#loving all of the subverting their stories that’s going on. perry going on their own ariadne lying to the cyclops gwaine dying fr. so cool | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

letterboxd · 5 years

Photo

Spiritual.

“It just goes to show you can give four people similar ingredients and they will absolutely not make the same movie.”

In Max Minghella’s Teen Spirit, aspiring teenage singer Violet (Elle Fanning) pursues her pop dream via a TV reality competition show. The Cinderella plot-line is common enough in underdog stories, but Teen Spirit uses the setup to mount a textured, vibrant, uplifting film enhanced to no end by a clear love for the power of pop music.

A lot of the credit goes to Fanning, who does her own singing. The 21-year-old has enjoyed an auspicious career thus far, but none of her previous roles suggested the power of her performance in Teen Sprit as Violet, a Polish immigrant high schooler living a meager existence with her mother on the Isle of Wight (off the south coast of England).

Violet lies about her age to sing on the weekend in dingy pubs, and sees an opportunity when the titular TV show comes to town for open tryouts. Her mother doesn’t approve, but Violet needs a guardian, so she ropes in a local drunk, Vlad (Croatian actor Zlatko Burić), who happens to be a former opera star. Together, Violet and Vlad will face the stark odds of trying to make it as a modern day pop star.

Teen Spirit is an assured writing and directing debut for Minghella, who is best known as an actor (The Social Network, The Handmaid’s Tale). He’s also the son of Academy Award-winning filmmaker, the late Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain.

Letterboxd met up with Minghella in Austin recently, following a well received screening of Teen Spirit at SXSW. Minghella developed and produced Teen Spirit with his old friend, actor Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot, King Kong), so when he says “we”, it’s Bell he’s referring to.

Max Minghella and cinematographer Autumn Durald on set.

How did you know the drama of this film would go beyond the usual drama that feeds the kind of reality shows it takes place around? Max Minghella: You don’t know. You hope. It’s interesting because I don’t know how interested I was really in reality shows. I mean, I love reality shows, but it wasn’t what I was really thinking about making this movie. I was kind of fascinated by the mechanics behind them, what we don’t see, and I’m always interested in back rooms. I’ve always been a very voyeuristic person—that’s quite evident in the film. I love seeing things I’m not supposed to see, and the movie almost takes place exclusively in those sorts of spaces.

There’s a lot going on thematically in the movie between these people. I think the relationship is quite unique and unconventional for a film like this. We’re constantly trying to subvert the poppiness of it. Like the music does in the film, which is very melancholic, [the music is] very kind of candy-colored. There’s two things which should be diametrically opposed, yet they turn into something that’s quite cinematic.

I really wanted this movie to be a big cinematic experience. Movies right now are in a difficult moment, and we really hope that this will be a film that can play as a theatrical experience, and make people wanna go and see it on the big screen. Those are the movies I love. It’s a medium I love so much. That’s my church.

The songs feel very deliberate. How much freedom did you have to choose the ones you wanted? We wrote all the songs that you see in the movie into the original script. And we didn’t think we were gonna get them. To be honest this movie never felt real. That’s the honest truth. I didn’t feel as if this movie could happen at any point, until we were shooting. It felt ridiculous. There’s too much music. It’s got subtitles in it. It’s about an immigrant. There’s a thousand things about it that don’t feel plausible. It’s not a hundred-million-dollar Fox movie, it doesn’t feel as if the house was riding on it, so there was no reason not to be crazy. Because it didn’t feel like it would ever happen.

We were very, very lucky—every movie’s a miracle, our miracle was music. And the fact that [Teen Spirit producer] Fred [Berger] happened to have made La La Land, which he wasn’t even making at the time that we met him. He happened to go and make this film while we were writing Teen Spirit. It happened to work. It happened to involve Interscope Records. The songs that we had in our script happened to be with Interscope Records, 90 percent of them. It wasn’t planned. We don’t know anything about music. We were just going “we like this one, and this one” and it all happened to be the same place, and it happened to be a place that we had to go. So it worked out. If Sony BMG or somebody had released the soundtrack, this movie would be full of completely different songs, and not the ones we wanted.

Elle Fanning as Violet.

Elle Fanning is so powerful in this, yet so subtle at the same time. It’s a deeply nuanced performance for a film like this, and that’s what’s brave about it. She doesn’t do any of the ostentatious things or the loud things that people react to. People like acting when they see the “acting”. Those tend to be the kind of performances that are rewarded or applauded. It’s quite brave to take a role like this, which can be very showy and takes a lot of emotional range, and then not ever take the obvious hit. Never. She does what I think is always the most human honest choice in those moments.

Does it concern you or did it occur to you that Teen Spirit is coming out amongst a rash of movies about pop stars? Her Smell, Vox Lux, A Star Is Born… It wasn’t like we were aware that everybody was making music movies. We’re friends with Brady Corbet, who made Vox Lux, so I was very aware of Brady’s movie, and he’s somebody I hugely admire and have a constant dialogue with. But I also knew how different it was. So I wasn’t nervous about it. We’re very close to the A Star Is Born people, in fact they made both these movies, Interscope, so they’re actually kind of almost like a part of the same team, so it doesn’t feel competitive with them at all, it’s always felt very supportive. And Alex [Ross Perry], who made Her Smell, is a friend of mine. So none of it feels antagonistic.

What’s so fascinating is they’re so completely different. A lot of them have female protagonists. I don’t think anyone has said “this movie looks like this movie or feels like this movie”. It just goes to show you can give four people similar ingredients and they will absolutely not make the same movie. It’ll just turn into something very different. I feel like now there’s a huge appetite for films like this, an increasing appetite.

The reality show elements in the film feel highly authentic. I researched the actual truth. Everything that happens with [Teen Spirit judge/producer] Rebecca [Hall]’s character was very grounded in reality, that is sort of what happens on these shows, and I wanted all of it to be: what would happen? And how would these two people react to those things? The thing we studied the most was music tour documentaries, I would say. Like the Madonna movie, and the Katy Perry documentary, those are beautifully made. The behind-the-scenes stuff is so endlessly compelling and cinematic to me.

You’ve said that you wrote Zlatko’s role with him in mind—why did you want him in your movie? I’d just seen him in stuff, and he’s so unique. And if you’re going to do a Cinderella story and have a Fairy Godmother, he seems like a really unique way of doing a Fairy Godmother. I genuinely don’t think anyone else could’ve played the part.

Why did you choose to set it on the Isle of Wight? Well, my dad’s from the Isle of Wight, so that was sort of just a silly narcissistic thing. And then I think it’s a good metaphor. This girl is on an island, away from something, a place she wants to be. Looking at a horizon that she can’t quite reach, it’s another layer of alienation, which makes sense to me.

