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ikuzeminna · 4 years

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Why I love Gundam Wing and hate Frozen Teardrop

With Frozen Teardrop being the first new thing released in the Gundam Wing universe in ages, I feel I should make my stance on it clear, seeing as I’ve read (and by now thankfully forgotten) a large chunk of it.

So, what do I like about Gundam Wing? I can say without lying, almost everything. I like the story, the characters, the themes, the designs and the music. I like its humor, its subtlety, the fact that everyone plays a role and that there's no definite bad guy (nor good one for that matter). I like its dynamics and how you can view it any way you want, e.g. the Gundam pilots being heroes or plain murderers. And I like that you can and even must dig to understand things. The whole composition really works for me.

And what's best is that this entire composition makes Gundam Wing more; it makes it unique. I grew up with classics like Dragonball and Sailor Moon, the forefathers of the 'Idiot Hero' archetype for both males and females. Even to this day you see series featuring these types of main characters. Classic scenario of a naive yet pure kid growing up to become the savior of the world. We've all seen that.

It's why Gundam Wing is so special to me. It has a completely atypical setup and there's absolutely no stereotype I can apply to any character, no matter what TV Tropes may say. Heero is hardly your typical hero, is he? Heck, Heero is hardly a typical anything. What's more, Gundam Wing doesn't follow the 'growing stronger' plotline that, for example, the original MS Gundam or Seed series used. No, Gundam Wing starts out with fully trained soldiers who can kick your butt from episode 1 and will kill you without qualms if the situation requires it. (That's not to say that the characters don't grow, it's the physical growth and capabilities I'm talking about.) What's truly surprising about that is the age of the characters. This is another important point. Gundam Wing and realism. Many times I hear that GW is realistic. I'm sorry but no. Teens fighting against armies isn't realistic. Teens leading said armies isn't either. Neither is bending steel bars, nor surviving jumping off cliffs or blowing up your suit, nor successfully back-flipping from a motorbike onto a clothesline, nor becoming the Queen of the World as a teen, nor stealing a MS carrier plus suit at the age of ten, nor walking around with bazookas at the age of ten nor what have you. It's safe to say that Gundam Wing lacks any sense of realism. But it does not lack logic.

Realism never was Gundam Wing's aim to begin with. The way I see it, it's not just the plot or circumstances that prove this, but also the "inhumanity" of the characters. Would a real person with a similar background as Heero, Duo or Trowa really exhibit such selflessness or noble-mindedness as them and risk his life for strangers by fighting a war that could end in their death? I don't think so. Would anyone as sheltered as Relena give up her lifestyle, have the guts to go against the world's armed rulers with just words and put her life on the line for the sake of others? Hard to believe.

And that's it. One of the things that contributes to Gundam Wing's uniquity and is therefore a, if not the, defining trait of the series, is that it doesn't tell the story about angst-riddled terrorists and princesses, but a tale of heroes. The characters are ridiculously noble, strong, selfless, courageous, determined, make the impossible possible and still retain a certain purity, despite having gone through hell and back. It's what makes them so awesome. It's what makes the series so awesome. Duo isn't badass because he fights in the war. He's badass because he fights "so that no one else will have to" and when you see what he went through, you can only say "wow". Lady Une killed Relena's father and when Relena is given the opportunity to take revenge, she declines, saying there's been enough bloodshed. That's role model material there. Something that is sorely lacking in a lot of shows nowadays. And something that a lot of people seem to miss the point of (I'm referring to those that call the pilots wussies for not killing in EW).

All of this is the reason I hate Frozen Teardrop with a passion. Forget the nonsensical, recycled plot or the billion clones of everyone or the terrible mobile suit names like Snow White or Merciless Fairies. Forget Treize getting French’d by his mom or the Zero System being a digital cat or Relena’s grandfather being a disgusting ephebophile. That stuff is messed up and random and dumb and I have no idea what was wrong with the author at the time to write this.

It’s also that he completely destroys the essence of the original series, making every single characters whine about some drama and the never ending “woe is me” monologue I had to wade through every chapter.

Let’s take Duo, for example. He woke up one morning and decided to become an irresponsible, gold-digging bastard. To get Hilde’s money, he agreed to her terms to cut his braid off and get a “proper” name, just to buy himself a motorbike with their joined assets. Then he inherited a church plus orphanage, which Hilde got stuck with, too, being his wife, and when she asked him how to fund the orphanage, Sumizawa wants me to believe that Duo freaking Maxwell was just “Eh, whatever, leave them to it. I’m out” before taking off? Excuse me, what???

I’ve had discussions with people about this and there were statements that maybe more people just need to learn how actual manic depressives and people with PTSD act in relation to Duo's development in Frozen Teardrop. I've noticed a tendency for people to want to apply realism to Gundam Wing, especially in fanfics, but as I said before, Gundam Wing and realism don't have anything to do with each other. So why should I apply it?

What I expect from anything featuring Gundam Wing's characters is the same "heroic" behavior that was displayed in the series. Sure, the pilots each had a mental burden to carry but it wasn't what defined them. For example, Trowa's insecurity about not having a name or yearning for a home never became the main focus unlike his endless selflessness. And Heero's bitterness about the colonies' betrayal was well hidden under his joining the Treize faction to be able to keep retaliating against OZ. A noble deed to fight on but was it really necessary for him to go for the missions with the lowest chance of survival?

As I said, Gundam Wing is unique because it is atypical. That encompasses pretty much everything; you have bloody murderers in the role of the 'heroes', noble, honorable 'bad guys' who value life and the ever flashy Gundams that can't even begin to compare to non-flashy Relena's influence and importance to the plot. So why on earth should I go along with Duo and Wufei bickering like kids, like characters from five million other series do? I want my uniquity. I'm not saying that it isn't a possible outcome for Duo and Wufei to become bitter and bicker and argue and not be able to stand each other when they become adults. But considering those two could get along splendidly, it's a letdown. Duo and Wufei are very much alike; they both lost people important to them twice, they both fight partly out of revenge and their loss has had the biggest impact on shaping them into what they are in the series, unlike the other pilots. Heck, they both wear their respective culture's colors for mourning. Despite that, their personalities (or ways of dealing) are exact opposites. It's enough to make for a more interesting relationship dynamic between them than what was done in Frozen Teardrop and a lot of Gundam Wing fanfics.

Heero's regression is the same. He was frozen because J said something to the extent of "a guy like him would be needed in the future". How J is even alive is another point of unnecessary addition. But what would a guy like Heero be needed for? Killing, apparently.

Way to ignore the ending of Endless Waltz.

I guess it's partly my wish for Heero and everyone else to live a well-deserved 'happily ever after' which makes me have such a knee jerk reaction to all the drama. That and the fact that there was nowhere near as much drama in Gundam Wing. Nor sap, nor stereotyping, nor "realism". >_>

This grated on my nerves, which was why I dropped Frozen Teardrop like a hot potato and haven’t bothered since. This novel does not only fail on a general level with all the random, messed up crap and terrible pacing, it also fails to satisfy the Gundam Wing fan in me because Sumizawa, the very head writer of the show, also ignored major character traits on top of everything else. Why would Catherine, who stated that she hates war and did everything she could to keep Trowa from fighting, train his clone to become a soldier? Why would Duo become that deadbeat I described above?

Being the sole writer of Frozen Teardrop meant he could take as many creative liberties as he wanted. But in the end, he took too many, which in turn resulted in so many inconsistencies with the series that Frozen Teardrop now takes place in an alternate universe, in which not the series but the manga Glory of Losers takes place. Which is the sole reason I’m not bothered by Frozen Teardrop’s existence anymore.

There were some good passages in the novel, it wasn’t all bad. The battles with the new characters were exciting at times, I’ll be honest, but even those couldn’t be called genuinely good because of the carbon copies deal. There is always some blemish. Like Heero’s proposal to Relena. I’ve seen fans of the pairing rejoice at the scene. Alas, I’m not one of them because frankly, the characters in the novel hardly resemble the original ones. So I don’t care.

As the head writer of the show I had expected him to treat the source material with more care and not run it over with retcons and meaningless additions. Best example being everything surrounding Odin. The world could've definitely done without him being Heero's father. Or freaking Trant being related to him.

But again, alternate universe so who cares.

#gundam wing #frozen teardrop #rant #meta #I don't like it #at all

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kuromichad · 3 years

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like tbh at this point i think the general sort of Anti Movement has accomplished basically all it’s ever going to and maybe it’s time to like. not ‘calm down’ as in ‘i’m condescendingly telling you not to be upset that abusive/exploitative content exists’ but just like... at least... stop actively hunting for it!!! stop making it such a huge part of your identity and what you do online!!! stop lying your way into people’s private accounts and servers just so you can spread around the content that they obviously know is not something that should be spread around??? like it just does not have to be this way...

the thing that i wanted to accomplish when i was actively identifying as an anti, the whole reason i started being that way, is that at the time 5+ years ago fandom culture was still extremely “always be nice, never ever criticize or ‘shame’ anything, we’re all oppressed loner geeks here and being ‘mean’ to each other would be the worst social crime possible, worse than racism, worse than anything!!! boo hoo hoo!!!” and THAT is what created a really unhealthy passively-grooming environment. because expressing discomfort with things it’s literally normal to be uncomfortable with was met with “how dare you be shaming people, you’re a bad person.”

there wasn’t the same kind of content warning culture we have now, the edgy problematic shipping was literally just mixed in with everything else, people would presume comfort with all sorts of subjects and bring up edgy shit unprompted in response to non-edgy works. that’s the kind of shit that creates normalization, that’s what i grew up with: “i hope ron and hermione will be married with babies in the epilogue <3” and “it would be hot if snape sexually abused harry <3” were literally both just What Shipping Is and there were too many spaces where they were talked about side by side. the casual attitude was what was actively dangerous and unhealthy.

things are a lot fucking different than they were 5, 10, 15 years ago now!! there’s CONSTANT discussion of which subjects are harmful and why, there’s well-understood pressure to tag and warn for things, a lot of nsfw fandom accounts actively block any minors they encounter. there’s like, an actual divide now between ‘normal’ shipping and nsfw content and ‘problematic’ content. wahoo we won!! literally just this amount of separation wouldve resolved massive chunks of what was bad for me and so many others as a kid/teenager in fandom!

but like i have to be honest bro a lot of antis are on a fucking power trip and they dont want to stop getting that constant reward of righteous anger being validated. it was obvious to me like, immediately, only a few months into me being actively an anti i would see people all over who would parrot talking points without actually understanding them, invent new ‘rules’ tailored to ridiculously specific situations so they could ‘call out’ a person or ship they didnt like for petty reasons, arbitrarily enforce standards based on their own preferences... not everyone is righteous, not everyone is a wounded person trying to protect others. a whole fucking lot of antis are just people who love the thrill of Being Right at all costs. (and like, obviously also a lot of proshippers/anti-antis are just people who love being contrary, edgy, obnoxious. i’m not like coming out as anti-anti here i’m just expressing frustration with the side i’ve been involved in.)

and i just think it’s getting really fucked up and overboard and awful that people are so addicted to this War they think theyre in, and Being Right, being the Safe and Righteous ones, that they have to constantly escalate the dialogue and make everything so absolutely fucking urgent and awful, it’s not fun enough to have a thoughtful discussion about how tropes in media (even fan-created media, because fandom can encompass literal millions of people, and you literally spend more time socializing in fandom + consuming fanworks than you ever would just straight up rewatching/rereading the source material over and over) can contribute to abusive and exploitative relationships irl, what’s fun is the adrenaline rush of calling someone a literal pedophile over suggestive art of an anime 17 year old (with the same face and body of another character that’s 25, and another character that’s 13, and another that’s 21, etc etc), what’s fun is self-righteously insisting that the fandom term made up to say “i don’t care that you think reylo is destroying society” is actually a secret code name for “out and proud literal irl pedophile.” it’s fucking absurd. i’m so sick of it dude you’re not helping anyone.

we are so, so, so far past doing anything actually helpful for protecting kids from media they’re not ready for and people who aren’t safe for them. if anything i think it’s just its own new brand of deeply unhealthy to constantly be going LOOK, look over there, inside that locked account, there are horrors i’m going to describe to you in great detail, and that person is a bogeyman who wants to hurt YOU, personally, you the 14 year old reading this callout, you are never safe, even when people are purposely locking their accounts to keep you safe from the content they acknowledge is triggering to people, those people are deeply inherently sinful and evil and they are GOING to hurt you, look at the evidence right now, they’re hurting you. like. anti culture is sick, it’s decaying and poisoned and fucking obnoxious. i’m not saying that that means all proship people are perfectly innocent or morally in the right or whatever but i find it acutely more upsetting when the side that’s claiming to be all about Protecting The Children and being the ones that are morally good is behaving fucking absurdly and escalating conflicts on purpose. trying to shock people into agreeing with you by throwing out the word Pedophile every five seconds is not the fucking way to do things. cut it out.

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circumstellars · 3 years

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Fic Writer Interview

Tagged by: @under-the-shady-tree (aw thanks, even tho I don’t write much and don’t have much to offer!)

Name(s): Stellar

Fandom(s): The Umbrella Academy

Where you post: just on ao3 like everyone else m8 (but I posted a couple on tumblr first - they were only ficlets)

Most Popular One Shot (by kudos): The Light from the Other Room

Most Popular Multi-Chapter (by kudos): I have 0 time or mental capacity for multi-chap, and haven’t done one since I was a kid. Never say never, I guess, but certainly not right now.

Favorite story you’ve written so far: I dunno, they’re all ok I guess? Maybe Aphonia, I really don’t think Luther whump with bonus family angst gets the loving it well deserves in this god forsaken fandom.

Fic you were nervous to post: All of them, but the 2 PWPs ofc x 1000, because even if you feel fine about it at first, if no one finds it hot or interesting then it makes you the weirdo smh. I’m not a casual enough writer to pull smut off well, I’m so wordy and flowery, and I’m always like ‘man everyone is gonna think I’m a total virgin’ shshshshshk which sounds ridiculous for a jaded, exhausted adult knocking on 30′s door to think (still).

How do you choose your titles?: Dunno, I pick themes from the piece, or a phrase or quote that I feel encompasses whatever feeling it is I wanted to convey with the fic. Like many others, music is an inspiration for some, it’s hard not to make the connection!

Do you outline?: Yes, but loosely. I should be better at it, but in the few times I’ve managed to sit down and spit something out, if I don’t actually start writing and just watch where it goes on its own, it may just end up going nowhere at all.

Complete: All of them? I only have written ficlets and one-shots.

In-Progress: All the ideas, none of the lack of ADHD, full time college, or job. It’s not as easy to multitask writing as it is with my other creative outlets, I have to commit all my brain power to it when I do it, and I’m not afforded that luxury rn.

Coming soon/not yet started: I have 1 wip, that I wish I had the time to look at. the outline was the consequence of my and a couple friends just shooting the shit about Omegaverse tropes and one thing led to another... *vibrates*

Prompts?: Prompts actually help me. My personal experience with my ADHD is that no matter what it is, school, work, hobbies - the more open ended something is, the more difficult it is for me to get started, or finish. It’s not that I don’t have a million ideas of my own, I just can never settle them down and narrow it down enough - I just need someone to tell me something specific they want and suddenly I’m able to zone in and start hyperfocusing on the task. Part of it comes from the motivation to create for someone. I lose all energy to create if I can’t share it and hope someone gets enjoyment out of it. So prompts for anything I create, writing included, actually are quite welcome.

Upcoming work you’re most excited about: hahahahahahahaa :’) maybe one day, if I can rest, pls, but tbh, if I do get a break soon, my first stop will be to read tons of fic first thing. I find that to be my priority. I miss reading. - @taakotuesday69 @melivian @spikeymarshmallows @talkingcinemalight @ashayathyla2 I mean so many of you write fic, all more so than I do! There’s tons more, so if you’re a fic writer and would like to do this, consider yourself tagged!

#my nonsense #tag games #stellar answers #mywriting #myworks

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theeternalspace · 4 years

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Infinity // Eternity

Title: Infinity // Eternity

Chapter One: Infinity in the palm of your hand

Pairings: Virgil/Roman. Hints at past possible Virgil/Remy, or thoughts of it at least.

Word Count: 4.5k

Warnings: Major Character Death Pre Story. The death is not shown, or talked about in detail as to how it happened, only that Remy is dead. Blood, violence, thoughts of past experimentation on living beings. General all round angst. Near death.

Hello! Hello! Welcome to my gift for @gilby-the-grad-student for @sanderssides-secretsanta. I really hope you enjoy!

This story only features Virgil and Roman, with the briefest mention of Remy. Who, I repeat. Is dead. This is Angst with a happy ending. It also has werebears because... I wanted supernatural bears instead of wolves.

Sooo... I’m back with some of my favourite tropes. Twisting fairy tale themes and poetry. And yes, it is in two parts, because I can’t keep to word limits for toffee. We all know this, let’s move on! Chapter two will be out before the end of the year.

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Summary:

“To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour” - Auguries of Innocence, William Blake.

A fairy tale in two parts.

(This isn’t a fairy tale, Virgil warns him once.

It isn’t going to have a happy ending.

Being right doesn’t make him feel better.)

---

Roman is no Goldilocks.

Obviously, Virgil knows this. Roman’s hair is a rich dark red for one. In the stories, Goldilocks enters, eats, breaks shit, sleeps and then when the three bears show up, she runs away, never to be seen again by bears who were just minding their own business in the first place. Score one for the bears. Red-Rose then. Dark and outgoing, with a smile that blinds and a love for the outdoors which leads him carelessly into storms and danger. Yet he knows such storms won’t stop Roman, mere moments and he knows he is just too much of a survivor - too much everything - to let a storm keep him indoors.

Virgil finds him in the rain.

Pounding his hands against the closed door to Virgil’s cabin. He’s built it deep in the forest so that nobody will ever find him and yet here is a human. All alone, slapping his hands against the heavy wood and begging to be let in. Shouting some stupid story about going for a walk and getting lost, only for the bad weather to trap him. Scent alerts him to the intruder in his forest long before the man reaches his home, long enough for Virgil to slip out a window and circle around to come upon him from the back.

This boy - Roman, he will cheerfully tell him later, as if names are something to casually thrown about like falling leaves - doesn’t appear to fear the woods, only the dangers the cold and wet will bring his weak mortal form. It will take Virgil a lot longer to use the name out loud. Even longer to offer his own up. All that is for later. Right now, all Virgil can think about is the inescapable truth of this moment.

They have forgotten him.

A monster lurks in the forest, a creature of tooth and claw. One that had hunted their settlement on the orders of his master. It has been mere decades since the leash snapped and they have forgotten him. Or have they? For a moment, Virgil feels a familiar panic. The human is bait, is a trap. The scientists have finally tracked him down and they are going to drag him back there, they are going to study what he can do. Virgil will die first.

This human should die but he is the first human Virgil has seen in years. The first one who can tell him anything of what is happening in the world beyond the trees. His home is his prison, his isolation his punishment. Far away from the village, from the humans, from the memories of all the sins he committed against them. Their blood is on his hands, and no matter how many storms he wanders in, the rain will never wash that away. It’s his penance, although he knows that no amount of regret or isolation can ever wipe his slate clean. The red builds up rather than decreases.

Perhaps it is the knowledge of all his failures that finally inspires Virgil to speak rather than attack, to cause this intruder to spin around to face him. Roman falls half unconscious in his arms, sagging bodily into him. Virgil cannot help but catch him, carry him into his home and save his life. Warm him by the fire, cook a meal and plan the best way to get the human home as quickly as he can. Virgil is a monster but even he will not kill the wounded beast that crawls to his feet for shelter.

Barely conscious, shuffling halfheartedly towards the fire, drawn by the heat more than any deliberate thought. A drowned rat rather than a human.

Still more vibrant than Virgil has been. He is still life in all its glory. Like Snow-White and Red-Rose, sisters who met a bear and were not afraid. A bear who was a prince under it all, waiting for the chance to break his curse, shunned by everyone but those girls.

He’s no prince. There is nothing under his bearskin but more of the same, more animal and monster, more rage, always more, more, more. There is no curse to break, no redemption for the bear who lives alone and will one day die alone, forgotten. There is no possibility for any redemption anyway, and so no need for a prince to enter his life.

Virgil knows all this. He knows where this path will lead them both, and he knows it will only bring them pain.

Yet Roman curls up on his bed as though it isn't too hard or too soft. As if he’s Goldilocks after all.

(then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I -

No, that’s the Big Bad Wolf.

Is there a Big Bad Bear?

It's only a fairy tale if he is the villain.

He doesn't deserve any other ending.)

When Roman leaves, he tries not to mourn the absence of the other. Virgil had forgotten what it felt like to have company again, for someone to look at him and see more than a body to use or abuse. It had felt a little, as though when the human had looked at him, Roman saw... he saw - well, he didn’t see him, Roman couldn’t actually see Virgil because Roman had looked at him and smiled. The kind of smile that monsters don't get.

It had felt as if Roman had seen something good in him and as much as that makes Virgil want to laugh, there is a certain wistfulness about the idea. To be good enough for a smile, it was something the man he had once been would have laughed about. But then that man had walked the edge of savagery, had caused the ruin of countless men and women, had obeyed the orders of harsher, crueller people. Who killed because it was all he had been trained to do, all that he knew to do. More beast than man.

Roman would have been a joke that he would have swatted aside like a bug if he had even bothered to notice the human at all. That Virgil would never have even known what he missed. That Virgil would have carried on the cycle, would have kept losing himself to the full moon, month after month.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t see because Roman is gone, back to his life, to his world and that is a world so far removed from his own. He couldn’t enter it, even if he wants to. Virgil doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to be surrounded by that many people, that many hungry eyes and the overpowering sounds that so many lives create. A din which made him feel sick to his stomach at just the thought of it, a pain which feels heavier now he is one of that number.

