#i mean there has been a lot of kurt russell over the years

[thealmightyemprex]

Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3

In this 2023 film,Rocket (VOiced by Bradley Cooper ) is mortally wounded and on the brink of death ,as the Guardians struggle to save their friend ,we get flashbacks to Rockets orgins at the hands of the HIgh Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji)

SO......I havent kept up with the MCU ,after Endgame,I have only seen Spiderman Far From Home,Werewolf By Night ,a few episodes of What if and Spider Man No Way Home.....But I love the Guardians of the Galaxy so I rewatched the first two films ,plust the Holiday special (DOnt have much to say about it,its just sweet and funny and I love that to cosmic folks actors are viewed as repulsive ).I think the first film is a fun sci fi romp ,second one I prefer due to the performance of Michael Rooker,soundtrack, Kurt Russel being a phenomenal villain and a tearjerking ending

As for my oppinions on this 3rd film.....I'll have to let it simmer a bit ,but I like it as much as the second film,and I like that film a lot.....I also think this both the most emotional of the three and kind of the darkest .....HOwever if I have an issue,the film isnt as accessable as the first two films ,cause the film follows up on Infinity War and Endgame where (Spoilers) Gamora dies ,and the Gamora in this film is a past Gamora from before the begining of Guardians .Also the Holiday special established Mantis is Peters sister and the gangs base is Knowhere-Look I get when people say modern comic book movies are too complicated .That said its not too complicated and is a good film worth a watch

Now I am doing this review cause @ariel-seagull-wings asked me why I considered this film the most emotional ....WEll for one its all about Rocket ,more accurately what Rocket means to his friends and what he means to himself ,The Guardians are afraid to lose him .....And for Rocket we learn his hidden pain ....In that we meet his first group of friends and learn of the horrors inflicted upon him by the High Evolutionary.....I'll get to him later.Add to that each Guardian has their own baggage ,especially Peter ,and there is just a sense of finality to this one ,that the guardians as we know them cant last

NOw I usually go into the cast...But considering the core actors have been playing these roles off and on for 10 years ,these actors are good .I was impressed by the anguish Chris Pratt could convey,KAren Gillian was possibly my second favorite of the main performances ,Sean Gunn gets some time to shine ,Dave Bautista is fun as always,I think Pom Klementief has really come into her own as Mantis ,Zoe Saldanna is basically playing a diffrent version of a character she has played for years so its a unique performance ,Vin Diesel is solid ,and Bradley Cooper is really solid as one could argue this is the Rocket Racoon movie over being a Guardians movie

OTher highlighted characters,Will Poulter brings himbo energy to Adam Warlock and I love it ,Nathan Fillion is a pretty fun punch clock bad guy for a few scenes ,Maria Baklova brings an adorable energy to Cosmo the space dog (Love her dynamic with Kraglin ) and Linda Cardalini is heartbreakingly good as Lyla,Rockets friend

....So lets talk about the High Evolutionary ,cause I think he is one of my favorite MCU villains.Hes not the strongest,not the most clever,nor is he the most complicated.Hes basically a mad scientist with a god complex ......But wow do I DESPISE this bastard,in a good way ,this raving narcistic egomaniac is one of the most vile villains in the MCU ,especially with all the horrors he subjected to Rocket but hes still fun to watch due to a wonderful scene chewing performance by Chukwudi Iwuji

Overall,I love the movie,worth a watch

@ariel-seagull-wings @the-blue-fairie @amalthea9 @theancientvaleofsoulmaking @themousefromfantasyland @princesssarisa @greektragedydaddy

[mermaidsirennikita]

Can you recommend enemies to lovers historical romances? I want them to genuinely despise each other. Thanks!

For sure! A classic trope.

--Once More, My Darling Rogue by Lorraine Heath. Just read this and super enjoyed it. It's based on the 80s Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn movie Overboard, if you've seen that. She's a high class bitch, he was born in the gutter and taken in by a duke and duchess--she loathes him and he enjoys poking at her until he finds her nearly drowned, with no memory. Soooo naturally he tells her she's his housekeeper to teach her a lesson lmao. Wildly unethical, yet. Fabulous. TW: The heroine was sexually abused as a child, and this is discussed.

--Wicked in His Arms by Stacy Reid. Cold earl meets tempestuous young lady looking for a husband. He haaaaates her for getting under his skin, and she's provoked to being totally childish and petulant around him. Culminates in an unthinking closet hookup that forces them into a marriage of convenience.

--The Return of The Duke by Lorraine Heath. Hero's father lost the family dukedom after he was executed for conspiring against Queen Victoria, and the hero is out to clear his name... which means working with his father's mistress. Naturally, there is a lot of mutual hatred. TW: the heroine had a major health issue in the past which led to a hysterectomy.

--A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare. Cocky hero/nerdy heroine, lots of resentment there before they go on a road trip together. Very romcom ETL.

--The Bride Goes Rogue by Joanna Shupe. The beef is reeeeal in this one because the heroine has been saving herself and waiting to marry the hero in an arranged marriage for a year before he reveals that he has zero intention of marrying her. She decides to fuck off and have an affair at a masquerade, and oops, who'd've thunk it, the hero is the guy in the mask playing d/s games with her. EXTREEEEEMELY hot.

--Married by Morning by Lisa Kleypas. This one benefits from reading the earlier books, imo, but still. The hero is a recovering alcoholic, very cocky and hiding his trauma with a smile, and the heroine is his sisters' bossy governess. It's very much a "pulling on her pigtails" ETL thing. TW: the hero was, I believe, sexually preyed upon in the past.

--It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas. Thee Classic ETL which Bridgerton s2 probably cribbed from let's be honest about a haughty, uptight lord who meets a wild American heiress he can't resist. Lots of legs. Lots of longing. "And you call me a savage" is said during sex. TW: it's an older book, and in the original versions of the book she is suuuuper drunk when they have sex the first time. This is edited out of earlier versions. Personally, I prefer the original version.

--Sweetest Scoundrel by Elizabeth Hoyt. Hero is a pleasure garden owner and the heroine is the uptight sister of his patron trying to shut him down. Much sniping and sexual tension and masturbating in carriages ensues. TW: heroine was sexually abused as a child and this is discussed.

--Duke of Midnight by Elizabeth Hoyt. I say this one gives me BatCat vibes, but Georgian. The hero is Georgian Batman in basically every way, and the heroine is the lady's companion of the woman he is courting--she has her own agenda and blackmails him, leading to a game of cat and mouse. Verrrrry hot.

--Notorious Pleasures by Elizabeth Hoyt. Heroine is a classy society girl, hero is her fiancé's no-good brother. They begin a sexual affair that becomes emotional over time.

--The Scot Beds His Wife by Kerrigan Byrne. Heroine is an American widow who takes the identity of an heiress, and the hero is the Scottish lord who wants the land she has supposedly inherited. Leads to a marriage of convenience with a lot of secrets. TW: heroine was physically abused by her first husband.

--Between the Devil and Desire by Lorraine Heath. Heroine is a duchess with a young son, hero is the lower class scoundrel who (for reasons neither of them understand) is selected in her husband's will as the guardian of the estate and her son. Leads to them living together even though she haaaates him. TW: hero was sexually abused as a child, this is discussed.

#romance novel blogging #book recs

[smokeybrandreviews]

Monster Mash

The final episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is in the books and it has been one hell of a ride. This show had no right to be as good as it was. Seriously, Monarch was a solid, refreshing, little entry that squeaked in just before the end of the year and I’m glad it did. Obviously, it’s not highbrow, intellectual fair but it is very well written, with strong characters, great performances, outstanding effects, and a whole ass realized world. I have my issues, of course. Off the top, I don’t like any of the original monsters being introduced by the Monsterverse. These things suck balls, every last one of them. Admittedly, this is an overall Monsterverse thing, not just a Monarch show thing. The US is just so uninspired with their kaiju design, always has been. Ren Watabe is kind of awful and doesn’t have the acting ability to carry such an emotionally involved role. Also, this thing just blows open gaping plot holes and raises so many questions about all of the content which came before. I like a lot of the “revelations”, I just wish they were integrated with the established lore better. There’s only a handful of films. You can’t be f*cking up that narrative like this so soon. Those are minor gripes, of course, because Monarch has been a beacon of what streaming originals can be and it has found a pretty broad audience because, and this is kind of the point of this essay, the lead is a lesbian Japanese woman and no one seems to care.

You would be forgiven if you thought this was Kurt and Wyatt Russell’s show, the marketing pushes that narrative strong, but you would be wrong. This show is about the Randa siblings, Cate and Kentaro. The aforementioned disappointment, Ren Watabe plays Kentaro but, in direct contrast to his flaccid performance, Anna Sawai plays his half-sister Cate, and she is the engine that makes this show go. You watch Cate’s character develop, spend so much time with her, learn so much about it. This is HER show and it never she’s away from who she is, which is kind of remarkable because Cate kind of checks every box of diversity bingo. Woman? Yessir. Japanese? You betcha! Lesbian? Check. Overtly carrying romantic feelings for Kiersey Clemons’ bisexual May? Check, again. Also, May is black. Just wanted to throw that in there for reference. Oh, and she basically left Kentaro FOR Cate, too. You’d think having a queer relationship presented front-and-center in the middle of A-spec Goji content would get all the neckbeards in a tizzy, but I haven’t heard a single peep. But the representation doesn’t stop there. The leader of Monarch is a woman. Mari Yamamoto plays the Randa siblings grandmother, Keiko, and she’s also a founding member of Monarch, itself. Michelle Duvall, Sandra Brody’s sister, is this bad ass Monarch operative who goes rouge with Lee Shaw, eventually taking over his band of defectors after the good Colonel goes missing for the second time. This show is riddled with POC, queer, and female representation. By all means, it’s woke as f*ck and no one has said a word. Why? Because it’s f*cking good.

I will dies on this hill, man. There is no such thing as “Go Woke, Go Broke.” There is not Superhero fatigue. The issue is that this stuff is poorly written. Identity politics can encapsulate your entire goddamn narrative, as long as you write it well. Your lead characters can be two, gay ass, men, as long as the character work is there to make those aspects part of who they are, not define them as a whole. I’m speaking, specifically, about The Last of Us. They did that sh*t twice, actually. Nick Offerman’s episode as some of the strongest television I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. It was beautiful It was tragic. It was inspired f*cking television. That’s how you do representation and identity on television for the wide audience. That’s what Monarch has done with Cate and May. That’s what we need to see more of out of Disney, Lucasfilm, and the MCU. There has to be nuance when developing these characters and stories. They have to feel real, not just performative checkboxes for Xitter clout. You’re always going to have Neckbeards upset that The Force is Female, but don’t feed the trolls with more lazy characters like Rey. Write better ones who line up closer to Ahsoka and Dr. Aphra. Interestingly enough, Chelli is also a queer woman of visibly Asian descent. An just like that, we’ve come full circle! Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a great show. It’s probably the best thing The Monsterverse has produced to date, and it did so while incorporating a ton of diversity, without alienating the entire audience. That, alone, I think, is worth a watch. And, more to the point, worth the entirety of Hollywood taking note. We need more shows like this, Atlanta, Beef, Reservation Dogs, and The Brothers Sun. It’s not hard to write “Woke” content for the masses, as long as what you write is organic and true to the characters. No one wants to be preached at or pandered to. Monarch towed that line beautifully and every follow it’s example.

#Monarch: Legacy of Heroes #Monsterverse #Godzilla

[smokeybrand]

Monster Mash

The final episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is in the books and it has been one hell of a ride. This show had no right to be as good as it was. Seriously, Monarch was a solid, refreshing, little entry that squeaked in just before the end of the year and I’m glad it did. Obviously, it’s not highbrow, intellectual fair but it is very well written, with strong characters, great performances, outstanding effects, and a whole ass realized world. I have my issues, of course. Off the top, I don’t like any of the original monsters being introduced by the Monsterverse. These things suck balls, every last one of them. Admittedly, this is an overall Monsterverse thing, not just a Monarch show thing. The US is just so uninspired with their kaiju design, always has been. Ren Watabe is kind of awful and doesn’t have the acting ability to carry such an emotionally involved role. Also, this thing just blows open gaping plot holes and raises so many questions about all of the content which came before. I like a lot of the “revelations”, I just wish they were integrated with the established lore better. There’s only a handful of films. You can’t be f*cking up that narrative like this so soon. Those are minor gripes, of course, because Monarch has been a beacon of what streaming originals can be and it has found a pretty broad audience because, and this is kind of the point of this essay, the lead is a lesbian Japanese woman and no one seems to care.

You would be forgiven if you thought this was Kurt and Wyatt Russell’s show, the marketing pushes that narrative strong, but you would be wrong. This show is about the Randa siblings, Cate and Kentaro. The aforementioned disappointment, Ren Watabe plays Kentaro but, in direct contrast to his flaccid performance, Anna Sawai plays his half-sister Cate, and she is the engine that makes this show go. You watch Cate’s character develop, spend so much time with her, learn so much about it. This is HER show and it never she’s away from who she is, which is kind of remarkable because Cate kind of checks every box of diversity bingo. Woman? Yessir. Japanese? You betcha! Lesbian? Check. Overtly carrying romantic feelings for Kiersey Clemons’ bisexual May? Check, again. Also, May is black. Just wanted to throw that in there for reference. Oh, and she basically left Kentaro FOR Cate, too. You’d think having a queer relationship presented front-and-center in the middle of A-spec Goji content would get all the neckbeards in a tizzy, but I haven’t heard a single peep. But the representation doesn’t stop there. The leader of Monarch is a woman. Mari Yamamoto plays the Randa siblings grandmother, Keiko, and she’s also a founding member of Monarch, itself. Michelle Duvall, Sandra Brody’s sister, is this bad ass Monarch operative who goes rouge with Lee Shaw, eventually taking over his band of defectors after the good Colonel goes missing for the second time. This show is riddled with POC, queer, and female representation. By all means, it’s woke as f*ck and no one has said a word. Why? Because it’s f*cking good.

