#she has several other quotable lines

[tardxsblues]

CLARA OSWALD IN SERIES 8

Don't you dare lot me in with the rest of all the little humans that you think are so tiny and silly and predictable. You walk our Earth, Doctor. You breath our air. You make us your friend, and that is your moon too, and you can damn well help us when we need it.

#happy pride to clara oswald #she has several other quotable lines #but the kill the moon one always gets me #doctor who #dwedit #dwgifs #timelordgifs #moffatedit #clara oswald #dws8 #jenna coleman #tvedit #gifwarning #some of these turned out so good i could kiss myself #and some of them make me want to commit arson

[meret118]

In 1976, when prolific writer, activist and self-described Black lesbian mother warrior poet Audre Lorde published her seminal poetry collection, Coal, the world wide web was still 17 years away from becoming a public-facing invention, and the platform of podcasting hadn’t even been dreamt up yet. The volume established her as a champion for women, Blackness, queerness and equity in the explosive 1970s Black Arts Movement—other works to come, like Sister Outsider, positioned Lorde as a justice-demanding mouthpiece for people who’d been shoved into the crosshairs of marginalization.

She was highly quotable and, in recent years as discussions about mental health and the prioritization of personal peace have become more frequent and fervent, one of her most notable lines of writing has become its own celebrity: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” From that sentence, knit into the reflective context of A Burst of Light, Lorde’s award-winning contemplation on the healthcare system and the cancer that had invaded her body, the concept of “self-care” was popularized and made real.

“We noticed that in the public discourse, particularly in media and social media, there are several Black feminist terms, ideas and practices floating around,” says Klingenberg, a curator of Black music and entertainment in the museum’s division of cultural and community life, in an interview after the series debuted earlier this year. “But they’re always disconnected from the Black feminist thinkers who created them, the context in which they were created, and in some instances, from the very meaning that the original creators were thinking of when they created them.”

Like many terms that originate in the canon of Black art and thought, self-care has been swallowed into a vortex of mainstream overuse and lack of attribution.

. . .

In 1977, the women of the Combahee River Collective released a groundbreaking statement “defining and clarifying” the politics of Black feminism. It was also arguably the first time that the phrase “identity politics” would appear, and Smith is credited with coining the term.“We were not saying that we were superior to any other groups of oppressed people,” says Smith in the podcast. “We were not being a vanguard. We did not think that we were the only people on Earth who were oppressed. We just wanted to assert that unlike the women’s movement and unlike the Black liberation movement at that time, that there was a particular set of situations, circumstances and experiences and oppressions that Black women experienced, and that we needed to deal with those. And that’s what we meant by identity politics.”

More at the link, including the podcasts.

#Feminism #Black #Poc

[perlukafarinn]

This has been done a million times before and no one asked but I decided to rank the songs from Nerdy Prudes Must Die.

Let's go Nighthawks!

15. Cool As I Think I Am

I actually do love this song but when I listen to the full album, it’s one of only two songs I sometimes skip. The sound of it is very sweet, just like Pete, and it’s a great song to establish his character and his conflict in stepping outside his set social role (also props for originating the “I’m not a loser” refrain that repeats several times throughout the show to great effect). It’s just maybe not as exciting as the rest of the songs on the list.

14. Bully the Bully

Very catchy and fun, and the “cool beans” verse holds a special place in my heart (as do Grace’s little spins). Half the fun of it are the (very cute) dance moves which makes this song a little less effective when just listening to it. I love the guitar riffs and hearing all the nerds teaming up and happy for the only scene in the entire show.

13. Bury the Bully

I don’t usually prefer the shorter reprise but this song is too unhinged for me not to love it. Some highlights: Grace’s immediate acceptance of the situation and detailed knowledge in disposing of a body (and the casual “how else he gonna fit?” like she’s not suggesting something absolutely psychotic), “oh god, she’s snapping again”, Ruth coming around faster than the rest of the nerds because she’s apparently only slightly less unhinged than Grace, the discordant slamming on the piano keys after every “hack all his limbs off”.

12. Dirty Dudes Must Die

Would be much higher if only it were longer. This was the heel-face turn I was waiting for and Angela absolutely kills it, the deranged energy is off the charts. Grace singing “who will pray for you” and pointing at the audience gives me chills as does that final “run”. It feels like another story is just beginning.

11. Go Go Nighthawks!

I love all the sounds in this song - the beats that sound like lockers closing, the school band drums and trumpets, the jocks grunting and the “caw caws” from the cheerleaders. They add so much and convey such a strong sense of the setting, a must for a show that doesn’t really have any sets lmao. Also, fuck Clivesdale!

10. The Best of You

This song is just super cute and it makes me happy to listen to - Lautski own my entire heart, I can’t help it. Many have pointed out the Disney channel sound of it but it also reminds me a lot like those mid 2000s pop punk British boybands (think McFly and Busted) and I think that was deliberate with the British accent Joey and Mariah put on a couple of the lines. Anyway, I love how overwhelmingly bright and happy this song sounds, because it almost rounds back to sinister as you just know this can’t be the end of the show - we don’t get endings this happy in Hatchetfield!

9. Just For Once

This is the other song I sometimes skip but only because it’s five minutes long and such a character piece that I’m not always in the mood for it. Lauren blows me away with her ability to perform in character. That switch from Ruth’s amateur acting in the verses to the more sincere chorus is so beautiful. And that ending, oof. “I used to dance”, gets me every time.

8. Hatchet Town

I love a good mob song and this is an all time favorite for me. The Hatchetverse has been successful in establishing a multitude of interesting side characters that make the world feel lived in and that really pays off here; the song works if you don’t know most of the characters but it’s so much better if you do. 

This is the first scene in the show that expands the story outside the school and the characters there, and it makes the danger feel all the more pressing, especially with how frantic and sinister it sounds. It’s also endlessly quotable; in a way, aren’t we all Dan Reynolds (with Action News, weekdays at 10 PM)?

7. Dirty Girl

Seems like I’m a much bigger fan of this song than many but I could never resist a musical theater song about sex. I love how weird and gross this song is while also containing some masterful lyrics. I love this bizarre look at sex through Grace’s warped, sheltered worldview. Most of all, I love that this is the first time we hear the line “will you pray for me” in the show and every time it appears after it’s in a wildly different context.

6. Cool As I Think I Am (Reprise) 

This song makes me cry and I’m not afraid to admit it. It's the way Pete starts the song being so brave and so gentle as he convinces Steph to make an impossible choice, how they come together in the middle of it, finally completely honest with each other about their feelings, and how at the end the song slows as they’re both overwhelmed by the tragedy of the situation. “I’d have to let you go” let me go curl up and cry for a week, maybe.

5. High School Is Killing Me

A killer intro (heh). This is how you set the mood for a show! The slow start with Richie and Ruth is perfect and then the beat kicks in and I ascend to a higher level. A really strong aspect of the songs in this show are the harmonies and we get some incredible ones here - they sound so good together. This may also be the catchiest song on the soundtrack.

4. The Summoning

Oh my god this song!! First the intro with the chant, the trio’s bright voices underscored by the creepy whispers in the background, and then the descent into immediate chaos as soon as the Lords enter. I guess this is more of a “theatrical” song in that it’s not really something you listen to out of context of the musical but it works so incredibly well in context. Hearing all five of the lords together and taunting our protagonists is so insanely good. And I love how this song works musically, too, with the guitars and drums in the louder parts almost battling it out with the piano in the slower parts. Jeff Blim really popped off with this one.

3. Literal Monster

God, the foreboding atmosphere in this song is unmatched. The incredible build-up to our antagonist, managing to make a believable threat out of a cliched high school bully. Kim Whalen belting “He roars, and we cry” lives rent free in my mind. And then Will Branner shows up and lives up to every single expectation instantly. 

2. Nerdy Prudes Must Die

Extremely basic opinion to think this song is great (the real unpopular take might be that it’s only number two) but what do you want me to say? That the similarities to the Halloween theme don’t make me wanna clap my hands with glee? That the music and lyrics don’t both absolutely slap? (“Will you pray for me” I will give you my entire life actually) That Jon Matteson belting “I’m not a loser” might not be the single greatest moment in the entire show? This is why they invented musical theater. I will take no further questions.

1. If I Loved You

Look I am Lautski trash, I will fully admit that, but this song is also just a bop. It’s the most fun song in the show to sing along to, by a mile. It is young, stubborn love boiled down to its most entertaining bits. It is two people almost coming together but missing each other by a hair and that hair is having too much pride to be the first to admit you’ve got a crush. This song has drama, it has fun, it has two characters vehemently denying their feelings for each other while insisting the other only deserves the best. “Don’t need a lover boy, need a lover man” marry me, Mariah Rose. How about that? Also, Joey Richter’s improvement as a singer has been severely underappreciated and this song shows his voice off perfectly. 

I am ranting but that’s because I cannot coherently express how much I love this song. In a soundtrack filled with nothing but hits, this one hits me right in the heart. 

#nerdy prudes must die #npmd #starkid #found this in my google docs #i wrote it like two months ago and i don't remember why i didn't post it then #i'm not 100% sure i still fuck with this ranking but it's close enough that i don't feel like changing it

[kingwithpaintedfingers]

As promised!! My recommendations for Warhammer 40k reading

So, rayshell22live asked me what I thought GW was doing wrong vis a vis Warhammer 40k, and I responded with a rant about Black Library instead.

Oops. (Listen, a lot of this is pent up...)

But! I promised (myself) I would list my favorite stuff I've read from Warhammer 40k. For ease of access, I have divided it into several categories.

XENOS

There are not enough stories about Xenos. And apparently a lot of them aren't good. But here are a couple I read and liked!

The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath: Everyone recommends this, and for good reason. Fun, sometimes lighthearted, sometimes deep, it's the story of two old robots who hate each other but are forced to work together. It's a tale of two opposing forces, the past and the future, and what they both could mean for the present of the Necron race. Come for the dinosaurs and enemies-to-friends, stay for the old man fights and pranks gone horribly wrong.

War in the Museum by Robert Rath: Basically a deleted scene from The Infinite and the Divine. A short story.

Brutal Kunnin' by Mike Brooks: Orks vs. Tech Priests. Turned out to have way more humans than I would have liked, but still fun! Includes some hell-yeah moments and very quotable lines AND includes TWO non-binary characters! Very nice. Introduces two heroes for the ages: Ufthak Blackhawk, and his squig. The best squig.

Road Rage and Where Dere's Da Warp Dere's a Way by Mike Brooks: More Ufthak shenanigans! Both short stories.

Da Gobbo's Revenge by Mike Brooks: A Grot, tired of being abused by Orks, takes up the role of the ancient Grot hero Da Red Gobbo and begins a revolution. A novella, not long but fun.

The Hand of Darkness by Gav Thorpe: A lovely audio drama about Yvraine, the last hope of the Aeldari, on a mad quest to deprive Chaos of a dangerous asset. (Or, when I want to pretend to be bitter, "Rob's Not Actually Girlfriend (Seriously, She's Just An Ally) Breaks Into Mort's Basement and Ruins the Only Piece of Art He's Ever Made" It is a fantastically emo piece of art, I can't believe I've never referenced it in a fanfic before.) It's a good audio drama, I like it!

The Child Foretold by Nicholas Kaufmann: This one. This one is so. So freaking. GOOD. I just. It's so good??? A man adopts a baby. He has no idea what he's gotten himself into. Warning, it's also from Warhammer Horror.

And, recommended by friends, though I haven't read them yet:

The Twice-Dead King by Nate Crowley: A series of novels about a Necron phaeron trying to save his dynasty. Supposed to be really good, if less humorous than The Infinite and the Divine.

Day of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Supposed to be a really good sci-fi novel all around, it tells the tale of a genestealer uprising.

THE CIAPHAS CAIN SERIES by Sandy Mitchell

Listen, you're either going to love this series, or you're going to hate it. Most people can get over the stylistic choices (seriously, there are a lot of phrases that are repeated over and over and over and over and over again by the author), but others find those phrases grating after a while. Give the series a try (personally I think the series gets really good with the second and third books) and decide for yourself. If you like it, you're in good company, and if you don't, that's okay, you're still in good company. Personal highlights for me include The Traitor's Hand, Death or Glory, Cain's Last Stand, the audio drama Dead in the Water, and the novella Good Soldiers Never Die.

BOOKS THAT MENTION MORTARION

There is probably at least one person out there who wants to know what books I recommend for the way I write him. So I included this in its own section.

The Buried Dagger by James Swallow: my first Horus Heresy novel, and the last one before the Siege. Aka "Oh Fuck, We Forgot to Give Mortarion an Actual Personality and Now He Needs to Do Some Emotional Heavy Lifting." And let me just say, Swallow knocks it out the fucking park on this one. I cried. Then I found out he's not written like this in almost ANY other story, even ones by James Swallow, and I cried even more. Do yourself a favor, pick up the audio book, because the way Jonathon Keebler says "I know" in Interval Two is heartbreaking.

"Lantern's Light" by James Swallow: A lot of BL books have what I like to call a "companion short story" that goes with it. This is the one for Mortarion's half of The Buried Dagger. It elaborates Mort's relationship with the Emperor and why it's so bad (hint: it has nothing to do with the Emperor killing his adopted dad).

Unification by Chris Wraight: One of Mortarion's sons reflects on why he follows Mortarion into battle. A companion short story to The Lords of Silence (see below).

Mortarion Pale King of Barbarus and Verdict of the Scythe by David Annandale: While I wish they had gone more in-depth with his character, they both provide us with some intriguing details into how Mortarion wages war in the Great Crusade, and why he does it in the way he does. As well as what his brothers think of him, and how that weighs on him and his actions (a lot more than he's willing to admit).

The above are really good for Mortarion as his own character, and the tragic protagonist of his own story.

Scars, the Path of Heaven, and Warhawk by Chris Wraight: Whereas these stories are good at depicting Mortarion as his own villainous character. Most stories twist and turn Mortarion's personality to depict him as the Jungian shadow of whatever character is the protagonist of this series. Not so the Jaghatai Khan trilogy. Here he is still (mostly) recognizable as the same character as the Buried Dagger's Mortarion, but now he's a villain. Kind of. He's not the main villain of the first two books, but he kind of is for the third one? He doesn't show up often, but it's interesting when he does.

Daemonology by Chris Wraight: There's only one paragraph from his perspective, and it's the last paragraph of the story. Regardless, it provides us with a rare look at how people weaker than Mortarion who aren't on his good side see him. And it shows us that, like the witches and sorcerers he hates, Mortarion has more brains than sense.

Honorable mentions:

Grandfather's Gift by Guy Haley, because Mortarion enjoys a garden in it and it mentions how much pain Mortarion's transformation is (also, he's mostly naked for most of it, make of that what you will). Flight of the Eisenstein by James Swallow has one or two good scenes with Mortarion, but he's barely in it.

HORUS HERESY AND PRIMARCHS

Saturnine by Dan Abnett: Some people hated it, some people loved it, personally I'm in the Loved It camp? It had some memorable moments and some interesting battles! On the other hand, if you're a Fulgrim fan, skip it, it does him no favors. If you're a Perturabo fan, give it a try! He gets some great Only Sane Man moments (and a shirtless scene. That's not important, but it's there.)

Magnus the Red Master of Prospero by Graham McNeill: It's a Magnus book, but it's a fuckin' banger for Perturabo. Good stuff. Petition to have McNeill write all the Perturabo stuff? Just...not the War of Rust, please.

Lorgar Bearer of the Word by Gav Thorpe: Holy shit, did Lorgar not have a happy childhood. Depicts him very sympathetically!

Fulgrim the Palatine Phoenix by Josh Reynolds and Ferrus Manus Gorgon of Medusa by David Guymer: Both of these go on the list for having scenes that live rent-free in my head, most of them involving either Fulgrim or one of Fulgrim's sons. Josh Reynolds is a really good writer in general, though I think he might be the one who doesn't write for GW/BL anymore.

A Lesson in Darkness by Ian St. Martin: Creepy, serial killer fun starring Konrad Curze doing creepy, fucked-up Night Haunter shit. An Audio Drama.

Angron Slave of Nuceria by Ian St. Martin: a grim look at Angron's backstory, and how the suffering he experienced in his past doomed his entire legion. There's a companion short story called "Ghosts of Nuceria," but I'm saving that one for when I really, really need to cry as if the world is ending, so I haven't read it yet. I've read part of it already and man. Man.