How do you feel now that Teen Spirit is being shown to audiences? It feels so masturbatory making a film, it really does. And I’m extremely happy with where we’ve gotten to with it. It’s the film I wanted to make. For better or worse. And it’s lovely to share it with people. But at the end it is a slightly selfish exercise I think. I’m at peace with what I’ve made. I feel good. And now I’d like to move on and start thinking about something else. But it feels good to have finished this process—I don't think we squandered it and didn’t waste people’s time. It’s a lot of people’s energy, a lot of people’s hard work and kindness. You make a movie and a hundred people are going too far and doing too much for you and not sleeping enough and you want to be responsible to those people.

‘Teen Spirit’ is in New York and LA cinemas now, and opens US-wide from April 19.

#teen spirit #elle fanning #max minghella #pop star #reality tv #jamie bell #sxsw19 #letterboxd

9 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 3 years

Text

Superman & Lois Easter Eggs are a Love Letter to Every Era of DC History

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains Superman & Lois spoilers.

Superman & Lois Episode 11

If you just tuned in to Superman & Lois episode 11, “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” a few minutes in, and perhaps without having seen the previous episodes, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is in fact the pilot episode for a brand new show about the Man of Steel. While every other Arrowverse superhero began life with a fairly detailed origin story episode (or season!), by the time we first met Tyler Hoechlin as Superman and Bitsie Tulloch as Lois Lane, both characters were meant to be well established in their world and careers. The actual first episode of Superman & Lois reminded us that these two were so “seasoned” that they’re already the parents of twin teenagers!

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

So there are still plenty of questions to be asked about the backstories of our title characters, and “A Brief Reminiscence In-Between Cataclysmic Events” is a big step towards that. But it’s so much more than a “how did Lois and Clark meet/Clark’s first time in costume/Superman getting established in Metropolis” episode. It’s a genuine love letter to both of these characters, and one that successfully encompasses the entirety of their 83 year history.

Oh, and it manages to do all of that while ALSO still moving the main story of the season forward nicely. It’s an incredibly versatile episode, and a fine piece of storytelling in its own right, making the well-worn beats of the Superman origin story feel fresh and vital, without losing sight of everything else the season needs to do.

Young Clark Kent and the Fortress of Solitude

The opening of this episode, with young Clark trudging through the arctic, carrying the sunstone and trying to figure out both his and its purpose, is the first of many nods to Richard Donner’s 1978 superhero movie masterpiece, Superman. Clark is even wearing a similar red check flannel jacket to the one Jeff East wore in a similar scene.

Jor-El

The concept of Jor-El as an AI that runs the Fortress of Solitude (as well as the Fortress itself stemming from a Kryptonian artifact) also traces its roots back to Donner’s Superman film. That was the first time we got the notion that Clark had to learn about his powers and alien heritage from the collected memories of his biological father and his people, and it’s updated nicely here.

Man of Steel

Clark’s first flight in the arctic, with Jor-El’s words ringing in his ears, well…again, Donner’s Superman. But specifically the way it’s presented here with Clark’s powerful takeoff and unsteady first moments it feels a lot like a similar moment in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.

The Fleischer Superman Costume

While we did hear Superman say “my mom made it for me” in the first episode, here we get to see more of why that actually happened. Clark’s current suit definitely feels like something slightly alien, perhaps the Kryptonian ceremonial wear it was hinted as being in Donner’s Superman (the first place to use the “S” as a Kryptonian house crest), Man of Steel, and recent DC Comics. But for the majority of Superman’s comic book history, it has always been the case that Martha made Clark’s suit for him.

Superman & Lois splits the difference, though, with Martha having made Clark’s first costume…one that happens to look exactly like the first screen interpretation of Superman ever: the classic Max Fleischer animated Superman shorts which first arrived in 1941. If you haven’t seen these, please do so. They’re gorgeous. Spending more time with that suit in this episode is a real treat, and it’s a perfect illustration of why “less is more” with superhero costuming.

It even kind of explains why the “S” on the original suit wouldn’t be the perfect Kryptonian symbol that Clark and Supergirl wear in the present day: Clark probably helped her design it from memory, since the first time he would have seen his family crest was when the Jor-El hologram appeared to him in the Fortress!

Also, this may or may not have been intentional, but Martha telling Clark “go save the world” before his first adventure also happens in J.J. Abrams never-filmed Superman screenplay, which despite it’s reputation, when it gets stuff right, it really gets it right. I wrote about that in much more detail here.

First Day on the Job

The episode cheats ever so slightly by reusing footage from the pilot with Superman catching the green PT cruiser and chatting with the citizens of Metropolis. But it’s worth repeating that this is a gloriously realized homage to the cover of Superman’s first appearance in 1938’s Action Comics #1. But everyone knows that, right?

But here we go one further, with the revelation that this wasn’t a random flashback, it was truly Clark’s first act in costume as Superman! Again, a nice little tribute to Action #1.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…

Superman changes back into Clark in a phone booth. I’m not sure at what point in Superman history that the “changing in a phone booth” became such an accepted bit of pop culture lore. It did happen in at least one of the aforementioned Fleischer Superman cartoons, and infrequently in the comics themselves, and almost NEVER in live action. In fact, Donner’s Superman even had a quick sight gag about this, when Christopher Reeve’s Clark is looking for a place to change for his first public act in costume, and gives one of those “modern” (for 1978) non-enclosed phone booths a bemused look.

A passerby notes to Clark that Metropolis’ new hero flew “like a bird or a plane.” This of course nods to the famed narration first popularized by The Adventures of Superman radio show (more on that in a minute) and the Fleischer cartoons: “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s…Superman!”

The Daily Planet

We don’t spend a heckuva lot of time at The Daily Planet on this show, but when we do it tries to capture the manic, bustling energy that we saw in Donner’s Superman (wow, that keeps coming up a lot…and with good reason).

Also, how good is Paul Jarrett as Perry White?

Lois Lane

Lois showing Clark the ropes at The Daily Planet is something that goes all the way back to their earliest appearances. I will die on this hill: Lois is slightly older than Clark, and is also the more experienced and better reporter. Even with “all those powers” (the real ones know) she’s at least one step ahead of Clark in the reporter game.

This one might not be intentional, but the montage of Lois and Clark on the job together reminds me very slightly of a montage page from John Byrne and Dick Giordano’s Man of Steel #2, where Lois, trying to track down Superman during his early days in Metropolis, keeps showing up just after he has left.

Lois and Clark staying late on the job has echoes of both the pilot episode of 1993’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and the “rooftop scene” from Donner’s Superman. It is the former in that it’s the first indication of a romantic attraction brewing between them (and significant because up until that point in history it was ALWAYS the case that Lois was attracted to Superman and not Clark). But there’s also a hint of the latter in their playful but wary flirtation.

