#‘characters-trapped-somewhere-to-hide-from-the-storm’ trope | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

polygarnstars · 5 years ago

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part 1: 4, 12, 15, 18, and 19

If you think I’m going to have common sense and not answer all of these in a single post, I have Bad News lmao

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you? Smart, mostly. “Gifted”. This very much Did Not Last lmaoooo

12. name of your favorite playlist? I literally never make playlists I’m a stupid fuck who uses their spotify premium to skip freely through all my thousands of liked songs on shuffle until I find something I want to listen to lmaooooo (Having said that: Rey and I put together a playlist for some characters we were entering a contest to win last fall which I titled Story and Song after the TAZ arc and also because we wrote Way Too Much for it and I’m Very Proud Of That)

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment? Okay upon reading this I initially genuinely couldn’t remember any of the books I read in school because for the last several years of my schooling I just fuckin Sparknotes and TV Tropes-ed everything lmao... having said that, I do remember enjoying Maus! It was neat having a graphic novel assigned amongst all the “literary classics” that I couldn’t sit through a sitting of without falling asleep, and it may be the furry in me but the depiction of the characters/people as animals was Good :0c See, if all history was depicted with methods like this, I’d maybe actually be able to remember it ghfdjhgjfkdl

18. ideal weather? Depends on the day, but generally: Between like 65-80°F, not humid, not a lot of wind, and either sunny, partly cloudy, or drizzly but not outright storming. Basically decent temperatures without feeling like I’m walking through soup because of the humidity and weather that’s not completely gray and boring. Aka what Maine basically never is lmaoooo

19. sleeping position? I change positions every five minutes I swear to god (don’t take that out of context gfhdjbhvjd). Usually with at least one arm draped over a pillow that is Definitely Not Being Mentally Portrayed As A Character I Like To Supplement The Fact That I Did Not Get Enough Affection To Be A Functional Adult As A Child ghfdjknbhgfjdk

21. obsession from childhood? bold of you to assume i don’t still obsess over nintendo games (and just video games in general tbh)

23. strange habits? OKAY I COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING FOR THIS AT FIRST BUT I HAVE ONE NOW: MIDNIGHT FRIES

28. five songs to describe you? Speeding - LightsDaydreaming - ParamoreMusic - Mystery SkullsNo Lullaby - SIAMÉSLonely Dance - Set If Off+Bonus because it came up on Spotify while I was shuffling for songs for this and it’s a Mood: Pineapples Do Not Belong on a Pizza - Vargskelethor

29. best way to bond with you? I don’t know I usually just scream about ocs or video games with people and suddenly it’s been a year??? @riskreyes how has it been a year since we started talking but also how has it only been a year??? Wild bvhfdjkbhvgfjdk

30. places that you find sacred? Lmao I’ve never had anywhere like that really. Need a goddamn lock on my door :p I guess... the woods by my house? As a little kid before things got shitty my neighbor’s cousin or niece or something would go out there wandering around catching frogs and stuff in the spring or almost falling into the frozen streams during winter. When things started to go to shit in my life as a teenager I would hide out there to get away and nobody would find me. I haven’t been recently but the last time I did my friend and I walked along the train tracks and dove off into the woods by the side to avoid the amtrak coming by, it was great lmao. Uhh, other than that... I dunno, Boston and New York and New London all make me feel good to visit. Probably mostly because during those trips I don’t feel trapped in a dying land like Maine feels like bgvhfdjkhvgfjd

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names? ......my entire wardrobe is my work outfit, excessive graphic tees, and jeans. So uhh... I dunno. I guess my NWTB shirts are pretty rad, I’d kick a dude’s ass wearing Nate’s merch

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head? if i have to see another ad for some fuckin branch of the us military while i’m just out here trying to watch people play video games i swear to god-

