#kristen's already known as a god-killer...
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Handicapping the 2020 Dem primary
Tier Four
The Tom Vilsack Memorial “No Chance in Hell” Tier
These are the candidates whose family members won’t even vote for them. They will drop out either before or immediately after Iowa. Some of them will be working specifically to plant the seeds of a 2024 run, while others are auditioning for an MSNBC gig.
Joe Kennedy
Any person who is simultaneously old enough and illiterate enough to have any fondness for the Kennedys is 100% in the Trump camp. Joe has zero appeal outside of this voting bloc, which literally does not exist. He won’t even win Massachusetts--won’t even be in the top five in Massachusetts.
Michael Avenatti
My man ain’t even announced his run and he’s already facing domestic assault charges. A potential Avenatti run had a mystical WWF vibe to it. I will admit, I was excited, the same as I’d be excited to finally pull alongside the accident that caused the pile up. No one has any idea what his policies are, because neither does he. He might honestly beat Trump in the general, as he is far and away the most likely candidate to physically assault Trump if the two ever share a stage (any Dem who punches Trump will be automatically 100% guaranteed to win the election). But he probably won’t even run.
Mitch Landrieu
Mitch will appeal to that small demographic of erstwhile independent voters who were drawn to Trump solely because he is an openly corrupt grifter. By May he will be a panel participant on a new MSNBC show that’s like Shark Tank but but all the contestants are trying to get the panel to fund their medical gofundme’s.
Eric Holder
Like every other member of the Obama administration, his faults are glaring and the relatively good stuff he did takes way too much context for most voters to understand. Under his leadership, the DoJ began began to litigate hate crimes, which had been almost completely neglected under Bush. That’s good. Also, under his leadership, the DoJ stalwartly refused to prosecute the war criminals who lied us into Iraq or the bankers who tanked the world economy. That’s bad. Politically, he has the platform of a Republican circa 1992. Personally, he has the charisma of a very dry snail.
Steve Bullock
He looks and sounds like the dumb guy sidekick of an old cartoon villain. He is therefore the Bebop/Rocksteady of the field. His policies are indistinguishable from any other civil moderate/fiscal conservative candidate, and his moistness will drive away both donors and media . (NOTE: With Bullock, the Avenatti Rule applies: if he threatens to physically assault Trump or any member of Trump’s family--especially including Baron--he will rocket to the top of the pack. If he actually assaults them, he will win the general election and usher in a glorious Centrist Utopia)
Kristen Gillibrand
She was once considered a front-runner for the same reason Corey Booker kinda sorta still is a frontrunner--because she looks similar to a previous Dem nominee, and many liberal strategists and commentators cannot conceive of a politics beyond identity markers. Trouble is, unlike Booker, Gillibrand pissed off her donor base by leading the the charge against Al Franken. I don’t for a second think that Gillibrand’s efforts had anything to do with principles. She just leaned into the wrong direction of the skid of cynicism: if there’s one thing Democrat donors hate, it’s a candidate who appears to adhere to any kind of moral framework. And Gillibrand is not the sort of candidate who stands a chance without full institutional support.
Tier Three
The “Gormless Dweebs” Tier
These people might stick around until late in the game for the same reason they’d stay at a house party until well after they were no longer welcome. Each also possesses a very particular strain of weirdness that might resonate with voters in New Hampshire enough that they’d finish in the top 3, but none has a realistic chance to live past Super Tuesday.
Martin O’Malley
O’Malley is the Democrat John Kasich. He’s mostly running because he wants to have people to talk to. Several New Hampshire people will nod at him and that will be it.
Terry McAuliffe
Imagine if Joe Lieberman were a governor and slightly less physically repulsive. He is still a very moist man, and his only moments of attention will come when he criticizes one of the more left-leaning candidates after they point out that the Iraq war didn’t go so good. (Let me ask Senator Sanders a question. We he says that global warming is the biggest threat we face... has he ever heard of ISLAM?” *Tufts University crowd goes wild*) Terry might come in top 3 in Virginia, and he also might stick around if a frontrunner is facing some kind of big scandal. But his main effect on this debate will be that of a zebra mussel on the side of a leaky rowboat, hoping it fills with just enough water that he’ll be able to slither aboard for the last few minutes before it sinks.
Elizabeth Warren
Warren is one of small handful of Dem candidates whose economic politics fall to the left of Margaret Thatcher. That doesn’t really work for her, though, because it’s hard for a quiet dweeb to project any sense of populism. She’d be a significantly less horrible president than most on this list, probably. But there’s no way she would beat Trump head to head. He can bait her with literally any claim and her response will always be “golly gee I will refute this man with logic and evidence and then those who repeated his taunts will surely see the error of their ways.” By August, it would get to the point where she’d be sending out topless pics to prove she really doesn’t have several teats and therefore is not a pregnant dog, as Trump suggested. But thankfully she will have flamed out long before that.
Tier 2
The “Viable Candidates Who Are Gonna Get Rat Fucked Really Hard” Tier
Sherrod Brown
Same general platform as Bernie, only without the voting record, name recognition, or widespread appeal. We are also living in an age where crudity is now taken for a sign of sincerity, and while he does kinda give off a “disheveled history teacher” vibe, that’s not enough to really combat Trump. Trump can only really be beaten by a platform, not a personality, so Brown might have a chance. But he’ll also almost certainly bow out before Super Tuesday. My guess he won’t be able to take the heat nearly as well as Bernie and he’s gone before Iowa.
Bernie
Bernie will win New Hampshire. He will win for the same reason he won it in 2016: he’s well-known there, he will be the only believable candidate running on a civil libertarian platform. He will win it by a bigger margin, because the Establishment field will be more split. He will win Iowa for the same reasons: much more name recognition now. Pledged delegates-wise, he will be far and away the frontrunner after the first two contests, although on-screen graphics will continue to present him as a longshot, due to superdelegates. He will then square off in a contest between 1-2 of the following candidates, whom the establishment will rally behind. He could win the nomination, but you and I literally cannot imagine the absurdity of the smears he will face. If he wins the nomination he wins the general Reagan vs. Mondale-style, and we might narrowly avoid civilization collapse. There’s only about a 25% of that happening, though.
Tier 1
The “If the Establishment Unites Behind Any One of These People They Will Beat Bernie for the Nom Then Get Stomped by Trump” Tier
None of these candidates would have a realistic chance against Trump, but each of them is well positioned to take advantage of the unique corruption of the Democratic Party. Our only real hope--as a society and a species--is that they manage to split the vote between themselves.
Kamela Harris
Did you watch HBO’s The Jinx? It’s about a weird, repulsive millionaire serial killer who keeps evading justice. She was the prosecutor who tried to convict him. To stress: she could not convict Robert Derst. She’s running in the right direction, though, (disingenuously) espousing some populist positions while hoovering up donor cash. She could very well wait this thing out and then see the donors line up behind her enough so that he "victory” is called by the AP right before the California primary.
Beto
Centrism couldn’t win in Texas, even with a candidate who was immensely more appealing than his opponent. That’s exactly what Centrism is designed to do, and it didn’t do it. It failed. It will always fail. Still, Beto is very handsome and very shameless and not Republican-level evil, which means he will make some money and also sway some idiots. But he’s not nearly connected enough, yet, to win the nom. He will come close however, and bow out at the right time so as to not burn any bridges. Beto will be the nominee in 2024, when he will narrowly win the popular vote but lose the electoral college to Immortum Joe.
Corey Booker
Laugh if you must, but Booker appeals strongly to the exact strain of idiocy that controls the strategy within the Democratic Party: He is a black male... like Obama! That means he will win, since Obama did. Yes, anyone who spends a few minutes studying Booker will realize he lacks Obama’s intelligence, wit, and oratorical ability. But that’s not how the Democratic establishment understands politics: they believe, genuinely, that the way to win is to raise the most money while being in possession of the correct identity markers. Should a candidate do this and lose, as Hillary did, it was the inevitable result of machinations outside of their control. Ergo, we must appoint the anointed one and see if he pleases the gods. Plus, if you mute the TV and squint, Booker totally looks like Obama!
Hillary
The main benefits of wokeness--why it has so many adherents, so far as I can tell--is that it allows certain people to skirt all responsibility for everything they say and do, even as it forces others to attempt to adhere to literally impossible programmatics of speech and comportment. And so Hillary’s recent nativist turn will be forgiven (it will most likely go unmentioned), while Bernie’s wardrobe and posture will be used as evidence of his sexism. She can continue making jokes about Colored People Time, while any of her competitors will be crucified for not using the exact right terms in describing whatever happen to be the Woke Cause of the Day. This insulation from criticism is Hillary’s biggest strength with the Democrat electorate, while her fiscal conservatism will continue to help her with donors. She will get beaten horribly in the general, but still stands a strong chance in the primary.