One visit and he finds himself craving contact. Contact that will never happen again.

And then - Roman comes back. Time and time again. With a picnic, with a book he thinks Virgil might like, with nothing but his smile and the sun on his face.

(this isn’t a hotel, he tells Roman.

Virgil had meant he couldn't come and go as he pleases.

He seems to take it to mean that now he is here in Virgil’s life, he doesn't have to leave.)

The funny thing is, he has never hated Roman. Not once. His default is hate. Hates the scientists for what they had done to him, not just the experiments which were little better than torture but the decades of silence, with only his thoughts for company and that was torture. Hates how it took being rescued by another werebear before he could even put a name to what he is. Hates that his whole life has been stolen from him, always a puppet dancing to someone else's whims.

He hates the hunters that came after. Hates them for murdering his friend. Hates them for being the first blood he sheds since taking a name that is his own.

Hates the world because nothing is ever going to change and he is stuck here alone and it is only because he has started talking to someone again that Virgil even realises how much he hates being alone all the time.

Hates because it is all he knows how to do anymore.

It isn't until Roman has been in his life for a while that Virgil looks back and realises he slipped in under the radar and there had been a lack of hate. At first, it had been fear. A cold, all encompassing fear that had wrapped itself tightly around his heart and squeezed. That changed in the end, fading to a dull ache and a variety of other emotions flooded to take its place. Confusion. Low level annoyance for sure but buzzing under all of that... something else. Something Virgil has trouble putting a word to because it is so alien to his nature. A... a...

A warmth that curled through him. And pride, pride that Roman has never shown any fear towards him. Virgil’s brave little human and some part of him knows how dangerous that is, the way in which his bear side has already laid claim to Roman. He knows the sensible thing to do is to cut off all contact now.

Every second Virgil spends time with his human just lets the knives slide in deeper, their joined life blood pooling around them. Roman has nothing to look forward to with him but the unhappy ending because life isn't fair, it doesn’t reward the good or save the bad, he couldn't be made good just because Roman wanted it. Life was cold and cruel and more often than not saw nothing wrong in sticking fingers into open wounds, prodding, poking, stretching thin sanity and life. This thing, whatever it is, has to stop. After all just because Virgil might want something, doesn’t mean he should have it.

(he thinks he hates Remy for - for -

For saving him

For dying for him

For thinking he was worth saving

For leaving him here alone

For making him feel anything in the first place.)

Just once, he considers burning the cabin to the ground. It would be so easy to do and it wouldn’t be the first time Virgil has let the cleansing brutal beauty of fire to its work. A few sparks in the right places, a little time and the wooden cabin would go up in roaring flames. A pyre to what could have been until nothing was left but the ghosts of a possibility. There is nothing inside the building that he is overly attached to, nothing Virgil couldn't recreate a few miles away, build another cabin and start again. Virgil has always been pretty good at keeping his possessions light, constantly on the move - constantly running, running because he is a coward, because he can't look behind him, can't go back to that, to the ghosts of either his sins or his friend. One strike of a match to set the whole chain tumbling down. No more worry that someone else might notice Virgil living here, no more worrying that people might follow Roman, that he might lead the enemy right to his door. No more Roman -

Thoughts of burning the cabin stutter to a stop at that. The whole point of the plan was to wipe the slate clean, so he can't get him caught. It's hard to do that without cutting Roman out of his life. It will hurt him - it will hurt him too, but that is never the point - and Virgil finds he doesn't want to hurt Roman. The mere idea of something taking that smile off his features is more than either the bear or man side of him can handle. To imagine the smile wavering because of something he did... It is breaking his heart, it is breaking his heart and Virgil thought that that organ had shattered into harmless pieces long ago.

It is disconcerting to realise the muscle hasn’t atrophied away from lack of use through all the long years and instead is as hot and as alive as anything. Even the hate Virgil has felt over the years has never felt like this, never made his chest ache in a way that the idea of hurting Roman does. It's not necessarily a good feeling, and the thoughts which pool around his mind like fresh blood are raw, born out a new and unexpected wound.

Virgil will kill to make sure that smile never wavers. He will do what he has always done. He will drown the whole world in blood is that is what it takes in order to protect Roman and his happiness. The thought is wild, a wounded animal clawing in the back of his mind just begging to be let free. It's the first time Virgil realises he will kill for Roman. Not the last.

(he thinks he loved Remy once upon a time.)

There are times too, when Virgil thinks about really telling him some of the things he has done. In clinical, excruciating detail about bodies he has left broken in his wake. About the lives he has ruined - why Grandma, what big arms you have - and worse of all, how Virgil had enjoyed it at the time. It was all Virgil had been built for, and he had never thought to question it, had simply accepted it. Someone points, and he moves, a weapon created for one purpose. Everyone in his life has been like that, always looking for ways in which to use him. Even Remy hadn't been wholly selfless when it came to their friendship, always half an eye on what he could get out of it.

Not that Virgil blames him for that, Remy at least was kind, offered something in return instead of just tugging harshly on the leash. And in the end, Remy gave his life to the misguided idea that Virgil is a life worth preserving.

The world is full of people just waiting to take and take. The world that Virgil knows at least is one of the scientists, experiments, hunters and Virgil has no reason to believe that this brave new world is any different. Roman should know who he is smiling at, who he is trusting his back to and how the Big Bad Wolf will hurt him worse than he can ever imagine.

Of course, he actually never tells Roman. Virgil tries to convince himself it's because he doesn't want to be the one to wreck that innocence he wears like a cloak around his shoulders but Virgil knows it's a lie - why Grandma, what big eyes you have - and normally he has no time for lies. Roman can't keep doing this to him, smiling and looking and understanding. As though all the broken pieces in him are okay, as if he doesn't want to press Virgil to a shape of his own choosing but instead can simply let it be.

It feels good and oh so bad at the same time, something being rubbed raw in the back of his mind, grating on a nerve. It leaves Virgil permanently on edge, as though he is constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the blood red haired to turn out to be just like everyone else. Until then, Virgil pretends he isn't waiting for his little red riding hood to pull the hood down and allows himself to maybe enjoy it. Just a little. Just while he can.

He knows it won't last.

Because in reality, Virgil needs Roman not to hate him. More than that, he needs those eyes on him. Needs the kindness. The easy affection and belief offered is like a drug and he needs to pretend there is something more to him than the violence - why Grandma, what big teeth you have - and Virgil has to hide away that animalistic desire to kill to protect Roman, to become the monster once more. Roman cannot see, he can never see how the bear will happily drown the world in blood for him because Virgil knows he will hate it. He will hate Virgil and that will hurt him more than anything, more than he thought it was possible to hurt. Being denied Roman’s smile will break him, he knows it down to his core.

He wonders when he became so weak, or if he has been this fragile all along.

(in his dreams he is killing Roman.

Over and over, a different method each time.

And always behind him, that voice he can't shift, the scientists who held his leash for decades.

Smooth honey, sweet poison of his past as they purr in approval.

He drives the knife in deeper.

He’s always needed to belong to someone.)

The first time Roman touches him with purpose, he can’t help but flinch. Virgil had been in control of himself before then, with only the slightest tense of muscles whenever Roman brushed up against him in passing, an accidental contact. And he brushes up against him a lot - fingers catching his skin when Virgil hands him something, bumping into Virgil as Roman slips past, a tug on his shirt as warm fingers press against him when the human needs to get his attention.

This time is different.

There is an intent behind the motion that Virgil can’t quite understand. It isn’t harsh, isn’t the promise of blows and pain if he disobeys but Roman touches and in that moment - a second, an eternity - Virgil is all the way back in that small, bright, white, room. Back in a world of pain and endless tests where he never understood the rules or the purpose only that everything he did was wrong. Everything invited pain, action or inaction. Everything hurts, his body is on fire and Virgil has forgotten how to breathe. Lungs burn with the rest of him and he feels - Virgil feels everything and it is far too much.

The moment of eternity passes.

Virgil is back in his cabin, hand carved table pressing into the small of his back. Virgil doesn’t remember physically moving, can’t recall the active thoughts that made him more than flinch but cross a whole room in a bid to escape an innocent touch. Roman watches him as though he’s given some new piece of a puzzle. As if his freak out wasn’t something to be embarrassed about and not for the first time Virgil wishes he understood what went on in that beautiful head of his. Virgil was simple. Virgil knew what he wanted, what he liked, what he didn’t like and he was rarely shy about expressing himself one way or another, although his words were sparse, as though there was only so many in him and he had to ration them out to get through the day.

It’s better this way. Better to hold his words in reserve, to guard them and hold himself taunt. Hold himself closed off as best he can. If he lets his thoughts out, if he actually speaks any of the horrors that whirl around his mind that Virgil doesn’t believe he would stop until the well is dry. It is a frightening thought, to lose control. To let Roman see into all the ruined edges.

Roman, on the other hand, talks a lot. Without shame, without hesitation. He lets all the thoughts that pass through him escape. He shares everything he is and Virgil can only marvel at it. There is no end to his stream. No possibility of worry, of any of the doubts that plague Virgil it seems.

So many words, a hymn of sound that rose and broke in gentle waves around him but there was so much more unsaid, music in the silence between the words, a code that he can’t quite understand. Something is happening now, some conversation he can feel slipping silently between his fingers as they look at each other, the human slowly closing the gap he had unwittingly created.

Clear brown eyes stare up at him and Roman reaches out again. For a moment, Virgil thinks he sees pity in those warm eyes. The one emotion Virgil has never wanted from him and he will take any amount of hate or disdain over pity. It passes before he can decide if he is right or not, or if he is simply reading too much into things. It passes before his brain can recoil, some part of him trusting that it wasn't pity. It can't be pity, he wouldn't be that cruel. Not his Roman.

Fingers brush against his own in silent greeting, a tender motion. Gentle but confident, a second of waiting before pressing on. It's more than a greeting now, that strange purpose is back as Roman’s fingers entwine with his own, panic threatening to overwhelm Virgil once more, everything spiralling and screaming out of control. He breathes in. Breathes out. Thinks of deep and dark woods, the endless path that winds through it. Thinks of the smell of damp earth after a storm. Thinks of the sound of Roman’s laugh.

The moment of eternity passes.

He relaxes. Just a fraction, a shift of shoulders dropping but it's enough to let the fear start to seep away, to feel the moment as it actually is over the memory of what it had once been. Its enough to reward him with a brilliant smile, unrestrained joy on Roman’s face at the single act. He is beyond happy and that, in turn, makes him feel happy, easily washing away the last fragments of fear.

His hand is warm. So perfect against the rough edges of his own, slotting smoothly into place, as if it belongs there.

(bring me the heart of Snow White, commands the Queen.

As you wish, whispers the Huntsman.

Roman is that Snow White, Red Rose, Goldilocks and all the others.

He’s the Big Bad Wolf, the Huntsman.

But the Huntsman isn’t the villain.

If he’s not the villain, what is his role anymore?)

Roman is always so happy, so cheerful. Nothing can dampen his spirits and there are times when Virgil is envious of that. There are plenty of times when it pisses him off too, the way in which no matter what he or the world might say or do, Roman keeps on smiling. Through any bad day, through any snarled response from Virgil. When something bad happens, it only prompts Roman to offer a charming smile and a wholly impracticable suggestion to how to fix it. As though Virgil can be fixed. As if his bear skin really is just that, and there might be a prince under it all after all.

Not that he’s told Roman about his bear skin. Not that he ever will.

Endless smiles, as addictive as they are, also grate on his nerves at times. Nobody can be that cheerful, that positive. Life was cruel and constant, a grinding sensation that just kept demanding more and more, never happy with what it took. His - not his, never his - Roman takes it all without a blink, he smiles and doesn't seem to be affected.

Except Roman is his. And has been for a long time. Perhaps forever? From human, to his human, and Roman to his Roman. The bear has claimed him and it has simply taken Virgil this long to catch up. It is easier to accept it in abstract. To think of it as though the knowledge is just another fairy tale. The Big Bad Wolf doesn’t want to eat Little Red Riding Hood - the need which burns in the veins of this bear is not the hunger for food, but for something that still shuns a name.

Sometimes, Virgil wants to shake him and point out all the ways in which the world sucks, how this world is made up of lies and trickery. How blind they all are. Monsters of all sorts lurk in the world. Some are like him. Fairy tale beasts made flesh. Creatures of sorrow and regret and red so rich you could drown in it.

It’s the ones that are mortal which are the worse though. The ones that age, sicken and die like all the others of their kind. The ones that hold more power than they have any right too. The ones that cause endless suffering in the name of science or their morality.

Once, he asks how Roman can possibly remain calm in the face of everything. How can he get back up time after time again? How can every set back just makes him blink and then smile? Roman manages to keep on going as though the bad news was good. And oh, Roman just smiles that smile of his, the one like bubbles of champagne brushing against your throat. It is the one that twists Virgil up in knots that he both loves and hates at the same time. Despite everything Virgil knows about the world, he finds himself wanting to believe in Roman’s version of the world.

Despite the reality that is screaming at them both, the endless ways in which the world will chew them both up and spit out their remains - he wants to believe.

Virgil doesn't of course.

His very soul has been burnt raw by his life. All the body blows have had their effect and Virgil sees the world for what it is. A blade, just waiting for its chance to impale you. Once bitten, twice shy? Many times beaten and experimented on, another time wary. Virgil isn’t going to risk showing his weak underbelly to such a world once more. He ignores the fact that Roman is nothing but a weakness. Virgil has gotten pretty good at ignoring truths when it comes to his human.

Roman simply insists it easier to be happy, to not give in to negative feelings. There is no point in being sad, nothing good can come of it and so Roman simply remains happy, as though it's that easy. As though there is some switch in the world that he can just press. Boom. Happy. It can’t be that simple. Roman isn’t done explaining and Virgil finds himself leaning forward all the more, desperate to understand this new magic.

There is just more good in his life, he claims, and so he focuses on that, smile never faltering. Roman looks at Virgil and promises that there are things in the world that make everything else worthwhile.

He still doesn't understand.

(he is in free fall.

He’s been in free fall since Roman held his hand.

Little pig, little pig, let me come in.

No, he's been in free fall long before that and the ground is coming up fast.

Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin.

This is going to hurt.)

#sanders sides #fic #virgil sanders #roman sanders #angst #aca writes #infinity/eternity #werebears #long post

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grigori77 · 4 years

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2019 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 1)

30. GLASS – back in 2000, I went from liking the work of The Sixth Sense’s writer-director M. Night Shyamalan to becoming a genuine FAN thanks to his sneakily revisionist deconstruction of superhero tropes, Unbreakable. It’s STILL my favourite film of his to date, and one of my Top Ten superhero movies EVER, not just a fascinating examination of the mechanics of the genre but also a very satisfying screen origin story – needless to say I’m one of MANY fans who’ve spent nearly two decades holding out hope for a sequel. Flash forward to 2016 and Shyamalan’s long-overdue return-to-form sleeper hit, Split, which not only finally put his career back on course but also dropped a particularly killer end twist by actually being that very sequel. Needless to say 2019 was the year we FINALLY got our PROPER reward for all our patience – Glass is the TRUE continuation of the Unbreakable universe and the closer of a long-intended trilogy. Turns out, though, that it’s also his most CONTROVERSIAL film for YEARS, dividing audiences and critics alike with its unapologetically polarizing plot and execution – I guess that, after a decade of MCU and a powerhouse trilogy of Batman movies from Chris Nolan, we were expecting an epic, explosive action-fest to close things out, but that means we forgot exactly what it is about Shyamalan we got to love so much, namely his unerring ability to subvert and deconstruct whatever genre he’s playing around in. And he really doesn’t DO spectacle, does he? That said, this film is still a surprisingly BIG, sprawling piece of work, even if it the action is, for the most part, MUCH more internalised than most superhero movies. Not wanting to drop any major spoilers on the few who still haven’t seen it, I won’t give away any major plot points, suffice to say that ALL the major players from both Unbreakable and Split have returned – former security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has spent the past nineteen years exploring his super-strength and near-invulnerability while keeping Philadelphia marginally safer as hooded vigilante the Overseer, and the latest target of his crime-fighting crusade is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the vessel of 24 split personalities collectively known as the Horde, who’s continuing his cannibalistic serial-murder spree through the streets. Both are being hunted by the police, as well as Dr. Ellie Staple (series newcomer Sarah Paulson), a clinical psychiatrist specialising in treating individuals who suffer the delusional belief that they’re superheroes, her project also encompassing David’s former mentor-turned-nemesis Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the eponymous Mr. Glass, whose life-long suffering from a crippling bone disease that makes his body dangerously fragile has done nothing to blunt the genius-level intellect that’s made him a ruthlessly accomplished criminal mastermind. How these remarkable individuals are brought together makes for fascinating viewing, and while it may be a good deal slower and talkier than some might have preferred, this is still VERY MUCH the Shyamalan we first came to admire – fiendishly inventive, slow-burn suspenseful and absolutely DRIPPING with cool earworm dialogue, his characteristically mischievous sense of humour still present and correct, and he’s retained that unswerving ability to wrong-foot us at every turn, right up to one of his most surprising twist endings to date. The cast are, as ever, on fire, the returning hands all superb while those new to the universe easily measure up to the quality of talent on display – Willis and Jackson are, as you’d expect, PERFECT throughout, brilliantly building on the incredibly solid groundwork laid in Unbreakable, while it’s a huge pleasure to see Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark (a fine actor we don’t see NEARLY enough of, in my opinion) and Charlayne Woodard get MUCH bigger, more prominent roles this time out, while Paulson delivers an understated but frequently mesmerising turn as the ultimate unshakable sceptic. As with Split, however, the film is comprehensively stolen by McAvoy, whose truly chameleonic performance actually manages to eclipse its predecessor in its levels of sheer genius. Altogether this is another sure-footed step in the right direction for a director who’s finally regained his singular auteur prowess – say what you will about that ending, but it certainly is a game-changer, as boldly revisionist as anything that’s preceded it and therefore, in my opinion, exactly how it SHOULD have gone. If nothing else, this is a film that should be applauded for its BALLS …

29. THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON – quite possibly the year’s most adorable indie, this dramatic feature debut from documentarian writer-directors Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz largely snuck in under the radar on release, but has gone on to garner some well-deserved critical appreciation and sleeper hit success. The lion’s share of the film’s success must surely go to the inspired casting, particularly in the central trio who drive the action – Nilson and Schwartz devised the film with Zack Gotsagen, an exceptionally talented young actor with Down’s Syndrome, specifically in mind for the role of Zak, a wrestling obsessive languishing in a North Carolina retirement home who dreams of escaping his stifling confines and going to the training camp of his hero, the Saltwater Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), where he can learn to become a pro wrestler; after slipping free, Zak enlists the initially wary help of down-at-heel criminal fisherman Tyler (Shia LaBaouf) in reaching his intended destination, while the pair are pursued by Zak’s primary caregiver, Eleanor (Dakota Johnson). Needless to say the unlikely pair bond on the road, and when Eleanor is reluctantly forced to tag along with them, a surrogate family is formed … yeah, the plot is so predictable you can see every twist signposted from miles back, but that familiarity is never a problem because these characters are so lovingly written and beautifully played that you’ve fallen for them within five minutes of meeting them, so you’re effortlessly swept along for the ride. The three leads are pure gold – this is the most laid back and cuddly Shia’s been for years, but his lackadaisical charm is pleasingly tempered with affecting pathos driven by a tragic loss in Tyler’s recent past, while Johnson is sensible, sweet and likeably grounded, even when Eleanor’s at her most exasperated, but Gotsagen is the real surprise, delivering an endearingly unpredictable, livewire performance that blazes with true, honest purity and total defiance in the face of any potential difficulties society may try to throw at Zak – while there’s excellent support from Church in a charmingly awkward late-film turn that goes a long way to reminding us just what an acting treasure he is, as well as John Hawkes and rapper Yelawolf as a pair of lowlife crab-fishermen hunting for Tyler, intending to wreak (not entirely undeserved) revenge on him for an ill-judged professional slight. Enjoying a gentle sense of humour and absolutely CRAMMED with heartfelt emotional heft, this really was one of the most downright LOVEABLE films of 2019.