But that’s subverted further with Lois’ exclusive interview with Superman. Just as in Donner’s film, Lois lands the first exclusive interview with the Man of Steel (there it was in private for later print publication, here it’s on TV). But again, Lois isn’t interested in Superman, because she’s already in love with Clark. It completely eliminates the old “love triangle” where “Clark loves Lois, but Lois loves Superman, but Superman wants to be loved as Clark” which has been a staple of the legend for years. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you.

One more thing from that lovely evening scene with Lois and Clark working late: when Clark is getting ready to leave, Lois asks him “what’s your hurry?” In Superman II, when Lois was suspecting the truth about Clark, she asked him “What’s your hurry, Superman?”

Atom Man

OK, the inclusion of Atom Man is some next level stuff. The character first appeared in 1945 on The Adventures of Superman radio show. There, he was “Heinrich Milch” (hence the “Henry Miller” of this episode), a Nazi empowered by Kryptonite in his bloodstream.

We met a different Atom Man in the second Superman movie serial in 1950, the appropriately titled Atom Man vs. Superman. There, Atom Man was the alter ego of Lex Luthor. One of these days I’m going to get around to writing about Columbia’s Superman serials, but today is not one of those days.

The Atom Man we meet here is based on the visual design from Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru’s EXCELLENT (seriously, I can’t stress enough how absolutely great this book is) Superman Smashes the Klan. That Atom Man was based on the “Henry Miller” version of the character, and thus the racist nonsense spouted by tonight’s villain is appropriate.

One other cool thing about the use of Yang/Gurihiru’s Atom Man? In Superman Smashes the Klan, Supes is rocking a version of his costume that looks very much like the Fleischer suit. The folks on Superman & Lois know exactly what they’re doing. One callback to the movie serial version? It seems that Henry Miller is bald and stocky, much like the very first screen Lex Luthor Lyle Talbot was in Atom Man vs. Superman. It’s like an Easter egg singularity!

Now FLY (do not walk) to your local comic shop to buy a copy of Superman Smashes the Klan which, in what will probably be my final mention of The Adventures of Superman radio show for tonight, is loosely based on a DIFFERENT adventure from the radio show. Anyway, it’s great and the best Superman story to hit comics in approximately a decade or so. Thank me later.

Morgan Edge, Tal-Rho, and Zeta-Rho

This episode continues and reinforces the “nature vs. nurture” debate around Morgan Edge that began last week. Here, the mirroring of his journey with Clark’s is made even more pronounced. Clark was given good guidance by Jonathan and Martha, and those lessons were only reinforced by Jor-El, while Tal-Rho just had those impulses amplified by Zeta-Rho in his desert fortress. Jor-El sent his only son to escape a dying planet in the hopes that he could help another one. Zeta-Rho sent his only son to revive a dying planet at the expense of a vibrant one.

The “headband” that Tal-Rho is using to insert himself into Superman’s memories (and Supes has a matching one) feels like a subtle nod to the fact that headbands were the height of Kryptonian fashion in the comics from the late 1940s until John Byrne’s reboot in 1986.

The apparently successful “turning” of Superman at the end of the episode had better be a red herring. This show has faked us out so many times in its final moments, I really can’t imagine they’re gonna do something as obvious as giving us an “evil Superman” for even one episode.

Other Cool Kryptonian Artifacts

When Clark returns to Smallville and tries to meet up with Lana, there are two films playing at the theater: one is an instalment in the Harry Potter franchise. The other is Friday Night Lights, the movie that inspired the TV show that has been a surprisingly strong influence on a lot of elements of Superman & Lois.

For the Smallville fans, there’s a “Teague’s” sporting goods store visible on the street, as well, possibly a nod to Jensen Ackles’ Jason Teague character from season four of that series.

Yes, Lois does indeed call John Henry Irons at the end of the episode. Steel is coming back!

Clark Kent is a Seinfeld fan! It’s canon! Why is this so significant? Jerry Seinfeld is a noted Superman fan, and on the famed TV show (the greatest TV comedy of the ’90s), there was a very visible Superman magnet on his refrigerator in many episodes. Wait…that causes reality problems that are going to make my brain hurt.

Was anyone able to catch the names of the books on Clark’s nightstand? They look like old sci-fi paperbacks, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

I didn’t spot any significant names in Clark’s yearbook, but I’m old and my eyes are going, so if you spotted anything, please let me know in the comments!

The post Superman & Lois Easter Eggs are a Love Letter to Every Era of DC History appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3hcrosr

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

1 note · View note

cwl190 · 3 years

Text

Week 4

Benjamin Percy’s “Designing Suspense”

“Start with reality. Come up with a moment when you really, really wanted something. Could be you wanted to land a job or could be you wanted to quit a job... Recall tha tmoment. Then inject it with a healthy dose of imagination. What is the worst-case scenario for this character?” (80-81)

“Some of my characters are on a quest, moving from point A to point B. But by flashing back and forth between the Sancturary and the journey west, I’m able to enhance suspense (by leaving the reader hanging with every chapter break) and to contrast the terrors and hopes of two very different worlds. The more tiem we spend in the Sancturary, the more we understand why the perilous escape from it is so necessary” (87).

TC Boyle’s “How Stories Say Goodbye”

“When the narrator says “It’s really something.” it tells us that he’s feeling deeply, but it doesn’t tell us what he’s feeling. That’s the beauty of the story: It’s up to us to know what he’s feeling” (298).

Talks a lot about your work flowing organically, not everything being structured

Ethan Canin’s “Rehearsals for Death”

“Endings are about emotion, and logic is emotion’s enemy. It’s the writer’s job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel” (305).

“The biggest problem for young literary writers, besides plot, is how to characterize: how to make a character seem like a real human being. One of the more subtle ways... is to have a character describe other people” (307).

“Writers tend to think that their own prose is the most compelling thing. You have to strangle that off, I think. Talk about killing your darlings. It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way. The less present you can be, the more you can be the character you’re trying to write about” (308).

“With characterization, you have to let go. You’ve got to release yourself from your grandiose intentions, your ambitions, your ideas about humanity, literature and philosophy by focusing on the being-another-person aspect of it- which, by the way, is freeing, delightful, and one of the few real joys of writing. Stop worrying about writing a great novel- just become another human being” (308).

“Whether or not a novel actually contains death, it’s often about the highlights of a life. Literature allows us to experience thousands of lives, to understand how we might want to live our own” (309).

DESIGNING SUSPENSE; Or, FLAMING CHAINSAWS:

The authors were able to keep those flaming chainsaws “dancing” through the momentum they managed to keep up throughout both of their novels. In “The Minature Wife”, things continue to escalate right after the climax of the story. We had just gotten over the fact that the wife had cheated on the narrator and the narrator had literally fed his co-worker to the birds. We aren’t given a pause or hope things will get better because the tension between the narrator and the wife overflows and she attacks him, kills the cat as well as gouges out one of his eyes.