OTHERS FROM 40K

The Lords of Silence by Chris Wraight: Generally agreed to be one of the best Chaos Space Marine novels, it follows the story of a warband of Death Guard, the titular Lords of Silence, as they wage war and have existential crises. Introspective and philosophical at times, and always careful to make everyone a well-rounded character, has mystery elements. The story is told out of order and in the present tense, so if those are dealbreakers for you, you'll have to sit them out. also includes a great scene with Mortarion okay thanks bye

The Way Out by Rachel Harrison: part of the Black Library's Warhammer Horror line, it's an audio drama that will keep you guessing until the end. Spooky and creepy and mysterious.

A couple more honorable mentions to round things out. The following all have scenes that live rent-free in my mind, all are either short stories or novels from Warhammer Horror, all take place in 40k:

The Deacon of Wounds by David Annandale; The Bookkeeper's Skull by Justin D. Hill; Imperator Gladio by Richard Strachan.

AND A FEW FROM AGE OF SIGMAR Not very many, though, because I haven't read very many...

Hallowed Knights: Plague Garden by Josh Reynolds: the only AoS novel I've ever read. Loved it. If Torgun dies, I'll fucking riot. Part of a series that may have been stopped, sadly.

The Vintage by David Annandale: a Warhammer Horror short story I hated the first time, loved the second time. Got a really killer premise, pun not intended. From that one year where Games Workshop decided that all of the Warhammer Horror Week stories would be about vampires.

Anyway, some of the stuff I enjoyed.

#black library recommendations

[denimbex1986]

'Doctor Who celebrated its 60th anniversary with three special episodes airing across as many weeks, and each provided viewers with some great quotes from its characters. These specials mark the return of David Tennant, now playing the Fourteenth Doctor, and Catherine Tate, who reprises her role as Donna Noble. The two were last seen in the season 4 finale, "Journeys End," in 2008. The specials also see the surprising debut of the Fifteenth Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa, who wasn't expected to appear in the show until the 2023 Christmas Day special, "The Church on Ruby Road."

The three Doctor Who 60th-anniversary specials, entitled "The Star Beast," "Wild Blue Yonder," and "The Giggle," all feature memorable dialogue, including several quotable lines. Not only do the Doctor and Donna's exchanges bring some expected brilliant moments to the show, but there are also some entertaining comments from other returning characters, such as Donna's mother, Sylvia Noble (Jacqueline King), and the Doctor Who villain known as the Toymaker (now played by Neil Patrick Harris). With Doctor Who season 14 due to air in Spring 2024, there are sure to be more amazing quotes to come, but the 60th-anniversary episodes deliver enough great lines to tide fans over until then.

15. "Tuna Madras." - Sylvia Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Star Beast"

While Donna's mother doesn't feature too heavily during the 60th-anniversary specials, one of the best quotes from these episodes is spoken by her. The deadpan delivery of this line, as Shaun (Karl Collins) returns home from work to find his family panicking over an alien in their kitchen, is nothing short of hilarious. The entire scene gives off a deer-in-headlights atmosphere, and Sylvia's line is a perfect breaking point after Shaun's arrival before all hell breaks loose.

14. "No Such Thing As Spaceships? We've Got A Bloody Martian In The Shed!" - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Star Beast"

Donna Noble's return to Doctor Who shows that the character hasn't changed too much and, as has been established during her original run, always manages to miss the arrival of aliens on Earth. However, this doesn't last long, and she finds the Meep (Miriam Margoyles) in her daughter's shed. This scene is absolute chaos, but it sees Donna at her funniest, screaming as she attempts to pull the Meep off her leg.

13. "I Don't Just Fire Darts, Mate." - Shirley Anne Bingham

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Star Beast"

"The Star Beast" introduces Shirley Anne Bingham (Ruth Madeley), as well as the return of UNIT to Doctor Who, as she is the latest to hold the position of the Doctor's scientific advisor. Shirley is an ambulatory wheelchair user and this is to her benefit when she helps the Doctor against the Meep. Her ability to use her wheelchair to not only knock out the manipulated soldiers but also to blow a huge hole in a brick wall while uttering this line is nothing short of incredible.

12. "I Had A Subconscious Infracutaneous Retrofold Memory Loop, Making Me Act As Soft As You And Give Away £166 Million!" - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Star Beast"

When the Tenth Doctor (also Tennant) said his goodbyes before regenerating, one of his last acts was to leave Donna and Shaun a winning lottery ticket on their wedding day. "The Star Beast" reveals that they had won £166 million, but Donna gave her money away to charity. This quote shows off Donna's character and her hilarious reaction upon getting her memory back, only to shout at the Doctor, blaming him for her actions as she'd done so to be like him.

11. "Then... We Go... And Kick Its Arse!" - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "Wild Blue Yonder"

The Doctor Who special "Wild Blue Yonder" sees the Doctor and Donna dropped into the middle of hostile action and the TARDIS abandoning them. In a typical Donna fashion, her realization of the danger only motivates her, knowing she has to get back home to Rose (Yasmin Finney) on Earth. With her having been away from Doctor Who for such a long time, it's great to see Donna still as the head-strong and boisterous character that made her so brilliant 15 years ago.

10. "We've Got A Chair. That's A Good Sign. It's A Lifeform With A Bum." - The Fourteenth Doctor

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "Wild Blue Yonder"

It wouldn't be Doctor Who without the Doctor making an obvious comment. While "Wild Blue Yonder" is a Doctor-and-companion-only story, minus the brief appearance of Isaac Newton (Nathaniel Curtis) in the cold open, it sees great dramatic performances from both David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Plus, the Doctor identifying that the threat must be able to sit down is made even creepier when they struggle to find any further signs of life.

9. "So I Arrived In Southampton, Which Allowed My Mother To Say I Was A Problem From The Day I Was Born. And I've Not Come To The Edge Of The Universe To Discover I'm Still Dealing With That." - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "Wild Blue Yonder"

The Doctor Who 60th-anniversary specials dig deeper into Donna's backstory, and considering she has been such a prominent character in the show since its 2005 reboot, this was unexpected. Season 4 saw plenty of moments that indicated that Sylvia wasn't the most appreciative of her daughter, and even though it's clear that their relationship has improved since 2008, Donna clearly has some lingering issues on the subject. Still, it's great to see yet another classic Donna line that seems like a ramble about her life but ends up being something that helps her and the Doctor save themselves from danger once again.

8. "Although, Don't Say Companion. That Sounds Like We Park Him On The Seafront At Weston-Super-Mare." - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

Donna's casual remarks are one of the reasons why she's such a brilliant character, and her response to being referred to as a companion only proves this. On top of this, she's quick to check with Shirley if her comment is offensive or not, not wanting to insult anyone other than the Doctor in the process. Donna's ability to paint a picture with just a few choice words is hilarious, and it's not the only time she does this in "The Giggle."

7. "I'm All Sonic And Tardis And Time Lord. Take That Away. Take Away The Toys. What Am I? What Am I Now?" - The Fourteenth Doctor

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

While there are many funny moments in the Doctor Who 60th anniversary specials, one of the most dramatic comes from the Doctor in "The Giggle." David Tennant's portrayal of the Doctor's more solemn moments is just as strong as The Fourteenth Doctor as they were as The Tenth, and breaking his walls down to Donna once again shows that their friendship is just as strong as it was before. This particular quote also sets up the Doctor's fate at the end of the specials, and it's a refreshing moment to see the Doctor acknowledge his reputation across the universe.

6. "Well, That's All Right Then." - The Toymaker

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

One of the most intense scenes in "The Giggle" sees the Toymaker spill details about the Doctor's lives and companions since he'd last seen Donna, in the form of a creepy but accurate puppet show. The Toymaker's sharp tongue is quick to call the Time Lord out about what happened to his friends over the years, and even when the Doctor retaliates, he spits back at him. It's an interesting moment for the show, especially as nobody had ever really made the Doctor face his actions in such a way before, but without this scene, the Doctor might never have accepted that he needed to grieve properly.

5. "You're Gonna Be Someone Else. It Doesn't Matter Who. Cause Every Single One Of You Is Fantastic." - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

Donna's reaction to the Doctor regenerating in "The Giggle" is significantly different from the first time she'd seen it, way back in the season 4 episode "The Stolen Earth." This time, now aware of what would happen and having seen more of his incarnations as part of the DoctorDonna, she's quick to hold his hand and gently guide him through the process. This scene shows one of the most wholesome moments between the pair, proving that they are one of the best Doctor Who duos.

4. "Can You Pull?" - The Fourteenth Doctor

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

The Doctor's bi-generation is a huge shake-up for the format of Doctor Who and is particularly unexpected by the Doctor himself. Whatever is running through his head for him to ask this question must be interesting, but it leads to the arrival of Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor. It must also be quite an odd moment for Mel (Bonnie Langford) and Donna too, as being asked to pull could mean anything.

3. "Do You Come In A Range Of Colors?" - Donna Noble

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

In another one of Donna's classic remarks, she quickly points out a first in Doctor Who: Ncuti Gatwa's portrayal of the Fifteenth Doctor makes him the first actor of color to play the Doctor on Doctor Who, and the second to play a Time Lord, with the first being Sacha Dhawan's Master. Of course, Donna's playful way of acknowledging this is a great way of explaining this to audiences.

2. "You Can't Save Everyone." - The Fifteenth Doctor

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

Even though the Fifteenth Doctor only appears toward the end of "The Giggle," he still has some great lines of dialogue. What's unique about this version of the Doctor is his ability to look back on his past without any shame and face his problems head-on. It's refreshing to see the Doctor speak to himself, and to tell his past incarnation exactly what his companions had spent years telling him: "You can't save everyone."

1. "One Thing You Need In This Place Is A Chair." - The Fifteenth Doctor

Quoted from the Doctor Who 60th anniversary special "The Giggle"

With there now being two TARDISes, the Fifteenth Doctor points out exactly what is missing from both: a chair. The jump seat was a staple of previous versions of the Doctor's ship, and it did seem unusual that the new TARDIS didn't have one, especially as the Tenth Doctor had one in the design he'd had in his original era. Seeing as the new version is so much bigger compared to previous ones, surely Doctor Who's design team could find the room to squeeze one in.'

#David Tennant #Catherine Tate #Donna Noble #Doctor Who #The Star Beast #Wild Blue Yonder #The Giggle #Jacqueline King #Sylvia Noble #Ncuti Gatwa #60th Anniversary #The Master #Sacha Dhawan #Bonnie Langford #Melanie Bush #The Toymaker #Neil Patrick Harris #Journey's End #Karl Collins #Shaun Temple #The Meep #Miriam Morgolyes #Shirley Anne Bingham #Ruth Madeley #UNIT #Rose Noble #Yasmin Finney #Issac Newton #Nathaniel Curtis

[thelensofyashunews]

Chow Lee is the Sexiest Rapper Alive in His New Single + Video

Always out of pocket and never out of options, Chow Lee uses his sly charisma to make quotable rap bangers. Today, the Sexy Drill pioneer lives up to his lofty reputation, sharing "S.N.A.!," his new single. The song samples "Sexy Boy," famously used by WWE wrestler Shawn Michaels as his entrance music, and transforms it into an airy instrumental filled with angelic vocal choirs that belie Chow's sinful desires.  "S.N.A.!" is an outrageously confident missive that proves the young rapper is NYC's most eligible, and least faithful, bachelor: "She asked if I got other b*tches/Is that a question, for real?/Look at me, is that a question for real?," he raps. In the video, Chow presides over a beauty contest, as he invites all the finest ladies on the block to strut their stuff and before heading out for a night in the Towns. 

The new single and video arrives shortly after a series of high profile live performances by the Long Island native. In February, Chow opened on several dates during Lil Tecca's "HVN ON EARTH Tour," and on Valentine's Day, Chow hosted his own sold out show in Bushwick, which also featured appearances from his close friends Lonny Love and R2R Moe. In March, Chow made an appearance at Rolling Loud California 2024, performing hits from his catalog on the main stage. Last week, Chow made an appearance at the notorious Slizzyfest, celebrating his close collaborator Cash Cobain's birthday.

"S.N.A." continues a hot streak for Chow Lee, who has released several singles in the wake of his album, Hours After The Club. In December, Chow dropped "swag it!" (over 4 million audio + video streams across platforms), an ethereal sample drill anthem, which gained viral traction for its blunt opening line: "How do you feel about being my side b*tch?" In February, just in time for Valentine's Day, Chow released the "porno story!" two-pack, featuring the title track and the viral, sensual, Cash Cobain-produced single "Ms. Beautiful V" (1 million streams on Apple Music, on top of 12.4k creates on TikTok), which reached the Top 25: New York City on Apple Music. Last summer, Chow released his super sexy album Hours After The Club, the latest evolution of his sexy drill sound. Hours After The Club is an addictive listen, radiating with the seductive charm that inspired Pitchfork to affectionately call Chow Lee the "horniest rapper out." Hours After The Club is chock full of infectious melodies, as Chow's natural bravado makes every X-rated flex feel natural. Chow followed-up Hours with singles like “team effort!” and  “ready 2 live.”

Stay tuned for much more from Chow as he continues to establish himself as the most eligible bachelor in the rap game.

#chow lee #sna #sna! #SNA! #sexiest nigga alive #sexiest n alive #sexy drill #sex drill #slizzy drill #slizzy talk #slizzy music #slizzy #nyc rapper #nyc rap #nyc music #nyclife #ny rapper #nyc #spotify #youtube #music #artist #musician #soundcloud #rapper #culture #art #rap #Youtube #Spotify

[sarahjkl82-blog]

Artistic Instinct Chapter 1

Header thanks to the lovely @yespolkadotkitty​ 

Summary: Marcus Pike and OC Anushka Pierce have been selected to work on a 5 eyes (Australia, Canada, NZ, the UK and US) intelligence team to track down art forgeries as a part of taking down an international white terrorism cell. Marcus is trying to escape his broken heart, Anushka is just trying to escape what the world expects of her.

Word count: 2,595

Warnings: Language.

Pairing: Marcus Pike x reader (OC)

This comes with a MASSIVE THANK YOU to the lovely @yespolkadotkitty , who read, re-read, pointed out the constant flipping between tenses and gave me the confidence to try to write something!

This is the first thing I have written since angsty poetry as a teenager. Apologies if it is shit!

In art, as in love, instinct is enough.

Anatole France

Chapter 1: 

That look crosses your face. The one that all your teachers at school said was a perfect mimicry of theirs. The one that forces grown men and women to quieten and pay attention. With your eyebrows slightly raised and a look of stop-fucking-about-and-listen in your eyes, the room grows quiet and attentive as the glow of the presentation lights up behind you. 

“Have you ever wondered what makes art unique? Is it the piece of art itself or the hand that created it?” you address the latest batch of students coming through Mi5’s doors. Whilst it is highly probable that the majority of these trainee intelligence officers will not specialise in forgeries as it doesn’t quite capture the glory of fighting extremism, you only want those who truly cared to join forces with your team. Although, what team? Stephens had pretty much washed his hands of you after your latest exploits. Who knows what your new team on Monday would bring. You are too old to try and squeeze yourself into the buttoned up box that Mi5 like their agents to fit into and whilst your old team never expected you to completely toe the line, you knew where the boundaries lay. Or at least, you thought you did. 

“If a perfectly painted Rembrandt or a superbly sculpted Rodin appears to be vivid as the original to the point where even an educated eye cannot spot the difference, why does authenticity matter?” you pose to the class. “The fact is, every artwork is an unparalleled expression of an individual creative talent and a result of a precise personal, historical and cultural context. Art forgeries, even if aesthetically pleasant or technically stunning, can cause serious misinterpretations with extremely damaging consequences for the art world and anti-money laundering services.” A couple of polite coughs, a not so polite yawn and a few shuffles of aching bums on their uncomfortable benches punctuate your lecture. You couldn’t blame them. This isn’t where you want to be either. 

This lecture was a punishment by Stephens for your latest step out of line. He probably would have looked the other way if your paperwork had been correctly filed but it was still somewhere, half done on your quagmire of a desk. You’d love to be organised but that was for other people, who had their shit more together than you. The punishment slowly crawls to an end and the students gather their belongings and filter out of the theatre. Glad to not have any questions posed, you squeeze your eyes shut to try and rest them against the sharp light flowing from the overhead projector.

