after the official statements are released. Everyone needs some time to cool off.

The pesky bandages on your hip crinkle as you sit up. You rip them off without looking. Tony insisted that you wear them last night after Helen Cho fished the bullet out of your hip. There’s no pain this morning, and you don’t even need to check to know there’s no scar.

The temptation is too great. Maybe you’re a masochist. You grab the phone before sitting down on the toilet, determined to find at least one positive comment about you in your feed. You try Instagram instead of Twitter this time. Since your public appearance last night, comments on your last post about a year ago have been flooding in.

spideyismydaddy: hey @The-Official-Spiderman what do you think about @Y/N_Stark? She invading your territory or what?

You click on @The-Official-Spiderman. It’s got to be a spoof or fan account, right? Sure enough, the account isn’t verified. You almost swipe out of it but your eyes catch on some of the photos he’s got uploaded. Either he’s super good at photoshop, or...

Is this really Spiderman’s account?

The photos look exactly like the crime-fighting spider you’d encountered last night. He doesn’t have a recent story that you can watch, but he does have a highlight story that you click on. In the first one, he does a backflip. The second clip is of him racing a train and winning. The third one is a pretty picture of the sunset.

You rest your hand on your cheek. Before you know it, you’ve watched his entire highlight story and wasted fifteen minutes sitting on the toilet.

“Miss Stark, your father wanted me to inform you that breakfast is ready,” FRIDAY says, making you jump a little bit. At first it had been a struggle to stop talking to her. The amount of times you’d say, “FRIDAY, turn off the lights,” or “FRIDAY, what time is it?” is a little bit embarrassing. No doubt how many times she’ll startle you will be embarrassing too.

“Sure,” you grunt, throwing a MIT sweatshirt on and shoving your phone in its pocket. “Coming.”

“Morning, sweetie,” Tony says cheerfully, attempting a smile when he looks at you. “I made your favorite—waffles.”

“Great.” You try a smile yourself. “I haven’t—that’s—thanks, Dad.” You’d been about to comment that you haven’t had waffles for over a year, but that would probably bring down both your spirits.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” You take a big bite of waffle and look as innocently as you can at your father. “Just peachy.”

Tony gestures to his own hip. “No... pain? Bleeding? Scar?”

You shake your head and shrug. “Healed overnight.”

“Good.” Your dad actually fiddles with his fingers as you take another bite. “I, um... I don’t know what you want to do.”

I want to spend time with you is the first thing that crosses your mind but it sounds way too sappy and weak. You settle on a shrug. The familiar fire under your skin wavers and you scowl to bring it back to a simmer.

The next time they try to take you away, you’ll be prepared. Even if you have to take out thousands of agents. But you can’t let go of your anger for even a second.

“I have an idea,” you say after another awkward silence, struck with a great idea that would involve time with your dad but doesn’t involve actually asking for it outright. “I couldn’t keep up with all the new shows and movies that came out. Maybe we could get Disney+ and, I don’t know, watch The Mandalorian? I saw a lot of Baby Yoda memes online and it looks like a cool show.”

“That’s the new Star Wars show that came out, right?” Tony checks. “With the ugly green baby?”

“Hey! He’s not ugly!”

“Well,” he starts. You already know he’s about to suggest a bad idea. “Star Wars is probably Parker’s expertise. Considering both of us won’t know what’s going on, maybe we should call him and have him here? Just to translate the nerd stuff to the non-nerds?”

The hand holding your waffle clenches. You should have known that Tony would try to involve his precious Peter Parker so he wouldn’t have to spend time alone with you.

The waffle starts to smoke and you drop it with disgust. “I’m going to the training room.”

“Come on, Y/N—” Tony starts but you stomp off. Why won’t you understand that he just wants you to make a friend? He’s not trying to replace you with Peter—he’s trying to get you to replace Tony, at least a little bit, with Peter.

Tony eyes the waffle you hadn’t finished. A clear outline of fingers is burnt onto its surface.

You stalk through the compound angrily, halfway expecting a team member to jump out at you. You were the last one to be released, after all. Then again, they’re all under house arrest or on the run. But what about the ones that had sided with Tony? “Where are they?” You’d love to run drills with Nat or talk with Rhodey.

“Tony cleared his schedule for the next week,” FRIDAY informs you. “He wanted this to be a more relaxed homecoming so you wouldn’t be overwhelmed before more enthusiastic well-wishers arrived.”

“He cleared out his schedule for everyone except Peter fuckin’ Parker,” you mutter. Jesus, how important is this kid to Tony? First he never stops talking about him to you, takes him to pick you up from jail, and now he’s banned everyone but him from the compound?

For lack of sparring partners, you decide that lifting weights and running on the treadmill wouldn’t be too bad. Thankfully your muscles didn’t atrophy too much while you were locked up, though you rarely mustered the energy for exercises. You left the heat simmering under your skin at all hours. Judging by how many times you woke up to singed blankets, you started doing it in your sleep too.

No doubt due to the Extremis, you can lift every weight in the weight room—together. It’s too easy, so you move to the treadmill.

Your feet pound on the track. With every step, another thought bombards your mind: Peter Parker smiling, how you spent three months in the cage before they consented to giving you a plant, the cell smaller than your whole bed, you never even saw the sun for months, Tony coming to brag about Peter fucking Parker—

Only when your foot hits the ground do you realize that you’re running hot. “Shit,” you mutter, reaching for the ‘off’ button. Your whole body is glowing bright red and instead of turning off, the keypad melts at your touch just like how your shoes had melted off and how the track is hardly more than a melted pile of goo around your red-hot feet. The poor treadmill gurgles unhappily and its gears stop churning.

“Miss Stark, you are not wearing your fireproof clothes,” FRIDAY points out.

“Yeah, I got that, FRI,” you respond through gritted teeth, closing your eyes and taking a deep breath. You need to calm down before your clothes burst into flame.

The red hue to your skin fades slightly.

You need to get your excess anger out. And you know exactly how to do that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some guy swings a metal bar into your face. Something definitely cracks but heals within seconds, so quickly you almost don’t register the pain. It doesn’t slow you down, anyway, and you grab the man’s arm before he can whack you again with the bar. You slam his head against the side of a brick building and he slumps to the ground. If he doesn’t wake up in thirty seconds, you’ve either given him brain damage or flat-out killed him. You can’t find it in yourself to care.

Before you can turn around, your back burns. Not the comforting burn of your anger, but a stinging burn that takes your breath away.

You turn around slowly. The man’s partner backs away, his hands in the air as a scared expression takes over his face.

You reach behind you. Your hand hits something hard that makes the pain in your back worse. It’s the handle of a knife, you presume. With a wince, you pull it out of your back. The blade is dark with blood that you already feel dripping down your back. The wound will knit together, scab, scar, and fade. A body’s week- or month-long process of healing occurring in seconds.

You’re not thinking when you brandish the weapon, but thankfully a weird thwip sound interrupts you. The man’s raised hands find themselves stuck against a wall by a white, sticky substance.

“Shit!” a vaguely familiar voice hisses after a second thwip. “Oh Jesus! You killed him!”

You turn around. The man you’d knocked against the wall still hasn’t moved, but there’s a dark puddle spreading around his head. Spider-man takes a quick look at him, shakes his head, and looks at you.

“And you got stabbed!” Sounding sort of like a smothering grandmother, he spins you around and lifts up your shirt. “Oh, shit, that’s a lot of blood...”

“The wound’s probably closed by now,” you mutter. The ground sort of leans away from your feet and strong arms wrap around your waist as something swipes at your back.

“I don’t see an opening.” He gingerly takes the knife from your hand places it on the ground. Then you find that the ground is underneath your butt. Spider-man’s mask swims in your vision.

“I killed him?” you ask blearily. Shit. You can’t afford to be murdering people not two days after being released from prison. They’ll send you back. They’ll lock you in that cage! Is Spider-man here with them? You smack his hands away. He’s here to get you, he’s here to take you—

“Whoa, whoa, let’s calm down a little bit,” Spidey says beseechingly. “You don’t have any wounds, but you lost a lot of blood.”

“It’ll replenish soon,” you mutter. After some sugar. Sustenance. That would help. As if he’d heard your thoughts, Spidey waves something in front of you. It takes a hot second for your eyes to focus on it, but when you realize it’s a churro your mouth waters.

“I did not mean for this to go this way,” he mutters. Almost shyly, he thrusts it at you, saying, “Here. I got it for you.”

You’re not one to refuse free food. If he’s poisoned it, chances are the poison won’t affect you much, anyway. You’ll take your chances.

You wolf the churro down in record time. Now that you’re feeling less woozy, knots are starting to form in your stomach. Spider-man, a superhero largely known for helping people out, just witnessed you accidentally murdering someone.

And you just murdered someone. You need to take that knife and burn it in an alley far from here and toss it in the trash.

Heat rises in your cheeks, but it’s not anger-heat that can be used as a weapon or self-defense. Letting Spider-man see you like that is embarrassing.

“Are you feeling better? I can get you another churro, if you’d like, or maybe a burrito, I think I have enough cash for that...” Spider-man reaches into his back pocket, but maybe his tone is too light, maybe he’s not being nice and he’s trying to lull you into a false sense of safety.

Quick as a whip, you take the knife and hold it in Spider-man’s direction. The superhero falls back, his voice cracking as he exclaims, “Hey! Whoa! Please don’t stick me with that! Do you have any idea the potential ramifications of mixing blood? Not that I think you have STDs or something, but still, I could still get alien bacteria in me! The Extremis is still in your system, right? Well, of course it is! I really don’t need that in me because it might make me blow up! Please—”

You blink. He sounds like a kid. Like someone your age. He’s in no way your father’s age. And he’s definitely not a threat. “Relax.” You close your fist around the knife and channel your anger into that extremity. It melts within seconds and drips to the ground. You shake your hand of the last bit of molten metal and allow the flesh to return to regular temperature. “You’re not going to hurt me for killing him?” Your heart still races in his presence, but it’s starting to calm down.

“I saw everything.” Spider-man stands up awkwardly, especially for someone that can do backflips and crawl up walls, and points up to the top of a nearby skyscraper. “They attacked you. It was self-defense. Besides, these two killed a bystander in a shootout recently. I’m not saying they deserved it, because that would be really mean to say, but I’m also not saying that you’re a terrible person. You know?”

“You certainly talk a lot,” you comment. It’s amusing.

“Do you want me to stop talking?” Spider-man rubs his neck. “I know it can be annoying. My friends—”

You shrug. “Why were you watching?”

“Well, last night you got shot, right? And I see you out again fighting crime. So I’m like, ‘Holy crap, is she in pain, she’s probably not all right, maybe she’s getting mugged because she slept on the streets because I didn’t help her when she got shot in the hip and then you slammed that dude against the wall and I saw the other dude stab you and—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the point.” You stuff your hands in your pockets. “It was my fault, anyway. If I was wearing my suit the knife wouldn’t have gotten so deep in. It probably wouldn’t have gotten in at all.”

“Why are you just wearing a MIT sweatshirt and sweatpants, by the way?”

You shrug. “Couldn’t be bothered to change.”

“Well, I think you’re going to have to now. There’s a big hole in your sweatshirt and your whole back is bloody.”

“Shit,” you mutter. “But that’ll lead people back to... him.” You shoot a glance at the dead man. “And he’s going to snitch on me.” You shoot a nervous glance at Spider-man. You have no idea how he’ll react to you considering a tied-up would-be mugger.

Spider-man shakes his head. “People will see my webs. They’ll blame me.”

“So we’ll both be blamed,” you say grimly. “Great.”

“Yeah, The Daily Bugle is going to have a field day. But we should get out of here.” Spider-man puts a hand on the small of your back (right where you’d been stabbed) and gently applies just enough pressure to get you moving. Shocked at the gentlemanly gesture, you take a few steps before remembering your bloodstained clothes. “I’ll get you new ones,” Spider-man says grimly when you voice your concern. “But then I won’t be able to get you a burrito.”

The sweet concern is touching. “It’s really okay,” you say. If you had your credit card, or any cash on you, you’d buy the poor boy as many burritos as he wanted. “You gave me your churro. You’ve done more than enough.”

“Well, I wanted to make a good impression!” His voice cracks again.

“Really?” you shoot him a glance out of the corner of your eye. “Why?”

“I don’t know a lot of other teenaged superheroes,” he shrugs. “I thought we could be friends.”

See, Dad? You think viciously. I can make friends without your interference. I’ve found a friend loads better than Peter Parker. “Get me a change of clothes and we’ll talk.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“A radioactive spider, huh?”

“Yeah. And I know all about the Extremis. Killian.”

“Yeah. He murdered my mother and then tried to blow me up but my body didn’t reject the serum.”

“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Your mother’s death is like a bruise; tender when you poke at it but livable with. “What about your parents?”

“Oh, they’re both dead.” Spider-man gives you a half-shrug. “I live with my aunt. My uncle used to live with us until he died.”

“Shit, dude.” You lay down on the skyscraper, hesitant, and fold your hands together over your stomach clad in the I <3 NEW YORK sweatshirt Spider-man bought you. Goosebumps rise on your exposed legs, courtesy of the NEW YORK sleep shorts he’d barely had enough money to buy at that sleazy mart. What would you want someone to say to you?

“Like you said. I’ve dealt.” Spider-man lies down next to you, watching the sun set.