I will dies on this hill, man. There is no such thing as “Go Woke, Go Broke.” There is not Superhero fatigue. The issue is that this stuff is poorly written. Identity politics can encapsulate your entire goddamn narrative, as long as you write it well. Your lead characters can be two, gay ass, men, as long as the character work is there to make those aspects part of who they are, not define them as a whole. I’m speaking, specifically, about The Last of Us. They did that sh*t twice, actually. Nick Offerman’s episode as some of the strongest television I have ever seen in my entire goddamn life. It was beautiful It was tragic. It was inspired f*cking television. That’s how you do representation and identity on television for the wide audience. That’s what Monarch has done with Cate and May. That’s what we need to see more of out of Disney, Lucasfilm, and the MCU. There has to be nuance when developing these characters and stories. They have to feel real, not just performative checkboxes for Xitter clout. You’re always going to have Neckbeards upset that The Force is Female, but don’t feed the trolls with more lazy characters like Rey. Write better ones who line up closer to Ahsoka and Dr. Aphra. Interestingly enough, Chelli is also a queer woman of visibly Asian descent. An just like that, we’ve come full circle! Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a great show. It’s probably the best thing The Monsterverse has produced to date, and it did so while incorporating a ton of diversity, without alienating the entire audience. That, alone, I think, is worth a watch. And, more to the point, worth the entirety of Hollywood taking note. We need more shows like this, Atlanta, Beef, Reservation Dogs, and The Brothers Sun. It’s not hard to write “Woke” content for the masses, as long as what you write is organic and true to the characters. No one wants to be preached at or pandered to. Monarch towed that line beautifully and every follow it’s example.

[bill-weasley]

someone told me they thought about Pedro Pascal for starlord too and i haven’t stopped thinking about it. Very himbo

OHHH Pedro would be amazing too, but hold on -- lemme raise u something better, Pedro as Ego tho?? instead of another problematic old white man

#i mean there has been a lot of kurt russell over the years #im pretty sure he wants celebs to keep their opinions out of politics #which lowkey means #ur a trump supporter #but shdkfjhsd u know #idk #answered

[ms-demeanor]

Some meandering thoughts about jokes about rape and cultural changes in the last decade and a half

Like, don’t get me wrong, I’m really glad we’re in a place now where we DO question rape jokes and it would be much harder to get away with “raping Jonah Hill is incredibly amusing” as the center of a scene the way that you could in 2007-2013 but I do kind of feel like we don’t talk about how sudden that change was enough.

People talk about how you should have always known that awful things are awful but if you’re surrounded by rape jokes and pedophilia jokes all the time and that’s what’s funny to the other kids around you and the adults in your lives and what makes up the jokes in the movies you watch then it’s hard to act like you always knew it was wrong.

Dead baby jokes were a HUGE thing when I was a teen and in my early twenties and sitting around swapping dead baby jokes was just a thing we did, and tossed in among them were things like:

A joke about incest with the punchline “Get off me pa, you’re crushing my smokes.”

This joke about a pedophile murdering a child.

Let’s not turn this rape into a murder.

And hell, look at the activity graph for “soap on a rope” on urban dictionary:

2014 starts a significant taper.

Letterboxd has their “sexual assault against men played for comedy page” and if you sort by release date there’s a downward trend with 2014 as a really stand-out year for rape jokes about men in popular movies:

2010 - 10

2011 - 12

2012 - 14

2013 - 12

2014 - 18 (jesus, which includes a prison rape joke in “Paddington”)

2015 - 9

2016 - 9

2017 - 11

2018 - 15

2019 - 4

2020 - 1

(this is of course with the caveat that this is only what has been documented so far)

Shock porn sites used to be a thing and they used to be a COMMON thing. A thing that would get remixed and have late night hosts make jokes about them and that got parody music videos.

So on the one hand I was really glad that in 2010 the hacker conference WASN’T asking me to make a rape joke on their tee shirt, but since Pool 2 Girl came up at every single “this is what defcon is about” discussion and some of the guys from the con had printed up “lemonparty.org” stickers to slap up around town it wouldn’t have been *surprising* if they’d been asking for that.

If you were a teenager in 2005 would you have known how much of a dick move goatse-ing people was? We didn’t have the same culture of trigger warnings (not that I disapprove of trigger warnings, they are good and I like them) and there was very much an attitude online at the time of “if you can’t handle it log off.”

I think the fappening was the turning point for a lot of this stuff - I think that was a big cultural moment that changed a lot of people’s attitudes really quickly and I’m seeing echos of that with what Chris Evans is dealing with right now: people are a lot faster to say “oh, that sucks, don’t be an asshole, report people for posting the pics” while I remember sitting and arguing in an imgur thread because there were a bunch of people saying “if you don’t like it don’t take nudes” about the celebrities who got caught in the icloud leak.

People look at Shane Dawson’s (admittedly gross and incredibly inappropriate) behavior with a poster of Willow Smith and act like it’s unprecedented***** but as someone who remembers not only Olsen Eighteenth Birthday countdowns but ALSO the jokes about fucking the Olsen twins that came BEFORE they were legal that’s just bizarre. Seeing people my age and older react to James Gunn’s pedophilic twitter jokes like they’re worse than Jay Leno’s jokes about Michael Jackson (which were made on TV! Across America! On a major network!) is just. It’s bizarre.

I’m glad we are where we are now, I’m glad that making rape jokes in public or jokes about incest or pedophilia (or murder or abortion) is less common and less okay (especially in children’s media, jesus fuck) and more likely to get criticized.

But I’m also pretty sure I’m going to get called a rape apologist by *someone* for saying “2010 was a different time, rape jokes were more common and we didn’t realize how shitty it was” when it really was a different time and rape jokes were more common and most people didn’t realize how shitty it was. I sure didn’t. I do now, and I’m glad I do now. But pretending that we should have ALWAYS known this, pretending that this was NEVER acceptable, pretending that it WASN’T a different time is ignoring the fact that for over a decade there was an entire genre of pedophilic rape jokes (that were frequently also racist) centered around one celebrity and that people told these jokes in public and in pop culture *all the time.*

Does that make it right? Fuck, I don’t know, shit is relative. It was still largely acceptable to electrocute gay kids and people tossed around the word “faggot” pretty freely. Mean Girls is full of jokes about how awful it is for people to think you’re a lesbian and Superbad is full of jokes about getting people shitfaced so they’ll sleep with you (so date rape) and there’s an entire “cute comedy” from the 80s starring Kurt Russel and Goldie Hawn that’s an extended rape-by-fraud joke. I think that as a whole we’re better now as people than we were in 2010 and the 90s and the 80s and the 50s and I don’t think that someone who made a sexist joke in the 80s is irredeemably evil and I don’t think people making rape jokes in the 2010s are rape apologists in 2020 and I wish there was a lot more understanding of both history and nuance in these conversations.

*****to be very, very clear Shane Dawson has been filmed kissing underage fans on the mouth and having explicit sexual conversations with his very young cousin - Dawson has done things that go beyond “inappropriate” and fall clearly into “wrong” “bad” “dangerous” “illegal” etc, which is all the more reason that it’s so strange to see people focusing on him fake masturbating on a poster of Willow Smith. YES doing that was gross but why is it even being compared to the way he’s been filmed interacting with fans? The lack of nuance, making “fake masturbating at a poster” and “creating a sexually abused puppet character” the same as “inappropriately touched and kissed minor fans and engaged a young child in explicit sexual conversations” is NOT GOOD. That is a bad thing. Two of those things are tasteless and two of those things are actively harmful and it’s the actively harmful stuff that we should be focusing on and part of why it’s really weird to see shit like “pizzagate conspiracist accuses James Gunn of making inappropriate jokes” like yes Gunn please don’t but can we maybe refocus and talk about the dude who can be pretty significantly assigned blame for a fucking shooting? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/james-gunn-alt-right-marvel-film-director-tweets

Actually, you know what, I thought I was done ranting, I’m not.

It’s purity culture.

YES you should attempt to do less harm with your language, YES you should attempt to not use slurs, YES you should try to avoid making rape jokes. But there’s an entire huge group of people who are willing to drag up rape jokes from a decade when rape jokes were REALLY REALLY common in order to say that nothing you say or do today matters.

And that same group is ALSO really interested in expanding the concept of what pedophilia is to include age differences in adults or liking the wrong style of drawing and it’s a purity culture silencing tactic and can we PLEASE stop pretending that gross, tasteless jokes are the same thing as actually sexually abusing people? Can we stop pretending that pointing out “rape jokes were more common fifteen years ago and I feel bad about it but that’s just the way it was and I don’t make jokes like that anymore” is the same as saying “rape isn’t bad and you shouldn’t make a big deal out of it.”

It’s always good to try to be a less shitty human but if you’re only allowed to grow and improve and be less shitty if you never fucked up in the first place then it’s all just calvinist bullshit and none of us could ever really be saved in the first place.

I dunno, dudes. We got so careful about disapproving of the wrong kind of language that we let a white supremacist concern troll Disney into firing a director who caught the attention of the alt right by shit-talking the president.

I think perhaps we need to reexamine some strategy here.

[neon-green-reagent]

Aquatic Horror Films that Float My Boat

Shout out to an IRL friend for shooting this title at me off the cuff when I mentioned the concept. It made me laugh, so it had to be the one. Watery horror! It’s one of my favorites, and other than Jaws, I don’t see a ton of love for it. So then it’s list time in that case, isn’t it?

Underwater | This is a more recent film than I tend to list, because I feel like recent films are on everyone’s radar. I’m not blowing the doors off telling you to watch a movie that came out two years ago. And yet. This movie got blasted and forgotten. I think maybe audiences forgot what creature features are, because if you’re familiar with that sub-genre, then this will blow you across the room and have you wondering what everyone hated. It goes full Lovecraft, and I don’t want to spoil anything, but if you love the giant unknowable-ness of those creatures, you’ll cream. The fight for survival starts within five minutes, and while we get necessary breathers, the tension really never lets up. Kristen Stewart proves yet again we did her dirty by dismissing her because of some teen romance movies. (Also, what a LOOK she has in this.) Just... watch this. Give it a chance. 

Dagon | More Lovecraft! But more traditional Lovecraft. Well. Stuart Gordon Lovecraft. Meaning lots of goop and sex. And goopy sex. While the name references another story, this is actually an adaptation of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, and it’s quite good. In fact, it’s better, especially in terms of backstory and motivations. Lovecraft has proven good for only base ideas, and everything else around it needs to be retooled to become a deeper story with less PROBLEMS let’s call them. Gordon was a master at that. Also, despite not being underwater per se, this movie is drenched in rain and flooded houses and sea creatures galore, so it fits the bill. 

Leviathan | The Thing underwater. That’s the easiest way to sum this movie up. With Peter Weller instead of Kurt Russell. Cast of likable characters discover a creature in the ocean that gets in their underwater base and wreaks havoc. It mutates, it infects, it kills, and I need more people to appreciate how good and fun that is. 

Deep Star Six | Um. Leviathan. But. With Miguel Ferrer? Okay, it’s slightly more different than that. The creature isn’t like The Thing, for starters. It’s definitely an unknowable monstrosity, but it chooses to just eat you rather than complicate things. This movie has a totally lovable cast, and I especially like how strong the female characters are. This one’s all about getting way too attached to cool characters who won’t survive. Particularly Miguel Ferrer. 

The Shallows | Every shark movie that’s come out since Jaws has gotten eye rolls. This one’s different. We’re not talking about a Jaws clone. This isn’t a boat full of guys semi-prepared to deal with a threat they are themselves hunting down. No, this is about a woman who just wanted to surf in a secluded spot and gets absolutely bodied by a shark. Who dominates the situation in a such a way that she can’t even get back to land. This one gets the blood pumping. Also, before you groan about a CGI shark, I gotta say this movie is very beautifully made, and you find yourself not even noticing the special effects because of how well they used them. 

Deep Rising | From the guy that brought you the 90s Mummy and Van Helsing comes THIS FUCKING THING. An extremely elite cruise liner gets attacked by a a massive and deadly deep water creature. Jesus fuck it just kills you in the worst way. It’s so goddamn violent, this monster. And the people left to face it are the nasty folks who wanted to rob the ship. So imagine Rick in The Mummy quipping with that level of gorn. It’s beautiful, truly. 

The Beach House | Oceanic body horror. A group of four people spending time together at a beach house all decide to get high one night. Probably it would’ve been better if they’d had all their faculties, because shit hits the fan, and they are entirely not ready for that. Disease and mutation happens thanks to some mysterious ocean life coming in off the shore. This one is a slow burn, but once it kicks into gear, it kicks hard. Highly recommended if you like a big sense of DREAD with your horror. 