The same thing occurs in “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, where the author hits us with a murder after a murder. The entire thing is veiled in confusion and unreliable narration until the tiger caves into his natural instincts and we are given a sense of violent euphoria from him as he tears into his final victim for the last time. We feel overwhelmed by sensory and emotional overload the same way the narrator is. It’s due to the fact that the narrator is a tiger that we are able to buy into his corruption.

HOW STORIES SAY GOODBYE:

When I read “The Infamous Bengal Ming”, I think the story was finished for me. At the start of the story the tiger seems to have a very idealistic sense of love, but by the end it’s devolved into something warped beyond our comprehension, something more sensory and without reason or limits. We know that the tiger will eventually get caught and things will most likely not end well for him, but his emotional arc is already finished. I didn’t feel the need to see anything more.

For the “Minature Wife”, I think I am still compelled to see what happens next. Does the wife end up killing the narrator? Is the narrator able to capture his wife? I also want to learn more about the shrinking machine, and the consequences that extend beyond the narrator’s own personal circumstances. However, I don’t think that’s the direction the author set out to do and I thought the blowout confrontation between them was satisfactionary enough.

REHEARSALS FOR DEATH:

I don’t believe that quote because there are several classics that have been praised to no end with super ambiguous endings. One of them that comes to mind is “The Giver”. We have no idea whether or not Jonas finds his way into the real world, heaven, or if the entire thing was a hallucination he created in order to help him cope with the deadly circumstances in which he escaped from. I think it depends on the story you want to tell. I agree with the idea that you should definitely feel something, but just because an abstract conclusion pushes you to think logically doesn’t mean you aren’t feeling something at all. If done right, you might leave confused, but with a drive to pick at the story. It might make you want to talk about it with other people who read the same book, or even revisit sections of the book to design your own interpretation of what happened.

This is partially applicable to “The Minature Wife” because we don’t know what happens to the narrator or his wife at the end and we have an even fainter idea of the lab the narrator works at, which means that even after they are done ripping each other to pieces we still have questions for the world the narrator lives in. becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way.

CONNECT THE DOTS:

“It’s not just about killing your good scenes, it’s about killing your instinct to try to impress with witticism and handsome phrasing- becoming, instead, a vessel for telepathy in a way” (Rehersals for Death, 308).

I think Orringer applies this piece of advice really well into her novel because in the section of the story where Ella goes to fetch her parents after burying Claire’s body, we are not given any insight into what Ella’s thinking at all. Orringer utilizes show not tell to the maximum here. We don’t get a window into Ella’s emotions because she is focusing on her present goals and senses. She needs to fetch her parents and leave that place immediately, and she’s probably in shock over what had just happened. We’re being fed that Ella is paranoid through what she sees, which is a portrait of someone who resembles who Ella had just saw die.

THE END:

Orringer’s story simultaneously invites me back in as well as makes me hope the story is finished because I want to know what happens while the family makes their escape, but also not because if they’re stopped from their escape I’ll be upset, and also because they’ll be held accountable for the death of Claire.

EMOTION v. LOGIC:

I was feeling a sense of unease and sadness throughout the novel because of how helpless it was. Ella and Benjamin have no control over what happens to them all throughout the novel and it just made me feel upset from them. The circumstances before they entered the house was very depressing because of their ill mother. I just felt uncomfortable when they moved into the new house because of how unnerving the adults were, the violence of the kids and the weird foods they were forced to eat. The story seemed to be setting itself up for Ella to evolve emotionally and appreciate this more “humbled” enviornment due to how she kept wanting to return to the past, but I didn’t even want that to happen to her because of how awful it seemed there. When Claire died it completely subverted my expectations, and honestly made me relieved because her family was able to bag it and run. It was still completely horrifying, I don’t understand the point of why they came there. If it was for treatment, the mom was better off going to a regular hospital.

HOW’S IT GOING?:

It’s okay. I really like the texts we were given. If it was something boring like American history, my entries would probably be halved. I wasn’t expecting Benjamin Perry’s “Thrill Me” to be so good, and honestly I’m glad I’ve been forced to read it because I don’t know if I would’ve been able to finish it if I couldn’t. There’s some super helpful advice there and some examples of suspense/horror/escalating that seem to be done well that I’m interested in checking out. I don’t know if I have that much faith in his recommendations though because he describes the horror of what happened to the professor in Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode”. It really intrigued me when I read it in the context of Perry’s book, but recently I was assigned to it in another class and I didn’t even recognize that gorey scene until it happened. While it seemed horrible in description, I didn’t feel much of the fear and disgust I think I should’ve. It just felt like it was being described to me but there was nothing to be scared of or dread.

#week 4 #weeks 1 through 4

0 notes

delicatelythoughtfulpatrol · 4 years

Text

How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended

A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

Story by Spencer Kornhaber

“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji. She titled one world tour “Hello Katy,” a nod to the Japanese cat character on gel pens worldwide. She made her voice-acting debut, in 2011, by playing Smurfette.

Perry’s music was cartoonish too: simple, silly, with lyrics stringing together caricature-like images of high-school parties, seductive aliens, and girls in Daisy Dukes with bikinis on top. Kids loved the stuff, and adults, bopping along at karaoke or Starbucks, enjoyed it too. (Maybe that’s because, like with so much classic Disney and Looney Tunes animation, the cuteness barely disguised a ton of raunch.) Teenage Dream generated five No. 1 singles in the United States—a feat previously accomplished only by Michael Jackson’s Bad—and it went platinum eight times.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuchsia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in. Ultra-hummable singers such as Halsey and Billie Eilish are still on the radio, but they cut their catchiness with a sad, sleepy edge. A light disco resurgence may be brewing—BTS just strutted to No. 1 on the American charts while capitalizing on it—but that doesn’t change the overall mood of the moment. Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream; almost nothing sounds as if Smurfette might sing it.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes. This type of pop prizes easily enjoyed melodies and sentiments; it moves but does not challenge the hips and the feet. It is omnivorous, and will spangle itself with elements of rock, rap, country, or whatever else it wants without losing its essential pop-ness.

The early-2010s strain of it seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2-D.

Pop has seemed to die and be reborn many times. When the 21st century arrived, the music industry was near the historical peak of its profitability—in part because of slick sing-alongs catering to teenagers and written by grown-up Swedes.

But over the first few years of the 2000s, CD sales crashed thanks to the internet, boy bands such as ’NSync began to splinter, and Britney Spears’s long-running confrontation with the paparazzi reached an ugly culmination.

Around the same time, women such as Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Ashlee Simpson, and Avril Lavigne began scoring hits inspired by mosh pits but more appropriate for malls. Gwen Stefani moved from rock-band frontwoman to dance-floor diva during this period as well. Such performers, though often assisted by the same producers and songwriters who helped mold Spears, flaunted unruly personalities to a reality-TV-guzzling public hungry for a kind of curated grit.

