lbmockingbird

[lbmockingbird]

I know Sophie's Bree isn't popular, but I think her performance has grown into something wonderful. She is an out of time girl from the late sixties. Having been a girl from the late sixties that felt I was out of my time, I speak with some authority.

I don't think this measly eight episodes will be the last, but if they can't do better than Episode 5, they should quit. If they are going to do a 16 episode finish, they should fire their show runner who I will not humiliate by mentioning him, and bring back Ron Moore and hire the Season one and two directors

I’ll give you an easy one in cb’s absence. How is an entire ep so good except one consistent weak link? 😂 How was perfect casting so sorely missed on such an integral character. It pains me every week. This week more so since she was more prevalent. Ugh!!!!!!!! Will never get this decision.

Ooh 🙋‍♀️! I got this! In fact, I know who you mean and I haven’t even seen the episode yet. This was an easy one just based on how badly I cringed watching the previews. I don’t know 🤷‍♀️. I don’t get it either. The casting was so spot on until that point. The flat breathy monotone…Bree wasn’t my favourite book character by any stretch either and this is not helping. She shouldn’t have to choose between accent and emotion. She needs both.

[lbmockingbird]

My feelings exactly. People are insane in Texas. The words I should have used are insane and stupid.

Take it from the biochemist who used to work with vaccines:

1. Some vaccines will keep you from getting sick: measles, mumps, rubella, etc.

2. Some vaccines won't keep you from getting sick, but it will keep you from dying: COVID, flu, etc.

3. Some people can't get vaccines, or vaccines don't work for them. They are a tiny percentage of the population.

4. Side effects from vaccines are normal.

5. mRNA vaccine technology has been around for 20 years. It's not *that* new.

6. Vaccine cards have been around for a very long time. You'd know that if you traveled to certain countries, or looked it up on Google.

7. I'm getting tired of saying all this stuff to people. At this point, I don't give a flying fuck what you believe, grow the fuck up and just get your fucking vaccine and/or booster shot. But if you insist on being a selfish asshole, stay the fuck away from me.

[lbmockingbird]

I can’t wait to see this movie.

Belfast...

Kenneth Branagh has been thinking about making a film about his childhood in Belfast for a long time. But it took a pandemic for the 60-year-old director to realize it was time. “I found that this lockdown really triggered something for me that reminded me of a fragility in our lives,” he tells Vanity Fair. “I felt obliged and compelled to finally revisit this moment.”

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

The moment was the summer of 1969, when an eight-year-old Branagh’s life was changed forever by the Troubles, the decades-long political conflict between Irish Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. “In a way, innocence was lost, things would never be the same again,” he says, reflecting on that time. “It’s something I’ve been trying to understand, as I grow older, that it was a moment when the world tried to insist that you put away childish things, and demanded that you are dragged into this perilous adulthood.”

Belfast, which will play at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12 before Focus Features releases it in theaters November 12, recreates that moment in black and white and via a nine-year-old boy named Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill), whose idyllic childhood in Belfast is taken from him as his parents (played by Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe) and grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds) attempt to protect their family among increasing violence and danger. And while the film includes plenty of drama and emotional moments, Branagh has sewn in moments of quick-witted humor and lightness that he says perfectly encapsulate his memories of that time.

The small-scale Belfast is a stark shift from Branagh’s signature directorial efforts, which, whether Shakespeare adaptations (Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet) or giant crowd-pleasers (Thor, Cinderella), have largely been generously budgeted studio efforts. Indeed, after he started writing the script in March 2020, the first people he showed it to were his brother and sister, who had a very emotional reaction to it. “They were very supportive,” says Branagh. “But my sister said to me, ‘Wow, for a very, very private, quiet man, you really put it out there, haven’t you?’ So I guess I did. Sometimes it has to happen that way. Sometimes I think things have to come out.”

Belfast opens with a powerful scene in which Buddy is walking down the street in his quaint neighborhood, with all the neighbors greeting him warmly by name. It’s clear he’s beloved by the small community. Suddenly, around the corner comes a loud, angry mob, set on attacking the homes of Protestants living on the streets. Buddy is swept up in the mob until his mother is able to grab him and bring him into their home, just as the rioters light a car on fire and it explodes in a fiery blast. It’s an affecting scene that quickly establishes how Buddy’s safe existence has forever changed—and it’s pulled from Branagh’s memories. “I remember I thought I was hearing a swarm of bees, I didn’t understand why it should be so loud,” he says. “And then it was just this mob. Overnight, that security has gone.”

The town swiftly builds up a barricade manned by its residents, while many, including Buddy’s family, grapple with how to stay safe. Buddy’s father is away often, working in England, and coming home every couple of weeks. He wants them to consider moving out of Belfast, to either England or somewhere else for a fresh start. “The last time I really remembered, and thought that I knew who I was, was when I was back in Belfast,” says Branagh, who moved to Berkshire, England, with his family soon after the summer of 1969. “There was such a settled sense of identity, a sense of place, and a knowledge of your relationship to the world.”