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school? Oh boy I don’t know how weird these are but do you want a list??? I can give you a list hang on- In 4th grade we had a day of class where we all just had a party and ate chips and salsa and stuff because the pats won the super bowl and our teacher was Obsessed- In middle school my math class started working out of college textbooks, which is a bit much when you’re 11, advanced classes or no. Yet somehow none of the other students had any problems with this- Also in middle school, the school counselor really wasn’t very Good at his job so I usually just ended up playing Rock Band in his office instead of talking out any of my Many, Many Problems. I played the drums, for the record- Also in middle school, one time I straight up fell down a flight of stairs? Like, a full flight of stairs. Fuckin somersaulting down the stairs. The binder I was carrying broke open, papers went everywhere, my arm got cut open somewhere along the way and started bleeding. I get to the bottom, the other students are staring at me in horror, aforementioned counselor fuckin steps out of his office which is, of course, right at the bottom of the stairs, all concerned because what the fuck a kid just fell down the stairs, right? And so I, laying on the floor disoriented and laughing, declare, and I quote: “That was fun, let’s do it again!”- THE MOTHERFUCKING MAC AND CHEESE MUFFINS IN HIGH SCHOOL. Macaroni and cheese baked into the sweet batter of a muffin. I refused to touch the stuff but a friend of my did and it was bad enough he had to go to the trash can and fucking empty his stomach in it.- SAID FRIEND ALSO MANAGED TO GET A CARTON OF MILK THAT EXPIRED A MONTH BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED AT THE START OF ONE OF OUR YEARS IN HIGH SCHOOL and if I didn’t trust cafeteria food before that sealed the deal on me Never Trusting It Again- OH BUT SPEAKING OF CAFETERIA FOOD one time in the old school before the renovation, in like freshman year I think? I laughed so hard a piece of spicy chicken strip flew up my windpipe and got stuck in my nose and it was too big for me to snort out so I had to suck it back down and for the rest of the day all I could smell was burning- ON ANOTHER FOOD RELATED TOPIC down in the library I was on my iPad and 3DS because I had Long Since Given Up On School and some asshole dudes threw a rotting orange at me and it splattered all over the screens of both? So I picked up the remains and chucked it back at them and yelled “Do you wanna fucking NOT?” and they all ran off. The librarian heard me yell and saw me throw the orange back at them and she just didn’t give a fuck lmao- The librarians at my school were cool as shit really during one of our years we had to do x hours of volunteer work so I did some adjustments to the library catalogue for mine but the thing is I was fast enough at it that there really wasn’t enough to fill up my required hours so instead of giving me more to do they just sort of let me and my friends hang out playing Yu-Gi-Oh and called that good lmao. (For the record I only had one starter deck so I let my friend pick half of the cards and I would use the half she didn’t want. I managed to fuckin WRECK her with throwaways it was Iconicque)- OKAY ONE LAST LIBRARY STORY on the last day of finals I was hanging out in one of the smart tv rooms in the library right? My last finals weren’t for a few hours and lord knows I wasn’t gonna study, ADHD ass couldn’t do that and I’d already given up on school lmao. So I fucking... I brought my Wii U to school, hooked it up to the smart tv, and just started playing Splatoon there in the library. One of the librarians walked past to check on everyone, stopped at my room, watched me play for a minute (I noticed her and just sort of nodded and waved like ‘Sup’ so she Knew what was going on), and then just LEFT. Like, she didn’t give a fuck. Shoutout to the librarians, the Chillest- ALRIGHT LAST STORY LAST STORY I straight up never got all the credits I needed to graduate lmao. I was missing half a credit but they let me go anyway and to this day I cite the reason as being my high scores on the SAT/PSAT? I was the first student at the school in like, a decade, to have gotten an award from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for my performance on them, and I guess they must have thought that me failing to graduate on time would look bad on them because, uh, yeah, it would, if people found out their teachers couldn’t handle a ~smart kid~ to the point that they did poorly enough to not even graduate with the rest of their class nobody would be willing to send their kids there lmao. And that’s the story of how I graduated when I wasn’t technically supposed to!!!

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have? That’s a good fuckin question hey shit memory what was that thing that made us laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe again?...Don’t remember? Yeah I thought so lmaoI dunno, probably a joke in some let’s play? Or... god. Now that I think about it was probably the Slicer of T’pire Weir Isles moment actually. Holy shit, that was good.

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried? That I’ve ever tried? Jesus, I dunno, I have issues with texture more than flavor. I Refuse to eat my mother’s stuffing because it’s literally just soggy ass bread. In terms of pure flavor alone? Her shepherds pie. It’s just... there is no flavor. It’s like eating cardboard. I’m begging you, De, use seasoning. If I ever have to eat shepherds pie that just tastes like tin from canned peas and vague hints of unseasoned beef again I’m going to go on a murderous rampage.That said? F in the chat to Cameron for that mac and cheese muffin. Rest in pieces

73. favorite weird flavor combo? GVFHDJBVDN JUST GONNA MAKE ME SHARE THE DILL PICKLE/CHOCOLATE PUDDING PACK COMBO FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE HUH

93. nicknames? Gar, Garn, Lane, Bill, Master, Pants, Shortpants. The first three are self-explanatory, first two are shortenings of my name and then my masc/surname. The latter four come from usernames of mine - Bill from Bill Ciforce (If you stack a Bill Cipher on top of two other Bill Ciphers, you get the Ciforce), Master, Pants, and Shortpants from MasterShortpants in reference to one of Link’s nicknames in Skyward Sword

95. favorite app on your phone? Does the internet app count? No? Lmao. Spotify I guess :p Need me some Tunes

#if you're on a version of the site that readmores don't work on i'm sorry #long post #ask game thyme

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ryan-masamune-of-oshu · 6 years ago

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Fic Inspiration Roulette

It’s a collection of posts I’ve seen that inspired some of my fics. They’re not all written like prompts but you get the idea. It’s a mix of fluff and smut. Anyways I decided to post it for my own reference but also so people could use it as a meme if they want to.

Send a ship name and I’ll randomly generate a number 1-40 for a “fic prompt”

1. “Characters trapped somewhere to hide from a storm” trope, more like: “HOW MANY ORGASMS CAN THESE CHARACTERS HAVE IN 48 HOURS WHILE WAITING OUT A BLIZZARD? THE ANSWER MAY SHOCK YOU!”

2. BOSS: Know why I called you in here? ME: Because I accidentally sent you a dick pic BOSS: [stops pouring 2 glasses of wine] Accidentally?

3. “I am not sorry for who I had to become in order to survive.”

4. PERSON A: “Babe you wear a lot of black. Don’t you ever want some bright colors?” PERSON B: [smirks] “Nah you already brighten my day.” PERSON A: “I fucking love you.”

