#I always found Marc’s involvement in this team-up to be a little funny

[age-of-moonknight]

Variant cover for Conan: Serpent War (Vol. 1/2020), #3 by Kim Jacinto.

[whump-mania]

Welcome Home

TW: abuse, kidnapping, stalking, HEAVILY IMPLIED R*PE/NONCON (please stay away if under 18), blood, implied gun use, panic attack, nonconsensual touching, implied bone breaking, cursing

inspired in part by @whump-me-all-night-long (i love your stuff btw!)

Marcus looked up from his book at the sound of the door knocking. He stared at the door for a while, irritated. He knew exactly who was at the door, what he was going to say, and what he wanted.

He should have expected this sooner, to be honest. Chloe had gotten out of her so-called “prison”, as she liked to call his house, many months ago. Marcus had broken a deal with a very powerful person, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a bit worried.

A lot of money was on the line with keeping his sister and the police station quiet. Their town was small, and Marcus had quite a bit of power when it came to his job, but surprisingly enough, his little sister was the bigger problem to deal with. Marcus hadn’t expected her to be smart enough to find her phone and learn his schedule, so when she did, he expected an angry phone call from his high school friend.

The call came eventually, but Aaron wasn’t angry. He was amused, and strangely cheerful, telling him about how Chloe “came to the rescue” and only got herself and her twin brother into even more trouble. Marcus’s only concern was the money, and his worries were relieved when Aaron said he’d still get to keep his bribe as long as the police stayed quiet.

But Marcus knew they’d get out eventually. It was two against one, and no matter how strong Aaron was, he knew how inseparable his younger siblings were. They were a good team, as much as he’d like to deny it. Ben was a wimp, but he was clever and could get into someone’s head. On the other hand, Chloe was pretty dense when it came to understanding other people (besides her twin), but she could definitely beat someone up. They were bound to escape eventually.

That’s why Marcus knew who was at the door. They got out, and Aaron was here to take his money back. Or kill him. Damn it.

Another knock at the door snapped the man out of his trance. He sighed deeply and approached the door, opening it to find his old friend, smiling at him. No surprise there. “Hello, Marcus.”

“They got out, didn’t they?” Marcus sighed. “I told you it’d happen.” He stepped aside to let Aaron in. Marcus noticed a slight limp in his walking. The blond moved his hair out of his face and took a seat on his couch. He nodded.

“Unfortunately, yes.” Aaron gestured to his leg. “Benny decided it would be cute to shoot me in the leg after his little bitch sister tackled me to the ground.” He chuckled. “Such spitfires, those two.”

Marcus didn’t laugh, rolling his eyes and moving to sit on the coffee table. “So they’re gone then, right? No idea where they could be?” He crossed his arms. “And I assume you want your money back.”

Aaron’s grin grew as he leaned over to lie down on his side, resting his head on his hand. “Not exactly. True, I have no idea where my little toys ran off to. But I think you can help me find out.” He sat up again. “So here’s how this is gonna work. I can take all the money away, leaving you with basically nothing from your shitty paying job.” He leaned in closer. “Or, I can double your pay if you can get your little cop team to help me find them.” Aaron leaned back on the couch, crossing one leg over the other. “What’s it gonna be, Marc?”

Marcus’s eyes widened. Double the money would be insane, but so would be getting his team to help him find Ben and Chloe while keeping it all under the table. With that much money, though, he could do a whole lot of bribing...

“...Okay, I’ll do it. Just get out of my house, you creep.”

~

Ben was smiling as he got ready in the bathroom. He had a date with his boyfriend for their 6 month anniversary, and he wanted to impress him. He knew Ethan would go all out, so he at least wanted to look good for him too. Chloe was in the living room when her brother came out of the bathroom and gathered his things. Chloe looked up and smiled when she saw him.

“Damn, you look great! Ethan’s not even gonna recognize you,” she joked. Ben laughed and rolled his eyes.

