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'Blue Beetle': Latino Culture Reigns Supreme in Long-Needed Superhero Departure

'Black Panther' proved there was an immense audience for movies based on diverse comic book characters. Will DC's latest also deliver at the box office?

— Steve Appleford | August 11, 2023

As a young comic book writer and fan in 2006, Josh Trujillo was immediately captivated by a new take on an old second-tier superhero, the Blue Beetle. Less important than the character’s powers and ancient scarab technology was the name behind the mask: Jaime Reyes, a high school kid from a Latino home in El Paso, Texas, grappling with his new capabilities amid the usual teen angst.

Traditionally, most superheroes from DC and Marvel were dependably square-jawed and Caucasian, but this was something different. “The fact that his name was Jaime —that’s something you rarely saw in comics at the time, and even now, it’s relatively rare,” says Trujillo, a Los Angeles-based creator who now writes the character for DC Comics. “I kind of became obsessed with learning everything I could about him.”

Now, the character is the latest superhero to lead a live-action feature film, Blue Beetle, directed by Ángel Manuel Soto, with Xolo Maridueña (the hit Netflix series Cobra Kai) in the title role. The August 18 release from Warner Bros. Pictures will face a variety of constituencies, including fans outraged by last year’s cancellation of Batgirl, which had been anticipated as the first superhero film starring a Latina actor, Leslie Grace. Blue Beetle also lands after disappointing box office numbers in June for The Flash, which some blamed on allegations surrounding its star, Ezra Miller. Others suggest, not for the first time, that the superhero genre is simply running out of steam.

For many of those eagerly awaiting Blue Beetle, its arrival as a commodity could not be less relevant to its value as a cultural statement, regardless of fallout from The Flash. Superhero fans from Latino neighborhoods across the country are openly anticipating the film, which stars a mostly Latino cast, including George Lopez and Adriana Barraza, with Susan Sarandon as a ruthless villain named Victoria Kord.

Ángel Manuel Soto, George Lopez, Xolo Maridueña, and Harvey Guillén. Instagram.Com/George Lopez

“Everybody’s really excited about this in the community,” says Frederick Luis Aldama, author and professor of humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in comics studies and Latino pop culture. “The support is going to be because, for the first time, we have a Latino superhero who is the protagonist — he’s the one carrying the story. And we haven’t had that in the past.”

Aldama, who has adopted the nickname “Professor Latinx” (a takeoff on X-Men’s Professor X), noted his disappointment that the film relocates Jaime from the borderlands of El Paso for the fictional Palmera City. But he appreciates that in the comics, and in the movie trailer he saw a month ahead of the film’s release, Jaime “didn’t lose his Latino-ness” after being transformed into the Blue Beetle. “It was very much still a part of his identity and his struggle.”

Before Blue Beetle, the first major superhero film to feature a Latino lead character was 2018’s animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, winner of that year’s Oscar for animated feature, with a kid named Miles Morales in the Spidey mask. It was followed by this year’s sequel Across the Spider-Verse. Last year, Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness included a teenage Latina superhero named America Chavez. And in The Flash, the central role of Supergirl was played by Colombian American Sasha Calle.

Most likely, the castings aren’t so much about social justice as reading the room. In 2021, Latinos made up 24 percent of the U.S. moviegoing audience, according to a study by the Motion Picture Association. “Within the Latino community, there’s always been excitement for colorful characters and larger-than-life heroes,” says Trujillo, who also created an openly gay version of Captain America for Marvel. “You see that in luchador [wrestling], right? You see it in even telenovelas. There’s this larger-than-life element that people are really drawn to in our community.”

With the new DC Universe brand of superhero films, television, and video games still a full year away, DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn has declared that the movie’s incarnation of Blue Beetle is “the first DCU character” of the new regime. What exactly that portends for future films with Blue Beetle was left vague, but the film seems destined to rise and fall on its own, unconnected to any of the major DC heroes. It’s also arguable that Maridueña is much better known for Cobra Kai and better positioned to lead a film than The Flash’s Miller had been.

Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Comics

“He looks just like Jaime Reyes, and we all know he can act,” says Trujillo. “The special effects and the action, it feels very youthful. It feels very fresh. I think a lot of people who might be turned off by the heavier continuity of the superhero movies will be able to find something new and something they can really take ownership of in the Blue Beetle movie.”

The negativity emanating from Batgirl’s cancellation continues to resonate. The company line from the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery was that the film was unreleasable, though the move was widely seen as a Machiavellian choice by CEO David Zaslav in order to take an easy $90 million write-off, turning the mogul instantly into DC’s least popular supervillain.

Zoe Saldana, a star of three popular movie franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Trek, and Avatar — called the cancellation a “truly atrocious act from a studio.” And filmmaker Kevin Smith, normally a dependable booster for the comics properties he adores, noted that it was “an incredibly bad look to cancel the Latina Batgirl movie. I don’t give a shit if the movie was absolute fucking dogshit — I guarantee you that it wasn’t,” pointing to the sterling bona fides of the film’s codirectors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, on the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel.

The Batgirl cancellation drew the attention of U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, who was already critical of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Castro was one of four members of Congress in April to urge the Department of Justice to investigate the merger. “I don’t see how it’s been beneficial to many people,” Castro says.

That said, Castro is already looking forward to Blue Beetle and has met with the director and star, with plans to rent a theater in his working-class “bread and butter” district to share the film with members of his community. “I and many others were concerned at the time of the Batgirl announcement that the same thing would happen with Blue Beetle. I’m glad that it didn’t,” he says. “It’s important for the Latino community because Latinos have been excluded from Hollywood, by and large, in front of and behind the camera.”

Castro has also been active in promoting Eva Longoria’s streaming comedy-drama Flamin’ Hot and attended a screening at the White House. He says these films follow generations of Hollywood stereotypes of Latinos and other communities, if they’re shown onscreen at all. “So Blue Beetle, where you have a Latino who

is a superhero, is a striking departure from the usual Hollywood fare of Latino as gangbanger, as ‘illegal,’ as criminal. And that means a lot.”

The movie was already in production when Trujillo began writing his recent comic book miniseries Blue Beetle: Graduation Day, which is set for rerelease in book form in time for the movie’s debut. He says it is the first American mainstream superhero comic to be created by an all-Latino team, including Spanish artist Adrian Gutierrez. He was given bits and pieces of information from the movie to incorporate into his storyline but hasn’t seen the film. He hopes to attend the premiere and bask on the “blue carpet.”

“I’ll be there day one, regardless,” he says of the Blue Beetle movie. “I do think there’s a bit of a rising tide, and DC in particular has done a really good job of embracing the Latino community. I’m really grateful that DC’s been on board for it from the very beginning.”

[ordinaryschmuck]

What I Thought About Encanto

Salutations, random people of the internet who won’t read this! I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons.

And it's been a hot minute since I've written a full-length review, huh? Yeah, you can probably blame school for that one. BUT now that I'm on winter break until the eighteenth, I'm finally going to talk about the s**t that I love. Spending most of that time talking about the latest hit from the company that ruined its best-animated series by a long shot.

That's right! Today, I'm talking about Disney's Encanto, a movie that skyrocketed into my list of favorite Disney movies! And the craziest thing is, I didn't think it would. It looked cute from the trailers, but I didn't believe there would be anything that would make it stand out from Disney's other greatest hits. I didn't even go watch it until I looked at my workload for finals month and decided, "F**k it. I need something cute and fun out of sanity's sake."

And so I saw the movie...and fell in love with it.

It was fun, beautiful, highly emotional, and made me cry in a way no movie in memory has accomplished. What do I mean by that? Well, to explain how would require going into spoilers, and trust me when I say that this is your last chance to see the movie before reading more of this review. It's on Disney+ right now, and, believe me, it's worth the price.

With that said, let's get into why Encanto might be my favorite Disney movie...or at least in the top three.

WHAT I LIKED

The Animation/Designs: Let's get it out of the way and state that this movie is gorgeous. I wouldn't really say the animation is a game-changer in any way as there's nothing really new being done. It just looks like Disney has once again naturally progressed its 3D animation since its first attempt with Dinosaur, and I'd say they definitely got the hang of it this time. The movements are fluid, the characters are mildly expressive, and there are moments--but not many--where it feels like a 2D film with a coat of CGI paint. It's all really well put together. And to discredit Encanto because its animation isn't a game-changer like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse is doing the movie a huge disservice. There was clearly a ton of effort into making Encanto look astounding, and it shows with every scene.

The effort also shines in the character designs. For one, everybody looks so incredibly detailed, showing almost every hair and even a few pores to their skin. It's stuff they didn't need to do, but you appreciate and respect that they did. But what I personally adore is the designs of the Madrigals. Every Madrigal looks related to one another, having features that resemble their parents and even their abuela. Like how Julieta and Pepa inherited her sharp chin, and that trait went into...basically all of their children. And even then, there is a mix of features that the children share with their parents, like skin color, nose size, and even ears. Despite there being similarities between them all, though, each Madrigal still has a unique design that fits well into their character. Dolores has emphasis drawn to her ears, Isabela looks like the most generically beautiful Disney princess you can get, and Alma has sharp features and dark colors. That last one is a fact that I appreciate for two reasons, which I'll get into later. For now, I'll just say that there's no half-assing when it comes to this movie's animation. People behind the scenes cared about how great it looked, and, by golly, it paid off.

“The Family Madrigal”: Let's take a moment to appreciate that there are two Lin-Manuel Miranda musicals now under Disney's roster...Three if you want to count their taping of Hamilton...which I do not.

Now, some people are saying that Encanto isn't Lin's best work. To me, that's the equivalent of saying the sun doesn't shine bright enough because even though Encanto's soundtrack doesn't live up to things like Hamilton, In the Heights, and even Moana, the songs are still incredible. They're catchy, written well, orchestrated phenomenally, and will likely be played on repeat while I'm doing work. We're going to go over each of them, and there's no better place to start than the first musical number in the movie.

"The Family Madrigal" is a pretty good opener. It's a quick and entertaining way to introduce us to the main characters and even offer some motivations. Alma's portion of the song actually shows a lot about her character and why she does the things she does in the film. You see it in lines like, "earn the miracle/That somehow found us" and "But work and dedication will keep the miracle burning." It's a solid introduction to her point of view that future scenes expand on top of introducing the audience to these characters (Also, I’m going to return to Alma’s lyrics later, so, remember that). And the visuals are also pretty nice. Everyone and everything moves and dances with the beat, alongside a neat little detail that I don't think anyone's mentioned. When Mirabel talks about a family member, the mural behind her brightens up the colors of the Madrigal in question. Here it is when she talks about Pepa:

Bruno:

And Julieta:

It's another detail they didn't have to do, but the fact that they did makes you respect this movie even more. Overall, "The Family Madrigal" is still a great song that lets us know enough about the characters while leaving some details out so we can have the rest of the movie to get to know them.