“I guess we kinda have to be friends, right?” You say after a brief pause of silence. “We got all the heavy stuff out of the way.”

“Sweet!” His phone buzzes. He pulls it out and types a quick text to someone. You presume his aunt, considering that’s the only family he has. Or one of his friends.

You can hear the smile in his voice and it makes a smile spread across your face too. For the first time you feel the wind whipping and realize you’re not angry. You call the heat back immediately, both to warm yourself and to protect yourself. What if—?

“Can I do a livestream?” Spider-man props himself up on his elbow and holds up his phone, which displays his Instagram page.

“Sure?”

Spider-man rolls up his suit to just under his nose and starts recording a video. You notice he lowers his voice slightly, probably to make himself seem more mature, and roll your eyes. “Hey guys! You’ll never believe who I’m with right now.”

Immediately comments start to roll in and people start sending emojis, mainly hearts.

You wave at the camera before unlocking your phone and following him on Instagram, now that you know it is actually him. A minute ago you’d gotten the notification he’d followed you, so you figured it was only fair.

Spider-man starts to do a run-down of his day, leaving out the man you’d killed. “Then I gave Inferno here a churro and we went shopping because we’re besties.” He nudges you with his arm. “No, but seriously, we had to burn her clothes. I can’t believe that dude threw her in the dumpster. It was disgusting.”

You wrinkle your nose at the camera, actually enjoying playing along. It does make you wonder exactly how much he says on his social media is a cover-up of some sinister stuff. He seems perfectly fine at lying about why you needed new clothes.

“Okay, now I’ll answer some questions...” Spider-man browses the flood of questions. “Okay, well, you guys know I can’t just tell you my name. No, I haven’t seen Iron Man recently. No, I’m not an Avenger. Still. And no, I do not have a girlfriend... Why is everyone asking if Inferno is—no, she’s not!” His voice cracks again and you glance curiously at him, tucking your wild hair behind your ear. The wind is whipping it everywhere.

“What?”

Spider-man just waves a hand at you. “I can’t tell you guys my schedule, either, because the bad guys will take advantage of it. You guys know that. Sheesh. Okay, well, since you guys are being jealous and immature, I’m going to log off now. Bye!”

“Let me guess,” you say sarcastically. “Mostly female fans, huh?”

“It’ll be such a shock when they all find out I’m gay,” Spider-man jokes. At least, you think he’s kidding. After a beat, he clarifies. “I’m not. By the way.”

You shrug and transfer your gaze back to the skyline. The sky is starting to turn orange and pink. “I wouldn’t really care if you were.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Hey, you know what isn’t fair?”

“What?”

“You obviously know who I am. Everyone does.” Not to sound conceited or anything, Y/N, good going... “But the only thing I know about you is that your parents and uncle are dead and you got your powers from a radioactive spider.”

So what, you’re curious about who’s under the mask. Sue you.

“My middle name is Benjamin,” Spidey suggests. “But I’m not going to tell you the rest of it.”

“So I should refer to you as Benjamin?” You don’t take your eyes off the horizon, not wanting to seem or sound pushy.

“Please don’t.” You giggle as he pretends to gag. “You can call me Spidey. I know Spider-man is a long title. As long as I get to call you Y/N instead of Inferno.”

“Sure thing... Benjamin.”

“I should not have told you that,” Spidey sighs. “Um, what else... I, uh, go to high school.”

You nod. “I should still be in high school.”

“You graduated high school when you were fifteen and went to MIT, same as your dad, for two years, same as your dad, and graduated college summa cum laude...”

“Also same as my dad.” You sigh.

“Sorry. I’m just... kind of a fan.”

A weird warm feeling spreads in your stomach, but it’s not Extremis-heat. “That’s okay.”

“And then you were arrested.” Spidey’s tone turns a little bit dark. “You turned eighteen in the Raft.”

“Happy birthday to me,” you sigh.

“It was shitty what happened to you.”

“I’m out now.”

“Still,” he persists. “It sucks I can’t make it better.”

You laugh. “What would you do? We only became friends maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

Spidey sighs. “I know. It just sucks, right? All these powers and we still can barely make a difference in the world.”

You sit up halfway, propped up by your arm. Desperate to make the subject lighter, you say, “Speaking of powers. I know you’re sticky and all. What else?”

“Fast and strong.” Spidey shrugs. “Not much else.”

“Wanna race?”

Inferno Taglist:

@paullrud @eridanuswave @loveissupernatural @moistpotatobear @oh-annaa

Peter Parker x Reader Taglist:

@iconicbabesss

Forever Taglist:

@lemirabitur @annymcervantes @queenmissfit @quiet-because-it-is-a-secret @iksey @thehyperactiveteen @luxmoonlight

#peter parker #Peter Benjamin Parker #peter parker fic #peter parker fanfic #peter parker fanfiction #reader insert #peter parker x reader #peter parker x you #reader x peter parker #you x peter parker #tony stark #stark!reader

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chiseler · 4 years

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Sinner’s Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code

Once upon a time, Hollywood movies showed us Spencer Tracy skinny-dipping with Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck ducking into the ladies’ room with her boss in exchange for a promotion, and chorus girls warbling hosannas to marijuana.1 This, of course, was pre-Code: shorthand for the era of Hollywood movie-making between the advent of sound in 1929 and the ascendance of Hays Office censorship in 1934. The term is in fact a misnomer. The Production Code was written and officially adopted in 1930, but for the next four years, like Prohibition, it was flouted with near impunity. A look at a representative film of the time provides ample evidence of the Code’s impotence. Take Night Nurse (Wellman, 1931), starring Barbara Stanwyck: a fast, tough, sleazy and thoroughly enjoyable tale of a nurse who uncovers a plot to murder the children in her care for their trust funds.

The Code proclaimed that Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot. Stanwyck and her roommate, played by Joan Blondell, often speak their lines while casually changing their clothes in front of the camera. An intern who walks in on Stanwyck in her scanties assures her, “You can’t show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room.” The Code said, The use of liquor in American life…shall not be shown. The mother of Stanwyck’s charges, who is never seen in any other state than blotto, boasts, “I’m a dipshomaniac—and I like it!” Stanwyck befriends an amiable bootlegger when she treats his bullet-wound and agrees not to report it, contrary to law. In gratitude, he sends her a bottle of rye. “But you’re not allowed to drink,” a square nurse objects. “No,” Blondell cracks, “But it’s swell for cleaning teeth.” Adultery and profanity are both proscribed by the Code. The dipsomaniac is plainly carrying on a tawdry affair with her chauffeur, Nick (Clark Gable), and at one point Stanwyck, disgusted to find her passed out while her children are on the brink of death, rebukes her with, “You mother.” The Code said, Methods of crimes should not be explicitly presented. When sent out to get milk for the sick children, the amiable bootlegger breaks into a grocery store. As for Revenge in modern times shall not be shown, the movie ends with the bootlegger arranging for Nick to be “taken for a ride.” Did I forget to mention that Apparent cruelty to children or animals, the central trope of the plot, is also forbidden by the Code? Or that Gable socks Stanwyck on the jaw, or that Stanwyck gets her job by flashing her ankles at a doctor?

Code? What Code?

The appeal of pre-Code movies lies not in sex, violence or vulgarity (there’s more than enough of those in the infinitely more explicit cinema of the last forty years) but in their attitude, which conveyed the pessimism and irreverence of their time. Radical cultural changes in the wake of World War I, the farce of Prohibition, the 1929 stock-market crash and the Great Depression combined to create a pervasive disillusionment and loss of respect for authority and traditional values. With rapid changes in fashion and technology, violent upheavals in economic and political conditions, society was wide open, hectically elated in the twenties, confused and frightened in the thirties. For a few years the lack of rigorous censorship allowed movies to channel the mood of the country and to capture society warts and all. They depicted adultery, divorce, rape, prostitution and homosexuality; bluntly portrayed alcoholism and drug addiction, glorified gangsters, con artists and fallen women. With a distinctive blend of cynicism and exuberance, they offered escapist entertainment but also bitter and sometimes radical visions of a society on the verge of breakdown. Oscar Levant famously quipped that he he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin; Hollywood too was grown up before it was innocent.

The Con Man as Comic Hero: Blonde Crazy

During the silent era, censorship of films was piecemeal. Not only states but individual towns had boards of censors who screened movies and ordered cuts of shots or scenes they considered too racy. Projectionists simply snipped out the offending material, a practice that accounts in part for the incompleteness many surviving films from the twenties.2 In the early twenties, Hollywood was hit with a string of off-screen scandals, culminating in the trial of comedian Roscoe Arbuckle on charges of rape and manslaughter. The movie moguls, terrified that bad press would scare away audiences, invited Will Hays to become the guardian and public face of Hollywood’s morals. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former postmaster general, became director of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. He was an ideal choice to project a more wholesome image of Hollywood, but as a censor he proved ineffectual, and movies continued to be attacked for their evil influence on the country’s moral fiber.

Silent movies contained many elements that would not be seen during the Code era, including nudity, drug use and comic vulgarity. But the absence of sound gave film a degree of unreality that lent itself to fantasies like Valentino as an Arab sheik and Douglas Fairbanks riding a flying carpet, as well as to timeless moral fables like Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans, whose characters are called simply The Man and His Wife. From Mary Pickford as a spunky urchin to Harold Lloyd as a college freshman, actors frequently played much younger and more naive than they were in real life. Even the flapper films of Clara Bow and Joan Crawford, which purported to expose the shocking mores of modern youth, presented their heroines as pure though misunderstood. With the change to talkies, the silent era’s swashbuckling heroes, Great Lovers, ringleted sweethearts and carefree flappers suddenly seemed antiquated. Sound punctured fantasy and brought movies down to earth and up to date: never again would they soar to the heights of romance they had reached in silence.

The coming of sound involved a complete reinvention of movies, amounting to the development of a new medium. The fluid spectacles of the silent screen gave way to small-scale films confined by the technical limitations of early sound recording technology to interiors and studio sets. The bulk of films from 1929 and ’30 are clunky and static, with stilted dialogue and acting. When talkies hit their stride in the early thirties it was with urban settings that could be recreated on studio backlots and zingy vernacular dialogue delivered at machine-gun pace by Brooklyn-bred voices. As the old screen gods faded, snappy young urbanites like James Cagney and Joan Blondell entranced audiences with their unaffected style and wised-up attitude.3 This new earthiness brought the censorship issue to a crisis; everyone agreed that movies were going “from bad to voice.” In 1930, still hoping to render external censorship unnecessary through self-regulation, the studio moguls officially adopted the Production Code, written largely by a Jesuit priest named Daniel Lord (hence it should, aptly, be known as the Lord’s Code rather than the Hays Code.) But this effort coincided with the onset of the Depression, when the movie studios were struggling like other businesses. Desperate to lure audiences back to theaters they defied the Code to create daringly risqué entertainment, treating the list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” as a list of “Do’s.”

The kick in pre-Code movies comes from the awareness shared by the actors and filmmakers that they are pushing the limits, getting away with something. Since today’s films must work so hard to raise an eyebrow, they can never recapture the harmless fizz of Maurice Chevalier taking Jeannette MacDonald’s measurements in Love Me Tonight, or Jean Harlow slipping a portrait of her boss into her garter in Red-Headed Woman, or Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise picking each other’s pockets over the course of a romantic meal. (“I trust I may keep your garter?”)

There was a Code, after all, and movies were never completely uncensored. Because they couldn’t get away with explicitness or profanity, pre-Code movies specialized in innuendo. A line that would register with sophisticated adults but fly over the heads of children or more naïve viewers was considered ideal; it would protect the innocent while enticing the experienced. In The Half-naked Truth, a scheming promoter played by Lee Tracy checks into a fancy hotel with a Mexican carnival dancer he is passing off as a Turkish princess. Also with them is rotund Eugene Pallette, wearing a turban. The hotel clerk looks at the register Tracy has filled out and does a double take at Pallette. “Oh, they have them in all Turkish harems,” Tracy says, adding confidentially, “He’s very sensitive about it.” The joke is carried through the movie without a word being spoken that could bring a blush to the most prudish cheek. Pre-Code wasn’t always this artful—there’s nothing subtle about Dick Powell singing “I’m Young and Healthy” in a tunnel of chorus girls’ legs, or Tarzan and Jane romping around the jungle in loin cloths—but in general the naughtiness was low-key, not flaunted but there to be discovered by the alert viewer.

Movies offered vacations from reality in sleek art deco style: gleaming penthouses with twinkling views of Manhattan, shimmering bias-cut evening gowns and shiny top hats, buoyant jazz scores and intoxicated gaiety. Beyond mere escapism, there’s a loopy, zany, surreal streak in pre-Code that flourishes in the early Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields films, in Busby Berkeley musicals with their kaleidoscopes of semi-nude chorines and in the cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers, where Cab Calloway lends his voice to a ghostly dancing walrus singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues.” There’s a dizzy feeling, as if the whole of society, like Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, had an empty stomach and it went to their heads.

Maybe it was the effect of hearing so often that prosperity was just around the corner while the country sank deeper and deeper into despair. Demented optimism was parodied—or endorsed; it’s hard to tell—in a bizarre cartoon short from Columbia Studios called Prosperity Blues. A world of wretched, baggy-eyed, trembling sufferers, of cobweb-infested banks and pitiful apple-peddlers, is transformed into a fascistic spectacle of crazed cheerfulness as the hero, to the tune of “Happy Days Are Here Again” slaps disembodied grins on people’s faces with the command “Smile, darn ya, smile!”