And that’s all I got. In fact, if anyone has suggestions for me in this arena, I welcome them. 

#horror recs

[latveriansnailmail]

Favorite Movies as of 2021

Subject to updating because surely I’ve missed a few. This is not supposed to be a list of meritorious films but rather just a list of movies I genuinely enjoy. It runs from Shakespeare to Bill & Ted with heavy doses of 80s fantasy, superhero schlock, and pretty much anything with Kurt Russell in it. Enjoy.

1- Harvey No contest, my favorite of all time.

2- Big Trouble in Little China It’s always a great joy to introduce a new viewer to this film.

3- Flash Gordon (1980) In which they totally lean into the camp and low budget.

4- The Thing I watch this annually upon the first major snowfall.

5- Titus (Taymor) One winter break Titus would be on one of the movie channels each day when I woke up, so I watched it daily for a month and it didn’t get old.

6- Death to Smoochy “Are you alright?” “I’m a little fucked up in general so it’s hard to gauge.”

7- Blade Runner (The Final Cut) So there’s this dude Deckard and he hunts robots but it turns out HE’S a robot, oh so very clever, little film

8- Tombstone I recently learned that Kurt Russell directed this film in all but name.

9- The Dark Crystal Immersive fantasy, though I’m sure it appears plain, drab, and simple now after the Netflix prequel.

10- Somewhere in Time I’m a romantic, I guess. Thus all the John Carpenter movies.

11- Grosse Pointe Blank So good, I used to think I liked John Cusack.

12- The Producers (musical) You heard me. Wilder and Mostel were great but the musical version had decades to mill over and expand the premise.

13- To Be or Not To Be (Brooks) Surprisingly suspenseful.

14- The 13th Warrior Saw it again recently and it holds up. Horror, only it happens to viking warriors who would rather chop the horror down than run.

15- The Mighty Thor I mean, Black Panther is objectively the best of the lot but subjectively this is my personal favorite superhero flick. I must have seen it a half a dozen times at least.

16- Lost Boys A billion Chinese can’t be wrong.

17- Die Hard A Christmas tradition. As a postman, it’s cathartic for me to watch Christmas get blown up a little before all the hugging and sentiment.

18- The Blues Brothers Deadpan hilarity cut with performances by legends of blues and soul.

19- The Sting The best heist film. It keeps you guessing until the very end and no twist feels arbitrary or leaves a hole.

20- Interview with the Vampire Fun fact, I looked like Pitt’s Louis when I was a young man in the goth scene.

21- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure “Be excellent to each other!” “Party on, dudes!” *air guitar*

22- The Seventh Seal See? This list has its high points.

23- Revolutionary Girl Utena Note: Read the entire manga, watch the entire anime series, and read Adolescence of Utena BEFORE watching this or you’ll be left confused. Dazzled but confused.

24- The Nightmare Before Christmas So good I got the tarot deck.

25- The Last Unicorn It’s still a damn shame they never made that live action remake. Christopher Lee was set to reprise King Haggard.

26- Chasing Amy Honestly changed my life.

27- Excalibur It’s weird though how they’re always in armor. Wedding? Armor. Dinner? Armor. Deathbed? Armor.

28- Ginger Snaps A cut above any other werewolf movie I’ve seen.

29- Top Secret! My sense of humor distilled.

30- Clash of the Titans (Harryhousen) Yeah it’s dry but then there’s the monsters.

31- Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life People are not wearing enough hats.

32- Shadow of the Vampire Nosferatu nearly made this list but it’s hard to pinpoint a definitive cut. Try instead this film about the making of Nosferatu with an actual vampire as the vampire.

33- Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust Look, we as a culture had the unfortunate experience of Twilight. This is the same premise but actually good.

34- The Last Supper This film challenged and changed me as a young man more so than any other work of art.

35- The Princess Bride The perfect film, but I’ve seen it so much it’s down at 35 now.

36- Blazing Saddles What can I as a white guy say? Just watch the movie.

37- Streets of Fire Always suspicious to me how Final Fight premiered within a year of this movie.

38- Gremlins More Christmas havok. Yum?

39- The Beastmaster Forgotten and underappreciated.

40- Ladyhawke A thing of beauty.

41- Willow C’mon. It’s Willow. I have nothing to justify here.

42- Speed Racer I know you heard it’s bad but hear me out: it is the strongest narrative I’ve ever seen on film and it’s exactly the way you played with your toy cars when you were little.

43- Angelheart You’re supposed to know that de Niro is Lucifer. The rest is mystery and the final reveal set up a trope that’s been done into the ground nowadays.

44- The Hunger More atmosphere than plot, but hey, vampire Bowie!

45- Zoolander My partner’s favorite.

46- Faust (Murnau) You will be shocked to see what was possible to achieve in film in 1926.

47- A Muppet Christmas Carol but a cut that includes the fiance’s song This finishes out my traditional Christmas films.

48- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Y’know, I’ve got two Branagh films on here and neither are what you would expect given his catalog. The other one’s Thor for crying out loud.

49- Highlander I noticed in recent editions of Vampire: the Masquerade that it’s still possible in that game to hide a katana in a trenchcoat. This movie is why.

50- The Name of the Rose One of only a few instances where I prefer the film to the book. That book loooooong.

51- Robocop (1987) Of all the damn science fiction, why must we be in Robocop?

52- The Prophecy Now we’re getting into films I demoted since the last time I updated this list. This film’s a slow burn unless you get turned up for angels and Christopher Walken like I do.

53- The Warriors Would be higher if the opening wasn’t so slow.

54- Legend Tim Curry kills it as Darkness.

55- Black Panther Objectively the best superhero movie and the Academy backs me on that one.

56- Wonder Woman I do wish they’d trot out Vandal Savage as a Wonder Woman villain.

57- Captain America: The Winter Soldier Just rewatched this one earlier! It is heavily marked by the height of the War on Terror.

58- Blade The ancestor of all modern superhero movies and a solid vampire flick to boot.

59- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Nostalgic for me? Maybe, but I hold that this is the first comic film worth a damn because they stuck with the comics when they wrote it.

60- Captain America: the First Avenger This movie is a real test of character. If someone doesn’t like Cap it’s because they think goodness is unrealistic.

61- Four Rooms Really just rooms 3 and 4.

62- Reservoir Dogs Hey, two Tim Roth films in a row!

63- Event Horizon Do you see?

64- What Dreams May Come Kind of an emotional ringer, especially after William’s death.

65- Monty Python and the Holy Grail Have I watched it into the ground? Yes. Is it still hilarious? Yes, and it gets funnier the more you study Arthurian myth.

66- Pulp Fiction I’m kinda over this now.

67- The Crow People who liked the comic passionately disagree with me but I still like this one.

68- Akira Still.

69- Ghost in the Shell Still, though the farther you get from 13 the less titties you need in your art.

70- Beetlejuice Why not? Let's just tack this on there.

Honorable Mentions:

Fight Club A suburb film but one I grew out of, as should everyone. If you meet a man who’s passionate about Fight Club, run!

American Psycho Ditto. I grew out of this but it’s still excellent.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape A horrible caricature of my brother’s life. I don’t get along with my brother any more.

Rocky Horror Picture Show Not actually a good film if you watch it straight with no commentary. Still, it’s a cornerstone of queer culture.

Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 Of all the superhero films, this is the one that resonated with me the most. I was in a weird place at the time. It still resonates with me now because I’m a foster dad.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Compare & Contrast: ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD Movie vs Novel

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is my favorite Quentin Tarantino film, a love letter to late 1960s Los Angeles / Hollywood, an alternate history where the wicked (or at least three of them) are punished and the virtuous are spared and rewarded.

Tarantino has since expanded his basic story into a new novel, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and it’s interesting to compare & contrast the two approaches to the material.

Movie tie-in novelizations are not unusual, of course, but it’s the rare example when the original creator (writer or director) takes a whack at it.  Ian Fleming famously turned an unsold screenplay, James Bond Of The Secret Service, (written with Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Ivar Bryce, and Ernest Cuneo) into the novel Thunderball and a busted TV pilot, Commander Jamaica, into Dr. No, while Ed McBain (a.k.a. Evan Hunter ne Salvatore Albert Lombino) adapted a couple of original 87th Precinct movie scripts into novels.  

Here Tarantino takes his stab at it, and the results are…well, let’s cut to the chase…

Which is better, movie or book?

Good movie, okay novel.

For those who want a more detailed analysis…

[SPOILERS GALORE]

Story Structure

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel is just barely a standalone story; it’s really enhanced by seeing the movie first.

The story flow is roughly the same, and it’s clear a lot of the material in the book are from early drafts of the screenplay (with a few callbacks to earlier Tarantino films).  There’s also a lot of material missing that was in the movie (the immediate aftermath of Cliff visiting George Spahn, f’r instance).

However, the main plot and many major scenes from the movie are described as almost asides, hints at things seen on screen that aren’t elaborated on in the movie.

In one sense, this works to the novel’s advantage; there’s little point in reiterating already familiar scenes.  On the other hand, scenes in the book that expand on scenes from the movie can benefit only by seeing the movie first.

While Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie features a pretty clear if typically erratic Tarantino timeline, the book’s timeline is less easy to track (but more on that later).

This isn’t a deal breaker in terms of enjoyment, but it occasionally does get in the way of the story telling.

Characters

What I liked most about Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie was that the Rick Dalton character is presented as a self-involved / over anxious / ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray actor who, despite his very apparent shortcomings, also demonstrates a truly professional dedication to his craft and an ability to listen and learn and grow.

Taking part in the big fight at the end cements his hero status in the framework of the movie.

He’s not nearly as likeable or as admirable in the book.

A big hunk of this is leaving out those crucial action beats mentioned above.  Another hunk is letting us peek too deeply into Rick’s head, and learning what happens to him after the climax of the film.

Instead of moving into the quality artsy A-list movie world as the film version intimates at the end, Rick becomes a John Wayne-like figure with similar intolerant attitudes, popular with middle American audiences.

He does come across as clear headed when it comes to his career and his place in the Hollywood pecking order, as demonstrated in his own analysis of why he would never have gotten Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape.

Sharon Tate is still the delightfully airy character shown in the movie, though Tarantino gives her a broader emotional palette to play with.  She comes across as more fully rounded than the movie version but is still the wonderful, life-loving character of the film.

Cliff Booth, on the other hand, suffers badly.

First off, Cliff’s character in the film is already extremely problematic.  The movie deliberately makes the circumstances around his wife’s death vague enough to be read in a variety of ways:  He could have deliberately murdered her and got away with it, it could have been justifiable homicide in self-defense, it could have been an accident, it could have been something else.

We never know and that works to give Cliff a Schrodinger’s cat-like characterization:  We can’t know until we open the box and look in.

Well, Tarantino flings open the box and boy, what’s inside is stupid.

I can absolutely believe Cliff killed his wife in a momentary fit of rage, I do not believe the speargun cut her in half and he held the two halves together so they could have a long lovey-dovey talk until the Coast Guard shows up and she literally falls apart.

If Tarantino’s intent was to hint Cliff had a psychotic fugue after he killed his wife and thought he was holding her together and talking to her, he didn’t make that clear.

Considering how often Tarantino employs the omniscient third person point of view in this story, I don’t think it’s a failure style but of plotting.

That would be bad enough, but there’s a lot of other problems with Cliff in the book.

He flat out murders four people by the time of the novel:  Two petty gangsters back east, his wife, and the guy who offered him a share of Brandy’s prize money from dog fights.

Yeah, Cliff is plugged into the dog fighting world and really enjoys it.  He shows enough affection and appreciation for Brandy the pit bull to recognize when her career is over, and he’s ruthless enough to kill Brandy’s co-owner when the guy insists on sending her to her almost certain death in one last dog fight.

[Sidebar: Elsewhere Tarantino has told aspiring writers to leave morality out of their character’s motives and despite this sounding counterintuitive, it’s actually solid advice.  Morality forces good guys to act like good guys, it never gives the characters room to think and breathe and act as real people.  Tarantino isn’t saying characters can’t make moral choices, but those moral choices must come from who they are, not from some arbitrary code or editorial fiat.  To this degree the novel Once Upon A Time In Hollywood depicts Cliff in a wholly believable light, a natural born survivor who will do whatever’s necessary to stay alive.]

Book Cliff is depicted as a far more unpleasant person than Rick, lightyears more unpleasant than movie Cliff.  Part of this is a deliberate choice on Tarantino’s part as his omniscient third person point of view frequently mediates on the meaning of likeability vs believability in movie terms; he certainly strives to makes Rick and Cliff as unlikeable as possible (Sharon, too, but she’s basically too sweet a character for any negativity to rub off on her).

Cliff also demonstrates a considerable amount of bigotry and prejudice, in particular his opinions on Bruce Lee.  The substance of those opinions re Lee’s martial arts abilities is not the problem, it’s the way in which they are expressed.

Does this sound believable coming from a near 50 year old WWII vet?  Yeah, it does.  That doesn’t mean the book benefits from it.

Which leads to the single biggest problem with Cliff, however, is his age and background.