“Ha ha. I’ll be back at around nine, I’ll let you know if anything changes.” Chloe nodded, they said their goodbyes, and Ben made his way to Ethan’s house to pick him up.

The night was everything Ben could ask for. Ethan looked great as ever, melted when he saw how he made himself up, and they had a nice dinner. It was calm, and romantic, and stress free. It was perfect.

They ended up waiting a bit longer for their food than they thought, so Ben decided to call his sister and let her know he’d be a bit late to get home. His good mood faltered a bit when she didn’t answer. She always answered her phone, and when she didn't...

“Something wrong?” Ethan was looking worriedly at Ben, holding his hand across the table. Ben nodded.

“Y-Yeah, Chloe just isn’t answering her phone. I hope she’s okay...” Ben squeezed Ethan’s hand, not noticing he was shaking slightly. Ethan squeezed back gently.

“I’m sure she’s okay. If you wanna go back home we always can.” Ethan looked into his eyes reassuringly. “She’d call if something was wrong, right?”

Ben nodded, wanting to believe him. He stared at his phone the entire time they waited for the check to arrive, still getting no call back. He called twice more before they left, with no response. A pit grew in his stomach. Something was definitely wrong.

The drive home was silent and miserable as Ben’s anxiety grew. Ethan’s hand was on Ben’s leg the whole time, trying to soothe him, and if he wasn’t so clouded by fear, it would have helped.

Ben shakily opened the door with his keys and stepped inside, Ethan following close behind. Chloe wasn’t on the couch. “Chloe? I’m home, did you get my calls?” He yelled out. He listened carefully.

His heart stopped as he heard muffled yelling from upstairs.

Oh no. Oh god, no.

Ben scrambled up the stairs with Ethan behind him, filled to the brim with fear. “Chloe?!” He called again, barging into the room where he heard the muffled voice.

Ben gasped and clapped his hand over his mouth. His sister was tied to her own bed, gagged, and covered in bruises.

“Holy shit, Chloe! What happened?!” Ethan exclaimed and ran to her, trying to untie her. She screamed and desperately shook her head. Ben was frozen in shock. He thought everything was okay, and now he was back to the terrible place he worked so hard to escape from.

Ethan managed to remove the gag from Chloe’s mouth, avoiding the bruises on her face. She gasped for air. “Ethan, you need to grab Ben and get the fuck out of here NOW.” Ethan had never seen Chloe afraid before.

“I can’t just leave you here! Who even did this to you?!” Ethan demanded, trying to untie her. Chloe shook her head.

“Please, Ethan, you need to go. Please just leave me here, I’m not what he wants, this is a trap, just please RUN!” She yelled back. Ethan ignored her and persistently tried to free her.

Ben didn’t know what to do. He wanted to help but he couldn’t hear anything, or see anything, or talk, or breathe, or move. He was so out of it that he didn't notice the door closing behind him. He didn’t notice Ethan turning around and yelling at him to move. He didn’t even notice the arm wrapping around him, or the hot breath against his neck.

“Welcome home, Benny.”

The nickname brought him back to his senses and he was suddenly screaming, trying to rip himself away from the monster he wished was dead. He was sobbing as he was brought back to his own personal hell that he thought he had escaped forever. But the grip on his waist was too strong, and he wasn’t going anywhere.

“Get away from him!” Ethan shouted, rushing at the taller man. Aaron smirked and used his free hand to punch Ethan in the nose, sending him to the ground.

“So you’re the boyfriend, huh? Damn, Benny, you really need to get higher standards,” Aaron said loudly over Ben’s screaming. He looked over to Chloe. “What? Not gonna talk back this time? Finally scared of me, babe?” He laughed as Chloe remained silent and glared straight through Aaron’s soul.

Aaron decided he was tired of Ben’s constant struggling and grabbed something out of his pocket. He dragged him to the wooden chair that sat next to Chloe’s bed and pushed him down into it, using handcuffs to lock him in. He also grabbed the gag from the floor and secured it back in Chloe’s mouth before returning his attention to Ben.