Katy Perry capped off this rock-pop boomlet. The California-born Katheryn Hudson had kicked around the music industry for years, first as a Christian singer—her parents were traveling evangelists—and then as an Alanis Morissette–worshipping songwriter.

She finally hit on a winning combo of sounds for One of the Boys, her delicious 2008 major-label debut, whose spiky rhythms, crunching guitars, sneering vocals, and juvenile gender politics earned her a spot on the Warped Tour, a punk institution. But the gooey, sassy hooks of “I Kissed a Girl,” “Waking Up in Vegas,” and “Hot n Cold” really made her a household name.

Some of those songs benefited from the touch of Max Martin and Dr. Luke, songwriters-slash-producers of 2000s pop legend. (In 2014, Kesha filed a lawsuit accusing Dr. Luke, her producer and manager, of rape and abuse; he denied her claims and eventually prevailed in a years-long, very-public court battle over Kesha’s record contract.)

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof.

Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry.

Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

The conceit of Teenage Dream’s title track—“you make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream”—really boils down pop’s appeal to its essence: indulging a preposterous rush while also reveling in its preposterousness. “It is Perry’s self-consciousness—her awareness of herself as a complete package—that makes her interesting,” went one line in an NPR rave about the album. Even skeptical reviewers gave credit to standout singles such as “California Gurls” and “Firework” for being effective earworms. Perry had laid out her intended sound by sending a mixtape of the Cardigans and ABBA to Dr. Luke, who was part of a production team that pushed for perfection.

“People on the management side and label side were pretty much telling me that we were done, before we had ‘Teenage Dream’ or ‘California Gurls,’” Luke told Billboard in 2010. “And I said, ‘No, we’re not done.’”

Such efforts ensured Teenage Dream’s incredible staying power on the charts through early 2012. The album’s deluxe reissue that year then generated a sixth No. 1 single, “Part of Me,” which also provided the title of a self-produced documentary that Perry released around the same time. Much of the footage showcases the stagecraft behind her 2011–12 world tour, a pageant of dancing gingerbread men and poofy pink clouds that would presage her hallucinatory 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. Perry comes off as charming and willful, and the film currently sits as the 11th-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. box-office history.

Yet the movie is best remembered today not for the way it shored up Perry’s shiny image, but for the way it complicated it. Over the course of the tour, Perry’s marriage to the comedian Russell Brand dissolved, and the cameras captured her sobbing just before getting on stage in São Paulo. It’s a wrenching, now-legendary scene. But elsewhere in the film, the viewer can’t help but experience cognitive dissonance as the singer’s personal dramas are synced up to concert footage of grin-inducing costumes and schoolyard sing-alongs. By hitching Teenage Dream’s whimsy to real-life struggle, the movie seemed to subvert exactly what had made the album successful: the feeling that Perry’s music was made to escape, not amplify, one’s problems.

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic Artpop, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales.

It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves.

Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough.

Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft.

The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers.

“When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are.

There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore.

Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”)

connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match.

This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B.

The current status of Dr. Luke, who has retreated from the public eye but still works with lesser-known talents and while using pseudonyms, seems telling too. He can’t land a hit with Kim Petras, a dance diva in the Katy Perry lineage. But he can land a hit with a rapper: He’s behind Doja Cat’s recent smash “Say So.”

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life.

Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive.

It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality.

0 notes

noddytheornithopod · 7 years

Note

Phineas & Ferb and Milo Murphy's Law?

Interesting, this should be fun.

Which has the better protagonist: Hmm, in terms of actual story structure I’m gonna say Milo Murphy’s Law. I might love Candace, Phineas, Ferb, Perry and Doofenshmirtz more and am more attached to them, but as I just indicated Phineas and Ferb is more of an ensemble cast so it’s harder to break down. Milo is already one of the strongest aspects of his show (and that’s not even taking into account how great Weird Al Yankovic is as him), and the fact that ultimately he is the protagonist does make this easier to answer. If I were to break it down into individual plots then I would definitely say Candace in PnF’s A-plot (or Phineas and Ferb if Candace is in her own C-plot, to which the same feeling applies) and Perry and Doof in the B-plot, but if we’re talking about whole shows then it’s easier to go with Milo because he’s the only real protagonist in the end.

Which has the better villain: Phineas and Ferb. Doofenshmirtz is one of my favourite characters in general, and the fact that his entire villainy is pretty much subverted in the end in that he’s not even really evil just makes that even more interesting. Even when you take into account that Doof isn’t even really evil in the end, I still choose PnF though. They might be one-off villains but characters like Second Dimension Doofenshmirtz, Mitch the alien, the Drill Sergeant from PnF Get Busted and if they count despite being a horde enemy the zombie pharmacists (ESPECIALLY) I still have found more memorable than what MML has offered. We do have recurring villains in the forms of the Pistachions, and King Pistachion himself is fun and they do have a very sinister plot, but I just don’t feel like they’ve really left a mark on me as much yet (even if the whole kidnapping humans and replacing them with themselves plot is pretty creepy). I guess I just find them a bit one-note for being major villains? That’s fine and all if you want to focus more on the protagonists, but it doesn’t necessarily get you villain points.

Which has the better plot: Depends on what you mean by “plot.” If we’re talking about an overarching plot and continuity then Milo Murphy’s Law wins by default because it is a more serialised show and as a result has a more solid continuity. If we’re talking about individual episode plots though, then I still have to pick Phineas and Ferb because “kid with stuff going wrong around him and sometimes there’s time travellers” is compelling enough, but “two brothers build and invent impossible things, their sister wants them busted while struggling with teen life and their pet platypus is a secret agent who fights a not-so-evil scientist, also all of these plots influence each other’s outcomes” is something else entirely.

Which has better cinematography: I’m not really sure to be honest, though if I had to pick I’d probably pick Phineas and Ferb. It being a storyboard driven show as opposed to MML being script driven probably helps a lot, and some of the visuals in later episodes (especially specials) are great.

Which one is more fun: Phineas and Ferb. Of course both shows can be really fun, but I’ve been with PnF for longer and it being more ridiculous in general as well as the characters being more interesting and offbeat to me really helps.

Which one makes me think the most: Phineas and Ferb by far. Maybe i’m biased since I’m Autistic and PnF is my main interest, but there’s just so much stuff out there to explore, and the characters truly fascinate me.

Which do I watch when I want to relax: I rarely go back and revisit shows more than once because I’m lazy, but in general I find Phineas and Ferb to be more that kind of show, even if in my case it’s more images/GIFs and fanart. :P

Which do I watch when I want it to consume me: Phineas and Ferb. Despite Milo being more serialised, I find it easier to watch single episodes of. With Phineas and Ferb, I end up getting so obsessed with even minor details that I need to watch everything to pick it all up.