“Perhaps you missed your calling as a teacher?” a voice scoffs from the back of the room as you log out of the computer.

“Don’t be a total cockwomble,” you mutter in the direction of the voice that was now attached to a hand offering a steaming cardboard cup of black Americano.

“Oh I can see it now! Instead of teaching the ins and outs of international art crime, you could be doing finger painting and collages- your skin shimmering with a film of glitter!” Hephzi snorts into the foam of her chai latte. Your best friend from the first day of training knows how to lift your spirits with her subtle teasing and caffeine bribery.

After a gulp of coffee sets your blood caffeine level at its normal level, you poke her in the ribs before hugging her one-armedly. “Are we still on for tonight?” you ask, “I have severe cravings for halloumi fries and a massive mixed kebab while we lose ourselves in a nouvelle vague classic?”

“You truly walk a fine line between cultured intelligenzia and Friday night British food, my darling girl!” Hephzi purrs as she scoops one of your totes filled with scribbles and dog-eared books, tossing it over her shoulder, settling it next to the strap of her rucksack. 

With a gentle roll of your eyes, you huff at her suggestion, threading your arm through her elbow and follow her out of the poorly lit lecture theatre towards the late afternoon gloom of a London March day. 

✪✪✪✪✪

All airports are hell. 

The black on yellow signs of Heathrow buzz like angry bees through Marcus’ mind after the seven hour flight from DC, the recycled aeroplane air still sitting heavy on his skin. He’d been to London many times and knew the airport like the back of his hand so his semi-zombified state isn’t an issue through the warren of staircases and corridors that make up Terminal 4. As he watches the slow, steady spin of the baggage claim, he rolls his shoulders and stretches his neck. Even despite his escape to DC, it still wasn’t quite far enough from Lisbon and Jane, the ghosts of their relationship haunting him through the hallways and offices, dreading seeing the toxic pair around the next corner.

Grabbing a small grey case, with his most treasured possessions that he didn’t want shipping over, he didn’t really look like someone who should be heading up the Five Eyes department of Art Crime. He just feels old, tired and irritated that he could just not shake the ghosts of his past.

The failed marriage. 

The failed engagement. 

Dressed in an old pair of jeans, a white henley and a baggy grey hoodie with suitcases rather than bags under his eyes, he looks more a middle aged, world weary man, than the sharpest American mind in art crime. As he heads towards customs, his navy passport in hand, he wonders if he’ll be pulled over again as he was in Lyon. He’d obviously matched a profile somewhere but there were certainly red faces all around when he’d got the American Embassy to ring through and explain that Marcus was exactly who he’d said he was. Fingers crossed, eh? 

He needn’t have been worried. There was no price on his face today. 

“Marcus Pike?” a slightly Northern, male voice asks gently.

Marcus swung out of his airport reverie, raised his eyebrows and smiled warmly in the direction of the voice.

“Andy Welbeck,” a large warm hand stretches towards Marcus, “I’m going to be your PA whilst you’re in London. I hope you don’t mind but I took the liberty to grab you a coffee- it’s a vanilla latte? I did check with the staff at your DC office as to what your preferred drink would be.” 

Gripping the hand tightly, and accepting the steaming coffee, Marcus feels a wave of warmth and friendship wash over him from the handsome, young man in front of him. “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” he goofily quotes and then instantly could have facepalmed- like this twenty-something would have any idea about Marcus’ favourite film! 

Andy read the man’s discomfort like a book, raising a hand to soothe his awkwardness, “Casablanca is a favourite of mine- how is a film so incredibly quotable and still has such an incredible plot?” Reaching for the handle of Marcus’ wheeled suitcase, Andy continues, “in fact to me, the only other film that manages it, albeit with less of a plot is Withnail and I.”

The tension eases from Marcus’ brown as the younger man’s ease at conversation flowed naturally as they headed to Andy’s car. “So how are you feeling about Monday? Have you had a chance to check out the team yet?” Andy questions gently. 

Marcus ran a hand through his hair, trying to lift the airport-flattened curls. “I have read their files, but I was wondering if you’d give me your point of view on the ones you already know?” 

“Obviously, I can fill you in on the Brit - and the Canadian, who arrived a week early and still hasn’t stopped apologising.” Andy added with an eye roll, “Harper Gleason doesn’t get in from Melbourne until tomorrow morning, Kiritopa arrives on Sunday so I shall be moving my flat from Lewisham to Heathrow arrivals gate over the next couple of days.” 

“Oof!” Marcus exhales, shaking his head in sympathy, “Ouch- is there anything we can do to make it easier? We could just order cabs for them? I need you in one piece for next week!”

“That wasn’t meant in any way as a moan, Sir. It’s the perfect opportunity to make some important first impressions.” Andy delivers firmly, “So, the Canadian is sweet as fuck. She’s super bright and just needs to stop apologising for everything. Dian seems to have this way of watching and seeing the very essence of people. Her clarity of understanding people around her is incredible. She will be such an asset to the team.” 

“Great! What about Anushka?” Marcus enquired as he read down the list on his emails.

Andy laughs heartily, hitting the heel of his palm against the steering wheel. “Ah Nush, Nush, Nush! Where to start with my little firecracker?”

Marcus’ eyebrows raise at this reaction and then furrow. “There’s not much in her file apart from her personal info and yet she’s been with Mi5 since leaving university almost twenty years ago?”

“Probably had to be redacted, Sir.” Andy grins lopsidedly at Marcus. 

“Please don’t call me sir- Marcus only! Stephens put her forward as one of the best?”

“She most certainly is. She’s also a bit of a car crash- albeit the most endearing one there is- but I can honestly say that if she lets you in, Nush will sweep you off your feet with her brilliance.” 

Marcus ruminates over this information and the photo of you attached to your file. A striking woman with almond shaped eyes, olive skin and a Cupid bow mouth stared back him with a slightly raised eyebrow as if she was daring him to disagree with her. Scratching at the scruff on his face, he wonders quite what he’d gotten himself into, heading up the art division of 5 Eyes and being based in London for at least two years. 

“Here you are, Sir, I mean, Marcus. This will be your digs until you find something a little more to your taste.” Andy shifts forwards in his seat to point out Marcus’s new building- a large newly built block stretching into the sky above them. “GHCQ have rented the penthouse suite for you for six months to give you time to settle in. I live roughly five minutes in that direction so please don’t hesitate to call any time. No penthouse for me, but it’s home!” 

“Thank you so much, Andy. I’m grateful for the welcome you’ve shown me. This will be a great partnership.” Marcus pats Andy’s shoulder. “Whilst I promise not to bug you too much, can we go out for a drink sometime? If you’re local, it’d be nice to have someone to introduce me to the area.” 

“Marcus, I’ve already got you pencilled in for a pint on Friday- you don’t need to worry, I’ve got your back.”

✪✪✪✪✪

“Fuck. Where the ever loving fuck are my fucking keys?” You grumble as you rootle through your rucksack. Years of receipts and scraps of paper with doodles from dull meetings obstructed your view and hindered your search for those elusive metal bastards that stood between you and your comfiest jammies, your sofa and A Bout de Souffle. 

“For goodness sake, woman! So glad I got my own key cut.” Hephzi shakes her head, “Out of the way.”

“If you didn’t have a key, I’d have to live on my doorstep more!” you snigger to yourself.

As she turns the key, the door needs a swift kick to open it fully. “Has your landlord still done nothing about the damp here?”

“Course not!” 

“Want me to send a couple of my brothers around? Sort him out?” 

“Mate, I have three useless oiks of my own I could call on for the same outcome. No point in poking the bear,” you shrug resignedly. Hephzi licks her lips as you split the food between two plates- the rice and chickpeas spilling over the side onto the surprisingly clean work tops. 

“Your mum been over?”

“How can you tell?” Your eyes crease in laughter, “Genuinely, I think she believes I’m a bit broken. All my brothers married and babied up and her only daughter is living in a shitty, ex LA, messy, damp filled flat and a nameless “IT” job that she wears an invisible ring for!” Your left hand does the Single Ladies dance as Hephzi roars with laughter. 

With a glass of wine and a heaped plate of food in hand, you kick some of the cushions from the sofa onto the floor. “Do you ever see yourself meeting someone or are you just too married to the job?” Hephzi pries gently, knowing that even with her closeness to you that the door could quickly slam in her face. 

“Honestly?” Your eyebrows slightly raise, “I’m not sure that my mum isn’t too far from the truth. Too broken for anyone who’d I’d let get close.” Hephzi snorts. “Excuse me! I let people get close! Well, as close as I’d like them to be.” 

“You’re not broken, just guarded. To be completely honest, I just think you haven’t met anyone deserving of you yet.” Hephzi reaches over and pats your thigh. 

You exhale sharply and shake your head as you mutter quietly gesturing towards the cluttered flat, “No one deserves this. Now shush, I need to escape into the black and white.”

✪✪✪✪✪

Marcus shrugs his hoodie off as he enters the sparsely decorated apartment, his eyes roaming around his new home. New job. New country. How long could he keep running from his past? With a sigh and rolling up the sleeves of his Henley over gently muscled arms, he starts unpacking his suitcase. 

In some of the drawers, he found some basic t-shirts, pants and hoodies with a note from Andy saying, “Just in case your luggage gets lost!” In the cupboard, there are two suits- one navy and one grey and five shirts. Perfect size, fit and style. Is there anything this man doesn’t know about him? Marcus lets out a nervous laugh- kinda seems like Andy is underused as a PA and should be put into the field! 

A light filled, floor to ceiling tiled en-suite with a full sized tub and separate shower was lined with expensive smelling shower gels, shampoos and creams. Opening one, and inhaling deeply Marcus cocks an eyebrow as he enjoys the cedar, amber and rosemary scent. He is dragged back to that heady summer honeymoon he’d spent with his ex-wife in the South of France, drinking glasses of sauternes with frozen grapes keeping it cool as the air carried the scent of the lavender fields and sun warmed herbs floated on the mistral. That familiar ache returns to his chest, but perhaps it is time to lay that ghost to rest.

Marcus walks further into his discovery of the beautiful apartment. The kitchen is small but functional with two French doors that open onto a small Juliet balcony looking towards Canary Wharf and the many towers that organised all the money coming into the UK. All of the cupboards in the kitchen are stocked with a basic range of cooking ingredients and the fridge even has a few ice cold beers and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. 

“Andy, whatever you’re being paid, it isn’t enough.” Marcus sighs and reaches for a beer, grabbing a bottle opener from the top drawer. It almost feels like it could become home. 

Whatever that is. 

Ok some notes:

5 Eyes is a real thing- used for sharing information about international terrorism between those countries named above.

An ex-LA home means ex local authority home. Post world war 2, Britain built a lot of social housing which Maggie Thatcher allowed  in the eighties to be sold off to private buyers at a lower price to not local authority buildings. They’re not necessarily the prettiest but as the owner of an ex-LA home, they are solidly built and with a great amount of storage space!

The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean

I welcome any comments, questions or just chats!

tagging: @astroboots for your perusal

@mouthymandalorian​ @lv7867 @songsformonkeys

#marcus pike x reader #marcus pike #pedro pascal fanfiction #josé pedro balmaceda pascal #pedro pascal characters #the mentalist

[deadravenclaw]

hey love! happy 400! you deserve every single follower and so many more!

can i have 🦚 cm characters, 🐢 emily prentiss, 🐉 hotchniss, 🐍 as cm characters or if someone else asked then cm ships, and finally 🍀

feel free to skip any if it's too much! yet again, happy 400! you so deserve it! love you raven <3

Edit: I now know this is from @raegan-reid and I want to say tysm Raegan ily <3

🐢 A random headcanon (specify character, for cm)

Emily Prentiss (writing this first because I love Emily sm, also I have no self-control when writing):

Emily hates board games. It's not because she doesn't know how to play or because she sucks at it, she knows how they're played and has played a couple of those app store board games. It's just that when it comes to the actual, game night style of board games, she absolutely hates them. Like, won't come 10 metres near it kind of hate.

Which is strange to everyone because Emily's extremely competitive and is great at poker and chess, which would most naturally mean that she would like board games too. However, when it comes to game nights with the rest of the team, games such as Monopoly or Cluedo are met with immediate disagreement from Emily, who suggest other games like Cards Against Humanity, or they do something else entirely.

Emily knows she's being unfair to the rest. That her hatred of board games should not affect the rest of the team's choice of relaxation. The rest of the team disagrees however, stating that everyone should be comfortable during game nights. And as much as Emily knows she should at least explain why, she finds that she can't get herself to do so.

Then one night, during girls night at Penelope's apartment, Emily finds herself confiding in Penelope, Tara, and JJ. Explaining how it's because she's never had a chance playing them growing up. It wasn't because she didn't have them, in fact, the ambassador would get her the games if she wanted them. It was because she never stayed in one place long enough to make any friends, let alone have friends she could play with. Even her mother would not play with her, citing how it was childish and ridiculous, leaving Emily with a bunch of games she could never play with anyone and a brewing hatred for any board game that existed.

Hearing Emily's reasons, Tara and JJ immediately offer to play and teach her the ins and outs of board games, while Penelope takes it a step further by digging out board games that she kept in storage. They ignore Emily's protests and sit her down, explaining the rules of each game and showing her how fun board games can be.

That night, Emily learns the basics how to play several games, including Monopoly, Cluedo, and Risk. She enjoys Monopoly the most, mostly because JJ and Penelope got into an argument almost immediately about the pieces and the fact that towards the end of the game Tara had started swearing whenever she landed on someone's property.

That is also the night that Emily allows herself to like board games. To allow herself to forget the evenings during her childhood where she would ask her mother to play with her, only to get rejected or ignored. Instead, she allowed those memories to be replaced with the sound of uncontrollable laughter, the smell of her favourite wine and snacks, and the warmth that was Penelope's apartment. Memories that make board games a little more loveable.

Emily Prentiss may not fully love board games but with memories like this, she learns to like them a little more.

---

The rest of the requests are under the cut because the hc is already longer than expected 👀.

🦚 Rank my top 5 of anything

As CM characters:

1. Emily Prentiss - I love her so much. She's amazing. So many quotable lines and just, I love her.

2. Penelope Garcia - I love how she's always so supportive of everyone and she deserves the world honestly.

3. Tara Lewis - Tara deserves more love, she is brilliant. "Your mom" and "Went on a diet. Lost 185 pounds" live rent free in my mind.

4. Luke Alvez - First of all, I love Roxy. Second of all, he's just a great and caring person and just has a great dynamic with everyone.

5. Alex Blake - Okay so I don't post much about Blake but I love her. She's like the mum of the team and I just think she's amazing and I love her.

🐉 Rate a ship/character (for cm)

Hotchniss: 5/10

I'm sorry but this is not a ship that I personally like. That being said, I can still sorta see why people would like it. I just don't think they're good together romantically.

🐍 cyma as anything

CM Ships (missed this out the first time but um yeah, also i’m sorry i’m tagging people so often)

Temily - @temilyrights

Jemily - @raegan-reid

Garvez - @tenelvez

Moreid - @bus-kids

🍀 A character I associate you with

Emily definitely. She’s funny and seems like a great person to hang out with and you are just the nicest person whenever we interact <3

#criminal minds headcanons #criminal minds #cm headcanons #emily prentiss #raven's 400 celebration #raegan☄️

[siena-sevenwits]

From @valiantarcher: 1-5, 7, 9, 29, and 30, please? (cont'd)

A book you love that it seems like no one else has read.

I am going to briefly highlight three whilst I have the opportunity.

The Man From Rocca Sicca by Reginald M. Coffey, O.P., is a slim out-of-print biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. Like many a liberal arts student, I tended to think of Thomas Aquinas as a book rather than a man. This book changed all that for me, offering a picture of a man so vibrantly in love with Christ and His Cross, with a distinct and wonderful personality, for whom theological scholarship was charged with all the passion of a first love, the banner of academic orthodoxy and fidelity to Scripture as robust and red as the banner of a triumphant army's banner.

Three Religious Rebels by M. Raymond is a set of historical novellas about the fore-founders of the Trappist movement to reform the Benedictine Order. The first one, about St. Robert, is especially great. I have never forgotten the line "to do something gallant for God."