“You look so pretty in chains, baby,” Aaron murmured, leaning over him. Ben shrunk under his former captor’s gaze, tears flowing freely from his eyes. Aaron grinned and drew his fist back, landing a punch right onto Ben’s left eye. Ben cried out in pain and squeezed his eye shut, whining when it was too painful to open it again. “Now you look even prettier.” Aaron stroked his hair.

He then stepped away from Ben for a moment to look at the beautiful mess he created. His prized possession finally back where he belonged in front of him, his “savior” looking off to the side with guilt and tears in her eyes, and Benny’s new little boyfriend bleeding on the ground and moaning in pain. Everything was perfect.

Aaron went to the closet to retrieve something. “You must be confused, Benny. Let me explain some things to you, because I’m so nice.” He smiled when he found what he was looking for: the baseball bat he used to...calm Chloe down when he arrived.

“Your brother’s been a real good friend,” Aaron explained, pacing around the room. “He helped me find you. He’ll do pretty much anything for money, it’s kind of funny how desperate for cash that man can be.” He laughed. “Anyway, he did some investigating and found out that Chloe’s little girlfriend was involved.” Chloe tensed. “He interrogated her, but she wasn’t much help. Clearly. So we took matters into our own hands, dug a little deeper, and bribed the jet pilot that brought your asses here.”

Ethan groaned and tried to get up, but a kick to the stomach kept him down. Ben struggled when he saw his boyfriend get hurt, but he was too weak to do anything about it. All he could do was keep listening to the demon in front of him, looking all the more threatening with that bat on his shoulder. Aaron continued.

“It was pretty easy to find you from there. Used the girlfriend’s phone to track yours, and I watched you for a week or two. Heard all about the anniversary.” Aaron frowned at the last part but collected himself. “So that’s how I knew Chloe here would be nice and alone...” He approached Chloe and sat on the bed next to her, running his hand through her hair and ignoring her trying to pull away. “...so we could have some fun before you got here.” Chloe looked sick.

Ben was trying to process everything he was hearing. He thought everything was going to be okay when they escaped, that no one would be able to track them...boy, was he wrong. The “fun” comment snapped him out of his trance for a moment and he looked up fearfully at Aaron.

“Wh...What do you mean by...”

Chloe’s eyes stared blankly to the side as tears threatened to fall. Aaron only smiled and narrowed his eyes at Ben. “I think you can put the pieces together, Benny.” Just to add kindling to the flames, he reached over to Chloe’s chest and grabbed. Chloe whimpered and Ben’s eyes widened.

“Stop! D-Don’t touch her like that, please!” Ben cried, struggling again. He was mortified, and disgusted with himself. He let this happen. 

“It’s a bit too late for that, Benny.” Aaron loved how his little pet recoiled at the nickname. “But you can still stop it from happening again...I’d hate for you to have to watch me hurt your new little fucktoy, too.” 

Ben tried to calm his breathing as he looked up at Aaron. “...What do I have to do?” He believed he already knew the answer.

Aaron grinned and stood up to approach Ben once again, baseball bat still dragging behind him. He grabbed Ben’s chin with his hand. “Come back to me,” he whispered, a low rumble in his voice. “And I won’t lay another finger on them.”

Ben sobbed and hung his head. He couldn’t believe this. He had to go back to his prison, his worst fear, his hell. All of the work he put into his recovery would be destroyed, and it was already faltering at that moment. But he had to protect his loved ones, or it would be worse torture for him than anything Aaron could ever do to him.

Ben nodded. Aaron smiled.

“Perfect,” Aaron purred, standing up and brandishing the bat. “Now, before we get started, I think you need to learn a little lesson.” He raised the bat and relished in the horror in Ben’s eyes as he aimed at his kneecap.