“The age of chivalry is over,” James Cagney declares in Blonde Crazy (Del Ruth, 1931). “This, honey, is the age of chiselry.” Tough yet ebullient, Cagney personifies the essential pre-Code flavor of hard-boiled high spirits, sarcastically knowing and gleefully amoral, but not sour or misanthropic. Like nightclub owner Texas Guinan who greeted her customers with a hearty, “Hello, suckers!” the con artist hero of Blonde Crazy seems high on his own cynicism. Or maybe punch-drunk: you need a score card to keep track of how many times Joan Blondell slaps him, and he keeps coming back for more.

The films of Hollywood’s classical period are tight, smooth, polished. The scripts, dialogue, acting, lighting and art direction all gleam with controlled craftsmanship. Blonde Crazy, by contrast, skates on the verge of chaos: the actors seem to be winging it, cutting loose, seeing how far they can go. Cagney revels in this freedom, indulging in outrageous vocal mannerisms, flaunting his virtuosic control of his body as he darts and weaves through the role like a boxer in the ring, going from crafty schemer to world-class chump, wise-cracking operator to heart-broken lover. The anarchic, free-wheeling atmosphere of pre-Code, mined with slapstick and doubles entendres, often leaves modern audiences incredulous. Did I really hear that? Did they really mean...?

Like Night Nurse, Blonde Crazy methodically defies the Code. Undressing scenes? Cagney walks in on Blondell in the tub and appreciatively examines her underwear, doing a little shimmy with her panties, playfully holding her bra over his eyes like a pair of goggles. Liquor in American life? In an early scene Cagney, a bell-hop in an anything-goes hotel, peddles bootleg booze to a traveling salesman (Guy Kibbee). Adultery? Cagney and Blondell’s first con involves setting up the same salesman: caught “parking” with Blondell and a bottle of hooch, he offers a hefty bribe to the “cop” who’s actually their accomplice. Methods of crimes? The depiction of the movie’s confidence tricks, including a daringly simple ploy by which Cagney lifts a diamond bracelet from a jewelry store, is so detailed the viewer could easily copy them. Revenge in modern times? The movie lovingly details the means by which Blondell succeeds in fleecing a fellow con man who previously fleeced Cagney.

One scene is set in an elegant hotel lobby where men discuss the races while women share their plans to blackmail men with love letters. Every single person here is on the make. “Everyone has larceny in his heart,” Bert (Cagney) explains to Ann (Blondell) when he asks her to join him in the rackets. She’s reluctant, but only because she’s afraid of getting caught and sent to jail. Still, as the movie’s only hint of a conscience, she objects to out-and-out thievery and feistily protects her virtue. Bert keeps making passes at her and she keeps slapping his face, without harming their affectionate partnership. But the pair’s toughness keeps them from admitting the depths of their feelings. “I’ve wanted you ever since I saw you,” he tells her earnestly, then shrugs dismissively, “But if I can’t have you I’ll have someone else.” Still, by the time Ann tells him she’s marrying another man, your heart bleeds for Bert, the chiseler with the wandering eye. The other man is Joe Reynolds (Ray Milland) who chivalrously takes a cinder out of her eye and sends her a book of Browning (the poet, not the automatic, as Philip Marlowe would say.) She tells Bert that she’s going to marry Reynolds because he and his family know “a better way to live.” They care for “music and art and that kind of thing.” Of course he turns out to be the biggest louse of all, stealing from his firm and exploiting Bert’s devotion to Ann to make him the patsy. Bert winds up in jail and shot full of holes, but at least Ann finally admits her love and promises to wait for him.

Joan Blondell was the best love interest Cagney ever had. More than able to stand up to him, she brings out an unexpectedly tender and sexy side of his cocky, wound-up persona. With her wide-eyed, appetizing looks, Blondell has a warm, open front but an inner reserve and caution. Like her fellow Brooklynite Barbara Stanwyck, she was born wised-up. Cagney too, for all his extroverted energy, has a core that is aloof, introverted, nervously intense. It is touching to see these two wary, skeptical souls embrace each other so openly. They have good reason to be wary; only suckers trust anyone in the world of Blonde Crazy. Con artists con fellow con artists, and “respectable” citizens lack basic decency. Near the end of the movie, another con man tries to interest Bert in a ploy that involves tricking the relatives of the recently deceased into paying for good luck charms that the dead supposedly ordered just before “kicking off.” Anyone stupid or trusting enough to be conned deserves to lose his money. Life is a continuous game of one-upmanship, a contest to see who can laugh last.

In Guys and Dolls, Sky Masterson explains that among his people, “to be marked as a chump is like losing your citizenship.” During the early thirties, audiences who felt like victims of an economic swindle reveled in the exploits of sharpies, shysters, smart guys who know all the angles and who outwit hypocritical representatives of wealth, authority, respectability. Cagney played more con men than gangsters: in Jimmy the Gent, as “the greatest chiseler since Michelangelo,” he asserts, “There’s only two kinds of guys in business, the ones that get caught and the ones that don’t get caught.” But for all his street smarts, Cagney has moments of child-like naivité. “The consummate urban provincial,” as Andrew Sarris called him, Cagney is irrepressible rather than unflappable. His driving energy, self-mocking humor, hot temper and sentimental streak expressed the pre-Code mood—fast-paced, excitable, hustling for a buck—as Bogart’s world-weary postwar cool expressed the mood of noir.

Later in the thirties, Frank Capra would glorify his own version of the sucker: in his films Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart embody the soul of America as innocent, optimistic, easily fooled. Smart cookies like Stanwyck and Jean Arthur would crumble in the face of such purity, renouncing their hardened attitude and determination to get ahead by any means necessary. Even pre-Code movies often bow, sometimes wistfully and sometimes perfunctorily, towards the old-fashioned virtues. Chivalry makes a come-back in the final scene of Blonde Crazy, one of the few genuinely romantic moments in Cagney’s career as he gazes up at Blondell with shining, worshipful eyes. Bert has demonstrated that love can turn a crooked guy into a knight in shining armor. But he’s got a prison stretch ahead of him, and then—what? Will he go straight, get a job? It’s hard to feel any great confidence in his future, since the lasting impression left by the film is that the cornerstone of American society is the confidence trick.

“The End of America”: Heroes for Sale

The pre-Code years corresponded to the nadir of the Great Depression, when disgust with Herbert Hoover’s government deepened the country’s black mood, when the homeless called their shanty-towns “Hoovervilles” and the newspapers they wrapped themselves in “Hoover blankets.” Law-abiding citizens made folk heroes out of bank robbers like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, while hoboes sang of a utopia where “all the cops have wooden legs” and “the railroad bulls are blind.” The “bulls” were notorious for beating the hoboes they caught, shooting at them or forcing them to jump from speeding trains; even young teenagers weren’t spared. Being broke, jobless and homeless was treated not as a misfortune but as a crime. In the South, many towns used transients as slave labor: arrested on freight trains or in rail yards, they were put to work on chain gangs, and when their sentences were up, put back on the trains they’d been arrested for riding and told to get out of town. Communities posted signs, “Jobless men keep going—we can’t take care of our own.” Some towns denied medical care to travelers who fell ill or were injured, simply dumping them outside the city limits. Before the 1932 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, many people felt the country was drifting towards anarchy or revolution.

Not all movies of the time were escapist fantasies; many pre-Code films were “ripped from the headlines.” Warner Brothers even confronted the Depression in a musical, Golddiggers of 1933. The opening number, “We’re In the Money,” is pure wish-fulfillment, as chorus girls wearing only strategically placed gold coins crow that “Old Man Depression” is through and that, “We never see a headline about a breadline today.” This giddy fantasy shatters when it is revealed to be a rehearsal for a show that has to close down because the producers can’t pay rent for the theater. Soon the chorus girls are staying in bed all day (three to a bed) because they have nothing to eat. The plot invites us to enjoy watching Joan Blondell earn money the easy way again, squeezing it out of a man who is rich, self-righteous and not very bright. Golddiggers is fluff, but it concludes with a musical number that makes a powerful if disconcerting stab at social realism.

This is social realism à la Busby Berkeley, so Blondell dons a black satin dress and stands under a lamppost, suggesting that unless the government helps jobless men their wives will be reduced to peddling themselves in the street. “Remember my forgotten man,” she sings, “You put a rifle in his hand / You sent him far away / You shouted hip hooray / But look at him today…”4 The song is taken up by a black woman sitting in an open window, surrounded by other women posed to look like F.S.A. portraits: a gaunt and worried farm wife, a starved and empty-eyed grandmother. Meanwhile endless lines of men are seen marching off to war, stumbling through the muddy trenches, then shuffling along in breadlines. This was torn from some very fresh headlines: in the summer of 1932 thousands of World War I veterans, known as the Bonus Army, had camped out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., asking the government to pay them the financial bonuses they were promised for their war service in advance, since many of them were unemployed and destitute. The army under Gen. Douglas MacArthur violently dispersed the men and their families, inspiring outrage. In this frivolous Hollywood musical, Blondell confronts a policeman who is rousting a bum out of a doorway, pointing to the military medal pinned to the inside of the man’s shabby lapel. Her eyes burn with pure hatred for the cop.

In these desperate times, both socialism and fascism were touted as viable alternatives to America’s problems. Several Hollywood movies offered glowing visions of benevolent totalitarianism: in Gabriel Over the White House, produced by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, Walter Huston plays a president who seizes dictatorial powers for the good of the country and proceeds to get rid of gangsters by trying them in military courts without constitutional protections. (Sound familiar?) In The Mayor of Hell, the boys in an ethnically diverse and racially integrated reform school are offered the chance to run the place as a children’s democracy, and when a tyrannical director tries to destroy this system, they try him in a kangaroo court complete with flaming torches.

The government’s helplessness or callousness in the face of economic crisis was not the only source of disenchantment with authority. The prohibition of alcohol, enacted in 1920, turned the vast majority of Americans into criminals, law enforcement into hypocrites, and bootlegging gangsters into society’s pets. Meanwhile, in the late 1920s the lingering wounds of the Great War, initially suppressed by a generation desperate to forget, resurfaced as people began to take stock of what they now viewed as a ghastly waste of life. Pacifism was widely embraced; in 1933 the hallowed Oxford University Student Union debated and passed the statement, “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its king and country.” Movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Last Flight expressed horror at the costs and pointlessness of the war, while others called attention to the plight of veterans struggling to survive in the country for which they had fought.

Heroes for Sale (Wellman, 1933) is one of the bleakest films to come out of Hollywood during the studio era. What the confidence trick is in Blonde Crazy, gross injustice is in Heroes for Sale: the basic building block of American society. Richard Barthelmess plays the American everyman as Job, afflicted not by mere bad luck but by unfairness, misunderstanding and the heartlessness of the powerful. In the teens and twenties, Barthelmess had played pure-hearted farm boys in silent melodramas like Way Down East and Tol’able David; he stood for integrity, trustworthiness and boyish optimism. By 1933, his fresh handsome face looked tired and worn, prematurely defeated even at the start of the movie, when he supposed to be just 25. The story begins in the trenches during the War, and the first thing we see is an officer issuing a command for a raid intended to gain prestige by capturing a German officer. When a subordinate objects that the plan will amount to suicide, he snaps, “Suicide or not, it’s orders,” and tells the other officer to take nine or ten men, because “that’s all I can afford to lose.” This kind of callous abuse of power will recur throughout the film, until the penultimate scene in which armed policemen drive homeless men from their shelter into the rain, ignoring the plea that they are not bums but veterans.

Tom Holmes (Barthelmess) is one of the nine or ten expendables chosen for the mission, and when his superior officer turns yellow and refuses to leave the shell-hole where they are hiding, he single-handedly knocks out a machine-gun nest and captures a German officer, only to be wounded and left for dead on his way back. His own officer, Roger, takes credit for the escapade and wins the Distinguished Service Cross, while Tom is taken to a German hospital where he is treated humanely but given morphine to ease the pain of shell-fragments in his spinal column, starting him on the road to addiction. Back home, he winds up working in the bank owned by Roger’s father, who self-righteously fires him when he learns of his drug problem. Roger is a weak, nervous, sweaty-palmed villain; he feels bad about stealing Tom’s glory and allowing him to suffer unfairly, just not bad enough to do anything about it.

For a while things look up for Tom. In Chicago he falls in with a friendly father and daughter who run a café, gets a good job at a laundry, and marries a beautiful young woman (Loretta Young). But as soon as he reaches higher he is shot down. He agrees to help promote a friend’s invention to mechanize the laundry, but when his benevolent boss dies, the new owners use the machine as an excuse to fire all their workers. The workers blame Tom and start a riot, in which his wife is accidentally killed. As if that weren’t enough, he is blamed for leading the riot he was trying to stop and sentenced to five years hard labor. When he gets out, he’s still marked as a “Red” and driven out of town by government agents. By now the country is in the grip of the Depression, and he joins the army of hoboes riding the rails. Achieving secular sainthood, Tom gives away the fortune he earned from the laundry machine to fund a soup kitchen. And when he finally encounters Roger again, also on the bum after serving jail time for embezzling, Tom counters Roger’s pessimism (“The country can’t go on this way. This is the end of America”) with a pat speech about how the country isn’t licked and will rise again, just like Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech. Angry and anguished throughout much of the film, by the end he has slipped into a kind of haloed masochism. Despite his clichéd words, what he embodies is not can-do optimism but the kind of enlightened detachment that comes from having nothing more to lose.