28. PET SEMATARY – first off, let me say that I never saw the 1989 feature adaptation of Stephen King’s story, so I have no comparative frame of reference there – I WILL say, however, that the original novel is, in my opinion, one of the strongest offerings from America’s undisputed master of literary horror, so any attempt made to bring it to the big screen had better be a good one. Thankfully, this version more than delivers in that capacity, proving to be one of the more impressive of his cinematic outings in recent years (not quite up to the standard of The Mist or It Chapter 1, perhaps, but certainly on a par with the criminally overlooked 1408), as well as one of the year’s top horror offerings. This may be the feature debut of directing double-act Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, but they both display a wealth of natural talent here, wrangling bone-chilling scares and a pervading atmosphere of oppressive dread to deliver a top-notch screen fright-fest that works its way under your skin and stays put for days after. Jason Clarke is a classic King everyman hero as Boston doctor Louis Creed, displaced to the small Maine town of Ludlow as he trades the ER for a quiet clinic practice so he can spent more time with his family – Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color, Stranger Things), excellent throughout as his haunted, emotionally fragile wife Rachel, toddler son Gage (twins Hugo and Lucas Lavole), and daughter Ellie (newcomer Jeté Laurence, BY FAR the film’s biggest revelation, delivering to the highest degree even when her role becomes particularly intense). Their new home seems idyllic, the only blots being the main road at the end of their drive which experiences heavy traffic from speeding trucks, and the children’s pet cemetery in the woods at the back of their garden, which has become something of a local landmark. But there’s something far darker in the deeper places beyond, an ancient place of terrible power Louis is introduced to by their well-meaning but ultimately fallible elderly neighbour Jud (one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from screen legend John Lithgow) when his daughter’s beloved cat Church is run over. The cat genuinely comes back, but he’s irrevocably changed, the once gentle and lovable furball now transformed into a menacingly mangy little psychopath, and his resurrection sets off a chain of horrific events destined to devour the entire family … this is supernatural horror at its most inherently unnerving, mercilessly twisting the screws throughout its slow-burn build to the inevitable third act bloodbath and reaching a bleak, soul-crushing climax that comes close to rivalling the still unparalleled sucker-punch of The Mist – the adaptation skews significantly from King’s original at the mid-point, but even purists will be hard-pressed to deny that this is still VERY MUCH in keeping with the spirit of the book right up to its harrowing closing shot. The King of Horror has been well served once again – fans can rest assured that his dark imagination continues to inspire some truly great cinematic scares …

27. THE REPORT – the CIA’s notorious use of torture to acquire information from detainees in Guantanamo Bay and various other sites around the world in the wake of September 11, 2001, has been a particularly spiky political subject for years now, one which has gained particular traction with cinema-goers over the years thanks to films like Rendition and, of course, controversial Oscar-troubler Zero Dark Thirty. It’s also a particular bugbear of screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (The Bourne Ultimatum, Contagion, Side Effects) – his parents are both psychologists, and he found it particularly offensive that a profession he knows was created to help people could have been turned into such a damaging weapon against the human psyche, inexorably leading him to taking up this passion project, championed by its producer, and Burns’ long-time friend and collaborator, Steven Soderbergh. It tells the true story of Senate staffer Daniel Jones’ five-year battle to bring his damning 6,300-page study of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee, into the light of day in the face of increasingly intense and frequently underhanded resistance from the Agency and various high-ranking officials within the US Government whose careers could be harmed should their own collusion be revealed. In lesser hands this could have been a clunky, unappetisingly dense excuse for a slow-burn political thriller that drowned in its own exposition, but Burns handles the admittedly heavyweight material with deft skill and makes each increasingly alarming revelation breathlessly compelling while he ratchets up the tension by showing just what a seemingly impossible task Jones and his small but driven team faced. The film would have been nought, however, without a strong cast, and this one has a killer – taking a break from maintaining his muscle-mass for Star Wars, Adam Driver provides a suitably robust narrative focus as Jones, an initially understated workman who slowly transforms into an incensed moral crusader as he grows increasingly filled with righteous indignation by the vile subject matter he’s repeatedly faced with, and he’s provided with sterling support from the likes of Annette Bening, delivering her best performance in years as Senator Dianne Feinstein, Jones’ staunchest supporter, the ever-wonderful Ted Levine as oily CIA director John O. Brennan, Tim Blake Nelson as a physician contracted by the CIA to assist with interrogations who became genuinely disgusted by the horrors he witnessed, and Matthew Rhys as an unnamed New York Times reporter Jones considers leaking the report to when it looks like it might never be released. This is powerful stuff, and while it may only mark Burns’ second directorial feature (after his obscure debut Pu-239), he handles the gig like a seasoned pro, milking the material for every drop of dramatic tension while keeping the narrative as honest, forthright and straightforward as possible, and the end result makes for sobering, distressing and thoroughly engrossing viewing. Definitely one of the most important films not only of 2019, but of the decade itself, and one that NEEDS to be seen.

26. DARK PHOENIX – wow, this really has been a year for mistreated sequels, hasn’t it? There’s a seriously stinky cloud of controversy surrounding what is now, in light of recent developments between Disney and Twentieth Century Fox, the last true Singer-era X-Men movie, a film which saw two mooted release dates (first November 2018 then the following February, before finally limping onto screens with very little fanfare in June 2019, almost as if Fox wanted to bury it. Certainly rumours of its compromise were rife, particularly regarding supposed rushed reshoots because of clashing similarities with Marvel’s major tent-pole release Captain Marvel (and given the all-conquering nature of the MCU there was no way they were having that, was there?), so like many I was expecting a clunky mess, maybe even a true stinker to rival X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In truth, while it’s not perfect, the end result is nothing like the turd we all feared – the final film is, in fact, largely a success, worthy of favourable comparison with its stronger predecessors. It certainly makes much needed amends for the disappointing mismanagement of the source comics’ legendary Dark Phoenix saga in 2006’s decidedly compromised original X-Men trilogy capper The Last Stand, this time treating the story with the due reverence and respect it deserves as well as serving as a suitably powerful send-off for more than one beloved key character. Following the “rebooted” path of the post-Days of Future Past timeline, it’s now 1992, and after the world-changing events of Apocalypse the X-Men have become a respected superhero team with legions of fans and their own personal line to the White House, while mutants at large have mostly become accepted by the regular humans around them. Then a hastily planned mission into space takes a turn for the worst and Jean Grey (Game of Thrones’ Sophie Turner) winds up absorbing an immensely powerful, thoroughly inexplicable cosmic force that makes her powers go haywire while also knocking loose repressed childhood traumas Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) would rather had stayed buried, sending her on a dangerous spiral out of control which leads to a destructive confrontation and the inadvertent death of a teammate. Needless to say, the situation soon becomes desperate as Jean goes on the run and the world starts to turn against them all once again … all in all, then, it’s business as usual for the cast and crew of one of Fox’s flagship franchises, and it SHOULD have gone off without a hitch. When Bryan Singer opted not to return this time around (instead setting his sights on Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody), key series writer Simon Kinberg stepped into the breach for his directorial debut, and it turns out he’s got a real talent for it, giving us just the kind of robust, pacy, thrilling action-packed epic his compatriot would have delivered, filled with the same thumping great set-pieces (the final act’s stirring, protracted train battle is the unequivocal highlight here), well-observed character beats and emotional resonance we’ve come to expect from the series as a whole (then again, he does know these movies back to frond having at least co-written his fair share). The cast, similarly, are all on top form – McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (as fan favourite Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto) know their roles so well now they can do this stuff in their sleep, but we still get to see them explore interesting new facets of their characters (particularly McAvoy, who gets to reveal an intriguing dark side to the Professor we’ve only ever seen hinted at before now), while Turner finally gets to really breathe in a role which felt a little stiff and underexplored in her series debut in Apocalypse (she EASILY forges the requisite connective tissue to Famke Janssen’s more mature and assured take in the earlier films); conversely Tye Sheridan (Cyclops), Alexandra Shipp (Storm), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) and Evan Peters (Quicksilver) get somewhat short shrift but nonetheless do A LOT with what little they have, and at least Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult still get to do plenty of dramatic heavy lifting as the last of Xavier’s original class, Raven (Mystique) and Hank McCoy (Beast); the only real weak link in the cast is the villain, Vuk, a shape-shifting alien whose quest to seize the power Jean’s appropriated is murkily defined at best, but at least Jessica Chastain manages to invest her with enough icy menace to keep things from getting boring. All in all, then, this is very much a case of business as usual, Kinberg and co keeping the action thundering along at a suitably cracking pace throughout (powered by a typically epic score from Hans Zimmer), and the film only really comes off the rails in its final moments, when that aforementioned train finally comes off its tracks and the reported reshoots must surely kick in – as a result this is, to me, most reminiscent of previous X-flick The Wolverine, which was a rousing success for the majority of its runtime, only coming apart in its finale thanks to that bloody ridiculous robot samurai. The climax is, therefore, a disappointment, too clunky and sudden and overly neat in its denouement (we really could have done with a proper examination of the larger social impact of these events), but it’s little enough that it doesn’t spoil what came before … which just makes the film’s mismanagement and resulting failure, as well as its subsequent treatment from critics and fans alike, all the more frustrating. This film deserved much better, but ultimately looks set to be disowned and glossed over by most of the fanbase as the property as a whole goes through the inevitable overhaul now that Disney/Marvel owns Fox and plans to bring the X-Men and their fellow mutants into the MCU fold. I feel genuinely sorry for the one remaining X-film, The New Mutants, which is surely destined for spectacular failure after its similarly shoddy round of reschedules finally comes to an end this summer …

25. IT CHAPTER 2 – back in 2017, Mama director Andy Muschietti delivered the first half of his ambitious two-film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s most popular and personal novels, which had long been considered un-filmable (the 90s miniseries had a stab, but while it deserves its cult favourite status it certainly fell short in several places) until Muschietti and screenwriters Cary Joji Fukunaga and Gary Dauberman seemingly did the impossible, and the end result was the top horror hit of the year. Ultimately, then, it was gonna be a tough act to follow, and there was MAJOR conjecture whether they could repeat that success with this second half. Would lightning strike twice? Well, the simple answer is … mostly. 2017’s Chapter 1 was a stone-cold masterpiece, and one of the strongest elements in its favour was the extremely game young cast of newcomers and relative unknown child actors who brought the already much beloved Loser’s Club to perfectly-cast life, a seven-strong gang of gawky pre-teen underdogs you couldn’t help loving, which made it oh-so-easy to root for them as they faced off against that nightmarish shape-shifting child-eating monster, Pennywise the Dancing Clown. It was primal, it was terrifying, and it was BURSTING with childhood nostalgia that thoroughly resonated with an audience hungry for more 80s-set coming-of-age genre fare after the runaway success of Stranger Things. Bringing the story into the present day with the Losers now returning to their childhood home of Derry, Maine as forty-something adults, Chapter 2 was NEVER going to achieve the same pulse-quickening electric charge the first film pulled off, was it? Thankfully, with the same director and (mostly) the same writing crew on hand (Fukunaga jumped ship but Dauberman was there to finish up with the help of Jason Fuchs and an uncredited Jeffrey Jurgensen) there’s still plenty of that old magic left over, so while it’s not quite the same second time round, this still feels very much like the same adventure, just older, wiser and a bit more cynical. Here’s a more relevant reality check, mind – those who didn’t approve of the first film’s major changes from the book are going to be even more incensed by this, but the differences here are at least organic and in keeping with the groundwork laid in Chapter 1, and indeed this film in particular is a VERY different beast from the source material, but these differences are actually kind of a strength here, Muschietti and co. delivering something that works MUCH better cinematically than a more faithful take would have. Anyway, the Loser’s Club are back, all grown up and (for the most part) wildly successful living FAR AWAY from Derry with dream careers and seemingly perfect lives. Only Mike Hanlon has remained behind to hold vigil over the town and its monstrous secret, and when a new spree of disappearances and grisly murders begins he calls his old friends back home to fulfil the pact they all swore to uphold years ago – stop Pennywise once and for all. The new cast are just as excellent as their youthful counterparts – Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy are, of course, the big leads here as grown up Beverley Marsh and Bill Denbrough, bringing every watt of star power they can muster, but the others hold more interest, with Bill Hader perfectly cast (both director and child actor’s personal first choice) as smart-mouth Richie Tozier, Isaiah Mustafah (best known as the Old Spice guy from those hilarious commercials) playing VERY MUCH against type as Mike, Jay Ryan (successful on the small screen in Top of the Lake and Beauty & the Beast, but very much getting his cinematic big break here) as a slimmed-down and seriously buffed-out Ben Hanscom, James Ransone (Sinister) as neurotic hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak, and Andy Bean (Power, the recent Swamp Thing series) as ever-rational Stan Uris – but we still get to hang out with the original kids too in new flashbacks that (understandably) make for some of the film’s best scenes, while Bill Skarsgard is as terrifying as ever as he brings new ferocity, insidious creepiness and even a touch of curious back-story to Pennywise. I am happy to report this new one IS just as scary as its predecessor, a skin-crawling, spine-tingling, pants-wetting cold sweat of a horror-fest that works its way in throughout its substantial running time and, as before, sticks with you LONG after the credits have rolled, but it’s also got the same amount of heart, emotional heft and pathos, nostalgic charm (albeit more grown-up and sullied) and playful, sometimes decidedly mischievous geeky humour, so that as soon as you’re settled in it really does feel like you’ve come home. It’s also fiendishly inventive, the final act in particular skewing in some VERY surprising new directions that there’s NO WAY you’ll see coming, and the climax also, interestingly, redresses one particularly frustrating imbalance that always bugged me about the book, making for an especially moving, heartbreaking denouement. Interestingly, there’s a running joke in the film that pokes fun at a perceived view from some quarters that Stephen King’s endings often disappoint – there’s no such fault with THIS particular adaptation. For me, this was altogether JUST the concluding half I was hoping for, so while it’s not as good as the first, it should leave you satisfied all the same.

24. MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN – it’s taken Edward Norton twenty years to get his passion project adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel to the big screen, but the final film was certainly worth the wait, a cool-as-ice noir thriller in which its writer-director also, of course, stars as one of the most unusual ‘tecs around. Lionel Essrog suffers from Tourette syndrome, prone to uncontrollable ticks and vocal outbursts as well as obsessive-compulsive spirals that can really ruin his day, but he’s also got a genius-level intellect and a photographic memory, which means he’s the perfect fit for the detective agency of accomplished, highly successful New York gumshoe Frank Minna (Bruce Willis). But when their latest case goes horribly wrong and Frank dies in a back-alley gunfight, the remaining members of the agency are left to pick up the pieces and try to find out what went wrong, Lionel battling his own personal, mental and physical demons as he tries to unravel an increasingly labyrinthine tangle of lies, deceit, corporate corruption and criminal enterprise that reaches to the highest levels of the city’s government. Those familiar with the original novel will know that it’s set in roughly the present day, but Norton felt many aspects of the story lent themselves much better to the early 1950s, and it really was a good choice – Lionel is a man very much out his time, a very odd fit in an age of stuffy morals and repression, while the themes of racial upheaval, rampant urban renewal and massive, unchecked corporate greed feel very much of the period. Besides, there’s few things as seductive than a good noir thriller, and Norton has crafted a real GEM right here. The pace can be a little glacial at times, but this simply gives the unfolding plot and extremely rich collection of characters plenty of room to grow, while the jazzy score (from up-and-comer Daniel Pemberton, composer on Steve Jobs, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) provides a surprising complimentary accompaniment to the rather free-form narrative style and Lionel’s own scattershot, bebop style. Norton is exceptional in the lead, landing his best role in years with an exquisitely un-self-conscious ease that makes for thoroughly compelling viewing (surely more than one nod will be due come awards-season), but he doesn’t hog ALL the limelight, letting his uniformly stellar supporting cast shine bright as well – Willis doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time, but delivers a typically strong, nuanced performance that makes his absence throughout the rest of the film keenly felt, Gugu Mbatha-Raw continues to build an impressive run of work as Laura, the seemingly unimportant woman Lionel befriends, who could actually be the key to the whole case, Alec Baldwin is coolly menacing as power-hungry property magnate and heavyweight city official Moses Randolph, the film’s nominal big-bad, Willem Dafoe is absolutely electrifying as his down-at-heel, insignificant genius brother Lou, and Boardwalk Empire’s Michael K. Williams is quietly outstanding as mysterious jazz musician Trumpet Man, while Bobby Canavale, Ethan Suplee and Dallas Roberts are all excellent as the other hands in Minna’s detective agency. It’s a chilled-out affair, happy to hang back and let its slow-burn plot simmer while Lionel tries to navigate his job and life in general while battling his many personal difficulties, but due to the incredible calibre of the talent on offer, the incredibly rich dialogue and obligatory hardboiled gumshoe voiceover, compelling story and frequently achingly beautiful visuals, this is about as compulsively rewarding as cinema gets. Norton’s crafted a film noir worthy of comparison with the likes of L.A. Confidential and Chinatown, proving that he’s a triple-threat cinematic talent to be reckoned with.

23. PROSPECT – I love a good cinematic underdog, there’s always some dynamite indies and sleepers that just about slip through the cracks that I end up championing every year, and one of 2019’s favourites was a minor sensation at 2018’s South By Southwest film festival, a singularly original ultra-low-budget sci-fi adventure that made a genuine virtue of its miniscule budget. Riffing on classic eco-minded space flicks like Silent Running, it introduces a father-and-daughter prospecting team who land a potentially DEEPLY lucrative contract mining for an incredibly rare element on a toxic jungle moon – widower Damon (Transparent’s Jay Duplass), who’s downtrodden and world-weary but still a dreamer, and teenager Cee (relative newcomer Sophie Thatcher), an introverted bookworm with hidden reserves of ingenuity and fortitude. The job starts well, Damon setting his sights on a rumoured “queen’s layer” that could make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, but when they meet smooth-talking scavenger Ezra (Narcos’ Pedro Pascal), things take a turn for the worse – Damon is killed and Cee is forced to team up with Ezra to have any hope for survival on this hostile, unforgiving moon. Thatcher is an understated joy throughout, her seemingly detached manner belying hidden depths of intense feeling, while Pascal, far from playing a straight villain, turns Ezra into something of a tragic, charismatic antihero we eventually start to sympathise with, and the complex relationship that develops between them is a powerful, mercurial thing, the constantly shifting dynamic providing a powerful driving force for the film. Debuting writer-directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell have crafted a wonderfully introspective, multi-layered tone poem of aching beauty, using subtle visual effects and a steamy, glow-heavy colour palette to make the lush forest environs into something nonetheless eerie and inhospitable, while the various weird and colourful denizens of this deadly little world prove that Ezra may be the LEAST of the dangers Cee faces in her quest for escape. Inventive, intriguing and a veritable feast for the eyes and intellect, this is top-notch indie sci-fi and a sign of great things to come from its creators, thoroughly deserving of major cult recognition in the future.

22. DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE – S. Craig Zahler is a writer-director who’s become a major fixture on my ones-to-watch list in recent years, instantly winning me over with his dynamite debut feature Bone Tomahawk before cementing that status with awesome follow-up Brawl On Cell Block 99. His latest is another undeniable hit that starts deceptively simply before snowballing into a sprawling urban crime epic as it follows its main protagonists – disgraced Bulwark City cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Tony Lurasetti (BOCB99’s Vince Vaughn), on unpaid suspension after their latest bust leads to a PR nightmare – on a descent into a hellish criminal underworld as they set out to “seek compensation” for their situation by ripping off the score from a bank robbery spearheaded by ruthlessly efficient professional thief Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann). In lesser hands, this two-hour-forty-minute feature might have felt like a painfully padded effort that would have passed far better chopped down to a breezy 90-minutes, but Zahler is such a compellingly rich and resourceful writer that every scene is essential viewing, overflowing with exquisitely drawn characters spouting endlessly quotable, gold-plated dialogue, and the constantly shifting narrative focus brings such consistent freshness that the increasingly complex plot remains rewarding right to the end. The two leads are both typically excellent – Vaughn gets to let loose with a far more showy, garrulous turn here than his more reserved character in his first collaboration with Zahler, while this is EASILY the best performance I’ve seen Gibson deliver in YEARS, the grizzled veteran clearly having a fine old time getting his teeth into a particularly meaty role that very much plays to his strengths – and they’re brilliantly bolstered by an excellent supporting cast – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’s Tory Kittles easily matches them in his equally weighty scenes as Henry Johns, a newly-released ex-con also out to improve his family’s situation with a major score, while Kretschmann is at his most chilling as the brutal killer who executes his plans with cold-blooded precision, and there are wonderful scene-stealing offerings from Jennifer Carpenter, Udo Kier, Don Johnson (three more Zahler regulars, each featured with Vaughn on BOCB99), Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden and newcomer Miles Truitt. This is a proper meaty film, dark, intense, gritty and unflinching in its portrayal of honest, unglamorous violence and its messy aftermath, but fans of grown-up filmmaking will find PLENTY to enjoy here, Zahler crafting a crime epic comparable to the heady best of Scorsese and Tarantino. Another sure-fire winner from one of the best new filmmakers around.

21. FAST COLOR – intriguingly, the most INTERESTING superhero movie of the year was NOT a major franchise property, or even a comic book adapted to the screen at all, but a wholly original indie which snuck in very much under the radar on its release but is surely destined for cult greatness in the future, not least due to some much-deserved critical acclaim. Set in an unspecified future where it hasn’t rained for years, a homeless vagabond named Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is making her aimless way across a desolate American Midwest, tormented by violent seizures which cause strange localised earthquakes, and hunted by Bill (Argo’s Christopher Denham), a rogue scientist who wants to capture her so he can study her abilities. Ultimately she’s left with no other recourse than to run home, sheltering with her mother Bo (Middle of Nowhere and Orange is the New Black’s Lorraine Toussaint), and her young daughter Lila (The Passage’s Saniyya Sidney), both of whom also have weird and wondrous powers of their own. As the estranged family reconnect, Ruth finally learns to control her powers as she’s forced to confront her own troubled past, but as Bill closes in it looks like their idyll might be short-lived … this might only be the second feature of writer-director Julie Hart (who cut her teeth penning well-regarded indie western The Keeping Room before making her own debut helming South By Southwest Film Festival hit Miss Stevens), but it’s a blinding statement of intent for the future, a deceptively understated thing of beauty that eschews classic superhero cinema conventions of big spectacle and rousing action in favour of a quiet, introspective character-driven story where the unveiling and exploration of Ruth and her kin’s abilities are secondary to the examination of how their familial dynamics work (or often DON’T), while Hart and cinematographer Michael Fimognari (probably best known for his frequent work for Mike Flanagan) bring a ruined but bleakly beautiful future to life through inventively understated production design and sweeping, dramatic vistas largely devoid of visual effects. Subtlety is the watchword, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fireworks here, it’s just that they’re generally performance-based – awards-darling Mbatha-Raw (Belle) gives a raw, heartfelt performance, painting Ruth in vivid shades of grey, while Toussaint is restrained but powerfully memorable and Sidney builds on her already memorable work to deliver what might be her best turn to date, and there are strong supporting turns from Denham (who makes his nominal villain surprisingly sympathetic) and Hollywood great David Strathairn as gentle small town sheriff Ellis. Leisurely paced and understated it may be, but this is still an incendiary piece of work, sure to become a breakout sleeper hit for a filmmaking talent from whom I expect GREAT THINGS in the future, and since the story’s been picked up for expansion into a TV series with Hart in charge that looks like a no-brainer. And it most assuredly IS a bona fide superhero movie, despite appearances to the contrary …

#glass #glass movie #the peanut butter falcon #pet sematary #the report #dark phoenix #it chapter 2 #motherless brooklyn #prospect #prospect movie #dragged across concrete #fast color #2019 in movies

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dusted’s Decade Picks

Heron Oblivion, still the closest thing to a Dusted consensus pick

Just as, in spring, the young's fancy turns to thoughts of love, at the end of the decade the thoughts of critics and fans naturally tend towards reflection. Sure, time is an arbitrary human division of reality, but it seems to be working out okay for us so far. We're too humble a bunch to offer some sort of itemized list of The Best Of or anything like that, though; a decade is hard enough to wrap your head around when it's just your life, let alone all the music produced during said time. Instead these decade picks are our jumping off points to consider our decades, whether in personal terms, or aesthetic ones, or any other. The records we reflect on here are, to be sure, some of our picks for the best of the 2010s (for more, check back this afternoon), but think of what follows less as anything exhaustive and more as our hand-picked tour to what stuck with us over the course of these ten years, and why.