Joe Biden
I have no idea how this man is leading in some polls other than name recognition. Which--don’t get me wrong, name recognition is huge, especially in early goings within a crowded primary field. But what does Biden bring to the table, policy-wise or personality-wise? I realize the people who bleat about how they don’t want any more OLD. WHITE. MALES. running for president are just trying to make their cruel centrist politics appear radical--but could they be shameless enough to actually throw their support to Biden? Biden, the dude who most certainly would have been MeToo’d were he still in a position of power? Biden, the pro-war economic conservative who repeatedly says that young people just need to stop whining? That’s the guy you’re gonna run against Trump? Probably. I would take a 50/50 bet on him winning the nomination.
Final odds:
Biden: 1:1
Hillary 1.5:1
Bernie 4:1
Booker 8:1
Beto 10:1
Harris 12:1
Field (including only aforementioned candidates): 30:1
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Dax Shepard Is Listening – The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — In November, the actor Dax Shepard rolled up to a tree-shaded lot in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles in a wood-grain 1994 Buick Roadmaster and parked in front of a single-door garage.
The yard was brown and dusty, with trucks out front and a portable toilet on the premises. His house was under construction. But we weren’t going there.
Instead, Mr. Shepard, who is 44 and rangy, tramped up a set of stairs outside the garage and unlocked the door to a cozy space with slate blue walls and the odd wire dangling from the slanted ceiling.
A long couch sat opposite a leather recliner and a daintier, midcentury-style seat. Three microphones stood nearby.
Before we sat down, Mr. Shepard wanted to know: Would I like coffee? I said that I’d already had tea that morning, and besides, I was trying and routinely failing to honor my doctor’s suggestion to drink less caffeine. Filling the coffee maker with water for himself, he asked: Did I have addictive tendencies?
Such casually blunt questions are a hallmark of “Armchair Expert,” Mr. Shepard’s interview podcast, which premiered in 2018. The episodes feature a mix of Hollywood names (Will Ferrell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Emilia Clarke), authors (Elizabeth Gilbert, David Sedaris, Gillian Flynn) and specialists in various fields (Richard Dawkins, Esther Perel, the California surgeon general Nadine Burke Harris, Bill Nye).
The actress Kristen Bell, who is Mr. Shepard’s wife, was the show’s first guest.
Mr. Shepard — known for his roles on “Parenthood” and the new sitcom “Bless This Mess” — is the face and primary voice of the podcast. Monica Padman, a 32-year-old actress, is his quieter co-host; she also handles the behind-the-scenes work of wrangling guests and editing interviews.
The show, Mr. Shepard said, was never meant to be groundbreaking; long-form interviews have existed practically since the dawn of radio.
But he liked going on other people’s podcasts — how the intimacy and extended format granted more depth than seven minutes on a late-night show. When he appeared on “WTF With Marc Maron,” for example, he spoke openly about his sobriety. Afterward, he said, fans said that the conversation helped them on their own recovery journeys.
Now “Armchair Expert” competes with podcasts like Mr. Maron’s for listeners. The show closed out 2018 as the most downloaded new podcast on iTunes and won “Breakout Podcast” at the 2019 iHeartRadio Podcast Awards.
According to Mr. Shepard, it is often downloaded more than five million times in a week: roughly one million apiece from two new episodes, and another three million from the archive.
“It’s so wonderful to read that, to know that,” he said. “But then my brain shifts immediately into fear, like, how do we maintain that?”
“I’ve been in a bunch of things that work just enough,” he said. “So to have something that’s a hit for me also comes with fear as well as gratitude. I’m like, ‘This is wonderful. I don’t want to lose this. I would like this to go on for a long, long time.’”
Mr. Shepard was sitting in the attic’s leather recliner, rocking back and forth and sporadically tucking a long leg up under him. He was trying to police himself, he said, to make sure he didn’t sabotage the podcast’s success somehow.
On “Armchair Expert,” as in real life, Mr. Shepard is inclined toward self-analysis of his insecurities, motivations and shortcomings.
“It feels like Dax is a much more enlightened Howard Stern,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, whose interview aired in December. “You could say that he’s the poster child for an alternative to what sometimes gets called ‘toxic masculinity.’ I’m not a fan of that term — I much prefer the social science of what’s called ‘precarious manhood’ — but I think he’s a role model for how not to be someone who’s constantly trying to prove your manhood.”
Mr. Shepard’s frequent expressions of vulnerability — about his road rage, about his vanity, about being molested as a child — encourage his interview subjects to feel comfortable sharing something of themselves.
“His best quality in interviewing is making sure you don’t feel alone and naked out there,” said the actress Lake Bell, Mr. Shepard’s co-star on “Bless This Mess.” When she appeared on the show, she spoke about the traumatic birth of her son, which she hadn’t discussed publicly before.
“He creates a very safe space for an interviewee,” said Monica Lewinsky, who appeared on “Armchair Expert” in October. “There becomes something about Dax and about the way he deals with his own history which makes me want to meet him at his level of vulnerability.” (A fan of the show and a connoisseur of crystals, she brought green apophyllite as gifts for Mr. Shepard and Ms. Padman.)
It helps, Mr. Shepard said, that he and Ms. Padman give guests the option to cut portions of the interview after recording, should they regret something they said. Interviewees frequently take them up on this.
“I definitely had, as Brené Brown calls it, a ‘vulnerability hangover’ when I left,” Ms. Lewinsky said. “I panicked: ‘Oh God, was that O.K.? What did I just say? Will it be misinterpreted?’”
“You know how they pump oxygen into casinos?” she said. “It’s sort of like Dax and Monica pump some form of invisible truth serum into the air in the attic.”
Partway through our interview, Ms. Padman entered the room and sat next to Mr. Shepard. Concerned about the audio quality of my recording — “Can I be controlling and make a suggestion?” — Mr. Shepard relocated Ms. Padman’s chair between us so that she could be closer to the microphone. As we talked, he occasionally kicked a leg up to rest on the wooden arm of her chair.
The two have a close, almost familial relationship: First hired as a babysitter to Mr. Shepard and Ms. Bell’s children, Ms. Padman now works with both parents in a creative capacity, writing Ms. Bell’s awards-show monologues and reading commercial scripts to ensure that they’re written in the actress’s voice.
The affection between the hosts comes through most clearly during the “fact check” that they record after each interview, in which the two banter and debate — their favorite hobby — while Ms. Padman corrects various claims made throughout the interview.
When the comedian W. Kamau Bell recorded a live podcast with them in San Francisco, he got the sense that every audience question boiled down to some form of: “Can I move in with you and Kristen Bell and Monica?”
“A big part of the appeal of that show is that it scratches the same itch that a reality show scratches, without going down that tortured alley,” Mr. Bell said. “You’re in the middle of their relationship, and Kristen Bell is kind of like Kanye West on ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ where he’s just outside somewhere.”
Much of the work that Ms. Padman does on the show — the fact-checking, the editing, the scheduling — takes place off-mic. When they first started recording the podcast, she worried about getting enough airtime.
The anxiety, she said, grew out of a desire for approval from their guests, particularly those whose support could matter to her acting career, like Judd Apatow.
But, she said, “I don’t need to prove myself to any of these people. I can just be.”
Observing interviews from this slight remove, Ms. Padman sees herself as a proxy for the listener. She asks the follow-up questions that people may be curious about and makes sure to circle back to threads that get dropped midway through a conversation. She is always editing in her head. And, Mr. Shepard said, she holds him accountable.
“Monica will call me out when I’m being misogynistic or I’m being mildly racist or I’m being elitist or I’m being whatever — she will always call me out,” he said. “And I think she gives me latitude to be a real person who doesn’t do it right.”
At times, people have questioned their judgment. When the hosts invited Casey Affleck onto the podcast, some listeners criticized Mr. Shepard and Ms. Padman for giving a platform to the actor, who in 2010 was sued by two women for sexual harassment on the set of one of his films. (Both cases were settled out of court.)
In his interview, Mr. Affleck spoke in support of the #MeToo movement and discussed the difficulty of that period of his life.
Mr. Shepard was hesitant to discuss the backlash over that episode. He wasn’t afraid of a quote from his conversation with Mr. Affleck being pulled out of context, because the entirety of it is available to the public.
But to respond to it for this article would risk having his thoughts distilled into one sentence that could pour gas on the whole thing, he said. Still, he talked it out.
“We’re not a show that levies verdicts,” Mr. Shepard said. “We’re a show that lets someone tell their experience.”
He disagrees with the notion of “platforming” on the basis that it implies a person’s ideas are so persuasive that they shouldn’t be heard at all. Given the opportunity, Mr. Shepard said, he would gladly interview a serial killer — a bad analogy, he admitted, because it implies that he believes Mr. Affleck is somehow culpable, and he has no position either way on that matter.
