oh-mymessymind

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I would sell my soul in order to have this man win the Oscar.

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Brendan Fraser wins the award for Best Actor, “The Whale” at the 28th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards

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Why am I emotional?

As a final goodbye, Blue Sky Studios came together and gave Scrat a send off on their own terms.

He finally got his nut.

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Petition to make episode titles same as the chapter titles i don't make the rules

"Season 1: Episode 1: I accidentally vaporize my pre algebra teacher"

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[oh-mymessymind]

loss

July 13th, 2013.

My best friend at the time texted me. It was a simple message, it read, “They just announced that Cory Monteith was found dead. I’m sorry hun.”

A short message, a simple message, but one that left me messed up for the next day and a half.

Last month, on the exact same day, July 13th, 2020, my phone notified me of a news article. The headline: “Glee actress Naya Rivera dies in a tragic boating accident”. That loss I felt exactly seven years earlier came back to me in that moment, however I wasn’t messed up for as long this time.

In the years between Cory and Naya’s death, I have experienced the death of many celebrities that I was either a fan of, or that I looked up to; Alan Rickman, Robin Williams, Daniel Kyre, Anton Yelchin, Luke Perry, Stan Lee. There’s probably more I’m forgetting, but these are the deaths that hit me the hardest.

After Naya’s death, I debated on writing an opinion piece regarding the conversation that continues to be brought up when people heavily mourn the passing of a celebrity; why do people mourn the way they do? Why do people mourn as though they themselves knew the person who passed? Why do we get so upset over people we don’t know? The answers to those questions are very simple, and many people understand them by now, so I decided against writing the piece.

That was, until the announcement of the passing of Chadwick Boseman just three days ago.

The passing of Chadwick hit me harder than the passing of Naya Rivera, which I still find a little strange because I’ve been following Naya since the first season of Glee, over ten years ago. Truthfully, I only know Chadwick as T’Challa/Black Panther, a role he took on in 2016, only four years ago. But, after many days to process Chadwick’s death and to think it all over, I’ve come to the realization that Chadwick’s death was so unexpected to me. Naya had been missing for nearly a week when her body was recovered and she was declared dead, Chadwick’s death came out of nowhere.

That’s one reason I think we mourn celebrities - we never expect them to pass away. Death is a natural part of life, it’s something that happens, but sometimes we view celebrities as people who are immortal. Especially when you have someone like Betty White, who is nearly 100 years old, but who is still around and kicking as though she was still in her 40s or 50s, or someone like the Queen, who just seems to be living forever. It’s hard to picture someone you look up to passing away at all, but to have them pass away at a young age is a whole other situation.

Cory Monteith was 30 years old when he passed away from an overdose. 30 is not the age you would prepare to lose someone, at least for me it wasn’t at the time. When I heard he passed, it was just so hard to comprehend. Of course, overdoses happen. He struggled with drug addiction, I was well aware of that. But my head couldn’t wrap around the fact that he was gone so young.

Chadwick Boseman was 43 when he passed away due to stage four colon cancer, something he has been battling for four years. That’s another reason that I am so stricken by his death. Chadwick continued on his career without ever letting it slip that he was fighting for his life. He filmed four, four, superhero movies while going through treatments for his cancel. He filmed a total of seven movies in between being diagnosed and his passing (not counting Captain America: Civil War and Message from the King as those were filmed before his diagnosis). On top of that, he still made time for fans, most notably he made time to visit children who were also struggling with cancer while he himself was keeping such a dark secret.

When your hero passes away, it’s hard to fathom that you’ll never see any new content from them. It’s hard to process the fact that you’ll never meet them, to tell them how much they mean to you and what they’ve done for you. And that, over all else, is why people mourn the loss of celebrities as though they were losing their own family members or friends.

To everyone who has lost someone, whether it’s an idol, a family member, a friend, or just someone you had one or two good experiences with, just know my heart is with you. To the families of those who we have lost this year, last year, the year before, and so on and so forth, our hearts are with you.

To Chadwick Boseman, thank you.

To Naya Rivera, thank you.

To Cory Monteith, thank you.

To the idols who have changed someone’s life but were lost before they could be told, we thank you.

May you rest in peace.

[oh-mymessymind]

1917: a masterpiece in one shot

This post contains spoilers to the 2019 movie 1917. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please do not read this opinion piece.

Up until the tail end of 2019, 1917 wasn’t really on my radar. I saw a trailer for it in like September and the main reason I even found the trailer was because the Youtube channel it was uploaded on had Richard Madden’s name in the title and I was on a Richard Madden kick at the time (sidenote: he’s not even in the trailer). I watched that one trailer and essentially forgot all about the movie until December, when all the movie review channels I subscribe to on Youtube start uploading videos reviewing 1917. The only review I watched was Jeremy Jahns’ (I’ll link it here because his videos are fantastic and should be watched) as his reviews tend to be spoiler free and I didn’t really want any spoilers for the movie. After that, I was intrigued.

1917 was finally released in my local movie theatre around the end of January (we’re very behind, we only got Jojo Rabbit like the beginning of the year), and after it had been out for about a month, myself and my boyfriend got the opportunity to go see it. And all I have to say is wow.