Tarantino envisions him as a WWII vet, a survivor of the Sicily campaign reassigned to the Philippines (as with Inglorious Basterds, Tarantino really doesn’t care about what actually happened in WWII), taken prisoner by the Japanese, escaping to the jungles to lead a guerilla force against the Imperial Army, recipient of two “Medals of Valor” (who knows what Tarantino means by this as no such award exists in the US military.  Medal of Honor?  Distinguished Service Cross?  Silver Star?  Bronze Star?), and record holder for the most confirmed Japanese killed by a single individual who wasn’t a crew member of the Enola Gay.

Okay, so that makes him what, mid-20s at the youngest in 1945?  

He’d be 49 at the time of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, not an unheard of age for Hollywood stunt men but certainly pushing the edge of the envelope.

Playing Rick’s double?  That sounds quite a bit more farfetched.  Rick’s exact age is never mentioned but from the way others treat him, he’s somewhere between Cliff’s age and that of James Stacy, the real life actor who starred in the Lancer pilot Rick is filming in 1968 when Stacy would be 32 years old.

That would make Rick roughly 40 at the time, and there’s an aside in the book that reveals one of Rick’s early roles was in 1959’s  Away All Boats, the latter with Tom Laughlin (who in real life later directed and starred in Billy Jack), and since Rick and Laughlin are presented as contemporaries and Laughlin was born in 1931, this would make Rick 28 when Bounty Law started airing that same year and he and Cliff, then age 40, first started working together.

Cliff saves Rick’s life from a stunt gone wrong early in the filming of Bounty Law, so one understands how their bond formed and why Rick continues to keep Cliff around even after Cliff kills his wife.

Missing from the novel is the voice of Randy Miller, the stunt director (played by Kurt Russell in the film) who narrates much of the movie.  I can’t recall if Randy is even mentioned by name in the book, but he certainly isn’t featured prominently in it.  Sometimes the narrative voice of the novel seems to be his, sometimes it seems to be Tarantino’s (and we’ll discuss that below, too).

Not all the characters in the movie make it to the pages of the book, and likewise quite a few characters appear who never showed up in the film version of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood or any other Tarantino film.

Sharon Tate first appears in the book hitchhiking and accepting a ride from rodeo cowboy Ace Woody, originally slated to be one of the assorted baddies in Django Unchained but later melded into another character.

On the other hand, many minor and obscure real life Hollywood players and personalities and hangers on do appear in the novel.  Tarantino is careful to put dialog in the mouths of only certifiably dead personalities, however, and as we’ll go into down below, that’s a wise move.

(BTW, Tarantino works himself into his own story a couple of times, mentioning himself as the director of a remake of John Sayles’ The Lady In Red featuring a grown up Trudi Fraser a.k.a. Mirabella Lancer in the Lancer pilot Rick is starring in, and as the son of piano player Curt Zastoupil, Tarantino’s real life step-father, who asks Rick for an autographed photo for his son Quentin.)

The Hollywood Stuff

Which leads us to the real hook of the book, a glimpse behind the scenes of Hollywood circa 1969.

If, like me, you’re fascinated by this sort of stuff, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is a fun read.

Tarantino is a devourer of pop culture and dedicates his book in part to Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Burt Reynolds, Robert Blake, Michael parks, Robert Forester, and Kurt Russell, thanking them for the stories they told him about “old time” Hollywood (i.e., the 1950s and 60s from Tarantino’s reckoning).

A lot of the book rings true in attitudes and opinions expressed back in that era, and some of the stories included are jaw-dropping (the Aldo Ray one especially).

The examinations of various maneuverings and strategies in the entertainment industry are also illuminating.

However, this raises a fair question about what the intent of any given work is, and how well documented a work of fiction needs to be.

There’s a trio of actors (all dead so none can sue Tarantino for libel) labeled in derogatory terms as homosexuals in two or three places in the book.

There’s some observations on race that sound absolutely authentic coming from the mouths of those particular characters at that particular time, but one questions the need for using those exact terms today; it’s not that difficult to show the character speaking is bigoted without letting them sling all the slurs they want.

Speaking of terms, I’ve never heard “ringer” used before in the film industry in the context of this book, so if it’s fake, Tarantino did an absolutely convincing job presenting it as real.

But here’s where we start heading into some problematic areas, not problematic in undermining the enjoyment of the book, but problematic in the sense of understanding what Tarantino is trying to convey.

Cliff’s story is awfully close to Robert Blake’s story, and you’d be hard pressed to find many people in town today who don’t think he got away with murder.

And of all the TV show’s to pick for Rick to be playing the villain in the pilot episode, why Lancer?

Few people today remember the series, and Tarantino taking liberties with the actual pilot episode plot isn’t noteworthy…

…or is it?

The actual series starred Andrew Duggan as Murdoch Lancer, patriarch of the Lancer family, with Wayne Maunder played Scott Lancer, the upscale older son, and James Stacy as his half-brother, gunslinger Johnny Madrid Lancer. Elizabeth Baur played Teresa O'Brien, Murdoch Lancer's teenage ward. 

For Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, Tarantino replaced the real life Elizabeth Baur / Teresa O’Brien with “8 year old” Trudi Frazer (in the book; Fraser in the movie) / Mirabella Lancer (played in the film by 10 year old Julia Butters).

Why Lancer?  Why this particular change?

Lancer’s Johnny Madrid Lancer was played by James Stacy, a brief appearance in the film, but far more substantial scenes in the book (as well as the reader getting to see what he’s thinking and feeling).  Tarantino uses these scenes in the book to explain a bit about on set etiquette.

James Stacy was an actual person, and he actually played Johnny Madrid Lancer in the series.

In September of 1973, he was maimed in a motorcycle accident, losing his left arm and leg.

He refused to let his disability sideline him, and in 1975 appeared in Posse as a newspaper man, then went on to play numerous supporting roles in films and TV shows until 1995.

That was the year he was arrested, tried, and convicted of molesting an 11 year old girl.

He didn’t show up for his sentencing hearing, choosing instead to fly to Hawaii and attempt suicide.  Arrested and returned to California, instead of probation he received a 6 year prison sentence when it was learned he’d been arrested twice after the first crime on prowling charges in which he approached two other young girls.

Quentin Tarantino, the all time grand master maven of pop culture didn’t know this?

And in the book, Trudi calls Rick for a later night conversation about their day on the set.

This is an 8 year old child calling an adult after midnight.

To their credit, Tarantino and Rick both tell Trudi up front this is not an appropriate thing to do…

…but the call continues.

It doesn’t veer off into creepy territory, and when it ends it actually puts Rick’s character back on an upward trajectory, one in which he no longer feels he’s screwed up his life.

But still…

This is a really weird context.

(The scene was filmed for the movie but didn’t make the final cut.  Look closely on the movie poster under Brad Pitt’s chin and you’ll see an image of Julia Butters holding a teddy bear and talking on the phone.)

Style

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the movie is consistent and spot on.  It uses cinematic language to maximum effect.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the book is all over the map.

It manages to stay entertaining even at its most erratic, but the inconsistency works against it.

As noted before, the point of view is constantly shifting, sometimes seen through a character’s eyes, sometimes through an omniscient third person point of view, sometimes in what appears to be uncredited narration from Randy, and in several chapters exploring the Lancer story-within-a-story as mediocre pulp fiction typical of movie and TV tie-ins of the era.

Tarantino does not stay consistent with his characters, either.  This indicates adapting scenes from earlier drafts without really smoothing out the fit.

Another point of view issue is Tarantino’s own.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel reads like the work of an older, very culturally conservative writer.

Many writers will argue that the evils their characters do in their books are not reflections on the author but simply the character acting consistently with who they are.

Kinda true…but that character comes from the writer’s imagination, and the writer needs to think up all those terrible things the character thinks and does and say, so somewhere deep down inside the dungeons of that writer’s mind…those things live and breed.

Rick is depicted as out of step with the new Hollywood and the hippie era in both film and book, but the book reinforces and rewards him for being out of step, unlike the movie whree he finds an entrance to the future.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the novel now makes me reexamine all of Tarantino’s earlier efforts, in particular Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained and The Hateful 8 and see if his world view has changed, or if its been there all the time only he concealed it better in the past.

Presentation

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood the book is packaged to look like a mass market paperback from the late 1960s to 1980s (in fact, very specifically 1980s style mass market paperbacks).

It even closes with ads for Oliver’s Story, Serpico, and The Switch, all bona fide movie tie-ins books, as well as Ride A Wild Bronc, a fictitious title, written by Marvin H. Albert.

Albert was a bona fide popular fiction writer under his own name and several pseudonyms, as well as screenplays based on his books for Duel At Diablo, Rough Night In Jericho, Lady In Cement, and The Don Is Dead.  Tony Rome, played by Frank Sinatra in two movies, is probably his best known character.  Several of the books he wrote were movie and TV tie-ins including The Pink Panther and The Untouchables.

The last ad is for the deluxe hardcover edition of Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, promising new material and previously unreleased photos.

The editing and copyediting of the book are subpar.  As noted above, tone and consistency fluctuate throughout the book.  A sharper editor would have removed redundancies, smoothed out clunky scenes.

Typographical errors abound throughout.  Early on they mention the Mannix TV show in italics (the book’s standard style for movie and TV show titles) then sloppily put the character’s name, Mannix, in italics as well and, to add further insult to injury, Mannix’ secretary Peggy also gets her name italicized.  Song titles are listed either in italics or unitalicized in quotes; pick a style and stick with it, guys…

Finally, Quentin baby, I gotta say ya missed a bet by not having a cardboard center insert ad for Red Apple cigarettes; that would have completely nailed the retro look.

  © Buzz Dixon

#Once Upon A Time In Hollywood #writing #Quentin Tarantino #Compare And Contrast

[letterboxd]

How I Letterboxd #5: Will Slater.

Talking mullets and other manes with the man behind the internet’s definitive ‘exploding helicopters in movies’ catalog.

“Man cannot live on helicopter explosions alone. Even I need some occasional intellectual nourishment.”

A London-based PR man by day, by night Will Slater has a thing (and a podcast, blog and Twitter account) for movies that feature exploding helicopters. According to his Letterboxd bio, it’s “the world’s only podcast and blog dedicated to celebrating the art of exploding helicopters in films… as well as shaming those directors who dishonor the helicopter explosion genre”. As Will tells Jack Moulton, he also loves film noir, Wakaliwood, masala movies and much more. Just don’t get him started on the one action movie cliché that never fails to disappoint.

Sylvester Stallone takes aim in ‘Rambo III’ (1988).

First things first, have you ever had a ride in a helicopter? Will Slater: What, do you think I’m mad? Of course I’ve never flown in a helicopter! If I’ve learned anything from watching hundreds of films where helicopters spectacularly explode, it’s that they are a singularly dangerous form of transport. You never know when Sylvester Stallone is going to pop up with an explosive-tipped arrow and blow you out of the sky.

I’m going to say the words ‘the definitive action hero/heroine’. Who pops into your head first? No runners-up. Go. Snake Plissken, no question, for a number of good reasons. First, there’s the look: that eye-patch, the beaten-to-hell leather jacket and Kurt Russell’s lustrous mane of hair. Second, there’s the attitude: his contempt for authority, the drawled sarcasm and all-round bad-assery. And I also like that he doesn’t have any special abilities. Action heroes generally tend to be either musclebound slabs of beef—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stallone—or martial arts specialists—Jean-Claude van Damme, Jackie Chan—Plissken is just a pissed-off, angry dude who’s trying to stay alive. He’s very relatable. Plus, I’d argue he pretty much invented the whole anti-hero formula that rules our screens today.

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in John Carpenter’s ‘Escape from New York’ (1981).

When did you start your podcast and which film got you into looking deeper into the topic? It was while watching the cheesily bad Cyborg Cop that I first had an epiphany about the weird and wonderful ways in which helicopters seemed to continually explode in movies. But the film that convinced me to start documenting the phenomenon was Stone Cold. If you’re not familiar with the film, it was an attempt to turn former gridiron star and mullet-king Brian Bosworth into the next big action star. It goes without saying that Stone Cold did not transform ‘The Boz’ into the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the film wasn’t a total failure as it features a helicopter explosion that is as brilliant as it is gloriously stupid.

And that was the prompt to start the Exploding Helicopter. I launched the website in 2009, and the podcast followed 2015. Since we started, our aim has been a simple one: to celebrate the strange and inventive ways that helicopters explode in films.

Motorcycle crashes into helicopter in mid-air, ‘Stone Cold’ (1991).

When did you join Letterboxd? What are your favorite features here? I’ve been around since 2013. As for the features, the stats are very cool. When you dig into your viewing history, you can learn some very revealing things about yourself. For example, I generally like to think I have a commendably broad taste in film, and watch only the most important and influential works from every decade, genre and country. But then you look at the data and find you’ve watched Thunderball nine times in the last five years, so maybe you’re not as cool as you thought.

We noticed that your profile faves are low-key and explosion-free, given your theme of choice. Why these four and not Die Hard four times? Man cannot live on helicopter explosions alone. Even I need some occasional intellectual nourishment, between watching whirlybird conflagrations. There’s a little bit of nostalgia tied up in The Ipcress File. I first saw it as a kid, and it made a big impression on me. It’s very stylishly directed, has a great John Barry score and a star-making turn from Michael Caine. I’m a big film noir fan and Sweet Smell Of Success is a beautifully sour tale of cynicism and manipulation. To borrow the words of Burt Lancaster in the film, it’s a “cookie full of arsenic”.