Tha Casita: Two awesome things come with the Casita.

One, it is its own character. Which is crazy because, well, it's a house. And despite that, the Casita has so much personality within it, given how it moves around. It can be playful, cautious, and, most of all, protective of the family within it. The animators manage to express emotions and personality through subtle ways in figuring out what part of the Casita can move. Like how it used some furniture to show that it shrugged. It's superb visual storytelling that allows the audience to figure things out for themselves, making it a ton of fun to watch this house be a character on top of a setting.

This brings me to the second thing that makes the Casita awesome: It functions perfectly as the movie's setting. In fact, the Casita might just be the perfect way for Encanto to have this personal story that manages to be a grand-scale adventure. Everything within the film basically happens in the house, which makes sense. This is a story about a family, and you can't really tell that type of tale if the main character goes off on this globe-trotting adventure like other Disney protagonists. However, because the Casita has, what might as well be, these pocket dimensions within each family member's room, it gives Mirabel that grand adventure without leaving her front door. It's a sort of "have your cake and eat it too" type of decision that works well in making this movie look epic while, at its core, it is still a personal family story. And it's all done through the Casita.

The writers could have made it a character. They could have also made it the setting. But because it's both, it makes the Casita much more special than one might think.

Mirabel: And now we're onto the best character of the movie. You'll see people give that honor to Dolores, Bruno, and even Camilo, all for good reasons... except for maybe Camilo. I honestly don't understand the appeal with him. BUT more power to you if he's your favorite character. No judgment here.

To me, though, there's nothing really beating Mirabel. She's an incredible protagonist, and the main reason is that she's the glue that keeps this family together. A good percent of this movie shows Mirabel helping each family member through their turmoils and anxieties. The scene that sold me on her character was when she helped Antonio with his nerves for the gift ceremony. When he's worried about what he believes to be the worst-case scenario about not getting a gift, Mirabel is there to reassure him, saying that he'll be fine no matter what happens. And, when Antonio needed her the most, Mirabel was there to hold his hand and walk him to his door. It broke tradition and brought a few unhappy memories, but she did it anyway. Why? Because Mirabel cares about her family. Hell, her main goal in the movie is to fix the miracle for her family. Sure, there's the tiniest part of her that's doing it for herself, but only because she holds the rest of the family in such high regard. Mirabel feels that she has to earn the Madrigal name, doing all she can to prove she can be useful despite not having a gift. A fact that is perfectly seen in the song--

“Waiting on a Miracle”: Or as I like to call it: The best “I want” song in ANY Disney movie.

We all know the "I want" songs from Disney. They're musical numbers that have our protagonists sing about how they want more from their dull lives, whether it'd be an adventure in the great white somewhere, to be a part of our world, or to see how far they'll go beyond a reef. For me, "Waiting on a Miracle" earns brownie points because of how easily sympathetic it is. What Mirabel wants more of is respect from her family. She doesn't just want to be called a Madrigal but seen as one. And the girl's pretty explicit about it, too, given how Mirabel screams "Open your eyes" three times, downright begging and pleading that her family sees her. Plus, by visually showing the audience how it's Mirabel's family's approval she's after, it takes away any thoughts that she is fueled by a need for attention. If the animators favored showing the villagers admire her, then the purpose would have been lost, and I'm glad they kept all focus on the family rather than anyone else, primarily in that last bit. By the way, now that we're talking about visuals, can we appreciate how gorgeous this number looked? Not only is Mirabel walking past the party members stuck in slow motion a neat trick, but that moment of her singing her heart out amongst the fireworks still gives me goosebumps for how beautiful it was. The best word to describe this scene is magical, and I adore it...even though this is probably the weakest song in the soundtrack.

I know it's weird to bash it after singing its praises (ha), but to be fair, this is more personal reasons, if anything else. It's still good, really, REALLY good...the thing is it doesn't have that replayability as the other songs do. I can listen to the other ones, jam out to them, and get emotionally invested. Just not with this song. It may be one of the best "I want" songs Disney made, but to me, it's not the best one in Encanto.

“Surface Pressure”: This song, however, might just be my favorite in the film!

Whereas "Waiting on a Miracle" is best described as magical, there is no better word for "Surface Pressure" other than EPIC! The reasoning behind such a claim goes to the visuals alone. Shots like Luisa running through the geysers, standing up to Cerberus, and holding up the rubble falling onto her is pretty awesome to see, I won't lie. But what sells it all are the transitions from scene to scene, with it all being seamless and often making me wonder, "How did they manage that?" The collaborative effort between the animators, set designers, modelers, and especially the editors shows, resulting in a musical number that's a treat to the eyeballs. As for the song itself, it's pretty good. The lyrics nail the feeling of, well, pressure, how one's responsibilities often leave them in a position where they can crack at any moment. Lines like, "I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service," "If I could shake the crushing weight of expectations," and "Give it to your sister, it doesn't hurt/And see if she can handle every family burden" all feed into that idea. And huge credit to Jessica Darrow for doing a phenomenal job at portraying the right amount of emotion each lyric deserves, whether that be intensity, anxiety, peace, or, of course, dread. Even the instrumentals do great at portraying the right emotions that the moment requires, coming together for a song that is something I'd replay over and over again...too bad it's also the most pointless song in the movie.

Yeah, as much as I love "Surface Pressure," narratively, you can cut it, and little would change. I mean, yes, it shows us how much Luisa is struggling under her responsibilities, which is nice...if Luisa had more presence in the movie. After this scene, her powers start fading away, and she gets basically left out for the rest of the time, being nothing more than a showcase of the consequences that come if Mirabel doesn't save the miracle. That's a great idea but is a character with a minimum presence in the story really the best choice to give this grandiose musical number? I don't think so, at least. Characters like Mirabel and even Isabela deserve their solo numbers for having more essential stakes in the plot alongside some actual relevance. I still love this song with all my heart, but if you had to ask me what needed to be cut, then there's nothing that "Surface Pressure" has that a single conversation couldn't handle instead.

“We Don’t Talk About Bruno”: "ThEn WhY dId ThEy SiNg AbOuT hIm?" There, I made the obvious joke everyone else has made. Let's talk about the actual best song in the movie now.

While "Surface Pressure" may win as my favorite on the soundtrack, "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is still easily Encanto's best musical number. The imagery and instrumentals give it this eerie feel, added by lyrics that paint Bruno as this person who brings forth prophecies that causes distress to the people around him. In a way, with how this song is presented, it's the movie's villain song. There are just a few problems with such a claim. For one, Bruno's not the story's villain...that's clearly Alma (I swear, I'll get to that). The other problem is that Bruno doesn't do anything wrong. When you look closely at the lyrics, people describe Bruno predicting how these bad things will happen to them, reacting as if he's the cause of it. The thing is, he isn't. Bruno just tells them this stuff will happen. How they react going forward isn't his fault. It's like getting angry at a doctor delivering bad news about your grandmother's health. Yeah, it's not a great situation, but it's not your doctor's fault, is it?

This isn't exactly hidden. The fact that Bruno is not the bad guy is right there in the lyrics. You just got to read them carefully. Especially during Delores' verse when she sings, "It's a heavy lift with a gift so humbling/Always left Abuela and the family fumbling/Grappling with prophecies they couldn't understand." (Miranda). The thing is, even though it's blatant, it's still cleverly hidden behind the presentation, as I've already mentioned and praised the song for.

But the blatant message and fantastic presentation aren't what make this song the best. That goes to the choreography. This is the first Disney song that I could wholeheartedly see being on a stage show...Ok, maybe not Camilo's bit. But the rest? Definitely. It probably helps that they actually had a whole dance number as a reference for this song, which is cool as it shows how much the people behind this movie wanted to get things right. And boy, does it pay off, resulting in a song that looks and sounds as perfectly as it’s presented. We might not talk about Bruno, but we’ll definitely be talking about this song for a while.

The Dinner Scene: This scene is just funny. It's a perfect comedy of errors, aided by everyone's facial expressions and attempts to fix certain disasters. It's just great.

Bruno: Let's talk about Bruno!

"We don't talk about Bruno!"

TOO BAD! WE'RE TALKING ABOUT BRUNO! Because I'm not kidding when I say that he's both the funniest and saddest character in the entire movie. At first, you're laughing at his whole crazy-man routine, with him pretending to be Jorge and Hernando and having rats reenact TV shows. It's a little sad that he ended up this way, I'll admit that. But with how well John Leguizamo delivers his lines, I find myself laughing at Bruno's insanity instead of tearing up from it. That is, until the revelation of where Bruno is exactly holed up. Yeah, if the reveal of him living right by the family dinner table isn't enough to clench your heart in a steel grip, then showing how he has painted a plate with his name on it for his own table is more than enough to destroy you. As he said, Bruno loves his family and couldn't force himself to leave even if he wanted to. So, the movie showing that Bruno's so close to his family, but feeling as though he's worlds apart, is disheartening in the very least. And the hits keep on coming when Bruno talks about his situation, revealing his anxieties stemming from the village getting mad at his visions. Remember how I said that the lyrics in "We Don't Talk About Bruno" don't really say how Bruno does anything bad? Well, when you hear Bruno explain how he left the family because he was sure people would expect the worst for the latest bad news he'll offer, it’ll show a sense of tragedy to a character that, let's be honest, we should have seen coming. After all, how else would you expect a man to go crazy if not for the dozens of people saying how awful he is. Those harsh words really got to him, and I wouldn't blame the man for cracking because of it. But, despite being the most tragic, Bruno's still the most hilarious character in the movie. His reaction to Mirabel's anger, him head butting his way out of the Casita, AND him failing to get off the horse are all moments that succeed in getting a chuckle out of me. I laugh at his antics, but I always manage to remember the sadness lying underneath them. It's an incredible balancing act of drama and comedy that would be hard to pull off, and kudos to John Leguizamo for voicing a character who has actual emotional depth instead of voicing Sid the Sloth again...Yeah, it's the same person who voices Sid the Sloth. And once you hear it, you can't un-hear it...You're welcome.