5. PERSON D: “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with ‘S’” PERSON C: “Is it [PERSON A and B’s] Sexual tension? PERSON A and B: “What?”

6. I stand in truth of who I am and what I feel. I’m liberated by authenticity. I stand exposed, my armor shed with arms outstretched in vulnerability. I am yours to wound, abandon, or embrace. I stand steady in patience as you search for your own truth. But know this: I will not wait forever.

7. I want sheet grabbing, back arching, heavy breathing, leg shaking sex. I want the slow kissing, hand roaming, and neck kissing. I want my lip bit and my back pinned against the wall. Pin me the fuck down. Get on top of me, rip my clothes off. Fuck...

8. If they stand behind you, give them protection. If they stand beside you, give them respect. If they stand in front of you, watch their back. And if they stand against you, show them no mercy.

9. No offense, but the soft uncertain kiss followed by a pause where the people look each other in the eyes and then fucking pull each other back into a more passionate kiss, will always be the most soul destroying trope. Catch me lying on the fucking ground sobbing and rewatching The Scene TM

10. I don’t want high school student aus. I want high school teachers aus. Please give me awkward teachers in love with each other and their students who work so, so hard to shove them together, please!

11. They told you it would feel good, but you couldn’t have imagined it would be this good. You hold their head down as you cum in their mouth. Don’t worry, let it wash over you. It’s what you both want. They’re happy to be on their needs, swallowing every last drop, unlike your partner.

12. Imagine your OTP having lazy Saturday morning sex. Eyes half open, early-morning sun washing across the bed. Sheets tangled around their legs. It’s nothing too intense. It’s warmth and messy tenderness, faces buried into each other’s necks and pleasure shivering down their spines.

13. If you run your fingers through my hair and pull a little while we’re kissing, I’m all yours.

14. Concept: We are laying in a hammock together, the summer breeze gently rocks us. My head is on your chest and I can hear your heartbeat and your breathing. The birds sing above and the sunlight warms us. I am in love with you.

15. You say you hate me, but I can see the love in your eyes. The way you say my name doesn’t match the vile words that follow. If I disgust you, then why do you pull me closer? If you say it hurts, then why beg to be touched. You confuse me darling, but let’s make one thing clear-you are mine, not his. So stop lying and show me how you really feel.

16. Neck kiss is honestly the hottest, most seductive thing anybody could ever do to me. If you kiss my neck, if you playfully bite my neck, if your tongue touches my neck, I will melt in your fingertips.

17. Plot: You’re an intelligent, pretty young thing who’s more familiar with books and philosophical concept. I’m that rough trade guy who you invite over to fix your sink and install a couple electrical things, but really you wanted to see me shirtless and of course, I end up fucking your brains out in the kitchen and then the bathroom and finally in the courtyard because that was the plan all along. Let’s be real.

18. When lazy kissing gets intense with that deep breath and hip pull.

19. When I have you, I’m gonna brand you with my lips and all of the world will know that you’re MINE now.

20. I say it’s time to bring back overtly sexual masquerade parties.

21. Someday, someone is going to look at you with a look in their eyes you’ve never seen. They’ll look at you like you’re everything...wait for it.

22. I’m sorry but if I’m sucking a dick and it hasn’t cum in like 10 minutes or less, it’s not my problem anymore and you can figure it out.

23. You call yourself ugly but you’ve only seen yourself when you look at the mirror, a thread. You don’t see yourself when your face lights up at the sight of a baby, ice cream, or your favorite restaurant. You don’t see yourself when you’re so focused on the things you love doing. You tell yourself you’re ugly but you’ve never seen yourself talk about the things you love. The stars, sky, the constellations, and the universe. You don’t see yourself when you smile at me for finally understanding what you’re trying to say. I guess that’s why it’s so easy for people to say they’re ugly because they’ve never seen themselves in the smallest moments, in the ordinary and still be beautiful. You never saw yourself tear up for laughing so hard or turn red after I told you something cheesy.

24. I want to lick your pulse and make you wonder if I’ll bite.

25. We’re on a date in a club and my friend is really high and confessing their love for me in front of you. So you take me to the back and fuck me to remind me who I belong to AU

26. Suggestion: Whisper praise in my ear when you’re fucking me from behind.

27. I’m sure you wouldn't mind them joining in, would you? You’re so needy. Sometimes you just need the extra attention. Don’t you? Need another set of hands on you, or more skin to get your hands on?

28. A shy sub riding your thigh, and hiding their face in your shoulder, mewling quietly as you guide their hips and make them move faster.

29. You’re OTP having sex. Person A has a habit of burying their face in something when they hit their climax, whether it be a pillow of Person B. This time Person B makes absolutely sure that Person A is looking at them when they orgasm (even if it means holding their face still). Bonus if Person B is so turned on by it they instantly cum.

30. From the bottom of my heart, please know that I’d appreciate being slammed against a wall with your hands down my pants and your breath against my neck saying that I am yours and only yours.

31. If a monster or demon isn’t rawing you behind a haunted house or inside the woods, are you even doing Halloween right?

32. So there I was, a woodsman in flannel, eating out a beautiful man in a red cloak after saving him from a dangerous wolf.