Jean-Pierre Melville is my favorite director and Le Samouraï was the first of his films that I saw. What Melville does so masterfully in this, and his other crime films, is distil the elements of film noir. Basically, he takes the genre’s iconography—the gun, the trenchcoat, the fedora—and familiar plot tropes—the betrayed assassin, the heist gone wrong, the criminal doing one last job—then elevates them above cliché into something almost mythic. And what do I really need to say about Taxi Driver, other than it’s a masterpiece?

Now you say you shame directors who dishonor the art of helicopter explosions? Which directors did you dirty? Well, one of the biggest names in our hall of shame is Tony Scott. For a man who specialized in hyper-stylized, pyrotechnic-filled action movies, he flunked every helicopter explosion he filmed. In our eyes, one of the most egregious offences you can commit is failing to show the helicopter explosion. And in both Spy Game and Domino, old Tony cheats the viewer by having the chopper fly out of sight before it explodes. Now, I can accept such visual chicanery in a low-budget film, where they presumably don’t have the money to stage the scene, but what’s Tony’s excuse? If you look at his filmography, at one time or another he’s wrecked trains, planes and automobiles in spectacular fashion. But for some reason, he repeatedly couldn’t be bothered to give us a satisfying chopper conflagration. At a certain point, it starts to feel like a personal slight. Tony, what did I ever do to you?

In your immortal words, “a film is always improved by a helicopter explosion.” When has this been especially true? When you see lists of worst-ever directors, Uwe Boll is a name that always seems to turn up. And, according to the internet, one of his worst-ever films is the video game adaptation, Far Cry. Now, I’m not going to try [to] convince you that the film is a neglected classic, but it does have a very imaginatively staged exploding helicopter scene. It’s too convoluted to explain here, but take my word that it wouldn’t be out of place in a Fast and Furious movie.

What about the unsung heroes; the stunt artists, the pilots, the pyrotechnicians, the VFX wizards who have worked on numerous iconic action moments, all of whom deserve a shoutout? Personally, I don’t understand why the Academy doesn’t have a stunts category. But if they did, I’d be lobbying hard for Spiro Razatos to get the first award. These days, he works as a stunt coordinator on the Fast and Furious and Marvel films, but I’d like to draw people’s attention to some of his early work. Back in the nineties, he did a lot of work with PM Entertainment films, an independent company that made low-budget action films for the home video market.

They might not have had much money, but they put every cent on the screen with glorious, raucously inventive set pieces that were often more spectacular than big-budget Hollywood offerings. And remember: this was in pre-CGI times, so every death-defying detail was absolutely ‘real’. Go back and watch films like The Sweeper or Rage, and you’ll can see why Super Spiro has now graduated to these more prestigious gigs.

Narrow this list down for us: which is the ultimate most spine-tingly epic “we got company” movie moment? As you may have gathered, I do like an action movie cliché. When you encounter one in a film, it’s like meeting an old friend. And one of my favorites is when someone uses this classic line of dialog to signal that a car chase or a gun battle is about to start. I’ve heard people deliver the line in all sorts of ways–funny, scared, angrily and often just badly. But if you want spine-tingly, then you can’t beat Harrison Ford in Star Wars. He drops the line during the detention-block scene after failing to bluff an imperial officer. As soon as he says it, John Williams’ iconic score kicks in. It gives you the ‘feels’ every time.

“Boring conversation anyway.” Han Solo and Chewbacca in ‘Star Wars’ (1977).

And which action movie cliché can you simply not stand? Stop it: my hackles are raising just thinking about it. For me, the trope that never fails to disappoint is the ‘reluctant’ hero being convinced to take up arms and join the fight. You know the scene. Invariably, the hero has hung up their spurs and is living a bucolic existence ‘off the grid’, when a gruff buddy shows up asking them to risk almost certain death by taking on ‘one last job’. Now, dialog is rarely an action film’s greatest strength, and these beefcake actors generally are not cast for their dramatic chops. Which means we get subjected to the same perfunctory and uninteresting scene over and over again: “I told you, I’m out the game”, “Goddamnit, we need you”, “OK, I’ll do it”. These scenes just never work and are never less than painful to watch.

Which up-and-coming action director are you most excited about? In terms of up-and-coming action talent, I’d pick the director Stefano Sollima. I first noticed his work on a couple of TV series: the fantastic Italian crime dramas, Romanzo Criminale and Gomorrah. The way he composed shots really stood out, and it was clear he had a very cinematic eye. He rather reminds me of Michael Mann. He’s now on Hollywood’s radar and got to direct Sicario: Day of the Soldado the other year. And he’s lined up to make a Tom Clancy adaptation with Michael B. Jordan. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Have you witnessed the glory that is Wakaliwood—Ugandan DIY action filmmaking—three of which make Letterboxd’s official top ten films by black directors? Which international films do you feel out-match Hollywood? I love the Wakaliwood films I’ve seen. It’s fascinating to watch action films from around the world and see their different styles and flavors. Recently, I’ve been trying to investigate Indian cinema and, in particular, what are known as ‘masala movies’. These mix action, comedy, drama, romance and dance numbers into one big, crazy, entertaining mess. They’re a unique experience. If you want to check one out, I’d suggest Dhoom 2. It’s bananas.

Can you believe there are only two female directors represented in your exploding helicopter list? Do you believe that’s due to systemic or thematic reasons? You have to say it’s systemic. Men have dominated filmmaking for more than a century. Until women have the same opportunities to direct and make films as men, it’s impossible to know what their interest may or may not be in blowing up helicopters. [Will has previously written about the search for “true gender equality in the world of exploding helicopters”.]

To address the elephant in the room, how has Kobe Bryant’s unfortunate death earlier this year changed the way you look at these scenes? Obviously, I appreciate that Kobe Bryant’s death was very shocking and a tragedy for his family and fans. But basketball really is not a thing on these grim shores, so it didn’t register with us unenlightened Brits other than [as] a sad headline about a US sports star.

What was your most anticipated movie event of 2020 before Covid-19 pushed every tentpole back? That’s easy: No Time To Die. I’m a huge Bond fan and as soon as tickets were available, I booked myself in to see it on opening day at an IMAX. But if the Daniel Craig era is synonymous with anything, it’s lengthy delays between films.

Freerunner Sébastien Foucan in the opening scene from ‘Casino Royale’ (2006).

What’s a fond memory you have in theaters related to the Bond franchise? I remember going to see Casino Royale. I was excited, but also nervous to see it. The Brosnan era had ended with the risible Die Another Day: invisible cars, kitesurfing and, worst of all, John Cleese’s awful Q. Since that had come out, we’d had Mission: Impossible, Bourne and the Triple X films, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that Bond might be finished. Then the first ten minutes of Casino Royale happened. And while that outstanding parkour-inspired chase was terrifically exciting, it also hit me like cinematic Valium. I suddenly realised I could sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that 007 was going to be just fine.

Are you planning on returning to theaters as soon as you can? When would you feel comfortable? I’m taking a wait-and-see approach. I’d love to see films back on the big screen again, but I want to know more about how cinemas are going to maintain social distancing inside.

Finally, what three Letterboxd accounts should we all be following? Why not give Todd Gaines, Jayson Kennedy or Fred Andersson a follow? If you’re interested in genre films that are a little off the beaten trail, they’ll likely all steer you towards some hidden gems.

#letterboxd #how i letterboxd #letterboxd member #letterboxd community #cine #film lover #exploding helicopter #chopper fireball #action films

[oltnews]

They really don't say anything to Scarlett Johansson. She may be the star of "Black Widow", but that doesn't mean that she has any idea when the movie trailer will be released. You may remember that we had a first surprise glimpse of "Black Widow" earlier this week. And when we say early, we mean early. Tuesday, our story was published just before 2 a.m. The trailer fell late Monday without fanfare or advance warning, and Johansson told Stephen Colbert Thursday evening that even she didn't know it was going to happen. "I woke up and received a text from Chris Evans saying," The trailer is superb. "I don't know what he was doing at 5 a.m. It's another story. Yeah, getting up, of course," she said, responding to Colbert's joke. haven't said it! They hide everything from me. " Also read: 'Black Widow': Natasha Romanoff has a family reunion and kicks ass in the first trailer for Marvel Prequel (Video) Johansson was on "The Late Show" to promote "Marriage Story", which she performed with Adam Driver, aka Kylo Ren from the "Star Wars" trilogy. So Colbert asked if she had any idea who would win a fight between Kylo and Natasha. She didn't have a lot of response, nor about the details she was allowed to say about "Black Widow", other than the fact that it was between "Captain America: Civil War" and "Avengers: Infinity War ". Johansson says the film is a "homecoming" in which Natasha must now face some of her guilt over the things she did before becoming revenge. However, fans wondered why a solo film, Black Widow is not an origin story that goes back to its training beginnings in Russia, and she explained why this story was better. "I could never have made this film 10 years ago when we had just started our journey with Marvel. It’s a film that speaks so much… the character informed this film. My trip with Natasha informed this film. She’s a character who’s a fully recognized woman. It has a complexity that it is delicious, "said Johansson. "Not to say it would have been something else or totally entertaining in 10 years, but we can do things that are good." Also read: Review of the film 'Marriage Story': Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver split up in the devastating drama of Noah Baumbach Colbert also had another theory to direct by her: that it was Johansson's last go-around as "Black Widow". Here is why: it is his eighth appearance because the character and the spiders have eight legs. Can't it be a coincidence? Of course, Stephen. Check out Johansson's appearance on CBS "The Late Show" above. All 23 Marvel Cinematic Universe movies ranked, from worst to best (Photos) No one on the Internet wants to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's something we simply can't continue to ignore. But seriously: even if this seemingly unstoppable franchise has rabid fans around the world, nobody can agree on those they prefer (or at least, for that matter). TheWrap film editor-in-chief Alonso Duralde gets into the subject - and no, he's not paid by anyone at Disney to love (or hate, for that matter) any of these films. wonder 23. "The Incredible Hulk" (2008) Released just five years after Ang Lee's "Hulk", this second attempt to make a man a leader in the great green creature radiated by Gamma proved just as disappointing. If we've learned anything from the Avengers movies, it's that Bruce Banner works best when he's a supporting character (and when he's played by Mark Ruffalo). wonder 22. "Ant-Man" (2015) Although this film deserves to be rewarded for not having put the fate of humanity at stake - the stakes are more than the size of a child's train - the stabs to the humor of the film seem to be overestimated , and little natural charm from Paul Rudd comes to the fore in what should be a breezy caper. We can only wonder what the original version of Edgar Wright might have looked like. Disney / Marvel 21. "Thor" (2011) Director Kenneth Branagh tackles the the-and-thou of Asgard's segments, but the little town where the pinnacle is played out has been one of the most cheesy fake towns on the screen since the terrible movie "Supergirl" in years 80. On the positive side, actor Chris Hemsworth shows a scintillating spirit in this adventure of the god of thunder, coupled with an impressive musculature. wonder 20. "Iron Man 2" (2010) The best MCU movies do a good job of distracting you from all the setup of future franchise entries; this one offers so much empire building that it might as well have a "Pardon Our Dust" sign on it. Still, Scarlett Johansson's first appearance as Black Widow, dispatching opponents down the hall, made an unforgettable impression. Disney / Marvel 19. "Captain America: the first avenger" (2011) Just like he did in "The Rocketeer", director Joe Johnston excels at portraying the brilliance of the 1940s, although the characters are not as vivid as the USO sparrow. But fear not, true believers - the screen adventures of Cap have improved a lot in his later solo and team movies. wonder 18. "Thor: The Dark World" (2013) Firmly average, yes, but an improvement over its predecessor and a good time, skillfully balancing superheroes, second bananas, entertaining villains and the occasional killer one-liner. In no way a cornerstone of the MCU, but this one, mainly, works. Disney / Marvel 17. "Iron Man 3" (2013) Director and co-writer Shane Black doesn't always have the narrowest understanding of history - what is the infamous Extremis still doing, and why? - but he shows his skill in witty jokes (which Robert Downey, Jr. can make within an inch of his life) and breathtaking action (a flight rescue of a dozen passengers who have just fallen from Air Force One). Disney / Marvel 16. "The Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015) It's always fun when the group comes together, but it's also hard to rediscover the magic of this first time. This sequel offers a lot of excitement and banter scripted by Joss Whedon, but it's also a bit overloaded with characters and support setups for the next MCU movie series. Both fans and enemies of superhero movies can find arguments for their arguments here. Disney / Marvel 15. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" (2017) The group is back together, and they are as hilarious as when they first came out, but overall, this sequel gives the impression that it is only vamping (entertaining) until the next major change of the intrigue in the MCU. Kurt Russell appears as Ego the Living Planet, who claims to be the long-lost father of Peter Quill / Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), and although the film is more concerned with character and emotion than intrigue , not all the movement the moments ring true. Disney / Marvel 14. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) This sequel has a better idea of ​​his own stupidity than his predecessor, as Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) flee the Feds, fight the phased-in ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) and thwart plans of a gangster (Walton Goggins), while planning a rescue of the mother of The Wasp (Michelle Pfeiffer) from another dimension. Feels more Disney - in the sense of Kurt-Russell-as-Dexter-Riley - than Marvel, but still fun. Disney / Marvel 13. Captain Marvel (2019) Both the personal development and the retro of the 1990s are played with a fairly heavy hand, but it's a lot of fun to have here, Brie Larson's heroine, both bubbling and haunted - nothing like amnesia to spice up another story of origin - to one of the biggest feline bananas in the history of cinema. 12. "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018) It's a little difficult to judge this one on its own merits, because it is clearly a half-film; we will not really know how this film will materialize until we have the sequel. But in the meantime, he does a pretty impressive job of juggling some 25 major MCU characters and keeping his sense of humor even in the face of mass destruction (and intense scenes involving torture and genocide). Disney / Marvel 11. "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) You get all the T-crossing and I-dotting required at this point in the game, but the capper for the first piece of the MCU saga is a mostly satisfying season finale that offers rare moments of catharsis among moments of entertaining characters. which will cause laughter and maybe even a few tears. Disney / Marvel 10. "Spider-Man: Far From Home" (2019) This second outing from director Jon Watts and leader Tom Holland maintains the lark tone and focus on the characters that make these films feel like such a unique corner of the MCU. This time, the post-snap (or "blip", as the film says) Peter Parker and his friends are heading to Europe in a film that looks like a road comedy that sometimes blows up some superheroes. Disney / Marvel 9. "Thor: Ragnarok" (2017) Director Taika Waititi ("Hunt for the Wilderpeople") strikes a delicate balance between breathless action and the fate of the universe on the one hand and ironic stupidity and catchy jokes on the other. Fortunately, he has Chris Hemsworth, who excels in both, surrounded by spirit like Tom Hiddleston, Mark Ruffalo and franchise beginners Tessa Thompson, Jeff Goldblum and a glorious Cate Blanchett. Disney / Marvel 8. "Captain America: Civil War" (2016) The plot and the pace aren't as tight as in "Winter Soldier", but if you're looking for somber human conflict and exciting superhero-on-superhero action, this movie does a lot of good as "Batman v. Superman : Dawn of Justice "did wrong. Disney / Marvel 7. "Iron Man" (2008) It all starts here - a story of superhero origins for literalists who cannot hide behind explosive planets or radioactive spiders. Jon Favreau, then most famous for directing "Elf" and writing and co-starring in "Swingers", seemed a strange choice for the material, but he knows how to give us the two characters (played by Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow with plume) and ka-blam. wonder 6. "Black Panther" (2018) While the titular African superhero king of Chadwick Boseman takes something from a back seat to a troika of fascinating female characters - played by Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira and Letitia Wright - the film nevertheless overflows with excitement and of a rich history. (And Michael B. Jordan's Killmonger ranks among the franchise's biggest villains.) Disney / Marvel 5. "Spider-Man: Homecoming" (2017) Less motivated by guilt and haunted than previous versions of the character (on the page or screen), Tom Holland's Spider-Man has enough on his plate to manage his superhero growing pains. Hungry to join The Avengers but still struggling with everything he has to learn - he's only 15 years old after all - our hero faces the evil blue collar The Vulture (well Michael Keaton, Birdman) in a funny adventure all by presenting real challenges, formidable characterizations and a wonderfully detailed cast. (You must love a teen movie that works for Zendaya, Tony Revolori, Abraham Attah and Josie Totah, as well as scene-robber newcomer Jacob Batalon.) Sony / Marvel 4. "Doctor Strange" (2016) It would be too easy to ridicule the master of the mystical arts on the big screen, but director Scott Derrickson and his team somehow gave us a version of the surgeon-turned-magician, Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), who seems at ease in the real world, rubbing shoulders with the Avengers and crossing tripping and dazzling dimensions where no one else could go. 3. "Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014) Pleasant, casual and steeped in the super hits of the 70s, this comic adventure is something of an outlier - both tonal and geographic - in the Marvel universe. Yet whether Rocket Raccoon and Black Widow intersect or not, this saga that covers the stars reminded us that there is more than one way to tell a story about superheroes. Disney / Marvel 2. "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" (2014) Aggressive patriotism meets anti-government paranoia in this fascinating tale that pits the captain against labyrinthine plots. It also turns out that Steve Rogers is much more interesting in time travel in the 2000s than firmly at home in the 1940s. And you will believe that the Falcon can fly. Disney / Marvel 1. "The Avengers" (2012) Still the gold standard of the MCU, this film reveals that Joss Whedon gets comics in their DNA, in the same way that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were fluent in the language of serials in the "Indiana Jones" movies. Putting all of these heroes in one room (or helicopter, anyway) has produced tremendous results, although the success of the film has led to the all-superhero-all-time ethos of contemporary Hollywood. Disney / Marvel Previous slide Next slide TheWrap reviewer Alonso Duralde orders the MCU, including "Spider-Man: Far From Home" No one on the Internet wants to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's something we simply can't continue to ignore. But seriously: even if this seemingly unstoppable franchise has rabid fans around the world, nobody can agree on those they prefer (or at least, for that matter). TheWrap film editor-in-chief Alonso Duralde gets into the subject - and no, he's not paid by anyone at Disney to love (or hate, for that matter) any of these films. https://oltnews.com/even-scarlett-johansson-didnt-know-black-widow-trailer-was-falling-video-thewrap?_unique_id=5ea1a7409999e

