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chronically-ghosted · 2 months

Text

you got your claws in me honey, like a tiger in love

rating: E for Explicit! 18+

word count: 8K

pairing: dieter bravo x f!reader

summary: you arrive at your estranged uncle's door. what else is there to do but catch up over grilled cheese? well, if you have anything to say about it, you might end up doing a bit more.

warnings: dbf!dieter, grilled cheese as a way to guilt trip your dad's best friend/uncle into fucking you, drug use (weed), raising arizona that comes with its own warning, flirting with someone twice your age, no smut — that’s what part 2 is for, reminiscing, a cliffhanger? 👀

a/n: the original fic came out MONTHS before the mcu rumors, so either i have precognition, or the apocalypse is becoming predicable. happy valentine's day you filthy animals because nothing says romance like porking your dad's best friend

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From the voicemail of Mr. Paul Landeau, official Hollywood talent manager and agent to one Mr. Dieter Bravo . . .

Tuesday, 6:43PM

No, I’m not doing it. I’m not.

There has to be something else out there. Look, I know Fire Monsters: A Cliff Beasts story didn’t do as well as we hoped, but Reddit says it could be a cult classic so why don’t you focus on making that happen, okay? Instead of giving me shit roles like this. I’m not doing it.

– the sound of a door opening and the phone being shuffled – – a zipper rips – – liquid pouring –

We fucking talked about this, man. I told you I needed something different, something new. Tiktok is just reels of me screaming and dying – it’s fucking bullshit –

– more liquid –

I’m done playing the fucking bad guy. I’m not signing any more headless action figures for those little snot-nosed, little fuckers in line. I’m not asking to sign their moms’ tits, either – okay, maybe – but Jesus Christ, Paul, what you sent over is, like, the opposite of where I need to be. It’s for little teeny boppers with one or two B horror movies under their belt to finally break out into the mainstream – or where actors over forty go to cash in an easy paycheck. And yes, I fucking know we need something, but fuck – is this really all there is?

– liquid stops pouring – – zipper rips – – the sound of a toilet flushing –

Don’t fucking call me back, Paul, unless you’ve got something. Something real.

Tuesday, 8:23PM

OW! Motherf–

– a skillet clattering –

Okay – fuck, that hurts – okay, Paul, what about this? It came to me in the bathroom. Remember Jack from the Christmas party at the studio’s place? So, he’s got those two Sundance films, right, but they’re in Spanish, so not appealing to an American audience. Nicki told me that he’s thinking about doing another project, one with a wider appeal, and I’m thinking I should totally give him a call. I think we could vibe. I really liked his stuff – reminded me of my old small town, fucking around with the neighbor kids, you know? Kinda hometown hero sort of thing.

– sharp inhale then a cough –

It’s not my usual thing, but I think we should give it a try. Gimme a call.

Oh, do you know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich? Been craving one but I think I might burn down my house if I try again and UberEats doesn’t reach the good places further south. Oh, fuck, wait –

Hey Google, how do you make a fucking excellent grilled cheese?

Tuesday, 9:21PM

No, fucking–

Siri – how.do.you.treat.a.burn?

Calling. . . Burger King . . .

No! Fuck!

Tuesday, 10:49PM

Paul-y! Baby! Paul-ito!

Don’t worry. I got an idea that’s going to make us a million dollars.

A shop that makes only grilled cheese. But like – fancy grilled cheese. What do the kids fucking call it, ah – boogie – yeah, boogie grilled cheese. Like gouda and white cheddar, and butter churned by blind nuns or some shit. Tomato soups that have been blessed by the Dalai Lama.

Big sign out front that says, Vegans Can Eat Shit.

They’ll eat it up.

Fuck yeah, they will.

– silence for three minutes and sixteen seconds –

Fuck acting, man. Fuck this place.

And fuck this fucking cheese that keeps burning – goddamn it!

Tuesday, 11:52PM

Paul, why don’t we hang out anymore?

When I got started, we hung out all the time, man.

Hot dogs on the Santa Monica pier. Beer in the Pacific Ocean.

You showed me all the cool spots that no one else in LA knew about. You got me my first bump and my first stripper. God, that was fucking wild, man, you remember? I was so nervous I thought I was going to throw up. Did I ever tell you that before? Coke probably didn’t help a kid from a small town in South Cali, but – fuck, it made me feel better. Like I could get my shit together if I really tried.

What, are you too good for me now – is that it? Am I not good enough for you, huh?

Look, I’ve got Raising Arizona on right now, so why don’t you come over with a six pack –

Oh, shit, that’s right. You got a fucking family now.

Not a good influence, ol’ Dee.

Not a good –

Wednesday, 1:05AM

Fine, Paul. Fine.

I’ll play Mr. Fantastic in the Fantastic Four reboot.

Dieter’s thumb brushes the red End Call button and tosses his phone onto the kitchen island with a growl. He can feel himself coming down from the bump earlier – a thing he absolutely did not want to happen – and he shoves his palms into his eye sockets.

There is more coke upstairs, but that would require him to walk through his very long hallways to get there. Very long, and dark, and empty hallways.

He should have asked Maria to stay once she was done with the laundry. He would have done it right too – big bowl of popcorn, fully dressed, with a sign around his neck that said, I promise I’m not trying to sleep with you.

He is becoming increasingly aware of how many erratic voicemails he just left for his agent, aware that behavior like that was libel to get him a sit down in Paul’s office with all the blinds and windows closed, Paul’s narrow face serious and using Concerned Emotion #5, as he asks, “do we need to go back to rehab, Dieter?”

We.

There once was a “we”, now there was just “he” – in a house with seven bedrooms and a pool that could fit a sixteen wheeler in it.

And TWO kitchens – why the fuck did he think he needed two kitchens –

Well, he knew he didn’t need two, but it would have been cool to show them off to someone – If there was anyone to show them off to . . .

Fuck this downer mood.

Dieter snatches up his phone again, and the movement brings up his latest apps. UberEats is the second one. He taps in a few keywords, blatantly ignoring his latest call list.

Goddamn Burger King . . .

The front doorbell rings.

Dieter frowns, pulling the screen closer under his big nose. Now, he knows he is high and he knows he should be wearing his glasses when reading but there’s no fucking way . . .

He goes out of the kitchen, the room still smelling of burnt cheese with the cast iron skillet in the sink and a black husk sticking to its bottom. He goes left, then right, his robe tightly wrapped around him as if he is some huffy housewife, then down a hall and across the marble entrance way – fuming – why is this house so goddamn huge – who thought this was a good idea?

And so he wrenches open the front door – to a girl, not holding a Burger King bag. No, she’s got a roller suitcase behind her, bright blue, and she and the case are dripping wet. Like, just sprayed with a hose kind of wet and her big bottom lip is trembling. Behind her, the sky pukes buckets of rain, groaning with thunder.

Now, he likes his call girls (he always thought it was classier to call them that) a little more . . . vampy than this, but hell, he had been turned on by much less than this— than her with her big eyes, fat droplets rolling off her lashes, flushed cheeks – and oh, shit, her shirt is totally see-through – is that purple, he feels the back of his mouth flush with spit – wow, is this Paul’s way of apology because –

“Uncle Dee?”

And he’s mentally shoving himself back into his pants because no one in years has called him that and that was a very different time in place, when he was a completely different person and if this girl is the person he thinks it is, then – Jesus Christ, he’s bound and gagged straight for hell –

He squeaks out your name and you smile, sort of grimace, at him and wave.

“Yep, it’s me. Been awhile, right?” You finally give into the mortification of your stupid plan and you scrunch up your face, your hand wrapped around your elbow. “Look, I’m so sorry, this is too weird. I don’t have your number, but I panicked when my flight got canceled and my phone’s dead and you’re the only person I know in LA and –,”

“No, no – you’re fine – sorry–,” Dieter blinks before stepping back and letting you through. You sigh in relief and yank your baby blue suitcase over the threshold as you walk in, dripping water everywhere. “Sorry, it’s been a weird night and for, like, two seconds, I thought . . . nevermind . . .”

I thought you were a fucking ghost.

You bite the corner of your lip, glancing at him, knowing it was probably unwise to piss off your one chance at not sleeping on the ground tonight — or if what you were about to say would piss him off in the first place.

“Yeah, well, it’s been eleven years since we last saw you, Uncle Dee.”

Early on in his career, he wanted to build up rep as not only an actor but a real tough guy, so he asked if he could do some stunts for an old cop show. For all his bravado, he ended up getting a real round-house kick to the face and it sent him reeling.

This feels a little bit like that.

“No way, it can’t have been that long. Besides, I know I left my number with your dad or your grandma before I left and —,”

His throat closes up when very old guilt washes over him. It’s intensified when you give him an uncomfortable look.

“So your dad didn’t give you my number then.”

It’s not a question. You shake your head. You don’t tell him that your dad tried to call years ago and got a busy tone for the first few, and then a few years after that, was brusquely informed the line had been disconnected.

He chews on his lip.

You try to smile at him again but then another shiver takes hold of you and Dieter grimaces. “Shit, sorry, one second. I think this closet down here has towels.”

He all but sprint-walks down one of the many halls branching off from the entrance, the ends of his robes flapping. You hear the creak of doors, several, as he digs around in the walls.

“Why do I have so many fucking linens?” You hear him grumble and you smile to yourself. You feel like you need to wring your hair out but wouldn’t dare move from the spot where he left you.

After a thump and more grumbling, he comes back, rubbing the back of his head, but holding out a giant lime green towel. In the light, you can see the dark circles under his eyes when you take the towel and immediately go to stop your hair from dripping on the marble.

His brain is waffling, ping ponging, between his memories and what is standing right in front of him. This? This is the little girl, not his literal blood relative, but she’s Enrico’s kid – Enrico, a slugger and one hell of a outfielder since he was eight years old, whose mom made enchiladas like nobody else in the goddamn world – Enrico, whose house became like a second home, Ricky's family a better family than his own – this is the same girl who hoarded Skittles like a fiend, the same one who he took to the pool on the weekends in the summer, and the zoo during Thanksgiving break? This little girl –

– is the same girl who is all legs under damp denim, eyes that could make Cleopatra fly into a jealous rage, and a fucking rockstar smile?

And, holy shit, those tits –

Dude, you cannot be checking her out. Dig deep and fight your fucking caveman brain. You’ve fucked up a lot in your life and you cannot do that right now. You cannot do that to Enrico.

You cannot do that to her.

You notice him grimace as he squints into the light of the chandelier above you both. “So, uh, not that I mind, but, uh, what are you doing here? I mean –,”

You laugh and it seems to echo in the empty house. “No, that’s a fair question. I was on a flight back from looking at colleges out east and my flight got grounded in LAX because of the storm. I absolutely don’t have enough money to stay in a hotel or rent a car and drive back home, so I needed a place to crash and call my sister to send me some money. And my stupid driver didn’t want to get flagged for harassing a celebrity, so he dropped me off at the corner, hence . . .”