“What Else Can I Do?”: To me, "What Else Can I Do" is a better "Let it Go" than, well, "Let it Go." Think about it: What reason does Elsa have when it comes to singing a song about letting loose one's inner ambitions? Sure, she feels as though there's no point about hiding what she can do now that everyone saw that she has ice powers, but, literally, the worst-case scenario that her parents warned her about just happened. People saw Elsa's powers and were afraid of her because of it. At that point, the song shouldn't be "Let it Go," but rather "Keep it In," as Elsa should struggle with the fear and anxieties of her worst nightmare coming true.

Here, with "What Else Can I Do," it's the same idea but executed perfectly. Isabela has made something unique and imperfect, and she is riding that creativity high for all it's worth. By reflecting on all the perfect flowers she perfectly grew for a perfect purpose, she sings about how she's straight-up sick of perfection. For once, she wants to make something new, experimenting with her powers rather than do what she's used to. And the joy that comes with it is infectious, as I find myself smiling along with Isabela as she lets it grow.

As for the song and musical number itself...it's pretty good. The instrumentals really express that pure happiness that Isabela's feeling at the moment, Diane Guerrero really nails the right emotions each lyric requires, and it all does a fantastic job at showing more to this character we thought was nothing more than a mean girl stereotype. There's nothing to really hate about it. It's just a really great song.

Abuela Alma: Yup. Let's get into it.

Alma, in many ways, is the movie's antagonist. A fact that when I finally realized it, I went, "Oh, s**t. She looks like a Disney villain!" And can you really blame me for such a thought? Her design is sharp, stature strict, and colors dark and grim. So, yeah, she looks like a Disney villain...but I wouldn't really call her that, as antagonist really is the better word. Don't get me wrong, her actions could be better. A lot better. She forces this idea of perfection onto her family, making them think they have to do all they can to help the town. It's only in doing so that Alma inadvertently causes conflict amongst the family as they all gain anxieties about being as perfect as she hopes they can be. But there's a keyword in that sentence, and it's "inadvertently." Alma doesn't intend to cause such pressure on her family. Hell, I doubt she's even aware of what she's doing. Look at Alma's reaction when Mirabel confronts her. Or when the Casita has broken apart. It looks as though she finally realizes that her actions are problematic, which makes Alma somewhat redeemable to me. She sees the consequences of her actions, and instead of doubling down on her believes, she apologizes for it. Better yet, she apologizes to Mirabel.

Out of all the family members that found Mirabel after the Casita was destroyed, I'm really glad it was Alma all for the heart to heart she and Mirabel shared. It's their relationship that's easily the rockiest, with Mirabel not getting her gift ruining how Alma sees her. So, to have Alma be the one to find Mirabel and to apologize, it shows how much she's willing to improve and do better. It was Mirabel that Alma arguably hurt the most, and it makes great leaps and bounds in showing how she’ll do better. Especially when she explains herself.

“Dos Oruguitas”: I'm mostly talking about the scene and not the song. Because while the "Dos Oruguitas" is nice as its lyrics perfectly portray the life of Alma and Piedro in the first half and Alma and Mirabel in the second, it's not the essential part of the scene. As great as it is, any song could play over the scene that follows just as long as it conveys the right emotions. It's good, but it's also replaceable.

As for the scene itself, it is astounding. It visually tells the story of Alma and Piedro, revealing so much of why Alma acts the way that she does. Her actions are hard to forgive, but you at least understand why she did them. The love of Alma's life died right in front of her eyes, and because of that, she remained emotionally broken. Look at this face:

This is the face of pure, unadulterated pain. Pain that does not go away without some long-form treatment. And on a second rewatch, when I saw Alma drape her black shawl over her, another realization came to me. Her dark colors don't represent a classic Disney villain. They represent a woman in mourning. As such, it affects how Alma should treat the miracle. She felt as though life gave her a second chance, and in no way was she going to waste it. To go back to her verse in "The Family Madrigal" (told you that I'd return to those lyrics), Alma sings how they must "earn the miracle/That somehow found us." The issue is that she focuses on the wrong way to earn the miracle, thinking that "work and dedication will keep the miracle burning." Even Alma admits that she now realizes that it was meant to keep her family happy, not strictly to benefit the town. Her goals are admirable, but Alma's execution falters in how her heartbreak made her stop thinking emotionally, focusing more on the miracle instead of the family. Even though it's her family that's the true miracle. Something that Alma understands when she says Piedro sent her Mirabel when asking for help. It's a very heartwarming confession that, while it doesn't fix everything, certainly puts Alma on the right track. As nice as "Dos Oruguitas" is as a song, the scene that comes with it is much better with how much it reveals and wraps up.

Alma Hugging Bruno: ...I mean...that's just instant. Bruno comes in swinging, expecting an argument, only for Alma, so happy to see her son after he disappeared for years, to run up and hug him. No yelling, no anger. Just pure gratitude to see her son, disproving how Bruno thought everyone saw him in the process. And that...Dang it. It tears me up inside!

“All of You”: I'm going to level with all of you (ha): I'm a sucker for finale songs that try to blend motifs and reworks lyrics of other musical numbers. So, as you can tell, I really dig this one. "All of You" nicely slides in similarities to previous songs while still standing out on its own. But it's not just the song that I'm in love with. It's also the emotional moments that came with it. "All of You" is perfect for the times when it had my heart feel full. Like Julieta and Pepa hugging Bruno the second they see him, the townspeople coming to help the Madrigals as they helped them, and...that moment...in the end.

The family's all lined up like it's a gift ceremony, Antonio walks Mirabel to the door to pay her back for doing the same thing for him, and--Oh, man. And everyone...everyone sings...about how...how important she is to all of them, thus...disproving everything she thought was true. It all comes to a head when Mirabel looks at the knob and says, "I see me/All of me.” And THAT is where I lose it. Every time.

Remember how I said this movie made me cry? Well, it's not because it made me sad. Far from it, in fact. In actuality, the reason why I cried to Encanto...was because it made me happy. Seeing Mirabel get something she's been wanting, dreaming for, as exemplified by "Waiting for a Miracle," to then be told that not only does she have it but always had it, is something that makes my heart feel whole. So much so that I cry, feeling so happy for her. As far as I can remember, that never happens. I've teared up from bittersweet moments and especially tragic ones. But for a movie to make me feel so happy that I have no choice but to cry? That is something special. And that's what makes "All of You" and, to a greater extent, Encanto so amazing. It did something impossible, downright paradoxical, in how it made me so happy that I cried. And I can't complain about a movie that does that.

WHAT I DISLIKED

But f**k you, I'm doing it anyway!

Here are, like, two complaints that I have about the movie. Yeah, two. Compared to everything else I've praised; I doubt I'm going to lose sleep over it. But they're still worth mentioning.

Mirabel Seeing the Casita Cracking Apart: I...I still don't know what happened here. I've seen this movie three times, and I still have no clue what happened. Was this a vision? Did the house magically heal itself? Is Bruno--sorry--Hernando better at fixing the cracks than we thought? How did the Casita look cracked up one second, but when Mirabel went to show everyone, it was fixed?

And before you said "it was magic, obviously," it's implied that the only thing that fixes the cracks is family unity. Not much of that going on when Mirabel remains isolated amongst the others. So, again, I'll ask: How does it happen? Because the lack of an answer makes me think we have a problem here.

Not Enough Time for the Rest of the Family: Don't get me wrong, I love every character in this film. Each Madrigal's personality is clear as day, and almost everyone gets at least one scene where they shine. The problem is, narratively, there's not enough room for everybody. Alma and Mirabel have definite arcs, Bruno, Luisa, and Isabela have some major narrative functions, and Julieta, Agustín, and Antonio work well as supporting characters. The rest of the family, though, feel like there's not enough time for them to do much. They sing, have some funny moments, and...yeah, that's about it.

Oh, wait, my apologies. Apparently, Dolores has romantic feelings for Mariano...I forgot about this until the last second because the movie does too. It's addressed halfway through the story, dropped, and then comes back up again for a rushed and confusing pairing. Like...why do these two love each other? I can sort of see why Dolores would love him. She literally spits out a list of reasons. But what about Mariano? What's his reason for loving her? All we can figure is that it happened as she talks about how great he is, and if that's the reason...then it's pretty shallow, my friends.

Moments like that make me believe that the movie needs... let's say, twenty more minutes. It wouldn't give much, but it would offer more than they already have. Especially for Camilo’s sake because out of everyone, he's probably the one character the film could cut. Yeah, I know he's everyone's favorite, but he doesn't really do anything. Dolores at least gets Mirabel on track. And Pepa and Felix bring the precious baby boy that is Antonio into this world. What does Camilo do? Nothing. He's a pointless character, and a few more minutes could at least absolve some of that.

(People are going to think I hate Camilo, when the truth is I actually think his character’s fun. I just don’t understand the hype behind him 😂)

But if the biggest complaint to a movie is that I wish there were more time to spend with each character...is that really a criticism?

IN CONCLUSION

Encanto is an easy A to me. It has its nitpicks, but there is still so much more to appreciate. The characters are well-defined, the songs are incredible, the visuals and animation are some of Disney's best, and I really adore how it's a perfect movie for both kids and their parents. Kids can love how nice everything looks and learn that there's nothing wrong with who they are. And the parents can, hopefully, realize that they don't have to pressure their kids to be great and already appreciate how wonderful they already are. Add that as one of the movies that will make you cry tears of joy, then you've got something that earns its spot as one of the best Disney movies ever made. Given the company's roster, that achievement in itself is one hell of a miracle.

[rabbittstewcomics]

Episode 328

Comic Reviews:

DC

Batman Annual 2021 by James Tynion IV, Ricardo Lopez Ortiz, Romulo Fajardo Jr.