Brian Eno — The Ship (Warp, 2016)

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You don’t need to dig deep to see that our rapidly evolving and hyper-consciously inclusive discourse is taking on the fluidity of its surroundings. In 2016, a year of what I’ll gently call transformation, Brian Eno had his finger on multiple pulses; The Ship resulted. It’s anchored in steady modality, and its melody, once introduced, doesn’t change, but everything else ebbs and flows with the Protean certainty of uncertainty. While the album moves from the watery ambiguities of the title track, through the emotional and textural extremes of “Fickle Sun” toward the gorgeously orchestrated version of “I’m Set Free,” implying some kind of final redemption, the moment-to-moment motion remains wonderfully non-binary. Images of war and of the instants producing its ravaging effects mirror and counterbalance the calmly and increasingly gender-fluid voice as it concludes the titular piece by depicting “wave after wave after wave.” Is it all Salman Rushdie’s numbers marching again? The lyrics embody the movement from “undescribed” through “undefined” and “unrefined’” connoting a journey toward aging, but size, place, chronology and the music encompassing them remain in constant flux, often nearly but never quite recognizable. Genre and sample float in and out of view with the elusive but devastating certainty of tides as the ship travels toward silence, toward that ultimate ambiguity that follows all disillusion, filling the time between cycles. The disconnect between stasis and motion is as disconcerting as these pieces’ relationship to the songform Eno inherited and exploded. The album encapsulates the modernist subtlety and Romantic grace propelling his art and the state of a civilization in the faintly but still glowing borderlands between change and decay.

Marc Medwin

Cate Le Bon — Cyrk (Control Group, 2012)

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There's no artist whose work I anticipated more this decade than Cate Le Bon, and no artist who frustrated me more with each release, only to keep reeling me in for the long run. Le Bon's innate talent is for soothing yet oblique folk, soberly psychedelic, which she originally delivered in the Welsh language, and continued into English with rustic reserve.

Except something about her pastoralism seems to bore her, and the four-chord arpeggios are shot through with scorches of noise, or sent haywire with post-punk brittleness. In its present state, her music is built around chattering xylophones and croaking saxophone, even as the lyrics draw deeper into memory and introspection, with ever more haunting payoffs. It's as if Nick Drake shoved his way into the leadership of Pere Ubu. She's taken breaks from music to work on pottery and furniture-making, and retreats to locales like a British cottage and Texas art colony to plumb for new inspirations. She's clearly energized by collaboration and relocation, but there’s a force to her persona that, despite her introverted presence, dominates a session. Rare for our age, she's an artist who gets to follow her muse full time, bouncing between record labels and seeing her name spelled out in the medium typefaces on festival bills.

Cyrk, from 2012, is the record where I fell in, and it captures her at something close to joyous, a half smile. Landing between her earliest folk and later surrealism, it is open to comparison with the Velvet Underground. But not the VU that is archetypical to indie rock – Cyrk is more an echo of the solo work that followed. There’s the sharp compositional order and Welsh lilt of John Cale. Like Lou Reed, she makes a grand electric guitar hook out of the words “you’re making it worse.” The homebound twee of Mo Tucker and forbidding atmosphere of Nico are present in equal parts. Those comparisons are reductive, but they demonstrate how Cyrk feels instantly familiar if you’ve garnered certain listening habits. Songs surround you with woolly keyboard and guitar hooks, and one can forget a song ends with an awkward trumpet coda even after dozens of listens. The awkwardness is what keeps the album fresh.

She lulls, then dowses with cold water. So Cyrk isn't an entirely easy record, even if it is frequently a pretty one. The most epic song here, reaching high with those woolly hums and twang, is "Fold the Cloth.” It bobs along, coiling tight as she reaches into the strange register of female falsetto. Le Bon cranks out a fuzz solo – she's great at extending her sung melodies across instruments. Then the climax chants out, "fold the cloth or cut the cloth.” What is so important about this mundane action? Her mystery lyrics never feel haphazard, like LSD posey. They are out of step with pop grandiose. Maybe when her back is turned, there's a full smile.

Who are "Julia" and "Greta,” two mid-album sketches that avoid verse-chorus structure? Julia is represented by a limp waltz, Greta by pulses on keyboards. Shortly after the release, Le Bon followed up with the EP Cyrk II made up of tracks left off the album. To a piece, they’re easier numbers than "Julia" and "Greta.” The cryptic and the scribble are essential to how Cyrk flows, which is to say it flows haltingly.

This approach dampens her acclaim and her potential audience, but that's how she fashions decades-old tropes into fresh art. She’s also quite the band leader. Drummers have a different thud when they play on her stage. Musicians' fills disappear. She brings in a horn solo as often as she lays down a guitar lead. The closer tracks, "Plowing Out Pts 1 & 2," aren't inherently linked numbers. By the second part, the group has worked up to a carnival swirl, frothing like "Sister Ray" yet as sweet as a children's TV show theme. Does that sound sinister? The effect is more like heartbreak fuelling abandon, her forlorn presence informing everyone's playing.

Fuse this album with the excellent Cyrk II tracks, and you can image a deluxe double LP 10th anniversary reissue in a few years. Ha ha no. I expect nothing so garish will happen. It sure wouldn't suit the artist. In a decade where "fan service" became an everyday concept, Le Bon is immune. She's a songwriter who seems like she might walk away from at all without notice, if that’s where her craftsmanship leads. The odd and oddly comfortable chair that is Cyrk doesn't suit any particular decor, but my room would feel bare without it.

Ben Donnelly

Converge — All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph)

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Here’s the scenario: Heavily tatted guy has some dogs. He really loves his dogs. Heavily tatted guy goes on tour with his band. While he’s on the road, one of his dogs dies. Heavily tatted guy gets really sad. He writes a song about it.

That should be the set-up for an insufferably maudlin emo record. But instead what you get is Converge’s “All We Love We Leave Behind” and the searing LP that shares the title. The songs dive headlong into the emotional intensities of loss and reflect on the cost of artistic ambition. The enormously talented line-up that recorded All We Love We Leave Behind in 2012 had been playing together for just over a decade, and vocalist Jacob Bannon and guitarist Kurt Ballou had been collaborating for more than twenty years. It shows. The record pummels and roars with remarkable precision, and its songs maniacally twist, and somehow they soar.

Any number of genre tags have been stuck on (or innovated by) Converge’s music: mathcore, metalcore, post-hardcore. It’s fun to split sonic hairs. But All We Love… is most notable for its exhilarating fury and naked heart, musical qualities that no subgenre can entirely claim. Few bands can couple such carefully crafted artifice with such raw intensity. And few records of the decade can match the compositional wit and palpable passion of All We Love…, which never lets itself slip into shallow romanticism. It hurts. And it ruthlessly rocks.

Jonathan Shaw

EMA — The Future’s Void (City Slang, 2014)

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When trying to narrow down to whatever my own most important records of the decade are, I tried to keep it to one per artist (as I do with individual years, although it’s a lot easier there). Out of everyone, though, EMA came by far the closest to having two records on that list, and this could have been 2017’s Exile in the Outer Ring, which along with The Future’s Void comes terrifyingly close to unpacking an awful lot of what’s going wrong, and has been going wrong, with the world we live in for a while now. The Future’s Void focuses more on the technological end of our particular dystopia, shuddering both emotionally and sonically through the dead end of the Cold War all the way to us refreshing our preferred social media site when somebody dies. EMA is right there with us, too; this isn’t judgment, it’s just reporting from the front line. And it must be said, very few things from this decade ripped like “Cthulu” rips.

Ian Mathers

The Field — Looping State of Mind (Kompakt, 2011)

Looping State of Mind by The Field

On Looping State of Mind, Swedish producer Axel Willner builds his music with seamlessly jointed loops of synths, beats, guitars and voice to create warm cushions of sound that envelop the ears, nod the head and move the body. Willner is a master of texture and atmosphere, in lesser hands this may have produced mere comfort food but there is spice in the details that elevates this record as he accretes iotas of elements, withholding release to heighten anticipation. Although this is essentially deep house built on almost exclusively motorik 4/4 beats, Willner also plays with ambient, post-punk and shoegaze dynamics. From the slow piano dub of “Then It’s White,” which wouldn’t be out of place on a Labradford or Pan American album, to the ecstatic shuffling lope of “Arpeggiated Love” and “Is This Power” with its hint of a truncated Gang of Four-like bass riff, Looping State of Mind is a deeply satisfying smorgasbord of delicacies and a highlight of The Field’s four album output during the 2010s.

Andrew Forell

Gang Gang Dance — “Glass Jar” (4AD, 2011)

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Instead of telling you my favorite album of the decade — I made my case for it the first year we moved to Tumblr, help yourself — it feels more fitting to tell you a story from my friend Will about my favorite piece of music from the last 10 years, a song that arrived just before the rise of streaming, which flattened “the album experience” to oppressive uniformity and rendered it an increasingly joyless, rudderless routine of force-fed jams and AI/VC-directed mixes catering to a listener that exists in username only. The first four seconds of “Glass Jar” told you everything you needed to know about what lie ahead, but here’s the kind of thing that could happen before everything was all the time:

I took eight hours of coursework in five weeks in order to get caught up on classes and be in a friend's wedding at the end of June. Finishing a week earlier than the usual summer session meant I had to give my end-of-class presentations and turn in my end-of-class papers in a single day, which in turn meant that I was well into the 60-70 hour range without sleep by the time I got to the airport for an early-morning flight. (Partly my fault for insisting that I needed to stay up and make a “wedding night” mix for the couple — real virgin bride included — and even more my fault for insisting that it be a single, perfectly crossfaded track). I was fuelled only by lingering adrenaline fumes and whatever herbal gunpowder shit I had been mixing with my coffee — piracetam, rhodiola, bacopa or DMAE depending on the combination we had at the time. At any rate, eyes burning, skull heavy, joints stiff with dry rot, I still had my wits enough to refuse the backscatter machine at the TSA checkpoint; instead of the usual begrudging pat-down, I got pulled into a separate room. Anyway, it was a weird psychic setback at that particular time, but nothing came of it. Having arrived at my gate, I popped on the iPod with a brand new set of studio headphones and finally got around to listening to the Gang Gang Dance I had downloaded months before. "Glass Jar," at that moment, was the most religious experience I’d had in four years. I was literally weeping with joy.

Point being: It is worth it to stay up for a few days just to listen to ‘Glass Jar’ the way it was meant to be heard.

Patrick Masterson

Heron Oblivion — Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop, 2016)

Heron Oblivion by Heron Oblivion

Heron Oblivion’s self-titled first album fused unholy guitar racket with a limpid serenity. It was loud and cathartic but also pure beauty, floating drummer Meg Baird’s unearthly vocals over a sound that was as turbulent and majestic as nature itself, now roiled in storm, now glistening with dewy clarity. The band convened four storied guitarists—Baird from Espers, Ethan Miller and Noel Harmonson from Comets on Fire and Charlie Sauffley—then relegated two of them to other instruments (Baird on drums and Miller on bass). The sound drew on the full flared wail and scree of Hendrix and Acid Mothers Temple, the misty romance of Pentangle and Fairport Convention. It was a record out of time and could have happened in any year from about 1963 onward, or it could have not happened at all. We were so glad it did at Dusted; Heron Oblivion’s eponymous was closer to a consensus pick than any record before or since, and if you want to define a decade, how about the careening riffs of “Oriar” breaking for Baird’s dream-like chants?

Jennifer Kelly

The Jacka — What Happened to the World (The Artist, 2014)

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Probably the most prophetic rap album of the 2010s. The Jacka was the king of Bay rap since he started MOB movement. He was always generous with his time, and clique albums were pouring out of The Jacka and his disciples every few months. Even some of his own albums resembled at times collective efforts. This generosity made some of the albums unfocused and disjointed, yet what it really shows is that even in the times when dreams of collective living were abandoned The Jacka still had hopes for Utopia and collective struggles. It was about the riches, but he saw the riches in people first and foremost.

This final album before he was gunned down in the early 2014 is full of predictions about what’s going to happen to him. Maybe this explains why it’s focused as never before and even Jacka’s leaned-out voice has doomed overtones. This music is the only possible answer to the question the album’s title poses: everything is wrong with the world where artists are murdered over music.

Ray Garraty

John Maus — We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves (Upset The Rhythm, 2011)

We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves by John Maus

Minnesota polymath John Maus’ quest for the perfect pop song found its apotheosis on his third album We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves in 2011. On the surface an homage to 1980s synth pop, Maus’ album reveals its depth with repeated listens. Over expertly constructed layers of vintage keyboards, Maus’ oft-stentorian baritone alternately intones and croons deceptively simple couplets that blur the line between sincerity and provocation. Lurking beneath the smooth surface Maus uses Baroque musical tropes that give the record a liturgical atmosphere that reinforces the Gregorian repetition of his lyrics. The tension between the radical ironic banality of the words and the deeply serious nature of the music and voice makes We Must Become Pitiless Censors of Ourselves an oddly compelling collection that interrogates the very notion of taste and serves an apt soundtrack to the post-truth age.

Andrew Forell

Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society — Mandatory Reality (Eremite, 2019)

Mandatory Reality by Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society

Any one of the albums that Joshua Abrams has made under the Natural Information Society banner could have made this list. While each has a particular character, they share common essences of sound and spirit. Abrams made his bones playing bass with Nicole Mitchell, Matana Roberts, Mike Reed, Fred Anderson, Chad Taylor, and many others, but in the Society his main instrument is the guimbri, a three-stringed bass lute from Morocco. He uses it to braid melody, groove, and tone into complex strands of sound that feel like they might never end. Mandatory Reality is the album where he delivers on the promise of that sound. Its centerpiece is “Finite,” a forty-minute long performance by an eight-person, all-acoustic version of Natural Information Society. It has become the main and often sole piece that the Society plays. Put the needle down and at first it sounds like you are hearing some ensemble that Don Cherry might have convened negotiating a lost Steve Reich composition. But as the music winds patiently onwards, strings, drums, horns, and harmonium rise in turn to the surface. These aren’t solos in the jazz sense so much as individual invitations for the audience to ease deeper into the sonic entirety. The music doesn’t end when the record does, but keeps manifesting with each performance. Mandatory Reality is a nodal point in an endless stream of sound that courses through the collective unconscious, periodically surfacing in order to engage new listeners and take them to the source.

Bill Meyer

Mansions — Doom Loop (Clifton Motel, 2013)

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I knew nothing about Mansions when I first heard about this record; I can’t even remember how I heard about this record. But I liked the name of the album and the album art, so I listened to it. Sometimes the most important records in your decade have as much to do with you as with them. I’d been frantically looking for a job for nearly two years at that point, the severance and my access Ontario’s Employment Insurance program (basically, you pay in every paycheck, and then have ~8 months of support if you’re unemployed) had both ran out. I was living with a friend in Toronto sponsoring my American wife into the country (fun fact: they don’t care if you have an income when you do that), feeling the walls close in a little each day, sure I was going to wind up one of those kids who had to move back to the small town I’d left and a parent’s house. There were multiple days I’d send out 10+ applications and then walk around my neighbourhood blasting “Climbers” and “Out for Blood” through my earbuds, cueing up “La Dentista” again and dreaming of revenge… on what? Capitalism? There was no more proximate target in view. That’s not to say that Doom Loop is necessarily about being poor or about the shit hand my generation (I fit, just barely) got in the job market, or anything like that; but for me it is about the almost literal doom loop of that worst six months, and I still can’t listen to “The Economist” without my blood pressure spiking a little.

Ian Mathers

Protomartyr — Under Colour of Official Right (Hardly Art, 2014)

Under Color of Official Right by Protomartyr

By my count, Protomartyr made not one but four great albums in the 2010s, racking up a string of rhythmically unstoppable, intellectually challenging discs with absolute commitment and intent. I caught whiff of the band in 2012, while helping out with editing the old Dusted. Jon Treneff’s review of All Passion No Technique told a story of exhilarant discovery; I read it and immediately wanted in. The conversion event, though, came two years later, with the stupendous Under Color of Official Right, all Wire-y rampage and Fall-spittled-bile, a rattletrap construction of every sort of punk rock held together by the preening contempt of black-suited Joe Casey. Doug Mosurock reviewed it for us, concluding, “Poppier than expected, but still covered in burrs, and adeptly analyzing the pain and suffering of their city and this year’s edition of the society that judges it, Protomartyr has raised the bar high enough for any bands to follow, so high that most won’t even know it’s there.” Except here’s the thing: Protomartyr jumped that bar two more times this decade, and there’s no reason to believe that they won’t do it again. The industry turned on the kind of bands with four working class dudes who can play a while ago, but this is the band of the 2010s anyway.

Jennifer Kelly

Tau Ceti IV — Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending (Cold Vomit, 2018)

Satan, You're The God of This Age But Your Reign is Ending by Tau Ceti IV

This decade was full of takes on American primitive guitar. Some were pretty good, a few were great, many were forgettable, and then there was this overlooked gem from Jordan Darby of Uranium Orchard. Satan, You’re the God of This Age, but Your Reign Is Ending is an antidote to bland genre exercises. Like John Fahey, Darby has a distinct voice and style, as well as a sense of humor. Also like Fahey, his playing incorporates diverse influences in subtle but pronounced ways. American primitive itself isn’t a staid template. Though there are also plenty of beautiful, dare I say pastoral moments, which still stand out for being genuinely evocative.

Darby’s background in aggressive electric guitar music partly explains his approach. (Not sure if he’s the only ex-hardcore guy to go in this direction, but there can’t be many.) His playing is heavier than one might expect, but it feels natural, not like he’s just playing metal riffs on an acoustic guitar. But heaviness isn’t the only difference. Like his other projects, Satan is wonderfully off-kilter. This album’s strangeness isn’t reducible to component parts, but here are two representative examples: “The Wind Cries Mary” gradually encroaches on the last track, and throughout, the microphone picks up more string noise than most would consider tasteful. It all works, or at least it’s never boring.

Ethan Milititisky

Z-Ro — The Crown (Rap-a-Lot, 2014)

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When singing in rap was outsourced to pop singers and Auto Tune, Z-Ro remained true to his self, singing even more than he ever did. He did his hooks and his verses himself, and no singing could harm his image as a hustler moonlighting as a rapper. He can’t be copied exactly because of his gift, to combine singing soft and rapping hard. It’s a sort of common wisdom that he recorded his best material in the previous decade, yet quite apart from hundreds of artists that continued to capitalize on their fame he re-invented himself all the past decade, making songs that didn’t sound like each other out of the same raw material. The Crown is a tough pick because since his post-prison output he made solid discs one after each other.

Ray Garraty

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creativity-is-rebellion · 4 years

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Top 10 Favourite Movies I Have Seen (So Far)

How to Make an American Quilt (1994)

I’m not sure exactly why, but I have always had a thing for intergenerational movies that go back and forth in time, which I think that this movie does superbly. You get to know each of the character’s backstories, and it is also a coming-of-age film where the main protagonist must choose a path and be happy with the one she goes down. This was a film I would watch again and again as a teenager when I was sad (movie marathons were always the cure for my blues back then). More recently, there are other reasons why this movie appeals to me; I can relate to Finn’s thesis-writing (I know it’s frustrating and easy to distract yourself from), and I can also relate with her dilemma in choosing what kind of future she will have. Also, Winona Ryder can do no wrong. Winona forever.

The Joy Luck Club (1993)

Another intergenerational film, I think it does a great job of juxtaposing the difference between parents who immigrate to another country and their children who do not really understand the sacrifices they have made to actually get there, which can cause rifts and divides. It does this specifically with the Chinese culture in mind, which is fascinating in its own right, and quite different to the US, which is where they immigrate to. The daughters who try to understand their mothers are able to bridge the divide when they are able to empathise with where their parents are coming from, by the parents telling them tales of their origins. My favourite character is hands-down Ying-Ying St. Clair, whose backstory is definitely the most tragic. In China, Ying-Ying was happily married to Lin-Xiao (Russell Wong) with a baby boy in China until Lin-Xiao abuses her and abandons her for an opera singer. Overwhelmed by her depression, Ying-Ying begins to dissociate and accidentally drowns their baby son in the bathtub during one of these episodes, which haunts her ever afterwards. Years later, she has emigrated to America and suffers from trauma of her past, worrying her new family, including her daughter Lena. When she is able to get Lena find her voice and to leave her own abusive husband, Harold. I have nothing but love for this film, which breathes life into Amy Tan’s equally beautiful novel. This film adaptation does the novel proud; It’s well-acted, well-told, and simply just heart-warming.