“But I would interview a serial killer in two seconds,” Mr. Shepard said. “And my interview with a serial killer wouldn’t be, ‘You’re so bad. You know, you’re bad. You’re really bad. Have you thought about how bad you were?’ I would want to know what the point of view of a serial killer is. I want to hear their story.”
There’s no long-form interviewer he respects more than Howard Stern. On a technical level, Mr. Shepard said, “he’s just so calm, so confident, so prepared, so open to wherever it goes, never panicky.” And he admires Mr. Stern’s willingness to make apologies on air and soften the shock-jock persona that made him famous.
They have met and corresponded, but Mr. Shepard has refused to ask him to be on the show because he doesn’t want to feel like Mr. Stern is doing him a favor.
Mr. Shepard has trouble accepting help, he said, and fantasizes that one day Mr. Stern will ask to come on the podcast of his own volition.
“In all truth, I want just what Stern has,” he said. Ideally he would come in more often than he does now “and just sit in here and talk with Monica and other people.” He thinks he would prefer that over acting, he said, or, really, “anything else.”
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Q&A: Actress Chloë Sevigny is Still Drawn to Outsiders
Chloë Sevigny knows the power of words, so she’s very careful with them, warily tiptoeing to the end of an answer when asked about the influence of her seminal trans-landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. The 1999 dramatization of the murder of real-life Nebraskan transgender teen Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) garnered the 43-year-old indie queen and style icon, who played Teena’s girlfriend, Lana Tisdel, an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Director Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids came first, with Sevigny portraying an HIV-positive teen. But Sevigny would go on to amass a body of LGBTQ films and roles, including If These Walls Could Talk 2, Party Monster, Will & Grace and Broken Flowers, playing Jessica Lange’s lesbian assistant. In 2012, she portrayed trans contract killer Mia in the British miniseries Hit & Miss, a part she now says she’d pass on if it were offered to her today. (Actress Scarlett Johansson recently withdrew from playing a trans character in the forthcoming Rug & Tug after facing LGBTQ backlash.)
Currently, Sevigny stars in and co-produces Lizzie, featuring the actress’ first lead role in her 50-film career. The thriller explores infamous 19th-century alleged murderous Lizzie Borden through a queer lens, which, according to this version, goes like this: Lizzie (Sevigny), to rebuke the patriarch who’s getting in the way of her romantic pursuit of maid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), slaughters her father and stepmother with an ax. And so, Sevigny can now add “real-life killer lesbian” to her abundantly gay resume.
youtube
What has led you to so many LGBTQ characters?
The marginalized, the misunderstood, the outcast – you know, I grew up super sensitive as a child, and my brother and I were pretty rebellious in a small town and were really into just questioning the status quo. I have a lot of older peers who are gay and knowing the struggle and what they fought through, and having so much respect and admiration for the times that they’ve lived through – not that the struggle is over by any means, but just the perspective that I think gets lost. Post Trump, with all the conversations that are being had, and everyone’s like “oh god, it’s so horrible; I can’t watch the news,” but thank god everyone is talking about how political the systems are. I really feel like change is happening.
Why do you think you didn’t experience the same backlash that Scarlett Johansson did for signing on to play a trans role?
It was just a different time then. When they came to me with that role I said, “I don’t understand why you don’t cast a real trans person,” and they said, “We can’t get the funding because we can’t find anyone that has a big enough name, in all honesty.” And I just felt like it was an important story to tell, and I loved the writing and I loved the creators and I wanted to be a part of it. If that opportunity came to me today, I would pass, for sure, 100 percent. It was just, unfortunately, what was acceptable then. I think it wasn’t as challenged, and it should be.
What are your thoughts on whether LGBTQ actors should exclusively be playing LGBTQ roles? And with that in mind, how did you approach Lizzie’s sexuality?
Well, I want to respect (the community) and their stories and who they are as people, and I feel like (Lizzie and Bridget’s) love was born out of the confines of the environment they were in at the time; they were looking for escape in one another. I feel like it’s kind of beyond the boundaries of queer, straight, you know?
We had a good writer, we had lots of out cast members who really respected the story and wanted to be a part of telling it, and I admire them all for being out and for coming forward and supporting the project. I mean, I feel if gay men or women can play straight, I don’t know (laughs) if it’s fair to do the reverse. But I just hope that there’s more opportunities, for everyone – especially the people who are marginalized.
Did it mean something to you to have someone who is not heterosexual, Kristen Stewart, play Bridget, who is also not heterosexual?
It… did. But she was also my first choice just as an actor, not the person. I have so much respect for her choices, and I could go on and on about her performances, but I like her persona. For me, I’ve always been attracted to directors or other actors that I feel like have more than just that going on – that aren’t just, like, theater nerds (laughs). Not that there’s anything wrong with theater nerds! But I feel like she really represents something to a lot of generations, with Twilight and beyond.
You’ve said what you had in mind for this film didn’t align with director Craig William Macneill’s finished feature. How about Lizzie and Bridget’s sexuality – was that explored as deeply as you had hoped?
I think when I said that I was more talking about the process because we had been through so many different incarnations of the script. Things were changing even until the last moment. It’s the power of the edit, things you have to let go of. There was more between our relationship, kind of questioning it, and deciding she doesn’t want to go any further and then coming back. And probably in the overall course of watching the movie it would’ve muddled things, so you kind of have to accept in the edits how things work and how some things don’t, and that’s just the process of filming.
There’s an intimate scene where Bridget and Lizzie almost kiss, but trepidation holds them back. How were you reading Lizzie in that moment?
She was starved for recognition; she just wanted to be seen as she was and she felt really that she didn’t have a voice, and I think she wasn’t valued by her family or her community and she found somebody who valued her and could hear her and who wanted to listen to her and talk to her. There was so much physical attraction between them, but also just what that person was for her. She was on a quest for freedom, and she goes to the most extreme thing you can do and in the end kind of loses it all.
As someone who’s known for her queer roles, when you get stopped by an LGBTQ person on the street, which film do they tend to most recognize you from?
Boys Don’t Cry, for sure. They say every actor has one thing that they get recognized or known for, and for me it’s Kids, but from the gay community it’s probably Boys Don’t Cry. I think there are just a lot of reference for that movie and it meant a lot to a lot of people.
youtube
Next year marks 20 years since Boys Don’t Cry. How do you reflect on the effect that movie had?
Just like… I just think at that time when it came out there just wasn’t a lot of representation of that community, on screen or on television or anywhere – oh my god. So sensitive around this subject. (Laughs) I’m always like, I’m gonna get take down for anything I say – it’s just a hotbed. It feels like it’s almost hard to talk about this without feeling under the gun, for some reason. Because it’s like, you can’t say the right thing.
But I feel like it was important to the world. Not even one community in general. As far as building tolerance and acceptance and educating people and portraying a person and seeing the violence acted out against them and how heart-wrenching it is and humanizing a story, it was a really important thing to be a part of. I had read all the articles about Brandon Teena and was already obsessed with the story before being offered the audition and I wanted to be a part of telling that story.
from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/09/27/qa-actress-chloe-sevingny-is-still-drawn-to-outsiders/
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Q&A: Actress Chloë Sevigny is Still Drawn to Outsiders
Chloë Sevigny knows the power of words, so she’s very careful with them, warily tiptoeing to the end of an answer when asked about the influence of her seminal trans-landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. The 1999 dramatization of the murder of real-life Nebraskan transgender teen Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) garnered the 43-year-old indie queen and style icon, who played Teena’s girlfriend, Lana Tisdel, an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Director Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids came first, with Sevigny portraying an HIV-positive teen. But Sevigny would go on to amass a body of LGBTQ films and roles, including If These Walls Could Talk 2, Party Monster, Will & Grace and Broken Flowers, playing Jessica Lange’s lesbian assistant. In 2012, she portrayed trans contract killer Mia in the British miniseries Hit & Miss, a part she now says she’d pass on if it were offered to her today. (Actress Scarlett Johansson recently withdrew from playing a trans character in the forthcoming Rug & Tug after facing LGBTQ backlash.)
Currently, Sevigny stars in and co-produces Lizzie, featuring the actress’ first lead role in her 50-film career. The thriller explores infamous 19th-century alleged murderous Lizzie Borden through a queer lens, which, according to this version, goes like this: Lizzie (Sevigny), to rebuke the patriarch who’s getting in the way of her romantic pursuit of maid Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), slaughters her father and stepmother with an ax. And so, Sevigny can now add “real-life killer lesbian” to her abundantly gay resume.
youtube
What has led you to so many LGBTQ characters?