You wave at yourself and inside his slippers, his toes curl, respectfully not looking at your damp legs and a definitely purple bra visible through your shirt.

Your mouth suddenly capsizes. “Shit, is that okay, if I stay here for a night? I didn’t even think - I - I’m not . . . interrupting anything, am I?”

Dieter chuckles, your expression undeniably cute, and he shoves his hands into the pockets of his robe.

“Nah. Not unless you call making the worst grilled cheese imaginable a party.”

At that moment, your stomach chooses to make the most aggressive growl in your entire life and you flush deeper than the cold outside.

“Apparently someone thinks that’s a good idea,” you chuckle weakly, horrified that your body is actively trying to sabotage a normal conversation.

Did it matter that you had posters of him in your bedroom when you were thirteen? That you went to midnight releases of every one of his movies?

No. Not at all.

“I got some food, mostly leftovers.” He worries at his lip as he realizes the only thing by way of something green in his fridge is the jar of olives he got for martinis. Even then, he has a sneaking suspicion he replaced the olive juice with vodka, but the memory of that night is entirely butchered. “But, uh, I’m sure we can find something.”

You smile at him. “Actually, grilled cheese sounds great.”

“Only if you do it.” He smiles, honestly, when you laugh. “What? Don’t laugh — I’m serious. I can’t make a sandwich to save my fucking life.”

“Pretty sure I can manage two slices of bread and cheese.”

His eyebrows jump as his lips press themselves together and you watch the thumb-sized bare spot on his beard twitch.

“Yeah, that’s what you think and then your goddamn kitchen is on fire.”

“Lemme change, do some rocket surgery and brain science, and then I’ll attempt to crack this grilled cheese thing.”

“Okay, but remember we do have Chinese leftovers and I can definitely crush a microwave. This way.”

You follow him through the halls, his shoulders loosening underneath the off-green fuzz, and you try and not to stare at the immaculately beautiful walls and expansive, clean floors, so your eyes wander, and then you’re trying not to stare at the immaculately beautiful man in front of you.

You push away the thought that this house looks nothing like you’d expect someone like Dieter to have, as he leads you to the kitchen — all black and chrome and steel, like what a Norwegian serial killer would have — and nods to a door towards the opposite wall. He’s digging around for the last slices of white bread when he says,

“Bathroom’s down there. I’ll get it all ready, but I’m leaving it up to you. Can’t afford to lose another pan.”

Your eyes finally drift down from the bare walls, unsure if you should be offended that nothing of the family back home is here, or accept that there was just nothing personal anywhere. You smile gently at him and nod in thanks.

He watches you go, that bright blue suitcase flashing as loud as a tornado siren, and he shakes his head. God, he needs a drink but drinking also makes him horny and he needs every mental facility available to him if he wis going to make it through this night with his sanity still intact.

Had it really been eleven years? He always meant to call up Enrico and the old neighborhood gang. He probably forgot about that last fight anyway – even if Dieter hadn’t – even if it wasn’t more than a decade ago. Mama Gonzales always said there’d be a place for him, even after his own father said acting was for maricos and drag queens. It always hurt more when the postcards from the Gonzales family stopped coming than when Mom stopped calling. And he always meant to send back a proper return address when he moved out of that crappy loft after his first real movie premiere but that was the 90s, and much of the 90s was spent between working shit jobs and drooling on the floors of rave warehouses. It wasn’t them specifically he didn’t want to see him like that, but anyone. Anyone who knew him before Dieter Bravo.

Certainly not anyone who called him Uncle Dee —

Something flashes in the corner of his eye and he realizes he’s always fucking hated the fact that the a) the back of his house is just one big window and b) he never bothered to put in curtains. Because, the thing with windows is they reflect things — things like his pseudo-niece taking her top off in his guest bathroom. Reflected and in full color right across his kitchen island like the sexiest hologram that will haunt his fucking wet dreams until the day hell freezes over.

Yep, that’s definitely your hips, your ribs, and okay—

Nope. Absolutely not.

Dieter’s knees give out and he crouches (more like slumps) to the floor behind the island, his palms so far in his eye sockets he can only see stars.

Yeah, only stars. Focus on the stars, not the image of the curve of your gorgeous tits that’s running around his brain like a child with scissors and a Thanatos instinct off the fucking charts.

Fuck, and he just wanted to get high and watch Nicholas Cage in a mullet.

“Hey, I’m done. Dee, you still here?”

He stifles a groan and stands up. You smile at him, the wet jeans and agonizing white tank top gone, only to be replaced by a black Fleetwood Mac tshirt and — fuck, where are your pants?

You lower the handle to your suitcase and go to stow by the bathroom door. And that’s when he realizes you are actually wearing pants, black shorts that are practically hidden by the oversized t-shirt and are comically, hilariously, painfully small. He can’t actually see the curve of your ass as you walk around the side of the island but he is absolutely not going to let his gaze linger long enough to confirm.

He clears his throat as you come to stand beside him. He gestures to the four pieces of white bread and a stack of Crafts American cheese.

“H-h-have —,” he clears his throat again and his forebearers groan collectively in embarrassment. “Have at it.”

You smile and tuck your hair over your ear before picking up the knife.

“D’you have mayonnaise? Butter?”

No amount of irredeemable hotness can distract him from that. “What? What do you need mayonnaise for? It’s grilled cheese.”

You cluck your tongue, an eyebrow raised. “Brain science and rocket surgery, remember? Don’t question the master.”

He can’t help but chuckle as he goes to his steel monolith of a fridge.

“Jeez, sorry, I asked,” he grumbles playfully.

He comes back with an (thankfully) unexpired jar and tub of butter and you get to work. Silence stretches a bit too long, something Dieter has never been good with, especially with beautiful women. He loves running his mouth and sometimes he's found that the women liked it too. He resigns himself to sit across from you at the island, watching you spread mayonnaise on both sides of the bread.

“So, uh, how are the folks? How’s your, uh, dad?”

You nod slowly and even though he hasn’t been around in eleven years to pick up on all your tells, he swears your hackles go up.

“Fine. All good. Dad’s still at the car repair shop — owns it now, actually. Makes decent money, I guess.”

“You guess?” He hadn’t made it his life’s work to mimic the human condition to not recognize cagey language.

You glance at him briefly before flipping over the last piece of bread and dropping a dollop of mayonnaise on top.

“Yeah. I — uh, we haven’t — I actually haven’t talked to them in a while. Though if I had, I probably wouldn’t be here right now.” You sneak another glance, this one ladened with a smile that had a secret curled up in its corners. “Serves me right, probably.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

He can’t help but return the smile, one of a familiarity he hasn’t earned yet. You were smiling at him as if you two had years of secrets together, memories and inside jokes that were for the pair of you alone. For the life of him and all the water in his ridiculous pool, he couldn’t fathom why you were being so nice to him. Letting him off the hook. It had been eleven fucking years after all. There are a lot of things he takes guilt free from the world. Your fucking star-eyed smile is not one of them.

So, he lets you off the hook. He doesn’t push it. If you don’t want to talk about your folks, he is happy to chatter aimlessly about something else. But, his brain winds up, what happened that caused you to fall out with your parents? Enrico, even back then, had been a hard ass, with you and your brothers. Always made sure to walk the straight and narrow. Detested drugs, always shined his shoes, thought tattoos were the devil, never kissed a girl on the first date —

And here you are, making fucking mooneyes at his daughter.

Well, one thing was for sure, he muses, something warm spreading in his gut, you are nothing like your daddy.

The hiss of the bread hitting the hot butter in a pan (you didn’t even need to ask where another pan was, you just helped yourself to his cabinets and he couldn’t have been more proud) jerks him out of his daze and he realizes that annoying silence has set in again.

“So, colleges, huh? Anything in particular spark interest?”

You nod excitedly as he found a topic that made you glow. Clearly, no one had asked about your interests in a long time.

“Yeah, actually. Emerson in Boston was amazing. I loved the city, but not sure I’d survive the winter. Swarthmore sounds good, Amherst too, but again, cold.” You grin sheepishly and flip the sandwiches, pressing the spatula (he didn’t even know he owned one of those) into the bread, making the butter sizzle and the air fill with a smell that can only be described as mouth-watering.

“It’ll be a nightmare, taking out loans for those places, but fuck, I think I’d be really happy there.”

He leans against the counter, facing you with crossed arms. He smiles a smile that he knows doesn’t reach his eyes.

“What, your folks wouldn’t pay for it? Or at least help out?”

Something sharp flashes in your eyes, like a rabbit catching the scent of a predator, before you shrug your shoulders flippantly. A well-worn deflection, he notes, right next to the place where he’s got all the places you mentioned are about as far away from California as possible. If you had mentioned somewhere in Europe, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Nah. I wouldn’t let them. Don’t want them thinking they get input into my life because they hold the purse strings over my head.” You turn off the stove and he moves to get the plates out from the cabinets – something to contribute as you made him a better meal than he’s had in ages.

“So, uh, we eat in there?” You glance down the hall to the eerily clean dining room, a place he’s pretty sure he’s never once set foot in after three years of living in this goddamn mansion.

He chuckles and shakes his head. “C’mon, I already have a movie picked out.”

You follow him, plates hot, down carpeted stairs to clearly the only room in the house that Dieter actually lives in. The lights down here are low, much more bearable than the white spotlights of the kitchen. Against one wall, there’s a fully stocked bar, with most of the alcohol halfway empty and costing a fortune. Across from the stairs is a massive record collection, going up to the ceiling, next to a gorgeous old record player — all wood and black vinyl — with big, plushy earphones curled up on a black leather recliner.

But the star of the show is the wall-to-ceiling television, with a brown, mouse-soft leather sofa that wraps like a giddy, up-turned grin in front of it.

And of course, in between the superstar television and the cozy couch, is a low glass table where he had snorted lines of coke more times he could count and where a virgin joint sits, unsmoked and tempting.

Dieter flushes as though he’d been caught by his parents with his pants down around his ankles.

“Fuck, sorry–,” he rushes over, the plate clattering with the glass, and he reaches for the joint, ready to squish it into his pocket when–

You laugh. “Relax, Dee, I know what a joint is. In fact, we are very well acquainted.”

You fold yourself into the couch, legs crossed, grinning at him as you bite into your sandwich.

He swallows, unclenching slightly as he sits down next to you. He watches you eat for a moment, trying to think of something cool to say.

“Sounds like I’ve missed my calling as the fun uncle, getting you high for the first time and all that.”

You snort and swallow your mouthful. “Yeah, by like two fucking years.”

“Oh, what a fucking lifetime. You poor thing,” he says, pouting dramatically and you giggle again, bumping into his shoulder. It sends his sanity knocking around in his brain.