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Ego

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Years ago, comic book movies were absolutely, totally afraid to be even a little weird. Raimi carried the weirdness torch for a while thanks to the success of the Spider-Man trilogy, but for some reason he was the only person unafraid to be goofy; even Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, a movie about one of the more fun and campy classical hero teams, was completely and utterly afraid to show a big man in purple armor who eats planets and so instead opted to show us an intergalactic fart cloud. The precedent set by franchises like Blade, X-Men, and Nolan’s Batman films lingered for a long time.

Then along came James Gunn.

Gunn is a man unafraid to be weird, and Guardians of the Galaxy really changed the game in 2014. There’s a gun-toting raccoon, a talking tree, a bald blue cyborg woman, and an alcoholic duck, and the movie is a smash hit critically and financially; there is now no excuse not to put the wierdest stuff from the comics faithfully into film. And for the sequel, Gunn apparently saw fit to bring in one of Marvel’s most bonkers bad guys: Ego, the Living Planet.

Ego is the perfect example of how to adapt something utterly bizarre from the comics, changing some major elements while still staying true to the nature of the character himself. Ego here is Peter Quill’s father, something that isn’t true in the comics, as well as a Celestial, something also not true in the comics… but he is still a sentient planet, and he is still completely and utterly evil.

Actor: Kurt Russell, 80s superstar and the reason Solid Snake exists, plays Ego to perfection. Ego is a character with, well, an ego; he’s selfish, self-centered, and lacking in empathy, but he also needs to come off as charming and friendly or we the audience would see through him immediately. Russell is the exact perfect man for that job; this is a guy who managed to play a character who was mildly transphobic and still have them come off as likable. Russell is also able to switch from affable and charming to scary and furious with ease, which is a big help after the reveal when Ego drops all pretense. Russell just kills it, there’s no other way to put it.

Motivation/Goals: Ego has an almost sympathetic goal, one that, from a certain point of view, makes him come off as a bit sympathetic. The guy was drifting alone in the void for eons and had to piece himself together, so is it any wonder he was horrifically lonely when he was finally able to set out to find life? Of course, that loneliness and isolation led to him developing some really nasty personality traits, and so he decided the best course of action after finding out other intelligent life was “boring” was to plant seeds on every planet, sire a child with powers just like him, and then wipe out all life and turn all the planets in the universe into extensions of himself. It is a plan truly befitting a character with the name “Ego,” and while it is true his motivation is at least a little deserving of sympathy, his goals and how he goes about trying to ameliorate his pain is what makes Ego an irredeemable monster.

Personality: Ego is perhaps one of the most aptly named characters in all of fiction, and he’s also one of the few characters one could make the honest claim that his ego is literally the size of a planet. Ego puts forth this identity of a charming, fatherly figure, happy, affable, jokey… just really sweet and charming. But much like the avatar he uses, it’s all just a mask.

Look at how he talks about what he did to Peter’s mom; he says it with such a wistful, resigned melancholy flavored with this “I did what I had to do” smugness that is a twisted reflection of how one might recall their first date, and then follows it up with a horrifically callous response of “I know that sounds bad.” Ego is such a monstrous, unrepentant sociopath with so little regard for life that is beneath his lofty stature that I just don’t think he really comprehends things like empathy. He is the ultimate psychopathic manchild, an arrogant egotist who hides behind this friendly veneer until the moment things don’t go the way he wants, at which point he starts screaming, ranting, and raving. The fact he is completely and utterly taken aback that Peter would unload multiple shots into him after being told Ego gave his mother a brain tumor is really telling of just what kind of person he really is.

Final Fate: The bomb Groot planted on Ego’s brain goes off, and Ego’s avatar crumbles to dust as the planet begins to blow up, seeing as its brain just got obliterated. The beautiful karma of this moment makes it extra delicious; after putting that tumor on Meredith Quill’s brain, is it not fitting he die after having something planted on his brain?

Best Scene: Ego just really dominates every scene he’s in, but I think the big reveal, where he shows just what a sick and depraved villain with a lack of care for life as he reveals what he did to Meredith Quill, is one of the MCU’s finest scenes.

Best Quote: It took only one single line to cement Ego as the most horrible, evil, disgusting monster in the MCU: “It broke my heart to put that tumor in her head.”

Final Thoughts & Score: Ego is fantastic on so many levels, but one level I think should not be overlooked is on a meta level. As I mentioned, for the longest time silliness and weird concepts were out the door when it came to superhero films. One needs only look at the X-Men franchise to see how dour things were, with their dull black costumes and overwhelmingly miserable and unfun atmospheres. More lighthearted or sillier fare did not go over well, as Iron Man 2 and Green Lantern can attest, and magic was totally absent for a while in the MCU probably because of fears audiences wouldn’t take it seriously. But James Gunn changed all that, and I think Ego definitely played a huge role in cementing that audiences will embrace and love in the weirdest stuff out of comics. Thanks to Ego, I think a lot of other creators became unafraid to let that freak flag fly and put things in movies they might have been too worried to put in before, with the ultimate and best example being Mister Mind joining the DCEU in the end of Shazam! It gives me hope that Tawky Tawny might show up there in a sequel.

On a character level, Ego is without a doubt the most punchable scumbag in the entire MCU, with only Mysterio coming close. The fact he casually admits to killing Peter’s mother and expects him to be okay with it… Can you really blame Peter for immediately unloading his guns into his father? I mean, when faced with a man who is utterly unrepentant in killing a loved one that they also claimed they loved and says they had to do it to further their goals, would you not also have a knee-jerk reaction like that? Yes, I am getting at this being a canon moment that shows Peter’s reaction to Thanos in Infinity War was not a stupid moment, it was a moment that was built up by what he did to Ego. And I think that just adds to Ego even more, because he helped cement a character trait of Peter’s that would lead to one of the most horrific gut punches in cinematic history.

Ego is an easy 10/10, and is one of the MCU’s greatest villains. He’s a perfect “love to hate” character, and he’s also a perfect villain for a story about family. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has family as a focal point of the story, with the arcs of every single character revolving around the idea that family doesn’t have to be blood ties, it can be with the people who love you and who you’ve bonded with the most. Yondu’s line of “He may’ve been your father, boy, but he wasn’t your daddy” is what really sells it, honestly; Ego is Peter’s biological father, yes, but Yondu raised him and even if he didn’t always do right by him, in the end he showed himself to be a better man and better dad than Ego ever could have hoped to be. I suppose that’s a bit off topic from Ego himself, but I feel like it’s important to note just how deeply thematic he is as a villain, tying into the core message of the story while also letting loose in utter sociopathic villainy.

I think there is a great irony in Ego’s ultimate plan; for all his claims of being lonely and desiring others like him, what exactly does he think would happen if the entire universe was nothing but himself? Would he truly have been satisfied? Perhaps; he was a narcissistic to the highest degree for sure. But I like that there is some ambiguity to things about Ego, I like how there are some things to think about, I like how a villain who has a plan that is not clearly thought out by them yet that they believe is the proper course of action is something of a setup for what Thanos would be.

And really, out of every other villain in the MCU, Ego is most like Thanos. The obvious part is the plan, though only Endgame Thanos really wanted to reshape the universe in his image; still, as I mentioned, their plans are both something they believe is the true and righteous course of action, though Thanos is far more sympathetic in this regard. They also both felt the need to sacrifice loved ones in pursuit of their goals, and they both have incredibly poor relationships with some of their kids. I think the main difference is that Thanos, for all his faults, does have some empathy, he does have some sympathetic traits even if they don’t redeem how much of an awful person he was. Ego has none of that. Ego squanders any sympathy he could have gained by being utterly unrepentant and casual about his misdeeds, which include slaughtering his other children and killing Peter’s mother despite claiming to have loved her dearly. At least Thanos openly wept at what he did to Gamora, at least he felt sadness,  guilt, and regret. Ego just doesn’t care. He did it because whatever he really felt for Meredith, there was only one person he could ever truly love: Himself.

In short, Yondu was right: that guy was a jackass.

#Psycho Analysis #Ego #Guardians of the Galaxy #Marvel #MCU

[everymovie2020]

Poseidon (2006)

Date watched:  4 November 2019

Round 3 of Poseidon related shenanigans.

This is the CGI-heavy, Wolfgang Peterson-directed, Josh Lucas-starring version of the 1972 movie and it's not great.  It's also way better than Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.