Branagh focused on authenticity to cast his parents, bringing in Northern Ireland native Dornan—best known for the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise—to play his father. “He greeted the script like it was an old friend,” says Branagh. “You could feel the excitement in his voice, that he felt he knew this person.” And while Balfe, known for starring in the Outlander series, was born in Dublin, her family later relocated and she grew up near the border with Northern Ireland. “So she knew about the challenges of uprooting,” says Branagh. 

 Buddy also has a deep relationship with his grandparents, who he often spends time with after school. In casting his grandmother, Branagh turned to Dench, whom he’s worked with for years on films including 1996’s Hamlet, 2018’s All Is True, and 2020’s Artemis Fowl. Because of Dench’s vision loss, Branagh read the script aloud to her, and he says Dench gravitated toward it because she had earlier in her life traveled to Ireland with her own parents who had grown up there. “It’s this kind of eternal song of the Irish, the immigrant’s song, that has them moving away for various reasons. It just goes very deep in the DNA of the culture,” he says. Hinds, who plays Buddy’s grandfather, grew up down the street from Branagh’s childhood home, Branagh says. “He kind of recognized his own father in this character,” says the director. “That allowed each of them to make it quite personal.”

But even when he felt sure he had found the right actors to play his parents and grandparents, Branagh knew that the film rested on finding the right young actor to play his onscreen doppelganger. “It was always so clear that it couldn’t work if you didn’t find a way to connect very strongly with Buddy, who is so named, as a friend to the audience, to be the everyman who takes you by the hand through this story,” he says. Branagh was looking for someone who had energy and loved running around, but was also a thinker and had a “slightly older head on his shoulders.”

“He had to be very naturally himself, and then, paradoxically, also be very attentive about how to be specific with certain moments in the film,” says Branagh. He found that in Hill, a 10-year-old from Gilford in Northern Ireland. While Belfast is Hill’s first major production, Branagh says he was able to watch Hill’s talent blossom as shooting progressed. “He was very much a rough diamond across the audition process,” he says. “But I’ve rarely seen someone pick up what is required so swiftly, and with such alacrity.” Hill learned the most from his onscreen grandmother, Branagh says. “I felt as though Jude Hill at the Judi Dench acting academy was a sight to behold,” he says. “She asked him for tips about the accent, and he asked for just about everything else.”

Even as a period piece, Belfast includes an eerie amount of parallels to our pandemic age: feeling unsafe to leave your own home, losing a previous comfortable reality, and the hard decisions that need to be made about how to keep your family safe. Says Branagh, “In this last 18 months or so, there’s been this profound disturbance to what, in retrospect, was this innate comfort of the routine, in what might’ve felt like normal lives. And suddenly, you live with this thing that human beings just don’t like: uncertainty.”

One of Branagh’s comforts during that time was moviegoing, and Belfast is also an ode to the movies. One of the few times color is included in the black-and-white film is when Buddy and his family go to the movie theater. Branagh chose to feature films from his own childhood memories, including One Million Years B.C. and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. “The cinema, for me, was one place where the screen engulfed you so totally that you could, for those moments, forget,” he says. “You could feel safe, away from the mayhem.”

It’s a feeling that many have been seeking as the emotional toll of the pandemic drags on. And it was that feeling that pushed Branagh to finally tell his story. “It felt like the movies, and that experience of big-screen movies, they gave me a new home—in fact, the home that I’ve been living in for a large part of my adult life,” says Branagh. “When I started to write this movie, it felt like it’s about time to go back to my real home.”

Belfast premieres September 12 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Focus Features will release the film in select theaters November 12. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/08/awards-insider-kenneth-branagh-gets-personal-with-belfast

[lbmockingbird]

You mean the guy that makes you look like like a self-serving idiot?

Clint Eastwood:

"I love when people call Trump Stupid..

You mean the multi-billionaire who kicked every Democrats butt, buried 16 career Republican politicians, and continues to make fools out of once reputable news organizations ..

You mean the guy who won the presidency?

You mean the guy with the super model wife?

You mean the guy whose words alone put a massive slow down on illegal border crossings?

You mean the guy whose mere presence made the stock market smash its previous records?

You mean the guy who created 1 million jobs in his first 7 months in office?

Are you sure you even know what it is you're resisting?

Are you sure you back a party that enables the decimation of every core principal of Christianity?

Are you sure you back a party that voted 100% against the abolition of slavery?

Are you sure you really take a politician like Maxine Waters seriously?

Are you sure you don't see anything wrong with someone who has a 40 yr career as a public servant living in a $4.5 mansion representing a district she doesn't even live in?

Are you sure you see nothing wrong or peculiar about Hillary Clinton a woman being involved in politics for the last 30 yrs having a net worth of $240 million?

Are you sure you're not just basing your opinion on hatred spewed by a crooked paid for media platform?

Could you even tell me 5 things the Democratic Party has done to improve you're day to day prosperity as a hard working American citizen?

Probably not..

Do you realize the debacle you are sending your children into once they become adults by continuing to support a political party that has done nothing for the poor except kept them poor, gave them free abortions, and a few hundred a month to keep food in their fridge?

The prosperity and safety of its citizens is job one of your government.

Get with the program.

Everyone else has horribly failed you!

Smarten up and take a position for the sake of your children.