You don’t notice, though, your eyes falling to the joint in the small ceramic bowl. The smile slides from your face.

“Well, you might have missed my first joint, but I’d be more than happy to take this one as my next.”

His eyebrows practically bounce off his forehead. “You’re serious?”

Your eyes slide away from the joint to his, something distractingly dark hiding there. “I mean, if the parties on your Instagram are anything to go by . . . And, well, when in Rome . . .”

You trail off, smirking, gesturing around you as if you had any idea the levels of debauchery that were obtained in this very room. Come to think of it, he halfway considers picking you up off the couch and putting a towel down underneath your perfect ass.

This is how it went sometimes, with the slower hook ups. No wet clothes, or grilled cheese, or bringing up family trauma — but initial touches, curling smiles, and then drugs. Always drugs. As if there needed to be another hand that tore off the cap of the pressurized, fizzy soda bottle. He’d play music then, for them, to show off his vinyl collection and have a plausible reason to rub his dick between their ass cheeks while dancing slowly to something croon-y from the seventies.

Not that any of that would be happening with you.

He wasn’t a complete monster after all.

With a playful grin that he had mastered over many press junkets, he snatches up the joint and lighter, and presents both to you in the flat of his hand.

“First hit goes to you, since you were so kind to make dinner for an old fuck like me.”

You snort and put your plate onto the table, wiping your hands free of crumbs on your black shirt.

“Such a gentleman.”

With deft and practiced hands, you take the joint between your index finger and your thumb, and sparking the lighter, brought the flame to your lips.

Just for one second, one goddamn second, he swears he saw The Look reflected in your eyes. He glances away, his cock fluttering awake like goddamn Lassy hearing the calls of another well-begotten child. He picks up his own plate.

“Hardly. It was all a ploy to get you to admit you follow me on Instagram.”

You burst out coughing, smoke chugging from your nose and mouth. “Dieter!”

He cackles, his tongue between his teeth, as you shove him away from you — do not think about her fingers clenched around your bicep — try to sit up and inhale again. You hang your head and groan.

“Fuck, I can’t believe I said that.”

“Yeah, and for that, I get two puffs,” he says out of the corner of his mouth, the rest of it full of the most perfectly cooked grilled cheese sandwich he’d ever had. He finishes chewing and swallows. “Hand it over, princess.”

You hand over the lighter and the joint, the paper slightly greasy from your fingers, leaning back dramatically into one of the many plushy cup holder seats spread out along the very long couch.

He chuckles devilishly again, far too satisfied, as he lights up and leans back into the cushions.

“And, as gesture of goodwill, I’ll admit that’s a good fucking grilled cheese.”

Your eyes snap open and a wide grin splits your face. “Hell yes! Mayonnaise on both sides, butter on the side with cheese. Best family recipe. Mwah!”

“Fuck, even I know that’s too much cholesterol for me,” he grunts and digs into the cushions, feeling around for the remote.

“Well, that’s not enough cholesterol for me,” you wink as you take the joint from the hand on his thigh, eyes daring you to do something about it. Nowhere near high enough to take the bait, he just narrows his eyes at you as he clicks the button and the entertainment system comes to life with a primordial hum.

“Jesus Christ,” you mutter, eyes wide, as the speakers roar and the lights dim further and the screen glows, “it’s like I’m in a fucking movie theater . . . in space.”

“It’s great, right?” Dieter moans like a loving father over his first child. This thing is his pride and joy, the only thing he could stomach in this goddamn house.

The DVD buffer for Raising Arizona begins and you squeal quietly, sliding onto your back, the joint dangling between your lips.

“No fucking way, I love this movie.”

Dieter stilled. “Really? You do?”

The few times he felt nostalgic for his old life — his old, old life when he was still a kid from nowhere, a nobody, you couldn’t pick him out of a line up of his sweaty, grubby cousins when they were all cobbled together like crooked teeth in front of Abuela Josefina’s television that still had knobs and bunny ears to watch movie after movie of Nicholas Cage reruns. Even with knees in his back, elbows in his ears, Dieter could quote every single line, his heart swelling.

That’s gonna be me some day.

“This movie is from, like, another century,” he mutters as he watches you settle in, something sickening like adoration clawing up in his chest.

“Yeah and it’s great,” you say eagerly, ignoring the way he plucks the joint out of your fingers. “Put it on!”

He resolutely ignores the pinch in his low stomach at your almost whine and presseS the play button with a little more force than necessary. Then, balancing the joint on the ceramic bowl, he sticks his fingers into his robe, pulls out his glasses, and puts them on without a second thought – just as he always did when watching movies.

It is only when he realizes he doesn’t hear you breathing that he realizes what he has done. Slowly he pulls the square glasses off his face and looks at them, feeling as disgusted as the day his doctor put them in his hands.

Near-sighted. Very common. Happens when people as they age.

“Got ‘em–,” his throat closes again, “got ‘em a few years ago. Only have to wear ‘em to see things up close and, uh . . . Well, I think they make me look old as shit.”

He can’t quite look at you, unsure what he’ll see on your face and knowing for sure that he couldn’t stand it if it wasn’t the way you look at him before. If you just would tease him about it, then —

“No,” you say, your voice very soft and small. His heart nearly punches out his throat, his neck nearly snapping in half as his head whips up to look at you. You sit up on your elbows, the darkness of the room cushioning your soft cheeks and muting the glaze in your eyes as you watch him over the bend of your knees.

“Nah,” you say, your nose scrunching, the weight of the high clearly settling into your skin, “they make you look . . . Uh, they’re cute.”

Dieter sucks in the side of his cheek, nodding slowly and sliding the glasses back over his nose. Cute, he could work with that.

“Jeez, would you start the movie already?” You poke his side with your toe. He doesn’t need to look at you to hear the faint blush in your voice.

He turns the volume up and crosses his arms, smiling faintly. You’re warm next to him, he thinks vaguely, his own high finally starting to sink into his bones.

Cute. Definitely not a word he’s going to obsess over.

The movie goes on.

Nicholas Cage is Nicholas Cage with a mullet.

Your laugh is the clattering of bells in his ears and he can’t remember the last time he laughed so hard his sides hurt.

He’s coming up from bent over, knees almost to his chest, laughter nearly popping his ribs, when he realizes your feet are in his lap. The arches of your soles, the delicate bones of your ankles, the long smooth planes that run up to your gorgeous calves—

They are there, in his lap, and you don’t seem to mind. Head turned towards the screen, face bright from laughing, your arm arched back over your head, pressing your chest up — it’s like you meant for them to be there.

It’s just one hand, right? Two at the most. Just putting his hands down where he had them a moment ago. Up and — down.

You don't flinch. His palm is on the arched top of your foot, the other just above your other ankle.

You do smile, but that might have been because of Nicholas Cage raging again.

And then, during another bout of giggles, he clutches your shin bone, wraps his fingers around your heel, and laughs and laughs and laughs.

You wipe the tears away from your eyes, the end credits rolling.

“Fuck, that’s a such a good movie.”

He swallows, swiping quickly under his glasses before taking them off and chucking them onto the table in front.

“You’re fucking right it is,” he says hoarsely, leaning forward and plucking up the last of the joint. He inhales, letting the smoke ease stifle the tears in the corner of his eyes, gulping down a breath before offering it to you.

You take it, distracted, eyes on the credits, the light from the screen glowing on your cheeks.

He presses up under your ankle with his middle finger. “What? You knew what was gonna happen, you’d said you’d seen it before.”

You nodded, still not looking at him.

He goes for a more direct approach. He pinches your calf, and you scowl, the light back in your eyes.

“What are you thinking about?” He asks, a bit sharply. He’s not nearly done having fun with you, not nearly. You take another sip of smoke before setting the joint back on the table.

You huff, settling onto your back, pinching at your nails.

“Just . . . Nothing, it’s stupid.”

Dieter hums. He knows when to let him come to you. He taps the arch of your foot.

“How are you feeling?” His gaze nudges the joint on the table.

You grin. “Really good. Tingly. Warm. Like everything else is a million miles away.”

Just the two of us.

“Enough to tell ol’ Uncle Dee what’s on your mind?”

You roll your eyes and sit up a bit, yanking a pillow behind you.

“Just thinkin’ about the old days, I guess.” You glance up at him from under your eyes. “Not in a bad way. At all. I just . . .”

“What?” If you gave him hell for the last eleven years, then fuck it, he deserved it. He pulls at your ankle. “What?”

With a big sigh, you lean back, something finally breaking and, with it, comes a great big smile.

“Okay, remember when you’d put on those plays with the rest of us kids during those super lame family reunions o-o-or Christmas? Marissa would have everything written out, all the cousins cast and you’d beg her to let you play – fucking – Bear Number 5 or something ridiculous – and she’d fight you on it but she’d relent, always putting on a show of her own – as if a ten year old could be put out like that.” You giggled, biting on your thumb, a sparkling in your eyes that made something in his chest burn.

Yes, he remembers the incredibly stupid fuzzy ears and the bear claw mittens. The fake roaring. TMZ would have a fucking stroke if those pictures of him, baby-faced, were to ever surface online. He smiles at you and basks in the warmth of those memories, his high making them brighter.

“I think it would have crushed her little heart if you didn’t ask,” you said, heavy-lidded eyes on you again. “I know it broke her when you stopped showing up at all.”

His heart actually pinches at that. He knows you’re not scolding him but fuck, maybe he’d feel better if you did. What a fucking idiot he was, for leaving all of that for empty mansions and meals from UberEats and all this fucking gunked up shit in his veins that made him feel older and older every year. Like he was chasing something that was never real in the first place.

“Look, honey,” the pet name is out of his mouth before he can stop it. He’s twisting towards you, both hands under your calves now. “I should have called. Should have made sure that at least you knew where to find me, even if things between your dad and I were fucked.”

“Oh, God, Dee, no. I don’t blame you. I don’t even blame my dad, sometimes. You just were very different people. He’s fine living his life in the same small ass town in the middle of nowhere. But you weren’t. And, fuck . . . I’m not either.”

He frowns. You bite your lip and continue.

“You know, I thought about following you out to Hollywood. Because of those plays. I had the best fucking time doing them and Hollywood didn’t seem so scary . . . with Uncle Dee out here. But, uh, I dunno. I grew up, I guess. Figured I was better at telling stories than performing them. I just knew I didn’t want to end up like my dad. Dying where I lived. Unremembered.”

His gut doubles in on itself. Please don’t say you gave up your dreams because I stopped calling.

“Do you still think about acting?” He asks quietly, trying to fight the faint ringing in his ears.

“Oh God, no,” you wave your hands, dusting away his near-panic that he’d somehow ruined your life. “I really do prefer writing stories, even if they exist only within the pages of a book. Or a really bad pamphlet, once or twice. I tried to continue the plays at home for a few years, after you left and Marissa took up cheerleading and thought she was too old to play with her little cousins anymore. But it just wasn’t the same without her. Or you.”