The marginalized, the misunderstood, the outcast – you know, I grew up super sensitive as a child, and my brother and I were pretty rebellious in a small town and were really into just questioning the status quo. I have a lot of older peers who are gay and knowing the struggle and what they fought through, and having so much respect and admiration for the times that they’ve lived through – not that the struggle is over by any means, but just the perspective that I think gets lost. Post Trump, with all the conversations that are being had, and everyone’s like “oh god, it’s so horrible; I can’t watch the news,” but thank god everyone is talking about how political the systems are. I really feel like change is happening.
Why do you think you didn’t experience the same backlash that Scarlett Johansson did for signing on to play a trans role?
It was just a different time then. When they came to me with that role I said, “I don’t understand why you don’t cast a real trans person,” and they said, “We can’t get the funding because we can’t find anyone that has a big enough name, in all honesty.” And I just felt like it was an important story to tell, and I loved the writing and I loved the creators and I wanted to be a part of it. If that opportunity came to me today, I would pass, for sure, 100 percent. It was just, unfortunately, what was acceptable then. I think it wasn’t as challenged, and it should be.
What are your thoughts on whether LGBTQ actors should exclusively be playing LGBTQ roles? And with that in mind, how did you approach Lizzie’s sexuality?
Well, I want to respect (the community) and their stories and who they are as people, and I feel like (Lizzie and Bridget’s) love was born out of the confines of the environment they were in at the time; they were looking for escape in one another. I feel like it’s kind of beyond the boundaries of queer, straight, you know?
We had a good writer, we had lots of out cast members who really respected the story and wanted to be a part of telling it, and I admire them all for being out and for coming forward and supporting the project. I mean, I feel if gay men or women can play straight, I don’t know (laughs) if it’s fair to do the reverse. But I just hope that there’s more opportunities, for everyone – especially the people who are marginalized.
Did it mean something to you to have someone who is not heterosexual, Kristen Stewart, play Bridget, who is also not heterosexual?
It… did. But she was also my first choice just as an actor, not the person. I have so much respect for her choices, and I could go on and on about her performances, but I like her persona. For me, I’ve always been attracted to directors or other actors that I feel like have more than just that going on – that aren’t just, like, theater nerds (laughs). Not that there’s anything wrong with theater nerds! But I feel like she really represents something to a lot of generations, with Twilight and beyond.
You’ve said what you had in mind for this film didn’t align with director Craig William Macneill’s finished feature. How about Lizzie and Bridget’s sexuality – was that explored as deeply as you had hoped?
I think when I said that I was more talking about the process because we had been through so many different incarnations of the script. Things were changing even until the last moment. It’s the power of the edit, things you have to let go of. There was more between our relationship, kind of questioning it, and deciding she doesn’t want to go any further and then coming back. And probably in the overall course of watching the movie it would’ve muddled things, so you kind of have to accept in the edits how things work and how some things don’t, and that’s just the process of filming.
There’s an intimate scene where Bridget and Lizzie almost kiss, but trepidation holds them back. How were you reading Lizzie in that moment?
She was starved for recognition; she just wanted to be seen as she was and she felt really that she didn’t have a voice, and I think she wasn’t valued by her family or her community and she found somebody who valued her and could hear her and who wanted to listen to her and talk to her. There was so much physical attraction between them, but also just what that person was for her. She was on a quest for freedom, and she goes to the most extreme thing you can do and in the end kind of loses it all.
As someone who’s known for her queer roles, when you get stopped by an LGBTQ person on the street, which film do they tend to most recognize you from?
Boys Don’t Cry, for sure. They say every actor has one thing that they get recognized or known for, and for me it’s Kids, but from the gay community it’s probably Boys Don’t Cry. I think there are just a lot of reference for that movie and it meant a lot to a lot of people.
youtube
Next year marks 20 years since Boys Don’t Cry. How do you reflect on the effect that movie had?
Just like… I just think at that time when it came out there just wasn’t a lot of representation of that community, on screen or on television or anywhere – oh my god. So sensitive around this subject. (Laughs) I’m always like, I’m gonna get take down for anything I say – it’s just a hotbed. It feels like it’s almost hard to talk about this without feeling under the gun, for some reason. Because it’s like, you can’t say the right thing.
But I feel like it was important to the world. Not even one community in general. As far as building tolerance and acceptance and educating people and portraying a person and seeing the violence acted out against them and how heart-wrenching it is and humanizing a story, it was a really important thing to be a part of. I had read all the articles about Brandon Teena and was already obsessed with the story before being offered the audition and I wanted to be a part of telling that story.
source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2018/09/27/qa-actress-chloe-sevingny-is-still-drawn-to-outsiders/
from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2018/09/q-actress-chloe-sevigny-is-still-drawn.html
0 notes
Text
5 True Stories That Put Every Horror Movie To Shame
Show a group of people a randomly picked news article, and three personality types will emerge. Some ask themselves: “How does this affect me?” Others query: “What can I learn from this?” And then there’s a third group, which rarely wears pants and only wants to know: “What kind of horror movie would this be?” I’m firmly in that last group, and judging by how you clicked on this article, I’m guessing that so are you. So come — let’s grab a bunch of truly creepy news stories and give those stupid, rational types a sample of what the inside of our collective head looks like.
5
Boats Full Of Corpses Keep Washing Up In Japan
There are many horror plots you’d associate with Japan: creepy ghost girls, giant monsters, the lingering farts of long-gone otakus still haunting their apartment complexes. You wouldn’t necessarily include the classic “ghost ship” story in that list … which is why Japan, being Japan, has taken that trope and cranked it up to 11.
Instead of the traditional version where a ship is found with its crew mysteriously missing (and may or may not make its finders disappear as well, thanks to the vengeful sea ghosts haunting it), the country has opted for a real-life version where mysterious boats full of decomposing and mutilated corpses keep washing up on the country’s shores. That’s insane. Even the most visceral of ghost ship-themed horror movies tend to start with an empty ship, singular. Here, we have a whole bunch, turning up with some alarming regularity, and complete with a ton of well-worn corpses to bring some extra gore to the tale. Is … is this going to be a zombie situation somewhere down the line? Is this how the whole “undead pirate” thing from Pirates Of The Caribbean would really play out?
In the interest of accurate reporting, it should be mentioned that one of the boats has been connected to a unit of North Korea’s army, along with Kim Jong-un’s apparent insistence on fishing as a source of food and foreign income. So the leading boring theory is that these are North Korean ships, risking literal life and limb in order to catch a mackerel or six for the Great Leader.
Wait, hold on. That’s … actually even more terrifying than a dark saltwater god stealing fishermen’s faces or whatever. Imagine that your entire lot in life is sailing notoriously stormy and awful seas in a barely equipped vessel, only for your crew to face the unspeakable horrors of the ocean. Maybe things get so bad that you end up with a Donner Party situation. Finally, after the inevitable gory climax, you wash up in a foreign land, where your badly decomposed mortal remains are collected and cremated by stoic Japanese coast guards who have at this point seen way too much of this shit to give a damn.
Around Act Two of that story, having your soul eaten by a horde of ravenous ocean witches would probably be a welcome respite.
4
A Company Had A Secret Nuclear Reactor For Decades
Let’s say you’re a resident of Rochester, New York. You’re just minding your own business, pretending your city has famous people who are not Ryan Lochte and Kristen Wiig, when one day, your neighborhood is full of dudes in hazmat suits. Because a company next door had a goddamned secret nuclear reactor in their basement. But what kind of real-life Umbrella Corporation would go and pull a stunt like that … ?
… K-Kodak? The photography company?
What the fuck?
shurik/Pixabay
Who knew a Kodak moment has a half-life of 24,110 years?
It’s hard for a corporate entity to seem sympathetic, but Kodak — a company most notorious for manufacturing film — is probably as close as it comes in an era where everyone has a camera in their cell phone. Finding out a firm like that has been gleefully playing with Fallout tech all along is like discovering that your sweet grandpa’s house has a secret dungeon for a 16-foot fuck doll constructed entirely out of rotting ham. Still, Kodak totally had a nuclear reactor. It was called “californium neutron flux multiplier,” and they started messing around with it in 1974. The company is quick to mention that the reactor was just a relatively small one, they were operating it remotely behind two feet of concrete, and they only used it for non-nefarious purposes such as testing chemicals for impurities. They might even point out that they themselves were, in fact, the ones who revealed that they had one in the first place.
To all that I say: Poppycock.
You know what kind of company just abruptly up and goes, “Hey, guys, did we ever tell you the story of this doom machine we’ve had in our basement for decades? We didn’t? Well, how about that, ha-ha!”? One that’s doing damage control, that’s what. I can imagine around least a dozen reasons for Kodak needing an unsanctioned, rarely mentioned nuclear reactor that was suddenly decommissioned in collaboration with the government in 2007. None of those reasons include the words “making photography shit better,” and absolutely all of them include the term “super mutant.”