On a less spiritual note, let me note that while for some reason Rudyard Kipling's works don't tend to click for me, I have a deep-rooted love of his Stalky and Co (get the "complete" edition if you can.) These rollicking tales were inspired by his own school days, about the most outrageous kings of mischief you can get up to in a British public school. They burst with both affection and hatred for late Victorian military schools. The amount of culture-based in-jokes is and delightful and mind-boggling, much like one finds in the Wimsey books. These stories are some of the most quotable works on earth, and Mr. King, the Latin master, deserves to be remembered among literature's great characters - his assertion "it sticks" has often encouraged me as a teacher.

A book that left you feeling overwhelmed with happiness.

The Man Born to Be King by Dorothy L. Sayers. This cycle of twelve plays on the life of Christ was insightful, reverent, but most of all, such an ode to the humanity of Christ. She knew how to show him, as down-to-earth and real as fresh-baked bread that needs no butter, it's so good and hot, but without any need to downplay his divinity to do it. She realizes, unlike so many authors, that there is no need to "humanize" Jesus, for He is human. The characterization of each of the apostles is great. The joy and understanding, the wit and sacredness of these plays is amazing, and fanned my desire for scripture while loving it as a literary work in itself.

A book that you found yourself thinking about a long time after you finished it.

The White Rose by Inge Scholl was recommended to me by a trusted professor. It was my introduction to the Munich student resistance and their infamous pamphlets calling upon their fellow citizens to rise up on behalf of the true Germany, rejecting the false Germany Hitler had stained over it as a veneer. Inge was the younger sister of Sophie and Hans, university students who, along with several others, established a basement hideout from which to print and prepare their pamphlets for mass dispersal. They were caught while attempting to secretly leave piles of pamphlets in the university corridors while no one was about, and were executed after a few days' interrogation. Their heroism, in death and life, resounded with me on so many levels - spiritual, political, passionate. Inge's account is especially poignant, because while she strives for impartiality she was still a little girl at the time these events took place, and she never knew what he her siblings had become involved in until their final days. To read the six pamphlets themselves one must do some honest self-examination in their light. The story this book introduced me to stayed with me so long I ended up writing and directing a play about the White Rose in the following years, and incorporating the story and pamphlets into at least two curricula. One of my actors still texts or emails me on the day of the execution to remind me of it, even after all this time.

An author you recently discovered and would like to read more of.

I must admit I haven't done much in the way of discovering new authors lately. Other than Katherine Addison (whose other books don't look like something I plan on reading,) I've mainly been exploring or rereading authors with whom I am already familiar lately. Shakespeare, the Pentateuch, Homer, Austen, Tolkien, Sanderson, Beagle. I suppose I did just begin The Thief - the world and its dog have recommended the series to me for years, but I'm not far enough in to call myself properly invested. Oh, Andrew Peterson, possibly?

A fictional book that taught you about/increased your interest in a real-life subject.

George Bernard Shaw's gem of a one-act play, "The Man of Destiny," kickstarted my fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte. The play concerns him before his rise to power, as a young general who ran before cannons to secure the victory. It's about an encounter he has at an inn with a lady known only as "the strange woman" who has stolen his military dispatches, and the cat-and-mouse game of wits they play for who shall walk away with the letters. As usual, Shaw is tremendously wordy in his commentary, even during the play itself, enough to ignite me on a true kick of learning about the real life Napoleon.

Thank you so much for the ask! The original ask post is here. My asks aren't working, but if you'd like to ask, feel free to tag me in a comment!

#Coreander's Old Books #recs #books #ask game #the man from rocca sicca #three religious rebels #stalky and co. #rudyard kipling #dorothy l. sayers #the man born to be king #george bernard shaw #the man of destiny

[gstqaobc]

CBC THE ROYAL FASCINATOR

Friday, April 09, 2021

Hello, royal watchers and all those intrigued by what’s going on inside the House of Windsor. This is your biweekly dose of royal news and analysis. Reading this online? Sign up here to get this delivered to your inbox.

Janet DavisonRoyal Expert

Prince Philip’s life of duty

(Adrian Dennis/Getty Images)

For so many years, Prince Philip was at Queen Elizabeth’s side — or walking just behind — deeply devoted in his duty as consort to the woman who is now the longest-reigning monarch in British history.

But the Duke of Edinburgh, who died this morning aged 99 at Windsor Castle, was seen by many as having his own role in helping an institution steeped in tradition try to find its way toward the future.

Much of that began nearly 70 years ago, after the former sailor who gave up a successful naval career saw his wife ascend the throne.

“What Prince Philip did was help modernize the monarchy in the 1950s,” Michael Jackson, president of the Institute for the Study of the Crown in Canada, said in an interview this morning.

“It was still a very tradition-bound institution…. We can credit Prince Philip, with the Queen’s full support, of course, with modernizing [its] finances, protocols, how Buckingham Palace was run … its outreach to the Commonwealth.”

Philip pushed to have Elizabeth’s coronation televised in 1953, an idea she did not wholeheartedly welcome at first.

“He was the modern person,” John Fraser, author of The Secret of the Crown: Canada’s Affair with Royalty, said in an interview this morning. “He was in touch with real people, non-royal people, and so he always had the instinct to reach out. He understood both the dark side of the media presence as well as the necessity of it.”

Fraser credits Philip’s profoundly unsettled early years, after he was “born in poverty and insecurity,” with how he looked toward the future of the Royal Family, and the monarchy.

“I do think those early years were the single biggest factor in his life and how he approached life,” said Fraser. “I think he never assumed things would last forever because he didn’t make any assumptions like that, and I think he certainly assumed the monarchy wouldn’t survive if it didn’t reach out more to the constituency that it had to serve.”

Fraser met Philip, and recalled him as a man who would revel in asking questions and challenging others.

“He was — charming is not the word I would use — but he was an invigorating person to speak to.”

Jackson, who was Saskatchewan’s chief of protocol from 1980 until 2005, met Philip during four visits to the province — three with the Queen and one on his own — and remembered a man with “a great sense of humour.”

“Sometimes people found him a bit abrasive, a bit abrupt, but that’s the way he was,” said Jackson.

“He was a straight shooter and he complemented the Queen beautifully because the Queen is a very soft-spoken, more laid-back person. Prince Philip really spoke his mind and occasionally made jokes and … put everyone at ease. I found him very refreshing, good to work with.”

With Philip’s death, there is an inevitable sadness for the Queen, and inevitable concern for how she will cope with the passing of her husband of more than 73 years.

Both Fraser and Jackson say the Queen will carry on, with Jackson noting “That’s the way she is. She’s a very strong person” with a deep religious faith that will sustain her.

“She’ll do her duty,” said Fraser. “And I think that’s the big lesson of him. He did his duty.”

For a full obituary of Prince Philip, click here.

For photos from Prince Philip's royal career, click here.

Family dysfunction

When Philip Mountbatten married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, the family he was joining was in marked contrast to the fractured one he had known in his youth. His parents' marriage broke down and offered him nothing like the nuclear family arrangement (mom, dad and two kids) that Elizabeth had known throughout her childhood. "In marrying the Queen, [Philip] gained that sort of stable home life that he didn't have when he was younger," royal author and historian Carolyn Harris has said in an interview. Philip's parents were Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Philip was born a prince of both Greece and Denmark on June 10, 1921, on the dining room table at Mon Repos, a villa that was the summer home for the Greek royals on the island of Corfu. He was the last of five children — his four older siblings were all girls. At the time, he was sixth in line to the Greek throne. But life in Greece didn't last long. His father, a professional soldier, was exiled from Greece in 1922 as his uncle, King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate. Philip's family fled, with the story being that Philip was nestled into an orange box as the family was evacuated from Greece on a Royal Navy ship. They eventually made their way to Paris. Philip's childhood took a "dysfunctional turn," author Sally Bedell Smith wrote in her book, Elizabeth The Queen, when he was sent by his parents at the age of eight to England for boarding school. The family eventually broke down. Philip's mother, who was born deaf, was ill periodically, diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in a sanitarium in Switzerland. His father went off with his mistress to Monte Carlo, where he died in 1944. Philip was left to be brought up in the U.K. by his mother's family, shuffled among various relatives and boarding schools throughout his youth. He didn't see or have any word from his mother between the summer of 1932 and the spring of 1937. "It's simply what happened," Philip said matter-of-factly in an excerpt from a book by Philip Eade, Young Prince Philip, Turbulent Early Years, published in the Telegraph. "The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does." As life went on, there really was no father to guide, consult or do anything else a father can do for his child. Several other close relatives died in his early years, including his favourite sister, Cecile, and her family in a plane crash in 1937. The following year, the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, his uncle and guardian, died of bone cancer. That left the marquess's younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, to bring up Philip. His family ties also extended into Germany. Three of his sisters were married to German princes involved in the Nazi party. Cecile and her husband, Don, had just joined the Nazi party before they died. Those family alliances had a visible repercussion when Philip and Elizabeth were married in 1947. "His sisters were not invited to the wedding as they were married to German princes who had been involved in the Nazi party during World War Two," Harris said. Philip's mother, Princess Alice, however, was at the wedding, and in her later years, came to live at Buckingham Palace. Alice had her own moment in the cultural conscience in 2019, as an episode during the third season of the Netflix drama, The Crown, focused on her. "She's just the most extraordinary character," Crown creator Peter Morgan told Vanity Fair. She set up charities for Greek refugees and later established a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns. During the Second World War, while her son was serving with the Royal Navy and her German sons-in-law fought for the Nazis, she was hiding Jews in Athens. As much as there was the distance between Philip and his mother in his younger years, there was a closeness later. Alice came to live at Buckingham Palace in 1967. Alice died at the palace in 1969 and was interred in the royal crypt at Windsor Castle. In 1988, her remains were transferred, as she had wished, to the church of St. Mary Magdalene in east Jerusalem. In a 1994 visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Philip planted a tree in his mother's honour and visited her gravesite. "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special," Philip said during his visit. "She was a person with deep religious faith and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress."

No stranger to Canada

(Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)

Prince Philip's last visit to Canada was a short one in 2013 — on his own, without the Queen — to present a ceremonial flag to the Royal Canadian Regiment's 3rd Battalion. It came as something of a surprise. Philip had experienced a few health scares in the 18 months prior. So overseas travel was not necessarily a given for the Duke of Edinburgh at the time. But given Philip's feisty personality, dedication to his role and some of the interests he showed over the years, his return to Canada — he made more than 70 visits or stopovers between 1950 and 2013 — may not really have been a complete surprise. The 2013 trip was billed as a private working visit and was only a few days long. But while he was here, he was finally able to pick up the insignias he had been awarded as companion of the Order of Canada and commander of the Order of Military Merit from David Johnston, then Canada's governor general.

To read more about Philip’s time in Canada, click here.

Royally quotable

“He is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”

— Queen Elizabeth, publicly acknowledging Prince Philip’s importance to her during a speech on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in 1997.

To read more on what Philip meant to the Queen, click here.

Remembering Prince Philip

Royal Fascinator readers are welcome to share their thoughts on the passing of Prince Philip, and any memories they may have of meeting him over the years. We’ll include some in the next edition of the newsletter.

I’m always happy to hear from you. Send your ideas, comments, feedback and notes to

[email protected]

. Problems with the newsletter? Please let me know about any typos, errors or glitches.

GSTQAOBC 🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿

[lovemesomesurveys]

[zelthie]

What's were you doing before you got on the computer? Drinking coffee and watching TV.

Is there anything you really want right now? To not feel crappy would be nice.

What's the best gift you've ever gotten? I couldn’t possibly choose just one. 

What's a song you think the world needs to listen to? I don’t know.

Has there ever been a person you regret ever being friends with? Nah.

Do you think you have a good understanding on love? I haven’t experienced the romantic kind still.

You just discovered a new color! What would you name it? I have no idea.

What's your favorite ice cream flavor? I’m not a big ice cream person, but I do like strawberry, mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, and birthday cake. I haven’t had ice cream in years, though.

What do you want to do on your honeymoon? I don’t plan on getting married.

What's one thing you remember learning in school? The Fifty Nifty United States song. And all of the Grammar Rock from Schoolhouse Rock VHS tape. <<< Awww, yep I remember both. Those Schoolhouse Rock tapes really helped me with my multiplication as a kid and it’s cool how the states song stayed with me all these years later.

Are you more of a cat or dog person? Doggo.

How do you want to be remembered by people? I don’t need to be remembered by people. I’m sure my loved ones will remember me and that’s all that matters.

Do you like road trips? They can be fun, but long car rides are rough.

Do you think Medical Marijuana should be legalized? Yeah.

If you were forced to dye your hair another color, what color would you get? I don’t know... I really just want to keep dyeing it red.

Are you excited for anything? No.

What do you think of your parent(s)? I love my parents, they’re the best.

Are your grandparents dead? My maternal grandparents are, RIP. <3

What celebrity do you think should of never become famous? All the pervy, gross, bad ones out there, which unfortunately seems to be a lot.

What's your favorite thing to do online? Tumblr and YouTube.

If you could appear on any TV show, what show would you choose? Nah.

What does your full name look like without the letters t,a,i,o,e,l,n or s? I’ll just do my first name: Ph. 

Your mood summed up into one word? Shitty.

How often do you talk to other people about the weather? I bring it up most when it’s hot.

Are you doing anything else besides taking this survey right now? Not really. My TV is on, but it’s more background noise at the moment.

What's a name you wouldn't mind having? I’ll stick with mine.

What's your favorite thing to wear that you own? My leggings and graphic tees.

What do you think of Barbie dolls? I was obSESSED with Barbies as a kid.

When you were little, did you ever want to go to Disneyland? Yesss. I was fortunate to be able to go a few times. I still get just as excited as an adult. 

What's the first thing you thought in your head when you woke up today? I woke up to my brother handing me a Starbucks, ha so that was nice. He’s so sweet.

If your best friend confessed that they can see the future, you would...? I don’t believe in that, but I’d question them about it and hear what they had to say.

Write a random quote that comes to your head: Nah.

What's your opinion on milk chocolate? I like it, but white chocolate is better.

What about Dark Chocolate? Ew.

You do know that white chocolate isn't even really chocolate, right? I don’t care.

Do you get annoyed when surveys mention a band you\'ve never heard of? No.

What's your opinion about Katy Perry's song "I kissed a girl"? I remember how risque that was considered at the time lol. People were like *gasp!* She what???

What's your least favorite pizza topping? I’m super picky and basic, so I don’t like any other toppings besides what I put on mine, which are white sauce, cheese (preferably feta and ricotta, but I’m not picky about the cheese), garlic, spinach, green onions, and crumbled meatballs if they have it.

What would you do if you discovered the US was now drafting for the war? I have a physical disability, so I’m out of the running but I’d be terrified about my brother getting drafted.

Are you even living in America, or are you from another country? Yes, I live in the US.

What's your favorite social website? Tumblr and Twitter.

Do you believe in heaven? If so, what's it like? If not, why? Yes. I’ve never been, obviously, but I imagine it to be like how the Bible describes it to be.

What's your favorite video game? Mario Bros games will always be a favorite.

In your opinion, is Bzoink the best place to find fun surveys? I never go on there myself, but a few fellow survey takers on here seem to find a lot of surveys there that I then steal from them, ha.

What's your opinion of high school? It had its ups and downs. The first two years were rough for me.

Do you prefer the country or city? I like both, but I think I prefer living in the city. I’ve never lived in the country, though, so I can’t say for sure.

Texting: Is it fun, evil, boring, or none of the above? I don’t text much at all, I’d just say it’s convenient and preferred over talking on the phone.

What email service do you use for your main (or only) email account? Yahoo.

What's your favorite dumb pick-up line? *shrug*

What are your plans for the next 48 hours? Same things as always.

Did you ever read "Captain Underpants" when you were little? No, I was older when those came out. My lil bro loved ‘em, though.

What's better: The old Cartoon Network, or the new one? Or do you not care? I’d say the old, for sure. I don’t know wth happened to that channel, mainly the Adult Swim segment. Like seriously, what. the. fuck.

Disney Channel shows are all pretty cheesy, aren't they? I’m definitely biased, but Disney Channel growing up and in my teen years was waaaaay better. I haven’t watched it in several years now, but I feel like the shows for kids and teens nowadays are super cringe.