He realizes all too late that he can feel your pulse under your ankle. Strong. Pounding. Pounding, hard. Like you’re nervous. So struck by the notion that he can feel something so personal of yours, the smoke trapped in his brain lifts only slightly when he catches your eyes looking somewhere you absolutely should not be.

Oh, fuck.

Oh, fuck, he knows that look. You blink at him, then your gaze slowly slides down, down to his crotch, as smoothly you can beneath the weight of the smoke in your brain and he battles between the desire to throw your legs off him or pull you underneath him.

It’s The Look.

Men, women, it didn’t matter. The look was the same.

When the possibility of sex first enters their mind, when that first bloom of lust rushes down their spine and the memory of the physical exertion of fucking – all the panting and the heavy breathing, aching muscles and sweat – comes back, as real as a song stuck in your head. When that spark of imagination threatens to sway from the hypothetical to the actual, it’s a look he knows so fucking well, he might as well be able to carve it from clay, blind-folded.

And you’re giving it to him, right now.

You haven’t really thought about seducing him yet, no, that part hasn’t crossed your mind yet. But you definitely are imagining what his cock would feel like inside you, and you and your imagination and your wide-eyed gaze at his lap all whole-heartedly agreed: that would be a great fucking thing.

You, on your elbows, your heel dangerously close to his half-hard cock, the glaze in your eyes having something to do with what you were so shamelessly picturing, and your short breath having everything to do with what you were so shamelessly picturing.

He was quite sure you were completely unaware of the expression your face was making. Eyes hooded, mouth parted, breath short. Masking your emotions and filthy thoughts is a skill set mastered later in life and perhaps the last time you looked at someone like that, they simply bent you over the nearest surface and railed you till your knees buckled.

What a fucking excellent idea, his libido trilled. Now get off the couch and do something about it. I’m foaming at the fucking mouth here, man.

Dieter silences his inner horny monster, unintentionally squeezing his hand, the one that happens to be wrapped around your calf.

The movement seems to break you out of your dizzying spiral and you blink up at him.

He swallows. With a half smirk on the edge of your lips that you try to not let him see, you take your feet out of his lap, then reach forward, your palm alarmingly high on his thigh as you take the joint from his fingers. Your eyes flash like warning signs.

DANGER. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON. DANGER.

“So, you gonna give me a tour of this place or what?”

End of Part 1 | Next

#dieter bravo #dieter bravo x f!reader #dieter bravo x reader #dieter bravo x you #dieter bravo fanfiction #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters #the bubble fanfic #the bubble 2016 #the bubble fic #the bubble fanfiction

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neitherabaron · 1 year

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Really looking forward to the Chris Pine D&D movie, and I want to share some love for the original attempt at a D&D film from 2000!

Make no mistake, this is a so-bad-it’s-good film, with digital effects that are ropey as hell (especially when you consider that Fellowship of the Ring was already in post-production in 2000), a plot so disjointed it barely exists, (including a final battle that the main characters don’t even really take part in) and staggering levels of camp.

But it’s fucking charming.

Jeremy Irons (Scar from The Lion King) is the villain, an evil archmage who wants to overthrow an (not particularly benevolent anyway) empire with a plan that is never really clear but involves dragons?

Just look at this guy:

:readmore:

He walks about like that for the whole film, waggling his fingers slowly so you know he’s the baddie. He has an office where all the furniture and decor is made of human skulls and bones (a real location; I believe it’s a church somewhere?) and likes swooping his cape about. And Jeremy Irons himself is so bored, it’s hilarious. I seem to remember that in the dvd extras he’s interviewed alongside Gary Gygax and pretty much expresses open disdain for the whole process. He’s a serious actor! This is beneath him!

Elsewhere on the supporting cast, we have a henchman with spiky armour and inexplicably blue lips that are always pouting in a way that seems vaguely sexual; Tom Baker(!) as a wood elf Druid who only exists in order to say something vaguely mystic about dragons for 20 seconds before disappearing forever; and Richard O’Brien in full fey bastard mode as a camp thieves’ guild master who challenges the party to…find a crystal…in a deadly maze filled with traps and puzzles. Like in that game show he used to present…I forget the name. I wanna say Diamond Labyrinth? 😂

As for the party, it’s all delightfully one-note characters. We’ve got a rogue? bard? who goes from being a selfish dickhead to altruistic freedom fighter on a dime. Some dialogue suggests he’s some kind of chosen one, but the plot never actually explores or resolves that. Then there’s a wizard who doesn’t like poor people, an elf fighter who doesn’t like anyone, a dwarf who’s so out of it he barely knows he’s there and is never given any character motivation to explain why he’s travelling with these guys; and some dude called Snails, whose personality is…he’s scared? Basically Shaggy without Scooby.

These guys have to save a princess from Jeremy Irons, who wants to kill her because she has friendly dragons or something. But here’s the great thing: the party have very little reason to want to rescue her (most of them as non-mages are actively oppressed and even enslaved by the ruling mage class of which she is the figurehead) and they never actually *meet* her until the very end of the film, after the evil archmage has pretty much already been defeated - by the princess and her dragons btw, not the party, who basically teleport a magic wand to her and then just watch.

They rescue her because in order for the film to be a film, there needs to be an end goal, even if it’s totally arbitrary. And that’s what I love. Isn’t that just so reflective of a slightly haphazard campaign of Dungeons & Dragons with a party that’s hastily thrown together?

And there are more similarities that compound this feeling of watching some randoms play a home campaign. The plot as I mentioned is disjointed. It’s not a series of events that flows or has any kind of pacing - the movie is a series of 15 minute adventures that don’t really connect to each other or build to the ending. As if the director is a dungeon master arbitrarily stringing together modular adventure sourcebooks! Let’s storm a castle for reasons! Great, now let’s raid a tomb. No, I don’t know why. At one point a party member just bounces from the plot and is never seen again, just like that player in your group who never shows up and you all just move on.

It’s like the writers transcribed a home campaign, warts and all, into script form and then somehow successfully pitched it as a B-movie. Though the Chris Pine version will doubtlessly be a much better movie, Dungeons & Dragons (2000) is perhaps the most accurate possible dramatic presentation of D&D as it actually is in practice for most people playing it. What could be more charming than that?

#dungeons & dragons #D&D

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chxrlie-cox · 9 months

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20Q: Charlie Cox

The man behind the Marvel superhero talks faith, fans and falling in love with co-stars

Playboy, December 2018

Q1 Do you find it’s a struggle to be on a popular Marvel show and at the same time try to maintain your private life?

I think I’ve managed to keep my private life very private. That wasn’t born out of any intense feelings toward privacy, though I think it’s quite normal and natural to want to be able to have a private life. I think it’s partly due to the fact that I don’t engage in social media. I also don’t think I entirely trust myself with social media. I wouldn’t want to have a bad day and end up tweeting something without having really thought it through. You can’t take that back.

Q2 What else don’t you like about social media?

It’s just not in my DNA. Occasionally someone will show me Ryan Reynolds’ handle. He maintains his privacy, but he’s very funny, and he says some interesting stuff. I guess he kind of gets it right; he knows exactly how to manage it. I read an interview years ago—I think it was with Matt Damon, who said that he doesn’t like doing interviews. He tries to do as few interviews as possible, because he doesn’t really want people to get to know who he is as a person; it might make it harder for them to believe him as his character. I remember thinking, That’s a really good point.

Q3 You’ve worked with some superb actors over the years—women in particular, including Claire Danes, Kate Mara and Krysten Ritter. Have you ever fallen in love with a co-star?

Yeah, many times.

Q4 Can you tell us about that?

No! [laughs] Look, that was probably one of the humbling experiences of my 20s—beautiful actresses I’d fallen in love with. Spend enough time googling me and you’ll probably find a list of a few of them.

Q5 Is it complicated to be involved with someone who is also an actor on-set with you?

Yes. You’re in some weird location where you don’t know anyone else. You’re all there, you’re making this movie, and if you’re co-stars, you’re pretending to be in love during the day. It’s not surprising that people confuse reality. Often, I think, when you do have these on-set romances and then you get back to the real world, suddenly you begin to see it wasn’t quite what you thought it was. I think that’s why you get so many actors dating one another: It’s nice to be with somebody who understands what the job is like.

Q6 Your fiancée, Samantha Thomas, is a producer on Iron Fist and Jessica Jones but not Daredevil. How did you guys meet?

Yeah, so she’s a producer. I’m not going to talk about her at all, because one thing I’m very careful about is keeping my family out of it. That’s one of the reasons I’m not on social media. I really don’t think people need to know about my family.

Q7 We’re not going to ask about your sex life, because you’re not going to tell us. So what’s something no one has ever asked you that you wish people would?

I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that question before. The truth is, for someone like me, I don’t feel comfortable talking about myself in any way that’s going to then be put on camera or in print or something. But I recognize that part of my job is to publicize the stuff that I do. I also know that no one is going to read an interview where all I talk about is what it was like to play the character. It’s a balance, and you have to try to figure out what is appropriate and what isn’t.

Q8 Do you imagine sacrificing your career for your family?

Oh, 100 percent. My career is not more important than my family. No, there’s nothing more important than family. Go to any hospital or old people’s home and find me someone who will answer the question “What would you do differently?” with “I wish I’d worked harder.” No. Everyone would say, “I wish I’d made more time for my family.”

Q9 What were you like as a kid?

I’m the youngest of five by 10 years; the closest sibling to me is 10 years older. So I’m a total mistake, effectively. I was an only child and I wasn’t, if that makes sense. My dad was a publisher and my mom worked for him, in London. I was obsessed with sport—football.

Q10 Which team do you root for?

I’m an Arsenal fan. There’s a great line in one of my favorite films, an Argentinean film called The Secret in Their Eyes. They’re looking for a criminal and they say something like “When you’re on the run, you can change everything about you. You can change your look, you can change the way you live, you can change the people you hang out with, you can change anything you need to. The one thing you can never change is your passions.” And they end up finding this guy because they look for him at his football team’s stadium. You can’t choose what you’re passionate about. Sometimes I think, How am I wasting this time and energy and suffering these devastating losses that ruin days—over a game? But you just can’t help it. For my bachelor party, my best friend was like, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I just want to go to the park with my best mates, put sweaters down and play.”

Q11 If you were obsessed with sports when you were growing up, when did your artistic side come out?

If I think about it, it was always there. I always enjoyed engaging in the theater. We did a play at one of my schools when I was seven or eight years old. It was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I played Charlie. I don’t know if we’ve lost the tape, but if you watch it, as well as knowing my own lines, I’m mouthing everyone else’s lines.

Q12 Many people say your breakout role was in Stardust, but we remember you in Casanova with Heath Ledger, which came before Stardust, right?