If you don’t know what 1917 is about and you don’t really care for spoilers, let me give you a quick synopsis: the story follows two soldiers, Lance Corporal Schofield, played by George Mackay, and Lance Corporal Blake, played by Dean-Charles Chapman, in the first World War. They’re given orders to stop an attack on the enemy after they seem to have retreated as it’s really just a planned attack and some thousands of men will die if the attack goes ahead, one of these men being Blake’s older brother.

The movie is shot to look like one take with no cuts between takes at all and takes us on the journey with the two soldiers, making the audience feel like a third member of their adventure, and I think that’s one of the most brilliant parts of the movie. Jeremy says it best in his review, you as an audience member really feel like you’re a part of this journey and that you also need to be alert at all times, and this is so true! At one point in the movie Scho and Blake are telling stories and trying to lighten the mood as they’re walking, and myself and my boyfriend found ourselves watching the skies or any open area around them in the scene to see if we could see any German enemies about to shoot them while their guard was down.

Another thing that I think the movie does so well is that it gives you an expectation on what’s going to happen and then completely flips it on its head. I walked into 1917 thinking that I knew exactly what was going to happen in the movie: these two soldiers were going to have hardships crossing enemy lines, but they’d eventually make it and stop the attack from happening. I figured Blake would find his brother and they’d be reunited, and the movie would end with one of those black screens that goes on to tell you how and when the first World War really ended (the following year in 1918).

But boy was I wrong.

The first time I changed my expectations was when Scho and Blake reach abandoned German trenches and go into them to cross through. A trip wire is triggered by a rat - which, sidenote, this movie is full of explosions and gunfire and the one thing in this movie that made me jump out of my skin was a rat falling from the fucking ceiling, but I digress - and there’s an explosion. Scho is buried and when Blake digs him up he looks like he’s dead. In my head, I figured this was foreshadowing that Scho wouldn’t make it. Eventually he was going to die and Blake would have to continue on by himself, eventually finding his way to the attack and stopping it, but unable to find his brother in the process.

Of course, with this thought in mind, I wasn’t shocked when the movie killed off one of their two leads about 40ish minutes into the movie. What I was shocked about, however, was that it was Blake, not Scho who died. And I have to say, for that scene alone, Dean-Charles Chapman and George Mackay were ROBBED of an Oscar nom. Blake’s death scene alone was absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking. Like most war movies do, it makes you understand what these poor men who fought in the war went through; they watched people that they considered their friends die, their actual family in some cases. They watched the young men, like Blake who was only 19, die with so much ahead of them. They watched people like Scho, who is revealed at the end of the movie to have a wife and two children, be killed and have to send letters home to their families. And should they survive and be able to go home themselves, they were never completely okay ever again.

The death of Blake lights a fire under Scho’s ass and we see his character do a complete 180, in my opinion anyways. Leading up to this, Scho didn’t seem to be into the mission, especially not after being buried in the German trench and nearly killed. There’s even a line he says where he snaps at Blake and asks him, “Why’d you choose me?! Why’d it have to be me?!”, and when Blake says that he didn’t realize what he was signing up for, Scho tells him, “You never do!”. But then, when Blake dies, he’s so focused on the mission. He will stop at nothing until he reaches the Devonshire Regiment and delivers the message to Colonel Mackenzie to call off the attack. He even goes as far as trying to push the truck he’s travelling in out of a mud puddle because he feels he doesn’t have the time to waste and has to get there as soon as humanly possible.

Besides flipping expectations, the movie is also cinematically breathtaking. The one scene that will always stick with me, as I know it has others, is one of the final scenes in which Scho knows he can’t get through the trenches to get to Colonel Mackenzie so he runs across the battlefield with bombs going off behind him and soldiers running to what we know will be their death if he can’t stop the attack and the real debris falling around him and at him. The scene is absolutely beautiful and devastating in my opinion, and is still one of my favourite shots in the entire movie.

And goddamn, the song I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger, it’s an actual song they released on Spotify and Apple Music. I can’t stop listening to it, and I can picture the scene it’s in and what happens before and after that scene and I just get the chills. I feel like this song was also snubbed for an Oscar, but it probably isn’t an original song written just for the movie so I totally understand that. But I have to talk about the song while I discuss the movie because I feel like I haven’t seen enough people talking about it when they talk about the movie.

All in all, 1917 is such a breathtaking movie. I thought at first that the single shot following mainly two characters was going to make the movie drag on and feel boring, but I could not be more wrong. I’ve been urging absolutely everyone I know to go see this movie because I feel like it’s one of those movies absolutely everyone should be watching. I really hope George Mackay and Dean-Charles Chapman blow up after this. I know they both have a decently sized filmography, including Game of Thrones for Dean, but I think this is the movie that will catapult them into being household names and you’ll start to see them on the big screen much more often.

That’s just my opinion on the movie. If you’ve seen 1917 (which I hope you have if you read through my whole opinion piece), what did you think of it? What was your favourite scene? Or least favourite if you had one? I feel like people don’t talk about that enough. What’s your opinion on the one take style?