What's your opinion on the Jonas Brothers? I’m a fan, but I was a huge fan in my teen years. I’ve kept up with them as a group and their solo and side projects all this time.

What are some of your favorite singers/bands? I have a lot.

Why do the lead singers in bands always get the most recognition? Because they’re the voice and face of the band. I think the other members certainly should get their recognition, too, though. They all together make up the band and its sound.

Did you ever believe in the Tooth Fairy? Yeah.

What's your favorite type of weather? Fall and winter weather.

What's your opinion on reading books? I love reading.

You're given a chance to act in a Hollywood blockbuster! Would you accept? Nooo.

What it if it was a movie directed by Tim Burton?(He directed Sweeney Todd) I enjoy his work, but still no. It wouldn’t matter who was directing it.

How do you feel about Taco Bell? I like it. It’s been awhile since I’ve had it, though. I went through a major Taco Bell phase a few years ago and was getting it all the time. 

Are you hungry right now? Yes.

How often do you go on to YouTube? Everyday. I spend a lot of time on there, mainly for ASMR videos, but also other stuff I like to watch. Usually while I’m eating I like to catch up on some videos.

It's possible to be addicted to anything... What are you addicted to? Caffeine.

What's your opinion of Walgreens? I like it. My mom also works there.

Back when Spongebob Squarepants was famous, were you interested in it? Not really. I just watched it here and there cause my lil bro was into it. There were quotable moments I liked, though.

What's your dream pet? I love having doggos.

You see a mermaid while relaxing on the beach with friends. What now? lol I’d just assume it was a group of people chillin’ with mermaid tails. You can buy blankets or costume pieces like that, so.

Who's been your favorite teacher growing up, and why? My 4th and 8th grade teacher, Mr. McG.

When you were little, did you ever like Pokemon? I did have a brief Pokemon phase. I collected the cards, too.

How often do you get headaches? Not often at all, so when I do - they really tend to hurt pretty badly. <<< That’s how mine are. I’ve been sick this past week and headaches have been apart of that, unfortunately, and they haven’t been fun. I can’t take anything for them either, which really sucks.

Do you have any songs stuck in your head right now? If so, what? That new Wendy’s jingle, “Bag alert, major bag alert.” That commercial comes on constantly and that’s literally the only words to the jingle. It’s annoying.

#personal #text #survey #surveys

[bloody-wonder]

One thing that irritates me w this fandom is how every perceived offense is ramped up 200%. I.e, Nora’s racist bc Nicky’s a creep & the yakuza are the villains, Andrew’s abusive bc he choked Kevin, Seth deserved “redemption” bc he had 1 good quotable line w/o any slurs in it. It’s exhausting & no one seems to understand the concept of middle ground & that not everything has some malicious intent. Calling these things racist and abusive only dilute the seriousness of actual racism & abuse

what annoys me isn’t the fact that people make those call outs - bcs frankly that’s what i like to do as well - but the hypocrisy and double standards

yes nora is probably racist like all of us are to some extent. she has a cast of ten characters who come from troubled environments so if my understanding of the social issues in the us is correct then it’s very likely at least for several of them to be poc. however we only have one poc man and he’s a walking problematic trope. the asians are all evil gangsters and the only named black person in the entire series is thea who appears for one (1) scene. this is disappointing in terms of rep and shows that nora views her characters as white by default which speaks of her internalized prejudice. but let’s not act like most of us don’t have the same prejudice and most of famous established writers have the same poor rep and totally get away with it. it’s a problem but it’s not unique to aftg and the fact that it is nora who is called out so often is bcs of tumblr culture, aftg being a self-published self-indulgent story, its dark themes that according to some are not handled well enough - not bcs nora’s racism is in some way more harmful or outrageous than that of all your other favorite writers.

same with the foxes - all of them have faults and if you will criticize some of them you’ll have to criticize all of them. if andrew is abusive bcs he choked kevin, then so is allison bcs she hit aaron, so is matt bcs he punched kevin. was nicky a creep bcs of malicious intent? i don’t think so but it doesn’t make his words and actions any less malicious. let’s criticize him for being abusive and amatonormative as well. seth didn’t deserve anything just as the rest of them didn’t. no one deserves anything, stuff just happens and you live with it. this theological view of storytelling in which the author creates characters the way they like and then allegedly decides who deserves what based on their actions for which the characters had no free will bcs it’s the author who made them do those actions is very archaic and needs to go away. 

sorry this turned into a ramble once again

#andrew minyard #kevin day #nicky hemmick #all for the game #the foxhole court #aftg mine #aftg ask #the redemption arcs need to go away #i remember reading a post about how andrew apparently has one #like srsly? #aww andrew was soooo bad and then redeemed himself #is this how people see it? #ugh anyway #if i had started writing a story at 14 #all the characters in it would sure haven been white as the snows of siberia #and if i decided to publish it at 30 i probably wouldn’t change their skin colors #even though i knew it would be better for the rep #bcs i’ve spent 15 years of my life with them and this is how i see them #it's a personal story that has been shared with you #and no one makes you buy it and read it

[gravecinema]

Why Heathers is the Best High School Movie of the 80's - 06/03/2020

The 1980’s brought forth many a high school movie. The most famous movies were the John Hughes movies such as Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. These are all great movies in their own right, but it was a movie by director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters in 1989 that would prove to be the defining high school movie of that decade. That movie was Heathers.

Heathers is anchored by a career performance from Winona Ryder. Winona Ryder has said she was motivated to make this movie because of her strong feelings about girl cliques, the pervasive bullying that goes on in high schools and the "hellishness" of the high school experience. With a character name of Veronica, she is the black sheep in the group of four popular girls at school, with the other three girls are all named Heather, which is where the title of the film comes from. Unlike the more teen-friendly John Hughes movies, Heathers is an R-rated dark comedy covering the themes of body image, depressive isolation, date rape, murder, suicide, and toxic relationships. Veronica is just trying to be like one of the other Heathers at the start of the movie, even though she hates the peer pressure of doing things she’s morally against. All that is about to change though, when she starts a relationship with the new bad-boy student at school named JD, played by a young Christian Slater.

Christian Slater has a star-making performance in the movie, and his character of JD is the main driver of the plot. JD uses his influence on Veronica after hooking up with her to push her towards killing everyone whom he considers to be a bad element in the school, while having the idea of making them all look like suicides. Even though when they kill the first Heather it can be considered somewhat of an unintended accident, JD starts to like the idea of killing everyone that he feels deserves it. JD is an immensely tragic character, which is part of what makes him such a great antagonist. After witnessing the suicide of his mother when he was a kid, JD carries that trauma along with being an outcast wherever the next place his dad moves him to. He is also the only character in the movie to successfully commit suicide at the climax of the film. He’s a character that especially has a much deeper meaning today after school and mass shooting events such as Columbine in 1999.

One great strength of Heathers that always stands out to me is the memorable lines from the fantastic script by Daniel Waters. It contains great quotable lines such as “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” “Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count,” and “Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.” The best and most memorable line of all though has to be when the father of one two football players who they believe were killed in an apparent gay suicide pact is giving a eulogy. “My son’s a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead gay son.” You’ll be quoting Heathers for a while with friends long after you’ve seen it.

Heathers also has a memorable and distinct soundtrack with a score by David Newman. An opening and closing song of “Que Sera, Sera” also provides a nice theme for the movie. It bookends the start and ending of the film and gives the story a nice whimsical feel to it. The only other featured song used in the film provides the main message of the whole movie. The name of the song: “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).” Fairly on the nose if you ask me.

One thing that always stands out to me when I watch this movie is the wonderful display of 80’s fashion. The blazers, designs, and hairstyles could only have come from the 80’s. The character of JD is the only one who looks the most timeless out of the bunch, since a dark trench coat never goes out of style. The most interesting costume choice though is whatever the hell the spirit of Heather Chandler was wearing in a dream sequence. I guess that���s the beauty of dream sequences. You can do weird stuff in them.

The best thing about the costume design in Heathers aside from its 80’s-ness has to be the use of colors. The five major characters each have a prominent color and by extension a certain emotion attached to them. Veronica is dressed in pure blue, the alpha Heather Chandler is dressed in power red, Heather McNamara in innocent yellow, Heather Duke in secondary green, and JD in evil black. One thing I love about this is that it shows character transitions at certain points in the film. After Heather Chandler is killed and taken out of the top of the high school hierarchy, Heather Duke stops wearing green and adopts the color of red in her wardrobe to signify her stepping into the role of the new Queen of the colony. The red hairband that she takes after Heather Chandler’s demise also represents a sort of crown for this role. This symbolism is further cemented when at the end of the film Veronica takes the hairband off Heather Duke and puts it on herself proclaiming that there’s a new sheriff in town.

The real staying-power of Heathers rests in the major themes that it tackles. Even though the script plays the movie up as more of a satire with how the high school faculty is represented in their reactions to the suicides, the major commentary on teenage suicide and toxic relationships carry heavy weight. It shows how peer pressure can carry a heavy influence on the major social groups in school, and how being an outcast from that group can cause major depression and lead to suicidal thoughts. The scene where Veronica stops Heather McNamara from committing suicide in the bathroom is the main showcase of this. It tackles the questions of why a teenager would feel that they have no choice but to commit suicide, and also why doing so would be stupid. We also see the outcasted Martha attempt to commit suicide, only to later reveal that she was unsuccessful in her attempt, which prompts Heather Duke to mock her even more for being a failure at that.

The relationship that starts between Veronica and JD is a textbook example of how one partner can have a toxic effect on the other, leading them both down a path of self-destruction. They practically beat you on the head with it as JD literally self-destructs at the end of the film. Veronica is ultimately saved by her rejection of JD and his codependent bullshit. She sees the futility of the path JD is taking and is doing her best to get away from it. JD lost the love of his mother when was young and shows his disconnect with his dad. He then shows a need for the love of Veronica and her acceptance of him with his views and choices. When she stops giving him both, that’s the trigger that leads him down his final path of self-destruction. It was only through the direct actions of Veronica that he is prevented from taking the rest of the school and the people that he hates with him.

There were originally several alternate endings for the film than the one they ultimately decided on. The original ending from scriptwriter David Waters had JD being successful in blowing up the entire school, and then ending the movie with everyone getting together in a sort of prom in heaven where everyone got along and accepted one another just as JD proclaimed while trying to blow up the school. When that was rejected for being too dark since they all died, the writer then had Martha stab Veronica when she was trying to make peace with her at the end, claiming that she is a Heather while Veronica is denying it. In the end, we ultimately got the ending that was used in the film when Martha accepted the peace offering, and the movie ends on a more upbeat and hopeful note.

The more upbeat ending was a good choice, since the cult following that would grow with the movie over time would eventually lead a successful stage musical adaptation in 2014. The musical is great at expanding on the themes from the movie, using the power of musical numbers to help highlight them. The great and iconic line of “I love my dead gay son” even gets its very own song. I recommend listening to the West End version of the show, since that version replaces one song with a better one and adds two of the best songs in the whole show. Musicals always have songs containing certain emotional themes and the “Fuck you” song is always my favorite song in any musical, and “I Say No” is the best “Fuck you” song from a musical that I’ve heard in a long while.

Heathers will always be a great movie and one of my favorites to rewatch. The themes contained within will continue to resonate with high schoolers today. While there are other high school movies made during the 80’s that teens can also identify with, none of them quite have the biting satire and dark themes that Heathers provides. For me, Heathers will always be the best high school movie of the 80’s.  

#heathers #grave cinema #review #video essay #high school #80's #winona ryder #christian slater #1989 #critique

[houseofvans]

ART SCHOOL | IN SESSION WITH ROB SATO

From vibrant rainbows to familiar yet alien landscapes occupied by strange beings, LA based artist Rob Sato’s works are filled with creative energy in a loose minimalistic style. From watercolor, digital medium to acrylics and oil, Rob’s artworks and illustrations have been shown in various galleries from Giant Robot 2 to the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, where recently his original paintings for a comic called 442 were exhibited. We’re excited to chat with Rob about his work, his various collaborations and what he’s got coming up for the rest of the year.  Take the Leap!

Photographs courtesy of the artist.

Introduce yourself Hello, my name is Rob Sato. I’m an artist, illustrator, and writer. Something people might not know about me is that I was a kid I was so fanatical about the Oakland A’s that when they lost in the World Series I threw a tantrum so big that I destroyed my bedroom and after that I felt so stupid I quit following baseball. Also, I’m told I have maybe one of the great poop stories of the world. It can only be related in person, so ask me about it sometime if we ever meet.

How would you describe your work and style? Eclectic? Kaleidoscopic? I’ve never had a concise answer to this question. I tend not to pin myself down because I think if I did, I’d stop making things. 

Art is my outlet for the cryptic and obscure as well as the gushing spillover of foolish idealism and wild fantasy. It’s the only place I’ve ever found where you can healthily play with unhealthy thoughts, where you can explore undefined emotions, things that lurk out in the corners of consciousness that may be embarrassing or uncontrollable.

I love to make entertainment and decorative work, things that tend to be obvious, that communicate very clearly and reveal all their cards, but I also love to make work that hides things, that actively resists easy understanding or recognition and risks being super personal or unrelatable and strange. This can make things difficult, especially in the ongoing deterioration of attention spans, but I can’t help but pursue things outside of a pop sensibility and logical thought. I have to be, much of the time, in mental wildernesses. It’s hard to get there, hard to be there, and hard to come back, but it keeps me going.

Tell us about how you really started getting into art, and how that turned into what you do now? Was it something you always intended to pursue? I’ve drawn every single day for as long as I can remember. I never really thought about it. It just seems to be what I do. It’s how I have fun, how I solve problems, how I think. I’ve wanted to pursue other things like make movies or write books, but I always find myself drawing. Before I know it, it’s time for bed again.

When you are working on a new piece or upcoming exhibition or show? What’s your process like? What themes do you find yourself taking on? I explode. I used to plan things in a very directed way, but lately I’ve just let my brains spill out everywhere. I make a ton of drawings and paintings, and try my best to be fearless and open. Most of it produces failure after failure, but it shows me what might be worth building on, plus many exciting surprises reveal themselves in the process. As a show nears I start seeing what things fit together, what needs to be edited out, and how it all might form a cohesive exhibition. Sometimes the subject matter is the glue that makes everything stick, other times it’s the aesthetics. Alongside the explosion I usually have 2 or 3 pieces going at any given time that I’ve had long term plans for. These pieces can take take months or even years. 

Thematically I’m all over the place. War and peace, realism and surrealism, grim realities and escapism, sober observations and dumb jokes.

What are some of your go-to art making materials? Are there mediums you want to explore that you’ve yet to get your hands on? I feel pretty comfortable with anything you can use to make a mark on a piece of paper. I’ve mainly used watercolor and various drawing tools for the past several years. I’m been having fun with acrylics and oils again, and I’ve started to play around with photography a little. I’ve had ideas for sculpture and film for years that I’d really like to finally get to. What I really want to get my hands on is more time.

Where do you find inspiration? What kind of things or people inspire what you make? Watching someone pick their nose listening to headphones and singing softly to themselves in line at the grocery store. Just watching my cat live her weird life. Even though the final artwork may not really show it, these places are usually where my ideas originate. Art has also been a place where I can put memories that have some abstract need to be recorded.

I made this series of drawings called “Bad Hands”, which started out with me laughing at these dumb hands I was drawing with academically incorrect anatomy. Abandoning correctness felt so good. In the process it triggered a memory from High School. I had been forbidden from drawing in one of my classes, so I was contorting my hands into different shapes at my desk to amuse myself. There was a hysteria over gang activity in the school at the time and the teacher freaked out thinking I was throwing gang signs and I ended up getting sent to detention. 

At detention I was talking with a friend and made fun of the teacher for her mistake. A kid who was in a gang overheard and then HE misunderstood and thought I was making fun of gangs or something. On my way home from school he and a couple dudes punched and kicked me for a bit while I tried and failed to explain. I think it’s funny. 

So embedded in that piece is this tumbling series of misunderstandings, these multiple layers of hands being perceived as bad, speaking in an absurd language that communicates different things to different people. I know people aren��t going to see all those layers in the final piece, but that’s where it comes from and I hope it at least sparks some thoughts about talking with our hands, and where else can you follow this kind of train of thought except in art?