Batman Fear State Omega by James Tynion IV, Riccardo Federici, Christian Duce, Ryan Benjamin, Guillem March, Trevor Hairsine, Chris Sotomayor

Detective Comics Annual 2021 by Mariko Tamaki, Matthew Rosenberg, David Lapham, Trish Mulvihill, Lee Loughridge

Gotham City Villains Anniversary Giant 1 by Danny DeVito, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain, Wes Craig, Jason Wordie, G. Willow Wilson, Jordie Bellaire, Emma Rios, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Riccardo Federici, Sunny Gho, Nadia Shammas, Max Raynor, John Kalisz, Stephanie Phillips, Max Fiumara, Dan Watters, Skylar Patridge, Marissa Louise, Mairghread Scott, Ariela Kristantina, Trish Mulvihill

Joker Annual 2021 by Matthew Rosenberg, James Tynion IV, Francesco Francavilla

Justice League Dark Annual 2021 by Ram V, Dan Watters, Christopher Mitten, Romulo Fajardo Jr

Justice League Incarnate 1 by Joshua Williamson, Dennis Culver, Brandon Peterson, Andrei Bressan, Tom Derenick, Hi-Fi

Nightwing Annual 2021 by Tom Taylor, Cian Tormey, Daniel Hdr, Raul Fernandez, Rain Beredo, John Kalisz

Robin Annual 2021 by Joshua Williamson, Roger Cruz, Victor Olazaba, Luis Guerrero

Wonder Woman Annual 2021 by Becky Cloonan, Michael Conrad, Andy MacDonald, Nick Filardi

Wonder Woman: Historia The Amazons 1 by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Phil Jimenez, Hi-Fi, Arif Prianto, Romulo Fajardo Jr

Marvel:

Darkhold: Black Bolt by Mark Russell, David Cutler, Roberto Poggi, Matt Milla

Death of Doctor Strange: Spider-Man by Jed MacKay, Marcelo Ferreira, Wayne Faucher, Peter Pantazis, Andrew Crossley

Death of Doctor Strange: White Fox by Alyssa Wong, Andie Tong, Luciano Vecchio, Arif Prianto

Avengers 50 by Jason Aaron, Christopher Ruocchio, Carlos Pacheco, Aaron Kuder, Javier Garron, Ed McGuinness, Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines, Frank D'Armata, David Curiel

How to Read Comics the Marvel Way by Christopher Hastings, Scott Koblish, Nolan Woodard

Infinity Comics: Spider Bot by Jordan Blum, Alberto Alburquerque, Dono Sanchez-Almara

Image:

King of Spies 1 by Mark Millar, Matteo Scalera

Boom:

Magic: Master of Metal 1 by Mairghread Scott, Jorge Coelho, French Carlomagno, Jacques Salomon

Ablaze

Animal Castle 1 by Xavier Dorson, Felix Delep

AfterShock:

Maniac of New York: The Bronx is Burning 1 by Elliott Kalan, Andrew Mutti

AWA

Hotell Season 2 1 by John Lees, Lee Loughridge, Dalibor Talajic

Dark Horse:

Sir Edward Grey: Acheron 1 by Mike Mignola, Dave Stewart

Eve Online Capsuleer Chronicles 1 by Sam Maggs, Melissa Grey, Kieran McKeown, Dexter Vines, Sebastian Cheng

Dynamite:

Evil Ernie Volume 3 1 by Scott Lobdell, Ariel Medel

Red Sonja 2021 Holiday Special by Luca Blengino, Mirka Andolfo, Zulema Lavina

Mad Cave:

The Last Session 1 by Jasmine Walls, Dozerdraws

Behemoth

No Holds Barred 1 by Eric Gladstone, Gabrielle Kari

Oni

Sprite and the Gardener GN by Joe Whitt, Rii Abrego

Tea Dragon Trilogy by K. O'Neill

Additional Reviews: Hawkeye ep3, Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous s4, Only Murders in the Building s1, Doctor Who

News: new Lemire/Nguyen series from Image, Enola Holmes comic, Dark Horse being sold, Avatar Studios developing their own proprietary 3D animation style, Metal Men animated film, DC announcements from villains special, Marvel does something stupid, Disney confirms first two Jewish major franchise characters, Charlie Cox is back as Daredevil

Glenn asks a question

A Tale of Hulk and Glenn

Trailers: Peacemaker, Spider-Verse 2

Comics Countdown:

Department of Truth 14 by James Tynion IV, Martin Simmons

The Me You Love In the Dark 5 by Skottie Young, Jorge Corona, Jean-Francois Beaulieu

Snow Angels Season Two 6 by Jeff Lemire, Jock

Robin 2021 Annual by Joshua Williamson, Roger Cruz, Victor Olazaba, Luis Guerrero

Redneck 31 by Donny Cates, Lisandro Estherren, Dee Cunniffe

Daredevil 36 by Chip Zdarsky, Manuel Garcia, Cam Smith, Scott Hanna, Victor Nava, Marcio Menyz

Human Target 2 by Tom King, Greg Smallwood

Avengers 50 by Jason Aaron, Christopher Ruocchio, Carlos Pacheco, Aaron Kuder, Javier Garron, Ed McGuinness, Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines, Frank D'Armata, David Curiel

TMNT 123 by Sophie Campbell, Jodi Nishijima

Action Comics 1037 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Miguel Mendonca, Adriano Lucas, Shawn Aldridge, Adriano Melo, Hi-Fi

Check out this episode!

[chiseler]

Ginger Rogers: Curse of the Working Class

A natural-born mimic, ham, tease, hard worker, stoic follower and out-of-reach babe, Ginger Rogers has proven one of the most difficult to define of all the 1930s Hollywood stars. At her best she was a synonym for fun and high spirits while also conveying a dignified and skeptical kind of resistance to other people, and these contradictory impulses made her one of the most special and ambiguous performers of her time. Rogers excelled in her first seven musicals with Fred Astaire and in several of her comedy vehicles and even in some of the programmers she churned out in the early 1930s. She was beloved, and rightly so.

In Stage Door (1937), Rogers gives one of the most distinctive, most suggestive, and most perfectly judged performances of the period, molding every one of her bone-dry, wisecracking line readings (and what lines she has in that movie!) into something pleasurable, something unexpected, even something profound, delivering them all with her guarded, in-transit sort of face.

I’ve seen Stage Door probably more times than I’ve seen any other movie, but I always notice something new in it, some new line, some new angle. As a kid, I didn’t really understand the source of Rogers’s misgivings here, which is the same source that animates her outrageously and inventively bitchy yet somehow tender and worldly fights with Linda (Gail Patrick), her high-falutin’ former roommate. Linda is the mistress of Anthony Powell (Adolphe Menjou), a powerful Broadway producer. When Powell sees Rogers’s Jean Maitland rehearsing a dance routine, his little weasel eyes light up with lust. He thinks she’s just playing hard to get when she makes her habitual mordant jokes at him, but she is really just trying to delay the inevitable. She wants no part of sleeping with a man for his money not because she thinks it’s morally wrong, per se, but because she’s basically too tired-out to go through those motions.

Jean is so disenchanted that the disenchantment seems to be leading her to some kind of drastic change. She talks herself into going out with Powell but gets out of sleeping with him by getting, or pretending to get, disruptively yet vaguely drunk. Jean gets drunk the way she does everything else, at some very unusual kind of steady and wary behavioral half-mast. She cracks wise as a matter of course, but she sleeps with a doll and she plays a ukulele. These cute details don’t seem to fit her character, but they do express the divided character of the woman who was playing her.

Jean stumbles home from Powell’s penthouse to her new roommate Terry (Katharine Hepburn), a rich girl with airily la-di-da attitudes about life and the theater. Hepburn had not endeared herself to Rogers with her much-repeated remark about Rogers’s partnership with Astaire: “He gives her class and she gives him sex.” The competitive rivalry between Hepburn’s upper-class pretension and Rogers’s low-burning common sense is the heart of their conflict in Stage Door, and this conflict and mutual dislike reads as pure chemistry on screen, just as it did for Rogers with Astaire.

There is such chemistry between Jean and Terry that Stage Door has always been a kind of closeted lesbian classic just waiting to burst into full-on Sapphic love. Terry has no love interest and shows zero interest in acquiring one, while Jean looks more than ready to give up on poor, unreliable young men and rich, sexually demanding older men like Powell. Jean and Terry, in fact, are perfect for each other and wind up with each other, and in the last scene Rogers reaches a kind of epiphany as she reacts to their friend Judy (Lucille Ball) leaving New York to get married. “At least she’ll have a couple of kids to keep her company in her old age, and what’ll we have?” she asks. “Some broken-down memories and an old scrapbook that nobody’ll look at.”

I first saw Stage Door when I was eight years old. Now that I’m well into adulthood, these last few lines that Rogers tosses off with such face-the-facts casualness have the force of revelation, as if she has finally washed up on the shores of some final philosophy. They predict the real lives of both Hepburn and Rogers (though some people still do want to leaf through those particular scrapbooks) and Terry and Jean, and everybody else for whom the easy way and the conventional way of living will never fit or will never be acceptable.

Rogers was capable of that tough-minded and frank and bleak attitude on screen, but in life and in general she was actually, and alarmingly, one of the most clueless of stars, never quite knowing what it was that people liked about her. Starting as early 1938, the year she made Vivacious Lady and Carefree, something peculiar started to happen to Rogers. After years of the most unlikely and enormous success in her Astaire films, where she was up to any dance challenge he gave her and where her timing in both musical and comic and dramatic scenes was magically sharp, her timing started to go horribly awry. Rogers began to be afflicted by self-consciousness, miscalculation, cutesiness, self-infatuated archness and flashes of deep-rooted mean-mindedness. She slipped back into her best controlled star mode in several films after that year, but she started to deteriorate more and more by the mid-1940s, almost as if someone had put a curse on her.

Rogers was born Virginia McMath in Independence, Missouri in 1911. Her formidable mother Lela Rogers was a writer for silent films and a journalist, and she was seemingly joined at the hip to her daughter. It was Rogers who wanted a career as an actress, and Lela resisted this at first, but when Ginger won a Charleston contest Mama Lela knew which way the wind was blowing. She poured all of her own considerable energy and ambition into making Ginger a star and keeping her one (that first name supposedly came about because a cousin couldn’t pronounce the name Virginia).

At the height of her stardom, when Rogers was sent the script of The Hard Way (1943), she wonderingly said, “This is the story of my life,” and turned it down. In that movie, Ida Lupino works like a demon to get her malleable kid sister (Joan Leslie) into show business, and the comparison is not flattering to Lela, who made a fool of herself testifying before HUAC as an expert on Communist infiltration of Hollywood, citing particularly the time when Rogers had to say Dalton Trumbo’s line, “Share and share alike, that’s democracy” in Tender Comrade (1943). Lela herself actually turns up playing Ginger’s mother in Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor (1942), and she’s a rather low-key presence, but she talks and moves like a woman who has power and feels no need to make any outward show of it.

In that Wilder movie, Rogers spends most of her time pretending to be a twelve-year old, and this uneasy reversion to little-girlhood was one of her most troubling fallback modes. She had made her first successes on stage with “baby talk monologues” written by Lela, and her early style, as seen in films like Young Man of Manhattan (1930) and Honor Among Lovers (1931), was very much a hold-over from the 1920s, a Betty Boop baby vamp persona that was more suited to cameo roles than to leads (Claudette Colbert, the star of Young Man of Manhattan, gently mocks these baby affectations after meeting Rogers’s character).