33. I don’t need prayers to worship you; just my head between your legs and your hands tugging at my hair.

34. I wanna hide my face in someone’s neck and sleep

35. Having sex with someone actually is a big deal and involves a ton of vulnerability and I think it’s extremely troubling and gross and unhealthy and actually exceptionally dangerous that we pretend otherwise and encourage people to “be mature” by compartmentalizing/completely eliminating their deeper human emotions from their sexuality and that any other view is dismissed as prudish and invalid and unenlightened and childish and restrictive. I can’t think about this too much because it makes me rage but I hate how much porn and capitalism have destroyed how we understand and experience sexuality and intimate connections with one another so much.

36. I want to sleep with you. I don’t mean have sex. I mean sleep, together, under my blankets, and in my bed. With my hand on your chest and your arm around me. With the window cracked so it’s chilly and we have to cuddle closer. No talking, just sleepy blissfully happy, silence.

37. Making out is one of the most underrated things in the world of sex. Like, one of the best feelings on Earth is tongue on tongue, biting each other’s lips and pressing your bodies together and grinding your hips into each other while your breathing mixes and making out is just so ugh God...

38. Imagine someone buying you lingerie just so they could see you in it.

39. “We’ve been fucking no strings attached but I just saw you go upstairs with another guy and I’m drunk and following you both upstairs to punch the shit out of him.

40. My muse us clearly having a very vivid dream. Their body is reacting to it in a very sexual manner, panting and writhing in reaction as they sleep. It seems that whatever or whoever they are dreaming of is doing a good job of turning them on. Send me your muse’s response to walking in and finding them like that.

#meme #fanfiction #fanfiction meme #writing prompt #inbox meme #shipping otp

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ahouseoflies · 7 years ago

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Best Films of 2017, Part V

This is the last entry of the series. I hope you’ve enjoyed this year’s rundown. Thanks for reading. GREAT MOVIES 22. Nocturama (Bertrand Bonello)- The first half painstakingly observes a terrorist attack--one so vaguely expressed that, until you see a gun twenty minutes in, you can't even be positive that's the coordination you're seeing. As gripping as that is, however, the second half is better. To hide out after their attack, all of the kids lock themselves in a mall overnight, and of course they can't resist goofing off in there. The juxtaposition of (presumably--again, their motivation isn't explained) anti-capitalist ideals with capitalist dressing is what makes the movie. Sometimes it's obvious: a gold lamp shaped like an assault rifle. Sometimes it's artful: One of the kids is arranged in a hot tub to look like David's The Death of Marat, as if to suggest that this tragic sort of disaffection is inherently European. Always it's effective: "Whip Your Hair" blaring across the electronics section and silencing news reports might be the music moment of the year. That song is another intentional choice. Inspired or not, Willow Smith is too young to mean what she says she does, and she's forever trapped in a space that cannot be owned by her. She can't eclipse the legacy set for her. How French. 21. Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott)- (Weyland-Yutani needs to step its game up on the signal for their communication devices.) The Alien series has always been about smuggling. (In fact, Alien: Resurrection is literally about smugglers.) Alien takes a sci-fi framework and smuggles in slasher tropes; Aliens slips a war film into the spaceships; Alien 3 is a prison movie. All of them take the established boundaries and disrupt them with another genre. Now Ridley Scott is taking the blueprint of an Alien movie itself and using it to meditate on the limits of reason. It's still an Alien movie, slow like the others, and the orgiastic gore of the alien scenes still pops. But it's way better when robots are talking to each other about why they don't dream. Early on, Billy Crudup's Oram admits to his wife that he was passed over for the captain job because Weyland-Yutani didn't trust a "man of faith" to make rational decisions in stressful situations. (Good casting: To me, Crudup has always looked like a youth minister who thinks you're a really interesting kid and wishes he could get to know you better.) So what Scott interprets for the rest of the movie is: Could a man of faith achieve true rationality, or is his faith so foundational that it could be an impediment to the logic that makes us human? That is, if your belief in the guiding hand of God supersedes even proof to the contrary, there are clear limits to your reasoning. I suspect that Ridley Scott, as an atheist, lacks respect for that type of person, but he also sort of admires the idealism. Oram's logical limit is what Weyland was trying to overcome when he created the synthetic David. If a being knew its creator (and, more importantly, knew that creator was not worth praying to), would that make him transcendent or would it expose a fundamental emptiness? A synthetic basically lives forever, so it has more in common with the "engineer" gods of Prometheus than the humans do. But halfway through Covenant--the title itself referring to a negotiation between God and man--we find out how uncomfortable mankind was with such a creation. Updates to David have squelched his creativity and brought him down to humans' level, since the flawless nature of such a creation illuminates the creator's flaws. Our blurry line to our own creator is a source of strength and a source of weakness.Looking back on Alien 1, the idea to make space travel tedious and blue collar seems quaint now. Of course the future isn't shiny and evolved; on a superficial level, we'll probably share a lot with the people that come after us. As far as the yearning in our souls goes, we'll definitely share a lot with the people that come after us. An Alien movie is an Alien movie is an Alien movie. 20. All the Money in the World (Ridley Scott)- If Ridley Scott's other 2017 film is about how hell is other people, then All the Money in the World is about how hell is yourself. At the perfect time for his audience to be pissed about petty rapacity, Ridley Scott has made his own large-scale commercial adaptation of "Ozymandias." I'm in the bag for late-period Ridley auterism, but it was fascinating for me to watch a logically escalating crowd pleaser about the emptiness of money from a person who probably knows that emptiness very well.The performances are all over the map. Wahlberg sucks--he's miscast, but at this point I don't know what he wouldn't be miscast in. National Treasure Michelle Williams overdoes it, but that might be the right calculation in something approximating reality this broadly. Her presence can't be denied. And then there's Christopher Plummer, the heart of the film, who is in way more of it than I expected. In a way I think Kevin Spacey's misdeeds would have helped the movie: The audience would be reflexively booing a person they're supposed to be booing in the context of the piece. But I suspect Plummer's approach to the role is more broken and lonely than what Spacey would have turned in. He's more believable as someone who is staring unrepentantly at the end of his life, and his speech about how "things" never disappoint him is what brought it home for me.