Yeah, but I don’t think anyone would refer to that as a breakout role. [laughs] What you don’t even remember is that I did a Shakespeare movie, The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons before that. I’ll tell you something: In the first part of the movie, we were all in Luxembourg, and Pacino—I can’t remember how he phrased it, but he said to me, “Do you have a leather jacket?” And I was like, “No.” He was like, “If you’re an actor, you have to have a leather jacket.” Later, my mom and dad asked me, “What do you want for Christmas?” And I said, “A leather jacket.” I still have it. A bunch of my friends are still really jealous of it.

Q13 And who are your friends? Who do you hang out with?

My dear, dear, dear friends aren’t actors. My dear friends are my friends from school. The guy who is going to be my best man, my best friend—our parents were friends before we were born. I’ve become friends with people like Eddie Redmayne, but you know, I don’t see them regularly at all. They’re out doing something, or I’m doing something. Ben Barnes is in Stardust, so we met on that. He’s one of the loveliest humans I’ve ever met—and he’s also been in my life a huge amount because he’s now on one of the Netflix shows that shoot in New York. I found him an apartment in my building, because he lives in Los Angeles. So for two years, he’s been living underneath us.

Q14 What was it like working with Krysten Ritter on The Defenders?

I love Krysten. I can’t say enough good things about her. And she and I, in particular, got along really well. She’s unapologetically who she is, and I learned a lot from that. Not in any way does she apologize for being successful and talented.

Q15 Do you apologize for those things?

I think I do. Maybe it’s being English, but I become horrified by a compliment. You know that feeling when someone says something wonderful to you—“Oh my God, you’re great,” or something like that? My instinct is to say, “No, I’m not.” It’s very difficult for me. I think I was brought up to not be boastful or a show-off, and what I’m learning from people like Krysten is that being authentic and being proud of who you are and what you do is not the same thing as being boastful. So one of my practices as a human is to try and be right-sized, if that makes sense.

Q16 Is it difficult dealing with fans at conventions like Comic-Con, knowing that compliments make you uncomfortable?

I have to say, one of the great things about playing this character is that I’ve had the opportunity to go to loads of conventions and meet loads of fans, and I love that. The fans are so respectful. I haven’t had a bad experience to date. You get to hear what people have to say about the show—people who have no agenda in telling you that they like something. And again, I still manage to lead a very private life. In my day-to-day life I seem to be anonymous.

Q17 The new season of Daredevil keeps getting darker and darker. There are a lot of rumors about the Born Again Daredevil story arcs for the coming seasons. How do you feel about playing Daredevil in an arc that compares him to Jesus?

I guess what your question makes me think of is that this character has his faith: He has a very strong attachment to his God, to his Catholicism. And yet what he engages in as a superhero runs in direct conflict with those ideas. One of the great gifts of playing this character is to enjoy that feeling of being torn in different directions. We play on the idea that the character gives up the Matt Murdock element of his life and starts to engage with the idea that it’s make-believe—that Matt Murdock is the character he’s invented, and the true him, his true authentic self, is Daredevil, which is a dangerous path to tread.

Q18 Do you ever feel as though you’re losing yourself in the role?

No. I know that Sam jokes about when she has to live with Matt Murdock for six months. I know that it can affect your moods, but some of that is because of fatigue and your body aching 24/7. I’ve played this character for so many hours now—it’s not like a movie.

Q19 Daredevil seems to be a very vulnerable character. Do you consider yourself to be a vulnerable person?

The short answer is yes. The truth is in real life, in my heart—and this may sound naive—but I don’t believe violence is the answer to anything. I don’t think there needs to be, or should be in an ideal world, any level of violence to try to solve any problems. One of the things you commented on, which we try to do with the show and I try to do with Matt, is really highlight the moments when the answer is not violence but vulnerability, forgiveness and kindness—characteristics that really, ultimately, hopefully should be what make a superhero a superhero. What makes a superhero is the ability to make the right judgment call in the right moment, the ability to not engage in violence when it’s not absolutely necessary.

Q20 In what ways do you think playing Daredevil has changed you?

One of the things I like about Matt Murdock is that he doesn’t worry about what other people think. He doesn’t feel people’s feelings for them. He’s very comfortable telling them exactly how it is, and he lets other people have their own feelings around it. And that’s something that, at times, makes him seem quite cold. But actually, a very respectful way to live is to not try to influence how people experience a conversation or a challenging difference you might have. I’m trying to take that onboard a little bit as myself, as Charlie—to speak my truth and let people have their experience around that.

#charlie cox #matt murdock #daredevil #interview

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bengiyo · 11 months

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Comfort Films Tag

Rules: List 7 of your comfort movies, then tag 7 people.

Tagged by @callipigio

1 - Shelter (2007)

I often joke around here about how I’ve been watching queer cinema for over half of my life at this point, and it’s easy to recommend this film. This is a coming of age film about a guy who gave up art school to become the primary breadwinner and caregiver for his family. However, when the older brother of his best friend returns to their town to collect himself, our artist and he reconnect and find something special between them. Great use of a young actor in this shores up the caregiving aspects.

I’m probably going to rewatch it now. Because it was produced by Here! TV, you can only legally watch it via a subscription to their platform. I own it on DVD because I fell in love with it and knew I needed to keep it forever.

2 - Big Eden (2000)

Big Eden. Oh, Big Eden. This is the film equivalent of a warm blanket and a tight hug. It’s about an artist named Henry Hart, who is preparing for a big exhibition in New York when he’s called back home to Montana because his uncle has had a stroke. We are greatest with the most queer-friendly town to ever exist as Henry manages his old angst about his straight best friend as the local general store owner also secretly pursues him. It’s absolutely lovely.

3 - The Blues Brothers (1980)

Luna has great taste, because this is one of the best films ever made. What was originally just an SNL bit turns into a fun road film about getting the band back together so that two brothers can raise enough money to pay the back taxes owed by the orphanage they grew up in. We also run over Illinois nazis in this movie and demolish dozens of cop cars. Cab Calloway, James Brown, Carrie Fisher, Chaka Khan, Paul Reubens, and Aretha Franklin are in it. John Candy orders orange whips. This is the kind of film I would watch with my dad any time it was on.

4 - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

This is one of the most man movies ever made. I don’t know any woman who wants to sit down and watch this film, but me and boys will spend an entire afternoon on this film in a heartbeat. The sexual tension between Russell Crowe’s and Paul Bettany’s characters goes unremarked on this website in a way that lets you know for sure this hellsite is dominated by femmes, because those two have definitely fucked. At least twice. It’s 1805 and oceans have become battlefields!

5 - Clue (1985)

A movie based on the board game of the same name should not have been this good, but it instead goes on to become a camp masterpiece. Many people will end up remembering Tim Curry for Rocky Horror or even Muppet Treasure Island, but this is still one of his favorite performances for me. This film is batshit and I love it.

6 - Camp (2003)

Speaking of camp films, let’s talk about one of the best of all time. I know we often talk about the bad singing in Thai BL, but I unironically love all of the musical theater in this film. I regularly listen to this soundtrack, and have been for over 15 years. It’s a film about a bunch of weird theater kids who get to escape the bullying and hellishness of their lives for a few weeks during the summer, where they get to put on a bunch of classic plays. It’s so camp. I love this film because it was difficult for me to find queer films that had happy components with them, and this little movie has a wide array of queer kids in it.

7 - Make The Yuletide Gay (2009)

This was the first queer film I ever watched that had a happy ending that was also a comedy. Prior to this, I think I had watched Beautiful Thing (1996), Edge of Seventeen (1998), Get Real (1998), and Bent (1997). Most of those films ended resolved or sad. Yuletide is a silly little gay film of almost nonstop innuendo about a guy who goes back into the closet when he returns home for Christmas, but hijinks ensue when his boyfriend shows up unexpectedly. It’s an annual watch for me around the holidays, and I usually host people for it.

Also, Adamo Ruggiero is in it! He played Marco on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

This was fun! I think most folks have been tagged that I know, but I’ll tag @warningtothecurious. If anyone else does this, please tag me back if you do this! I want to know what films you all return to.

#tag meme #comfort films #shelter 2007 #make the yuletide gay #big eden #the blues brothers #camp 2003 #clue 1985 #master and commander #Ben watches #ben writes

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fandoomrants · 4 months

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So I have this love-hate thing for the whole Hunger Games because while I've seen the movies and read the books and I've been hyped and I've waited for each movie, gone to see it, etc, and I usually don't like First POV in books yet everything in them is so brilliant... It gives me chills. Because I can't say the writing itself is a masterpiece in terms of language used, although it's brilliant because it fits the perspective of a teenage girl, it's raw and doesn't sugarcoat anything, the way everything is presented is amazing and that's the whole appeal actually.

The Capitol, for example. They're shown almost as the bad guys, not just Snow but all the citizens because they find the games interesting and don't do anything to stop them. And District 13, which was believed to be destroyed and then we find out it's not and in the beginning this is like some light in the tunnel but then we slowly realise that Coin and Snow aren't too different and they're both power hungry and cruel in their own ways while at the same time we meet people from the Capitol who aren't bad and genuinely want to help and change this reality. And all the layers that get revealed until we reach these conclusions along with Katniss...

But what really scares me is that... This isn't entirely unlikely to happen in the future. Like, we already have distopian novels that have influenced real reality shows and we have way too many shows about survival and all of that, the only difference is that people aren't dying there (but you know what, there have been death cases in some! They cancelled one season or Survivor in my country years ago because someone died) so really, the line here is thin. And if it's not really about the games really happening, then there's the political situation. That's even more likely to happen one day. These thoughts have always been holding me from truly getting in this fandom.

And now revisiting it when I'm much older, I see other sides of it. And I think I dislike some things even more but at the same time... I can't help but find some understanding of the Capitol citizens. And no, has nothing to do with TBOSAS and young Snow. If anything, this scares me even more because what do we see there? A character we already know and despise that suddenly people start liking him because he looks good (no judgement here. I admit he looks good. I just can't simp), and people finding the games boring in the book/movie itself and then also people seeing the movie complaining about the same part with the games because it wasn't as interesting as the ones in the OG trilogy? The Capitol is basically the same as almost every one of us.

And let's face it - we see the Capitol and its citizens as bad because we get to see it in the OG trilogy through Katniss's eyes, a girl which was brought up in poverty and knows what real hunger and dealing with this life is but this is almost like comparing a third world country to... Almost every other country. Because the Capitol is loud, it's obsessed with crazy things, shows, fashion trends, etc but this is not too far from our own lives. And we as an audience are shocked by them just because we see them compared to the Districts and their life but in fact, we're living in a world which is so much closer to the Capitol than it is to any of the districts. And it's the same thing happening with Snow. He's charming and uses it to his advantage, and is played by a good-looking actor and people like him just the way people like Snow in TBOSAS.