She churned out lots of low-budget programmers in 1932, and in 1933 she made ten films. In two of those, 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Rogers nearly steals the show in fairly small parts. As Anytime Annie, a notoriously obliging chorus girl in 42nd Street, Rogers is first seen wearing a monocle and affecting a grand manner accent, and this was the first sign of her aptitude for two-faced disguise. As Manuel Puig once said of Ann-Margret, Rogers is anything but reassuring.

She’s close to surreal in her gold-coin outfit singing “We’re in the Money” with pig Latin verse in Gold Diggers of 1933, looking directly into the camera and not flinching as it travels all the way up to her face. Rogers gobbled up attention like that, and she had what it took, but she needed something or someone to stabilize her. When she strips down to her slip and stockings and gyrates in Professional Sweetheart (1933), an outraged Norman Foster spanks and then punches her, the first in an increasingly ominous series of punishments that would shadow her later career.

In the very horny Pre-Code musical Flying Down to Rio (1933), her first film with Astaire, Rogers is a hot mama, singing and swaying to “Music Makes Me” in a vagina power dress that even Marilyn Monroe might have rejected as too overt. When they dance “The Carioca,” Astaire starts out holding his head slightly away from Rogers, as if she might be diseased, but by the end their electric chemistry has fully kicked in.

Astaire had spent his youth dancing with his sister Adele and didn’t want to get stuck with another steady partner. Rogers had her eye on dramatic parts, announcing to an incredulous press that she wanted to play Joan of Arc. She was an ambitious and competitive person, and she knew that she was not even close to Astaire’s Olympian league as a dancer. But that’s part of the magic of their series of films, in which Rogers improves as a dancer bit by bit until she is fully capable of following his every step.

Astaire objected that no one would believe Rogers as an English girl in The Gay Divorcee (1934), and surely no one could mistake her for English, but this part gave her the reserve that she intriguingly used and toyed with for her best years as a star. Like most first sexual experiences between two people, their first real romantic dance together in that film, “Night and Day,” is both exciting and a little awkward. In their follow-up Roberta (1935), Rogers looks tense during their slow “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” routine, but she comes wonderfully alive when they casually tap to “Hard to Handle,” their first really great dance together.

She was always at her best in the lively comic numbers, where her wacky energy seems to warm Astaire, but she worked hard at the dramatic routines, so that when they do “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” in Follow the Fleet (1936), Rogers has somehow ascended up to Astaire’s level as a dancer. It must have taken nearly super-human will, but she did it, and audiences saw and felt her progress, and they loved it because it meant that anything was possible if you worked hard enough, even dancing like or with Fred Astaire.

Astaire didn’t like her feather dress for the “Cheek to Cheek” dance in Top Hat (1935), and you can see why he didn’t: it’s a little tacky. Costumer Walter Plunkett said Rogers always wanted to “add a crepe paper orchid or a string of beads or some goddamned feathered thing. She just never could resist little improvements.” But her feather dress in Top Hat does move beautifully when she dances, even if we do see some of the feathers floating away from them, as if she’s molting.

A more characteristic and winning image of her comes in the way she hikes up her skirt in the “Pick Yourself Up” number in Swing Time, which has a deeply charming kind of put-on nonchalance, or in the soldier-like way she executes a series of brutally exacting turns at the end of the “Never Gonna Dance” finale toward the end of that movie (while she shot this scene, her feet started to bleed in her shoes). One of the real pleasures of American moviegoing is watching Rogers as Astaire sings a love song to her: she would listen so intently, with barely any change of expression, but with such sensitive receptivity behind her eyes and in the set of her mouth.

People like to wonder if Astaire and Rogers hated each other. Maybe there were moments when they did, but mainly they just resented being tied together as a team, and those misgivings are part of what give their partnership and their best dances such impact, such crackle. Rogers reported in her autobiography that Astaire had taken her out on dates in New York when they were both working in theater, and at the end of one such date he gave her “a kiss that would never have passed the Hays Office Code!” But when they worked together in films, Astaire was married to a woman he adored, and he was a distant taskmaster in the killer rehearsal sessions for their dance routines. His friends, cultivated when he played on stage in London in the 1920s, were the English gentry. Rogers was not his cup of tea, and he made that known to her in subtle ways. She said either, and he said eye-ther, and they wanted to call the whole thing off, but no one else ever did.

In the many years after their partnership ended, they were still stuck with each other, and they both still resented that. Rogers would sometimes make friendly overtures to Astaire, and he would politely but firmly put her off, and this led to hurt feelings for her, so much so that she didn’t even go to his American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony. Film scholar Joseph McBride helped to put together that evening, and when I asked him about it, he remembered Astaire saying, “I suppose we’ll have to have Ginger,” in an irritated voice. When she didn’t come to the ceremony, it seemed like sour grapes on her part, but it had been made clear to Rogers that Astaire only wanted the bare minimum to do with her, and so she withdrew. It would do well to remember, of course, just how obnoxious Rogers could be. If you want to feel the full force of that, just look at any number of the films she made from 1944 to 1964 and you’ll see one garishly misplayed, mistimed performance after another, including the last one she did with Astaire, The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), where her dramatic aspirations were mocked and then the mockery was unintentionally confirmed when she did a goggle-eyed recreation of Sarah Bernhardt reciting the Marseillaise.

So what happened to Rogers? Why did she lose all of the qualities that had made her a star right after her stardom was confirmed? Many writers have tried to explain it. Analyzing Astaire and Rogers in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972), Arlene Croce says, “She’s an American classic, just as he is: common clay that we prize above exotic marble. The difference between them is that he knew it and she didn’t. Rogers always wanted to be something more. Probably no other major star has so severely tried the loyalty of her public by constantly changing her appearance and her style.” In his book Romantic Comedy (1987), James Harvey writes, “Can there be any other major star who was so variable, even from film to film, as she was?”

Harvey blames George Stevens, who directed maybe the finest Astaire/Rogers film, Swing Time (1936). He sees a softening of her character in the straight scenes in Swing Time, but the rot really sets in with Vivacious Lady, a romantic comedy that has all the elements for success but perversely ruins them with its taffy-pull pacing, its willful lack of coordination, its leaning on jags and cutesiness and bizarre sequences like the fight scene between Rogers and a rival that devolves into a series of unmoving tableaus broken only by a coy laugh from Rogers, as if Stevens wanted to turn her into Frank McHugh. In the same year, in Carefree with Astaire, Rogers exhibits such unpleasant sadism when her character is under hypnosis that it feels like a revelation of some inner nastiness that had always been prudently hidden from view.

The damage was reversed in Bachelor Mother (1939), a working girl comedy that has no right to be as charming as it is, where Rogers added a kind of moony dreaminess to her repertoire of personas. She then made two films for Stage Door director Gregory La Cava, 5th Avenue Girl (1939) and Primrose Path (1940). In her second La Cava film, Rogers is so deadpan that it reads as a lack of basic vitality, a first in her career; it’s as if La Cava is unearthing the suicidal or even homicidal side of Jean Maitland. “People annoy me,” she says in that movie, and boy does she mean it. In Stage Door, when Powell tells Jean he wants to put her name in big electric lights, she says, “Gotta be big enough to keep people away.” La Cava is the director who understood Rogers the most, discerning something anti-social and solitary behind her sunny audience-pleasing looks and manner. In Primrose Path, he cast her as a teenager who breaks away from her family before she joins their prostitution racket, and her work in that movie is stark, clean, unsentimental.

Rogers won an Oscar for Kitty Foyle (1940), and many have dated her decline from that point, even if she is modestly touching in what is a modest working girl soap opera. She was close to unbearable in Tom, Dick and Harry (1941), where director Garson Kanin seems to dote on every moment of her self-indulgent performance as a dumb and narcissistic telephone operator who must choose between three suitors. Something about playing dumb here makes Rogers’s style seem laborious and throws her timing all out of whack, yet the following year, in Roxie Hart (1942), she certainly gets her laughs with her broad playing of a very dumb murderess who lives for publicity and likes to do the Black Bottom for reporters. In her segment in Tales of Manhattan (1942), you want to say to her, “OK, you can have all that hair on the top of your head or you can have all that hair fanning over your back, but you can’t have both, Ginger.”

Leo McCarey’s Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942) did her no favors, but most writers agree that the real coup de grâce in her career was Lady in the Dark (1944), a Technicolor movie of the psychoanalytical stage musical that had starred Gertrude Lawrence. Rogers insisted on playing it, and she was at loggerheads with director Mitchell Leisen and Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, who vengefully cut most of the Kurt Weill songs from the film. All in all, the mercifully little-seen Lady in the Dark looks now almost as if it had been made in a spirit of deliberate sabotage. It is has to be the most nastily misogynist of any major studio production of this time, constantly hammering home the idea that Rogers’s Liza Elliott is an unnatural woman unhealthily attached to her work, and her leading man Ray Milland warrants particular scorn here for the gleefulness he brings to the scenes where he humiliates Rogers’s character. In the one extended musical number Rogers has, “The Saga of Jenny,” she doesn’t seem to have been given any choreography or direction and she can barely move in the outfit Leisen designed for her. “After Lady in the Dark there was nothing left of the Rogers character,” wrote Croce. “She died on the analyst’s couch.”

Rogers’s career proceeded only through sheer determination on her part (and on Lela’s part). She floundered in an updated remake of Grand Hotel (1932) called Week-end at the Waldorf (1945), and the next twenty years of her career were a real trial for her fans from the 1930s. Howard Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952) was supposed to be about scientist Cary Grant reverting to childhood when he drinks an elixir of youth, but Rogers insisted that she “wanted to do the kid thing too,” and so she ripped into scene after scene of coarse-grained youthful impersonation, the wise child of her early ‘30s character bearing rotten and poisonously un-watchable fruit.  Cast as a hardened gangster’s moll in Phil Karlson’s Tight Spot (1955), Rogers is so heavy-handed and slow and cutesey with her dialogue that the effect is ghastly. If I were to make a simple diagnosis of her problems in the last half of her film career, I’d say that she caught a bad case of George Stevens-itis and never got over it (she had an affair with the married director during Vivacious Lady, which had Lela up in arms).

When she worked with a fine and sensitive director, as she did with Frank Borzage for Magnificent Doll (1946) and with Edmund Goulding for Teenage Rebel (1956), Rogers was still capable of restrained and acceptable if somewhat colorless work. But hateful things kept happening to her. In something like Storm Warning (1951), where she does battle with the Ku Klux Klan while also doing a transposed version of A Streetcar Named Desire, it seemed as if someone behind the scenes wanted to see Rogers punished. When Steve Cochran attacks her in Storm Warning, the scene is so prolonged that finally it is Rogers being humiliated and hurt, not the character she is playing.