Sinister (2008)

I love myself a good horror movie, and Sinister flips the script by starting out as a crime mystery before going bananas and introducing Mr. Boogie (or Bughuul), a pagan demon who manipulates the lives of children, having them kill their families, until he can consume the child's soul. Ethan Hawke, who both directs and stars in this film, does a phenomenal acting job as washed-up crime author Ellison Oswalt, who moves his family into one of the homes which was the scene of one of the ‘crimes’, where a whole family has been massacred and one child is missing. It isn’t long until he finds a bunch of 8mm tapes in the attic, which represent the equivalent of snuff films, detailing previous family massacres occurring elsewhere. Seriously, some of these 8mm tapes are both difficult but strangely thrilling to watch, due to their haunting quality. It takes him a while before he becomes aware of Bughuul, who he discovers hiding in the corner of one of the tapes, and who he is able to get to know about with the help of a rookie cop and a professor. The ending is also a delicious twist, and indicates the inevitability of not being able to escape evil. Seriously, it’s a must-watch, as it breathes rare new life into the tired horror genre.

Insidious, Chapter One (2010)

Another worthy 21st century horror addition, the Insidious franchise (especially the first film) delivers some great twists, and creates a rich universe way beyond any ordinary haunted house or child-plagued-by-demon trope, by introducing some genuinely scary characters (The Lipstick Demon, Doll Girl, and the Bride in Black, anyone?!), and also introducing The Further, a dark and timeless astral world filled with tortured dead souls and nightmarish spirits. I love the twist that the end of this movie delivers, and also the appropriate jump-scares throughout. It is yet another horror movie that breathes life into a somewhat tired genre. 10/10, I highly recommend this movie, even if The Lipstick Demon looks kinda like Darth Maul, lol.

Reality Bites (1994)

Although it’s kind of aged badly, due to advancing technology, this movie was one of the first to introduce the idea of reality television, whilst also capturing the zeitgeist of Generation X, with it’s rather nihilist message about life after college, and the trials and tribulations of growing up. Some of the characters (especially Lelaina and Troy) are self-indulgent, immature, intellectually snobby and navel-gazing, but you root for Lelaina to succeed because she is played with enough sympathy by the amazing and incomparable Winona Ryder that we believe she deserves better. This is one of the reasons I hate that she ends up with Troy, even if he is the broody bad boy we are all expected to swoon over. Seriously, he treats Lelaina so badly that I just want to punch him in the face. It also has some great side characters, like Vicky, who works at The Gap, but is scared to find a real job, and Sammy, who is gay and afraid that he may have HIV. It is also relatable for me as a Millenial who graduated from university when the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) hit, making it complicated to find a good job, mirroring the recession that these characters graduated into. I love that it talks about pivotal Generation X issues, as well as universal issues that encompass growing up and moving into adulthood. Also, again, Winona forever.

Candyman (1992)

Candyman is a horror film that subverts horror movie expectations whilst still managing to deliver some great scares. Being set in the long-gone notorious Chicago housing projects Cabrini Green, a name synonymous with vice, violence and murder, and a place which instils non-supernatural horror in an individual all on its own, tells the story of thesis student Helen, who is researching urban legends, and through her participants, she learns the story of Candyman, a vengeful rendition of the classic Bloody Mary, who will split you from groin to gullet with his hook for a hand if you say his name five times in the mirror.

The people who recount this legend go on to recount a notorious murder that has taken place recently in Cabrini Green which has been attributed to Candyman, and Helen chooses to investigate the claim. Helen rationalises that the residents of Cabrini Green use the legend of Candy Man to cope with their stressful daily lives. Before visiting Cabrini Green, Helen and her research associate decide to test the theory by saying ‘Candy Man’ five times in a mirror, but nothing happens, at least not yet. In real life, the murder rate in Cabrini Green peaked in 1992, the same year that Candy Man was made. Candy Man himself (played with great aplomb by the legendary Tony Todd) doesn’t show up until around 44 minutes into the movie, but when he does, he steals the show with his dangerous charisma.

In total, Candy Man subverts 3 horror rules: Number one, that you need to have a high body count to keep audiences engaged. By doing so, it stretches out the tension for as long as it can. Number two, there is a Black antagonist. There were some issues addressed by Black critics that this depiction played into some racist stereotypes, such as the idea that Black people need a White saviour, that Black people are especially superstitious, and that Black men prefer to pursue White women. But one could say that Candy Man is more a depiction of the White fears associated with Black poverty, and specifically, White Liberal fears that Black poverty can’t be helped, despite their best efforts. Helen doesn’t mean any harm (some may even call her an ally), yet she dies anyway.

By making the antagonist Black, the film becomes about so much more than just visceral horror, it is about societal, racial and historical horror as well, albeit told from a White perspective. It also plays into the fear that Black people, through no fault of their own, could be killed for no reason at all but panicky neighbours. Finally, number three, this film is more sad than scary; sadness tends to be the most common negative emotion that I experience, so I am drawn to movies that have something to say about it. The only reason Candy Man gives for wanting to kill Helen is that she demystified him, which seems pretty petty and vindictive. She is also supposed to resemble his long-lost love that got him killed in the first place. When Candy Man kills the psychiatrist in the movie, it is literally the only on-screen proof we have that Candy Man isn’t just a figment of Helen’s imagination. Candy Man, like my most favourite horror film, The Shining, begs the question: Are there really supernatural elements at play here, or is the main character simply going insane? Phew, this was more than I planned to write, but I guess this film is complex enough to warrant it. See it for yourself.

Final Destination (2000)

As time wore on, the Final Destination franchise became more well-known for its gruesome deaths (and tired plot) than anything else, but the first addition was a fresh take on the inescapability of death, and the vengance Death Itself may take if you screw with his Design. The first 15 minutes of the film are truly thrilling through the main character Alex’s premonition, and the wait after the gang have been kicked off the airline for the plane to blow up without them on board. Seriously, that scene gave me aerophobia more than any Air Crash Investigation episode. What follows are some truly twisted, macabre domino-like deaths that prove that Death has a wicked, dark sense of humour. That every character in this franchise dies eventually is kind of disappointing, and definitely places Death in this franchise as possibly the most diabolical villain in all of the horror genre (move over, Jason and Michael and Freddy). The mysterious undertaker played with delightful maliciousness again by Tony Todd adds to the mystery of understanding Death’s Design. and the reality that no matter what the survivors do, Death will eventually come for them, really adds to the overall hopelessness and nihilism of the whole situation. The way that the last film of the Final Destination franchise, which is really a prequel to the first film, rounded out the franchise really well, and provided a twist as good as the original film was epic. If you are going to watch any of the films in this franchise, I cannot recommend the first and last film enough.

Now and Then (1996)

I love this film more for the cheesy, feel-good memories of my childhood it gives me. Christina Ricci is also one of my all-time favourite actresses (I absolutely loved her as Wednesday Addams), which just bolsters this movie in my eyes. Thora Birch does a good job as well. But seriously, I can pop this movie on any time and it’ll just make me instantly happy for a simpler era. Even if I wasn’t born in the 60′s or 70′s, there is a lot to relate to about bridging the gaps between childhood and the inevitable teen cross-over. I mean, who didn’t have seances in graveyards with their friends as a 12-year-old girl? No-one?! Just me then. OK. Ahem. I think my favourite character was hands-down Gabby Hoffman’s Sam, who is trying to cope with her parent’s divorce in a town and time when divorce is unheard of. I like that her grown-up character played by Demi Moore is a successful writer, and is also the narrator of the entire movie. If you want to watch a truly feel-good movie that promotes feminist ideals, this movie is for you.

IT: Chapter One (2017)

Since I watched the 1990 TV miniseries in 1992 at the tender age of 7 (my parents never monitored what I watched - which sometimes led to some gnarly nightmares), I have been waiting for a worthy remake. I, like most of the aficionados that watched the miniseries, loved Tim Curry’s rendition of the demonic entity of IT, but weren’t quite happy about the spider ending. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. You may be asking why I haven’t included Chapter Two that came out this year (2019), and the reason is, despite Bill Hader’s wonderful performance as the grown-up Ritchie, a cameo by Stephen King himself, and more screen-time for Bill Skarsgaard’s scary clown, the ending here was also disappointing. IT’s true form just doesn’t seem to translate well onto screen. It was adequate. Meh. Anywho.

IT Chapter One, however, is awesome. Instead of jumping back-and-forth in time like both the mini-series and the book did, it focuses on the well-acted ‘Loser’s Club’ as kids, and is truly scary like this story should be. The bully Henry Bowers is truly sociopathic, and Bill Skarsgaard as IT truly nails the fact that IT is so much more than just a killer clown. The death scene with Georgie at the beginning of the film is quite subversive and daring, as it actually shows you the death of a child in all its gory detail. My verdict? Watch the first with gusto, but do not expect anything great from Part Two. Part Two has to exist for continuity, but the first film outshines the second installment in every way possible.

Lady Bird (2017)

For an Indie sleeper film, this story is fantastic as both a coming-of-age film and a depiction of separating from your parents and becoming your own person. Ladybird’s mum is overprotective, and Ladybird needs to break free, whilst also trying not to cause a permanent rift. She’s a different kind of gal, sensitive, intelligent, artistic, and so not meant for a dead-end small town. Her transition toward independence is extremely relatable to me, as I grew up with an over-bearing, interfering mother myself. Also, it’s set in 2002, the year I graduated, with adds to my feelings of nostalgia. It’s the relatablity of Ladybird that makes it so re-watchable to me. I grew up in a dead-end town, was creative and different to my peers, and went to a fancy private school that I didn’t fit into as well. So Ladybird is a cinematic delight as you see her progress to something more hopeful in the future. A must-watch.

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edsbev · 6 years

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can we just talk about the whole window climbing thing? it’s so soft. Eddie being half asleep with his back facing the window, and then Richie climbs in (clumsily, so he makes a lil noise) and Eddie just turns with his eyes still closed and says calls for him with grabby hands. And Richie says ‘hi, baby’ kisses Eddies forehead and lets him curl up in his chest. “I love you, bubba.” followed by “I love you too, lovebug.” And then they’re both asleep. S O F T

ok so i wrote a lil thing for this but its not rlly like ur message at all im sorryfhjds i just love this trope and i dont think ive rlly written anything thats focused on it before?? so heres this sappy garbage that was supposed to be like 500 words and ended up being 1.9k lmao (also a bit of this is nsfw not rlly but just a warning)

Eddie doesn’t always hear it,when Richie comes through the window, but still he knows the action better thananything, by a distinct set of sounds.

There is a soft thud atfirst, of Richie’s palm meeting the glass, and then the scraping of woodagainst wood, of the window being moved up in its frame. Sometimes rattling as Richie struggles with the weight. There is a beat afterthat - once the window is lifted enough for Richie to stick his hand under itand push it up the rest of the way - where he pulls his hand away. And in thatbeat comes a rush of music from outside. Summer nights bring the chirps ofinsects, a car or two humming as it crawls along the road. Autumn nights bringa wind that rattles the frame and rustle the trees. Spring nights bring theflap of bird wings and hooting of owls.

All nights bring a little gruntfrom Richie’s throat as he slides the window right up until he can crawlthrough it. And sometimes that is followed with laughter, as he tumbles ontoEddie’s floor. Or Eddie’s name sung sweetly, teasingly from Richie’s lips as hesticks his head in through the opened window. Or a groan that escapes withouthim being for it. Or nothing at all.

Tonight, it is winter, and themusic is an orchestra of heavy rain hitting the roof and the road and the soggygrass. And it’s so loud that Eddie can’t make out anything else. Lies on hisside in his bed, his back to the window, his face half buried in his pillow.With one eye open he sees a rectangle of moonlight spill into his dark, quietroom, paint silver over the carpet. And then a dark shape, shadowing over thatlight, in the vague shape of Richie hunched over and squeezing himself throughthe gap. And then tumbling onto the floor.

The bed shakes and mattress dipsas Richie leaps onto it. Landing on his knees by Eddie’s side, his hand holdinghim up planted on Eddie’s spare pillow. When Eddie rolls over, he comes face toface with the image of Richie leaning over him, eyes bright and grin wide.Looking raggedy and breathless, with shadows cutting over his face and his haircurling over his forehead.

“Hey,” Eddie says,with a smile. When he breathes in, Richie smells damp, of rain and the bitterair outside.

“Hey,” Richie says,and leans down further for a kiss. And that’s when Eddie feels something cold and wet driponto the corner of his eye, and slide down toward his ear, like a tear.

“Holy shit, Richie,”Eddie yelps - in a way that’s more like he’s swallowing down a yelp, because heneeds to be quiet. He gets a hand onto Richie chest and pushes him away.“You’re dripping wet you fucking idiot.”

Richie lets himself be pushed,stumbling off the bed and onto his feet with a laugh. “Please let me kissyou,” he says, no less cheerful and breathless.

Eddie sits up, and now thatRichie is standing right where the moonlight hits him, Eddie can see the wayRichie’s wet hair sticks to his face, his skin shiny and damp when it catchesin the light. His jeans look plastered to his skin and the shoulders of hisdenim jacket are so soaked through they’re black.

“You walk here?” Eddieasks, as a joke.

“Ran,” Richie replies.

“Fuck off, you’resuch an idiot,” Eddie says, though there’s a tinge of affection to it,because Richie is still grinning at him, looking almost eager and excited.Happy. Eddie would think he’s drunk only he didn’t smell any alcohol on himwhen he was close. Just that sweet scent of rain. “You have a car, youknow.”

“Yeah but I’m grounded, youknow,” Richie repeats in the same know-it-all tone. He cocks hiseyebrow, the corner of his mouth, in a teasing “what? you asked forit” when Eddie looks offended at the mockery. “Now how about thatsmooch. I didn’t run all the way here just to look at you. Not that that’d beterrible–”

“Get out of those wetclothes and I’ll think about.”

“I like where this isgoing,” Richie says, and starts to peel off his jacket.

Eddie laughs.

It’s always been this way. Well,not always always. But throughout all the time that’s mattered, Richiehas been climbing in through Eddie’s window.

When they were twelve, andRichie was sticking out a sticky hand for Eddie to shake. And Eddie was saying“my name is Eddie,” and Richie was saying “my name isRichie,” and one week later Richie fell from Eddie’s window sill ontoEddie’s floor purely because he was curious if he could actually climb throughit and Eddie screamed because he thought a burglar had broken in.

When they were fourteen and bestfriends and Richie would crawl in through the window because he was bored. Andthey’d play cards on the bedroom floor and Richie would laugh and push hisglasses up his nose over and over and talk about girls in a way that soundedmore like he was just reciting words he had heard and not saying anything he’dthought of himself.

When they were sixteen and onthe verge of dating and Richie’s toes would find the carpet late at night,shutting the dark out behind him. And they’d spend the nights lying side byside in Eddie’s bed, painfully aware of each other’s presence. Careful not totouch but so desperately wanting to. Their legs and arms and ankles alwaysmysteriously draped over each other in the morning. Eddie never knew why Richiecame in, then, because he doubted so late at night that Richie was just bored,and that was usually why Richie would climb through his window. But then Eddiefound his nerve one night when he’d rolled over in bed and found Richie awake,looking at him sleepily beneath heavy eyelids - and Eddie realised he’d caughtRichie staring at the back of his head, as he so often stared at the back of Richie’shead, gaze tracing over Richie’s curls. And so he’d leaned over and pressedhis lips against Richie’s, and Richie kissed him back in a gentle way, like it was a dream he didn’t want to wake up from, and Eddie realised thatRichie came over because he just wanted to be close to him, just as Eddie hadwanted to be close to Richie.

When they were eighteen and inlove but too young to truly know it and Richie would sweep into Eddie’s roompast midnight with an eagerness that was not so much excited as it wasdesperate. Eddie would sit up and Richie was already there, kneeling in frontof him on the bed, a hand cupping Eddie’s cheek. “Eddie,” hewould breathe, with their noses bumping and lips so close every breath Richietook sent a thrill up Eddie’s spine and Richie’s gaze glued to Eddie’s mouth.“I’ve been thinking about you.” He’d say it in the same way someonemight say “I want you.”

Eddie’s own gaze was glued toRichie’s mouth. He’d reply, “I’ve been thinking about you too.”

And Richie would kiss him. AndRichie would push Eddie gently onto his back and kiss him. Kiss slowlydown his jaw, kiss hot and wanting down Eddie’s neck, until little gaspswere escaping Eddie’s throat and Richie was sucking at Eddie’s skin with agroan. And they’d continue until they were both undressed and Eddie wasscraping his nails down Richie’s back and biting his lip to hold back a sob andRichie was rocking into him and biting down on Eddie’s shoulder to hold back aslew of swears that would escape anyway.

And through it all Eddie wouldnotice that in his rush Richie had left the window open. And he’d feel a senseof freedom in it, being able to feel the night air on his face, and see thestars in the sky, before Richie would kiss the side of his mouth and holdEddie’s chin so he could look into his eyes. Like whatever was, is, betweenthem - this all-encompassing feeling of…feeling - didn’t need to behidden.

They’re still eighteen now. Butthey’re verging on nineteen very quickly, and maybe soon they’ll move out. Intoa house that’s their own, no parents to ground them because ‘if you’re under myroof you’re under my rules".

“I think these jeans arepermanently stuck on me,” Richie says, still trying to jimmy out of hiswet clothing. His jacket and shirt are off, chest bare, but he actually hasn’tbothered to go so far as to unbutton his pants. Just gave them one look andgave up. “This is how I’ll have to live now. With jeans for legs. You cancall me Jean-Boy.”

“Oh my god,” Eddielaughs, climbing out of bed. He stands in front of Richie, tilts his head up togive his boyfriend a grin as he tucks his fingers into the waistband of hisjeans. “Do I really have to do everything for you, Jean-Boy?”

In a house that’s their own,they can have the windows open all the time. Even on rainy nights like this.Because their house won’t be here, in Derry. It’ll be somewhere where theynever have to hide.

Richie smiles down at him. Hishair is already starting to dry and frizz and curl. Eddie feels a suddenfondness for him and his frizzy hair but he doesn’t feel like reaching up toRichie’s mouth so he just plants a soft kiss below Richie’s bare collarbone.

When he looks back up again, hesees a flash of Richie’s grin before Richie is ducking down and pressing a kissto the corner of Eddie’s eye. Then his cheek. Then below Eddie’s ear. Then hisjaw. Then, then, then.

“Oooh, my EddieSpaghetti,” Richie croons as Eddie giggles at all the soft littlekisses. “He’d do anything for me. He loovess me.”

“Wow, you got me,”Eddie says. He struggles with the buttons of Richie’s jeans for a moment beforepopping them open. “Now help me get these jeans off so we can go to bed. Iwanna be little spoon this time because I always get a shit night sleep whenyou’re little spoon.”

In a house that’s their own,Richie won’t have to climb in over the window sill and creep over the carpet,run all the way over here in the rain just because he wants to sleep with Eddiecurled up by his side.

“Yeah, yeah,whatever,” Richie grumbles. Together they manage to unstick Richie’s dampjeans from his damp legs and peel them right off over his feet. Then theystumble over into Eddie’s bed, laughing, Eddie shushing Richie when he gets tooloud, reminding him of his mother downstairs. Richie slots himself againstEddie’s back and smothers his laughter into Eddie’s neck. Then noses there affectionately. Then falls asleep with his lips pressed to Eddie’s shoulder and his body warm and dry. And there’s a contentedness to it that makes Eddie think that Richie wholeheartedly believes that running all the way here against the rain is worth it. Not that he’d ever admit it in a way that isn’t disguised as a joke - that he’d brave cold nights and hot summer days and the climb up to the second storey and the wrestle with Eddie’s window just to be pressed up against Eddie like this. But Eddie knows.

Eddie will miss it.

#reddie #ask #writing #mine #why is everything i write the same #dfgghhjjkk #Anonymous #yall can take this trope from my cold dead hands idc that its been done to death !!!!!#also i might have actually written somethin abt this before i cant remember #all my writing blurs together bc. its all the same like i said lmao #but im pretty sure i havent??#idk idk

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thewildmother · 6 years

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previously on wrath of the lich king

(session #whoknows i just started this thing so i could come back to refresh my memory before sessions ((p.s. this is a homebrew dnd campaign set in azeroth so things might be weird, don’t @ me)))

with Leva’lyn, the eladrin necromancy wizard; Lucius Hellscar, the human oath paladin; Raksha, the tiefling trickster cleric; & Ulryn, the night elf old one warlock (controlled by me for the last two sessions due to scheduling problems)

TL:DR; the party heads to Stormglen to help defend it from the hordes of undead (they’re partly responsible for) and werewolves attacking it, Lucius unlocks the admin permissions on his Hellscar Tome, Leva’lyn discovers her ability to raise undead is useless in the area, and the party is successful in their attempt to Hallow the entirety of the village.

The party decides to make use of their wizard’s ability to cast the Sending spell and contact an old acquaintance, Two-Shot Turner, a man they’d previously met in Stormglen defending the village from the undead with a company of Hellscars under his command

Hellscars = a faction of people who pledged themselves to the name so that they could fight the undead together, have been for a long time. They’ve been in Stormglen for almost the entirety of its time suffering under these attacks. Most of these Hellscars are paladins, though there are a mix of other classes and things within. Hellscar Tome = a tome that empowers a paladin’s auras, and [after being unlocked] to a member of The New Dawn can detail another Hellscar’s name, parents’ and siblings’ names and life status.