And another thing I've already seen people commenting on but I still wanna add is that we have these movies which I believe are good adaptations but most of the characters are played by older actors. Like, go look at some actual teenagers and imagine them in these scenes where children are killing and dying... (When's the last time y'all saw a 14yo? Imagine this being an actual victor of these games...)

So yeah, these things really make me think how it's a brilliant story but the concepts we see there are so messed... (And a good proof is how I have way too many thoughts of the games and their making and wanna know more despite how wrong they are...)

#the hunger games #thg series #thg #tbosas #katniss everdeen #the capitol #president snow #president coin #district 13

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mitochondriaandbunnies · 9 months

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Miami Vice S1E14: Golden Triangle, Part 1

A rash of violence against sex workers raises Castillo's suspicions.

And we learn that Castillo is... I don't know? A martial arts wizard?? We'll later learn he is also a fucking samurai, but this is really the first "let's give Castillo depth" episode, and they really fucking go for it

An absolutely useless bit of trivia: some of the opening credits in this episode are in the wrong font.

This is not the Miami Vice font. It switches back to the Miami Vice font like two names later.

Love Castillo downing a cafecito from what is absolutely not a heat-safe plastic glass, and Rico and Sonny following him as he walks away like he's a beautiful girl in a bikini

Also love that Crockett's "nerd" disguise involves going over dot matrix printouts by hand by the pool. A normal vacation activity. Love less that he is just blatantly doing an entrapment.

When Sonny and Rico take Candy in, we cut to a currently-in-progress conversation in which she asks Sonny, "well, am I right or what?" Then pauses, while neither Sonny or Rico look her in the eye, but they both smile in the most hollow and awkward way possible, and then Candy nods and says, "Yeah, I'm right." I really want to know what she thinks she's right about that both Sonny and Rico basically are like 'please stop talking' about.

Candy is great-- she's very savvy about the police (and rightly does not trust them), very intense, and has no issues telling Sonny off.

Rico finds all of this hilarious.

The drug dealer who wants a safety deposit box is John Snyder, who will always be "extremely annoying Joey in the Mafia Wars arc of Wiseguy" to me, except that recently Dan and I watched an episode of Star Trek in which he was a eugenicist from the eugenicist planet. Man sure plays some roles. He's also apparently a long-time anime voice actor??

Sonny complains about the system being broken and Tubbs kind of sighs and says "the system. Want a cold one?" #1 reason Tubbs isn't as broken by the end of the show is that he comes in from day one knowing that Everything Sucks Forever, while Crockett takes it personally every single time

Alligator Nail Filing

Alligator

Nail

Filing

"We're getting too good at playing bad guys" sure is the understatement of the whole series

It's not actually clear until around the 3/4 mark that this is the first Castillo Episode, but he makes a wonderful little suspicious face when Sonny starts telling him about Szarbo-- he knows something is amiss.

There's an exchange with the cop who has been working part time as a pimp where Sonny no-true-Scotsmans him-- he states that the man isn't a "real" cop for what he's done. I think Sonny still genuinely believes this at this point in the series. He will not by the end.

Castillo finds out that one of the dead people is Thai and just absolutely flips out and is like I NEED TO SEE THE CORPSE. I get what the actual intention here is-- that Castillo has put together enough things about the case based on similarities to things that happened during his own years in Thailand-- but we don't know that yet as an audience, so it just kind of seems like Castillo is totally paranoid and thinks any deceased person of Thai descent MUST be involved in crime, which is not a good look.

I adore the sequence in which it is implied Tubbs and Castillo go to like eight Thai restaurants together, partially because I appreciate when they work together, and partially because I love seeing restaurants from bygone days.

To the tune of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:

Awkward dinner naked waiter

Marty n' Rico having supper

It is awkward!

(but seriously why does that waiter not have a shirt)

And we learn, finally, that Castillo is a master of every martial art, as he gets in a wild action movie fist fight with the naked waiter in the parking lot. It's stupid and fantastic in equal measures, and we'll learn even more about Castillo's exciting fisticuffs adventures next time.

#miami vice #miami vice s1 #s1e14 #golden triangle #sonny crockett #rico tubbs #martin castillo #my gifs

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canonmisogynyvictimstournament · 6 months

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PROPAGANDA

MIKAELA BANES (TRANSFORMERS)

1.) mikaela’s case is so egregious that i struggle to really properly word any propaganda beyond ‘just look at the movie. look at it.’ but congrats to mikaela banes for getting in! was thinking of submitting her along with my arcee but couldn’t even like. begin to describe it. agh.

best i can really say for her right now is ‘open her tfwiki article, open sam’s, look at the pictures, compare how they frame the two, you will see what i mean then and there.’ but i might do a rewatch of the bayverse transformers movies just to be able to get all my more complex thoughts in order to actually submit a breakdown of her. which is not something i want to do, but if anyone deserves it it’s mikaela. she deserved so much better.

2.) She was the female character played by Megan Fox, and Michael Bay wanted to make sure everyone watching knew this was a woman played by megan fox. She is the quintessential “not like other girls” (in fact, this is the second sentence of her wikipedia page - “She is differentiated from “typical” women in her age group, having inherited mechanical skills from her father”) who has guy interests, but is still hot and wears crop tops and jean shorts. I remember two things from that movie, Bumblebee and the scene where she is working on the car ~sexily~, which today genuinely seems like a parody, but was included entirely earnestly (I wasn’t going to add a picture from this scene, but it was literally the first and third pictures that showed up when i googled her)

3.) Mikaela is so sexualized it's unreal. Like, I feel I really just need to submit this screenshot:

Look at the way she's posed, the way she's dressed, the expression on her face. It's pure objectification, like the kind that should be in textbooks as easy examples. The way it emphasizes both her butt and her boobs but also shows her stomach is just astonishing. God it doesn't even show her FACE. This shot really amazes me, just good god.

And then there's also this famous shot:

It's so aggressively sexy, so much a pose and not at all a way a real human would position themselves. The way her ass is popped out, the way her hair is flipped, jesus christ. Someone needs to put Michael Bay in misogyny jail.

ABBIE MILLS (SLEEPY HOLLOW) (CW: Racism)

1.) Abbie starts out as one of the two protagonists of the show, only to get almost entirely sidelined as early as season 2, getting less and less screen time and allowed no relationships, either platonic or romantic, while the other lead Ichabod Crane has a seemingly infinite amount of them. It got bad enough that her actor wanted to leave the show, which they did by having her sacrifice her soul in the season 3 finale for the male lead to live, and then they ended the show after season 4 anyway, because guess what, it’s a bad idea to entirely sideline and eventually kill off one of your leads!

2.) She was killed by the narrative to advance her white male co-protagonist’s plotline and I’m still mad about it, Abbie deserved so much better. This is an example of racism in the narrative too and it extended to the production of the show, see news coverage:

3.) Look, I only watched the first season but they killed her off the show SHE was a co lead of!! Misogyny AND racism, all rolled into one. I remember seeing the fan reactions and I was so mad on their behalfs. They wrote her off her own show and from what I recall, gave her less and less screentime leading up to that. Truly, she deserved so much better and I will always be upset by this.

#polls #round 3 #week 6 #new #cw racism

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destinyc1020 · 2 months

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My Movie Review: "Madame Web"

Whew....LAWWWWWDDDD..... Y'all where do I even begin? 😭😭

Y'all.....

Y'ALL........

This movie was SO bad y'all.... Like.... I'm almost in shock at how bad it was lol... 😓

It takes a LOT for me to label a movie just plain BAD, so this is really saying something. It was awful... 😭

Like, you know a movie is bad when you and other people in the audience are laughing at how BAD the film and the acting is lol. 😅🤣 Seriously! My friend and I and a couple sitting beside us were laughing the ENTIRE movie at how bad the acting was.

You guys, the acting was so criiiiiiinge! 🙈 I seriously have not seen acting this bad by an ENTIRE cast EVER lol. It was so bad, I was literally sitting there laughing at the dialog and the delivery. The only people who were decent were Adam Scott, the other side characters, and the three younger girls who were playing teenagers (Sydney Sweeney included). Everyone else sucked wind so bad. I swear, I don't think I've seen a movie where not only the LEAD was doing bad acting, but even the VILLIAN in the film was such a baaad actor, omg. 😭 His voice was so robotic. He was so WOODEN. He sounded like he was just reading his lines. Half the time, I wasn't sure if he was really talking to someone in the room like that lol. His voice sounded so unnatural.

This movie made me appreciate DECENT acting lol. I never realized how just your VOICE and your delivery of your lines can make the entire difference btwn someone who's a good actor, vs someone who's a bad actor. 🥴

Dakota Johnson.... Okay.... I gotta talk about her cuz lol..... 👀 This was actually my FIRST time seeing one of her films, so I went in with an open mind ykwim? But CHILE! That woman cannot act. 😭 At least, not in this film! Half the time, her character was talking out loud to herself. 👀 Her line delivery was so bad, and her voice was so monotone and didn't fit some of the scenes she was in. It was so cringe to the point where the couple of people beside us were LAUGHING at how bad her acting was. 😭 I know Dakota is another NepoBaby, but I thought that surely her acting must be better than this since she's had quite a few lead films under her belt by now. But nope! I was legit shocked by how bad her acting was in this. 🥴

Not only was the acting bad, but the WRITING of this film was horrendous also! Stuff that should have been conveyed by a look, a glance, a facial expression, etc. was all SPOKEN OUT LOUD by Dakota's character Cassie smh.

🤦🏾‍♀️

Like, what on earth kind of writing is that?? I haven't seen writing and editing of a film THIS bad in a very long time.

It took forever for the real action of the film to even begin. It took over an hour and a half to even get to the "meat" of the film, and when you finally get there, it's like: "this was it???" 🥴

Sony Sony Sony!!! What is you doing??? Y'all know I try to defend Sony on here. I have a soft spot for them. But geez.... I'm sorry Sony, I cannot defend this movie lol. 🤦🏾‍♀️

What on earth??

What sucked the most though, is that we didn't even get to see anybody suit up in their costumes/uniforms/suits because we only got snippets of them in the future in costume.

Soooo basically, it really wasn't a "superhero" film to me. Like, it was all this buildup and buildup to NOTHING in the end.

At the end, my friend said that the movie was so bad that she liked it lol. 😅

I'm not going to try to sway anybody's decision....Go see it if you wish. All I know is it was so bad to the point of laughter out loud for me all throughout the movie lol. 😅🤣

You know how some actors OVER-act and it's so cringe?? Yea, it was THAT level bad in some scenes lol. Maybe not on THIS level bad like the film "Showgirls" ROTFL, but it was still pretty bad...

youtube

😅🤣

The Pros:

The three "teenage" girls and Adam Scott were probably the best parts of this movie tbh lol

It was so bad, that it was pure comedy for us after a while lol😅

The Cons:

The writing was HORRENDOUS in this film

Dakota's acting and voice was just awful lol

Most of the acting SUCKED in this movie lol

The Villain was awful and sounded like a robot. Most of the time, it sounded like he was literally just reading his lines off of a script rotfl 😅🤣

The editing was horrible also!