“The only thing that matters is money. Without it you are garbage. With it you are a king.” These words are spoken by Max, the German inventor who makes Tom rich and indirectly ruins his life. Max is a ludicrous stereotype, starting out as a ranting communist and abruptly turning into a greedy plutocrat (when someone points out that he used to hate capitalists he responds, “Of course—because I had no money then!”) In its one idyllic interlude, the film shows a workplace where capital and labor cooperate in smiling harmony and the boss is even willing to use mechanization to give employees more leisure and easier jobs without cutting the workforce or lowering salaries. This utopian fantasy, along with the café whose owners give to the poor even as they struggle to survive, suggest that the only solution to the country’s problems is selfless generosity. Unfortunately, the movie also implies that heartlessness and blinkered malice are far more common.

Heroes for Sale is not a lucid analysis of economic problems, and despite a gritty atmosphere it lacks the objectivity of neo-realism. At once bitter and sentimental, it portrays the whole of American society as a “you-must-pay-the-rent-I-can’t-pay-the-rent” melodrama, with villains as vile and heroes as pure as those in a D.W. Griffith tale of wronged innocence. Many pre-Code movies invite the viewer to identify with and root for people who cheat to get ahead: gangsters, con artists, gold-diggers. Heroes for Sale instead asks us to identify with an innocent and virtuous but hapless and often helpless hero. If people fantasized about being one of Cagney’s confident, cynical operators—predators rather than prey—they saw themselves as Tom Holmes: down on their luck, taking one hit after another, but struggling on and clinging to hope.

Wellman’s next film was Wild Boys of the Road, his famous portrait of teenage hoboes, which grinds through hardship and injustice only to veer into shining idealism in the last five minutes. Two middle-class high-school boys turn into ragged panhandlers, one a cripple, the other stooping occasionally to petty theft. A crowd of vagrants bands together to attack and kill a brakeman who has raped a teenage girl, and to fight off the “bulls” who try to put them off a freight train. It’s easy to imagine audiences cheering as the young bums pelt the cops with eggs and fruit, and booing when the cops use fire hoses to drive them from the shanty-town they have built in disused sewer pipes. The hobo community is painted as loyal, diverse and supportive (blacks and girls are treated as equals), but no one is having any fun. They’re not wild, just bone-weary. The protagonists wind up in New York, living in a garbage dump, and one is tricked into taking part in an attempted robbery. But when they are hauled before a judge, instead of coldly meting out injustice like the judge in Heroes for Sale, the kindly man lectures the youths on how things are going to be better now, they will get a fresh chance, as the camera pans up to the National Reconstruction Administration poster above his head (“We Do Our Part”). The ending looks like a cop-out now, but audiences of the time probably cheered it too.

The pre-Code era was vanquished not only by stricter censorship but by the mood swing following Roosevelt’s inauguration, when the desperate country embraced the promise of a “new deal for the American people.” Pictures of FDR went up next to icons of Jesus; at the end of Footlight Parade, another Warner Brothers musical, solders marching in formation create an American flag, the president’s face, and the NRA eagle. Roosevelt campaigned to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again,” and one of his first actions in office was to repeal Prohibition. The New Deal failed to end the Depression but it did stop the free-fall of the country’s spirits, ending the sense that the people had been abandoned by their leaders. Hollywood diligently promoted the new tone of wholesome optimism, strictly punishing vice and rewarding virtue. But can you regain innocence once you’ve lost it?

The Age of Experience: Baby Face

Pre-Code movies finally went too far. The last straw may have been the lesbian “dance of the naked moon” in The Sign of the Cross, Miriam Hopkins getting raped in a barn in The Story of Temple Drake, or Mae West just being Mae West. America was divided then as now, and the backlash that ushered in the Code crackdown was driven in part by heartland resentment of movies pitched at sophisticated urban audiences. 5 Outraged by the increasingly salacious tone of Hollywood, in 1934 the Catholic Church formed the Legion of Decency and ordered its congregations to boycott the movies it condemned. In fact, box office receipts rose for movies that were banned by the Legion, but Hollywood’s producers panicked at the prospect of shrinking audiences; of being attacked as foreign corrupters of America’s youth, since most were Jewish immigrants; and of federal government intervention. They capitulated. After 1934, the studios could no longer flout the Production Code Administration and its viciously anti-Semitic head, Joe Breen; unless movies earned its seal of approval they would be blackballed. For a few years filmmakers fought hard against the Code6, but as ticket sales rose with the easing of the Depression, they settled into acceptance of its strictures. For the next twenty years married couples would sleep in twin beds and no couple would kiss for longer than three seconds. The most damaging aspect of the Code was not that it limited what could be shown, but that it forced movies to uphold conservative values, to show respect for authority and religion, and to present a simple dichotomy of good and evil, virtue and sin. The censors did not want controversial subjects like abortion, prostitution or racial tensions discussed from any angle, no matter how morally serious. Hollywood managed to produce great movies under the Code’s restrictions, but sometimes its stifling effect gave them a sterile, airless, homogenized quality.

Some of the pre-Code spirit survived in screwball comedy, a genre created by the Code—the sexes must battle lest they wind up in bed. Even at the height of the Code, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder consistently subverted its precepts, probably because their dialogue was too clever or just too audaciously dirty for the censors to decipher. After World War II the hard-boiled, wised-up attitude went underground, flourishing in film noir, but what became of the pre-Code sensibility after the end of the noir cycle? Our own time may be rife with irony and black comedy, but sneaky innuendo can’t thrive without restrictions, and all-pervasive, indiscriminate irony becomes shallow and facile. The gritty, sassy tone of pre-Code flourished precisely because it still had the power to shock.

The proponents of censorship cited the overwhelming power and mass appeal of movies, which made them particularly dangerous to the young. And after all movies were not art, so they couldn’t claim first-amendment protection as books or plays might: one journalist wrote in 1934 that no “classic” movie had been created yet. Hollywood’s producers were all too ready to agree, viewing their creations only as commercial products. Even pre-Code films weren’t safe from retroactive censorship. Those that were re-released during the Code years or the early years of television had bits cut out: Myrna Loy trilling “Mimi” in a sheer nightgown in Love Me Tonight, Edward Woods tussling in bed with Joan Blondell in Public Enemy. Ironically, films that were considered too thoroughly offensive to be salvaged remained intact. In 2004 a complete, uncensored print of Baby Face, perhaps the crown jewel of pre-Code, was discovered at the Library of Congress. Baby Face (Green, 1933) was so sordid that it was rejected outright by state censorship boards and heavily altered before being released, but a copy of the original camera negative showed the film as only censors had ever seen it.

Sold-out crowds packed New York’s Film Forum on a snowy Monday in January 2005 to be the first audience ever to watch Barbara Stanwyck smash a beer bottle over the head of a man molesting her, then lie down in the straw with a brakeman in return for a free ride on a freight train; to hear a sinister German cobbler quote Nietszche to Stanwyck and advise her to stamp out all emotion and use her power over men to get the things she wants. A New York Times piece on the rediscovered print stated that “you couldn’t make this film today.” Baby Face’s heroine, Lily Powers, is sexy and heartless, with a hidden, wounded fury built up during a lifetime of mistreatment. Accompanied by a growling rendition of “The St. Louis Blues,” she climbs a ladder of weak and venal men from a dreary steel-town speakeasy to the inevitable Manhattan penthouse. With her all the way is the only person she really cares for, her black maid and best friend, played by the beautiful Teresa Harris. Baby Face has all the kick, the style, the shocking laughs and underlying bleakness that exemplify pre-Code.

During the Depression, with so many men unable to support families, women became responsible for their own and their children’s survival as they had rarely been before. Many pre-Code movies focus on the predicament of women looking for ways to support themselves outside of marriage. While the flappers of the 1920s were young girls sowing their wild oats, the women of pre-Code are looking for security, and they aren’t too scrupulous about how they get it. They are neither virtuous helpmeets nor destructive vamps; they are adults who have faced some cold, hard facts. Actresses like Constance Bennett and Miriam Hopkins played a new kind of woman who was hardened, experienced, far from spotless, but who instead of paying for her sins usually triumphed in the end.

World War I shattered the traditional manly and womanly ideals of the nineteenth century; World War II brought back the celebration of the he-man and the homemaker. Between the wars there was a blurring and mingling of the sexes. Women bobbed their hair, smoked and drove cars; men got manicures, sang falsetto and danced the Charleston. A novelty song of the time complained: “Masculine women, feminine men / Which is the rooster, which is the hen? / It’s hard to tell ‘em apart these days.” Homosexuality was an object of sniggering fascination, and caricatures of effeminate men and butch women show up regularly in pre-Code movies. In Ladies They Talk About, a new inmate in a women’s prison is warned about a hefty cigar-smoking lady in a monocle: “Watch out for her, she likes to wrestle.” In Wonder Bar, a fey young man cuts in on a dancing couple and dances off—with the man. “Boys will be boys!” Al Jolson comments with a swishy gesture.

In the Victorian era, Europe and America embraced the ideal of woman as untouched by experience, the “angel of the house.” One of the arguments against granting women the vote or allowing them to enter universities and the work-place was that if they left the domestic sphere they would lose their purity and moral authority. The working women of thirties Hollywood triumphantly backed this argument: they are hard-nosed, pragmatic, independent. The “double standard” for pre- and extra-marital sex was a common theme in films of the early thirties: why shouldn’t women act like men? The feisty yet vulnerable pre-Code woman was more compromised than the fast-talking dame of later screwball comedies, who usually worked as a reporter or secretary and relished her self-sufficiency. One aspect of pre-Code movies that might actually shock contemporary audiences is the ubiquitous equation of sex and money. It’s taken for granted that women will sell themselves for furs, jewels and apartments, as “kept women” or free-lance party girls. This reflects the Depression too, a time when—so the movies warned—the scarcity of honest jobs might tempt girls to take “the easiest way.” Men, meanwhile, might turn to crime, bootlegging, gangs: selling their souls for flashy suits, cars and women. Unlike their female counterparts, the fallen men always pay, dying in the gutter or going to the chair. Women who break commandments—even a hard-bitten ex-felon like Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses—can be redeemed through the love of an honest man, in this case the poor but hunky Joel McCrea.

The thirties were a golden age for women in Hollywood movies, the only decade when they were regularly allowed to be smart, competent, funny and sexy all at once, and seldom required to be tamed or put in their place by men (Female is a dispiriting exception.) Throughout the decade, women continued to embody the toughness and cynicism of the Depression years in romantic comedies, where they were habitually both more dazzling and more down-to-earth than their male counterparts. The experienced woman paired with a naïve, virginal man is partly a comic reversal of a more traditional trope, Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. But while these women take economic advantage of their male prey, they are also seduced by male innocence. They yearn for what they themselves have lost.

The uncensored version of Baby Face makes it clear that Lily was forced into prostitution by her own father when she was fourteen. Hence the cruel irony of the title: while she poses as girlishly helpless (“Nothing like this has ever happened to me,” she pleads when she’s caught in the restroom with her boss) she has been, as the cliché goes, robbed of innocence. This is the festering wound behind her hard, defiant poise. No one could play the part better than Stanwyck, with her devastating ability to face the facts; her sudden lashing rages; and the enticing warmth that she could—chillingly—turn on or off at will. Douglas Sirk spoke later of how Stanwyck seemed to have been “deeply touched by life.” Her most arresting trait is her level, unwavering gaze, both bold and sad—what Sirk called her “amazing tragic stillness.” The simplicity of her style comes from a steely inner resolve, a hard-won self-mastery that allows her to look at the world without fear—but not without anger or sorrow. “My life has been hard, bitter,” Lily tells her husband. “I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.”

Movies of the early thirties revel in the victory of experience over innocence, but they mourn it too. James Cagney stumbles into the gutter in the rain muttering, “I ain’t so tough.” Ann Dvorak, as a drug addict whose sleazy lover has kidnapped her son, crashes through a window and plummets to the street below to save the boy’s life. Paul Muni, fugitive from a chain gang, fades into the darkness, answering his girlfriend’s question, “How do you survive?” with the despairing words, “I steal!”7 It is this sense of bitter knowledge, of deeply-felt experience, that makes the best pre-Code movies truly “adult.” W.H. Auden said that the purpose of art is to make self-deception more difficult: “by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate.” Enchantment and intoxication have always been Hollywood’s stock in trade, but occasionally—in Out of the Past, in The Lady Eve, in Blonde Crazy—the studios blended cocktails of fantasy and disillusionment, of disappointment and romance. Hollywood in the 1930s cast its lingering spell not with cynical magic, but with magical cynicism.

by Imogen Sara Smith

NOTES

1. In, respectively, Man’s Castle, Baby Face, Murder at the Vanities.

2. What happened to the cut footage? Most of it probably wound up in the wastebasket, though some found a home elsewhere. In his book The Silent Clowns Walter Kerr recounts how a boyhood friendship with his local projectionist enabled him to amass “what must unquestionably have been the most extensive collection of shots of Vilma Banky’s décolletage existing anywhere in America.”