I get inspired by artists who seem to approach art as an intuitive discovery process rather than a  pursuit of mastery, that play is one of the more important aspects of making things. My wife, Ako, has been a huge influence on me in this respect. She’s continuously playing with various materials around her at any given time and finding out what she can do with them. Everywhere she goes she abandons a nest made of fresh creations she’s manifested out of mud, string, packaging, plants, uneaten rice, her used drinking straw, lint and whatever else was within her reach

You’ve done a lot of collaborations with companies, museums and art galleries. Do you have a favorite collaboration, and what about the collaboration do you enjoy the most? I’ve recently been collaborating with Tiny Splendor, an indie publisher and printer who have studios in LA and Oakland. It’s been really great working with them, Cynthia Navarro in LA on risographs, and with Max Stadnik, who runs the print shop in Oakland. 

Max has been returning to lithography, my favorite traditional printing medium, and he printed a piece of mine inspired by mushrooms called “Growerings". It’s a full 5 color print, which means it took five separate plates and each print had to go through the press 5 times. It turned out more beautifully than I could have hoped for. Litho is a super difficult but also very fun process and the results are so rich. 

I think I particularly love this collaboration because the image fits the medium so well, and the combination of the two elevates the final piece of work, When it works, the artwork and the print become more than just an image on a piece of paper. It’s more alive in some undefinable way.

Since we’re called Art School, we always ask the artists to give us their favorite art tip? Never force the thing you think you want, you’ll probably miss out on the really interesting thing that’s happening. Also, don’t drink too much coffee. I have trouble taking both of these pieces of my own advice every day.

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not making stuff? How do you chill out? I read and run. I love coffee and I love gossip and talking nonsense with friends. Also, I cannot stop watching Terrace House.

What is the last art show that you went to? What artists should folks keep an eye out for? I recently went to the Velveteria in LA’s Chinatown, which is one man’s collection of paintings on velvet. A very entertaining and very fucked up experience. I went to a life drawing session at Subliminal Projects and got to draw surrounded by Chad Kouri’s fun abstracts. I’m actually typing this interview inside an art show right now. 

I’m here at my wife, Ako Castuera’s, show “Soil” at the Weingart Gallery at Occidental College. We’re here feeding worms. She sculpted this beautiful ceramic vermiculture composter for the show. It’s a grand temple for worms. The show is an act of gratitude for the exchange we have with the soil which provides the clay for ceramics, and for the worms who turn decay into healthy earth to grow new life in. 

She sculpted a menagerie of creatures out of the worm poop that also populate the show. Super fun. Speaking of Ako and Subliminal, her show there with Hellen Jo and Kris Chau this past December was one of those once-in-a-lifetime powerhouse gathering of forces. That may have been the best show I’ve ever seen.

What advice would you give someone thinking about following in your footsteps? What’s something you learned that you want to pass along to art making newbies. Don’t listen to advice if it is extremely quotable. Pay no attention to it especially if it accompanies a photo of a famous artist and fits perfectly into an instagram post. If it’s easy to remember then it’s probably empty, crap inspiration. Those things are entertainments and not words to live by.

 If you’re interested in making art you’ll keep making it. It takes day in, day out patience and exploration and mutation to discover how you really work, not some idea of how an artist works. 

Sometimes it will be very hard, sometimes it will be so breathtakingly easy you think that your problems have been solved forever. Neither situation ever lasts, but cultivate and nurture your curiosity and what you love, and you’ll find ways to make it through the rough times and keep on making things one way or another.

Who are some of your favorite artists to follow and/or see in a show? Lately I’ve been really enjoying the work of Nathaniel Russell whose work makes this great space where funny, grounded matter-of-factness and sweet nothingness sit comfortably together. His drawing also reminds me of Ben Shahn, my all-time favorite drawer. 

I really like Amy Bennet’s oils, these intimate studies of isolation in suburbia where mundanity overlaps with quiet drama and melancholy. Her work obliquely reminds me of Edwin Ushiro’s work, though his stuff is the opposite of melancholic. He captures almost incidental but haunted moments from growing up in Hawaii and infuses them with warmth, and it’s in a style influenced in a super personal way by animation. It reminds me of Satoshi Kon’s movies in its well observed, slice-of-life elements. Edwin’s sketchbooks are a treasure too.  Esther Pearl Watson’s recent autobiographical paintings, Hellen Jo’s latest badass watercolors, Amber Wellman’s funny, playful oil paintings, and Matthew Palladino’s watercolors are also favorites. 

Megan Whitmarsh’s work is some of my favorite to see in person. Her installation with Jade Gordon at the Hammer’s “Made In LA “ show was maybe the funnest work I’ve ever seen and interacted with. I went to see the Ai Wei Wei show at the Marciano Foundation, which I thought was impressive in scale and execution but still somehow lame, but I stumbled on a Mike Kelley installation/ video piece I’d never seen before in the upstairs collection and loved it so much, but I can’t remember the name of it at the moment. 

It’s 2 videos shown side by side of the same guy wearing a cape singing almost the same song simultaneously, but each version has different words at different points. It’s a love song but one version is more bitter and mean and one is sickly sweet. Anyway, highly recommended!

What do you have coming up the rest of the year that you can share with us?  For just a few more days there’s a show up at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center with a bunch of my original paintings for a comic I illustrated about the 442, the Japanese American Army unit of World War II. Plus it has some personal work about Japanese American Incarceration and images from my family’s experience in the concentration camps. My grandfather was incarcerated in the Arkansas camps, and he was a soldier in the 442. 

Next up, I’m in a slew of group shows all happening within a few weeks of each other this month. Poor scheduling on my part as usual, but it’s nice to be invited to so many. I just sent off my piece to the “Seeing Red” show curated by Jeff Hamada of the BOOOOOOOM art and culture blog. That show will be at Thinkspace in LA. Giant Robot has been kind enough to host another solo show for me in September. 

I’ve been busy experimenting with some more 3d stuff that pushes the more narrative side of my work which I hope to show there. We’ll see how the experiments turn out. I’ve also been working on a ton of prints and ideas for books. This year I want to focus on working in print, making zines and comics, and writing a lot more. 

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[willgetback]

Non-radial Ejecta Morphologies of Martian Craters and their correlation with Latidudinal-Longitudinal Values

Week 1 Assignment for: https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-visualization/home/welcome Since I am a Humanities scholar and used to be an Engineering graduate, I wanted to pick a currently unfamiliar and challenging dataset to get a fresh start to this assignment, so I picked the Mars Craters Dataset (it also tickled the fancy of the nerd in me). I wanted to 'come in from the cold' to learning data management, so to say (that tickled the fancy of the masochist in me). My research discipline is Visual Studies (currently studying the online visual culture of Indian queer men) and I am a visually inclined person, so the Martian craters with non-standard shapes (those which are other than round) attracted my attention right away. After I read through pp. 53-62 of the source thesis to understand the terminologies of the data set, I had to change my mind about my consideration set. For the creator of the dataset (and his scientific discipline), more than the shapes of the craters (MORPHOLOGY), the shapes of the 'splash' (EJECTA) created around the craters post-impact, are far more important. So I decided to concentrate on the column G titled 'MORPHOLOGY_EJECTA_1' of the Mars Craters Dataset and only those entries which are non-empty and non-Rd (Rd = Radial, the standard round 'splash' or Ejecta). I picked a random research question (akin to a self-assigned wild goose chase) that whether these selected craters (with non-standard, non-radial ejecta) have a certain distribution pattern across the Martian surface. Are their non-standard morphologies and their latitudinal-longitudinal values correlated somehow? The hypothesis, as of now, simply is, there IS a correlation (the nature would be worked on later). So I highlighted my considered data sets in my personal codebook accordingly (figuring out how to highlight took me quite a while though) and am yet to figure out my way around Google Spreadsheets (looking up Youtube tutorials about Macros and plug-ins constantly as I progress). Coming to the selection of existing literature review, I have zero-ed in on the following: 1. https://books.google.co.in/books?id=QMwt9iaYA9gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false 2. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1987mgsv.conf...28K 3. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(83)90125-2 4. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(76)90166-4 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/0019-1035(90)90026-6 6. https://doi.org/10.1029/1998GL900177 7. https://doi.org/10.1029/2000GL012804 8. https://doi.org/10.1029/JS082i028p04055 The short summaries of their answers by these literature of my research question is  as below: 1. The latitudinal-longitudinal values of a location is correlated to the hydrothermal conditions of Martian surface which in turn is corelated with crater ejecta morphologies. In layperson's terms, how the 'splash' looks depends on how dry / wet the surface is, not just with what kind of metor is impacting the surface or what kind of 'subsurface volatiles' are present on the impacted surface. 2. “Johansen reports observations indicating that the morphology of Martian rampart crater ejecta varies considerably with latitude. She finds that Martian rampart craters can generally be classified into two major descriptive types. The predominantly low latitude "water-type" ejecta morphology typically includes a sharp ejecta flow-front ridge and a highly crenulated, lobate flow-front perimeter; the higher latitude "icy-type" ejecta morphology lacks a sharp distal ridge and has a more circular perimeter. On the other hand, Mouginis-Mark- concludes that no correlation of rampart ejecta morphology with latitude exists if one excludes his "type 6" pedestal craters. These contrary conclusions are each based on global surveys of Martian rampart craters using two different qualitative ejecta morphology classifications. This study is intended to approach this controversy in a more quantitative way.” 3. “It is suggested that target water explosively vaporized during impact alters initial ballistic trajectories of ejecta and produces surging flow emplacement. The dispersal of particulates during a series of controlled steam explosions generated by interaction of a thermite melt with water has been experimentally modeled.” 4. didn't have any directly quotable evidences for my hypothesis, as far as my ruimentary comprehension goes. 5. “The results of the analyses indicate that changes in ejecta and interior morphology correlate with increases in crater diameter. Excavation depths corresponding to these diameters are calculated from depth-diameter relationships and are compared to the theoretical distribution of subsurface volatiles. The different ejecta morphologies can be described by impact into material with varying proportions of volatiles, and the latidudinal variations seen for rampart crater morphologies correlate well with the proposed latitude-depth relationship for ice and brines across the planet. Many of the interior structres show distributions indicative of terrain-dependent influences: for example, the concentrations of central pit craters around ancient impact basins and on Alba Patera suggest that volatiles preferentially collect in these areas. However, central peak and peak ring interior morphologies show little relationship to planetary properties and probably result from changes in impact energy. Thus, many of the unique morphologies associated with Martian impact craters result from the presence of subsurface volatiles.” 6. didn't have any directly quotable evidences for my hypothesis, as far as my ruimentary comprehension goes. 7. The crater evidence therefore suggests the presence of a large ground water reservoir capped by a relatively shallow layer of ice in Solis and Thaumasia Planae. Heat associated with Tharsis may have maintained deep volatiles as liquid for a longer time period than elsewhere in the martian equatokial region. The geologic evolution of Tharsis helps explain the concentration of such a large reservoir of volatiles in Solis and Thaumasia Planae. 8. “Several types of Martian impact craters have been recognized. The most common type, the rampart crater, is distinctively different from lunar and Mercurian craters. It is typically surrounded by several layers of ejecta, each having a low ridge or escarpment at its outer edge. Outward flow of ejecta along the ground after ballistic deposition is suggested by flow lines around obstacles, the absence of ejecta on top and on the lee side of obstacles, and the large radial distance to which continuous ejecta is found. The peculiar flow characteristics of the ejecta around these craters are tentatively attributed to entrained gases or to contained water, either liquid or vapor, in the ejecta as a result of impact melting of ground ice. Ejecta of other craters lacks flow features but has a marked radial pattern; ejecta of still other craters has patterns that resemble those around lunar and Mercurian craters. The internal features of Martian craters, in general, resemble their lunar and Mercurian counterparts except that the transition from bowl shaped to flat floored takes place at about 5‐km diameter, a smaller size than is true for Mercury or the moon.” So a rough and ready hypotheis by a non-expert is: 'weird' ejecta shape is dependent of latitude and longitude as latitude and longitude are related to groundwater and ground ice locations which in turn determine the dryness, wetness and hardness of the ground waiting for the meteor visit and then the 'splash' happens.

[amphtaminedreams]

50 Films You’ve Got to Watch

Hi to anyone who’s reading,

I thought I’d take a break from the fashion posts to ramble on about something else that I’m really interested in for a hot minute. And I say ramble with intent, because I do go ON. 

The topic is film and I thought that I’d make a list of my 50 must watches. These are movies that I feel had the biggest impact on me which means, yes, I do have tattoos referring to a couple of them, lol. My genre of choice is usually horror and although there has been a bit of a “horror renaissance” and a shift towards prioritising good quality storylines over jump scares in recent years, on the whole, they typically aren’t the most highbrow films out there, so there aren’t THAT many on this list. Most of the horror films I listed are just genuinely good quality rather than a straight-up gorefest or anything too terrifying, however, I’m not that easily scared so if you did fancy watching any of the films I mentioned, take that with a slight pinch of salt!

Also, this isn’t anything to take too seriously. I really like movies and cinema but I’m also not a movie critic and this is more of a hobby than something I want to pursue. Like, I’m completely aware of how unrealistic working in TV or film is as a career if your family isn’t loaded. Very aware. Painfully aware you could say (imagine me sighing as I’m writing this). That being said, part of me does want to do a ranking of every film I’ve seen in 2019 at some point this year, so if anybody else is interested in this kinda thing let me know! 

Lauren x

50 Films You’ve Got to Watch:

1. Black Swan (2010)

“I felt it. Perfect. It was perfect.”

I watched Black Swan years ago now and I still remember how disturbing I found it and how exciting that was to me. I was probably a bit too young (young enough that my mum felt it necessary to cover my eyes during the Natalie Portman/Mila Kunis sex scene, lol) but even then I could recognise that it was a beautifully haunting film and Darren Aronofsky has gone on to be one of my favourite directors.

2. Jennifer’s Body (2009)

“And now, I'm eating your boyfriend. See? At least I'm consistent.”

Engrave it on my tombstone: JENNIFER’S BODY DESERVED BETTER. I fully believe that if this movie was released in 2019, it wouldn’t have faced half the criticisms it did back in 2009. It genuinely was ahead of its time. Megan Fox? As a boy-eating, demonic cheerleader? And Amanda Seyfried? Some of the most ICONIC DIALOGUE EVER? It should’ve invented a GENRE. Instead it got paid DUST. Yes, when I write in caps lock, my internal voice is YELLING. I feel passionately about this, okay?!

3. La La Land (2016)

“I guess I'll see you in the movies.”

Again, maybe it’s a basic film bitch opinion to have but I adored La La Land. I saw it at the cinema and spent the last 20 minutes of the film sobbing, only to find my mum and sister distinctly underwhelmed. I indignantly ranted back then to them how perfect a film it was and I’m going to do the same thing now so if you are reading and you didn’t like it, then you should probably just move on because I wouldn’t want to read myself banging on about Emma Stone again for several paragraphs either (don’t worry, I’ll try and keep it to one). I can’t help it. This film was just TOO REAL! Like, in every way but the actual plot and characters, La La Land has the dreamlike quality of a fairytale. The colours are rich and thick and always complimentary, the musical sequences are either like Disney songs or lullabies, and Emma and Ryan Gosling are made for each other. But then life and ambitions and resentments get in the way. And that’s the real part! That’s why it’s so bloody good! 

4. Easy A (2010)

“People thought I was a dirty skank? Fine. I’d be the dirtiest skank they’d ever seen.”

And so we arrive at the movie that actually began my love affair with Emma Stone. Iconic. Iconic in every way. The bad reputation montage is cinematic excellence. For real, though, this is so underrated as a coming of age movie. Like don’t get me wrong, Mean Girls is everything (I easily could’ve included it on this list but I feel like it’s just a given that anyone who grew up in the noughties loves that film) but Easy A deserves just as much credit. It has Penn Badgley, one of the few celebrity males I care about! Amanda Bynes! Aly Michalka! Lisa Kudrow! Did I mention Emma Stone?

5. Kill Bill (2003)

“Now, if any of you sons of bitches got anything else to say, now's the fucking time!”