The cast includes my beloved Kurt Russell (dies), Josh Lucas, Emmy Rossum, Richard Dreyfuss, Andre Braugher (the captain – he dies), Fergie (dies), Freddy Rodriguez (dies), Jacinda Barrett and Kevin Dillon (dies).  There are also other less famous people who are in the movie as well but who cares about them, right?

So let's get into it.

And again, this is SUPER LENGTHY, so it’s under the cut.

Plot:

It's the mid-2000s.  The Poseidon is a very fancy, modern luxury liner along the same vein as the Queen Mary 2 – pics for comparison:

^ I’ve been on that ship and sometimes I think about that

The Poseidon has almost an old-fashioned feel to it:

That’s from the movie, this is the QM2 below:

I get what they were going for and honestly, if it was a real ship, I’d be totally into it.

So let's talk about how fucked everyone would be if the thing flipped upside down.

All the outside cabins with their balconies and glass doors – flooded instantly, people inside dead.  Not to mention the top deck, which contains the pools/entertaining areas including bars, etc – instantly flooded, everyone dead.  Then you've got internal rooms on the top decks which would also contain people who would also be very, very dead.  If anyone was in their room at the time of the sinking – and I'm guessing, even though it's New Year's Eve, a lot of (old) people would be – they would have no chance whatsoever.

Subsequently all the interior corridors would flood because the upper decks are not at all watertight – unless they are, in which case, there is a contingency plan in place for an event like this.

All of the weight of the engine room is now at the top, which is real, real bad.  I'm guessing there would be quite substantial structural damage from all the things in the engine room plummeting through the ship and taking out everything in their path.

The ship would settle low on the water because of the rampant flooding – I mean, I can't even imagine how quickly a modern-day cruise ship would flood.  Just look at how quickly the Costa Concordia sank, and it was only half submerged.

The air-conditioning ducts and shafts – water would pour into them with nothing to stop it.

The open areas in the interior of the ship – the atrium, for example, and all the elevator shafts, public areas etc – flood very quickly.  People in those areas would be totally fucked.  Not to mention the gaping chasms that would open from the ship being turned upside down, so floors are now ceilings, walkways are now ceilings, etc.

People in the elevators – totally, absolutely fucked beyond belief.

All the crew – fucked – although, the crew areas are low in the ship, so you would imagine if there are survivors, they would be passengers in the lower deck cabins or crew members.  But once they leave the ballroom, in this movie, they don't find anyone else alive.  Which in itself is a bit unbelievable because there would definitely be other survivors from the lower (now upper) decks of the ship.

The dining areas – in this movie there were large windows in the dining room, which leads me to think it's on a lower deck. Not sure if it was at the bow, stern or in the middle, but whatever the case, when the ship flips the windows are underwater.  Captain Raymond Holt orders watertight doors to be closed, which do nothing because the windows break and the water floods in that way.  Most modern-day cruise ships have multiple restaurants and eateries, and a buffet which is usually at the top.  Everyone in those areas would almost certainly be fucked.  If the restaurants were on the lower decks with less windows, there would likely be some survivors.  If it's one of those hibachi restaurants where they cook the food at your table?  Shit.

The structural damage from a ship this size rolling over completely would be astronomical – this ship is big.  This ain't no pleasure craft – this is a massive cruise ship with a lot of decks, a lot of passengers and a lot of weight.  I just cannot imagine that it would last very long upside down.

You've got water flooding in the decks that are now underwater and there is nothing to stop it.  This isn't the Titanic with its watertight compartments, that at least prolonged things because the Titanic, at least, was still upright.  There is nothing stopping water surging through the ship.  You'd have water forcing itself into air pockets and pressured "explosions" as the air was forced out.  You'd have multiple fires on board.  You'd have catastrophic structural damage.  No way to launch lifeboats – they're all underwater.  All the officers were on the bridge and are now dead.  The Captain is trapped in the main dining room and when that floods, he's dead too.  If there is a contingency plan for this sort of event happening to a modern cruise ship, I would love to know about it.

Look at some modern cruise ships for example:

^ the Norwegian Epic at the bottom is genuinely the ugliest thing I have ever seen in my life

Look at these ships.  These aren't just ships, they're floating hotels.  They're apartment buildings on water.  If one of these ships flipped over, everyone would be royally and completely screwed.

So I guess, with the original Poseidon Adventure, I can see how the ship may stay afloat long enough for people to escape.  But this version?  I can't see it.  I don't think they'd have any time at all.  I don't think the ship would last more than an hour, if that.  They're just not meant to be upside down!

And the other thing that shits me off about this version is that there is no explanation for the wave or how the ship flips so suddenly and completely.  All ships, if they're pushed to a certain limit, can capsize.  For sure.  With the original film, they point out the fact that the ship is top heavy and lacking in ballast; they're pushing it to its limits and the wave is caused by an earthquake off Greece.  So you go, okay, worst case scenario.

This ship is in the middle of nowhere.  It is a flat calm ocean.  In the original movie, they are going through huge seas. This version?  FLAT CALM, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere – not even showing up on their advanced radar because this is in fact the mid-2000s – is a gigantic rogue wave.

Like.

Look, I'm not an expert, but to my understanding, that's not what a rogue wave is.

The wave in this movie looks like it was lifted directly out of Deep Impact, as if a meteor has struck in the middle of the ocean and created this enormous wave.

They don't just form out of nothing.  I thought a rogue wave was a wave that doesn't move in the same direction as the other waves – usually if seas are high. They're not just waves that tootle around the ocean looking for shit to smash.

Where did this wave come from?  What caused it?  How did they not have any idea that it was coming?

And why does it take so long to break over the fucking ship?!

They don't give any explanation for anything. Rogue waves have hit ships before – they cause damage, surely, and ships can list to one side.  But they should right themselves.  Modern-day cruise ships have stabilisers (not that they would've been much help with this monstrous wave).  There are technological advancements to limit the damage to a ship.

You know what the wave in this movie looks like? You know in Interstellar, when they're on that water planet and Anne Hathaway is like, "Look at the mountains in the distance," but it turns out that there ain't no mountains, just a really big wave?

Yeah.

It's ridiculous.

Look, I love a disaster movie, and I do enjoy the ridiculous ones (2012, for example) – but I also like things to be rooted in reality.  You need a sense of "this could happen IRL" or else they're just dumb. Entertaining, but dumb.

So my point is – the wave is too big to be realistic.  If that did happen, and the ship did flip, it wouldn't stay afloat for very long.

The other thing about the scene where the wave wipes out the ship is that… it's a series of quick cuts, but it's a good minute of this wave slowly pushing the ship over.  It feels slow.  It doesn't feel realistic because… well, it's not realistic, but like… even with a wave that big… I don't think the ship would've flipped completely over?  I might be wrong.  I could be so wrong.  I just feel like there would've been a hell of a lot of damage, sure, and maybe the ship would've tipped onto its side, but… to keep turning until it's completely flipped over seems very unrealistic to me.

Anyway, whether it's realistic or not doesn't matter because it happens in the movie.  So the ship flips, and everyone who is in the main dining room is having a really bad time.  They also do show people in the nightclub when it flips as well, but after that initial nightclub scene – in which people survive – they don't show any other survivors on board at all.  Which again is unrealistic.  There are thousands of people on these ships.  There would've been more than six survivors.

I keep getting side-tracked by the minute details of this movie that annoyed me.

Okay, so everyone is in the dining room, and Captain Raymond Holt wants everyone to stay there because emergency beacons would have been triggered and help will be on the way (help does take an awful long time to arrive though, just saying).  Josh Lucas, who is… hmmm. Some kind of rich guy, who… I don't know what his character does or who he is.  He's rich and he seems to know boats.

Kurt Russell is Emmy Rossum's dad, and she's dating this guy who is on the cruise with them but he doesn't approve for some reason that I didn't care about.  Jacinda Barrett is on board with her goddamn fucking kid who keeps getting lost, and Josh Lucas has a hard on for her.  Richard Dreyfuss plays an elderly gay gentleman who gets dumped while on board, then is about to jump overboard, but sees the wave coming and manages to get back into the ballroom of the ship before it hits.  He also has a bad habit of getting Latin American people killed. That's not a joke.  Just a statement of fact.

So the wave hits, the boat tips and everyone in the ballroom and nightclub get completely fucked up (not to mention the other ship passengers who weren't in those areas who are all definitely dead). Kurt Russell was the mayor of New York and then before that a fire chief, so he has a vested interest in rescuing his daughter, who was in the nightclub, and also getting the fuck out. He and Josh Lucas team up together because they're hot white dudes.  Captain Raymond Holt wants to keep everyone in the ballroom and honestly, it's a mistake, but also it's probably safety protocol and I feel like he was doing everything right, and also, the captain goes down with the ship.  It would've been wrong if he lived and everyone else died.

With the help of Freddy Rodriguez (he does not last long in this movie), our gang of ragtag heroes make their way out through what's left of the kitchen (and over piles and piles of dead bodies) until they get to an elevator shaft.  They climb across one by one but of course, as Freddy Rodriguez is last, and panicking, and the ship is exploding or something (I can't remember), he ends up dangling from Richard Dreyfuss' leg.  And Josh Lucas tells Richard Dreyfuss to shake him off, which is so cold-blooded, but like… I get it, but also like… wow, that's so cold-blooded. And he does, and Freddy falls to his death and is impaled, and then the elevator, which was suspended above them, falls and crushes him, just to really wipe out the minorities from this movie.

Actually, thinking about it, only white people survive, so there you go.  Just make of that what you will.

They make it to the nightclub where they find Emmy Rossum, her boyfriend and Freddy Rodriguez's girlfriend, who Richard Dreyfuss also inadvertently kills later in the movie.  It's just a bad time to be Latin American in this movie.

Then the ballroom floods, which is bad news because literally most of the survivors are still in there.  There’s this weird bit where Fergie hugs Captain Holt but I can’t find a gif of it, disappointingly.

Then “our heroes” end up at the ship's atrium, with all of the glass elevators, and it's here that we get possible the funniest death of the movie in Kevin Dillon's asshole getting smushed, and we also get possibly the most utterly ridiculous thing in the whole movie, which comes directly after said smushing.

Again, I cannot find a gif of the smushing.  WHAT IS GOING ON.  It’s like nobody giffed this shit movie.  Instead, enjoy this photo of the immediate aftermath of said smushing:

So the atrium of the ship is a big void with staircases and glass elevators, right?  It's obviously in the middle of the ship and it leads from the lower levels all the way to the top and lets in sunlight.  When they get to it, they need to get from one side to the other to keep working their way towards the bow (I think, instead of getting out through the stern near the propellers, they go to the bow to get out through the azipods – and yeah I'm losing you guys I know).  There is a convenient way across in the form of a collapsed elevator (I think?) and of course, all but Josh Lucas, Emmy Rossum and the boyfriend make it across, because as Kevin Dillon is crossing, a piece of machinery from the engine room – which is now above the atrium – falls through the decks, smashes into him, and continues right through the bottom of the ship (formerly the roof of the ship).  It's hilarious.

Josh Lucas finds it less hilarious than I did, and he then does what is just genuinely the stupidest part of this movie – he does a swan dive from their vantage point quite high up above the flaming water below them, into the flaming water (and miraculously is not impaled by something submerged just below the surface, wow, what a legend), so he can swim under the flaming water to the other side with a rope to get the others across.

It is preposterous.

I don't even know what happens next because I was so boggled by the ridiculousness of that scene.

I mean, it's basically the same as the original. They're trying to make their way up and out but they keep coming up against obstacles, and flooding.  At one point the kid runs off and nearly drowns but Josh Lucas saves him.  They finally get to where they're going (after Richard Dreyfuss inadvertently kills the Latin American chick) and realise that the propellers are still running and they need to be turned off.  It's then a dick-measuring contest between Kurt Russell and the boyfriend, who used to be a swimmer in high school, but Kurt Russell heroically sacrifices himself to save his daughter and the boyfriend.  There is then an elongated scene of Kurt Russell drowning which does feel like overkill.

And then of course, whatever he does is right but there's still one more obstacle, so Josh Lucas has to blow up one of the propellers so they can escape, and they swim to a conveniently placed life raft and watch as the ship finally sinks, and then a minute later they're rescued.

I mean, at least in this one the ship does sink very quickly?

There's a lot wrong with it but my main problems are:

The lack of realism;

The fact that only white people survive;

The women are mostly useless and the men do all the heavy lifting;

You don't ever really care about these characters – but at least they're not straight up dicks like the guys in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure.

#poseidon #2006 #movies #movie review #disaster movie #wolfgang petersen #kurt russell #josh lucas #emmy rossum #kevin dillon #freddy rodriguez #jacinda barrett #richard dreyfuss #andre braugher #fergie #she's fergalicious #this was the height of the black eyed peas do not forget #stunt casting yo #mia maestro #mike vogel #oof it's bad #but honestly i'll probably watch it again one day

[kelleyish]

I keep thinking of all these things I need to post about, but I don’t because I’m busy transcribing instead.  This has actually been a lower earning week for me, because I sort of took some time off.  But somehow I’m still busy.

A couple nights ago I did a file that was an interview with a 15 year old Little League player.  Specifically it was about a game that happened about a year ago, where a woman drove her car onto the field in the middle of the game.  She ran over the grandfather of one of the players, a 68 year old man, and killed him. 