3. Native New Yorkers Cagney and Blondell were appearing together in a play called “Penny Arcade” when they were both offered contracts by Warner Brothers, the studio that, with its Vitaphone process, had pushed the changeover to sound. “Penny Arcade” became the film Sinners’ Holiday; Cagney and Blondell made six more films together and formed a life-long friendship.

4. Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which echoes the great Depression anthem, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” in its complaint that the men who built the country and fought to defend it were now reduced to begging for bread. These two songs were exceptional; Tin Pan Alley churned out hundreds of “keep smiling” ditties during the Depression, leaving it to Woody Guthrie to express the nation’s bitter mood in songs like “I Ain’t Got No Home in this World Anymore.”

5. The pre-Code Two Kinds of Women opens with the governor of a western state rehearsing a passionate speech decrying the evil influence of New York City on the rest of the nation, leading America’s youth astray with the lure of glamour and fast living. The scene cuts to the next room where the governor’s daughter (Miriam Hopkins) lounges on a sofa in sexy pajamas, reading The New Yorker and listening to a radio program broadcasting jazz from a Manhattan nightclub. The movie makes no secret of which side it’s on. At the end the daughter says that she and her New York playboy husband will announce that they are moving to South Dakota for the fresh air and clean living—until her father is re-elected, after which, “We’ll come back and live on East 58th Street!”

6. Producers and filmmakers at Warner Brothers were particularly hostile to the new regime. Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade features a puritanical censor who keeps popping up to warn Cagney, a director of musical prologues, “You’ll have to put some bathing suits on those mermaids—you know Pennsylvania.” Ultimately, he’s revealed as worse than just a buffoon when he’s caught in flagrante delicto with the film’s floozy.

7. In, respectively, Public Enemy, Three on a Match, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

#Imogen . Sara Smith #The Chiseler #Sinner's Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code #Joan Blondell #James Cagney

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dalekofchaos · 5 years

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Finn was used as a prop just to build Rey up

The treatment of Finn is intolerable.

When I look back on Finn in TFA and marketing him as the next hero in Star Wars. I was excited, especially when the signs of his force sensitivity was all over the movie. When I saw the opening scene of Finn, being a character to humanize Stormtroopers, I was excited and in awe. When he realized that The First Order were evil and knew he had to get away, I have been with him ever since and since then he has become my favorite character. When he finally learns to stand up for himself and face his oppressors and face Kylo Ren, I was really invested in his character. He lost but we knew he would rise up again and face Kylo again. Then when I thought Luke would make his grand entrance to save the day and take Finn and Rey to be trained as Jedi by the end of the movie. Instead it's Rey. Despite Finn's journey and the media promoting Finn as the next hero of the saga, he is cast aside and Rey comes in to steal his thunder without learning anything whatsoever. The closes thing we have to a hero's journey in TFA is Finn. Finn has a connection to this war and a reason to want to fight The First Order and Kylo Ren. Him walking away as a Stormtrooper is never brought up again. Nor is his decision to fight them.

In both TFA and TLJ, Finn is treated like the black comic relief and it’s downright disgusting.

This was really the easiest character arc for them to write. Indoctrinated Child Soldier turned Elite Soldier who after realizing what he was doing was wrong, wants to make things right, hunted by the FO for treason and because he knows too much, he slowly finds his path with the resistance and trains in the force with Rey.

Finn is a Force Sensitive Resistance Hero and a black lead, but they want to focus on the white brunette and the mass murdering white villain instead….Seems about white.

Finn is the very reason why the Resistance is even alive. Finn breaks his life-long brainwashing, informs Rey and Han about the importance of BB-8 and helps out in getting BB-8 to the resistance and provides vital information that lead to the destruction of STB and gets nearly killed while helping to achieve this. If it were not for Finn saving Poe, BB-8 would’ve been scrapped for parts and Rey never would’ve left Jakku. The map would either be destroyed or be in the hands of The First Order. Starkiller Base would’ve destroyed D’Qar and Ach-To. He is the reason why Poe is still alive. He is the reason why BB-8 isn’t parts and Rey left Jakku. Because of leaving Jakku, this is the sole reason why Han and Chewie were able to find the Falcon. And he is the reason why The Resistance was able to find out about Starkiller Base’s weakness. he Helps out in sabotaging STB so that Poe, the very pilot he saved in the beginning can deliver the finishing blow to Starkiller Base and destroy it completely.

It became very clear to me that Finn was used as a stepping stone so that Rey can be the heroine without any build up, development or effort into writing her story. A prominent black male lead was used to build up a white woman up. So much for being so diverse.

In the Last Jedi, Finn awakes from a coma with no one attending him. No medics or guards. He's not even on a medship, he's in the fucking cargo hold. Finn recovering from his injuries is meant to be seen as a joke and his injuries are never mentioned again, while Kylo gets sympathy and shown his scars. There was also no marketing for Finn in the build up to TLJ. Despite Finn knowing that the First Order must be fought and knows there is something bigger than himself and Rey, we then see Finn attempting to flee in an escape pod to hide with Rey. Then he meets Rose. Rose in mourning meets Finn and expects him to be this big Resistance hero, only Finn never officially became one. Rose thought he was deserting. Finn wants to escape to save Rey and because The Supremacy is tracking them through hyperspace, but Rose sees this as desertion….Desertion? You taze people for desertion? How exactly am I supposed to root for either side again? This is probably the same only less lethal treatment one could expect from The First Order. And what if The Raddus took critical damage? Are you trying to tell me Rose would taze anyone going to the escape pods? I thought she was supposed to be a mechanic, not someone who prevents escape. Despite Finn explaining himself, she tazes him. She spends the majority of the movie berating, insulting and belittling him. It's even worse in the novel. Finn, who was the main focus of the last movie, and one of the main protagonists, is now made the sidekick to Rose in a pointless side plot. Finn and Rose then get caught because none of them could bother park their ship legally. Finn, the child slave doesn’t even get to say they should save the child slaves of Canto Bight, instead he blindly follows Rose into freeing the space horses. Then they openly trusts a man who talks like a snake and is shocked when DJ betrays them. Finn and Rose are made to fail their mission pointlessly, when they could've succeeded and get caught on the way to the escape pods. Finn gets to face his oppressor and fight Phasma and end her, but Phasma's better death scene was stupidly cut for reasons I don't understand. Finn then makes one last effort to save The Resistance, the people he loves. Rose stops him. She takes one last chance to insult him and kiss him without his consent as the bunker is destroyed while The First Order prepares to kill what Finn loves....and people see this as love???

Finally, Rise Of Skywalker. Finn is not featured in ANY of the novels or graphic novels for the Journey to TROS. He is not featured whatsoever in any shape or form in marketing. We get to see him in two teasers but he says nothing. His new outfit looks awesome. Finn could’ve been used to rise as a Jedi with Rey and essentially be the Skywalkers that Rise. If not that, Finn could’ve caused a Stormtrooper Rebellion that burns The First Order from the inside out. Instead of any of that, it looks like Finn is given nothing for this movie. That is sad and heartbreaking. That's all I can say. For whatever reason Finn is given a small role and is shoved to the back or erased entirely. Finn was done dirty this entire trilogy.

It's gotten to the point where I know Finn was used to prop up Rey. He was used as a bait-n-switch, only to be sidelined/removed from the story entirely. I've made peace with it. Now I want LF to be held accountable for this racist stunt they pulled.

#Star Wars #Finn #Rebelfinn #Rebel Finn #Anti Lucasfilm

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mrhotmaster · 4 years

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16 Movies You Can Enjoy At Home During Lockdwown

16 Movies Or Series You Can Watch At Your Home During This COVID19 Lockdown

Whether videos of ping-pongs taken to the zoo or cats play games with their owners, the internet in these coronavirus holiday weeks can be an endless entertainment outlet as you ace social distancing.

Better Call Saul, Netflix

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This current one's a moderate burner made by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, and is a side project from the previous' massively effective Breaking Bad.

A great part of the cast of Breaking Bad, spare the two lead characters, show up in this show. The hero of this wrongdoing dramatization is Jimmy McGill played by Bob Odenkirk.

The show serves as an independent forerunner to Breaking Bad and outlines the moderate plummet of the adorable and road brilliant McGill into the universe of wrongdoing.

McGill is an independent man who earned his law degree while working in the sorting room, who at that point turns into a seriously paid legal counselor who works out of the back of a nail salon.

Despite the fringe criminal ways McGill completes things, the cards he has been managed nearly cause one to identify with his obscure character.

Hunters, Amazon Prime Video

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Motivated by accounts of genuine 'Nazi trackers', the polarizing show follows a diverse gathering of individuals who have decided to unite as one to search out war crooks stowing away (generally) in America under new personalities.

The show stars Al Pacino as Meyer Offerman, a Jewish altruist and Holocaust survivor who serves as the pioneer of the gathering secretively chasing Nazis in New York.

While genuine trackers, similar to Simon Wiesenthal, took their discoveries to the police or the media, the show's characters volunteer to vindicate the Jews who endured because of Nazis.

Also, it is this demeanor that makes their most youthful enlist, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) who assumes his late grandma's position in the gathering, questions everything that he has faith in.

With components of a retaliation dream and sarcastic comic book-narrating, the show has issues yet there's some heavenly acting in here.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Disney Hotstar

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Changing the least complex stuff into heavenly workmanship takes an uncommon ability. What's more, Larry David, author, and co-maker of Seinfeld, who plays a fictionalized variant of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, is a past ace.

To vent his wrath at flimsy tables and tepid espresso, he opens up a 'show disdain toward store', a café directly close to the café with the shaky tables and tepid espresso.

Without either, obviously. The tenth and freshest period of this arrangement is as applicable to the occasions as could be expected under the circumstances, tossing in references to Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo development.

There's additionally a scene where David circumvents town wearing a MAGA (Make America Great Again) cap after finding that the adornment promoted by Donald Trump has exactly the intended effect in warding individuals off (social separating before coronavirus).

Afsos, Amazon Prime Video

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This miniseries follows Nakul, an essayist so ineffective that he endeavors to end it all sequentially. He stays safe, yet the equivalent can't be said for the individuals who spare him.

On the off chance that this plot wasn't sufficiently strange to warrant a watch, Nakul chooses to enroll the assistance of 'changed' contract-executioners who presently 'help' individuals needing to kick the bucket.

While Nakul, played by Gulshan Devaiah, holds the story together, Heeba Shah as the fatal professional killer Upadhyay is a treat to look for her vacant promise to what she calls 'craftsmanship'.

Toss in a lot of researchers chasing for an everlasting status mixture, and a sadhu following Nakul because he has all the earmarks of being unfading, and you have a story ready with unexpected developments.

Coordinated by Anubhuti Kashyap, Afsos has a lot of things amiss with it, yet its chilled demeanor to horrible subjects like mortality and casualty makes it watchable.

Kidding, Disney Hotstar

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This Jim Carrey starrer is currently gushing on the web and it is suggested in any event, for the individuals who have recently been put off via Carrey's over the top acting in droll works, for example, Ace Ventura.

Carrey is viewed as Jeff Pickles, a cherished TV moderator who is venerated by kids and grown-ups the same, on account of his long-running manikin appear.

Mr. Pickles is a fantasy-like individual who shows kids important life exercises. In any case, when he loses one of his twins, his melancholy leaves him distressed and all he needs to do is recognize that misfortune on the show and show his watchers (basically kids) about death, something the producers of his manikin show emphatically restrict.

The impactful arrangement is a story of how Pickles manages the passing of a youngster, at the same time attempting to secure the multimillion-dollar brand domain that is based on his 'glad' picture.

Self Made, Netflix

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This restricted arrangement sees Octavia Spencer as the chronicled figure of Sarah Breedlove, generally archived as America's first African-American specialist who proceeded to turn into a tycoon in the mid-1900s.

The independent business visionary and humanitarian made a realm out of making makeup and hair care items for dark ladies.

Spencer, commended for her job in the Academy Award-winning film The Help, convincingly plays Breedlove, directly from her long stretches of being a single parent who began by being a washerwoman to help her girl to build a business called the Madam C J Walker Manufacturing Company.

Coordinated by Kasi Lemmons, the story has been fictionalized somewhat to rethink the battles of a lady conceived on a cotton ranch to an in the past oppressed family, yet the vibe great arrangement is to a great extent dependent on evident occasions.

Am Not Okay With This, Netflix

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This story about growing up figures out how to viably radiate a feeling of relaxed fear.

The show begins by revealing to us that the hero, Sydney Novak (Sophia Lillis), is managing each adolescent issue ever young person has ever had.

But, when she gets extremely furious, the object of her annoyance feels like they've been hit by a concealed scoop.

Among the most inconspicuous of these anger instigated periods is the point at which Novak's closest companion's beau, whom the hero loathes, begins seeping from his nose out of nowhere.

Things just deteriorate from that point and Novak has no clue why her wrath can "get things going".

In light of a comic book by Charles Forman, Novak helps us a little to remember Carrie, the hero of Stephen King's eponymous novel, just as Eleven from Stranger Things since both these little youngsters additionally have supernatural forces, yet the likenesses end there.