Which is my favorite: If it wasn’t obvious, Phineas and Ferb. I don’t think it’s going to be replaced anytime soon, because it really was for me a case of the right show for me showing up at the right place at the right time. My affection for the show has had years to develop, and the characters in the show are not some of my favourites out of anything I’ve consumed, but actually for the first time gave me ones I felt I could truly care about and connect with. Milo is already pretty good of course and definitely has a stronger start than PnF and arguably potential to be even better, but combined with sentimental value and the fact that it seems to be aware that it’s going to always live in the shadow of its predecessor (I mean, they wrote the first season KNOWING they were going to end up in a PnF crossover), I do have to say PnF is definitely the better show.

#ask #meme #Phineas and Ferb #milo murphy's law

19 notes · View notes

kidsviral-blog · 6 years

Text

Fireworks And Brimstone: The Personal God Of Katy Perry

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/fireworks-and-brimstone-the-personal-god-of-katy-perry/

Fireworks And Brimstone: The Personal God Of Katy Perry

The pop star’s Pentecostalism asserts that God plays an intimate role in every decision she makes, no matter how large or small.

View this image ›

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

What Katy Perry prays for, Katy Perry gets. She was just 11 when she asked God for “boobs so big that I can’t see my feet when I’m lying down.” It was the kind of prayer no one would expect God to take seriously, but Perry hails from a religious background that believes in a God who is eager to answer anyone’s prayers, no matter how small (or, ahem, big), as a way of proving His existence.

It’s the same God Perry prayed to on Feb. 1, when, as a fully grown pop superstar at the height of her career, she performed during halftime of the Super Bowl for an audience of 114 million. “I was praying and I got a word from God and He says, â€˜You got this and I got you,'” Perry told Ryan Seacrest days later on the red carpet at the Grammy Awards.

When Perry talks about her relationship with God, it always sounds both personal and somehow refreshing. No other pop star talks about God so regularly and sounds so candid doing it. “I do not believe God is an old guy sitting on a throne with a long beard,” she once told GQ, and it shows. Her God is deeply interested in the details of her personal life, from her Super Bowl performance to her relationships to her cup size.

It’s not strange for someone raised in the Pentecostal church — someone who once said, “Speaking in tongues is as normal to me as â€˜pass the salt'” — to feel like her success is the direct result of, and always dependent on, prayer. Her God is deeply invested in individual flourishing and prosperity. And a spirit as colorful as Perry’s would, in some ways, be a natural fit for Pentecostalism, which, with its emphasis on speaking in tongues and boldness in prayer, is one of the more fantastical forms of Christianity.

Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

Jason Merritt / Getty

It’s not what good girls do/ Not how they should behave/ My head gets so confused/ Hard to obey –Katy Perry, “I Kissed a Girl”

When “I Kissed a Girl” came out, I was just out of college — a small, Christian liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, Perry’s hometown. I went to a lot of weddings that year (There are a rash of weddings immediately after every Christian college graduation.) We had just graduated from a school that proscribed same-sex relationships, but everyone, young and old alike, was singing along on the dance floor: “It felt so wrong/ It felt so right/ Don’t mean I’m in love tonight.” Such was the broad appeal of Katy Perry.

She’s the closest thing we’ve got to a human emoticon — a totally lovable, expressive, candy-colored wink to pop culture. A word you keep coming across when reading about Perry is “cartoonish.” And cartoonish works for her image, but what it doesn’t do is tell us much about the person underneath the persona. “I have always been this character,” she told Glamour in 2010, “but I kind of cartoon-ized myself a little bit [in my stage persona]. So when someone really likes me, it’s like [she mimes opening a curtain] here comes a person! I wonder if you can handle this.”

Born Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson (she changed her last name to avoid being confused with the actress Kate Hudson) in Santa Barbara, California, in 1984, Perry’s childhood was tumultuous. Her parents, Keith and Mary Hudson, were Pentecostal preachers who moved wherever they felt the Holy Spirit call them, eventually settling back into Santa Barbara, where they founded the now-defunct Oasis Christian Center. “We were traveling all the time,” Angela Hudson, Katy’s older sister, said in the 2012 documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me. A traveling pastor’s salary — even doubled — isn’t much to survive on, so Perry’s family would occasionally eat from the food bank their church stocked. Katy, Angela, and their younger brother, David, weren’t allowed to eat Lucky Charms (“Luck” was too reminiscent of “Lucifer”) and had to call deviled eggs “angel eggs.”

It would be another 10 years before Keith Hudson would call his daughter a “devil child” in a sermon, and those 10 years held a world of change.

Katy Perry, like most of us, contains multitudes. The year she turned 16, she lost her virginity in Nashville in the front seat of a Volvo. The same year, she released Katy Hudson, an album of contemporary Christian music with songs like “My Own Monster” and lyrics like “Where can I go where can I hide from these evil sufferings?/ Oh these images painted on my walls/ They say there’s a place that I can hide in the shadow of your wings/ Oh Lord, bring me to this place of refuge.”

It’s precisely this tension between pastor’s daughter and good girl gone bad that makes Perry so intriguing — and, at first blush, cartoonish. But there’s a lot more under the surface, both to her appeal and to her life. “People love the story of good girl gone bad,” she said in Part of Me, “and they think my parents have disowned me, but that’s not the story at all.”

Keith and Mary Hudson have lived lives that evangelical Christians love to hear about, of the “I once was lost but now I’m found” variety. He played tambourine with Sly & the Family Stone and took LSD; she danced with Jimi Hendrix and got married in Zimbabwe, but was divorced before she met Keith. They became Christians and planted churches together across America while their children were young, preaching to new crowds on a weekly basis. There is a moment in Part of Me when we see Keith Hudson in front of a group of people in a small church with an eagle emblem on the wall behind him and, above it, the phrase “DECLARE HIS WORD IN ACTION.” He owns the room, as charismatic preachers do.

View this image ›

Amazon

A hallmark of the charismatic church is the belief in an active, intimately involved God. Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote a book about the American evangelical relationship with God, When God Talks Back. “Over the last few decades,” she writes, “this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God; a God who not only cares about your welfare, but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table.” This upbringing has undoubtedly influenced Perry as it has so many of the faithful; to them, God isn’t a distant grandfather type but an omnipotent being who has an opinion about every possible decision they have to make, no matter how small.

When Perry talks about praying before her Super Bowl performance, she is talking about (and to) this kind of God. The charismatic God “really is unconditionally loving,” says Luhrmann over the phone from her home. He’s “a loving God and a buddy God…people do this back and forth when they’re talking to God, the way two young girls talk to each other. They’re sharing everything.”

Another observation Luhrmann makes is how much some charismatic worship songs “are almost sexual, with a touch so light that the suggestion could slip past.” She cites the song “Dwell,” which includes a line, addressed to God, in which the supplicants ask the man upstairs to “Come and have your way.” Perry subverts images and practices in this way — from religious to sexual — on her song “Spiritual,” from Prism: “Lay me down at your altar, baby/ I’m a slave to this love/ Your electric lips have got me speaking in tongues.”