Some number of sessions previous to this; Leva’lyn and Ulryn were conscripted into the Hellscars after learning that doing so would empower Lucius’s abilities. The 3 of them (along with others whose names could not be accessed at the time) were under the special title of The New Dawn, a group of people supposed to create the first Council after defeating the undead scourge who would replace the monarchy.

Oh and when Leva’lyn signed this Tome to join the Hellscars, for a few moments the entire room faded to darkness and stars glittered around them before returning to normal, nbd. After this joining it was revealed that while Leva’lyn could not, Lucius could read Lev’s page within the Hellscar Tome and he learned what she was and who her true parents were -- when he tries to share this information with her, he instead chokes up fire and is silently chided by a burning figure within his mind.

Through her Sending spell, Leva’lyn learns that since the last time the party was in the village, the undead hordes were able to advance on the village because of *** and they are holed up with the remaining survivors inside the village’s tavern/inn.

*** = The party originally were sent to Stormglen by Sylvanas Windrunner, to fulfill a deal between them that she would provide forces to their army against the Lich King if they traveled to the village and rescued one of her val’kyr that had been taken because she held a certain curse within her that could be used. The party finds this val’kyr being drained of blood that is being used to fuel hallow’d runes that ward off the undead -- the party comes to the decision to take the val’kyr, flee the mad scientist trope of a man who’s been using their blood and send a warning to the other’s in the village of what’s to come. (80% sure this warning was lost in the middle of a shopping episode and class swap by Leva’lyn.) That mad scientist informed Two-Shot what happened, etc etc.

After making a to-do list of plans and setting a deadline of when they’d have to leave to meet with Malfurion Stormrage, the party makes their way to Stormglen. At the gates they dispatch a small amount of undead and are greeted by fellow Hellscars who inform them that Two-Shot is on patrol and they don’t know how to reach him. The party heads to the tavern and Leva’lyn makes use of Sending to inform the man that they have arrived and are waiting for him within the tavern.

Two-Shot shows up minutes later and aims his shotgun directly into Lucius’ face and asks for a reason he shouldn’t pull the trigger for what they did. Raksha leaves the tavern to aid the local blacksmith in repairing Hellscar weapons with her Mending, too new to the party to track their following conversations. [After a show of too much posturing and dramatics for Leva’lyn’s taste-] The man finally relents and speaks to them about the state of things, over the next few minutes they establish a plan to clear their path through to the middle of the village to establish a better foothold within.

During this conversation, Leva’lyn puzzles together that Two-Shot’s mood is more than just having to deal with extra work -- she recalls his daughter had been affected by the same curse of the val’kyr, and states aloud her conclusion that the man’s daughter, Elizabeth, was now the one being used to fuel the hallow’d runes at each barricade in the village. Two-Shot does not deny this and grudges on.

Before the party and Two-Shot part ways for the time being, the man is given time with the Hellscar Tome because Lucius believes he can unlock any withheld access to it. Two-Shot is overheard by Lev cursing and arguing with the sentient imp within the book, and he emerges minutes later with clear signs of crying-- but the book unlocked.

Lucius and Leva’lyn emerge from the tavern to find Raksha well into the groove of helping the blacksmith repair things for the Hellscars, as well as providing them much needed water. Lucius sits nearby while Leva’lyn enters a nearby tower [newly attached to the tavern] and climbs its steps until she reaches the floor where Elizabeth is being kept, allowed a glimpse behind the glamour placed on her to see that she is nearly skeletal in complexion and “not doing well”.

Those months ago when the party had been in Stormglen before, Leva’lyn had spent time with Elizabeth and her guardian dragonborn Zereithia. It wasn’t long but she was treated kindly, Elizabeth was a strong-willed woman and Zereithia had then revealed to Leva’lyn her magic had been blocked by a divine power.

Feeling upset and like she owed both Elizabeth and the people of this village something, Leva’lyn returns to her party in a rush and proposes that they Hallow the village so it will be clear of undead (and the hallow’d runes will no longer be necessary). The party agrees.

Out of game -- our DM has just recently introduced to us the new addition of a Heroic Ability he wants to testrun for flavor and reward to a party’s creativity. The party only has access to 1 heroic action, and it will be recharged by future acts of the party working together creatively or... well, heroically? It’s a new thing, it’s all a testrun leave me be. But this Heroic Ability empowers the action being taken when invoked, IE: Turning an attack into an insta-crit to defeat a weakened enemy, expanding the duration of a Teleportation Circle, or the radius of a Fireball. It’s basically the Cinematic version of an action.

In this case the party all agrees to “Cinematic” Hallow the village, with the DM’s permission, so that it will cover the entirety of the village.

Before anything else, Lucius takes a few minutes to sit with his steed and look into the pages he’s unlocked within the Hellscar Tome. Leva’lyn crouches behind him while he does, noting all that they read.

They discover that The New Dawn consists of 8 people, including themselves, and they are all alive except for one -- Jack Turner, son of Two-Shot and brother to Elizabeth, who is a member as well. They figure this to be the reason Two-Shot was in tears before when he unlocked the Tome for Lucius.

Lucius learns that his true name is not Lucius, and attempts to puzzle out which name he is on this list to no avail.

Leva’lyn requests they view her page in hopes of getting to see who her birth father is; to Lucius the page reveals the information clearly like any other member of The New Dawn, Leva’lyn only sees darkened pages with glittering stars that enrages her.

Raksha joins the Hellscars after watching Lucius and Leva’lyn read, then uses it to learn the names of her parents before quickly slamming it shut and moving on.

The party sticks with their original plan of clearing a path to further their foothold in the village, but with the addition of stopping when they’ve reached the Stables in the middle of the village so that Raksha can perform her Hallow ritual from there and encompass the village. Lucius requests aid from the Hellscars to cleanse the village, and with a failed Persuasion roll they are given only 2 Hellscars to help them -- a previously discovered paladin who despises tieflings named Dave (not a great relationship with Raksha for obvs reasons), and another perfectly nice paladin named Duncan.

The Hallow ritual will take 12 hours to cast, and after some undead whack-a-mole the party sets up a defense around the Stables while Raksha starts her casting. The party fights numerous waves of zombies, feral werewolves and spectres before realizing they were coming up on their final one. The party sends Duncan to request more aid, knowing that with each wave comes increasingly powerful entities and they may need more bodies -- Duncan does not return to the party, and Leva’lyn uses Sending once more to get in contact with the Hellscar bard, Gerard, who gave them Dave and Duncan in the first place. She requests more men and Gerard responds by saying he will do what he can, but (the ritual seems to be working because) undead are advancing on the village from within the marketplace and the Hellscars are busy defending. Duncan does not return, and instead 2 new Hellscars arrive in time for the final wave.

It’s during these waves that the party discovers that on these lands, undead cannot be controlled and any feral creature cannot be dominated. This was learned the hard way by Leva’lyn casting a 4th-level Animate Dead, only to have her creations turn on her seconds after being raised.

The final wave consists of many ghosts and one Banshee, that manages to knock the party warlock unconscious. She is quickly healed by Lucius. Leva’lyn recognizes the Banshee as a noblewoman who she had previously met during the party’s first visit to Stormglen; Grenda Lithewood, the epitome of the stuck-up noble, who offered the party a reward if they brought ships for the nobles to escape on. (This deal was declined, having learned the nobles were bullying village folk out of their provisions and homes.)

The Banshee is defeated, and the Hallow ritual is successfully completed without any causalities. ...Well, at least near the Stables. The party decides on the following effects to affect the village: Courage, [Necrotic] Energy Protection, and Everlasting Rest. The party takes a quick group hug to celebrate, and then Raksha declares she needs to go find somewhere to pass out.

& that’s the end of a 3-session quest, with the party leveling up to 10! We hope Duncan found his donuts and didn’t get eaten by a zambo.

#d&d adventures #oc: leva'lyn #okAY SO #this was basically made for the reason that I was awake at 3am and that sometimes our sessions end up a month apart #so by the time we made it back to this city it'd been over a year since we'd even done anything in the place so i couldn't remember a lot #but if anyone reads it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ hope you enjoy it and i'm here to clarify any confusion because this campaign is all over the place #this was originally going to have reaction images and gifs but i got caught up just writing #because this is lovely compared to my crappy handwritten notes lmao #i swear i'm going to be looking to this post more than my notebook my god #my god this looks a mess on mobile but who cares

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ozcarpin · 6 years

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An Ozpin Rant

Hey guys, so lately I’ve seen a lot of posts that subscribe to a realm of thought that Ozpin is untrustworthy/ evil/ immoral/ secretive, anything along those lines and I feel that it just doesn’t do him justice so here I am. Now, the focus of this rant is going to be around this quote:

because I feel that this quote encompasses more about Ozpin’s character than anything else.

Lets start from the beginning.

Now, there’s a bunch of fan theories about Ozpin’s original self being the old King of Remnant and while they’re pretty cool and have their merits, I’m going to try and stick to what we know as stated in the canon, just for brevity’s sake. What we do know is, When Salem and her forces rose, and Ozpin went against her, he failed and was then cursed to a life of conscious reincarnation via parasitic relations with ‘like-minded’ souls.

Here alone I could make the point that purely judging from the fact that from what we’ve seen Ozpin is ‘like-minded’’ to the fluffiest people on the planet (the floofiest farm boy and the fluffiest kitten of a man ever) coupled with the fact that the series ‘root of all evil’ by name swore him as her nemesis, we can probably assume that he’s not inherently evil, but that’s not good enough for me. I don’t just want to prove that he’s not evil, I want to prove that he’s both a relatable character and an incredibly good one at that. Thus we continue.

Let’s talk about the story of the seasons, wherein we learn about how Ozpin (who has been confirmed to be the old man) was at some point left in such a state of depression that he holed himself away from the world and seemed to have just given up completely on succeeding in his task. This makes sense, I mean according to Ozpin he’s been stuck like this for thousands of years, it’d be pretty silly to think that at no point he may have lost faith in his ability to actually succeed in anything especially when he’d been going in at it alone.

The maidens, however much of the original story was true, gave him hope. They restored his faith that all was not yet lost and there were still reasons for him to fight, to get back up and rejoin the world he felt he’d failed. They effected him so deeply, so profoundly in fact that he wanted nothing more than for them to be able to bring this hope to the entire world, to the point that he gave up a massive amount of his finite magic in order for them to be able to.

Now, its impossible for us to know if Ozpin knew what would happen from this: maybe he’d assumed that the original maiden’s would have become immortal, maybe he knew that the power would be similar to him in nature as it had come from him, we don’t know. What we can guess, is that he may have not been in the most reasonable state of mind at the time (having just come out from a massive depressive episode) and while his intentions were undoubtedly good, the creations of the maidens themselves was probably a mistake, though a well-meaning and understandable one.

Fast forward to the birbs.

I’d like to preface this with the fact that I’m hoping we do get more information on what exactly went down for this to be a thing, but gauging from what we know, I don’t see where people can call Oz a bad person for it. To start off, the ability itself doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks that we’ve heard of. Raven didn’t actually have anything negative to say about it other than the fact that Ozpin did it, and seeing as she has a track record of shirking responsibilities in the favor of selfish gain (hi Yang) the simple fact that she ditched on Oz and Qrow can’t be construed as evidence for much of anything at this point. Also, according to Qrow, this was a consensual, undertaking. If anything, I’d say the biggest mistake that Oz made here was in trusting Raven to begin with when, at least from what we’ve seen, there were probably some warning signs he should have taken into consideration before essentially wasting his finite magic once again on someone that doesn’t ultimately want to help his cause (that being defeating the source of all evil).

The Fall of Beacon.

Hoo boy, there is a lot to unpack here.

First of all, lets talk about team RWBY’s search and destroy mission, mainly just because I love the little interaction of it. I loved that, in the face of the old trope of the main character having information that the authority figures would like, Ruby decides to place her trust in Ozpin and tell him about the secret base because in 98% of all shows, she wouldn’t have and good on Rooster Teeth for it. I loved that, in turn, Ozpin decides to trust her and her team and allow them to go on that very mission, even knowing that it may have been the smarter choice to send higher level huntsmen, he puts his trust in their abilities. While this may or may not have been a mistake (depending on who you look at how it went/ how it might have went otherwise) the fact of the matter is that Oz put faith in his students where they had placed faith in him and I am 100% in love with that interaction and never see it mentioned.

Next up: Ironwood. Trust was a huge theme in the Ironwood-Ozpin relationship in this volume. What it came down to was: James wanted Ozpin to trust him, and pretty much forced him to do so (via the council stuff, bringing his own little army ect.) while at the same time not placing that same amount of trust in him (as we can tell seeing as it was revealed Oz didn’t know about Penny). As we all know, this backfired majorly. James’ robotic army turned against them all, and due to Ozpin not knowing there was anything to be worried about with the Pyrrha / Penny fight it went on and we all know how that went.

Alright, its time, we’ve finally come to the Pyrrha in the room. First off, the maiden business. While I will definitely admit that their bandage-ripping tactic of explaining the situation wasn’t the best way to go about it, I think that given the circumstances Oz’s choice of nominating Pyrrha to be the fall maiden was probably the best he could have made. Pyrrha was intelligent, incredibly strong and mature for her age, and seeing as they were under a massive time constraint with Amber’s uncertain health and the looming threat at Beacon, I think its understandable that they felt the need to impress upon her the importance of the decision at hand. I would also like to remind everyone that this was a decision for her to make, and the details of it were given to her to the full extent of their knowledge on it, including how uncomfortable it made them feel as well. They didn’t sugar-coat this, they didn’t lie, they gave her the facts: that they were all in a shitty situation and yes, she could make a difference on it. While I do agree that this would undoubtedly put pressures on Pyrrha to say yes considering it was the obvious moral answer when they hadn’t given her many options, they also didn’t have many options here. It was just an overall shitty situation and when it came down to it, Ozpin was repeatedly asking her if she was sure about this decision, Ozpin hated having to put this on her.

There’s another part of this that I wanted to bring up though, because I never see it mentioned, ever. This is the fact that Jaune indirectly caused the deaths of Pyrrha, Ozpin and Amber.

Yup. We’re going there.

While Ozpin and Pyrrha were having their little moral dilemma over the soul conversion, Jaune was set the task of acting as look out and protector. Now, lets imagine what might have happened if Jaune had actually done this job. He would have spotted Cinder as she came into the vault and been able to provide a warning. Ozpin, who was shown to nearly hold his own against Cinder at full maiden status more than likely would have been able to engage on her and protect Amber. Pyrrha could have also joined this fight and the two (three if you count Jaune) of them could have more than likely beaten her sparky ass and prevented literally everything that was to follow. Instead, Jaune is too busy focusing on Pyrrha, which is understandable, but it doesn’t take away the fact that Ozpin trusted him to do a job, a simple one at that, and he not only failed him, but lead to his eventual death. And you know what? Even with that, even while Ozpin is the only person besides Jaune who knows this, he still expressed nothing but positivity to Jaune’s presence the next time he sees him, while in Oscar.

What I’m trying to say is, Ozpin makes mistakes. Ozpin makes a shit ton of mistakes, but they’re human mistakes. They’re well-meaning mistakes, and even while a large amount of the fandom and the characters in the show seem to think that he’s overly secretive and all that, I’d actually make the claim that the opposite is true, that he’s almost too trusting considering all that its done to him. At the end of the day, Oz is just so genuinely hopeful, so willing to believe in the best of people, and while he may make bad decisions, that doesn’t make him a bad person, it just makes him human.

#mun #rant #Ozpin #theory #best headmaster

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nikkxb · 6 years

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spycaptain replied to your post.

Teach me how to love books again, Nikki Like goddamn

Answering seriously because my favorite job ever was working in a bookstore. I’ll throw out recommendations if you come to me with answers. Also ‘you’ in this is a collective you, only take it personally if it speaks to you.

First, questions to ask yourself:

What genres do you like to read? What authors have you loved in the past? What’s catching your interest? Any tropes you want to read again? What keeps you from reading now?

Second, being honest about the answers:

What genres do you like to read?

Not what genres are touted as great. Not what the world tells me I should be reading. Definitely not what genres can I justify to judgmental asswipes who misinterpret things not to their interest as ‘bad’ and ‘trite’. In general? I looked to fanfiction because I wasn’t reading those genres in real books. Because I kept getting that phantom judgment from people not in my life over what I should be reading. It’s easy to justify enjoying overused trope when its fanfiction, right?

Fuck that noise. I’m so over letting the opinions of others dictate what I should spend my time enjoying. So when you ask yourself this question, actually listen to the answer. Don’t put stock in the loud voices of people who aren’t you try to change your tastes. Don’t cater to what the world says or what the internet says or what social commentary says. Figure out what you like to read.

What authors have you loved in the past?

And this stems to further questions: What did you like about them? What were things you wish could have been improved? Why did you stop reading them? Sometimes, authors we’ve loved ten years ago don’t necessarily capture our interest today. And that’s okay! People change and with that, so do interests. But figuring out what you enjoyed about them will help you either find new authors to follow your tastes or revisit your loved ones and read their new work.

It’s not a coincidence that book recommendations usually follow similar authors rather than book subject.

What’s catching your interest?

What better way to dive into a book than to read about something that continues to grasp your attention in your daily life? You like the enemies-to-lovers/friends plot? Look for books containing it. You’re fascinated by colonial England? Browse through a few historical novels in that era. This one TV show is banging and utterly entertaining for you? Figure out what mainly appeals to you about the show and narrow that into a book genre.

An example: I enjoy a lot of things simply because of their humor. It plays over a dozen genres and showcases things that don’t necessarily correlate, but the author’s wittiness and the humor in the book is what grabs me. So I go and try to find those authors that contain that humor. It doesn’t have to be a continuous laugh fest, but drops here and there that make me chuckle? That grabs my attention and keeps it. Figure out where your interest is naturally gravitating toward and toss that answer in with the previous ones.

Any tropes you want to read again?

Any consumer of entertainment who claims they avoid all tropes necessary at all costs is a goddamned liar. There are tropes in every aspect of the entertainment industry, so my biggest suggestion is to find the ones you don’t mind reading or the one that’s caught your attention right now.

Again -- ignore the outside world. Ignore the voices that speak in condescending tones about an overused trope that you love in secret. Toss out the burden of someone else’s opinion because this is your entertainment and your time investment and your interest we’re talking about. Not the loud-mouth on her phone at the corner table in Starbucks about how it’s good that kids are reading these days but they should read something better or the patronizing reviewer hopping in everyone’s DMs on Goodreads to showcase his new book that’s better than the worldly drivel that takes up your ‘read’ shelves.

You want more farm boy who is falling in love with the rich daughter and leaves to make a name for himself? Or you want the kid who’s scared of his own person and seeks to hide it from the world in an attempt to remain “normal”? Or maybe you really really love well-written, titillating, heart-pumping, nail-biting, rough and rowdy and completely obscene scenes that you dare not admit to another soul who physically sees your face daily?

Whatever it is, identify it. Be honest with yourself because no one else will be.

What keeps you from reading now?

Not finding a good book isn’t an answer. Because books have changed isn’t an answer either. You changed, why shouldn’t your entertainment selections reflect that? You don’t go back and watch the same black and white 50s movies and expect diversity, don’t do that with books. Figure out what you’re looking for -- which is what we’re doing -- and then you’ll have the road to finding good books.

Not enough time? Well, no one ever has enough time. Period. You have to make time. The actual question is what’s taking up that time you would spend reading?

And that’s a hard question to answer. It’s going to force you to acknowledge some hard truths and make you realize that you’ve been prioritizing things over reading. “But I love to read---” Have you read? What have you been doing instead of reading? Actual love is an action. If you’re spending more time on something you claim not to love and ignoring the thing you do love, what are you loving?

Not yourself, that’s for sure.

And it’s hard, especially if the thing that’s keeping you from reading is social media like mine was. I was encompassed by this world online that isn’t real and I knew it wasn’t healthy. And I justified it by saying “well, I’d just be wasting this time reading if I wasn’t online”. Know what I discovered when I dropped social media cold turkey and went on a two-week reading spree where I read 13 books in 14 days?

I was wrong. Dead wrong. Social media takes up my time with people. I checked my phone in the bathroom, I checked my phone during workouts, I checked my phone between clients, at stoplights, during a movie with the family. I don’t pull out a book during any of those moments. Redirecting my time to reading actually made me more productive. I finally got in routines and could do laundry because it’s quicker to hang up clothes when you’re not checking notifications.

Yeah, I still read books when I can steal the time from chores. Or cooking. Or when I’m procrastinating because I hate cleaning. But it doesn’t steal my time with my husband, it doesn’t drive me to compulsion to read a paragraph when my car is idling at a stop light, it doesn’t take over my life to where I’m constantly thinking about it even when it’s not in front of my face.

Fair to say that a good book doesn’t go away when you put it down, but it doesn’t own my life. So look at my example and see what’s keeping you from reading.

Not having anything to read? Easily fixable. Not having the time to read? That takes some self-reflection and isn’t as easy. But acknowledging is the first step.

Finally third, what now?

Now you find some books! It could be picking up the book on your shelf that you’ve been wanting to read for three years. Or it could be buying that book you’ve had your eye on off Amazon. Or maybe you have a friend with something that you’ll like.

Take all those answers you found in step 2 and cultivate them into what you’re looking for. People who read have recommendations. A lot of recommendations. Find a reader you trust, explain your answers to them, see what they give you. Or have them give you their best rec even without your answers. At the bookstore I worked at, we all collectively recommended this one book. It was outside the genre most of us read, we’ve never read anything else by this author and it’s not something we chased, but it’s the best goddamn book I’ve ever read in my life.