Pushpavalli, Amazon Prime Video

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Season two of this dramatization sees humorist Sumukhi Suresh return as Pushpavalli, a young lady whose exceptionally flawed endeavors at charming a suitor, Nikhil (played by Manish Anand), left watchers alarmed.

A Tamilian from Bhopal who follows Nikhil to Bengaluru, the in any case clever Pushpavalli keeps on keeping crowds snared with her shamelessly tangled endeavors to snare the man she had always wanted.

In the wake of hijacking his pooch, paying off a chaiwallah to do her offering and getting her leg broken, Pushpavalli proceeds to discover inventive methods for escaping predicament, so imagine a scenario in which that requires getting connected with to another person, or releasing a reptile among clueless kids.

Extraordinary notice must be made of Bengaluru-based on-screen character Shraddha in this all-around scripted show as Vasu, the nightie-wearing, hockey stick-using proprietor who runs Pushpavalli's paying visitor settlement. Vasu's character alone merits a show to itself.

Guilty, Netflix

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Enlivened by how those blamed for lewd behavior have gradually advanced go into society, this Karan Johar creation means to revive discussions around the #MeToo development.

Coordinated by Ruchi Narain, the film stars Kiara Advani as Nanki, whose sweetheart Vijay 'V J' Pratap Singh (Gurfateh Singh Pirzada) is blamed for assaulting his school batchmate.

A government official's child and an artist, V J is the most dateable person nearby, while the lady who blames him, Tanu (Akansha Ranjan Kapoor), is somebody despised profoundly for being uproarious, consideration chasing and uncaring.

The film gives the advantage of the uncertainty to the two gatherings, making crowds question if Tanu is imagining everything for exposure (something she is prepared to do), just as throwing questions on V J's Teflon notoriety.

As the specialists examine, Nanki embarks to discover reality for herself, at the same time doing combating her very own evil presence.

Mentalhood, ALT Balaji and zee5

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Karisma Kapoor makes her Web debut as Meira, a mother of three, in this account of how defective guardians attempt to bring up their children as most ideal as.

A previous Miss Kanpur, Meira has as of late moved to Mumbai to raise a 'cutting edge family' with Sanjay Suri who stars as her obsessive worker spouse.

The arrangement likewise includes a reliable star cast that incorporates Sandhya Mridul, Tillotama Shome, Shilpa Shukla, Shruti Seth and Dino Morea.

Made by Ekta Kapoor and coordinated by Karishma Kohli, the show diagrams Meira's development into a blogger who composes on everything from nourishment to sex jobs with expectations of making a child-rearing aide.

The show seems to be being motivated by the Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman-starred American dramatization Big Little Lies and, in contrast to the American arrangement, this sermonizing arrangement is probably going to be delighted in additional by watchers who have youngsters.

Life of Speed, Netflix

This new on-the-square narrative portrays the tale of Juan Manuel Fangio, an Argentinian race vehicle driver who pretty much overwhelmed the primary decade of Formula One by winning the World Drivers' Championship multiple times during the 1950s.

This record stayed unbeaten till Michael Schumacher went along (as a major aspect of four distinctive hustling groups).

Coordinated by Francisco Macri, this verifiable narrative plans to comprehend the brain of the hustling legend while looking at the lives of race vehicle drivers who routinely change their lives for the love of speed.

The high-octane universe of hustling was maybe definitely more hazardous in Fangio's time than it is today considering there was no defensive rigging back then and wellbeing highlights were insignificant.

Maska, Netflix

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This transitioning film sees Manisha Koirala as a Parsi mother doing combating to get her child associated with the privately-run company of running an Iranian bistro.

'Nineteen years back when Rumi was conceived, his future had been chosen,' says Jaaved Jaaferi, Koirala's screen spouse.

Rumi was to grow up and turn into 'a mask-waala' (one who applies spread) like his dad (Jaaferi) before him.

In any case, he chooses to turn into a Bollywood entertainer. Prit Kamani plays Rumi, the befuddled youthful millennial who starts finding his Parsi legacy simply after separating himself from it.

Maska is as much about Rumi's excursion as it is a festival of Mumbai's Irani bistros.

With a reasonable sprinkling of youthful sentiment and family show, this is Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji author Neeraj Udhwani's first endeavor at the course.

Next in Fashion, Netflix

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As Netflix's first endeavor into configuration wars, this unscripted TV drama highlights 18 creators from over the world.

The candidates are generally experts who have dressed famous people before and have worked with significant design houses, yet none is an easily recognized name, something they all seek to be.

The show takes one through the way toward making a structure, directly from texture choice and preparing it to the time it's fit to be demonstrated.

The show is facilitated by Tanveer Wasim France (of Queer Eye popularity) and creator, model and TV moderator Alexa Chung.

The victor gets prize cash of $250,000, and the opportunity to turn into the following large thing in design.

There's additional space for motivation for watchers as challengers configuration outfits deserving of the runway, formals for work, just as stylish streetwear.

Special Ops, Disney Hotstar

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Coordinated by Neeraj Pandey of A Wednesday! what's more, Special 26 popularity and Shivam Nair, this is the most recent Indian spine chiller to be discharged on the web.

It highlights Kay Menon as Himmat Singh, a senior knowledge official. The story exemplifies how Singh has been pursuing a hypothesis that the real driving force of the 2001 Parliament assault was somebody whose presence nobody thinks about.

Singh has his operators in remote urban areas and has been spending lavishly on tasks to pursue this man down, and now he needs to legitimize the cash spent.

Between flashbacks, watchers are up to speed with how Singh's group is attempting to discover this secret miscreant.

The show helps us a little to remember Manoj Bajpayee's The Family Man, which is a superior show.

Activity scenes and awful writing in the moderate parts let down an in any case not too bad story, be that as it may, for the stuck-at-home and nothing-to-do, it's something one could thoughtlessly watch.

Miss Americana, Netflix

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Coordinated by Lana Wilson, whose past movies concentrated on suicide and late-term fetus removal, this venture follows the life of American vocalist lyricist Taylor Swift.

It opens with Swift being encompassed by journals, markers of individual stories. This is critical since Swift has gotten by out of diverting emotions into melodies that have become graph toppers.

She's at that point told that her most recent collection, Reputation (2018), has gotten no major Grammy assignments. Quick continues, practically aloof in her methodology.

Wilson proceeds to show Swift tending to her 'decent young lady' picture that has commanded the last's music profession, and how Swift arrangements with the thought that 'pleasant young ladies don't cause a ripple effect'.

The story graphs her ascent to distinction just as her longing to please fans, all of which have driven Swift to some dull spots.

The film shows the private side of Swift, the VIP who despite her whiz status drives a real existence shadowed by forlornness.

Westworld, Disney Hotstar

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The third period of Westworld is presently spilling on the web, and keeping in mind that it is being praised for getting cutting edge tech references right, we are as yet astonished by the splendid execution of the show's story.

The story starts in Westworld, an anecdotal, Wild West-themed event congregation where guests can do anything they need, with no results whatever, because the 'individuals' in Westworld are life-like androids.

These androids are so authentic as people that guests continually come back to the recreation center to play out their most out of control dreams, activities that would be inadmissible in the 'genuine'/world.

Inconvenience starts when the android has at the recreation center increase awareness about what they truly are.

This new season sees them escape into this present reality, our reality, after a bloodbath.

In light of Michael Crichton's 1973 film by a similar name, the arrangement stars Even Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy, an insightful android.

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#aladdin #best movies to watch online #best online netflix series to watch #best online series #coro

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bensolotags · 4 years

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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, BEST PRACTICES, AND TIPS FOR TWEETS

From @BenSoloTags

(Scroll down to see Best Practices and Tips)

Frequently Asked Questions

* How can I participate in a BenSoloTags campaign?

To participate in our hashtag campaigns, first, follow @BenSoloTags, our official twitter account to find out when they are planned. We suggest you turn on notifications for our account, so you can get notified whenever we tweet something official. You can do that by clicking the button with the alarm icon on it on our profile. We send out the official campaign notices from that account, including themes, time zones, best practices, and updates.

* Where can I suggest a hashtag idea for a future campaign?

Please send a tweet to @BenSoloTags if you have a campaign idea!

*How often do you do campaigns?

We try to do campaigns about once a month.

* Why don’t we do more campaigns?

Disney and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) see a LOT of tags, 24/7/365. We’re working to present unique monthly tags that are fun, positive, and creative. Disney and LFL will certainly notice when we trend a hashtag, even if it’s once a month.

* Are you the only people doing campaigns?

No. There are other groups out there working to bring Ben Solo back to Star Wars. We’ll try to share information about specific campaigns and the accounts/groups promoting them, along with our own monthly hashtag campaigns.

Twitter contacts for some of the other groups include:

@kiara_solo

@KarolV14070769

@solosaberx

* Why do you list different time zones on your campaign schedule?

The way to get attention for our cause is to “trend” on Twitter. The easiest and best way to trend is to have the most people possible tweet the same hashtag at once. Fans all over the world want to take part in the campaigns, so we try to accommodate as many of them as possible. So, for example, people in Los Angeles are tweeting at noon local time, which is 3:00 pm in New York, 8:00 pm in London, 11:00 pm in Germany, etc.

* How do you decide which tag to use?

We have spoken with some social media experts who have experience with how corporations read social media. According to our sources, corporations like positive hashtags and public engagement. Companies tend to “tune out” what they consider “negative” hashtags, or even categorize them as spam so they remain unseen.

Therefore, using hashtags like #YouKilledMyFavoriteCharacter would not bring us closer to our goal of bringing Ben Solo back alive to the Star Wars universe.

Longer hashtags mean fewer characters to tweet with, so those would be limiting.

We try to make it fun as well as send a message to Disney/LFL. We had so much fun before TROS came out, and we’ve been so bummed since, that we want to promote enjoying each other’s content.

* Is every tag featured on the Ben Solo Tags twitter account sponsored by BST?

No. We try to let people know about campaigns hosted by other accounts, as well as the monthly BST tag. Anything that isn’t our campaign will have “FYI” at the beginning and links to find more information (where possible).

* Why don’t you use the same hashtag every time? One that everyone can remember?

According to “15 Shortcuts to Get Your Hashtag Trending on Twitter:”

“...if a trend goes on too long, it ceases to be a trend. Twitter prefers trends to last for a day or two at a maximum, and trends that go on for too long are no longer spikes in traffic; they’re a new baseline. There are hashtags with 5,000 tweets in a day, while other tags are getting 50,000.

“If your tag hasn’t trended within the first day of using it, it’s probably not going to reach that spike without some exceptional circumstances. It’s better to abandon it and try to get something else trending than it is to try to get an old tag to trend again later.”

Source: https://follows.com/blog/2017/04/shortcuts-hashtag-trending-twitter

* Why don’t you campaign for other characters besides Ben? Rey (Rose, etc.) deserves some love too!

As much as we feel all the sequel trilogy characters were given a hard shake by TRoS, Ben is the only major sequel trilogy character that died. So even if Rey and other characters suffered, they still have a (hopefully better-written) future. However, unless we can garner support to bring Ben back to life, his story ends where TRoS ends.

In light of this, our campaigns focus exclusively on Ben, or Ben as a part of Reylo, but we would love to support and help spread information about campaigns to celebrate other characters. Just let us know how we can help at @BenSoloTags.

* Why aren’t we allowed to use any art we find? If it’s on Pinterest, it’s fair game, right?

Well, no. Most artists don’t appreciate your re-posting their work without permission. The best way to share an artist’s images in a way that acknowledges their work is to retweet the artist’s original tweet from their account whenever possible. A direct tweet is better than a quote tweet. If you can’t find the original tweet, you can try asking the artist to repost their work so you can share it, or ask them to grant you the permission to repost it.

* Where are you on social media?

Twitter @BenSoloTags

Facebook Ben Solo Tags

Instagram BenSoloTags

Best Practices

Feel free to amplify the signal and RT the BenSoloTags tweet about the campaign with your own followers.

If possible, use ONE hashtag per tweet (two maximum), so the Twitter algorithm won’t filter out your tweet as “spam.”

Try to tweet during the time zone recommended for your country, but if that doesn’t work for you, participate when you can the day of the campaign. Do not use third-party services or bots to tweet for you.

Retweeting other hashtag tweets helps the tag trend, but don’t go crazy. If you retweet too fast, you will get put in Twitter retweet “jail” for up to 72 hours for “suspicious activity.”

Never tweet the hashtag alone. Made sure to add some text or a picture to your tweet. Otherwise, it will be filtered out as “spam.”

Tweets with a visual component work especially well and get retweeted more often. You can include your own artwork or semi-official/official photos from the movies or of the actors.

Only share fan art from the artist’s original post or with their permission.

Tips for Tweeting with the Current Hashtag

Here are just a few ideas for creative, fun campaign hashtag posts:

Post photos of yourself with friends and family.

Fanfic writers - share a sample of your work or a URL of one of your stories.

Create memes and/or photo manipulations.

Create and share photos with appropriate quotes and/or poetry (your own or your favorite poet’s).

Share pictures of your own Ben Solo/Star Wars cosplay.

Express what you love about Ben Solo or how you feel about him.

If you’ve written a letter to an actor or one of the filmmakers, you could share it or a sample of it.

Edit your favorite Ben Solo film scene, or create a Ben Solo-themed music video; post it or a link to it.