19. After the Storm (Hirokazu Koreada)- "That's complex." "No, it's simple. Life is very simple...I just said something really deep, didn't I?" That sort of exchange, getting at the heart of the human condition through the most everyday, straightforward, intimate circumstances, is Koreada's bread-and-butter. The first ninety minutes are not without their charms, but they're sort of fatty and obligatory. They're really there to set up the emotional wallop of the final thirty minutes, and the gamble pays off. 18. The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola)- There's a scene about halfway through in which Farrell's McBurney is a captive audience for the ladies' evening prayers. The women surround him, sharing a chair, sitting on the floor, and the taffeta of their dresses in front of him pools into a multi-colored body. Their femininity is soft and inviting, but it's an obstacle as tangled as it is unified. It's that type of image that classes up cattiness into something more tragic and elegant. The 1971 version of The Beguiled is pulpy, so it might be helpful to describe this one as juicy. It's strained of anything that makes the original seem dime-store or exploitative, but it keeps the quality of satisfying sensationalism. Coppola does this by crafting a compelling composite character and, in large part, by excising the slave character. It's a slightly cowardly move, but ol' Hallie might have been a distracting bridge too far in 2017. Luckily, Coppola is able to nail the hypocrisy of the Confederate South through religion instead. To me, the pacing of a Sofia Coppola work is often what makes or breaks it. The slice-of-life detours in Lost in Translation, the poetic rhythm of day-to-day moments, feels like dilatory stalling in Somewhere. So The Beguiled is a new direction in the sense that it's a potboiler--every scene contributes to the next in a lean straight line. It would have been nice to see Harris Savides, her late collaborator, take a stab at all of this natural light, but other than that, I didn't miss the old her. 17. Song to Song (Terrence Malick)- If you don't already like what David Ehrlich calls Malick's "twirling horndog" era--I prefer "metropolitan trilogy of self-absorption"--I won't be able to convert you by now. Especially when Rooney Mara is fingering meats in a Costco, this feels like a film made just for me. I do think that, compared to To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, this film's journey of mercy is fairly direct for Malick. (As far as that group of films goes, there might be a loose progression of detachment, wandering, and return/restore.) Fassbender's devilish Cook waves at his possessions early in the film and says, "None of this exists," and his empty promises pervert innocence at every turn, sometimes tragically. For a hedonist, he isn't being-in-the-world in the way that Malick would prefer. It's telling that, by the "end" of the film--and I say that hesitantly since the events seem to loop back on themselves--Faye inverts Cook in her narration. She says: "This. Only this," referring to love. Or at least, like, authentic experience. That's why Weightless was such a better title for this: As an insult for "having no mooring," it describes Cook; as a compliment for "free," it describes Faye and BV. How Malick is this, besides that interpretation of planes of existence? Very Malick. There's a sequence in which Gosling's BV returns home to console his bereaved family, and his brother says something like, "After being so hung-up on Dad for so long, he finally dies and--" Malick cuts to something else, so wary of something that feels like a treacly Movie Moment. And in avoiding those cliches, he creates his own. Characters still fall out of relationships and drift toward other thin, unnamed beautiful girls with hair in their faces, and it has become such a pet trope for him that a woman even gets in on the trend this time. But how many filmmakers have enough style in the first place for you to be able to make fun of their style? If it all adds up to a moment as alive as Gosling sliding in his sock-feet, then make fun of it all you want. When Malick the classicist first started making films that take place in present-day, it was jarring to spot, say, a Target in the background of a shot. But now that I've adjusted to it, that topicality means...very little at all really, and that's why it's foolish to get hung up on why Mara has blonde hair in this scene or why Gosling is driving a different car in that scene. Austin City Limits or a Longhorns game are specific events, but the relationships are so elemental that they might as well be revealing themselves in a Middle Ages castle or a prehistoric cave. In fact, sign me up for Rooney Mara fingering meats in a prehistoric cave. 16. John Wick: Chapter 2 (Chad Stahelski)- It's lit. When I reviewed the first entry, I spent a lot of time on John Wick "transgressing realms" and stuff. (And that's there--the final setpiece takes place at a modern art museum, ever eager to mix the high and the low.) But let's be real: It's embarrassingly fun to watch Keanu Reeves shoot people in the head. Chapter 2 ups the ante on the mythology of the setting without spoon-feeding, and it's all in the service of a giddy two hours that is as lightning quick as it is painstakingly choreographed.