Perry regularly incorporates her religious background into her public persona, whether she’s performing or on the red carpet or writing song lyrics. Rather than run from questions of faith, she embraces them in the same way she responds to queries about her family — with nuance. Her songs often point to what evangelicals would call “a hunger for something more,” whether it be the deep questioning from “Lost” (“So if I pray, am I just sending words into outer space?”), the Biblical reference in “Who Am I Living For?” (“So I pray for a favor like Esther/ I need your strength to handle the pressure”), or the sexual overtones of “Spiritual” (“Lost in sweet ecstasy/ Found a nirvana finally”). She has managed to integrate prayer and meditation, speaking in tongues and singing to arenas, support for LGBT rights and an open line to a personal God.

giphy.com

One of the most affecting things about Katy Perry — something that is easy to overlook at first glance, but impossible to ignore as you spend time learning about her — is her vulnerability. I suspect it’s part of what makes her music so moving to her devoted fans, and it’s also what lets her get away with her cartoonish persona. Perry performed a medley of hit songs at the Super Bowl halftime show, complete with dancing sharks and costume changes, and turned around a week later and sang about overcoming suicidal thoughts at the Grammys in a relatively minimalistic performance. In that song, “By the Grace of God,” Perry recalls her frame of mind just after then-husband Russell Brand left her: “By the grace of God (there was no other way)/ I picked myself back up (I knew I had to stay)/ And put one foot in front of the other/ And I looked in the mirror and decided to stay.”

It’s a far cry from Katy Hudson’s Christian music album, which was written with about as much vulnerability as a phone book. But there’s something human in the fact that it’s taken some time for Perry to bare her inner life to the public. It’s a scary thing to write about one’s fragile mental state; scarier even than singing about kissing girls. (Although that proved difficult for Perry, too, who asked her sister to tell their parents that “I Kissed a Girl” was going to be her first single.)

The charismatic church presents a friendly God because it is concerned primarily that people might not know God at all, that they might be put off by an angry God. Where other denominations, like the Southern Baptists, are most focused on making sure people aren’t heretics, the charismatic church, to put it crudely, wants to make sure that people believe. That is both a cause and result of their conception of God as unconditionally loving, and unconditional love is a prominent theme in Perry’s music. Her song “Unconditionally” was written for John Mayer after their first breakup.

To talk about your own need for unconditional love — and your willingness to love unconditionally — is this really vulnerable thing. It’s rooted, for Perry, in this idea that God is all-loving and very close, not judging you but ready to hear whatever is on your heart, even when what’s on your heart is only pain. There was a scene in Part of Me where Katy, hours before a sold-out performance, is sobbing alone in a chair. Her marriage has started to fall apart, but she hasn’t told anyone in her inner circle. They fret about her, ask her if she wants to cancel, offer her water and a washcloth. Like many of us, she doesn’t really know what she needs.

In March 2013, Mary Hudson published an article on Charisma magazine’s website titled “How to Pray for your Prodigal.” Aside from an author bio at the beginning, Hudson never name-checks her famous daughter. “Satan’s assault on our youth is relentless,” she writes, and makes mention of the evils found in “movies, television, music and the Internet.” But, in a kind of unexpected and sweet aside, she also encourages parents not to hound their unbelieving or wayward children: “The people around you, including your child or unsaved relative, are not the ones who need to hear your prayers. Only God needs to hear them.”

“You just love her,” Perry’s mother says in Part of Me. “No matter what she was doing or what she was singing about, she’s just a blessing.”

Though public perception of Perry’s faith has led some to view her like an alien who has successfully adopted the form of a human being — “How did a fire-and-brimstone-preacher’s daughter become America’s sexiest pop star?” Rolling Stone asked — her life and lyrics point to an answer: “With help from my buddy God.”

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/lauraturner/katy-perry-god

#Katy Perry

0 notes

viralhottopics · 7 years

Text

‘Riverdale’ recap: ‘Twin Peaks’ meets ‘Gossip Girl’ in The CW’s scandalous Archie adaptation

We’re not mad at it.

Image: Dean Buscher/The CW

This recap contains spoilers for Riverdale Season 1, episode 1, titled “The River’s Edge.”

“Our story is about a town, a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world: safe, decent, innocent. Get closer though, and you start seeing the shadows underneath. The name of our town is Riverdale. And our story begins, I guess, with what the Blossom twins did this summer “

Riverdale, The CW’s live-action Archie comics drama, aims to subvert any and all assumptions you have about Archie Andrews (KJ Apa) and his friends from over 75 years of comic books.

This isn’t your grandparents’ Archie this dark, scandalous tale, equal parts Twin Peaks and Gossip Girl, is a lot more like recent iterations of Archie comic book stories, rather than the rosy-cheeked, aw-shucks gang that first debuted in digests back in 1941.

SEE ALSO: ‘Riverdale’ reinvents Archie with a ‘Twin Peaks’ twist, and we dare you not to love it

Narrating the whole saga for us in live-action is the moody, sardonic voice of Jughead Jones (Cole Sprouse), hardly seen in the series premiere but always heard as he tries to make sense of the town’s biggest scandal.

Just after dawn on the 4th of July, the Blossom twins, Jason (Trevor Stines) and Cheryl (Madelaine Petsch), went for a boat ride, and later that day Cheryl was found soaked and alone on the river’s edge and Jason was gone. Cheryl’s story was that their boat capsized and Jason never surfaced, so their parents buried an empty casket and his death was ruled an accident. His body was never found until the first week of the new school year, opening up an official murder investigation where everyone is a potential suspect, even his twin sister who creepily refers to her brother as her “soul mate.” Is Riverdale really going there with twin-cest and twin-tracide right out of the gate?

But we’ll get to that later. First, let’s meet the newest incarnations of the Archie gang and dig into all the secrets that the town of Riverdale is hiding.

New girl Veronica Lodge rolls into town fresh off her father’s incarceration for fraud and embezzlement. Her mother Hermione (Marisol Nichols) claims their apartment is the only piece of property in her name and not her corrupt husband’s, but after getting a duffel bag full of money anonymously delivered by their doorman Smithers (Tom McBeath), it’s clear there is more going on than Veronica realizes.

Camila Mendes as Veronica Lodge

Image: Diyah Pera/THE CW

The most interesting thing to note about The CW’s version of the bratty, elitist rich girl from the comics is that Mendes has been given the green light to fully humanize Veronica. Where she was once evil and manipulative in the comics, now she’s empathetic.

She’s not perfect, of course, and still makes some mistakes mostly where her new crush “Archiekins” is concerned but she’s committed to becoming a better person after realizing that she was basically a spoiled, entitled rich bitch before father’s arrest. She’s using her move to Riverdale as a fresh start, an opportunity to become the best version of herself. Finally, Veronica is a relatable character.