If I had to put any of these films as my singular favourite, it would probably be the first Kill Bill. Controversial, I know; even my dad introduced it to me as the weaker of the two. To list any Quentin Tarantino movie as the one that inspired you to want to be a director is probably a very cliche film student thing to say BUT I’m not a film student and I’ve put my directing pipe dream permanently to one side, thus, coming from me it’s not as hackneyed a statement. Or so I tell myself, lol. Basically, I was in awe of Kill Bill from start to finish. The colourisation is a dream, from the crazy 88 scene to the final fight between The Bridge and O Ren Ishii, and I particularly remember loving the animation sequence despite that not really being my kinda thing. I was just so impressed with how seamlessly something so out of place, considering the live action format of the rest of the film, fit in with everything else; even the scenes that should be absurd instead work with the comic book style narrative. Uma Thurman is of course amazing and iconic af but Lucy Liu as O Ren Ishii is my favourite thing about this film and the line I chose gave me all the bad bitch energy I need to, I think, get me through the rest of my time on this planet. If not, the tattooed version of this still I have on my arm should hopefully do the job. Yep, I truly ascended to a divine level of basic film hoe with that life choice.

6. Marie Antoinette (2006)

“This, Madame, is Versailles.”

The first Sofia Coppola film on this list, I love this woman’s work to death. Regardless of the content she’s working with, the end result always gives me the feeling I’m watching an extended music video. They always have this almost dreamlike quality to them and everything from the colour palette to the camera movements to the soundtrack in Marie Antoinette is tied together perfectly.

7. Mother! (2017)

“You never loved me. You just loved how much I loved you.”

I was tense throughout the entirety of Mother. As a socially anxious, obsessively tidy control freak, this whole film was like something from one of my nightmares; think unwanted house party on crack. I was mentally screaming along with Jennifer Lawrence for all of those people to get out, whilst simultaneously just staring at her face because she is so fucking gorgeous! Even when she’s completely lost it! Totally unrealistic but it makes for some really pretty shots! And then there’s the ending which left me kind of like “what the fuck did I just watch?” Which is what Darren Aronofsky films do best. They’re terrifying but also quite beautiful and Mother is no exception.

8. Gerald’s Game (2017)

“Everybody's got a little corner in there somewhere. A button they won't admit they want pressed.”

I finally got round to watching this for the first time the other day and I absolutely loved it. It probably helps that the last Stephen King adaptation I saw was Pet Sematary, so despite the praise this got at the time, my expectations weren’t super high, but I think this really is a perfect horror film. It’s clever, doesn’t rely on jump scares, and the creepy scenes that are in there really get under your skin. It drags a little in the middle though it’s beautifully shot, acted and has one of the few “body horror” scenes in a horror that’s actually made me cringe.

9. A Beautiful Mind (2001)

“I think that's what it's like with all our dreams and our nightmares, Martin, we've got to keep feeding them for them to stay alive.”

I don’t want to say too much about this film and spoil the plot, so I’ll just say that it’s incredible. Devastatingly sad but also wonderfully hopeful at the same time, and solidified my interest in psychology! I could watch Jennifer Connelly all day.

10. Alien (1979)

“This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”

As a horror fan, I don’t think I need to explain why this film’s on the list. It’s been raved about and video essayed and called a pioneer of the genre ad nauseam. Again, not that this is really anything new but part of what I love about this movie is the context of its release and success; before Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ellen Ripley, it was a rare occurrence to have a female protagonist in an action-based movie. Alien really paved the way for women to take up space in a previously male-dominated genre.

11. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

“Crazy is building your ark after the flood has already come.”

I saw this for the first time at the cinema and pretty much went in blind. I hadn’t seen Cloverfield but I love Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Final Destination 3 was always my favourite of the franchise, lol) and there wasn’t really anything else on worth seeing, so my sister and I chose this and it was an experience. Like, of all the films on this list, this is probably the one that had me most on edge and I’m not sure watching it on your laptop on Putlocker will do it justice. You need the curtains pulled to, the volume way up and complete silence.

12. American Psycho (2000)

“Try getting a reservation at Dorsia now, you fucking stupid bastard!”

There isn’t a dull moment in American Psycho. Every line is quotable and every scene is straight to the point. I feel like this film is a masterclass in that Stanley Kubrick quote about editing where he says he liked to get rid of everything that was not absolutely vital to advancing the plot or the audience’s understanding of the character in any way. Plus, the ending is trippy af! Or maybe I’m just a bit oblivious to something that was quite obvious throughout, who knows. Either way, what the final scenes really mean are fun to think about.

13. The Descent (2005)

“I'm an English teacher, not fucking Tomb Raider.”

Okay, so I literally just watched this the other day and had to begrudgingly remove Silent Hill to make space for it (I KNOW it was critically panned and I KNOW the video game is better but I liked the visuals, OKAY!?) because The Descent is truly one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen. Before we even get to the supernatural element of the creatures, which are genuinely creepy for once, there’s a party bag of other phobia-inducing sequences that had me emotionally exhausted within the first half hour alone. Claustrophobia, darkness, heights, actual cringeworthy body horror, The Descent has something for everyone. The way it utilises space (or lack of for that matter) and darkness and panicked camera pans makes you feel as if you are really down in the cave with the characters. To add to that, I was actually rooting for all of them too; it probably helped that they were English rather than the typical American slasher cast but I found them to be a believable and likeable group of women. I truly did want them all to get out alive *spoilers*, which only made the ending all the more devastating and although the general narrative is quite predictable, the way in which things get wrapped up left just the right amount of shocks and questions to leave you reeling.

14. Eighth Grade (2018)

“Gucci.”

No film has ever captured what it’s like having social anxiety during “high school” (it’s called secondary school here in England, I know, but you get me) better than Eighth Grade. A tribute to the feeling of never quite fitting in and wishing you knew how to do what everyone else seems to be able to do naturally, it encapsulates that awkwardness with an accuracy that is really impressive considering that 1. it’s Bo Burnham’s first film, and 2. he’s not...like...a 13 year old girl. It is just as funny as it is sad and Elsie Fisher is great and so, so believable. Girl should’ve won some kind of Oscar.

15. American Beauty (1999)

“I don't think that there's anything worse than being ordinary.”

I wavered on whether or not to include this film on the list due to the Kevin Spacey controversy and decided that I had to with the disclaimer that I watched it quite some time before the stories about him came out and won’t ever watch any of the new things he inevitably ends up doing (because Hollywood has a notoriously short memory when it comes to the actions of disgraced male actors, lol). You can’t deny the amount of talent and skill that went into making a film so graceful and elegant and yet in equal parts unnerving, and I don’t think we should refuse to acknowledge the achievements of everyone else on that set because of Spacey’s behaviour. 

16. Bandersnatch (2018)

“The past is immutable, Stefan. No matter how painful it is, we can't change things. We can't choose differently with hindsight. We all have to learn to accept that.”

As I was watching/playing through Bandersnatch, I didn’t necessarily love it. I think I’m echoing a common sentiment when I say that I was kinda confused. I was desperately trying to *spoiler* avoid the option of the protagonist murdering their dad (he seemed like a nice guy!?) but somehow always ended up there by their logic. So I watched most of the endings and then I went on and busied myself for the rest of the evening. AND I COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. One minute I was completely deluding myself into believing the whole parallel universes thing was true and that I should test it out (don’t ask), and then the next I was thinking how disturbing it was that we’d been basically been inside the head of a person experiencing a mental breakdown severe enough for them murdering their dad, who had only ever wanted to help when you think about it objectively, to seem rational. The confusion started making sense within the context of the experience of the protagonist and our role as the audience and though I hadn’t realised it at the time, I’d been completely absorbed in the episode. Maybe the confusion wasn’t intentional, maybe I’m giving Charlie Brooker too much credit based on the recent couple of series of Black Mirror BUT I can’t deny that Bandersnatch left a huge mark on me, and after all, this is the man who wrote White Christmas. 

17. Get Out (2017)

“White girls. They get you every time.”

Going into this film, I was cocky. I’ve gotten pretty good at predicting what’s going to happen in things, probably just because I watch too much TV, but from the trailer I was sure I knew exactly what was going to happen. And then, I was completely blown away. The ending was SO SMART, in terms of both the within universe storytelling and also the metaphorical narrative/commentary on the way our society treats black men and women. Like those early episodes of Black Mirror, it had me like “how the fuck did Jordan Peele think of that!?”. I can only dream of being as creative in my writing one day. Even little plot points like where the “police” car turns up at the end and your stomach sinks and you realise the intention of that is most likely to help you empathise with what the average African-American person feels in their day to day life when police make themselves present, what with institutional police brutality and racial profiling; it’s clear so much thought went into this script.

18. Ghost Stories (2017)

“It's funny, isn't it? How it's always the last key that unlocks everything.”

I don’t have all too much to say about this one apart from that I love a well-constructed English horror. I feel like it’s something we don’t do all too often and to be honest, I’m struggling to think of many English horror films in the first place. Ghost Stories is a great example of why we need more; it’s smart and spooky and folky without hitting you over the head with all those elements and Andy Nyman is a perfect lead. Love a bit of Martin Freeman too.

19. Girl, Interrupted (1999)

“Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's you, or me, amplified.”

Maybe this is the 13 year old black and white Tumblr girl in me jumping out but I still adore this film. I know it’s not necessarily the most critically well received but Winona Ryder, Angelina Jolie and Brittany Murphy are 3 of my favourite actresses and I do love the script. I also like the way that Borderline Personality Disorder was characterised in Winona’s character Susanna (I’m wavering on whether to call her a character as if I recall correctly the book was based on the author’s real experience) in that it was quite subtle and that she wasn’t portrayed as manipulative, or aggressive or basically, as the villain, which I feel is usually the go-to. It focussed more on the mood aspects and the way that people with BPD tend to latch onto and idealise others, as Susanna does with Lisa, and these are both things that I have personally struggled with in the past.

20. Hereditary (2018)

“All I do is worry and slave and defend you, and all I get back is that fucking face on your face!”

It was hard to find a quote that encapsulated what makes Hereditary so great because so much of it is about what isn’t said, if that makes sense. It’s a lot of pained silences and resentful looks and horrified screams, and doesn’t that sound like a fun time? Honestly, it’s not necessarily, lmao. Shocker. It has you feeling like something awful is about to happen the whole time, deep in the pit of your stomach, but I like that in a film, when it does make you properly feel. Ari Aster gets slow-burning dread just right in his exploration of dysfunctional families and grudges, with a few heart-sinking shocks thrown in for good measure all without overdoing the jump scares. There are a lot of deeply unnerving “supernatural” moments but there are just as many horrifically realistic familial conflict scenes that give you that whole “something is wrong” gut instinct in equal measures. It’s been a year and I’m still so angry that Toni Collette didn’t get an Oscar nomination for her performance, because it was really the perfect opportunity to break down the invisible wall between horror and critical recognition. On a more positive note, I loved Midsommar too (not as much as Hereditary but it was still a trip) and I cannot wait to see what Ari Aster does next. Once again, I’ll be in the cinema on opening night.

21. Heathers (1988)

“Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.”

Heathers is iconic in every way: the outfits, the cast, the lines. I mean, the acting can be a bit iffy at times but I honestly think that without Heathers, Jennifer’s Body might never have existed and that’s a world I wouldn’t want to live in. There was so much choice when I was picking a line to summarise why I like it so much and of course, “fuck me gently with a chain saw, do I look like Mother Theresa?” deserves an honourable mention. You almost made it bby. The TV remake? We don’t speak of it.

22. Hot Fuzz (2007)

“The way we see it, it’s all for the greater good.”

It might not be the “artiest” movie ever but I’ve seen Hot Fuzz so many times and it never gets old. Though I used to love it when I was younger purely for the PG-13 gore, now I appreciate it for the absurdity and the ridiculousness and to be honest, the total believability of the plot when it comes to towns ruled by low-key hostile, doddery old white people. I should know, I live in one.

23. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

“You probably heard we ain't in the prisoner-takin' business. We in the killin' Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’.”

I wish I wasn’t a hoe for Quentin Tarantino films (I’ve felt personally attacked by many a poundlandbandit starter pack) but I am. The breakneck pacing, the tongue in cheek dialogue and the gore all make this one of my ultimate favourites. Also, I have a huge crush on Melanie Laurent. Yes, it’s the French accent. No, I don’t know the mechanics of how that works. I hear someone speak French and I want to marry them! I can’t help it!

24. Ingrid Goes West (2017)

“Are you actually insane?”

This seems like a random choice to have on the list seeing as it was never really that hyped up, nor did it receive masses of critical acclaim. It did get positive reviews but that was about it. However, as soon as I saw the trailer, I knew I had to see it. Months, and an £8 purchase from HMV later, I finally got to watch Ingrid Goes West and I loved every moment of it. Whilst Aubrey Plaza’s character, I feel, is an exploration of a lot of young women’s insecurities and self-doubts and fears, blown up to monstrous proportions (or maybe just mine, lol), and a 90 minute film about that doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, this one is as intense as it is stylish and darkly comedic and that’s what puts it on the map for me. 

25. Insidious (2011)

“I like to call them travellers.”

So this film scared the ever-living SHIT out of me when I was younger and though I now consider horror my favourite genre and watch it on the regular with absolutely no qualms, 13 year old me was (not to use the world lightly) mildly traumatised. I genuinely couldn’t be home alone by myself or sleep at night without thinking the old woman ghost from the beginning was outside my room for a good 6 months or so. Like it literally exacerbated an already present sleep disorder to the point where my understandably frustrated-at-being-woken-up-nightly-by-her-panicking-daughter mother got me referred for CBT (to reflect on a time when I didn’t know what CBT or CAMHS was is…blissful, lol). And maybe because of that, in my mind, I still conceptualise it as one of the very few horror movies that has actually scared me, hence its place on the list. That scene where we first see that Star Wars looking red faced devil? I’d probably still nope out even now.

26. It Follows (2014)

“It could look like someone you know or it could be a stranger in a crowd. Whatever helps it get close to you.”

There’s not too much to say about It Follows, other than that it’s a good horror film and more importantly just a really good film. I feel it’s a crucial, early part of this warmly welcomed horror renaissance we are now fully in the thick of where writers are focussing less on making people gasp and more on actual good quality cinema. It’s a simple concept that leaves enough room for you to ask your own questions whilst still feeling somewhat complete, and not annoyingly open-ended. The shots are good, the characters are normal enough to be believable, and the colour palette is Fincher-esque; the muted tones perfectly complement the feelings of dread that run throughout. Whilst you don’t need to be concerned with what the whole thing is a metaphor of in order to enjoy the film, the possibility of there being that second reading of the narrative, for me, elevate it to a higher level. In other words, it’s got *Shrek voice* layers.

27. Juno (2007)

“I'm just gonna go ahead and nip this thing in the bud. Cuz you know, they say pregnancy often leads to…you know...an infant.”

I love Ellen Page. I love Michael Cera. Together they are the best thing ever. See, I’m not really much of a rom-com girl but I see this as less of a rom-com and more of a coming of age film with romantic snippets and great one liners. It’s sweet and whimsical and funny but also really fucking real in parts, and it’s definitely what I would consider a modern classic. If you haven’t watched it already, do!

28. Suspiria (2018)

“Love and manipulation, they share houses very often. They are frequent bedfellows.”

Witches! Ballet dancing! Decapitation! Tilda Swinton! What’s not to love? As soon as I saw the trailer for Suspiria, I knew I had to see it. Creepy but also beautifully shot and scored, it was worth the 8 month wait from the Venice Film Festival and eventual caving and watching on 123Movies after I couldn’t find the DVD on Amazon; I finally got to tick it off my watch list only to like it so much I had to add the original Suspiria back on.

29. Mulholland Drive (2001)

“I hope that I never see that face, ever, outside of a dream.”

Another film which had me like WTF by the end, I really recommend Mulholland Drive for anyone who wants to be vaguely creeped out and extremely confused at the same time. See, I really love a film where you spend the next few hours after watching researching all the different interpretations and reading interviews with the director. That sounds sarcastic, but honestly, I love it. It’s a moody, film-noir style mindfuck of a movie and even after doing my research I’m still quite baffled. That’s the best part. 

30. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

“Purple in the morning, blue in the afternoon, orange in the evening.”