I recently sent it off with my nephew’s girlfriend. She’d never read anything like it, wouldn’t have picked it up on her own, not even that great on the genre (suspense and thriller). Couldn’t put it down and raved on it afterward.

Readers usually have that one book that everyone will like. Or that they won’t put down. Find those. I promise. Find those and you’ll be reading books again.

#spycaptain #reading #books #literature #fiction #I KNOW THIS IS CRAZY AND MORE THAN YOU WANTED #but the words wouldn't stay bottled up #so here you go!#considering making this a separate post completely #we'll see #long post

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lifeonashelf · 4 years

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CLARKSON, KELLY

Since we’ve already tackled a fairly diverse musical sampling in this tome, it may not shock you to learn that I sincerely think Kelly Clarkson is awesome-sauce. And I’m not just referring to her talent (which is obviously abundant) or her register of great songs (which is also obviously abundant), I’m referring to her essence—the authenticity she embodies, and how much more fundamentally likeable she is than any other pop star of her stature or epoch. I have not met Kelly Clarkson, yet her entire vocational ethos has been so blessedly free of pretention that I kind of feel like I know her, even though the only thing I know for a fact about Kelly Clarkson is that she is a singer named Kelly Clarkson.

I never viewed one episode of the American Idol season she won and I have never seen her interviewed as far as I can recall. The impressions I have of her character are intrinsic, based on nothing more than the calmative sound of her voice and the traits I instinctively suppose a person whose voice sounds like hers must surely possess (certain voices are just like that—I don’t think anyone on the planet assumes Morgan Freeman is a dick, for instance). By that criteria alone, I am led to believe Kelly Clarkson is a kind human being, the sort of gentle soul who gleans authentic happiness from making other people happy. I am led to believe she is a humble human being, the sort of grateful and unaffected luminary who lends her resources to numerous charitable causes without requiring any fanfare for it. I am led to believe she is a wonderful mother, although I am merely presuming she has kids since I don’t actually know anything about her personal life. And I am so innately certain of these things that if someone told me they have it on good authority that Kelly Clarkson bathes in the blood of kittens to preserve her youth, I wouldn’t believe that person for a second, even if they had pictures (conversely, if someone told me the same thing about Taylor Swift, they wouldn’t even need photos to convince me).

I have an anecdote which supports my hypotheses, even if the anecdote isn’t my own. My cousin Lauren worked at a restaurant in Hawaii for a few years, and on her last day at this café, a vacationing Kelly Clarkson happened to stop in to eat there. Since it was Lauren’s final shift, her co-workers were scribbling farewell messages on her uniform with magic markers throughout the day, inscribing it like the pages of a yearbook. My cousin’s engraved vestment drew the notice of the eatery’s eminent visitor, who amiably asked about its significance; when Lauren explained the circumstances to this world-renowned superstar in her establishment, Clarkson proceeded to gush about how delightful she thought the gesture was and asked if she could add her signature to the shirt. As a result, my cousin is now the proud owner of a decidedly unique piece of apparel which is autographed by a slew of her former hospitality industry peers… and Kelly Clarkson. When Lauren told me this story, I was acutely charmed and—yes, I admit—a little envious. But I was not a bit surprised, because that is exactly the sort of genial exchange I imagine everybody who meets Kelly Clarkson probably has with her (conversely, if Lauren told me that Taylor Swift came into her restaurant, wrote “fuck you” on her t-shirt, then defecated on the floor, she wouldn’t even need the signed garment to convince me).

While artists like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj have allocated periods of their careers to embodying post-apocalyptic femme-bots or community-theater sorceresses or whatever-the-fuck, Kelly Clarkson has exclusively devoted her career to embodying a performer named Kelly Clarkson who doesn’t come across as markedly different than the self-effacing lass named Kelly Clarkson who curls up on her tour bus after her concerts to watch old episodes of Friends (granted, I have no idea if Clarkson is a fan of that particular show, but she sounds like she must be). The only way I would ever recognize Lady Gaga in the wild is if she walked up to me and said, “Hi, my name is Lady Gaga”—and after I nodded and remarked, “oh, that’s kinda neat for you,” I can’t imagine I’d have much else to say to her. Yet if I happened to be at a craft store and I spotted Clarkson browsing the yarn aisles (for some reason, I also presuppose she knits a mean sweater), I would instantly know who I was spotting because she would probably look exactly like Kelly Clarkson always does, and I’d feel duty-bound to approach her, shake her hand, and thank her for being all of the things I assume she is. And if she wanted to hang out for a little while and chat about patterns, I would totally hear her out, because listening to Kelly Clarkson extrapolate on the textile arts sounds like a perfectly pleasant way to spend an afternoon. I have a strong sense that if I were to meet up with Kelly Clarkson for coffee—actually, now that I think about it, she probably prefers tea—we would totally get along; I also have a strong sense that Kelly Clarkson is precisely the kind of celebrity who actually would meet up with a fan for tea (not me, obviously, because I clearly sound like a lunatic right now).

“The Girl Next Door” is such a tired trope (especially in my case, since the girls who live next door to me are a Goth lesbian couple), but that is indeed the model Clarkson educes: an ingenuous small-town gal-done-good who spent her teenaged weekends canning homemade jam with her grandmother and reading YA romance novels on her porch with a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade beside her (again, I’m not sure Kelly Clarkson did any of these things; regrettably, my insights into small-town living are limited to the saccharine tableaus represented in the Lifetime Original movies I’ve watched over the years—which, consequently, I presume Clarkson also enjoys). Her comportment evokes a high-spirited yet enduringly sweet kid sister you impulsively want to protect from the leering eyes of the world, and while she is certainly a beautiful woman, my attraction to her has never ventured anywhere near the realm of the erotic (my pop chanteuse crush is Demi Lovato, whose open struggles with bi-polar disorder, depression, and substance abuse—perhaps unfortunately—make her way more my type than Clarkson is). Honestly, I can’t envision making out with Kelly Clarkson; any fantasies my brain might entertain about her would be more likely to involve tracking down whatever scoundrel inspired the fervent pathos in her performance of “Behind These Hazel Eyes” and defending her honor by punching that fucker in the face.

I guess the word I’m really looking for here is “refreshing.” While Clarkson built her renown in a realm of play-acting, her career has been defined by an absence of artifice, which is ultimately a much more substantive thing to define oneself by than prowling around in spangled booty shorts. At her peak, Clarkson’s implicit message to the young women in her fanbase seemed to be, “you don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not; just be who you are and great things will happen.” I’m certainly no prig, but if I had a music-consuming daughter who looked to pop idols for guidance, I’d much rather her absorb that philosophy than the one proffered by, say, Rihanna—whose well-publicized turbulent coupling with Chris Brown would instead tacitly edify my fictional offspring that “ride-or-die” means sticking by your man even after he beats the absolute fucking shit out of you.

Of course, Kelly Clarkson’s ascent was predominantly reliant on her faculty—I doubt millions of people bought her records solely because she’s a nice person—yet in that respect also, she handily outshined her contemporaries. While most of the circa-aughts female pop icons were essentially sonically interchangeable, Clarkson’s soaring vocals always had enough distinctive character to render them unmistakably hers—surely, no amount of Auto-Tune could have endowed the bottom-scraping likes of Fergie with enough juice to do “Because of You” justice. She was also savvy beyond her years, and it was her refusal to let her handlers dictate the course of her career that ultimately allowed her to flourish when so many of her fellow American Idol graduates floundered.

Clarkson’s sophomore album—2004’s Breakaway—turned out to be the best-selling entry in her discography, and will likely forever remain her most iconic opus. But she had to fire her manager and battle just about everyone else in her camp to make that disc happen on her terms. After riding the wave of Idol worship which lifted her safe and satisfactory debut Faithful to its logical ceiling, she was tenacious in her resolve to transcend that threshold and announce herself as an artist capable of achieving far greater heights than triumphing in a televised popularity contest. As preparations for Breakaway began, Clarkson insisted on being heavily involved in the songwriting process—disregarding the protests of her mostly-male producers, who myopically deemed that a twenty-something woman couldn’t possibly possess any insight into what the twenty-something women who comprised the largest audience for the record they were making wanted to hear. She was also adamant about integrating more diverse and dynamic elements into her sound instead of simply settling upon another cycle of tepid pop-contemporary numbers. The result was a monster of a record that offered up five chart-igniting classics and a supporting cast of remarkably strong deep cuts. As evidenced on Breakaway, Kelly Clarkson’s vision of her craft encompassed something much weightier than a series of Pez-dispenser singles and shark-costume dance numbers. She clearly wanted to make a cohesive album that never gave the listener occasion to reach for the Track-Skip button, and she succeeded brilliantly. Commencing with the anthemic title cut, the feisty “Since U Been Gone”, the masterful “Behind These Hazel Eyes”, and the show-stopping apogee “Because of You” in immediate succession, Breakaway is surely a front-loaded disc, but it’s nevertheless one that continues delivering gems long after it exhausts its radio bait: “Addicted” is as solid as anything else on the record, “Walk Away” brims with irresistible quirk, and despite being buried near the tail-end of the track listing, “You Found Me” is more indelible than most other artists’ biggest hits.

This, too, illustrates a refreshing component of Clarkson’s mien—she made an entire record worth listening to, a feat which regrettably few artists on the pop landscape ever seem to bother themselves with. None of the tunes on Breakaway resonate as throwaways; each has something to offer beyond a hummable chorus, and each is solely Clarkson’s domain, firmly entrenched in her esthetic wheelhouse and blessedly devoid of any posturized pandering or blundering Ja Rule cameos. Even at this early stage of her artistic development, she possessed a seasoned understanding of the clear difference between making a song marketable and making a song memorable, and a keen awareness that those two things are not mutually exclusive. Surely, Clarkson was just as aggressively promoted as any of her peers, but her product wasn’t aimed at the audience hungry for gyrating, hypersexual caprice—peddlers like Christina Aguilera already had that demographic covered. Kelly Clarkson wasn’t selling her navel, she was selling a much more durable commodity: fantastic songs performed by an exceptional singer. And the grandeur of her vocal acumen elevated her wares beyond the disposable and into the timeless—indeed, as of this writing, Breakaway remains a thoroughly satisfying listen; meanwhile, nobody would bother spinning an Ashlee Simpson album from start to finish today, not even Ashlee Simpson.

And unlike far too many of her colleagues, Clarkson didn’t require a force-field of studio trickery to bolster her transmission. The organic nuance and passion in her voice floated atop the reverb rather than drowning in it, and the intricate, exquisite descants she conjured revealed hours spent mining her soul for the best way to communicate the emotion each track called for instead of pondering what shoes to wear in the eventual video. Which is probably why “Since U Been Gone” still makes me pogo around my apartment every time I put it on, while every Katy Perry song sounds like it was specifically written for a lipgloss commercial.

Clarkson’s output has waned in the last decade or so—though “Stronger” is a notable high-point—but even if her most significant work is destined to remain behind her, the legacy she built for herself transcends her standing as the first and most successful American Idol victor (at press time, that is; I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Lee DeWyze or one of the seven other winners whose names nobody remembers might still create the most amazing record ever made). After weathering an era replete with shameful moments like the skinhead meltdown of Britney Spears, The Pussycat Dolls pledging the drooling males in their litterbox echelons of filthy sluttery their lowly mortal girlfriends could never aspire to, and Lindsay Lohan being Lindsay Lohan, Kelly Clarkson emerged with her class, her dignity, and her career intact. The reality-TV platform that introduced her to the world is now a footnote, but her catalog continues to stand the test of time. And even though I actually shook Randy Jackson’s hand when he ate at the restaurant where I work (take that, Lauren), Clarkson will always be the American Idol alumnus I feel most closely connected to.

Speaking of… Kelly, if you’re reading this: my last shift at Eureka is on Monday, January 28. If you happen to be in the vicinity of Claremont that night and feel like swinging by, I’d be honored to have you sign my shirt. Just don’t invite Taylor Swift, please; I heard she does some really gnarly shit to kittens.

January 17, 2019

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grigori77 · 5 years

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Movies of 2019 - My Pre-Summer Favourites (Part 2)

The Top Ten:

10. GLASS – back in 2000, I went from liking the work of The Sixth Sense’s writer-director M. Night Shyamalan to becoming a genuine FAN thanks to his sneakily revisionist deconstruction of superhero tropes, Unbreakable. It’s STILL my favourite film of his to date, and one of my Top Ten superhero movies EVER, not just a fascinating examination of the mechanics of the genre but also a very satisfying screen origin story – needless to say I’m one of MANY fans who’ve spent nearly two decades holding out hope for a sequel. Flash forward to 2016 and Shyamalan’s long-overdue return-to-form sleeper hit, Split, which not only finally put his career back on course but also dropped a particularly killer end twist by actually being that very sequel. Needless to say 2019 was the year we FINALLY got our PROPER reward for all our patience – Glass is the TRUE continuation of the Unbreakable universe and the closer of a long-intended trilogy. Turns out, though, that it’s also his most CONTROVERSIAL film for YEARS, dividing audiences and critics alike with its unapologetically polarizing plot and execution – I guess that, after a decade of MCU and a powerhouse trilogy of Batman movies from Chris Nolan, we were expecting an epic, explosive action-fest to close things out, but that means we forgot exactly what it is about Shyamalan we got to love so much, namely his unerring ability to subvert and deconstruct whatever genre he’s playing around in. And he really doesn’t DO spectacle, does he? That said, this film is still a surprisingly BIG, sprawling piece of work, even if it the action is, for the most part, MUCH more internalised than most superhero movies. Not wanting to drop any major spoilers on the few who still haven’t seen it, I won’t give away any major plot points, suffice to say that ALL the major players from both Unbreakable and Split have returned – former security guard David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has spent the past nineteen years exploring his super-strength and near-invulnerability while keeping Philadelphia marginally safer as hooded vigilante the Overseer, and the latest target of his crime-fighting crusade is Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), the vessel of 24 split personalities collectively known as the Horde, who’s continuing his cannibalistic serial-murder spree through the streets. Both are being hunted by the police, as well as Dr. Ellie Staple (series newcomer Sarah Paulson), a clinical psychiatrist specialising in treating individuals who suffer the delusional belief that they’re superheroes, her project also encompassing David’s former mentor-turned-nemesis Elijah Price, the eponymous Mr. Glass, whose life-long suffering from a crippling bone disease that makes his body dangerously fragile has done nothing to blunt the genius-level intellect that’s made him a ruthlessly accomplished criminal mastermind. How these remarkable individuals are brought together makes for fascinating viewing, and while it may be a good deal slower and talkier than some might have preferred, this is still VERY MUCH the Shyamalan we first came to admire – fiendishly inventive, slow-burn suspenseful and absolutely DRIPPING with cool, earworm dialogue, his characteristically mischievous sense of humour still present and correct, and he’s still retained that unswerving ability to wrong-foot us at every turn, right up to one of his most surprising twist endings to date. The cast are, as ever, on fire, the returning hands all superb while those new to the universe easily measure up to the quality of talent on display – Willis and Jackson are, as you’d expect, PERFECT throughout, brilliantly building on the incredibly solid groundwork laid in Unbreakable, while it’s a huge pleasure to see Anya Taylor-Joy, Spencer Treat Clark (a fine actor we don’t see NEARLY enough of, in my opinion) and Charlayne Woodard get MUCH bigger, more prominent roles this time out, while Paulson delivers an understated but frequently mesmerising turn as the ultimate unshakable sceptic. As with Split, however, the film is once again comprehensively stolen by McAvoy, whose truly chameleonic performance actually manages to eclipse its predecessor in its levels of sheer genius. Altogether this is another sure-footed step in the right direction for a director who’s finally regained his singular auteur prowess – say what you will about that ending, but it certainly is a game-changer, as boldly revisionist as anything that’s preceded it and therefore, in my opinion, exactly how it SHOULD have gone. If nothing else, this is a film that should be applauded for its BALLS …

9. PET SEMATARY – first off, let me say that I never saw the 1989 feature adaptation of Stephen King’s story, so I have no comparative frame of reference there – I WILL say, however, that the original novel is, in my opinion, easily one of the strongest offerings from America’s undisputed master of literary horror, so any attempt made to bring it to the big screen had better be a good one. Thankfully, this version more than delivers in that capacity, proving to be one of the more impressive of his cinematic outings in recent years (not quite up to the standard of The Mist, perhaps, but about on a par with It: Chapter One or the criminally overlooked 1408), as well as one of this year’s best horror offerings by far (at least for now). This may be the feature debut of directing double-act Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, but they both display a wealth of natural talent here, wrangling bone-chilling scares and a pervading atmosphere of oppressive dread to deliver a top-notch screen fright-fest that works its way under your skin and stays put for days after. Jason Clarke is a classic King everyman hero as Boston doctor Louis Creed, displaced to the small Maine town of Ludlow as he trades the ER for a quiet clinic practice so he can spent more time with his family – Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color, Stranger Things), excellent throughout as his haunted, emotionally fragile wife Rachel, toddler son Gage (twins Hugo and Lucas Lavole), and daughter Ellie (newcomer Jeté Laurence, BY FAR the film’s biggest revelation, delivering to the highest degree even when her role becomes particularly intense). Their new home seems idyllic, the only blots being the main road at the end of their drive which experiences heavy traffic from speeding trucks, and the children’s pet cemetery in the woods at the back of their garden, which has become something of a local landmark. But there’s something far darker in the deeper places beyond, an ancient place of terrible power Louis is introduced to by their well-meaning but ultimately fallible elderly neighbour Jud (one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from screen legend John Lithgow) when his daughter’s beloved cat Church is run over. The cat genuinely comes back, but he’s irrevocably changed, the once sweet and lovable furball now transformed into a menacingly mangy little four-legged psychopath, and his resurrection sets off a chain of horrific events destined to devour the entire family … this is supernatural horror at its most inherently unnerving, mercilessly twisting the screws throughout its slow-burn build to the inevitable third act bloodbath and reaching a bleak, soul-crushing climax that comes close to rivalling the still unparalleled sucker-punch of The Mist – the adaptation skews significantly from King’s original at the mid-point, but even purists will be hard-pressed to deny that this is still VERY MUCH in keeping with the spirit of the book right up to its harrowing closing shot. The King of Horror has been well served once again – it’s may well be ousted when It: Chapter 2 arrives in September, but fans can rest assured that his dark imagination continues to inspire some truly great cinematic scares …

8. PROSPECT – I love a good cinematic underdog, there’s always some dynamite indies and sleepers that just about slip through the cracks that I end up championing every year, and 2019’s current favourite was a minor sensation at 2018’s South By Southwest film festival, a singularly original ultra-low-budget sci-fi adventure that made a genuine virtue of its miniscule budget. Riffing on classic eco-minded space flicks like Silent Running, it introduces a father-and-daughter prospecting team who land a potentially DEEPLY lucrative contract mining for an incredibly rare element on a toxic jungle moon – widower Damon (Transparent’s Jay Duplass), who’s downtrodden and world-weary but still a dreamer, and teenager Cee (relative newcomer Sophie Thatcher), an introverted bookworm with hidden reserves of ingenuity and fortitude. The job starts well, Damon setting his sights on a rumoured “queen’s layer” that could make them rich beyond their wildest dreams, but when they meet smooth-talking scavenger Ezra (Narcos’ Pedro Pascal), things take a turn for the worse – Damon is killed and Cee is forced to team up with Ezra to have any hope of survival on this hostile, unforgiving moon. Thatcher is an understated joy throughout, her seemingly detached manner belying hidden depths of intense feeling, while Pascal, far from playing a straight villain, turns Ezra into something of a tragic, charismatic antihero we eventually start to sympathise with, and the complex relationship that develops between them is a powerful, mercurial thing, the constantly shifting dynamic providing a powerful driving force for the film. Debuting writer-directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell have crafted a wonderfully introspective, multi-layered tone poem of aching beauty, using subtle visual effects and a steamy, glow-heavy colour palette to make the lush forest environs into something nonetheless eerie and inhospitable, while the various weird and colourful denizens of this deadly little world prove that Ezra may be the LEAST of the dangers Cee faces in her hunt for escape. Inventive, intriguing and a veritable feast for the eyes and intellect, this is top-notch indie sci-fi and a sign of great things to come from its creators, thoroughly deserving of some major cult recognition in the future.

7. DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE – S. Craig Zahler is a writer-director who’s become a major fixture on my ones-to-watch list in recent years, instantly winning me over with his dynamite debut feature Bone Tomahawk before cementing that status with awesome follow-up Brawl On Cell Block 99. His latest is another undeniable hit that starts deceptively simply before snowballing into a sprawling urban crime epic as it follows its main protagonists – disgraced Bulwark City cops Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Tony Lurasetti (Cell Block 99’s Vince Vaughn), on unpaid suspension after their latest bust leads to a PR nightmare – on a descent into a hellish criminal underworld as they set out to “seek compensation” for their situation by ripping off the score from a bank robbery spearheaded by ruthlessly efficient professional thief Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann). In lesser hands, this two-hour-forty-minute feature might have felt like a painfully padded effort that would have passed far better chopped down to a breezy 90-minutes, but Zahler is such a compellingly rich and resourceful writer that every scene is essential viewing, overflowing with exquisitely drawn characters spouting endlessly quotable, gold-plated dialogue, and the constantly shifting narrative focus brings such consistent freshness that the increasingly complex plot remains rewarding right to the end. The two leads are both typically excellent – Vaughn gets to let loose with a far more showy, garrulous turn here than his more reserved character in his first collaboration with Zahler, while this is EASILY the best performance I’ve seen Gibson deliver in YEARS, the grizzled veteran clearly having a fine old time getting his teeth into a particularly meaty role that very much plays to his strengths – and they’re brilliantly bolstered by an excellent supporting cast – Get Rich Or Die Tryin’s Tory Kittles easily matches them in his equally weighty scenes as Henry Johns, a newly-released ex-con also out to improve his family’s situation with a major score, while Kretschmann is at his most chilling as the brutal killer who executes his plans with cold-blooded precision, and there are wonderful scene-stealing offerings from Jennifer Carpenter, Udo Kier, Don Johnson (three more Zahler regulars, each having worked with Vaughn on Cell Block 99), Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden and newcomer Miles Truitt. This is a really meaty film, dark, intense, gritty and unflinching in its portrayal of honest, unglamorous violence and its messy aftermath, but fans of grown-up filmmaking will find PLENTY to enjoy here, Zahler crafting a crime epic comparable to the heady best of Scorsese and Tarantino. Another sure-fire winner from one of the best new filmmakers around.