Rogers went through five husbands, including the pacifistic and beautiful Lew Ayres, and most of them lasted for a couple of years, but Lela was her real partner for life. The last husband, William Marshall, got her to play a madam in a dire film shot in Jamaica, variously known as The Confession and Quick, Let’s Get Married (1964), and after that low point she made only Harlow (1965), where she was intriguingly cast as Jean Harlow’s mother, before retaining her star status in long-running stage stints in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway and Mame in London. After that came a little TV and nightclub work, where she ended most of her songs with a corny wink to the audience. A Christian Scientist like her beloved or at least inescapable mother, Rogers refused medical treatment after having a stroke, and she was ill for several years before dying in 1995.

The last forty-five or so years of Rogers’s long career basically ran on fumes of good will from her first twelve years in movies, and particularly those Fred Astaire musicals that she preferred to forget. Like many actors, Rogers had no real center or base that was really her, and this lack of center meant that she was able to in effect be something she wasn’t with Astaire, and transcendently so, but it also meant that bad habits and instincts were ready to rush in and overwhelm her when her guard was down.

“May I rescue you?” Astaire asks her in Top Hat, to which she snaps, “No, I prefer being in distress.” The Astaire/Rogers films are so romantic because part of her resistance is that she is suspicious of romance, and maybe she doesn’t believe in it at all. That lack of belief was what made her so sexy beyond her God-given but worked-on perfect figure (“Women weren’t born with silk stockings on, you know,” she says in Follow the Fleet). Look at how cool and unreachable she is when Fred is singing his heart out to her during “Never Gonna Dance” in Swing Time. She preached that God is Love and soda fountains were forever, but in her best work with Astaire and in Stage Door, she let darker and more movingly yearning things cloud her almost cartoonishly pretty brow, and those things are what should define her and what should be remembered.

by Dan Callahan

[cto10121]

Do you dislike Hamilton? If so, why? I'm just curious, I've never actually listened to all of it (not my genre), but Tumblr as a whole seems to love it so much.

Definitely dislike, though not for the usual reasons re: historical inaccuracy (although the real-life Hamilton’s elitist, anti-democratic tendencies are a fascinating read; I knew the gist of it from my AP History class and Howard Zinn, but this actually goes into detail and man, is it good tea). I’ve always insisted that musicals have no obligation whatsoever to be true to history. Even dramas have artistic license. And in a way, I can’t blame Manuel-Miranda for following the blatantly hagiographic Chernow biography - musicals are hard enough to write and do as it is without having to come up with a daringly original plot - nor do I begrudge him for his success in doing so, for that manner. 

But it just doesn’t work as a musical. When your comic relief ‘‘Daydream Believer”-pastiche villain song is the best song in the damn thing, then there is definitely trouble in musical paradise. Not one remotely good melody, and about half of the book-lyrics are literally just historical or dramatic exposition. That is the problem with using rap for your musical medium and the problem with rap, period - it’s neither music nor spoken poetry, just a weird limbo between the two. There is neither a melody that would qualify it as music (quick test - can you play it on the piano? If not, then probably not) nor can the text by themselves be taken as verse or the cut-the-top-of-your-head poesy that gets under your skin. Rap works best when it’s for comedy, like the Epic Rap Battles of History or the proto-rap patter songs like ‘‘Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man. (Ironically, I first heard about the musical in 2009 when I saw a video of Manuel-Miranda performed the Alexander Hamilton song to the Obamas. I laughed because I thought it was a joke and thought it’d make a pretty good parody about Hamilton. Ay).

But of course, the appeal of this musical lies in the fact that it’s aggressively non-political. The focus is on the characters’ quirks, personalities, and dynamics with each other, not so much their policies or the events they participated in and orchestrated. Which protects it from accusations of tendentiousness beyond just vaguely Obama-liberal identity politics, but still, it’s annoying to watch a hagiographic musical glorify complex, flawed white 18th century men who historically owned slaves and ultimately did little to nothing to improve the lot of women, Native Americans, black slaves and indentured servants and portray them as cool, quirky, edgy underdog rebels played by ethnic actors and pat itself on the back for its ~progressiveness. Nor is the musical’s pathetic attempts to play at said identity politics at all convincing, even dumb at times. Hamilton was an immigrant - so what? They were all immigrants or the sons of. Didn’t prevent him or the Founders from being distrustful of democracy and ‘‘mob rule.” (What would you call this, colorwashing? I’m just going to go ahead and call this colorwashing.*)  Either way, I think it’s clear the mix of non-political engagement + identity politics made it a big hit with the Tumblr crowd.

I think that if the musical had been a comedy à la Jesus Christ Superstar, or better yet, just a straight play, and did not take itself so seriously, it would have succeeded far better than what we got, which 2 1/2 hours of screeching and caterwauling and forced drama (the only time this musical dares condemn its precious Hamilton is when he cheats on his wife - and that is literally because he was conned into it) and monotonous beats and Poe-like rhymes. But yeah, I think this is yet another musical that would have benefited by simply...not being a musical. Broadway does know there is such a thing as plays with just dialogue right? Right?

*Unrelated, but perhaps apropos - a month ago I was in my local library when I caught sight of a children’s book about, orchestra band leader Juan García Esquivel, of all people! Amused as I was that someone somewhere actually thought, “You know what elementary kids would love to be read aloud about? The life of an eclectic jazz/swing instrumental arranger/pianist from the 60s!”, what struck me was that he was illustrated as far more brown-skinned than he actually was. Because all Mexicans are brown. *sighs*

[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: Windy City Pulp Show, King Arthur, Star Wars Target Audience, Model T in Combat

Conventions (DMR Books): The 19th annual Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention took place this past weekend in Lombard, IL. It was a three-day affair, but unfortunately I was only able to attend for part of the day on Saturday. Five hours may seem like a good amount of time, but it wasn’t nearly enough to take in all the event had to offer.

Doug Ellis and Deb Fulton were gracious enough to share some of their table space with me so I could peddle DMR releases.

    Anthologies (Tip the Wink): This nineteen story anthology is edited by one of Baen’s best, Hank Davis. Though the book is pretty new, the stories range from as early as the Thirties all the way to now. So I think it qualifies as a Friday Forgotten Book for it’s contents. For the most part, this is the kind of science fiction I grew up on and still love.

  Fiction (Old Style Tales): Doyle’s final great horror story is truly a worthy swan song – a tale who’s science fiction maintains a level of effective awe in spite of having been categorically disproven by aviators a mere decade after being written. And indeed the tale is science fiction, fitting snuggly on a shelf between the speculative horror of H. G. Wells which preceded it and the cosmic terror of H. P. Lovecraft which succeeded it.e cosmic terror of H. P. Lovecraft which succeeded it.

    Myth (Men of the West): Of all these Latin chroniclers by far the most important was Geoffrey of Monmouth, Bishop of St. Asaph, who finished his “History of the Britons” about 1147. Geoffrey, as has been said, is not a real historian, but something much more interesting. He introduced to the world the story of King Arthur, which at once became the source and centre of hundreds of French romances, in verse or prose, and of poetry down to Tennyson and William Morris. To Geoffrey, or to later English chroniclers who had read Geoffrey, Shakespeare owed the stories of his plays, “Cymbeline” and “King Lear”.

  Authors (DMR Books): James Branch Cabell, who was born on April 14, 1879–just over one hundred forty years ago–has slipped into genteel literary obscurity. An author once praised and befriended by the likes of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, JBC had his entire fantasy epic, known as “The Biography of the Life of Manuel,” printed in a uniform hardcover eighteen-volume set at the height of his popularity in the 1920s and early ’30s. He was, by far, the preeminent American literary fantasist of that era. And yet, he is barely known outside hardcore literary fantasy circles now.

  Cinema (Rough Edges): I didn’t mean to write about two Raoul Walsh movies in a row, but that’s the way it’s worked out after last week’s post on DESPERATE JOURNEY. COLORADO TERRITORY is a Western remake from 1949 of the Humphrey Bogart classic HIGH SIERRA, also directed by Walsh eight years earlier in 1941. Both are based on the novel HIGH SIERRA by W.R. Burnett. In COLORADO TERRITORY, Joel McCrea plays outlaw Wes McQueen, in prison for robbing banks and trains, who is broken out so he can take part in a payroll heist from a train in Colorado.

  Popular Culture (Jon Mollison): Long time genre fans expect to see the usual Boomer perspectives.  Naturally, his version of the story of science fiction begins and ends with the era of the Boomers. To be fair, he is a film guy making a film about film people, so it’s no surprise that his documentary would ignore the foundational stories of the genre.  It does start with HG Wells, but then skips straight past four decades of science fiction to land on rubber monster B-movies. The usual Big Pub diversity hires get trotted out to offer Narrative Approved talking points about how the genre has matured under the careful guidance of perverts like Arthur C. Clarke without a mention of giants like Howard and Burroughs and Lovecraft and Merritt and the rest of the True Golden Age writers.

  Star Wars (Kairos): Two cultural observations that have repeatedly been made on this blog are that Star Wars has been weaponized against its original fans and that decadent Westerners are perverting normal pious sentiment by investing it in corporate pop culture products. Now a viral video has surfaced that documents the unholy confluence of both phenomena. Watch only if you haven’t eaten recently.

  Cinema (Mystery File): I’ve spoken often and highly of Fredric Brown;s classic mystery novel of strip-clubs and theology, The Screaming Mimi (Dutton, 1949) and recently betook myself to watching both film versions of it, side-by-side and back-to-back, through the miracle of VCRm watching a chunk of one, then the other, than back again…

  Pulps (John C. Wright): So what, exactly, makes the weird tales and fantastic stories of that day and age so “problematic”?

The use of lazy racial stereotypes, did you say? This generation has just as many or worse ones, merely with the polarities reversed. See the last decade of Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Marvel comics franchises, for examples.

The portrayal of women as weak damsels in distress? I will happily compare any number of Martian princesses or pirate queens from the pulp era to the teen bimbos routinely chopped up in the torture porn flicks of this generation, and let the matter of malign portrayals of women speak for itself.