It took me a while to get on board with seeing Marlon Wayans in a serious role (I’ve seen White Chicks far too many times, clearly), but once I did, I was into it. To be totally honest, I don’t think there’s a single happy moment in this film; it comes up quite frequently as one of the most disturbing of all time, which I’m sure Aronofsky probably thinks of as another notch on his belt. Whilst imo, that’s quite a grandiose claim, Requiem for a Dream definitely stuck in my mind after I watched it. Even if you’ve never watched the film, the ending sequence is notorious for how fucked up it is and I do think it’s earned the infamy. What stuck out more to me, though, was how purposeful every shot and sequence felt in terms of trying to let you into the character’s states of mind, the short lived bursts of euphoria and the panicked downwards spirals.  I think it will always be one of the most compelling films about addiction for highlighting how terrifyingly out of one’s control it can be.  

31. Room (2015)

“No one is strong alone.”

This film made me cry buckets. Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay are wonderful, and everyone involved deserved all the Oscar hype. Every line was so heartfelt and emotive, and I loved Tremblay’s voiceovers. To translate the stream of consciousness of a kid from page to screen in a way that it remains believable in spite of its wisdom (not like those tweets where people try to make out their kid just casually made some off the cuff scathing political jibe at the dinner table) is quite the feat and similarly, I’m in awe of how the director managed to communicate the pain and confusion of the characters on a level that transcended the physical confines of said room. The escape scene had my heart in my mouth. All this being said, I should really read the book because it’s supposed to be even better. 

32. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

‘When I'm around you, I kind of feel like I'm on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time. All of them.”

Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are two of my favourite actors and so it’s a given that Scott Pilgrim is one of my favourite films. It’s such a fun, easy watch and the video-game inspired directorial style makes it, in terms of cinematography, probably the most memorable Edgar Wright film on this list imo. The concept, based on the graphic novel, is quite a simple one but that doesn’t stop it being entertaining from start to finish. The rest of the cast is great too: Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Mae Whitman, Aubrey Plaza and Alison Pill (Ivy from American Horror Story, anyone?) All make appearances, plus Chris Evans. He’s Captain America or something, right?

33. Scream (1996)

“No, please don't kill me, Mr. Ghostface, I wanna be in the sequel!”

The Scream movies were my absolute favourite when I was just getting into “horror” as a 13/14 year old because they were always pretty tame in terms of scares but nonetheless, always a trip. Though, controversially, I’d probably say I enjoyed Scream 4 just as much as the first one (I am a bit of an Emma Roberts stan), I chose the first one purely for how iconic it was and how ahead of its time. It mixed satire and horror in a way that hadn’t really been done in such a mainstream way before and made it possible for films like Cabin in the Woods and The Final Girls to do so well.

34. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

“Take car. Go to Mum's. Kill Phil, sorry, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over.”

I’ve seen Shaun of the Dead way, way, way too many times and I’ll still probably watch it again the next time ITV decide to show it too. It makes me laugh, it’s got lots of good gore and it’s easy to follow. The perfect film to put on whilst eating a take away, as long as you’re not too squeamish, lol.

35. Silence of the Lambs (1991)

“Well, Clarice. Have the lambs stopped screaming?”

Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Clarice Starling makes her one of my favourite movie heroines of all time; quietly courageous, she was the type of female lead that really hadn’t cropped up all that much in the films that came before Silence of the Lambs. And despite its problematic handling of certain issues, it’s a fucking incredible film. The thing about Hannibal Lecter is that they don’t have to tell you that he’s always one step ahead, you see it for yourself (the elevator scene!) and so it kinda feels like he’s looking into YOUR soul too. The confrontation at the end between Clarice and Buffalo Bill is one of the most nerve-racking 15 minutes or so of film I’ve ever watched, and if I ever get asked to justify why I’m scared of the dark again, I’m going to point straight to this scene. Yes, I’m a baby but my fears are VALID!

36. Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

“I do this! Time after time after time! I do all this shit for other people! And then I wake up and I'm empty! I have nothing!”

As you can probably tell from my inclusion of Mother! on this list, I love Jennifer Lawrence, and this is probably my favourite drama film of hers. The way that she and Bradley Cooper portray two people struggling with mental illness is refreshingly honest in that it shows it can make you quite an unlikeable person at times, albeit someone who is just trying their best to survive. That being said, in spite of the subject matter it’s still a relatively light and easy-to-watch film. The diner scene in particular is a masterclass in realistic conflict and reaction, and I hate to be “ooo, edgy” but several of the lines did strike a really deep chord.

37. The Babadook (2014)

“Sometimes I just want to smash your head against the brick wall until your fucking brains pop out.”

The best thing that the Babadook does, much like It Follows, is instils a sense of deep seated dread in you before you even see the supernatural forces at work. The washed out colour palette, apparent emotional disconnect of Jennifer Kent’s (who also directs!) character, and the disorienting movements of the camera all help to create a lingering unease that is just as effective as the grossly uncanny appearance of the monster/ghost/creature/whatever-you-want-to-call-it himself. It’s obvious that Kent had a very clear vision of the story she wanted to tell and even more so that she is a very talented woman; I hope to see even more female directed horror films in the future if the Babadook is anything to go by. The way this film blurred the lines between the inner struggles of a grieving family and the outside supposedly paranormal influence was unsettling as fuck and to get into the psychology of a mother left on her own to raise a small child and how terrifying that might feel is something only a immensely intuitive and empathetic woman could do. Props to her.

38. The Craft (1996)

“We are the weirdos, mister.”

Not to sound all halloween-is-the-only-day-of-the-year-I-care-about VSCO girl (although that might actually be quite an accurate description of me to be honest), but if there’s one thing that sticks in my mind about the craft, it’s the aesthetic. It’s kind of what I aim to emulate in every aspect of my life, NBD. Seriously, when I was trying to pick a still, I was spoilt for choice. The rituals, the outfits, the witchy interiors; there’s this one GIF of Nancy, Rochelle, Bonnie (and maybe Sarah?) lighting all these gorgeous candles and if I could walk around with it permanently looping on my forehead, I would. And ignoring my shallow reasons for liking The Craft, it’s just a really good film. Nancy Downs is probably one of the most interesting female villains of all time and I’m obsessed with anything that explores magic and the occult. It’s equal parts dark and girly, not to use that in a derivative way at all, in that not only does it teeter on the line of being scary, it’s also a gritty exploration of female friendship, power and jealousy. If you are a halloween-is-the-only-day-of-the-year-I-care-about VSCO girl, definitely watch it; more power to you.

39. The Favourite (2018)

“All I know is, your carriage awaits and my maid is on her way up with something called a pineapple.”

I’d seen The Favourite twice within, like, a month of it being released in British cinemas and I do not have a single regret about that; well, maybe a minor regret in paying over £12 to see it in the Leicester Square Odeon with the assumption that the extra price meant fancy seats (it didn’t), but on the whole, I’m pretty happy with my life choices. Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, and the period Mean Girls comparison drew me in but I came back the second time for the costumes, the dialogue, the editing and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Or Rachel Weiss, in other words. See, The Favourite is superbly casted in that Yorgos Lanthimos must have known we can’t help but see Emma Stone as the “good girl”/protagonist and so it took me a whole second viewing to see her character for what she really was, and realise The Favourite is in some ways less a story of Abigail Masham’s rise to power and more the tragic disintegration of Sarah and Anne’s relationship. I’m sure you can view the film both ways but to view it as the latter brings a whole new dimension to it and the ending, imo. I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t go into the film expecting some vaguely historical lesbianism and that definitely made for a slightly awkward birthday viewing with my family BUT I wasn’t at all disappointed.

40. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)

“If you dig a hole in the yard, better make it a big one.”

This film is slow-moving, weird and the acting can be stiff at the best of times, and yet somehow all these things add to the (take a shot every time I say-) dread that builds throughout. You don’t know exactly how things are going to end, but you do know it’s not well. Like in his latest directorial entry of The Favourite, Yorgos Lanthimos excels in the realm of the strange and vaguely fantastical through his script, score and cinematography, and so even though the settings are quite mundane, The Killing of a Sacred Deer kind of feels like some macabre modern fairytale, the moral of which I can’t quite work out. I can’t imagine anyone playing Martin more unnervingly than Barry Keoghan and I’m never going to complain about Nicole Kidman, but it’s the imagery of the tears of blood, Steven’s children dragging themselves along the floor and the ending scene that stuck with me long after the film had finished. If you’ve got the patience and you enjoyed the style of The Favourite, there’ll definitely be something positive for you to take away from The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

41. The Orphanage (2007)

“Seeing is not believing. It's the other way around. Believe, and you will see.”

When I was first told by my year 11 Spanish teacher that we were going to be watching The Orphanage in class, I definitely didn’t foresee myself including it in a top 50 films list 5 years later and yet here we are. I mean, I shouldn’t have been surprised really as she did tell us it was good and I had frequently seen it included in lists of the best horror films but as with pretty much anything our teachers would put on as an excuse not to teach for a few lessons (I’m really NOT complaining here, they deserve the break and I would definitely do the same, lol), my expectations were definitely low. Side note, I also since found out that Bilbao seems like a pretty cool place and there was a reason she kept banging on about that too, and so moral of the story, teachers do sometimes have some decent recommendations BUT my assumption was that The Orphanage must be pretty tame for her to show it to us. Parents-even of 16 of year olds-love to complain, lol. And to be fair,  it isn’t so much in your face scary so much as it is kind of tragic with an undertone of spooky but I really enjoyed it. I want to say that part of what I enjoyed about it so much was the mystery element but honestly I think a lot of that comes from the fact that it’s in Spanish so I had to work to follow what was actually going on. 

42. The Ring (2002)

“I can't imagine being stuck down a well all alone like that. How long could you survive?”

The Ring does visuals better than any other horror. The contorted faces of Samara’s victims, the infamous tape and the shots of the well all have a staple in pop culture for a reason. Whilst I don’t find Samara herself particularly frightening, the lore and mythology surrounding her feels so authentically creepy; the tape in particular reminds me of the kind of weird YouTube video you might stumble across when you’re supposed to be trying to get to bed late at night and instantly hate yourself for watching. Naomi Watts is a compelling lead and though I was probably rooting for Sarah Michelle Gellar in the American remake of the Grudge more (I still low-key associate her with the live-action Scooby-Doo and I have no shame), to compare other noughties horror classics, on the whole The Ring is definitely the better quality movie.

43. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

The Shawshank Redemption is just an unequivocally good film. On paper, it doesn’t necessarily have any of the things that draw me to a movie in it, but it’s brilliantly acted, written and shot. It’s frequently cited as one of the greatest movies of all time and I think that’s a very fair statement.

44. The Shining (1980)

“Wendy? Darling? Light of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in!”

I love The Shining. In terms of scares, not all that much happens in it, but what we do see (the corpse in the bath tub is fucking horrifying) undoubtedly leaves an impact. The score is so unnervingly perfect that I can still hear the sound that’s made when we see those 2…puppets? Costumed people? Basically some kind of weird furry activity-which believe me, makes sense if you’ve seen it-going on. And I only need to see a still of the Overlook Hotel and I can immediately feel the sense of claustrophobia and growing tension that Stanley Kubrick so effectively communicated. A lot of people shat on Shelley Duvall’s acting at the time and whilst she obviously didn’t match Jack Nicholson’s energy, she did come across as a woman genuinely traumatised which is sad when you do consider the effect that shooting the film had on her. With that aside, The Shining is a massively pivotal part of horror history and I’m very excited to see Doctor Sleep this year!

45. The Virgin Suicides (1999)

“Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.”

It really is a toss up between Marie Antoinette and The Virgin Suicides when it comes to Sofia Coppola’s best film, and so of course I had to include them both. See, whereas Marie Antoinette could be the visual incarnation of an album like Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart or Charli XCX’s Sucker (if you ignore the less than fortunate ending, lmao), The Virgin Suicides plays out more to the tunes of something less bubblegum pop and more breezy and mellow, maybe LDR’s Ultraviolence or Honeymoon. You could say in a way that this film romanticises suicide and you’d definitely have a point, but I think considering the fact that it’s based on a book and was made in a time when we were less aware of the damage popular media can do (I think there’s a similar point to be made about the way the villain of Silence of the Lambs’s gender is portrayed and linked to his motivation), I give it a pass. It does also kind of make sense for the film to take this approach; the Lisbon girls are viewed through the eyes of a group of boys who are infatuated with them but also ultimately know nothing about them. In a way, it’s almost a critique of the way these boys think and a commentary on just how stifling and confusing young womanhood can be. I think it’s a beautiful film and a perfect adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel.

46. The VVitch (2015)

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

Is it sad that I have this quote tattooed on my back? Is it biased for me to say no? Because for me, just as much as the Virgin Suicides is about how stifling society’s expectations of young women and how they are supposed to think and act, The VVitch is about the demonisation of girls who go against this and how liberation and sexual freedom for so long were perceived as the result of some kind of satanic and deeply disturbing force at work rather than individual expressions of freedom and femininity. The ending is HAPPY, okay, and if you take away the misty, barren landscapes and the isolation and the paranoia and the baby eating witches and the accusations and the demonic goats, it’s kinda a dark feminist fairy tale to go against puritan panic. I mean, let’s be honest, *spoilers* Thomasin’s siblings were annoying AF. Not that I’m condoning child murder on any level, but you know. In a narrative context was it really so much of a loss when those little shits got the chop?

47. Thoroughbreds (2017)

“At the end of the day, I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn't contain feelings. And that doesn't necessarily make me a bad person. It just means I have to work a little harder than everybody else to be good.”

I love Olivia Cooke. I love Anya Taylor-Joy. I love concise, cutting dialogue, the idea of middle class American social politics, and a little bit of (fictional, of course) murder thrown in there for good measure. Thus, I really love Thoroughbreds. If you watched it with the sound off, it’d be a Polo Ralph Lauren promotional film that gets really dark at the end, and what’s not to like about that?

48. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

“What are these people watching, people like me?”

I still haven’t got round to reading the book this film was based on and I feel like that’s something I need to get on top of ASAP, because it’s been sitting on my shelf for a long ass time. However, based on the little I know about how faithful a film adaptation it is, I think Ezra Miller and Tilda Swinton were a wonderful pairing, and this is a film that’s all about the characters, so it’s a good job they were so well cast. Miller does a great job at getting right under your skin and answering a lot of my questions about what leads someone to commit the kind of horrific crime that his character, Kevin, does. Arrogance, done subtly, is hard to pull off but he nails it, and Swinton is very, very believable as a haunted, grief-stricken mother wrestling with the natural question of the part she played in her son’s actions and the scrutiny that comes with it. Not only that but from the offset, every part of the cinematography helps to convey the feeling of impending doom that builds right up until the climax. The colour palette in particular, which for the most part doesn’t stray too far from the mundane greys and bleak washed-out tones perhaps reflective of Eva’s state of mind, does a great job of foreshadowing what to come when it quite purposefully does take a diversion. It’s all about the red, apparently. Take note.

49. Whiplash (2014)

“Any fucking moron can wave his arms and keep people in tempo. I was there to push people beyond what's expected of them. I believe that is an absolute necessity.”

You honestly wouldn’t believe that a film about drumming could feel like a horror and yet here Whiplash is, leaving me on the edge of my seat and wincing for, like, 2 hours straight. Tonally it couldn’t be more different from the other Damien Chazelle film on this list (La La Land), and yet it flows just as seamlessly and has his same impeccable rhythm; every word, yell and snarl slots perfectly into place and every swivel of the camera is flawlessly executed. If you’re looking for an intense and fast-paced drama, I can’t recommend Whiplash enough.

50. Zombieland (2009)

“Twelve's the new twenty. Gun please.”

Zombieland has only one fault: that Jesse Eisenberg’s character wasn’t played by Michael Cera. But it has Emma Stone and Woody Harrelson so I’ll let it slide. Not much to say about this one other than it’s a wild ride from start to finish, but simultaneously easy to watch and probably the most lighthearted zombie film out there. Almost like The Hangover or something along those lines, but with the addition of the undead. It’s a hard film not to enjoy and I’m just really hoping they don’t fuck up the sequel.

DISCLAIMER: 90% of these stills are from Filmgrab, it’s an amazing website!

#cinema #emmastone #michaelcera #cinematography #films #stills #film #filmgrab #filmreview #horror #natalieportman #blackswan #darrenaronofsky #damienchazelle #anya taylor joy #olivia cooke #sofia coppola #yorgos lanthimos #rachel weisz #mary elizabeth winstead