I’m calling it: They were totally running a nuclear-themed supervillain plot on the side, and something happened in 2007. Maybe their scientists finally managed to create a film that could capture future events, and were driven to homicidal insanity when every image persistently featured forests of flaming skeletons where trees should be. Or maybe, just maybe, they finally managed to recreate my favorite Masters Of The Universe failure Fearless Photog, who proceeded to tear through the facility like the Demogorgon in Stranger Things.
Mattel
If nothing else, he’d take found-footage movies to another level.
3
Family Flees Their Dream House Because Of A Mysterious “Watcher”
The “mysterious stalker in the shadows” trope is present in roughly 95 percent of all horror movies, but in real life, that particular plot device can usually be solved with a call to police, a restraining order, or a swift dropkick right in the dick.
Which makes it all the more intriguing that in 2015, a creepy entity known as “The Watcher” actually managed to stalk a family out of their New Jersey home. And wait, it gets better — said home happened to look like this:
There’s a reason our villain was called the Watcher and not, say, the Melon Baller Eyeball Collector — as befits the majesty of his preferred stalking grounds, he was all about psychological terror. The name of his particular game was threatening letters. And although that could technically put him in a “disgruntled dude who lost the bidding war” or “guy who really hates neighbors” category, he pushed his way into horror movie territory with his … peculiar methods. Here are some choice quotes from his messages:
“The windows and doors allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house. Who I am? I am the Watcher.”
“Have they found out what is in the walls yet? In time they will.”
Or, in reference to the family’s children:
“I am pleased to know your names now, and the name of the young blood you have brought to me.”
Hahahahaha! That’s awesome … ly, uh, awful for the family, that is. The letters kept coming, and as they included apt “young blood” references and hints that the writer actually did keep uncomfortably close tabs on the house and its renovations, the family was too afraid to make the house their home. In fact, they never dared to properly move in.
What really makes this one for me is that as a horror movie, it’s clearly a sequel. Not only does the family heavily insinuate that the previous owners who sold the house to them were already all too aware of The Watcher, the Watcher himself started his campaign of terror (a mere three days after they bought the house in 2014) with a statement that his grandfather and father had watched the house before him, and it now fell on him to “wait for its second coming.”
A real creepy, haunted-looking mansion where every owner is stalked by generations of unknown, hostile entities? Say that sentence out loud three times, and Wes Craven’s ghost will appear to high five you, because you just got yourself a horror franchise.
2
A Family Finds The Walls Of Their House Are Filled With Animal Carcasses
The Watcher may or may not have been hurling empty threats about “things in the walls,” but in Auburn, MA, one villain damn well delivered … a good 70-80 years in advance.
In 2011, the Bretzius family bought a house. They were thorough in what they were looking for. They had it inspected, looked for radon, the whole nine yards. Everything went well, and they moved in … which is when the dead animals started coming out of the walls.
In 2012, the family discovered to their horror that the walls were full of dead animals, spices, and assorted trinkets, all wrapped up in newspapers from 1930s and 1940s. Intrigued by the what-the-fuckedness of it all, they sent dozens of the carcasses and other finds to experts, who concluded that they likely had something to do with pow-wowing, a peculiar form of Amish folk magic where tricks like this were used to “heal” ailments.
Personally, I call bullshit. It’s one thing to perform a little ceremony for health, like sacrificing a goat whenever you pass through a doorway for the first time (you guys do that too, right?). Stuffing all your walls full of death and spices is the work of a serial killer who wants to show the devil who the boss really is. With that logic, and in the context of Pennsylvania Dutch magic being at play here, I’m forced to assume that the house is haunted by buckriders — demons who ride flying goats from Satan’s flock. Have those guys ever featured in a horror movie? They’re about to!
Still, before the spirits of Bokkenrijders inevitably rise and possess them, the residents of the house are a good example of how haunted houses really screw up a person’s life. Although they are on record for having been adequately “shocked, horrified, and disgusted” when they first found the terror-spell ingredients hiding in their walls, they are more concerned with the fact that this has forced them to do a buttload of expensive renovation their insurance company wants to hear nothing about, and the mold and terrifying smell of the animals has tainted the whole house. That, friend, is the true, mundane yet long-term, horror you’ll face the next time your ceiling starts weeping ectoplasm.
1
Man Arrested For Smuggling Roasted Black-Magic Fetuses
Wait, what?
I’m … That’s … What?
The Telegraph
SIX?
Gold leaf. Jesus.
Look, creepy babies are generally a pretty safe course for any horror movie worth its salt. But it’s one thing to go full Rosemary’s Baby, and completely another to roast fetuses, cover them in gold, and waltz off to the airport with a bunch in your luggage while attempting to whistle innocuously. That’s not the plot of a horror movie — that’s what gets you kicked out of the villain treehouse for creeping out Pennywise The Clown. Even the fact that the guy probably didn’t personally make the horror babies like a good, old-fashioned maniac doesn’t help matters; instead, he bought them from someone else for $6,000 and intended to sell them for profit as black-magic good-luck charms known as kuman thong.
Gilded. Roasted. Fetus. Black. Magic. Good luck charms. That someone out there is actively manufacturing for sale.
You know what? Fuck it. I’m out. I hope you’re proud of yourself, fetus guy. You can’t be spun into a horror movie, because you already are something way, way creepier. In other circumstances, I might say that you won, but I think we can agree that we all lost something precious today. Now, who’s hogging the brain bleach?
Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.
The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we’re living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house’s lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the US Constitution and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.
Join Jack O’Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history’s biggest moments you didn’t realize everyone was drunk for.
Get your tickets here:
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/23/5-true-stories-that-put-every-horror-movie-to-shame/
from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/162144044077
0 notes
Text
5 True Stories That Put Every Horror Movie To Shame
Show a group of people a randomly picked news article, and three personality types will emerge. Some ask themselves: “How does this affect me?” Others query: “What can I learn from this?” And then there’s a third group, which rarely wears pants and only wants to know: “What kind of horror movie would this be?” I’m firmly in that last group, and judging by how you clicked on this article, I’m guessing that so are you. So come — let’s grab a bunch of truly creepy news stories and give those stupid, rational types a sample of what the inside of our collective head looks like.
5
Boats Full Of Corpses Keep Washing Up In Japan
There are many horror plots you’d associate with Japan: creepy ghost girls, giant monsters, the lingering farts of long-gone otakus still haunting their apartment complexes. You wouldn’t necessarily include the classic “ghost ship” story in that list … which is why Japan, being Japan, has taken that trope and cranked it up to 11.
Instead of the traditional version where a ship is found with its crew mysteriously missing (and may or may not make its finders disappear as well, thanks to the vengeful sea ghosts haunting it), the country has opted for a real-life version where mysterious boats full of decomposing and mutilated corpses keep washing up on the country’s shores. That’s insane. Even the most visceral of ghost ship-themed horror movies tend to start with an empty ship, singular. Here, we have a whole bunch, turning up with some alarming regularity, and complete with a ton of well-worn corpses to bring some extra gore to the tale. Is … is this going to be a zombie situation somewhere down the line? Is this how the whole “undead pirate” thing from Pirates Of The Caribbean would really play out?
In the interest of accurate reporting, it should be mentioned that one of the boats has been connected to a unit of North Korea’s army, along with Kim Jong-un’s apparent insistence on fishing as a source of food and foreign income. So the leading boring theory is that these are North Korean ships, risking literal life and limb in order to catch a mackerel or six for the Great Leader.
Wait, hold on. That’s … actually even more terrifying than a dark saltwater god stealing fishermen’s faces or whatever. Imagine that your entire lot in life is sailing notoriously stormy and awful seas in a barely equipped vessel, only for your crew to face the unspeakable horrors of the ocean. Maybe things get so bad that you end up with a Donner Party situation. Finally, after the inevitable gory climax, you wash up in a foreign land, where your badly decomposed mortal remains are collected and cremated by stoic Japanese coast guards who have at this point seen way too much of this shit to give a damn.
Around Act Two of that story, having your soul eaten by a horde of ravenous ocean witches would probably be a welcome respite.
4
A Company Had A Secret Nuclear Reactor For Decades
Let’s say you’re a resident of Rochester, New York. You’re just minding your own business, pretending your city has famous people who are not Ryan Lochte and Kristen Wiig, when one day, your neighborhood is full of dudes in hazmat suits. Because a company next door had a goddamned secret nuclear reactor in their basement. But what kind of real-life Umbrella Corporation would go and pull a stunt like that … ?
… K-Kodak? The photography company?
What the fuck?
shurik/Pixabay
Who knew a Kodak moment has a half-life of 24,110 years?