We didn't really see the protagonists become "superheroes"

OVERALL SCORE: 3/10

Just plain bad!! I seriously haven't seen a movie THIS bad in a VERY long time. 😩 Thank goodness I have a movie membership and didn't have to pay full price for this, cuz I'd be PISSED! LOL

#my film review #Destiny's Film Reviews #madame web #destiny reviews movies #my movie review #Youtube

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gaykarstaagforever · 2 months

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FREE ON YOUTUBE

Murder by Death (1976)

A weird little guy invites five world-famous detectives to his spooky mansion for the weekend, to see if he can outwit them once and for all. Silliness and charmingly lame jokes ensue. And if you're at least a casual fan of 20th century English-language detective fiction / movies up to 1976, you'll appreciate the characters and genre tropes being parodied / taken down here.

While not as raucously funny as other comedy movies from this era (like Airplane! and Blazing Saddles, assuming that era's comedy works for you at all), the Neil Simon script is consistently chuckle-worthy, with some genuine lol moments. There is one joke involving Peter Falk firing a gun and having to go to the bathroom that is one of the stupidest, funniest things I have ever seen, almost entirely because of how he delivers it. Seriously, the whole movie is worth watching just for that.

Speaking of Peter Falk, the cast is Hollywood royalty, many of them reprising crime-solving characters in parody that they were at this point famous for. Special note to James Coco as the Hercule Peroit parody Milo Perrier, one of the few actors who seems to get the tone the screenplay is trying for, so he is perpetually funny. And of course Peter Falk as Sam Diamond, being absolutely perfect as Columbo doing Humphrey Bogart doing Sam Spade. Falk was never not 110%, and that's also true here. Truman Capote, playing the principal antagonist, is...well. He was never a great actor. But he's certainly being Truman Capote and that kind of makes up for it.

Also special shout-out to Estelle Winwood, who at 93 is bright-eyed and sharp enough to make an extended fart joke funny.

(That woman died eight years after this, two years after I was born. She was born in 1883 and debuted on Broadway in 1916. Amazing.)

The big black mark on this is Peter Sellers as Sidney Wang, doing his awful stupid Charlie Chan Tojo "me so solly" yellowface garbage. Obviously his history of doing this character like this, to pop culture acclaim, was enough to get him into this movie doing it, WELL PAST the point where it was in any way acceptable. The movie knows that, sort of, and tries to Tropic Thunder it by making his behavior an object of (too) light scorn, while also pairing him with an "adopted Japanese son," played by Japanese-American actor Richard Narita. It is still utterly awkward and gross, redeemed only slightly by the fact that Sellers is a good actor so he gives Wang genuine depth of character, despite the rest of this. That is in no way a defense, and it is still terrible. Just slightly less terrible, maybe? Relatively?

With all of the magical realism and trope tear-downs in this plot, I kept expecting by the end that someone would reveal Sellers as a character perpetuating a racist fraud. But they aren't brave enough to do that. Real shame.

Also there are no Holmes and Watson parodies here, which seems like a glaring omission. Wikipedia says they cut scenes from the original screenplay which would have had them either show up right at the end, after the crime has already been solved, or near the end, and then solve it. These were apparently cut because it was decided they would distract from and overshadow the plot at that point.

Fair enough. But as the plot by the end is purposeful convoluted goofiness mixed with a meta-commentary on the whodunnit genre in general...would it have made THAT much of a difference? I don't think so.

It is a breezy 90 minutes. And while the first half drags purposefully bad jokes out a little too long and has trouble settling on a consistent comedic tone, it ramps up and is really solid by the end.

There are also some surprising jokes about sexuality and gender identity here. I don't want to oversell that, because it is all played as just more wackiness. But I didn't expect anything quite like this in a Hollywood movie from 1976. A welcome surprise.

Oh and the paper caricatures of the cast at the beginning and end were drawn by Charles Addams. Yes, THAT Charles Addams.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 67%. I'd go higher than that, at least the high seventies. That Peter Falk bathroom joke at like an hour and seventeen minutes is really goddamn funny.

#free on YouTube #free movies #murder by death #1970s #racism #peter falk #whodunnit #mystery fiction #detective #noir

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trikadekaphile · 9 months

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Here’s where the fun begins (aka my “Star Wars” marathon)

I've been making my way through the entire SW saga, starting with TPM. It's been a while since I watched any of the SW movies straight through. I'm really amazed at how well the whole saga fits together -- despite what the fucking stupid pricks bashers claim, the prequels do dovetail quite well into the OT. And the prequels make the OT richer...especially ROTJ, but ANH and ESB too.

Specifically: Owen and Beru's exchanged looks when Luke talks about Obi Wan,and Obi Wan's own shifty-eyed looks when Luke asks about his father, gain so much from the prequels; and I always teared up at the scene in ROTJ when Anakin tells Luke to take off his mask: "I want to see you with my own eyes." But the enmasking scene in ROTS makes it even more resonant and heartbreaking. Now I don't just tear up, I bawl like a baby during that scene. And in ESB, I see various Luke scenes and think, "Damn, so much like his dad!", not to mention various Leia scenes and think the same thing: so much like her dad, she's got his temper and some of his personality traits. Of course, that gets muted a bit once she stops being in denial about being in love with Han.

And despite what the fucking perspectiveless assholes bashers claim, Hayden gives a good performance in AOTC and especially ROTS, before and after Anakin turns to the Dark Side. Another especially: he had to integrate the performances of no fewer than four actors (five if you count Ben Burtt providing Vader's breathing) into his own, and also make his own contribution to the character. That's no easy task. But Hayden was up to it, and he didn't deserve the thrashing he took from the self-important asshats known as movie critics, nor from the fucking shit-for-brains dickheads bashers, who did more than thrash him...they fucking persecuted him.

Which is why it was so nice to see him join Ewan onstage at, what was it, a Celebration? I forget, but anyway, he got a Standing O and the audience absolutely freaked out over him...part of that is because the people who were born around the time Episode I came out are now adults, and grew up with the prequels like our generation did the originals -- they've replaced some of the nastier fucking lamebrain sons of bitches bashers and have to some extent taken the microphone back from them. Also, the passage of time has mellowed some people out.

Even fucking Chris Gore. What changed him from a virulent, vile basher into a...well, not exactly a fan of the prequels, but someone considerably less hateful toward the prequels, was a simple, common life event: he became a father, and was able to see the prequels through his offspring's eyes to an extent, and realizing they're not so bad -- maybe there's a reason they were so popular and made so much money, maybe they're even (gasp!) kinda good!

(Kind of like how the passage of time, a run of flops, and an expensive divorce delivered a well-deserved kick to Harrison's ass and made him realize that being remembered as the fan favorite character -- one of the hippest characters in movie history -- of a stupendously successful and beloved movie series isn't so damn bad after all.

Mark Hamill was sensible enough to have realized all along that most actors aren't remembered at ALL, let alone remembered for being a central character in, again, a stupendously successful and beloved movie series. His good friend Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund realized it too, and both he and Mark had much more cause to bitch and moan about their respective series' association than Harrison ever had. I can't see where the SW association ever hurt Harrison's career, whereas Mark was denied the chance to play a substantial part -- the title character of the movie version of "Amadeus," a part he'd played on stage to great acclaim -- specifically because of the SW association. So shut the fuck up about SW hurting your career, Harrison!)

But anyway...Hayden has always been the nicest of guys, and behaved with real class when so many of the fans acted like stupid buttheads. It's good to see him be appreciated by fans now, and of course it was good to see him in "Obi Wan Kenobi," playing both Anakin and Vader.

Natalie...well, I feel kinda the same as I always have about her performance(s). I think she was really good in TPM, but kind of had bought into her own press with the other two (although I did think she was quite good in the family scenes for AOTC, and the "birth of the Rebellion" scenes for ROTS -- alas, those scenes ended up on the cutting room floor, a poor decision IMO) and felt she was "above all this." But to be fair, she did seem to change her 'tude more recently, and start to (gasp!) defend the prequels and her character against the fucking cretinous pricks bashers and their representatives in the media.

Liam as Qui Gon...love him. That's all that needs to be said. And despite Ewan's bitchiness about the prequels, I think he gave good performances too, and he had more fun making them than he claims. I really like the relationship between Obi Wan and Anakin in Episodes II and III. Yeah, there's a lot of friction between them in II, but it made sense -- Anakin was beginning to chafe under Obi Wan's tutelage, plus he was making his first serious steps toward the Dark Side. I remember how the fucking idiot dickheads bashers bitched about his whining, claiming (falsely) that Luke doesn't whine in ESB. First of all, Luke most certainly DOES whine in ESB. In fact, he whines twice as much as in ANH. Practically all he does once he meets Yoda is whine, for Pete's sake. But anyway...does it ever penetrate their thick skulls and find one of the two (dying) brain cells clattering around in the otherwise empty space in their craniums that Anakin being whiny was the POINT? That Anakin and Luke have completely opposite journeys? Isn't Anakin falling to the Dark Side just as Luke is fighting against it and, ultimately, rejecting it? Fucking DUH!

Then there's the complaint about how Anakin falling to the Dark Side "makes him look dumb." Jesus H. Christ, do they think it should have made him look SMART? I mean, turning to the Dark Side IS dumb. It's rejecting everything he's ever been taught and worked for, because he CLAIMS to want to save his wife, when really, all he wants is more power. So he makes this dumb decision for the sake of power...and it ends up nearly destroying him physically and mentally.

I haven't gotten as far as Episodes VII-IX, but watching them again is going to be hard, because of Carrie. Her death was not only devastating to the fans, but it threw a big wrench into the filmmakers' plans for Episode IX. It was supposed to be something like: each one of the movies was going to focus on one of the Big Three. VII was Han's movie, VIII was Luke's movie, and IX was going to be Leia's movie. But instead they had to rely on putting in cut scenes from the other movies to form Carrie's performance.

And I don't give a red-hot flaming SHIT who shot first, nor do think Jar Jar or the Ewoks ruined a bloody thing about the movies. *assumes bratty tone* So THERE! Nyah nyah nyah! *ends bratty tone*

Damn, that felt good. Now I will go resume my marathon.

#star wars #star wars marathon

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 11 months

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Is It Really That Bad?

Come. Gather round and listen to the legend of the Funny Vampire Director, AKA the Funny Nazi Director, AKA Taika Waititi.