Take a photo of yourself or a friend with a Rey-inspired hairstyle or a Kylo inspired pose...or vice-versa!

Please Do NOT tag official Disney or Lucas Film accounts or those of their employees.

PLEASE - DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS! Do not engage with them. Your replies count as negative discourse and may be used to invalidate the tag by the algorithms.

Please be respectful of others.

And most importantly, have fun sharing your love and enthusiasm for Ben Solo.

Never tweet the hashtag alone. Made sure to add some text or a picture to your tweet. Otherwise, it will be filtered out as “spam.”

Tweets with a visual component work especially well and get retweeted more often. You can include your own artwork or semi-official/official photos from the movies or of the actors.

Only share fan art from the artist’s original post or with their permission.

Please Do NOT tag official Disney or Lucas Film accounts or those of their employees.

PLEASE - DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS! Do not engage with them. Your replies count as negative discourse and may be used to invalidate the tag by the algorithms.

Please be respectful of others.

And most importantly, have fun sharing your love and enthusiasm for Ben Solo.

#SaveBenSolo #hashtag campaign #BenSolo Lives #BringBenSoloBack #BenSoloTags

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grantmkemp · 4 years

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Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch Demsky); 9th December, 1916 - 5th February, 2020

"His style and his personality came across on the screen, something that does not always happen, even with the finest actors. Douglas had, and has, a distinctly individual manner. He radiates a certain inexplicable quality, and it is this, as much as talent, that accounts for his success in films." .... Tony Thomas, biographer

After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he made his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war movies. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 movies. Douglas was known for his explosive acting style, which he displayed as a criminal defense attorney in Town Without Pity (1961).

Douglas became an international star through positive reception for his leading role as an unscrupulous boxing hero in Champion (1949), which brought him his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His other early films include Young Man with a Horn (1950), playing opposite Lauren Bacall and Doris Day, Ace in the Hole opposite Jan Sterling (1951), and Detective Story (1951), for which he received a Golden Globe nomination as Best Actor in a Drama. He received a second Oscar nomination for his dramatic role in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), opposite Lana Turner, and his third nomination for portraying Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956), which landed him a second Golden Globe nomination.

In 1955, he established Bryna Productions, which began producing films as varied as Paths of Glory (1957) and Spartacus (1960). In those two films he collaborated with the then-relatively-unknown director Stanley Kubrick, taking lead roles in both films. Douglas has been praised for helping to break the Hollywood blacklist by having Dalton Trumbo write Spartacus with an official on-screen credit. He produced and starred in Lonely Are the Brave (1962), considered a classic, and Seven Days in May (1964), opposite Burt Lancaster, with whom he made seven films. In 1963, he starred in the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a story that he purchased and later gave to his son Michael Douglas, who turned it into an Oscar-winning film.

As an actor and philanthropist, Douglas received three Academy Award nominations, an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As an author, he wrote ten novels and memoirs. He is No. 17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema, the highest-ranked living person on the list until his death. After barely surviving a helicopter crash in 1991 and then suffering a stroke in 1996, he focused on renewing his spiritual and religious life. He lived with his second wife (of 65 years), Anne Buydens, a producer, until his death on February 5, 2020, at age 103. A centenarian, he was one of the last surviving stars of the film industry's Golden Age

The Pictures .... Kirk Douglas in the 1949 film noir drama "Champion" which gained him his first Academy Award nomination. The drama charts the story of Midge Kelly (Douglas), a boxer who pushes himself to the top of his game by knocking out opponents and back-stabbing his friends. He has no qualms about deceiving the various females he encounters and double-crossing the manager who found him and helped pave his road to fame

Film historian Ray Didinger says "he saw Champion as a greater risk, but also a greater opportunity ... Douglas took the part and absolutely nailed it." Frederick Romano, another sports film historian, described Douglas's acting as "alarmingly authentic":

"Douglas shows great concentration in the ring. His intense focus on his opponent draws the viewer into the ring. Perhaps his best characteristic is his patented snarl and grimace ... he leaves no doubt that he is a man on a mission."

Tagline: "This is the only sport in the world where two guys get paid for doing something they'd be arrested for if they got drunk and did it for nothing!"

Champion is a stark, realistic study of the boxing rackets and the degeneracy of a prizefighter, Kirk Douglas makes the character live.

These are my colourised versions of two black & white promotional studio stills produced in 1949

Restoring Your Past … Website Restoring Your Past … on Facebook

#Kirk Douglas #Actor #Hollywood #Golden Era #Chamopion #Spartacus #Lust for Life #Paths of Glory #Anne Buydens #History #Vintage #colourised #colorized #photo col #photo colourisation #photo colorization

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nicole-goddessofloki · 5 years

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Tom‘s Spirit Week

Just one more day waiting! But first: #FavoriteTomFriday! For today I made again 3 collages. The first collage‘s theme is my favorite Tom Hiddleston moments from his 37th birthday – today. Here they come:

1. *Since I saw Early Man after the man‘s 37th birthday, I made an exception for this. In Early Man Tom does the voice of bad guy Lord Nooth. We know Tom is the king of accents! Here you can hear Tom do a French accent. There is a bath scene in which Lord Nooth gets an massage, you just got to see the Behind The Scenes footage of that! I really loved all the extra footage on the DVD.

2. The promotion he did for Avengers Infinity War even though his character only was seen in the first 5 minutes. Also for knowing Loki‘s ‘fate’ in this movie for more than 2 years..

3. Tom Hiddleston as Mary Poppins, or do I need to say: Mary Ploppins? Tom starred in the short video ‘Leading Lady Parts’ from which in the end you saw posters of Tom being the lead female role in films such as Mary Poppins & Wonder Woman. Leading Lady Parts sarcastically shows how hard the movie industry for women can be. Leading Lady Parts (produced by Rebel Park Productions) is an initiative of the Hear Her campaign in the United Kingdom, in which women who are normally not heard are given the opportunity to give their opinion on all kinds of subjects. In this short movie actresses audition do a serious role, but get the craziest requests. This becomes painfully clear when the casting agent, played by Catherine Tate, proclaims: 'It's not rocket science darling. We're just asking you to be thin and curvy, sexy and innocent. Thin, sexy, hooker, virgin with boobs and hips. " In the end because of the casting Agent pickiness, Tom Hiddleston is given the female roles instead. I appreciate it a lot that Tom is part of projects about women‘s rights. We all deserve to be treated fairly and not to be judged because of the way we look.

Tom said about this:

“I had so much admiration for everyone who's come forward and spoken up, and the movement of Time's Up and Me Too. I wanted to find a way to help but I was very conscious of it not being necessarily my story. First thing I felt that it was important to do very actively was to listen, to read, to hear so that women could tell their stories and begin to talk about how we might change the environment.” Time's Up

4. Suddenly out of the blue, there was this picture of Tom Hiddleston & Josh Wilson posted by Wilson Worldwide Productions Something about a secret project. I‘m still very curious, because we still don‘t know what it is! I think it‘s something very spectacular! We got something to look forward to! He also posted a second photo (that‘s the one in the collage) in which he tagged me & a few other Tom Hiddleston/Loki fan accounts in. That totally made my day, so thank you Josh!

5. This stands for all the Comic Cons he did. He healed a lot of fan‘s hearts (Which were still broken because of Infinity War). And even those who weren‘t there (including me) this angel reached with his wings. There were plenty of lovely pictures, lovely footage of the Panel‘s. I personally loved his face expression when a little boy asked him if Loki was truly dead. There also was this moment Tom said the words: “Know you are not alone!”, which meant a lot to me. We all have obstacles to face and unfortunately most of us had to deal with bullies (in the past). But where I‘m mostly grateful for is the fact that for every con there were fans collecting fans letters from all over the world, bonded in fan-books. Therefore I know a few of my letters, cards (Christmas card, Birthday card) are given to him! I think we can be blessed to be in such a wonderful fandom! ACE Comic Con.

6. On the 30th October Tom and Josie Rourke talked at the Alan Howard / JW3 Speaker Series. It was a lovely and inspiring interview, I was able to watch later on Youtube. He talked about how he stepped out of his comfort zone, which has inspired me to do the same. When I hear this man talk about acting; whether it‘s in film, series or theatre; it‘s so so visible I‘m listening to a man who found his passion and as I said it before: He truly has put his heart and soul it. Perhaps I do not know how to properly bring this into words, but I hope you understand what I mean. I think many people can see him as an example, given the fact for example how he has grown in +/- 20 years. From liking to do voices as a kid to this passion and talent which goes much deeper than just the word ‘acting’. He does inspire people to go take their passion to the next level as well.

7. Tom Hiddleston‘s first social media post in (what was it?) 2 years: Loki. More stories to tell. More mischief to make. More to come. That literally broke the internet! What Ralph Breaks the Internet? No, Tom Hiddleston breaks the internet! The #LokiSeries (#Disney+) confirmed by the man himself! I‘m so excited for this whole thing. Patient, patient.. But I‘m freaking out inside! Can‘t wait!

8. Tom also did a lot for charity this year. The picture that I chose is Tom visit to the Great Ormond Street Hospital and Children's Charity. He gave the children something they‘ll never forget! Online you were able to write a Christmas wish for the children, which got printed on a Christmas Stocking. On the photo he holds (I assume) his message for the Children. In general he did a lot for Children this year. Tom also donated for the Justice and Equality Fund which was all about the issues of sexual harassment and gender inequality. I remember people said Tom was late during the Avengers Infinity War screening/premiere in London, he met with children in co-operation from the Starlight Children's Foundation before. I cannot think of a better reason to be late for an official event ;).

9. This photo is taken by BBC Radio 2 during the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It‘s truly one of my favorite pictures yet! There he spoke about ‘#Betrayal’ which will be hitting the theatre in London next month. He also spoke a little about the Loki Series & about the #Nightmanager season 2, but he wasn‘t alowed to say much about it yet. What better to start your Friday morning (it was a Friday) with then listening to Tom‘s voice on the radio! They also had some real good music in-between the talks. I heard ABBA, Journey (Don‘t stop Believing) & a live performance of a song of No Doubt. Also they spoke about the film 'Mary Queen of Scots' which premiered that week. I found it very impressive!

(The Jamie Lloyd Company Official London Theatre)

The second collage shows some random pictures of Tom I really like + my favorite roles he portrayed other than Loki! Those are Thomas Sharpe in ‘Crimson Peak’, Hank Williams in ‘I Saw The Light’ (the image shows my fave scene: the Baby scene!), Prince Hal in ‘The Hollow Crown’ (I am planning to do a Hollow Crown marathon tomorrow on his birthday!) and I just found out F. Scott Fitzgerald from ‘Midnight in Paris’ is missing. I‘ve watched that film on his birthday last year. In Midnight in Paris a writer (Owen Wilson) literally finds his inspiration in the 20s. And one of my favorite moments of Tom still is when a baby easily got him distracted during an #Avengers Interview. He turns to the baby and says: “Hello baby..”, so adorable!

Last collage is dedicated to Loki! (How else, this blog isn‘t called Goddess of Loki for nothing!) I chose some nice photo‘s I hadn‘t used for We Share What We Want Wednesday yet + a few of my fave LokiTom moments.

I wish Tom a lovely 38th birthday tomorrow! (Of course I wish you all a lovely #TomHiddleston Birthday tomorrow!)

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maxwellyjordan · 5 years

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Argument preview: Justices to consider constitutionality of cross-shaped war memorial on public land

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post ran on December 10, 2018,, as an introduction to this blog’s symposium on The American Legion v. American Humanist Association, as well as at Howe on the Court, where it was originally published.

Over the years, the Supreme Court has sometimes struggled to explain when and why religious symbols are permitted in the public sphere and when they are not. Next Wednesday, the justices will hear oral argument in a dispute over the constitutionality of a cross that sits on a traffic median in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. The challengers say that the cross is an illegal government endorsement of Christianity, while its defenders counter that the cross is simply a secular war memorial. The justices’ eventual opinion will likely decide the fate of the cross, but the ruling could also clarify – or potentially even revamp – the Supreme Court’s test for resolving these kinds of challenges.

The Constitution’s establishment clause bars the government from both establishing an official religion and favoring one religion over another. In 1971, in a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, the Supreme Court struck down state programs that provided financial support for private schools, including religious ones. At the same time, the justices also outlined a test for courts to use to determine whether a government law or practice violates the establishment clause. They concluded that the law or practice will pass constitutional muster if it has a secular purpose, its principal effect does not advance or inhibit religion, and it does not create an “excessive entanglement with religion.”

Since then, the court has both tweaked the Lemon test and criticized it, with the late Justice Antonin Scalia famously comparing it to a “ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried.” And in a 2005 case called Van Orden v. Perry, the court rejected an establishment clause challenge to the display of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol without relying on the Lemon test.

Because Justice Stephen Breyer served as the crucial fifth vote to leave the monument in place, his concurring opinion in Van Orden provided the governing rule for the case. Breyer declined to apply the Lemon test, stressing that there is “no single mechanical formula that can accurately draw the constitutional line in every case.” Instead, he explained, judges should “exercise legal judgment,” staying “faithful to the underlying purposes of the” establishment clause and taking “account of context and consequences measured in light of those purposes.” In particular, he observed, the establishment clause does not require the government to remove all traces of religion from the public sphere. “Such absolutism,” he emphasized, “is not only inconsistent with our national traditions, … but would also tend to promote the kind of social conflict the establishment clause seeks to avoid.”