It’s hard for a corporate entity to seem sympathetic, but Kodak — a company most notorious for manufacturing film — is probably as close as it comes in an era where everyone has a camera in their cell phone. Finding out a firm like that has been gleefully playing with Fallout tech all along is like discovering that your sweet grandpa’s house has a secret dungeon for a 16-foot fuck doll constructed entirely out of rotting ham. Still, Kodak totally had a nuclear reactor. It was called “californium neutron flux multiplier,” and they started messing around with it in 1974. The company is quick to mention that the reactor was just a relatively small one, they were operating it remotely behind two feet of concrete, and they only used it for non-nefarious purposes such as testing chemicals for impurities. They might even point out that they themselves were, in fact, the ones who revealed that they had one in the first place.
To all that I say: Poppycock.
You know what kind of company just abruptly up and goes, “Hey, guys, did we ever tell you the story of this doom machine we’ve had in our basement for decades? We didn’t? Well, how about that, ha-ha!”? One that’s doing damage control, that’s what. I can imagine around least a dozen reasons for Kodak needing an unsanctioned, rarely mentioned nuclear reactor that was suddenly decommissioned in collaboration with the government in 2007. None of those reasons include the words “making photography shit better,” and absolutely all of them include the term “super mutant.”
I’m calling it: They were totally running a nuclear-themed supervillain plot on the side, and something happened in 2007. Maybe their scientists finally managed to create a film that could capture future events, and were driven to homicidal insanity when every image persistently featured forests of flaming skeletons where trees should be. Or maybe, just maybe, they finally managed to recreate my favorite Masters Of The Universe failure Fearless Photog, who proceeded to tear through the facility like the Demogorgon in Stranger Things.
Mattel
If nothing else, he’d take found-footage movies to another level.
3
Family Flees Their Dream House Because Of A Mysterious “Watcher”
The “mysterious stalker in the shadows” trope is present in roughly 95 percent of all horror movies, but in real life, that particular plot device can usually be solved with a call to police, a restraining order, or a swift dropkick right in the dick.
Which makes it all the more intriguing that in 2015, a creepy entity known as “The Watcher” actually managed to stalk a family out of their New Jersey home. And wait, it gets better — said home happened to look like this:
There’s a reason our villain was called the Watcher and not, say, the Melon Baller Eyeball Collector — as befits the majesty of his preferred stalking grounds, he was all about psychological terror. The name of his particular game was threatening letters. And although that could technically put him in a “disgruntled dude who lost the bidding war” or “guy who really hates neighbors” category, he pushed his way into horror movie territory with his … peculiar methods. Here are some choice quotes from his messages:
“The windows and doors allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house. Who I am? I am the Watcher.”
“Have they found out what is in the walls yet? In time they will.”
Or, in reference to the family’s children:
“I am pleased to know your names now, and the name of the young blood you have brought to me.”
Hahahahaha! That’s awesome … ly, uh, awful for the family, that is. The letters kept coming, and as they included apt “young blood” references and hints that the writer actually did keep uncomfortably close tabs on the house and its renovations, the family was too afraid to make the house their home. In fact, they never dared to properly move in.
What really makes this one for me is that as a horror movie, it’s clearly a sequel. Not only does the family heavily insinuate that the previous owners who sold the house to them were already all too aware of The Watcher, the Watcher himself started his campaign of terror (a mere three days after they bought the house in 2014) with a statement that his grandfather and father had watched the house before him, and it now fell on him to “wait for its second coming.”
A real creepy, haunted-looking mansion where every owner is stalked by generations of unknown, hostile entities? Say that sentence out loud three times, and Wes Craven’s ghost will appear to high five you, because you just got yourself a horror franchise.
2
A Family Finds The Walls Of Their House Are Filled With Animal Carcasses
The Watcher may or may not have been hurling empty threats about “things in the walls,” but in Auburn, MA, one villain damn well delivered … a good 70-80 years in advance.
In 2011, the Bretzius family bought a house. They were thorough in what they were looking for. They had it inspected, looked for radon, the whole nine yards. Everything went well, and they moved in … which is when the dead animals started coming out of the walls.
In 2012, the family discovered to their horror that the walls were full of dead animals, spices, and assorted trinkets, all wrapped up in newspapers from 1930s and 1940s. Intrigued by the what-the-fuckedness of it all, they sent dozens of the carcasses and other finds to experts, who concluded that they likely had something to do with pow-wowing, a peculiar form of Amish folk magic where tricks like this were used to “heal” ailments.
Personally, I call bullshit. It’s one thing to perform a little ceremony for health, like sacrificing a goat whenever you pass through a doorway for the first time (you guys do that too, right?). Stuffing all your walls full of death and spices is the work of a serial killer who wants to show the devil who the boss really is. With that logic, and in the context of Pennsylvania Dutch magic being at play here, I’m forced to assume that the house is haunted by buckriders — demons who ride flying goats from Satan’s flock. Have those guys ever featured in a horror movie? They’re about to!
Still, before the spirits of Bokkenrijders inevitably rise and possess them, the residents of the house are a good example of how haunted houses really screw up a person’s life. Although they are on record for having been adequately “shocked, horrified, and disgusted” when they first found the terror-spell ingredients hiding in their walls, they are more concerned with the fact that this has forced them to do a buttload of expensive renovation their insurance company wants to hear nothing about, and the mold and terrifying smell of the animals has tainted the whole house. That, friend, is the true, mundane yet long-term, horror you’ll face the next time your ceiling starts weeping ectoplasm.
1
Man Arrested For Smuggling Roasted Black-Magic Fetuses
Wait, what?
I’m … That’s … What?
The Telegraph
SIX?
Gold leaf. Jesus.
Look, creepy babies are generally a pretty safe course for any horror movie worth its salt. But it’s one thing to go full Rosemary’s Baby, and completely another to roast fetuses, cover them in gold, and waltz off to the airport with a bunch in your luggage while attempting to whistle innocuously. That’s not the plot of a horror movie — that’s what gets you kicked out of the villain treehouse for creeping out Pennywise The Clown. Even the fact that the guy probably didn’t personally make the horror babies like a good, old-fashioned maniac doesn’t help matters; instead, he bought them from someone else for $6,000 and intended to sell them for profit as black-magic good-luck charms known as kuman thong.
Gilded. Roasted. Fetus. Black. Magic. Good luck charms. That someone out there is actively manufacturing for sale.
You know what? Fuck it. I’m out. I hope you’re proud of yourself, fetus guy. You can’t be spun into a horror movie, because you already are something way, way creepier. In other circumstances, I might say that you won, but I think we can agree that we all lost something precious today. Now, who’s hogging the brain bleach?
Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.
The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we’re living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house’s lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the US Constitution and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.
Join Jack O’Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history’s biggest moments you didn’t realize everyone was drunk for.
Get your tickets here:
Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/23/5-true-stories-that-put-every-horror-movie-to-shame/
from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/5-true-stories-that-put-every-horror-movie-to-shame/
0 notes
Text
5 True Stories That Put Every Horror Movie To Shame
Show a group of people a randomly picked news article, and three personality types will emerge. Some ask themselves: “How does this affect me?” Others query: “What can I learn from this?” And then there’s a third group, which rarely wears pants and only wants to know: “What kind of horror movie would this be?” I’m firmly in that last group, and judging by how you clicked on this article, I’m guessing that so are you. So come — let’s grab a bunch of truly creepy news stories and give those stupid, rational types a sample of what the inside of our collective head looks like.
5
Boats Full Of Corpses Keep Washing Up In Japan
There are many horror plots you’d associate with Japan: creepy ghost girls, giant monsters, the lingering farts of long-gone otakus still haunting their apartment complexes. You wouldn’t necessarily include the classic “ghost ship” story in that list … which is why Japan, being Japan, has taken that trope and cranked it up to 11.
Instead of the traditional version where a ship is found with its crew mysteriously missing (and may or may not make its finders disappear as well, thanks to the vengeful sea ghosts haunting it), the country has opted for a real-life version where mysterious boats full of decomposing and mutilated corpses keep washing up on the country’s shores. That’s insane. Even the most visceral of ghost ship-themed horror movies tend to start with an empty ship, singular. Here, we have a whole bunch, turning up with some alarming regularity, and complete with a ton of well-worn corpses to bring some extra gore to the tale. Is … is this going to be a zombie situation somewhere down the line? Is this how the whole “undead pirate” thing from Pirates Of The Caribbean would really play out?
In the interest of accurate reporting, it should be mentioned that one of the boats has been connected to a unit of North Korea’s army, along with Kim Jong-un’s apparent insistence on fishing as a source of food and foreign income. So the leading boring theory is that these are North Korean ships, risking literal life and limb in order to catch a mackerel or six for the Great Leader.