“It’s not very nice to shoot people in the leg.”

[leverage-commentary]

Leverage Season 1, Episode 9, The Stork Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

John: Hi, I'm John Rogers, Executive Producer of Leverage.

Chris: Chris Downey, Executive Producer.

Albert: Albert Kim, Writer.

Marc: Marc Roskin, Producer...and Director.

[Scattered Applause]

John: And director! Marc Roskin’s first directorial debut, ladies and gentlemen. You have directed for second unit for years for the company and do most of our...You’re shooting pretty much as much as we are on A camera on the show.

Marc: Yeah, there’s a lot.

John: Alfred. Albert, pardon me. Why don’t you tell us where the idea for the show came from?

Albert: Well, this is The Stork Job and it’s another cheery topic. Concerning European orphanages and the scams people perpetrate on desperate parents there-

John: We give you the ones that are more soul-wrenching ones because we know you have no soul.

[Laughter]

Marc: Yes, that’s true.

John: You’re able to withstand the emotional torment.

Marc: But, this was actually based on actual, real scams. Doing research for it, I found there were unscrupulous adoption agencies out there who were preying on parents here in America. And, uh, it started our really grim, but in the end I think the episode came out to be kind of fun.

Albert: Very fun.

John: It’s very fun. It shows how the grim premise can kind of ground you and then allows you to go off and have little bit of fun.

Chris: What’s great about this one, also if I may, is that normally what the teams going after is money, and as you’ll see in this scene here they’re going after a child. Which is really, like, something we’re constantly trying to challenge ourselves in the writers room, to try and make the scams not always about money.

John: We generally fail.

[Laughter]

Chris: It’s very hard. It really is very hard.

John: Also, this also started as a Nate/Sophie scene- a Nate/Sophie episode, talking about Nate about his issues about fatherhood and adopting. And because, as we broke this story, these kids didn’t show up until later, there was no way to fuel that, and so it became much more about Sophie’s issues with the acting, and really Parker’s and Hardison’s issues with their own upbringing.

Albert: Right, this is a great Parker episode. And I found that writing for Parker is actually the most fun for me. I mean, because on the surface she’s got all these emotional quirks and slightly Asperger's like aspects, which is fun to write for the comedic bits, but you also get the sense that deep down, she’s this- there’s this wellspring of darkness and blackness there which is really fun to play with.

Marc: And it was also fun shooting it, because as the story goes on, we take her to a place where I don’t think the audience is used to seeing her go.

John: I’m- no I saw the dalies of one of the later scenes, and I was like, that is probably one of the finer pieces of television acting I’ve seen in a long time.

Marc: Yes. I think there was a four letter word in the email you sent me.

John: We can swear on these by the way

Marc: Oh good!

John: Yeah, no problem. I’ve already done it quite a bit. The fact that i’m drinking in all of them doesn’t help.

Albert: This was Eliot’s face that was all damaged, that we had to write a quickie line for.

John: Ugh, yes. The lesbian bar’s a throwaway because SOMEBODY, in his weekly poker game with Tim Hutton and Saul Rubinek at 1 AM on a Saturday, went out to throw the football around and SOMEBODY was wearing his cowboy boots and went down on the sidewalk.

[All laugh]

John: Yeah, I actually laughed out loud when I walked in the trailer, it was great he was so worried. I walked in and I could not help but laugh, he went ‘it’s not funny man’ and I went ‘no no we’ll figure it out’. Amazingly by the way, the makeup managed to cover it. They built like a little mini prosthetic or something. It was only two scenes we had to really deal with it

Marc: Right.

Albert: We gave one of his scenes- some of his lines over to Sophie and other than that we covered it with his line here, which turned out to be a really funny line. And then his weird mutant healing power kicked in and he was ready to go.

John: Here’s when you realize shit-kicker has a genetic component. Because he is a country boy, and he really healed way faster than you should be able to.

Marc: And he was pulling things off of his face that normally your doctor wouldn’t suggest.