  Fiction (Nerds on Earth): Howard Andrew Jones (who we’ve interviewed not once, but twice!) strikes that balance masterfully in For the Killing of Kings, the first book of an expected series. The book drops the reader right at the moment when a scandal in the Allied Realms begins. This controversy involves the legendary weapon of the most famous commander of the vaunted Altenerai Corps, N’lahr. Jones doesn’t even let two pages pass before the reader is invited into the discovery that something is wrong with this magic-infused sword, and it is that problem that carries the book’s action from start to finish.

            History (Black Gate): Enter the Western Frontier Force, a hastily assembled group of men from all parts of the empire that included two of the war’s many innovations. The first was the Light Car Patrol, made up of Model T Fords that had been stripped of all excess weight (even the hood and doors) so they could run over soft sand. Many came equipped with a machine gun. Heavier and slower were the armored cars, built on the large Rolls Royce chassis and sporting a turret and machine gun.

  Westerns (Tainted Archive): Geographically and historically the concept of “The West” is very loosely defined, when associated with the literary and film genre of the western. With the possible exception of the Eastern Seaboard almost every part of the USA had been called “The West” at some stage in the country’s history.

  Authors (John C. Wright): Gene Wolfe passed at his Peoria home from cardiovascular disease on April 14, 2019 at the age of 87.

This man is one of two authors who I was able to read with undiminished pleasure as a child, youth, man and master.

I met him only briefly at science fiction conventions, and was truly impressed by his courtesy and kindness. We shared a love of GK Chesterton. I never told him how I cherished his work, and how important his writings were to me.

  Authors (Rich Horton): Gene Wolfe died yesterday, April 14, 2019 (Palm Sunday!) His loss strikes me hard, as hard as the death last year of Ursula K. Le Guin. Some while I ago I wrote that Gene Wolfe was the best writer the SF field has ever produced. Keeping in mind that comparisons of the very best writers are pointless — each is brilliant in their own way — I’d say that now I’d add Le Guin and John Crowley and make a trinity of great SF writers, but the point stands — Wolfe’s work was tremendous, deep, moving, intellectually and emotionally involving, ambiguous in the best of ways, such that rereading him is ever rewarding, always resolving previous questions while opening up new ones.

Cartoons (Wasteland and Sky): One small loss of the modern age I’ve always been interested in is the death of the Saturday morning cartoon.

For over half a century they have lingered in the memories of just about everyone alive in the western world as part of some long ago age that will never return. But nobody talks about them beyond nostalgic musings. The problem with that is they require a deeper look than that. I don’t think it’s clear exactly why they do not exist anymore, and it is important why they do not.

  Fiction (Tip the Wink): It’s the stories, not the book, that are forgotten here. From the publisher’s website:

“Known best for his work on Popular Publications’ The Spider, pulp scribe Norvell Page proved he was no slouch when it came to penning gangster and G-man epics! This book collects all eleven stories Page wrote for “Ace G-Man Stories” between 1936 and 1939, which are reprinted here for the first time!”

      RPG (Modiphius): Horrors of the Hyborian Age is the definitive guide to the monstrous creatures inhabiting the dark tombs, ruined cities, forgotten grottos, dense jungles, and sinister forests of Conan’s world. This collection of beasts, monsters, undead, weird races, and mutants are ready to pit their savagery against the swords and bravery of the heroes of the Hyborian Age.

Drawn from the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, this roster also includes creatures and alien horrors from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, to which Howard inextricably bound his Hyborian Age. Other entries are original, chosen carefully to reflect the tone and dangers of Conan’s world.

Sensor Sweep: Windy City Pulp Show, King Arthur, Star Wars Target Audience, Model T in Combat published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[booksfilmsandmusicaltheatre]

Good bye 2018 - Hyvästit vuodelle 2018

The past 2+ weeks have been rather busy and I haven’t really found any alone time to update this blog, but now I am home alone. Not the most desirable night to be alone, though, but what can you do. My spouse has a couple of long night shifts (from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.) and my youngest went to the cinema, but will be home later on.

So, let’s start from three weekends ago. On Friday, quite out of the blue, my sister sent me a message and asked if I was free on Sunday. She had to use some tickets to the cinema before they expire, so she asked if I would come with her to see Nothing Like a Dame. Not my usual preference, documentaries, but I thought it could be a nice change, so naturally I said yes.

Our youngest went to see Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse on that Friday and liked it, plus I had read a good review about it in the paper, so I went to see it with my spouse on Saturday. I liked it. It had all the elements I like to see in a film: action, comedy and some depth and emotion as well. On top of these, it was different from anything I’ve seen before, a different kind of animation. It truly was like a comic book or magazine come alive. I have never really read any Marvel comics, but I like the films and I was very pleased to see a Stan Lee cameo in this film as well. I wonder how many of those there are left (i.e. how many he had managed to get done or filmed before he died). I like the feeling I get when I spot his cameos in the films.

And then, on Sunday, as planned and mentioned before, I went to see Nothing Like a Dame with my older little sister. I like it, too. Two of the Dames were quite familiar to me and I like their acting and a third I also recognised. It was interesting as they talked about their acting careers. I really hope that the industry isn’t quite as superficial as it has been. The most important thing about being an actor isn’t one’s looks, it’s their talent and acting ability, after all...

After the film we went to a nearby restaurant to have some dinner, took our time and talked about this and that. It was nice. But I cannot help but wonder was it all out of the blue, or had she put two and two together and figured our I needed some company. But that is not something I want to speculate any further.

The week after that was busy. I was alone quite a lot, but it was the week before Christmas and we wanted to get our place a lot tidier before the Holidays, so I did what I had the energy to do during the days, and we continued together in the evenings and the weekend before Christmas we stepped up a gear. As it happens, we did it. Some minor things were left for Christmas Eve, but all in all, I was quite satisfied and it was so much nicer to celebrate Christmas in a home that doesn’t resemble a dump or a temporary storage space. If only we were able to keep it this way (and gradually get it in even better order) from now on. We even moved some furniture around in the living room, moved the seating closer to the television, as the distance was too great to see texts, subtitles, and such properly.

On Christmas Eve we were home and our oldest came for dinner with his live-in-girlfriend (he recently moved in with her). It was the first time I really had the chance to meet her properly. We had a good time. Later on, when they had left, we watched Die Hard with our youngest, who apparently hadn’t seen it before.

On Christmas Day we played together on Nintendo Switch and had Christmas lunch just the three of us. Then in the afternoon we headed on to my mum’s (and step dad’s) where we three, my two little sisters and my oldest and his girlfriend, plus all the 4 dogs (1 is my mum’s and the rest belong to my younger sister) gathered for coffee. We had a nice time. Then my spouse gave the young couple a lift to the girlfriend’s parents’ place before he came to fetch me, our youngest and my oldest little sister. We had tickets to see Mary Poppins Returns.

It was the perfect way, at least for me, to spend Christmas Day. The film was very good. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s British accent didn’t really bother me anymore. I can see myself watching it a few times more as soon as it is released on blu-ray. After the film at home we played some more on the Switch.

On Boxing Day we were supposed to cram ourselves into our car, all five of us (we three under this roof and our oldest with his girlfriend) and drive to visit my in-laws (two homes, as they have been divorced for almost as long as we have been married). But, I really didn’t feel like it, so they went without me. I was fine with it, I suggested it, and this way there was more room in the car. I just wanted one day that was more peaceful. So I stayed home alone, relaxed, read. It was good after the nice but a little crowded Christmas.

Christmas was over and my spouse went back to work, and so I was (virtually) alone in the house (our youngest was home, but not seen that much during the day). Still, I was busy. There was a project that had to be completed by the end of this year (which is now completed, it was a group effort) and the Helmet reading challenge 2019 was published on last Thursday, so I have also been busy planning for the reading challenges of 2019. I am quite pleased with my lists now, I have something for almost all the prompts. I will do a little more digging today, but the rest of the decisions I will make as I go, decisions about which prompts I will fill with which book, when there are many prompts that one book is good for.

I actually took a head start. I started reading Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood a few days ago, as I had no unfinished books to read. I picked it, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish it this year. I will use it for both the Popsugar reading challenge (38. a novel based on a true story) and Helmet reading challenge (11. a book about women’s role in society). Today I also started a 30-day trial period on Storytel, and will start listening to the audio book version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust today. In the Popsugar challenge it will be the other of the two books that share the same title (47. & 48.). In the Helmet challenge I may place it under a romance novel (if it turns out to fit that description), as some list somewhere had categorised it as such.

So, this is how I have spent the end of this year, and now I am updating this blog while people outside are already busy scaring the neighbourhood pets and me with their fireworks, although it’s only 8 p.m. as I am about to finish this English bit of my post.

Happy New Year to anyone who happens to read this!

P.S. at 9.40 p.m. I had a scare just now. The laptop decided to go to sleep, as the battery ran out (I have been writing this post for at least two hours, maybe more) just as I was about to post it. I thought I lost all this text, but luckily everything was at it had been, when I got it plugged in and turned on again.

* * *

Viimeiset reilut kaksi viikkoa ovat olleet melko kiireisiä, enkä ole löytänyt omaa aikaa, jolloin olisin voinut päivittää tätä blogia, mutta nyt olen yksin kotona. Ei mikään kaikkein ihanteellisin aika olla yksin, mutta minkäs voit. Puolisolla on kaksi pitkää yövuoroa iltaseitsemästä aamuseitsemään ja nuorimmainen lähti elokuviin, mutta palaa kyllä kotiin vielä illan aikana.

Voisin aloittaa kolmen viikonlopun takaa. Sinä perjantaina, kuin tyhjästä, siskoni laittoi viestiä, että hänellä on elokuvalippuja vanhenemassa, niin lähtisinkö sunnuntaina hänen kanssaan katsomaan dokumentin Nothing Like a Dame. En kovin usein käy elokuvissa katselemassa dokumenttielokuvia, mutta ajattelin että se voisi olla piristävää vaihtelua, niin suostuin toki.

Tuona samaisena perjantaina nuorimmainen kävi katsomassa Hämäkkimies: Kohti hämähäkkiversumia -elokuvan, ja tykkäsi siitä. Lisäksi olin itse juuri lukenut siitä hyvän arvostelun sanomalehdestä, joten menimme puollisoni kanssa katsomaan sen lauantaina. Pidin siitä. Se sisälsi suurinpiirtein kaikkea mitä elokuvan pitääkin; toimintaa, huumoria ja koskettavia hetkiä. Lisäksi se oli erilainen animaatioelokuva, jotain sellaista, jota en ole ennen nähny, aivan kuin sarjakuvakirja tai -lehti olisi herännyt henkiin. En ole koskaan oikeastaan lukenut Marvelin sarjakuvia, mutta pidän kovin Marvelin elokuvista, ja ilahduin kovin siitä, että Stan Lee vilahti myös tässä elokuvassa. Kuinkakohan monessa elokuvassa hän vielä tulee vilahtamaan (toisin sanoen kuinka monta oli ehditty jo kuvata ennen hänen kuolemaansa)? Tykkään bongata hänen pikkuroolejaan niistä elokuvista, ne ilahduttaa aina.