I promise you a country full of illegal immigrants, abortions, $15 an hour jobs, and non-gender specific people aren't gonna make your country and life any more prosperous.

Rosie, Madonna, Katy Perry, and Robert Deniro are not just like you. They don't have to live through the real world day to day disparity of an average American.

Men don't hate women, white people don't hate black people, and Donald Trump is not a racist.

Stop allowing yourself to be brainwashed by a party that has continuously failed you.

Be about your prosperity, your safety, your children, and an America First mindset.

Dump these crooked politicians that have stunted your growth.

Dump these crooked politicians that have stunted your children's growth.

Toughen up, take a stand, and act like a proud American.

See the spirit of Trump supporting and freedom loving Americans and just imagine where we could be as a country if everyone had the same priorities"

[lbmockingbird]

Best blog ever.

So here's something to lighten the mood. I just got off the phone with my mother, the world's oldest shipper, who always wants to hear the latest, and to tell me that Bill Shitner didn't die again today. She is thrilled with the happy news and on the subject of bringing a baby into the narrative, kids being adaptable, able to move on from the crap we dole out along the way...well, it seems that Mom forgets that there were skeletons still in the closet. She had a list...

"Oh heavens yes! Look at my own mother, fresh from living 'in sin' it was back then for almost ten years and then hopping on a boat, not speaking a word of English, to meet up with the husband she barely knew and pregnant with me. Who even knows who my father was, come to think of it. There was no paternity testing then. Or your Aunt Helen, back in the fifties before it was okay to be, you know, although she couldn't have known that your Uncle George was a woman. That was quite the scandal when they found out"

So any of you still concerned about Baby Balfe, worry no more. My grandmother was a scarlet woman who got pregnant during rebound sex, my maternal grandfather is suddenly not who I thought he was, my Aunt Helen accidentally married a woman, yet look how well I turned out.

[lbmockingbird]

Weekend in London ...

[lbmockingbird]

Post #4 from my Fb memories of March 22, 2021 - Sam had been cooking for 5 days as he said in the Q and A on March 22, 2020. One of the dishes he cooked was spaghetti Bolognese. Caitriona said on March 20 that she had pasta for dinner the night before. No wonder she was still cleaning up in the kitchen. Hubs was cooking for 5 days!!!

[lbmockingbird]

duncan.lacroix

This is Tigh Neactains pub on Cross Street in Galway , Eire. I pretty much lived in it from 2000-2010. The scene of many an exploit, adventure, drama and romance and the hub of friendship. Picked up my first ever Theatre part in here whilst jawing to a director. Crazy seat of the pants times where lunacy abounded. Somehow I never got barred. You wouldn’t have had my brand of Murtagh without it! So to all the Irish, Happy Paddy’s day ya magical, beautiful, creative people ☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️☘️

[lbmockingbird]

Mr. Sam Heughan

[lbmockingbird]

Jess can you post the gifs of Sam and Cait when Ron was talking about how people have sex? I found it very telling.

Sure. So did I ;)

Moaning and arching her back or something and you kind of look at it and you just know, this isn’t how I have sex and I kinda doubt that anybody else does either. 

So if this show was going to have a strong sexual component to it I just said, let’s just try to be honest about it. Let’s try to present it in a way how human beings actually behave.  

It’s not about trying to film the sexy image. It’s just human sexuality.  Let’s just try to be as honest about it as we can.

[lbmockingbird]

Go suck eggs. How can any of you look in the mirror. Everyone left in your party is a destroyer.

I don't know who the hell Biden thinks he's uniting. After the Left calling conservatives Nazis, white supremacists, fascists, homophobes, xenophobes, science deniers and whatever the fuck else I don't know of a single conservative willing to forgive and forget. Biden can take his unity and shove it up his ass along with the $1.5 Billion dollar contract his drug addict son got from the Gov't of China. P.S. - no one is a bigger racist than that demented old fool.

[lbmockingbird]

Please take care of yourself.

[lbmockingbird]

I don’t really want to know their story any more, but I still like to see them smile at each other. It has a touch of magic.

#forever star struck by them 🤩 🤩

[lbmockingbird]

This is information we should all have.

[lbmockingbird]

I watched S1/1 when it first aired by pure happenstance. He was fabulous and the story was addictive. I read the books between S1 and 2. He was meant for the role.

That’s almost my story although I didn’t watch S1 until the summer after it aired and I read the books in between S1 and S2. 

Now we know why they all got excited when they saw his audition tape and took the risk of signing him right away versus continuing to look.

I wish they would share that tape too.  In fact, share them all during the extra-long Droughtlander!

[lbmockingbird]

It’s too bad they’re not in the same room.

requested by Anon: Cait & Sam gushing about each other during their GoldDerby interview

[lbmockingbird]

Sherri is totally right about this one.

Nobody wants to watch Sam and Cait tell us they are like siblings, and then watch Jamie and Claire fuck.

Regardless of separating actors from characters, those aren't two narratives you want in your audiences head at the same time.

They should have stuck with BFFs. At least THAT wouldn't have such gross crossover.

*not to mention how it is gaslighting and rewriting history.