Wait, hold on. That’s … actually even more terrifying than a dark saltwater god stealing fishermen’s faces or whatever. Imagine that your entire lot in life is sailing notoriously stormy and awful seas in a barely equipped vessel, only for your crew to face the unspeakable horrors of the ocean. Maybe things get so bad that you end up with a Donner Party situation. Finally, after the inevitable gory climax, you wash up in a foreign land, where your badly decomposed mortal remains are collected and cremated by stoic Japanese coast guards who have at this point seen way too much of this shit to give a damn.
Around Act Two of that story, having your soul eaten by a horde of ravenous ocean witches would probably be a welcome respite.
4
A Company Had A Secret Nuclear Reactor For Decades
Let’s say you’re a resident of Rochester, New York. You’re just minding your own business, pretending your city has famous people who are not Ryan Lochte and Kristen Wiig, when one day, your neighborhood is full of dudes in hazmat suits. Because a company next door had a goddamned secret nuclear reactor in their basement. But what kind of real-life Umbrella Corporation would go and pull a stunt like that … ?
… K-Kodak? The photography company?
What the fuck?
shurik/Pixabay
Who knew a Kodak moment has a half-life of 24,110 years?
It’s hard for a corporate entity to seem sympathetic, but Kodak — a company most notorious for manufacturing film — is probably as close as it comes in an era where everyone has a camera in their cell phone. Finding out a firm like that has been gleefully playing with Fallout tech all along is like discovering that your sweet grandpa’s house has a secret dungeon for a 16-foot fuck doll constructed entirely out of rotting ham. Still, Kodak totally had a nuclear reactor. It was called “californium neutron flux multiplier,” and they started messing around with it in 1974. The company is quick to mention that the reactor was just a relatively small one, they were operating it remotely behind two feet of concrete, and they only used it for non-nefarious purposes such as testing chemicals for impurities. They might even point out that they themselves were, in fact, the ones who revealed that they had one in the first place.
To all that I say: Poppycock.
You know what kind of company just abruptly up and goes, “Hey, guys, did we ever tell you the story of this doom machine we’ve had in our basement for decades? We didn’t? Well, how about that, ha-ha!”? One that’s doing damage control, that’s what. I can imagine around least a dozen reasons for Kodak needing an unsanctioned, rarely mentioned nuclear reactor that was suddenly decommissioned in collaboration with the government in 2007. None of those reasons include the words “making photography shit better,” and absolutely all of them include the term “super mutant.”
I’m calling it: They were totally running a nuclear-themed supervillain plot on the side, and something happened in 2007. Maybe their scientists finally managed to create a film that could capture future events, and were driven to homicidal insanity when every image persistently featured forests of flaming skeletons where trees should be. Or maybe, just maybe, they finally managed to recreate my favorite Masters Of The Universe failure Fearless Photog, who proceeded to tear through the facility like the Demogorgon in Stranger Things.
Mattel
If nothing else, he’d take found-footage movies to another level.
3
Family Flees Their Dream House Because Of A Mysterious “Watcher”
The “mysterious stalker in the shadows” trope is present in roughly 95 percent of all horror movies, but in real life, that particular plot device can usually be solved with a call to police, a restraining order, or a swift dropkick right in the dick.
Which makes it all the more intriguing that in 2015, a creepy entity known as “The Watcher” actually managed to stalk a family out of their New Jersey home. And wait, it gets better — said home happened to look like this:
There’s a reason our villain was called the Watcher and not, say, the Melon Baller Eyeball Collector — as befits the majesty of his preferred stalking grounds, he was all about psychological terror. The name of his particular game was threatening letters. And although that could technically put him in a “disgruntled dude who lost the bidding war” or “guy who really hates neighbors” category, he pushed his way into horror movie territory with his … peculiar methods. Here are some choice quotes from his messages:
“The windows and doors allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house. Who I am? I am the Watcher.”
“Have they found out what is in the walls yet? In time they will.”
Or, in reference to the family’s children:
“I am pleased to know your names now, and the name of the young blood you have brought to me.”
Hahahahaha! That’s awesome … ly, uh, awful for the family, that is. The letters kept coming, and as they included apt “young blood” references and hints that the writer actually did keep uncomfortably close tabs on the house and its renovations, the family was too afraid to make the house their home. In fact, they never dared to properly move in.
What really makes this one for me is that as a horror movie, it’s clearly a sequel. Not only does the family heavily insinuate that the previous owners who sold the house to them were already all too aware of The Watcher, the Watcher himself started his campaign of terror (a mere three days after they bought the house in 2014) with a statement that his grandfather and father had watched the house before him, and it now fell on him to “wait for its second coming.”
A real creepy, haunted-looking mansion where every owner is stalked by generations of unknown, hostile entities? Say that sentence out loud three times, and Wes Craven’s ghost will appear to high five you, because you just got yourself a horror franchise.
2
A Family Finds The Walls Of Their House Are Filled With Animal Carcasses
The Watcher may or may not have been hurling empty threats about “things in the walls,” but in Auburn, MA, one villain damn well delivered … a good 70-80 years in advance.
In 2011, the Bretzius family bought a house. They were thorough in what they were looking for. They had it inspected, looked for radon, the whole nine yards. Everything went well, and they moved in … which is when the dead animals started coming out of the walls.
In 2012, the family discovered to their horror that the walls were full of dead animals, spices, and assorted trinkets, all wrapped up in newspapers from 1930s and 1940s. Intrigued by the what-the-fuckedness of it all, they sent dozens of the carcasses and other finds to experts, who concluded that they likely had something to do with pow-wowing, a peculiar form of Amish folk magic where tricks like this were used to “heal” ailments.
Personally, I call bullshit. It’s one thing to perform a little ceremony for health, like sacrificing a goat whenever you pass through a doorway for the first time (you guys do that too, right?). Stuffing all your walls full of death and spices is the work of a serial killer who wants to show the devil who the boss really is. With that logic, and in the context of Pennsylvania Dutch magic being at play here, I’m forced to assume that the house is haunted by buckriders — demons who ride flying goats from Satan’s flock. Have those guys ever featured in a horror movie? They’re about to!
Still, before the spirits of Bokkenrijders inevitably rise and possess them, the residents of the house are a good example of how haunted houses really screw up a person’s life. Although they are on record for having been adequately “shocked, horrified, and disgusted” when they first found the terror-spell ingredients hiding in their walls, they are more concerned with the fact that this has forced them to do a buttload of expensive renovation their insurance company wants to hear nothing about, and the mold and terrifying smell of the animals has tainted the whole house. That, friend, is the true, mundane yet long-term, horror you’ll face the next time your ceiling starts weeping ectoplasm.
1
Man Arrested For Smuggling Roasted Black-Magic Fetuses
Wait, what?
I’m … That’s … What?
The Telegraph
SIX?
Gold leaf. Jesus.
Look, creepy babies are generally a pretty safe course for any horror movie worth its salt. But it’s one thing to go full Rosemary’s Baby, and completely another to roast fetuses, cover them in gold, and waltz off to the airport with a bunch in your luggage while attempting to whistle innocuously. That’s not the plot of a horror movie — that’s what gets you kicked out of the villain treehouse for creeping out Pennywise The Clown. Even the fact that the guy probably didn’t personally make the horror babies like a good, old-fashioned maniac doesn’t help matters; instead, he bought them from someone else for $6,000 and intended to sell them for profit as black-magic good-luck charms known as kuman thong.
Gilded. Roasted. Fetus. Black. Magic. Good luck charms. That someone out there is actively manufacturing for sale.
You know what? Fuck it. I’m out. I hope you’re proud of yourself, fetus guy. You can’t be spun into a horror movie, because you already are something way, way creepier. In other circumstances, I might say that you won, but I think we can agree that we all lost something precious today. Now, who’s hogging the brain bleach?
Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.
The proliferation of beer pong and craft beer may have you think that we’re living in one of the peak times to get drunk, but humans have been getting famously hammered for millennia. Like a frat house’s lawn after a kegger, history is littered with world changing events that were secretly powered by booze. The inaugural games of the Roman Coliseum, the drafting of the US Constitution and the Russian Revolution were all capped off by major parties that most attendees probably regretted in the morning.
Join Jack O’Brien and Cracked staffers Carmen Angelica, Alex Schmidt, Michael Swaim, plus comedian Blake Wexler for a retelling of history’s biggest moments you didn’t realize everyone was drunk for.
Get your tickets here:
from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/06/23/5-true-stories-that-put-every-horror-movie-to-shame/
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Dax Shepard Is Listening – The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — In November, the actor Dax Shepard rolled up to a tree-shaded lot in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles in a wood-grain 1994 Buick Roadmaster and parked in front of a single-door garage.
The yard was brown and dusty, with trucks out front and a portable toilet on the premises. His house was under construction. But we weren’t going there.