Sitten sunnuntaina suunnitellusti menin katsomaan vanhemman pikkusiskoni kanssa Nothing Like a Dame -dokumentin. Pidin siitäkin. Kaksi heistä oli minulle hyvinkin tuttuja kasvoja ja pidän heistä näyttelijöinä, kolmannenkin tunnistin. Oli mielenkiinntoista katsella, kun he muistelivat näyttelijänuriaan. Todellakin toivon, että ala ei ole enää nykyään aivan yhtä ulkonäkökeskeinen kuin se on ollut. Näyttelijälle kuitenkin ulkonäön sijaan tärkeintä on lahjakkuus ja kyky näytellä, minun mielestäni. 

Elokuvan jälkeen menimme lähiravintolaan syömään. Emme pitäneet kiirettä, vaan söimme ja jutustelimme rauhassa. Minulla ainakin oli mukavaa. En silti saata olla miettimättä, oliko se vain silkka päähänpisto ja sattumaa, vai oliko siskoni jostain päätellyt, että kaipaan seuraa. En halua sillä sen enempää kuitenkaan spekuloida.

Seuraava viikko oli kiireinen. Olin aika paljon yksin, mutta oli enää viikko jouluun ja kämppä oli sen verran kamalassa kunnossa, että halusimme saada sen riittävän hyvin järjestykseen ennen pyhiä. Minä tein päivisin sen minkä jaksoin ja iltaisin jatkoimme yhdessä. Joulua edeltävänä viikonloppuna piti pistää vähän enemmän vauhtia, ja saimme kuin saimmekin paikan riittävän hyvään järjestykseen. Joitain pieniä asioita jäi tehtäväksi jouluaattona, mutta loppujen lopuksi olin ihan tyytyväinen. Oli kuitenkin mukava viettää joulua asunnossa, joka ei enää muistuttanut kaatopaikkaa tai väliaikaisvarastoa. Kunpa saisimme pidettyä tän nyt tästä lähtien tässä kunnossa ja jopa pikkuhiljaa saada vieläkin parempaan järjestykseen. Siirtelimme jopa olohuoneessa huonekaluja: siirsimme istumapaikat lähemmäs televisiota, kun tekstejä ja tekstityksiä ei ole kunnolla kyennyt lukemaan niin kaukaa.

Jouluaaton vietimme kotona ja vanhimmainen tuli avopuolisonsa kanssa meille syömään. (Hän muutti hiljattain tyttöystävänsä kanssa yhteen asumaan.) Ensimmäistä kertaa sain kunnolla tutustuttua ja juteltua hänen kanssaan. Meillä oli oikein mukavaa. Myöhemmin, heidän lähdettyä, katsoimme kolmestaan Die Hardin, jota nuorimmainen ei ilmeisesti ollut koskaan vielä nähnyt.

Joulupäivänä pelailimme Nintento Switchillä kolmestaan ja ruokailimme keskenämme. Iltapäivällä suuntasimme äidin (ja avopuolisonsa) luo kahvittelemaan, jonne meitä kokoontui meidän lisäksi meidän esikoinen tyttöystävineen, minun kaski pikkusiskoani ja yhteensä neljä koiraa (yksi äidin, loput kolme nuoremman pikkusiskoni). Ja meillä kaikilla oli niin mukavaa... Puolisoni kävi heittämässä esikoisen ja tyttöystävänsä tämän vanhempien luo ja tuli sitten hakemaan minut, kuopuksen ja vanhimman pikkusiskoni elokuviin. Meillä oli liput Maija Poppasen paluuseen.

Mielestäni se oli täydellinen tapa viettää joulupäivää. Pidin elokuvasta paljon, eikä Lin-Manuel Mirandan brittiaksenttikaan enää häirinnyt. Voin kuvitella katsovani sen muutaman kerran uudestaan, kunhan se ilmestyy blu-raylle. Elokuvan jälkeen kotona pelasimme vielä jonkun aikaa Nintendo Switchillä.

Tapanina meidän oli määrä pakkautua autoon, kaikki viisi, mukaanlukien esikoinen tyttöystävineen, ja käydä appivanhempieni luona vierailemassa (kahdessa eri osoitteessa, ovat olleet erossa lähes yhtä kauan kuin me olemme olleet naimisissa). Minä en kuitenkaan tuntenut jakasavani lähteä, joten menivät ilman minua. Minulle se sopi, itse sitä ehdotinkin, ja näin autossakin oli paremmin tilaa. Minä vain kaipasin yhtä rauhallista päivää, joten jäin kotiin, otin rauhallisesti, luin. Tuntui ihan mukavalta mukavan, mutta ruuhkaisen, joulun jälkeen.

Joulu oli ohi ja puoliso palasi töihin. Olin taas (käytännöllisesti katsoen) yksin kotona (kuopuskin oli kyllä kotona, mutta häntä ei paljon päivisin näkynyt). Olin kuitenkin kiireinen. Vuoden loppuun mennessä piti saada yksi projekti valmiiksi (joka on nyt valmis, ryhmätyönä kasattu), ja sen lisäksi Helmet lukuhaaste 2019 ilmestyi torsaina, joten ensi vuoden lukuhaasteiden suunnitteluun on mennyt aikaa. Nyt kirjalistat alkavat olla ihan tyydyttävässä kuosissa, ja minulla on lähes jokaiseen kohtaan löydettynä jokin (tai useampi) kirja. Tänään aion vielä vähän etsiskellä kirjoja, mutta loput päätökset teen sitten vasta haasteiden edetessä, ja päätän minkä kirjan käytän mihinkin kohtaan, silloin kun sama kirja sopii useampaan.

Otin itse asiassa jo pienen varaslähdön. Aloin lukea Margaret Atwoodin Alias Grace -kirjaa pari päivää sitten, kun minulla ei ollut mitään muuta kirjaa enää kesken. Valitsin sen, koska tiesin, etten saa sitä luettua enää tämän vuoden puolella loppuun. Aion sijoittaa sen sekä Popsugarin (38. roomani joka perustuu tositapahtumiin) että Helmet (11. kirja käsittelee naisen asemaa yhteiskunnassa) lukuhaasteeseen. Aloitin tänään myös 30 päivän ilmaisen kokeilukauden Storytelissä ja aion aloittaa vielä tänään kuuntelemaan äänikirjaversiona Neil Gaimanin Stardustia. Popsugarin haasteeseen se on yksi kahdesta samannimisestä kirjasta (47. ja 48.). Helmet haasteessa sijoitan sen ehkä rakkausromaaniksi (mikäli se sellaiseksi osittautuu), kun jossain listassa se oli sellaiseksi määritelty.

Näin siis olen viettänyt vuoden tämän päättyvän voden lopun, ja päivittelen tässä blogiani samalla kun ihmiset ulkona jo pelottelevat naapuruston lemmikeitä ja minua ilotulitteillaan, vaikka kello on vasta puoli kymmenen tätä kirjoitusta päätellessäni.

Hyvää uutta vuotta kaikille, jotka tämän sattuvat lukemaan.

P.S. kello 21.42: Säikähdin juuri pahemman kerran: Läppäri päätti pimetä, kun akku loppui (olen kirjoittanut tätä kirjoitusta nyt ainakin kaksi tuntia, ellen kauemmin) juuri kun olin aikeissa julkaista tämän. Luulin jo menettäneeni kaiken kirjoittamani, mutta onneksi kaikki oli siinä, mihin se oli jäänyt, kun vihdoin sain laitteen johdon päähän ja koneen takaisin päälle.

[syco-friend]

tag dump

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MOVIE 1 VERSE;; BASICS OF A BARISTA MOVIE 2 VERSE;; MEAN BEAN MACHINIST MOVIE 3 VERSE;; END OF THE WORLD

MAIN VERSE;; EGGMAN-LAND’S PERSONAL LAP DOG GAME VERSE;; LATTE SHAKER COMIC VERSE;; READ THE MANUEL

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Dash Comm;; Live Stream Broadcast

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My art;; Its beautiful Doctor

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PSA;; Do NOT reblog

PSA;; Reblog From Source

PSA;; Read My Rules

Reblog;; Spacious and Crustaceous

Promo;; He's Back!

Ask Starter;; Taking Orders

Meme Prompt;; Right here in the manual

One Liner;; The Doctor Thinks You're Basic

Crack;; Goat Milker

Queue;; Please. Join me in the Crab

Relationships;; Best Of Friends

[syco-friend]

Mobile Verses

Cinematic Universe

Agent Stone, a long time employee of Doctor Ivo Robotnik, is a human man on the Planet Earth who sees himself as the Doctors personal assistant, friend, and sidekick. Despite his roll as a ‘lesser’, he takes pride in his work due to his unwavering devotion to his idol. He will abandon all responsibilities to pursue the Doctor’s safety and well being at his own expense every time. Determined to stay by his side at all costs.

(open) MOVIE 1 VERSE;; BASICS OF A BARISTA (open) MOVIE 2 VERSE;; MEAN BEAN MACHINIST (open) MOVIE 3 VERSE;; END OF THE WORLD

Video Game/Comic Verse (Original Concepts Ahead!)

Once a successful barista and ‘average’ person in Mobius’s Station Square most popular coffee shop, this lucky fellow was scoped out while at work by Doctor Eggman. Due to his unwavering desire to go above and beyond for someone who has tried to take over and nearly destroyed the world (So many times), Stone was given a business opportunity of a lifetime. He hesitated to accept at first, of course. How could he work for a maniac like- Oh no. Wait. He’s throwing his apron off as we speak and chasing after him. Well, he’s hardly the first to fall for the charms of Eggman, but he certainly seems the most promising!

Once an agent for GUN, being forced to retire due to his main project being put in classified files and scrubbed from the data base, he now poses as an additional threat to Mobius’s quaint way of life in the pursuit of the Eggman Empire. One evil latte at a time…

(closed) MAIN VERSE;; EGGMAN-LAND’S PERSONAL LAP DOG (Exclusive to Rothotnik’s interpretation of Eggman over @eggman-land.) (open) GAME VERSE;; LATTE SHAKER (open) COMIC VERSE;; READ THE MANUEL