Raised in the way of the director, Waititi was taught to make good movies, delivering the sort of funny and heartfelt films most can only dream of making. He directed, and he wrote, and he acted. He was sensitive, like a smile. And his love of filmmaking did not discriminate in what he could make. He once made a hilarious vampire mockumenatry that got a spin-off TV series. Another time, he proved that you could make Blazing Saddles in the modern day, except with Nazis!

But Waititi's greatest achievement was cameoing in The Suicide Sqaud. Oh, wait. No. It was making a good Thor movie, of all things. But sadly, in making a good Thor movie, he set himself up for failure with the sequel. In fact, he set himself up for spectacular failure. Mediocre reviews. Audience backlash. Criticism from the actors and directors. And bad reviews from all sorts of internet guys, again and again and again. And again.

Poor Waititi had to watch the internet’s respect for him explode. And then he said, 'What have I done?' It seemed that everything he’d worked for with Thor, he lost. And so he maybe got fired by Marvel and went back to making real movies for a change. But just because he was done with Marvel, didn't mean he was done with superheroes. He teamed up with James Gunn and set off to deliver the most powerful and thematic line in The Suicide Squad. He got in shape, putting in the hard yards to become a respected filmmaker again. Taking pains into gains and never skipping the chance to direct a movie based on Tower of Terror. He put in the work to go from the butt of jokes to a guy who would hopefully deserve an Oscar win.

But with all that being said, there was still a confused reviewer just trying to figure out if maybe the backlash to Thor: Love and Thunder was a bit overblown. Because really, this movie couldn’t possibly be as shitty as The Dark World, which committed the sin of wasting Christopher Eccleston. So he sat down and gave the movie a rewatch, accepting he was only good for one thing... Determining that age old question, 'Is Thor: Love and Thunder really that bad?'

THE GOOD

So maybe this is a hot take, but I really did enjoy Jane’s return and her romance with Thor and find it to be one of the film’s best aspects.

Now, don’t get me wrong, a lot of the writing here is clunky and poor Natalie Portman is saddled with a lot of really stupid dialogue now that she’s the Mighty Thor. But seeing her and Chris Hemsworth act off each other again in a less dull and restrictive fashion is so nice, and seeing Portman kick ass is a lot of fun too. She even wields Mjolnir in some pretty creative ways here! And her death is actually a genuinely powerful and touching scene that they don’t immediately fuck up with a lame joke.

The soundtrack, while not even close to touching the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks, is filled with Guns N’ Roses banger after banger. I grew up listening to these guys, so honestly I’m predisposed to like any scene where they play one of my favorite tracks by them.”Sweet Child O’ Mine,” “November Rain,” “Paradise City,” and “Welcome to the Jungle” are all whipped out at just the right time to keep my attention from flagging completely, so I’ll give them props for that. They aren’t the most inspired choices, but I’m a sucker for classic Axl.

The Axl above? Decidedly less so. Still, despite this film’s reputation for really bad effects and really bad costumes and just in general looking embarrassingly cheap because Disney abuses the animators, there are some extremely cool visuals here and there. The shot of Falligar the Behemoth in particular is so good they slapped it into every trailer, and a climactic battle on a monochrome planet looks way too good to be in this movie. But by far the most fantastic thing is the comic-accurate depiction of Eternity.

And of course, I would be remiss to not praise Christian Bale’s performance as Gorr the God Butcher. The man immediately has you hooked with the opening scene, which details his backstory and shows how he began his vendetta against all the deities of the Marvel universe. Then we have his fantastic climactic confrontation with Thor on the black-and-white planet, and then there is his final scene before Eternity. Each and every time he shows up, it’s completely clear that Bale is giving it his all and acting his pussy off, giving a performance that is honestly kind of astounding considering what’s going on around him.

THE BAD

Unfortunately, while Gorr is a fantastic performance, he suffers from the fact his character has absolutely no cohesion and is barely in the film. He shows up for maybe one big fight in the first hour, then completely disappears from the film until the third act, during which time he just sits around with a bunch of children and terrifies them. And despite being “The God Butcher,” we see him butcher precisely one single god in the whole film, and that’s in the film’s opening. Groot has as many onscreen god kills as Gorr. That’s fucking pathetic. Bale’s magnificent performance is strong when it counts, but so much of the dramatic moments feel unearned because he hardly does anything outside those moments. The fact they cut out so much material including him meeting with Peter Dinklage’s King Eitri and Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster, really stings. Would it have been a crime to cut out those annoying fucking goats and instead give Gorr more to do like, oh, butchering gods?

It doesn’t help that the story never actually refutes any of Gorr’s points. Every other god we see in the film is egotistical, hedonistic, a coward, or all three at once, with even Thor reverting into a corny blowhard for much of the movie. Zeus is pretty much emblematic of this problem; while I actually did enjoy Russell Crowe’s performance (even if it is, ultimately, a half-baked attempt at recapturing the magic of Grandmaster from Ragnarok), the fact that Zeus is nothing more than a blowhard more concerned with orgies and showing off to all the other gathered deities just kind of proves Gorr right. The gods don’t care, they are refusing to help their followers, and frankly the universe would probably be a lot better if it was littered with Knowheres instead of having these horny clowns prancing about.

Then we have the Guardians. The glorified cameo from the Guardians of the Galaxy that was hyped up in all the marketing. Despite being in the movie for maybe ten minutes and despite Star-Lord having 95% of all the lines between them, nearly every single one of them feels completely out of character. Star-Lord, on the other hand, actually feels like he was rerailed in time for Gunn to take the reigns back, but it doesn’t make up for how awkward and pointless it all feels. Although it is incredibly hilarious that after all of them spent Infinity War fawning over him they all now seem to barely tolerate him, with it being confirmed none of them kept in contact with him after the events of this film. I honestly don’t blame them.

A lot of returning characters really suffer. King Valkyrie gets it pretty bad since her subplot where she searches for love was dropped, leading to her feeling really superfluous in the plot. Lady Sif gets it even worse, with her barely even being in this movie; one has to wonder why they even bothered keeping her alive. Thor gets hit especially bad here, because he seems to have reverted from his post-Ragnarok characterization all the way to pre-Thor characterization, with all his hedonism, goofing, gallavanting, insecurity, and egotistical traits ramped up to maximum levels.

But the most divisive returning character of all is Korg. Korg became a fan-favorite due to his appearances in Ragnarok and Endgame, where he was genuinely a funny comic relief character who juxtaposed his intimidating rock golem design with a friendly demeanor and the chipper voice of director Taika Waititi. The thing is, both of those films used him sparingly, so that when he got a lame joke it wasn’t so bad because it’s one up against dozens of good ones. Here though he gets to be a main character and even the narrator, and boy does he get old pretty quickly. The thing is, though, that even if he’s not particularly funny here… I still like Korg. He’s just too damn charming, As lame as his jokes are, as lame as his fake out death is, as pointless as he ends up feeling to the plot, I just can’t hate the guy. I guess it helps that he gets to be Disney’s 52nd First Gay Character, but actually for real this time because in the end he gets to make a baby with a rock guy named Dwayne. I also really like the theory that the reason the whole film is corny is because Korg is narrating it, and he’s an unreliable narrator peppering the story with lame jokes and underplaying elements that should matter. Does it save the whole movie? No. Does it make Korg any funnier? Also no. Does it add an interesting layer that at least keeps me from wanting Korg dead? Yes, yes it does.

And really, every single problem here is something that was there in Thor: Ragnarok. Zany comedy? A terrifying, threatening villain with a murderous vendetta who gets weirdly underplayed and barely interacts with the heroes? A villainous character played entirely for jokes? Jokes that completely and utterly destroy the tension of any given scene? The big difference is that in Ragnarok, at least some of the jokes were funny, and Thor had more interesting characters to bounce off of. And maybe most importantly, that film knew when to dial back the comedy to let cool or emotional moments breathe. And maybe even more importantly than that, it knew to keep Korg to a minimum. This film doesn’t do that at all, with nonstop gags undercutting nearly every dramatic moment. It’s ultimately hard to give a shit about anything going on when the characters give so little of a shit about it that they’re cracking jokes.

And let me tell you, if you couldn’t already tell, the jokes are fucking bad. This is basically what would happen if you asked Seltzer & Friedberg to make Marvel Movie. This is the epitome of all those jokes about Marvel dialogue having the characters go “Well that just happened!” to the point where I’m shocked it’s not actual dialogue. The horrendously unfunny screaming goat meme is a pivotal plot point in this movie; that’s the quality of jokes we’re dealing with here. And while there are a few decent jokes here and there, there’s just too many fucking jokes to pay them any mind.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD?

Somehow this is one of the most overhated and yet rightfully disliked films ever made.

Like, Schafrillas was right to call this the Shrek the Third of Thor films. It’s not funny, it derails beloved characters, it’s incredibly annoying, it wastes a good villain, and the writing is just so hackneyed and ridiculous. This is absolutely not a good film at all. But the way you hear some people talk about it you’d think this film killed their grandma.

Like I know bad comedies are some of the worst kinds of films out there, and this film is definitely horrendously unfunny at every opportunity, but it has just enough good ideas and just enough strategic deployment of Guns N’ Roses songs that it just barely manages to be passable in my eyes. I definitely think this is a mediocre movie, and it is emblematic of everything a bad Marvel movie can be. But at the same time, it manages to be unfunny in ways I didn’t think were possible from a director and cast this talented. I’ll be honest, on my second watch through of the movie I was more bored than infuriated with this film. It has its moments, but it’s absolutely one of the weakest efforts Marvel has ever put out.

This film is pretty much what critics once accused Batman & Robin of being: An overindulgent, campy, unfunny smear on a cool hero. As you well know by now, I don’t agree with them on that, but it’s a somewhat fitting descriptor for Love & Thunder. I don’t think it’s a smear on Thor, who has been way too inconsistent for me to get mad about him being taken in some wild direction, but overindulgent, campy, and unfunny are pretty apt. Still, I don’t think this is nearly as bad as a lot of people say. It’s not bad in a “crime against humanity” way, at worst it’s bad in a “I know the people making this are capable of better and I kinda feel like this is the fault of studio executives at Disney” kind of way. If you like it, sure, that’s valid! I don’t think there is no value in this film at all, especially compared to some stuff I’ve reviewed for Is It Really That Bad. But if I never have to see this movie again, I won’t exactly lose sleep over it, and I’m sure many people feel the same.

Still, I’d have to have a heart of stone to not find the ending, which features Thor and his adopted daughter (played by Hemsworth’s own daughter) becoming a cute little superhero team and getting a corny title drop right before the credits, really sweet. Yeah, it’s not a good movie, but at least it’s better than the first two Thor movies or the unseasoned oatmeal that is Eternals.

#Is it really that bad #IIRTB #Thor #Thor: Love and Thunder #Taika Waititi #Chris Hemsworth #Natalie Portman #Christian Bale #Marvel #Disney #MCU

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