Instead, Mr. Shepard, who is 44 and rangy, tramped up a set of stairs outside the garage and unlocked the door to a cozy space with slate blue walls and the odd wire dangling from the slanted ceiling.
A long couch sat opposite a leather recliner and a daintier, midcentury-style seat. Three microphones stood nearby.
Before we sat down, Mr. Shepard wanted to know: Would I like coffee? I said that I’d already had tea that morning, and besides, I was trying and routinely failing to honor my doctor’s suggestion to drink less caffeine. Filling the coffee maker with water for himself, he asked: Did I have addictive tendencies?
Such casually blunt questions are a hallmark of “Armchair Expert,” Mr. Shepard’s interview podcast, which premiered in 2018. The episodes feature a mix of Hollywood names (Will Ferrell, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ellen DeGeneres, Emilia Clarke), authors (Elizabeth Gilbert, David Sedaris, Gillian Flynn) and specialists in various fields (Richard Dawkins, Esther Perel, the California surgeon general Nadine Burke Harris, Bill Nye).
The actress Kristen Bell, who is Mr. Shepard’s wife, was the show’s first guest.
Mr. Shepard — known for his roles on “Parenthood” and the new sitcom “Bless This Mess” — is the face and primary voice of the podcast. Monica Padman, a 32-year-old actress, is his quieter co-host; she also handles the behind-the-scenes work of wrangling guests and editing interviews.
The show, Mr. Shepard said, was never meant to be groundbreaking; long-form interviews have existed practically since the dawn of radio.
But he liked going on other people’s podcasts — how the intimacy and extended format granted more depth than seven minutes on a late-night show. When he appeared on “WTF With Marc Maron,” for example, he spoke openly about his sobriety. Afterward, he said, fans said that the conversation helped them on their own recovery journeys.
Now “Armchair Expert” competes with podcasts like Mr. Maron’s for listeners. The show closed out 2018 as the most downloaded new podcast on iTunes and won “Breakout Podcast” at the 2019 iHeartRadio Podcast Awards.
According to Mr. Shepard, it is often downloaded more than five million times in a week: roughly one million apiece from two new episodes, and another three million from the archive.
“It’s so wonderful to read that, to know that,” he said. “But then my brain shifts immediately into fear, like, how do we maintain that?”
“I’ve been in a bunch of things that work just enough,” he said. “So to have something that’s a hit for me also comes with fear as well as gratitude. I’m like, ‘This is wonderful. I don’t want to lose this. I would like this to go on for a long, long time.’”
Mr. Shepard was sitting in the attic’s leather recliner, rocking back and forth and sporadically tucking a long leg up under him. He was trying to police himself, he said, to make sure he didn’t sabotage the podcast’s success somehow.
On “Armchair Expert,” as in real life, Mr. Shepard is inclined toward self-analysis of his insecurities, motivations and shortcomings.
“It feels like Dax is a much more enlightened Howard Stern,” said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, whose interview aired in December. “You could say that he’s the poster child for an alternative to what sometimes gets called ‘toxic masculinity.’ I’m not a fan of that term — I much prefer the social science of what’s called ‘precarious manhood’ — but I think he’s a role model for how not to be someone who’s constantly trying to prove your manhood.”
Mr. Shepard’s frequent expressions of vulnerability — about his road rage, about his vanity, about being molested as a child — encourage his interview subjects to feel comfortable sharing something of themselves.
“His best quality in interviewing is making sure you don’t feel alone and naked out there,” said the actress Lake Bell, Mr. Shepard’s co-star on “Bless This Mess.” When she appeared on the show, she spoke about the traumatic birth of her son, which she hadn’t discussed publicly before.
“He creates a very safe space for an interviewee,” said Monica Lewinsky, who appeared on “Armchair Expert” in October. “There becomes something about Dax and about the way he deals with his own history which makes me want to meet him at his level of vulnerability.” (A fan of the show and a connoisseur of crystals, she brought green apophyllite as gifts for Mr. Shepard and Ms. Padman.)
It helps, Mr. Shepard said, that he and Ms. Padman give guests the option to cut portions of the interview after recording, should they regret something they said. Interviewees frequently take them up on this.
“I definitely had, as Brené Brown calls it, a ‘vulnerability hangover’ when I left,” Ms. Lewinsky said. “I panicked: ‘Oh God, was that O.K.? What did I just say? Will it be misinterpreted?’”
“You know how they pump oxygen into casinos?” she said. “It’s sort of like Dax and Monica pump some form of invisible truth serum into the air in the attic.”
Partway through our interview, Ms. Padman entered the room and sat next to Mr. Shepard. Concerned about the audio quality of my recording — “Can I be controlling and make a suggestion?” — Mr. Shepard relocated Ms. Padman’s chair between us so that she could be closer to the microphone. As we talked, he occasionally kicked a leg up to rest on the wooden arm of her chair.
The two have a close, almost familial relationship: First hired as a babysitter to Mr. Shepard and Ms. Bell’s children, Ms. Padman now works with both parents in a creative capacity, writing Ms. Bell’s awards-show monologues and reading commercial scripts to ensure that they’re written in the actress’s voice.
The affection between the hosts comes through most clearly during the “fact check” that they record after each interview, in which the two banter and debate — their favorite hobby — while Ms. Padman corrects various claims made throughout the interview.
When the comedian W. Kamau Bell recorded a live podcast with them in San Francisco, he got the sense that every audience question boiled down to some form of: “Can I move in with you and Kristen Bell and Monica?”
“A big part of the appeal of that show is that it scratches the same itch that a reality show scratches, without going down that tortured alley,” Mr. Bell said. “You’re in the middle of their relationship, and Kristen Bell is kind of like Kanye West on ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians,’ where he’s just outside somewhere.”
Much of the work that Ms. Padman does on the show — the fact-checking, the editing, the scheduling — takes place off-mic. When they first started recording the podcast, she worried about getting enough airtime.
The anxiety, she said, grew out of a desire for approval from their guests, particularly those whose support could matter to her acting career, like Judd Apatow.
But, she said, “I don’t need to prove myself to any of these people. I can just be.”
Observing interviews from this slight remove, Ms. Padman sees herself as a proxy for the listener. She asks the follow-up questions that people may be curious about and makes sure to circle back to threads that get dropped midway through a conversation. She is always editing in her head. And, Mr. Shepard said, she holds him accountable.
“Monica will call me out when I’m being misogynistic or I’m being mildly racist or I’m being elitist or I’m being whatever — she will always call me out,” he said. “And I think she gives me latitude to be a real person who doesn’t do it right.”
At times, people have questioned their judgment. When the hosts invited Casey Affleck onto the podcast, some listeners criticized Mr. Shepard and Ms. Padman for giving a platform to the actor, who in 2010 was sued by two women for sexual harassment on the set of one of his films. (Both cases were settled out of court.)
In his interview, Mr. Affleck spoke in support of the #MeToo movement and discussed the difficulty of that period of his life.
Mr. Shepard was hesitant to discuss the backlash over that episode. He wasn’t afraid of a quote from his conversation with Mr. Affleck being pulled out of context, because the entirety of it is available to the public.
But to respond to it for this article would risk having his thoughts distilled into one sentence that could pour gas on the whole thing, he said. Still, he talked it out.
“We’re not a show that levies verdicts,” Mr. Shepard said. “We’re a show that lets someone tell their experience.”
He disagrees with the notion of “platforming” on the basis that it implies a person’s ideas are so persuasive that they shouldn’t be heard at all. Given the opportunity, Mr. Shepard said, he would gladly interview a serial killer — a bad analogy, he admitted, because it implies that he believes Mr. Affleck is somehow culpable, and he has no position either way on that matter.
“But I would interview a serial killer in two seconds,” Mr. Shepard said. “And my interview with a serial killer wouldn’t be, ‘You’re so bad. You know, you’re bad. You’re really bad. Have you thought about how bad you were?’ I would want to know what the point of view of a serial killer is. I want to hear their story.”
There’s no long-form interviewer he respects more than Howard Stern. On a technical level, Mr. Shepard said, “he’s just so calm, so confident, so prepared, so open to wherever it goes, never panicky.” And he admires Mr. Stern’s willingness to make apologies on air and soften the shock-jock persona that made him famous.
They have met and corresponded, but Mr. Shepard has refused to ask him to be on the show because he doesn’t want to feel like Mr. Stern is doing him a favor.
Mr. Shepard has trouble accepting help, he said, and fantasizes that one day Mr. Stern will ask to come on the podcast of his own volition.
“In all truth, I want just what Stern has,” he said. Ideally he would come in more often than he does now “and just sit in here and talk with Monica and other people.” He thinks he would prefer that over acting, he said, or, really, “anything else.”
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