15. The Lost of City Z (James Gray)- Knowing that I would see this movie, I avoided reviews, but I have no doubt they employed the word "sweeping." To me though, that word implies a shorthand of emotion sacrificed at the altar of grandeur, a "they fall in love yada yada" that you have to exchange for scope. The Lost City of Z is not sweeping in that case because every minute of its running time seems essential, and the passage of twenty years only enhances the emotional acuity. It's lean and Lean. "Atmosphere": That's another word that people use for a vague visual texture. James Gray and Darius Khondji extend their collaboration to create visual layers--planes of smoke or fog that makes the images heavy in a literal sense. By the time they shoot the dappled sunlight and the faded green of the jungle, the screen already has a lather of sweat. On a more specific note, I appreciated that Gray found the through-line of such a complicated historical tale, and that through-line is his pet theme of obsession. Driven by the deficit of his ancestry, Percy Fawcett is motivated by risk down to his bones. On some level the film is something that we've seen before--though Robert Pattinson has never been better than he is as the obligatory shrewd guide. But the film taps into such a primal call to adventure that it feels as if it has always existed, as if it's The Story, and that's a compliment even if "sweeping" and "atmospheric" aren't. 14. Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)- If someone wants to know what a director does, and Casino is too long for him, then this is my new go-to example. Edgar Wright is a Tarantino follower, and like Tarantino before him, he started with fealty to different genres until he ended up with a type of movie to call his very own. I don't have much to add to the plentiful discourse about the chases or the music, ("Every Little Bit Hurts" is my killer track.) but I appreciated that every scene was as propulsive and direct as the chases. The film is broad, both in its characterization and its morals, but it would be a mistake to think of the characters as archetypes. Despite placeholder names, each character has a nuanced backstory, from Doc's nephew to Buddy's telling real name. Jamie Foxx is terrifying as the unpredictable Begbie figure of the crew, and the narrative gives him the latitude to do literally anything he wants. 13. Ingrid Goes West (Matt Spicer)- I could tell you about the breakneck beginning: Somebody gets maced in the first minute, and we, refreshingly, have to fill in a lot of backstory for ourselves. I could point out the tight, organic escalation of the second act, informed by all the details that I liked, especially Taylor's tendency to float an "If you can..." onto her sentences to soften herself. But let me talk about the ending (in an unspecific way). This movie can end in only one way, and it does. It offers closure for the theme it has established, knowing full well not to fill us with a false sense of security or pretend that it's tidier than it is. When the film falters, it's because it's trying to declare itself as a Movie of the Moment, but its ending is as humble as it is logical. 12. Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas)- A film way more about the language it's told in than the end result of what it's telling. [initiate conceit] These most recent Assayas films feel like fancy cocktails with different levels of separation. There's the base, which is a woman who is stalled and unhappy. One of the sweet liqueurs on top of that is her job--meaningless for her taste--as a shopper for a celebrity, a go-between for someone too famous to interact in public. The Kahlua to balance that is her status as a spiritual medium, a go-between for someone too dead to interact in public. She has a heart condition that tethers her emotions, she has a boyfriend who is absent yet present through Skype, she has Youtube videos as conduits for the past, she has a person who has emerged as a literal replacement for her dead brother's widow. Maybe you just want a beer, but I don't mind paying a little extra to see a real bartender get all of those pretty colors together. [close conceit] The film's elliptical final third provides closure in one sense but not another; it verges on cop-out. Maybe more importantly, the film is a step backwards for Kristen Stewart, who is still magnetic but has slipped back into being mannered. There's a scene with a police officer in which the stammering is out of control. She has earned such goodwill, however, that I'm willing to evaluate anything the character does as a productive choice. Why does she take one sip out of drinks and leave them to make a ring on the table? Why does she type a space before a question mark? Why does she use default ringers and not turn off the clicky-type setting? She always gives me something to do.

11. Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve)- Late in the movie--and by that I mean "after Harrison Ford appears"--the villainous Luv is about to smash a cartridge that powers Joi, our hero's holographic girlfriend, and Joi lunges forward as she croaks out "I love y--" before being shorted out. She's professing love as part of the motion forward to save herself, so I began to wonder which expression was more instinctive: self-preservation or love? Which one is more human, especially if the figure involved is only approximating humanity? It's a tiny moment isolated from some of the more intent questioning that Blade Runner 2049 is doing, but the film is still thick with those ideas. Thank God Villeneuve takes his time asking those questions too. Whenever the film shifts into plot gear, it gets silly, but when it's providing purely visual storytelling, there's no setting I would rather engage with. If Roger Deakins doesn't win an Oscar, then those awards really mean nothing. Together he and Villeneuve have made the most expensive art film of all time. At one point Jared Leto, who seems to be in a different movie from everyone else, plays a conversation from the November 2019 of the original movie, and it was a little thought bubble of everything that a re-quel should be: The present was the past was the future. 10. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig)- The best coming-of-age movies, like The 400 Blows or Rushmore (a mini-poster of which is on Lady Bird's wall if you squint), are not afraid to make their characters look small. The Lady Bird character isn't necessarily dumb or naive--though sometimes she is. She's selfish and martyred in the way that teenagers always are. The type of person who would lie about where she lives because she's ashamed of her class, who knows she shouldn't raise her hand at the assembly but does anyway. The genre buys a size up in pettiness, knowing that its characters are going to grow. Lady Bird's piggishness manifests itself most clearly when she's with her mother, to the extent that the relationship, the most important one in the film, is almost grating. That's the point, of course: They butt heads because they're so alike in their inexplicable principles. The first time we see them, they're silently crying at the conclusion of an audio book, connected by a feeling they share but can't articulate. Lady Bird is broader and tidier than I expected, but its details kind of sang to me, both in the tangible cell phones and 9/11-themed bulletin boards and the more abstract notion of a world threatening you and inviting itself to you at the same time. The success of a movie like this comes from how much you didn't want it to end, and I would have eaten up another two hours of L.B. cutting it up in New York. 9. Graduation (Cristian Mungiu)- I have to start including Cristian Mungiu among my favorite directors because every time out he crafts something naturalistic, piercing, and profound. This time Mungiu is working through moral compromise, but as always, he's using the protagonist's predicament to turn the lens on the corruption of the crumbling Romanian spirit. Graduation is probably his most thematically overt work yet--in fact, some of the scenes feel as if they're in italics--but it doesn't suffer from that directness. There's still a lot to grapple with, from the tone of the final shot to Aldea's penchant for cutting fruit, a symbol I haven't worked out yet. Demanding the same patience that it exhibits, Graduation slowly widens its circle of characters as Dr. Aldea gets in over his head, as if to suggest that, even when we think our sin is personal, it always taints others. Especially in the second half, the film is also an austere meditation on parenting--specifically the limits of its influence and sacrifice. It doesn't reach the heights of the last two Mungiu movies, but what does?

8. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (Noah Baumbach)- For me, Noah Baumbach is the filmmaker laureate of divorce. I knew this during The Squid & the Whale, when I recognized my broken home kin in the negotiation of "This is your house too" or the acid behind sentences that start with "Well, your mother..." Now that he's a sufferer of divorce in his own adult life, Baumbach shows a different understanding of blended families and their often imagined slights in The Meyerowitz Stories. Any discussion of the film would get personal for me because I got chills from saying almost the exact, prickish things that the characters say to their father. It helps that the father, Harold, is played by Dustin Hoffman in his best performance in twenty years. As written, the character is already a specific brand of pompous, jealous, New York septugenarian ass, but Hoffman combines what's on the page with a short-strided run and a conversational delay and the ability to make me laugh by just the way he says "shark." I'm not sure the film's structural gambit works--I could have accepted a fractured story with being told that it's a fractured story--but I think Baumbach, particularly as a writer, is on an amazing roll right now. 7. The Shape of Water (Guillermo Del Toro)- The Richard Jenkins character in this film comments on whatever is showing on his television, from Bojangles to Alice Faye but, tellingly for a fable, not the Civil Rights struggle. It occurred to me that, if a man were in his late '50s in 1962 like him, he could be conversant with all of 20th century pop culture. I'm not sure I would want that--I've watched all of the Mr. Ed that I care to--but it's something that is impossible now that media has splintered into so many different directions. Then I thought, if anyone comes close to that sort of knowledge, it's Guillermo Del Toro. The Shape of Water, his best, is the perfect distillation of his influences and an elegiac time in American history. He mixes together the Cold War, restaurant franchising, Hollywood musicals, New Advertising, and more. You may not immediately know what the deal is with those match cuts and candy, but they end up being sturdy bricks for an organically soulful whole. This is a director who has frustrated me with his tendency to get lost in the sauce, but his monster finally adds up to something beautiful here. The film goes too far, spelling things out for Jenkins especially, but it knows exactly where it goes too far and refuses to look back. Michael Shannon stands out as 2017's worst nightmare, but every character's arc gives him or her a fair, well-rounded shake. The script feels buffed to shine, the type they teach in school. And if Alexandre Desplat's score wasn’t the best of the year, then I can't wait to listen to whatever was better. 6. A Ghost Story (David Lowery)- This doesn't sound like the compliment that it is, but I can't remember a successful movie for which dialogue mattered less. In fact, the one piece that didn't work for me, the Will Oldham monologue, rings false because it's the only time that the "what" is more important than the "how." It's why the music is so effective, why there can be a whole sequence in Spanish without subtitles, why the movie doesn't have to make literal sense: It's about the heart, not the head. A Ghost Story is one of the grandest stories possible told in the most intimate way possible. It's the type of elegy for which any viewer could have a different spot to cry. (For me, it was the cross-cutting of the headphones between the expectant past and the grieving present.) The degree of difficulty was enormous--if you laugh the first time the ghost stands up and slinks around the hospital, then nothing else will work--and that's why the final product matters so much. 5. The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi)- I hope that college screenwriting classes are giving Farhadi his due since all of his films are marvels of incident and escalation. The thing that I admire most about his work is that no one is a villain: People are doing their best to survive with their dignity intact, and the conflict occurs because one person fails, honestly and realistically, in that regard. For most of The Salesman, we get a piercingly faithful depiction of the aftermath of a violent attack. Rana's fear is mixed with shame, and neither emotion gels with her natural need for privacy. But it's really through her husband Emad that we get something new. He tries to please her however he can, ignoring his own logic in an attempt to understand, and he gets frustrated when he can't accommodate her. Of course, both of them are actors, so their grief has layers: Their feelings are genuine, but they're performing for each other too. They're self-conscious to a fault, and especially when it comes to the police, they're more worried about how things will look to an outsider than what the actual right thing to do is.The play they're performing is Death of a Salesman, and, at first, it feels like nothing more than a concession to Farhadi's growing international audience. But there's common ground in Emad and Arthur Miller's trapped, tragic everymen. Emad conducts himself with the honor that his society instilled in him, even when it isn't a good fit. (For example, he patiently teaches literature even though he seems awful at it and his passion is the theater.) When he starts to break that mold--say, using his influence to ID a license plate--he actually does get what he wants for a while. But that fueling of his pride only increases his fall in the deliberate final section. He and Willy Loman were born to be victims. 4. Last Men in Aleppo (Feras Fayyad)- It's a bit undignified and short-sighted to lament a certain year in history--I doubt my grandfather ever tweeted "Ugh--1942 amirite." But 2017 was tough for me because the entire notion of having heroes to admire seemed to erode. Enter Last Men in Aleppo, which documents men who, despite the odds that they won't save anyone, despite the temptation to move somewhere else, knowingly enter bombed areas of Syria to try to rescue people trapped under rubble. The documentary isn't easy to watch in the sense that no one wants to see a lifeless baby lifted out of wreckage. But watching it from the safety of my home is the least I can do, not only to remind myself of the sanctity of my physical safety but to remind myself that human beings are inherently good. These guys are my heroes. INSTANT CLASSICS

3. Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson)- Reynolds Woodcock watches from the top of the stairs as each of his employees reports to work. They defer to him with a head-down greeting, and he then goes to breakfast. There's control there in an obvious sense: the imperious way that he clocks them in. But he shows power over them in other ways too. He lives at the House of Woodcock, so there will never be a situation in which anyone else can get there earlier than he can--no one can ever appear more devoted. And presumably they had to eat before they came, whereas he can luxuriate with his tea in his privileged silence until he deigns to inspect their work. In just that one example of characterization, there's more unsaid than there is said, and the whole film has that sort of explorable depth. Phantom Thread, lifted by a lush Jonny Greenwood score, is a spellbinding puzzle that will require multiple viewings, but I don't mean that it's ever unclear about what happens. You can explain its events clearly, just as you can explain the major events of your life clearly, but that doesn't mean you understand every reason for what happened to you, now or ever. At the same time, Paul Thomas Anderson is able to access minute, direct emotions. I'm reminded of the painful clarity on Daniel Day-Lewis's face as Reynolds's new wife chews loudly, and he knows that he's stuck with that sound forever. That expression elicited some laughs from me and the other assorted men by themselves in the theater, but it was one of the several moments pitched at such an acute and strange angle that we weren't sure how to react. Was it okay that this gothic romance, as chaste as it is nasty, was also silly? That's the magic of the best filmmaker in the world: After all this time, he's still giving us things we don't even know how to watch.

2. Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan)- Just when we thought we were done with cinematic experiences, Christopher Nolan proves that we aren't. For me at least, Nolan has always been caught between his cold tactician side and his sentimental populist side. When he has faltered for me, it's because he ventured too deeply into the latter, and Dunkirk is his most objective, observant, dispassionate work yet. Can't hear the dialogue from the sound mix? Well, there isn't much dialogue. Think that he can't write women? Well, there aren't any women. This feels like the film that he has been waiting to make in order to silence any critics who might be left. Auterism aside, what we're left with is a sincere heart-stopper powered by a downright experimental score and precise editing. How much faith do you have to have in yourself and your audience to cut away from someone in the act of drowning? There are three macro stories here--land, sea, and air--but the true empathy comes from the micro. A man walks into the sea to a certain death, a boy might or might not lock a door, one soldier accuses another of being a German spy. It adds up to something that elicits emotion from us without begging for it.

1. The Florida Project (Sean Baker)- In the office of Willem Dafoe's Bobby, there's an upside-down remote control sitting in a cup. Affixed onto that remote is a piece of masking tape labeled "NEEDS BATT." My eyes were wandering during the scene--I don't think I was supposed to notice the prop--but it's the type of lived-in detail that proves a) Sean Baker knows this world, and b) this location is totally real. In many ways the characters of the film are like that remote: Sometimes they work, but mostly they sit in their container, hoping for the inspiration that could power them to their potential. Often Baker's presentation of the action is like a remote control too. He switches over two or three times to Moonee playing in the bathtub, but it takes a while for us to orient ourselves to the tragic reason why that's going on. He often flips us to something, then expects us to catch up to its significance. Willem Dafoe is, as far as I know, the only professional actor in the cast, but he is as free of artifice as the children are. Bobby's a mediator, protector, and administrator, but the film doesn't let him off the hook just because he's male/White/adult/employed: He doesn't have his shit together either. It's one of the film's best tricks, painting him as the one in control when his son has lost patience with him and he still hasn't fixed the ice machine. Is he a good man, or is he just the smartest kid in a remedial class? Some people will gripe about the ending, but, as I squinted through tears, I thought it captured the spirit of the rest of the movie well. As harrowing as some moments are, as pitiful as some of the characters' struggles can be, daily life provides so much room for joy. I thought Baker's Tangerine showed promise, but I was hesitant to declare him the next important auteur, as many people were doing. I'm ready to do that now.

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