Once the story starting getting some publicity, a rather interesting fact came out.  Turns out that 50 years before, when he was 18, he drove drunk and ran over a little girl out trick or treating for Halloween.  He wasn’t sure what he’d hit, but he didn’t stop, and when the police came to question him he denied it.  The case went unsolved for 45 years, until renewed interest caused the cops to come knocking again.  He denied it again, but once they told him the statute of limitations had passed and he couldn’t be prosecuted, he was like lol jk it was me, my bad.

So I guess karma took it’s sweet ass time, but he died the same way he killed that little girl 50 years ago. Weird.

I just got finished making some chocolate chip cookies using the new milk chocolate chips from Lily’s, and the WIO flour that I use for bread.  They didn’t turn out quite like i was hoping. The flour obviously has slightly different properties and I should have used less. The cookie dough was too stiff and they cookies didn’t spread in the oven.  I’ll know for next time, I guess.

Someone is currently trying to scam me on eBay and i’m very, very angry about it. I had heard about other people having this problem on the reddit Funko sub.  What happens is they buy a valuable Pop from you (in this case, the Lucky Charms mascot figure). They then claim it’s damaged, and want to return it. If you agree you return their money, and then instead of sending your valuable figure back to you, they send back a box containing a common worthless pop instead.

In a court of law, I would have no problem winning this case.  Exhibit A - he’s saying that I basically misrepresented the item, that the pictures show an undamaged figure (the box actually, it’s always about the box), but the one I sent him is damaged.  However, if I sell a Pop that has some damage, I document it extensively in the listing.  Right now I have another Pop for sale, which has been listed for over a month, so it’s not like I put it up just recently to make myself look better, where the box is slightly damaged.  I mention that fact in the description, and I have close up pictures of every crease and ding.  Why would I document one item I’m selling in this way, but not another?  Exhibit B -  I have 55 positive reviews to my name which mention, among other things, that my items are exactly as described and I package them extremely well for shipping.  Exhibit C - this person’s account has no feedback, and is less than three weeks old. (I really wish I had noticed that before I sent the Pop out, that’s on me, I probably could have cancelled the sale right then if I’d noticed. Alas, like Hannibal Buress, for a moment I was living in a world where such shitty people didn’t exist.)

The bad news is that this isn’t a court of law, it’s the court of eBay, and they more often side with the buyer in these cases.  Other people that have reported these scams have had eBay decide against them.  I can only hope I get an understanding “judge,” when we get to that part.

You know, I can understand and forgive shit like credit card fraud, or shoplifting from Walmart.  I’m not saying it’s right, but those are big companies that can absorb losses.  But this shit is personal.  I am very angry.

What other unpleasantness can I document? Oh yes, I thought perhaps I might have to kill my dog last week. 

A little over week ago, I got up in the morning and Maggie was limping around like she’d been hit by a bus. She’s old and she’s got arthritis, but this was particularly bad. One of her back legs was so weak looking, we’d wondered if she’d had a stroke. I made a vet appointment for the next day, and overnight I ended up having a bit of a panic attack in the middle of the night.  I woke my mom up and she sat with me in the living room while I was shaking like crazy. 

At the vet the next day they wanted to do some x-rays. They didn’t show much, some arthritis but not extensive.  So we decided she’d probably injured herself falling repeatedly on my parents’ hardwood floors.  

They had to sedate her in order get the x-rays. They told us it would wear off in like 20 minutes, but it took about 2-3 days for her to fully get back to normal. She walked around in a daze like a zombie, and laid on the floor twisted up like a pretzel.  She didn’t want to eat.  She finally started to come out of it, and then she got a UTI on top of everything, having accidents and bloody looking pee.

The vet suggested we order these things called toe grips that you slide onto the nails and help them get traction on slippery floors.  They’re fucking expensive for what they are, these people making a killing, but they do seem to help. They weren’t fun to put on an uncooperative dog, either.

i’m still struggling with my diet.  I am bouncing right around 300, which means I’ve basically been stalled for a month. I keep giving myself ultimatums and then not following through.  If I don’t quit fucking around soon, I can say goodbye for sure to that $600 I bet on my weight loss.  That wasn’t the smartest decision I ever made, most likely.  

To end on a more positive note, I watched most of the movie Overboard the other night, the original with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.  I’m happy to report it’s still a mostly watchable movie, and I enjoyed it.  Tomorrow I’m going to go see Good Boys with my sister, and I expect to laugh a lot. The trailer is very funny, hopefully it’s not all the best stuff in the movie.

#my own posts

[jennaschererwrites]

How TV Is Putting the ‘B’ in LGBTQ — And Why It Matters – Rolling Stone

“Mom. Dad. I know you don’t want to talk about this, but I do. I might get married to a man, like you so clearly want. And I might not. Because this is not a phase, and I need you to understand that. I’m bisexual.” That’s Rosa Diaz (Stephanie Beatriz), Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s resident no-nonsense detective, pouring out her heart to her parents in the show’s landmark 100th episode. To which her dad (Danny Trejo) stoically replies, “There’s no such thing as being bisexual.”

Beatriz, who is bisexual herself, wrote in GQ: “When does it end? When do you get to stop telling people you’re bi? When do people start to grasp that this is your truth? …When do you start seeing yourself reflected positively in all (hey, even any?) of the media you consume?”

There’s a real cognitive dissonance to identity erasure. You can be standing right in front of someone telling them exactly who you are, and they can just look right through you, and intone, like a Westworld robot, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.” Nevertheless, it’s a daily reality for LGBTQ folks, and bi- and pansexual people in particular. (The term pansexuality, which has come into wider use in recent years, intends to explicitly refer to attraction to all genders, not just cisgender people — or, as self-identified pansexual Janelle Monae put it in Rolling Stone last year: “I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” However, many in the queer community define bisexuality the same way. You can read more about that conversation here.) Until recently, sexual and gender identities that existed outside the binary have been anathema to mainstream culture — and often, even, to more traditionalist branches of gay culture.

For a long time, people who identify as bisexual or pansexual didn’t have a whole lot of visible role models — particularly on television. But as our understanding of the LGBTQ spectrum has become more diverse and nuanced over time, there’s been a blossoming of bi- and pansexual representation. In the past few years, characters such as Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, David Rose on Schitt’s Creek, Darryl Whitefeather on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Leila on The Bisexual — to name just a few — have been at the forefront of a bi- and pansexual renaissance on the small screen.

But it wasn’t always this way. Even after television began to centralize gay characters and their experiences — on shows like Ellen, Will & Grace, Queer as Folk, and The L Word — the “B” in that alphabet soup fell to the wayside. Bisexuality was seldom mentioned at all, and if it was, it existed chiefly as a punch line — an easy ba-dum-CHING moment for savvy characters to nose out someone who wasn’t as in the know as they were. On Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw called bisexuality “a layover on the way to Gaytown”; and on 30 Rock, Liz Lemon dismissed it as “something they invented in the Nineties to sell hair products.”

Even some of the earliest shows to break ground for queer representation didn’t factor bisexuality or pansexuality into their worldviews. The designation basically didn’t exist in the gay-straight binary world of Queer as Folk, and was largely seen as a phase on The L Word. Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave many TV viewers their first-ever depiction of a same-sex relationship in 1999 with the Wicca-fueled romance between Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), but the show too neatly glossed over Willow’s years-long relationship with her boyfriend Oz (Seth Green) as a fleeting step on the way to full-time lesbianism. Or, as Willow succinctly put it in Season 5: “Hello! Gay now!”

Characters who labeled themselves as bisexual were considered to be confused at best and dangerously promiscuous at worst. On The O.C. in 2004, Olivia Wilde’s bi bartender character, Alex Kelly, appeared as a destabilizing force of chaos in the lives of the show’s otherwise straight characters. On a 2011 episode of Glee — a show which, at the time, was breaking ground for gay representation on TV — Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) savagely shot down his crush, Blaine (Darren Criss), when Blaine mentioned that he might be bi: “‘Bisexual’ is a term that gay guys in high school use when they want to hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change.” By the end of the episode, Blaine assures Kurt that he is, don’t you worry, “100 percent gay.”

One of TV’s first enduring portrayals of nonbinary sexual attraction came with the entrance of Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) into Russell T. Davies’ 2005 Doctor Who reboot. (Davies also created the original U.K. Queer as Folk.) The time traveler swashbuckled into the series to equal-opportunity flirt with the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and his companion Rose (Billie Piper), because, as the Doctor explains, “He’s a 51st-century guy. He’s just a bit more flexible.” Captain Jack went on to feature in his own spinoff series, Torchwood.

Then came Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy. Portrayed by Sara Ramirez (who came out as bisexual herself in 2016), Callie had a seasons-long arc that spanned from her burgeoning realization of her bisexuality in 2008 to her complex relationships with both men and women over the years. Callie’s drunken rant from the 11th season would make a great T-shirt to wear to Pride if it weren’t quite so long: “So I’m bisexual! So what? It’s a thing, and it’s real. I mean, it’s called LGBTQ for a reason. There’s a B in there, and it doesn’t mean ‘badass.’ OK, it kind of does. But it also means bi!”

Once the 2010s rolled around, representation began to pick up steam. True Blood’s Tara Thornton (Rutina Wesley), The Legend of Korra’s titular hero (Janet Varney), Game of Thrones’ Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal), The Good Wife’s Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), and Peep Show’s Jeremy Usborne (Robert Webb) all were portrayed in romantic relationships on both sides of the binary. But these characters’ sexual orientations were seldom given a name.

In some cases, this felt quietly revolutionary. On post-apocalyptic CW drama The 100, for example, set a century and change in the future, protagonist Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) is romantically involved with both men and women with no mention of labels. Because on the show’s nuclear fallout-ravaged earth, humankind has presumably gotten over that particular prejudice. On other series, however, not putting a name to the thing seems like a calculated choice. Take Orange Is the New Black, a show that has broken a lot of barriers but steadfastly avoids using the B-word to describe its clearly bisexual central character, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling).

A few years ago, though, tectonic plates began to shift. On Pop TV sitcom Schitt’s Creek, David Rose (co-creator Dan Levy) explained his pansexuality to his friend via a now-famous metaphor: “I do drink red wine. But I also drink white wine. And I’ve been known to sample the occasional rosé. And a couple summers back, I tried a merlot that used to be a chardonnay.”

Bisexuality got its literal anthem on the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with “Gettin’ Bi,” a jubilant Huey Lewis & the News-style number sung by Darryl Whitefeather (Pete Gardner) about waking up to his latent bisexuality as a middle-aged man. “It’s not a phase, I’m not confused / Not indecisive, I don’t have the gotta-choose blues,” he croons, dancing in front of the bi pride flag. Darryl’s exuberant ode to his identity felt like someone levering a window open in a musty room — a celebration of something that, less than a decade before, TV was loathe to acknowledge.

For Hulu and the U.K.’s Channel 4, Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) cowrote, directed, and starred in a series picking apart the subject, titled, aptly, The Bisexual. In it, Akhavan portrays Leila, a thirtysomething woman coming to a dawning awareness of her bisexuality after having identified as a lesbian for most of her life. The show navigates the tricky territory that bisexuals inhabit when they’re misunderstood — or sometimes outright rejected — by queer and straight communities alike. Akhavan, a bisexual Iranian-American woman, has said the idea for the show came to her after repeatedly hearing herself described as a “bisexual director.” She told Vanity Fair that “there was something about being called a bisexual publicly — even though it’s 100 percent true! — that felt totally humiliating and in bad taste, and I wanted to understand why.”

As Leila shuttles her way between sexual partners and fields tone-deaf comments from friends on both sides of the binary, The Bisexual offers no easy answers. But it also never flinches. “I’m pretty sure bisexuality is a myth. That it was created by ad executives to sell flavored vodka,” Leila remarks in the first episode, unconsciously echoing 30 Rock’s throwaway joke from a decade ago. Except this time, the stakes — and the bi person in question — are real.

The next generation — younger millennials and Gen Z kids in particular — tends to view sexualityas a spectrum rather than the distance between two poles. Akhavan neatly encompasses this evolution in an exchange between Leila and her male roommate’s twentysomething girlfriend, Francisca (Michèlle Guillot), who questions why Leila is so terrified to tell anyone that she’s started sleeping with men as well as women. When Leila tells her it’s complicated because it’s “a gay thing,” Francisca responds, “So? I’m queer.” “Everyone under 25 thinks they’re queer,” says Leila. “And you think they’re wrong?” Francisca counters. Leila considers this for a moment before answering, “No.”

Representation matters, and here’s why: Seeing who you are reflected in the entertainment you take in gives you not just validation for your identity, but also a potential road map for how you might navigate the world. For many years, bi- and pansexuals existed in a liminal place where we were often dismissed outright by not just the straight community — but the queer community as well. Onscreen representation is not just a matter of showing us something we’ve never seen before, but of making the invisible visible, of drawing a new picture over what was once erased.

#bisexual #bisexuality #pansexual #pansexuality #rolling stone #jenna scherer #lgbtq #queer #david rose #the bisexual #desiree akhavan #rosa diaz #brooklyn nine nine #representation #lgbt #pride #television #tv #crazy ex girlfriend #daryl whitefeather #stephanie beatriz #grey's anatomy #callie torres #sarah ramirez