6. SHAZAM! – there are actually THREE movies featuring Captain Marvel out this year, but this offering from the hit-and-miss DCEU cinematic franchise is a very different beast from his MCU-based namesake, and besides, THIS Cap long ago ditched said monicker for the far more catchy (albeit rather more oddball) title that graces Warner Bros’ latest step back on the right track for their superhero Universe following December’s equally enjoyable Aquaman and franchise high-point Wonder Woman. Although he’s never actually referred to in the film by this name, Shazam (Chuck’s Zachary Levy) is the magically-powered alternate persona bestowed upon wayward fifteen year-old foster kid Billy Batson (Andi Mack’s Asher Angel) by an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounsou) seeking one pure soul to battle Dr. Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), a morally corrupt physicist who turns into a monstrous supervillain after becoming the vessel for the spiritual essences of the Seven Deadly Sins (yup, that thoroughly batshit setup is just the tip of the iceberg of bonkersness on offer in this movie). Yes, this IS set in the DC Extended Universe, Shazam sharing his world with Superman, Batman, the Flash et al, and there are numerous references (both overt and sly) to this fact throughout (especially in the cheeky animated closing title sequence), but it’s never laboured, and the film largely exists in its own comfortably enclosed narrative bubble, allowing us to focus on Billy, his alter ego and in particular his clunky (but oh so much fun) bonding experiences with his new foster family, headed by former foster kid couple Victor and Rosa Vazquez (The Walking Dead’s Cooper Andrews and Marta Milans) – the most enjoyably portions of the film, however, are when Billy explores the mechanics and limits of his newfound superpowers with his new foster brother Freddy Freeman (It: Chapter One’s Jack Dylan Glazer), a consistently hilarious riot of bad behaviour, wanton (often accidental) destruction and perfectly-observed character development, the blissful culmination of a gleefully anarchic sense of humour that, until recently, has been rather lacking in the DCEU but which is writ large in bright, wacky primary colours right through this film. Sure, there are darker moments, particularly when Sivana sets loose his fantastic icky brood of semi-incorporeal monsters, and these scenes are handled with seasoned skill by director David F. Sandberg, who cut his teeth on ingenious little horror gem Lights Out (following up with Annabelle: Creation, but we don’t have to dwell on that), but for the most part the film is played for laughs, thrills and pure, unadulterated FUN, almost never taking itself too seriously, essentially intended to do for the DCEU what Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man did for the MCU, and a huge part of its resounding success must of course be attributed to the universally willing cast. Levy’s so ridiculously pumped-up he almost looks like a special effect all on his own, but he’s lost none of his razor-sharp comic ability, perfectly encapsulating a teenage boy in a grown man’s body, while his chemistry with genuine little comedic dynamo Glazer is simply exquisite, a flawless balance shared with Angel, who similarly excels at the humour but also delivers quality goods in some far more serious moments too, while the rest of Billy’s newfound family are all brilliant, particularly ridiculously adorable newcomer Faithe Herman as precocious little motor-mouth Darla; Djimon Hounsou, meanwhile, adds significant class and gravitas to what could have been a cartoonish Gandalf spoof, and Mark Strong, as usual, gives great bad guy as Sivana, providing just the right amount of malevolent swagger and self-important smirk to proceedings without ever losing sight of the deeper darkness within. All round, this is EXACTLY the kind of expertly crafted superhero package we’ve come to appreciate in the genre, another definite shot in the arm for the DCEU that holds great hope for the future of the franchise, and some of the biggest fun I’ve had at the cinema so far this year. Granted, it’s still not a patch on the MCU, but the quality gap does finally look to be closing …

5. ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL – y’know, there was a time when James Cameron was quite a prolific director, who could be counted upon to provide THE big event pic of the blockbuster season. These days, we’re lucky to hear from him once a decade, and now we don’t even seem to be getting that – the dream project Cameron’s been trying to make since the end of the 90s, a big live action adaptation of one of my favourite mangas of all time, Gunnm (or Battle Angel Alita to use its more well-known sobriquet) by Yukito Kishiro, has FINALLY arrived, but it isn’t the big man behind the camera here since he’s still messing around with his intended FIVE MOVIE Avatar arc. That said, he made a damn good choice of proxy to bring his vision to fruition – Robert Rodriguez is, of course a fellow master of action cinema, albeit one with a much more quirky style, and this adap is child’s play to him, the creator of the El Mariachi trilogy and co-director of Frank Miller’s Sin City effortlessly capturing the dark, edgy life-and-death danger and brutal wonder of Kishiro’s world in moving pictures. 300 years after the Earth was decimated in a massive war with URM (the United Republics of Mars) known as “the Fall”, only one bastion of civilization remains – Iron City, a sprawling, makeshift community of scavengers that lies in the shadow of the floating city of Zalem, home of Earth’s remaining aristocracy. Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) runs a clinic in Iron City customising and repairing the bodies of its cyborg citizens, from the mercenary “hunter killers” to the fast-living players of Motorball (a kind of supercharged mixture of Rollerball and Death Race), one day discovering the wrecked remains of a female ‘borg in the junkyard of scrap accumulated beneath Zalem. Finding her human brain is still alive, he gives her a new chassis and christens her Alita, raising her as best he can as she attempts to piece together her mysterious, missing past, only for them both to discover that the truth of her origins has the potential to tear their fragile little world apart forever. The Maze Runner trilogy’s Rosa Salazar is the heart and soul of the film as Alita (originally Gally in the comics), perfectly bringing her (literal) wide-eyed innocence and irrepressible spirit to life, as well as proving every inch the diminutive badass fans have been expecting – while her overly anime-styled look might have seemed a potentially jarring distraction in the trailers, Salazar’s mocap performance is SO strong you’ve forgotten all about it within the first five minutes, convinced she’s a real, flesh-and-metal character – and she’s well supported by an exceptional ensemble cast both new and well-established. Waltz is the most kind and sympathetic he’s been since Django Unchained, instilling Ido with a worldly warmth and gentility that makes him a perfect mentor/father-figure, while Spooksville star Keean Johnson makes a VERY impressive big screen breakthrough as Hugo, the streetwise young dreamer with a dark secret that Alita falls for in a big way, Jennifer Connelly is icily classy as Ido’s ex-wife Chiren, Mahershala Ali is enjoyably suave and mysterious as the film’s nominal villain, Vector, an influential but seriously shady local entrepreneur with a major hidden agenda, and a selection of actors shine through the CGI in various strong mocap performances, such as Deadpool’s Ed Skrein, Derek Mears, From Dusk Til Dawn’s Eiza Gonzalez and a thoroughly unrecognisable but typically awesome Jackie Earle Haley. As you’d expect from Rodriguez, the film delivers BIG TIME on the action front, unleashing a series of spectacular set-pieces that peak with Alita’s pulse-pounding Motorball debut, but there’s a pleasingly robust story under all the thrills and wow-factor, riffing on BIG THEMES and providing plenty of emotional power, especially in the heartbreaking character-driven climax – Cameron, meanwhile, has clearly maintained strict control over the project throughout, his eye and voice writ large across every scene as we’re thrust headfirst into a fully-immersive post-apocalyptic, rusty cyberpunk world as thoroughly fleshed-out as Avatar’s Pandora, but most importantly he’s still done exactly what he set out to do, paying the utmost respect to a cracking character as he brings her to vital, vivid life on the big screen. Don’t believe the detractors – this is a MAGNIFICENT piece of work that deserves all the recognition it can muster, perfectly set up for a sequel that I fear we may never get to see. Oh well, at least it’s renewed my flagging hopes for a return to Pandora …

4. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD – while I love Disney and Pixar as much as the next movie nut, since the Millennium my loyalty has been slowly but effectively usurped by the consistently impressive (but sometimes frustratingly underappreciated) output of Dreamworks Animation Studios, and in recent years in particular they really have come to rival the House of Mouse in both the astounding quality of their work and their increasing box office reliability. But none of their own franchises (not even Shrek or Kung Fu Panda) have come CLOSE to equalling the sheer, unbridled AWESOMENESS of How to Train Your Dragon, which started off as a fairly loose adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s popular series of children’s stories but quickly developed a very sharp mind of its own – the first two films were undisputable MASTERPIECES, and this third and definitively FINAL chapter in the trilogy matches them to perfection, as well as capping the story off with all the style, flair and raw emotional power we’ve come to expect. The time has come to say goodbye to diminutive Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel, as effortlessly endearing as ever) and his adorable Night Fury mount/best friend Toothless, fiancée Astrid (America Ferrera, still tough, sassy and WAY too good for him), mother Valka (Cate Blanchett, classy, wise and still sporting a pretty flawless Scottish accent) and all the other Dragon Riders of the tiny, inhospitable island kingdom of Berk – their home has become overpopulated with scaly, fire-breathing denizens, while a trapper fleet led by the fiendish Grimmel the Grisly (F. Murray Abraham delivering a wonderfully soft-spoken, subtly chilling master villain) is beginning to draw close, prompting Hiccup to take up his late father Stoick (Gerard Butler returning with a gentle turn that EASILY prompts tears and throat-lumps) the Vast’s dream of finding the fabled “Hidden World”, a mysterious safe haven for dragon-kind where they can be safe from those who seek to do them harm. But there’s a wrinkle – Grimmel has a new piece of bait, a female Night Fury (or rather, a “Light Fury”), a major distraction that gets Toothless all hot and bothered … returning witer-director Dean DeBlois has rounded things off beautifully with this closer, giving loyal fans everything they could ever want while also introducing fresh elements such as intriguing new environments, characters and species of dragons to further enrich what is already a powerful, intoxicating world for viewers young and old (I particularly love Craig Ferguson’s ever-reliable comic relief veteran Viking Gobber’s brilliant overreactions to a certain adorably grotesque little new arrival), and like its predecessors this film is just as full of wry, broad and sometimes slightly (or not so slightly) absurd humour and deep down gut-twisting FEELS as it is of stirring, pulse-quickening action sequences and sheer, jaw-dropping WONDER, so it’s as nourishing to our soul as it is to our senses. From the perfectly-pitched, cheekily irreverent opening to the truly devastating, heartbreaking close, this is EXACTLY the final chapter we’ve always dreamed of, even if it does hurt to see this most beloved of screen franchises go. It’s been a wild ride, and one that I think really does CEMENT Dreamworks’ status as one of the true giants of the genre …

3. US – back in 2017, Jordan Peele made the transition from racially-charged TV and stand-up comedy to astounding cinemagoers with stunning ease through his writer-director feature debut Get Out, a sharply observed jet black comedy horror with SERIOUS themes that was INSANELY well-received by audiences and horror fans alike. Peele instantly became ONE TO WATCH in the genre, so his follow-up feature had A LOT riding on it, but this equally biting, deeply satirical existential mind-bender is EASILY the equal of its predecessor, possibly even its better … giving away too much plot detail would do great disservice to the many intriguing, shocking twists on offer as middle class parents Adelaide and Gabe Wilson (Black Panther alumni Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) take their children, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex), to Santa Cruz on vacation, only to step into a nightmare as a night-time visitation by a family of murderous doppelgangers signals the start of a terrifying supernatural revolution with potential nationwide consequences. The idea at the heart of this film is ASTOUNDINGLY original, quite an achievement in a genre where just about everything has been tried at least once, but it’s also DEEPLY subversive, as challenging and thought-provoking as the themes visited in Get Out, but also potentially even more wide-reaching. It’s also THOROUGHLY fascinating and absolutely TERRIFYING, a peerless exercise in slow-burn tension and acid-drip discomfort, liberally soaked in an oppressive atmosphere so thick you could choke on it if you’re not careful, such a perfect horror master-class it’s amazing that this is only Peele’s second FEATURE, never mind his sophomore offering IN THE GENRE. The incredibly game cast really help, too – the four leads are all EXCEPTIONAL, each delivering fascinatingly nuanced performances in startlingly oppositional dual roles as both the besieged family AND their monstrous doubles, a feat brilliantly mimicked by Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale star Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker and teen twins Cali and Noelle Sheldon as the Wilsons’ friends, the Tylers, and their similarly psychotic mimics. The film is DOMINATED, however, by Oscar-troubler Nyong’o, effortlessly holding our attention throughout the film with yet another raw, intense, masterful turn that keeps up glued to the screen from start to finish, even as the twists get weirder and more full-on brain-mashy. Of course, while this really is scary as hell, it’s also often HILARIOUSLY funny, Peele again poking HUGE fun at both his target audience AND his allegorical targets, proving that scares often work best when twinned with humour. BY FAR the best thing in horror so far this year, Us shows just what a master of the genre Jordan Peele is – let’s hope he’s here to stay …

2. CAPTAIN MARVEL – before the first real main event of not only the year’s blockbusters but also, more importantly, 2019’s big screen MCU roster, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and co dropped a powerful opening salvo with what, it turns out, was the TRUE inception point of the Avengers Initiative and all its accompanying baggage (not Captain America: the First Avenger, as we were originally led to believe). For me, this is simply the MCU movie I have MOST been looking forward to essentially since the beginning – the onscreen introduction of my favourite Avenger, former US Air Force Captain Carol Danvers, the TRUE Captain Marvel (no matter what the DC purists might say), who was hinted at in the post credits sting of Avengers: Endgame but never actually seen. Not only is she the most powerful Avenger (sorry Thor, but it’s true), but for me she’s also the most badass – she’s an unstoppable force of (cosmically enhanced) nature, with near GODLIKE powers (she can even fly through space without needing a suit!), but the thing that REALLY makes her so full-on EPIC is her sheer, unbreakable WILL, the fact that no matter what’s thrown at her, no matter how often or how hard she gets knocked down, she KEEPS GETTING BACK UP. She is, without a doubt, the MOST AWESOME woman in the entire Marvel Universe, both on the comic page AND up on the big screen. Needless to say, such a special character needs an equally special actor to portray her, and we’re thoroughly blessed in the inspired casting choice of Brie Larson (Room, Kong: Skull Island), who might as well have been purpose-engineered exclusively for this very role – she’s Carol Danvers stepped right out of the primary-coloured panels, as steely cool, unswervingly determined and strikingly statuesque as she’s always been drawn and scripted, with just the right amount of twinkle-eyed, knowing smirk and sassy humour to complete the package. Needless to say she’s the heart and soul of the film, a pure joy to watch throughout, but there’s so much more to enjoy here that this is VERY NEARLY the most enjoyable cinematic experience I’ve had so far this year … writer-director double-act Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck may only be known for smart, humble indies like Half Nelson and Mississippi Grind, but they’ve taken to the big budget, all-action blockbuster game like ducks to water, co-scripting with Geneva Robertson-Dworet (writer of the Tomb Raider reboot movie and the incoming third Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie) to craft yet another pitch-perfect MCU origin story, playing a sneakily multilayered, misleading game of perception-versus-truth as we’re told how Carol got her powers and became the unstoppable badass supposedly destined to turn the tide in a certain Endgame … slyly rolling the clock back to the mid-90s, we’re presented with a skilfully realised “period” culture clash adventure as Carol, an super-powered warrior fighting for the Kree Empire against the encroaching threat of the shape-shifting Skrulls, crash-lands in California and winds up uncovering the hidden truth behind her origins, with the help of a particular SHIELD agent, before he wound up with an eye-patch and a more cynical point-of-view – yup, it’s a younger, fresher Nick Fury (the incomparable Samuel L. Jackson, digitally de-aged with such skill it’s really just a pure, flesh-and-blood performance). There’s action, thrills, spectacle and (as always with the MCU) pure, skilfully observed, wry humour by the bucket-load, but one of the biggest strengths of the film is the perfectly natural chemistry between the two leads, Larson and Jackson playing off each other BEAUTIFULLY, no hint of romantic tension, just a playfully prickly, banter-rich odd couple vibe that belies a deep, honest respect building between both the characters and, clearly, the actors themselves. There’s also sterling support from Jude Law as Kree warrior Yon-Rogg, Carol’s commander and mentor, Ben Mendelsohn, slick, sly and surprisingly seductive (despite a whole lot of make-up) as Skrull leader Talos, returning MCU-faces Clark Gregg and Lee Pace as rookie SHIELD agent Phil Coulson (another wildly successful de-aging job) and Kree Accuser Ronan, Annette Bening as a mysterious face from Carol’s past and, in particular, Lashana Lynch (Still Star-Crossed, soon to be seen in the next Bond) as Carol’s one-time best friend and fellow Air Force pilot Maria Rambeau, along with the impossible adorable Akira Akbar as her precocious daughter Monica … that said, the film is frequently stolen by a quartet of ginger tabbies who perfectly capture fan-favourite Goose the “cat” (better known to comics fans as Chewie). This is about as great as the MCU standalone films get – for me it’s up there with the Russo’s Captain America films and Black Panther, perfectly pitched and SO MUCH FUN, but with a multilayered, monofilament-sharp intelligence that makes it a more cerebrally satisfying ride than most blockbusters, throwing us a slew of skilfully choreographed twists and narrative curveballs we almost never see coming, and finishing it off with a bucket-load of swaggering style and pure, raw emotional power (the film kicks right off with an incredibly touching, heartfelt tear-jerking tribute to Marvel master Stan Lee). Forget Steve Rogers – THIS is the Captain us MCU fans need AND deserve, and I am SO CHUFFED they got my favourite Avenger so totally, perfectly RIGHT. I can die happy now, I guess …

1. AVENGERS: ENDGAME – the stars have aligned and everything is right with the world – the second half of the ridiculously vast, epic, nerve-shredding and gut-punching MCU saga that began with last year’s Avengers: Infinity War has FINALLY arrived and it’s JUST AS GOOD as its predecessor … maybe even a little bit better, simply by virtue of the fact that (just about) all the soul-crushing loss and upheaval of the first film is resolved here. Opening shortly after the universally cataclysmic repercussions of “the Snap”, the world at large and the surviving Avengers in particular are VERY MUCH on the back foot as they desperately search for a means to reverse the damage wrought by brutally single-minded cosmic megalomaniac Thanos and his Infinity Stone-powered gauntlet – revealing much more dumps so many spoilers it’s criminal to continue, so I’ll simply say that their immediate plan really DOESN’T work out, leaving them worse off than ever. Fast-forward five years and the universe is a very different place, mourning what it’s lost and torn apart by grief-fuelled outbursts, while our heroes in particular are in various, sometimes better, but often much worse places – Bruce Banner/the Hulk (Mark Ruffallo) has found a kind of peace that’s always eluded him before, but Thor (Chris Hemsworth) really is a MESS, while Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) has gone to a VERY dark place indeed. Then Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) finds a way back from his forced sojourn in the Quantum Realm, and brings with him a potential solution of a very temporal nature … star directors the Russo Brothers, along with returning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have once again crafted a stunning cinematic masterpiece, taking what could have been a bloated, overloaded and simply RIDICULOUS narrative mess and weaving it into a compelling, rich and thoroughly rewarding ride that, despite its THREE HOURS PLUS RUNNING TIME, stays fresh and interesting from start to finish, building on the solid foundations of Infinity War while also forging new ground (narratively speaking, at least) incorporating a wonderfully fresh take on time-travel that pokes gleeful fun at the decidedly clichéd tropes inherent in this particular little sub-genre. In fact this is frequently a simply HILARIOUS film in its own right, largely pulling away from the darker tone of its predecessor by injecting a very strong vein of chaotic humour into proceedings, perfectly tempering the more dramatic turns and epic feels that inevitably crop up, particularly as the stakes continue to rise. Needless to say the entire cast get to shine throughout, particularly those veterans whose own tours of duty in the franchise are coming to a close, and as with Infinity War even the minor characters get at least a few choice moments in the spotlight, especially in the vast, operatic climax where pretty much the ENTIRE MCU cast return for the inevitable final showdown. It’s a masterful affair, handled with skill and deep, earnest respect but also enough irreverence to keep it fun, although in the end it really comes down to those big, fat, heart-crushing emotional FEELS, as we say goodbye to some favourites and see others reach crossroads in their own arcs that send them off in new, interesting directions. Seriously guys, take a lot of tissues, you really will need them. If this were the very last MCU film ever, I’d say it’s a PERFECT piece to go out on – thankfully it’s not, and while it is the end of an era the franchise looks set to go on as strong as ever, safe in the knowledge that there’s plenty more cracking movies on the way so long as Kevin Feige and co continue to employ top-notch talent like this to make their films. Ten years and twenty-two films down, then – here’s to ten and twenty-two more, I say …

#movies 2019 #glass #glass movie #pet sematary #prospect #prospect movie #dragged across concrete #shazam!#alita battle angel #how to train your dragon the hidden world #us #us movie #Captain Marvel #avengers endgame #awesome sauce

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