Breyer acknowledged that the Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol “undeniably has a religious message,” but he added that the context in which the monument was displayed indicated that the state intended the monument to convey a secular message. And the fact that the monument had been on the capitol grounds for 40 years without any challenges, Breyer continued, suggested that the public also regards it as “part of what is a broader moral and historical message reflective of a cultural heritage.”

The cross at the heart of the current case was erected in Bladensburg, Maryland, to honor 49 soldiers from Prince George’s County, Maryland, killed during World War I. In 1922, the local American Legion post took over responsibility for the project after the private organizers ran out of money; the fundraising drive included a Christian prayer for the invocation. When the 40-foot-tall cross was finished in 1925, the dedication ceremony featured only Christian prayers, with no other religions represented.

In 1961, the state government acquired the cross and the land it sits on, due at least in part to concerns about safety as traffic around the cross increased. The cross is part of a larger park honoring veterans that also contains much smaller memorials remembering the War of 1812, World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the September 11 attacks. The symbol of the American Legion – a small star inscribed with “U.S.” – appears at the top of the cross, while a plaque at the bottom contains the names of the fallen soldiers and a quote from President Woodrow Wilson.

The plaintiffs in the case are local residents who are offended by the presence of the cross on public land, along with the American Humanist Association, a group that describes itself as a “non-profit organization that advocates to uphold the founding principle of separation of church and state.” They contend that the presence of the cross on government land and the state’s maintenance of the cross violate the Constitution’s establishment clause, and they asked a federal district court to order the state to either remove the cross or alter the monument so that it is no longer in the form of a cross.

The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ plea. In its view, the state’s involvement with the cross had less to do with religion than with maintaining traffic safety and honoring veterans.

The challengers appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which reversed. Using the Lemon test, the court of appeals ruled that the cross violates the establishment clause because it “has the primary effect of endorsing religion and excessively entangles the government in religion.” First, the court of appeals explained, it was impossible to “ignore the fact that for thousands of years the Latin cross has represented Christianity.” The cross is part of a larger park that includes other war memorials, but the cross is so much larger and more prominent than the other war memorials that “the historical meaning and physical setting of the Cross overshadows its secular elements.” Therefore, the court of appeals concluded, the average citizen “would fairly understand the Cross to have the primary effect of endorsing religion.”

The court of appeals found that the cross also violated another prong of the Lemon test: The cross creates “excessive entanglement” with religion because the state owns and maintains the cross on public property and does so in a way that suggests that the state “either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both.”

Both the American Legion (which entered the case to defend the cross) and the state asked the Supreme Court to review the 4th Circuit’s ruling. They warned that allowing the lower court’s decision to stand would endanger not only the Bladensburg cross, but other war memorials as well – including two crosses commemorating World War I at Arlington National Cemetery – and the American Legion lamented what it described as the “confused state of this Court’s Establishment Clause jurisprudence.” Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Atlanta characterized the court’s establishment clause cases as a “hot mess” even as it concluded that the presence of a cross in a Florida park violates the Constitution. On November 2, the justices announced that they would take up the case.

The state points to the Supreme Court’s decision in Van Orden, and in particular Breyer’s concurring opinion, as confirmation that the cross does not violate the Constitution. The cross was constructed for a “wholly secular” purpose, the state contends: When you look at its “dedications, its inscriptions, its context, and nearly a century of practice,” it becomes “abundantly clear that this monument was erected to serve—and, for 93 years, has served—as a secular commemoration of American servicemen in World War I.”

The American Legion argues that all of the Supreme Court’s establishment clause tests have a common theme that focuses on “the importance of historical tradition and an objective assessment of the government’s reasons for putting up the display” – a standard that the cross can clearly pass. But the Legion urges the justices to go further and adopt a less stringent test that focuses on whether a religious display is consistent with the country’s historical traditions; if it is, there would be no violation of the establishment clause as long as the government is not “exploiting the tradition to coerce religious belief or observance by” people who are not religious.

Defending the 4th Circuit’s ruling, the challengers argue that the cross at the center of this case “sends a much stronger message of Christian favoritism” than a privately donated creche in a courthouse, which the Supreme Court has already deemed unconstitutional.

In the challengers’ eyes, the 4th Circuit’s decision is squarely in line with the Supreme Court’s other cases on religion because the entire picture, history, and context of this cross all point to the cross being an endorsement of Christianity, rather than conveying a secular message.

What the American Legion is really asking the Supreme Court to do, the challengers stress, is to “overturn decades of Establishment Clause jurisprudence in favor of a” rule that would allow religious displays as long as the government isn’t trying to coerce or convert anyone. But the court can stick with a much simpler rule, the challengers tell the justices: There is general agreement that the government violates the Constitution when it uses religious symbolism that “has the effect of endorsing religious beliefs, and the effect of the government’s use of religious symbolism depends on its context.”

When the justices hear oral argument and then decide the case, there are two different things to watch for. The first, obviously, is whether the cross will survive, or whether the court will instead find that it is unconstitutional. The second question is how broadly the justices will rule. Will they issue a narrow opinion that resolves this case and future cases that are very similar, but without saying much more? Or will they instead issue a more comprehensive decision that provides more extensive guidance about when religious symbols are permitted in the public sphere, possibly even jettisoning their old establishment clause rules in favor of a new rule, as the American Legion as suggested? Given Chief Justice John Roberts’ penchant for “judicial minimalism” generally and what seems to be a recent effort by the court to try to avoid more controversial issues, a narrower opinion seems more likely, but we’ll have a better idea soon enough.

* * *

Past cases linked to in this post:

Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677 (2005)

[Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in this case. The author of this post, however, is not affiliated with the firm.]

The post Argument preview: Justices to consider constitutionality of cross-shaped war memorial on public land appeared first on SCOTUSblog.

from Law https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/02/argument-preview-justices-to-consider-constitutionality-of-cross-shaped-war-memorial-on-public-land/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

#law #justice

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stemplane83 · 2 years

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Golden State Warriors Legacy Nft Collection

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The NFT market OpenSea has guidelines in opposition to plagiarism and deepfakes (which it labels as non-consensual intimate imagery). Some artists have criticized OpenSea's current efforts to deal to plagiarism saying they are gradual to answer takedown requests and are subject to help scams from users who declare to be representatives from the platform. Other argue that there is currently a scarcity of market incentive for NFT marketplaces to crack down on plagiarism. There have been instances of artists having their work bought by others as an NFT, without permission. After the artist Qing Han died in 2020, her id was assumed by a fraudster and a selection of her works became available for buy as NFTs. Similarly, a vendor posing as Banksy succeeded in selling an NFT supposedly made by the artist for $336,000 in 2021; with the vendor on this case refunding the money after the case drew media consideration. My studio space would most likely remind you of an elementary faculty art classroom. There are pastels, pens, watercolors and paint brushes as far as the attention can see. When I’ve completed an asset on paper, I scan it after which use Adobe Photoshop to isolate the asset. Fans with $5,000 going spare for the NFT, “stash box”, model of the album had been rewarded with three bonus tracks. For one other NFT-related article, you can even check the 5 top-selling NFT artists in 2021. Futuristic illustrations have all the time had a particular place within the heart of artwork collectors. Bored Ape Yacht Club features various expressions of a "bored" primate. KYC is a requirement for nearly all financial institutions, from banks to stock brokerages to cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s used to forestall criminality like money laundering, funding of terrorism, and tax evasion. NFTs aren’t presently regulated by KYC, but with the market growing fast, and considerations about scams and cash laundering, many suspect they soon shall be. A key component of creating the NFT space fairer is proof of personhood . As the name suggests, PoP means every participant is required to prove they’re a real person. The public minting will begin on Feb 22 at 4pm ET and continue until everyone sees what female vampire they've minted six days later. OneOf has been featured in articles byFast Company,Rolling Stone,Variety,Billboard,Forbes,Uproxx,EngadgetandBloomberg. Orca is the best, fastest, and most user-friendly AMM and aggregator on Solana. As a staff with deep information of each crypto and human-centered design, we’re on a mission to create the best experiences in DeFi. 7,777 NFT characters created from 777 distinctive hand-drawn traits. Meta-Jesus is an NFT art project of 3333 items with 140 trait variations in 7 traits. Former Bored Ape Yacht Club artist Mig has released their second Sneaky Vampire NFT collection, comprised of 12,345 female vampires, Vantage learned from a press launch. Mig released his first Sneaky Vampire collection in September final 12 months. The Chicago Blackhawks today announced the team's first officially licensed Non-Fungible Token Collection comprised of 12 hockey character playing cards and 2,000 digital tickets all inspired by retro 8-bit gaming graphics. Drop 2 and three will embody the rarer diamond tier Elemental token that comes with guaranteed “VIP golden ticket,” and the coveted “OneOf” tier, a single edition token obtainable for auction solely. Made with ❤️ for the Decentralized World, NFT Drops Calendar is an impartial NFT database and isn't affiliated with any NFT project or company. One artist makes use of cartoon dogs, one other turns the co-founders into motion heroes, and the last playing cards in the collection are probably the most avant-garde. Several collectors are actually reselling their NFTs for as low as $71. Since the collection debuted on Nifty Gateway, the typical sales price is $83. There are 2,126 unique house owners of DistroKid NFTs, however solely 2.38% of the collection is currently for sale. The 2017 on-line game CryptoKitties was monetized by promoting tradable cat NFTs, and its success introduced some public attention to NFTs. The term "NFT" only gained foreign money with the ERC-721 standard, first proposed in 2017 through the Ethereum GitHub, following the launch of assorted NFT initiatives that year. The normal coincided with the launch of a quantity of NFT initiatives, together with Curio Cards, CryptoPunks and uncommon Pepe trading cards. It included works from over forty unimaginable, global artists spanning a quantity of disciplines. Martha is endlessly increasing her enterprise ventures, with every little thing from CBD products to a brand new frozen meals line. This includes a collection of digital collectibles on her just-debuted site, FRESH Mint. To bring this project to life, our founder partnered with all kinds of acclaimed designers, photographers, artists, and creators in the world of cryptocurrency. Robert Mondavi Winery has solid a primary of its kind partnership with French luxurious porcelain house Bernardaud to revolutionize the world of wine amassing and authentication. Ultimately although, the aim is to provide talented individuals cash for sharing their talent with the No Fun Toad neighborhood and the world at giant. The gross sales of Messi’s limited edition of authenticated NFTs’ reached $3.4M on the first day, breaking yet another report for the Argentinian star – the most expensive sports activities NFT in history. The first launch will be a Lil Nas X NFT and will happen on October 6th on what TikTok is looking its devoted "drop website" that can serve as a marketplace for TikTok creator NFTs. NFT - “non-fungible tokens” - implies an item, often a digital art work, is unique, can't be substituted, and isn't interchangeable. (Adweek’s Mark Stenberg has a primer on NFTs here.) They could be shared, which serves to doubtlessly improve their value for the rationale that viral consideration signifies demand. The NFTs were bought from impartial artists on Foundation, a platform for reside auctions of digital artwork and NFTs, using cryptocurrency. The winner of the auction may even be giving a bodily duplicate of the ring as properly as VIP entry to a apply, a jersey and more. Fans can also try to get hold of one of the 16 minted versions of the team's 2018 Stanley Cup banner. If CryptoPunks kicked off the NFT movement, CryptoKitties was the first project that attracted mainstream attention. "The current structure is now not match for the aim with the event of cross-border digital market actions," said the chairman of France's markets watchdog AMF. Jamie Redman is the News Lead at Bitcoin.com News and a financial tech journalist dwelling in Florida. Redman has been an energetic member of the cryptocurrency group since 2011. He has a ardour for Bitcoin, open-source code, and decentralized applications. The Gold Glass Dress NFT designed by Dolce & Gabbana and constructed by UNXD, a digital market. Original Pinhead actor Doug Bradley is also lending his support to the gathering, together with precise voice overs recorded specifically for the collection that shall be added to ultra-rare editions of the NFTs. As with Lil Nas, TikTok has paired each creator with an NFT artist for his or her contribution to the collection, as well as enlisting the NFT expertise of Grimes to help with inventive course. The blockchain verifies that the item is an unique, distinctive item that can’t be duplicated, hence the “non-fungible” part of the time period. The Rams became the second group in NFL historical past to achieve a Super Bowl played in their own stadium. Aaron Donald led a formidable protection, while former Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford steered the offense. Stafford was one of many stars acquired with the aim of taking half in for a championship at SoFi Stadium. Gap will debut its first collection of non-fungible tokens this week. Like some retail rivals, the brand’s NFTs will embrace a gaming component to encourage clients to proceed to have interaction. The restricted collection will feature work from Brandon Sines, the New York-based artist behind Frank Ape illustrations. Below is a continually-updated list of latest NFTs and how a wide range of brands—even the "Puppy Bowl"—are adopting them in their advertising in 2022. The fee for deploying a wise contract with NiftyKit is $9.99 on the time of writing this article. This includes an ERC721 sensible contract that might be tied to your MetaMask pockets that you simply connected with NiftyKit. The smart contract is then additionally available for visibility on marketplaces like OpenSea. To summarize, it's potential to deploy a sensible contract for your NFT collection without prior expertise in blockchain.

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