Meanwhile, classic girl-next-door Betty Cooper (Lili Reinhart) is hiding more than enough secrets of her own. Where Veronica is now a flawed hero in her own right one who’s even committed to helping Betty realize her full potential Betty has enough baggage and emotional damage to employ a therapist full-time… but she would never admit to that.

Her overbearing mother, already burdening her with the stress of college applications even though Betty is only a sophomore, pushes her into Adderall abuse, and the whole family is seemingly haunted by the mysterious events surrounding Betty’s older sister, who’s currently living in a group home after her relationship with Jason Blossom prompted a nervous breakdown of some kind, apparently “ruining” her.

But Betty desperately pushes all those issues down to maintain the perfect facade of well, perfection. Helping distract her from all the cracks starting to show in her psyche is her crush on her BFF Archie, whom she hasn’t seen all summer. Encouraged by her gay best friend (and the first openly gay character in the Archie universe) Kevin Keller (Casey Cott), Betty decides to finally tell Archie how she feels especially since, in the wise words of Kevin, “Archie got hot. He’s got abs now!”

Lili Reinhart as Betty Cooper

Image: Katie Yu/The CW

Did you really expect anything less from The CW’s live-action Archie? Yes, working for his father Fred (Luke Perry) all summer in construction had worked wonders on the redheaded teen. Not only had he developed jaw-dropping muscle definition, the physical busywork gave him a lot of time alone with his thoughts, helping him realize how passionate he is about composing music.

When he divulges his new secret to Betty, she practically turns into the heart-eyes emoji. Hot, sweet and gifted with a knack for catchy pop ballads? He’s the total package. But right as she’s pouring her heart out to her best-friend-turned-potential-soulmate, Veronica walks into Pop’s Chock-lit Shoppe, and by the look on his face, it’s clear that the classic Archie/Betty/Veronica love triangle is born.

But as has been repeatedly emphasized, this is not your classic Archie. He’s also harboring quite a scandalous secret more so than contemplating quitting football or telling his father that he wants to forgo inheriting his father’s construction company for a career in music: he’s been engaging in an illicit teacher/student relationship with the now young and hot Ms. Grundy (Sarah Habel) all summer long.

No one knows about their affair, but that all could change as Archie struggles with whether or not come forward about what he heard on the morning of the 4th of July. He and Ms. Grundy were getting in some, ahem, “alone time” at the river’s edge when they both heard a gunshot.

Not knowing back then that Jason Blossom would turn up dead, they tried to forget what they heard, knowing they couldn’t come forward or else Grundy would get in major trouble but with the discovery of Jason’s body with a bullet hole in his forehead, there’s no way Archie can keep quiet about the mysterious gunshot.

Grundy does her best to convince Archie not to come forward, but this is Archie we’re talking about as girl-crazy and dumb as this iconic teenage boy can be, he’s still a good person who always tries to do the right thing, especially with his father teaching him the value of honesty. There is an expiration date on both of their secrets, and the only question is when will it all get exposed?

SEE ALSO: 9 shows to get excited about in 2017

Betty and Veronica, oblivious to Archie’s tawdry affair with Grundy, convince Archie to join them on a trio group friend date to the back-to-school semi-formal dance, and Betty finally does get to confess her feelings to Archie. He doesn’t respond to her at first, and at Cheryl’s after-party he’s “forced” to spend seven minutes in heaven with Veronica.

Of course, they can’t deny their attraction: Archie and Veronica kiss, and he realizes he doesn’t feel the same way about Betty that she does about him. He tries to let her down easy later that night, telling her that she is so perfect that he’s not good enough for her, which, in typical boy fashion, he doesn’t realize is the exact wrong thing to say. Betty’s far from perfect, but she hides it so well from those closest to her, and now that’s costing her the one thing she wants most: Archie.

A shining beacon of light in the dark town is the empowered, confident and strong Josie McCoy (Ashleigh Murray) and her Pussycats. With record-ready voices and attitude to back up their talent, the Pussycats know they’re bound for stardom despite being trapped in their small town.

Ashleigh Murray as Josie McCoy

Image: Katie Yu/The CW

When Archie approaches Josie with songs he wrote, hoping to learn from her musical expertise and hopefully to convince the Pussycats to perform them, she shuts him down immediately, letting him know they’re all about building their brand and telling their own story with songs they write. And thus begins the iconic rivalry between Josie and Archie and their musical aspirations.

Other noteworthy moments:

-Jughead’s narration is revealed at the very end of the premiere to be the basis of a novel about all the events of the summer, starting with Jason’s death. Also interesting to note is that he and Archie are ex-best friends, which seems almost blasphemous to Archie fans but is extremely compelling to watch onscreen. Apparently, Archie did something to Jughead and never talked to him about it, ruining their relationship. Instead of letting him destroy another relationship, Jughead helps Archie realize in a tense conversation at Pop’s that he needs to talk to Betty to save their friendship, lest they end up as strained as Archie and Jughead.

-Hermione and Fred dated in high school. It’s going to be pretty awkward when Veronica and Archie find out their parents got hot and heavy after the teens shared a steamy make out sesh.

-Another steamy make out comes courtesy of Veronica helping Betty put Cheryl in her place during River Vixen cheerleading tryouts. Cheryl tries to shame Betty’s goody-two-shoes exterior for lacking “heat” and “sizzle,” so Veronica ends her tirade by kissing Betty in front of the whole squad. Veronica helps both of them make the team, but as a downside, they now have to put up with Cheryl on a daily basis.

Madelaine Petsch as Cheryl Blossom

Image: Dean Buscher/The CW

But when Cheryl tries to goad Betty into finally letting her feelings out, all it does is cause Betty to ball her fists so hard she makes herself bleed before once again swallowing her anger and emotions to maintain that good girl image. The troubled teen is already at her breaking point, and it’s clear she’ll go to any lengths necessary to keep maintain her illusion of control.

-Moose is gay! Well, closeted, but he definitely propositions Kevin in the bathroom for a little heavy petting that escalates into a late-night meet-up down at Sweetwater River. Unfortunately, their secret hookup comes to a screeching halt when they discover Jason Blossom’s dead body floating at the water’s edge, with a clear bullet hole in his forehead, marking the beginning of the series’ big murder mystery.

-Archie ends up making a deal with Grundy: he won’t come forward about July 4th, essentially keeping her safe from anyone discovering their affair, but only if she helps mentor him with his music. She agrees, under the impression that they’ll keep things strictly professional, but that’s clearly not going to happen. At least for now, he can juggle music lessons before school, football practice after school and working for his dad on weekends, so it’s not like he has to choose any particular path yet.

-Jason’s autopsy will be performed on Monday, and by Tuesday the first arrest will be made. The first, but certainly not the last.

Riverdale airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

BONUS: The differences you may not have noticed between the Scott Pilgrim film and comic books