[All laugh]

John: ‘I’m just gonna get rid of this scab here guys and we’ll be ready to shoot’. By the way, I do need to give you a little bit of shit. Why is there a glamor photo of the orphan? Why is he doing the glamor photo pose with the little hand on the chest?

Marc: You know, I initially picked something a little…

Albert: Grittier?

Marc: Grittier and less posed. But Tim liked the black and white aspect with the dirt smudge on it, so...

John: The dirt smudge- tragic dirt smudge. Also our porniest writing run coming up.

[Laughter]

Chris: Yeah we did- we had great fun in the writers room for sure.

Albert: And I actually did Emmanuelle research and it was amazingly difficult to come up with a title for an Emmanuelle movie that hasn’t been taken. There’s like 50 of these things.

John: I want these views to realize that we have something called clearance, where we can’t duplicate things that already exist, so we can’t be sued for implying certain things about them. And so just fabricating goofy Emmanuelle titles took us, like, half a day because every time we had come up with something more ridiculous, it had been used.

Albert: ‘Emmanuelle Goes to Mars’? Oh that already exists. Made in 1984. Ohh, okay.

John: Right. It’s also interesting because the conversation about Emmanuelle basically ran the exact same way in the writers room as it does in this bit. With the guys like ‘oh those movies!’ and the girls are like ‘what? I have no idea.’ So Mark, you have a lovely transition coming up, so why don’t you- everyone, every director talks about the hell of shooting in the conference room, tell us how you tackled it. Tell us how you handled it.

Marc: Well I was- I was fortunate that I was able to not have too many green screens in our conference room. Actually the first thing we shot was all the surveillance footage from the park and we were able to get it into the conference room quick. But this, we did a push in and then a take over from a purchased shot.

Chris: Oh that’s great. Isn’t that terrific? I mean I think that- that’s gotta be a signature bit of this show.

John: Yeah. We should do that more often.

Marc: And this is the Masonic Lodge in beautiful downtown Pasadena.

[All laugh]

Albert: This is also a fun episode because I think it’s the first- maybe the only one we did in the first season, where we travel outside of the country and we have that sort of cosmopolitan feel where we’re going to Europe, and doing a little thing- little stuff outside of there. And the team’s-

John: A little Mission: Impossible.

All: Yeah.

Marc: And this is- Christian of course blocked this. He grabbed all of the prettiest extras and surrounds himself.

John: [laughs] He just grabs and brings them all over and- yeah. It’s a nice bit of- there’s a little bit of annoyance there. He’s developed a nice relationship between the two characters.

Chris: It’s great.

Albert: Originally this scene was written and it was a lot more elaborately choreographed, where Nate and Sophie were originally going to be dancing and in that ballroom with them. And it would’ve been fun to try, but it ultimately would’ve been crippling to do production-wise.

Chris: This is a fairly late add, but it was really great.

John: To explain why they were in the office.

Albert: To cover why they weren’t there.

John: And wound up being a really great joke. I love this joke. I love the ridiculousness of the tiara and that somebody would fall for it.

Marc: Still kept the tiara.

John: And- ‘I still got the tiara’ yeah. That’s a dirty little line. This is actually kind of the steamiest little exchange - one of them - that we have in the season. between the two of them where they argue over relationships and- Because it’s not about relationships, it’s about something else that happens to involve relationships.

Chris: Yeah.

John: That’s a good general writing rule. Is to never actually talk about the relationship, which we violated several times much to our regret. Also the Orange SQ the knockoff, the idea that Hardison is filled with rage he has to eat the knock off variants of his usual diet.

Chris: Lot of pitching on what a Eastern European beverage would be. Orange SQ.

John: And big props out to Derek, our computer graphics guy. This is an amazing episode for that.

Chris: He did a really good job.

John: Now where are we here? Are we in the hardest-working office in show business, but we’re on the soundstage?

Marc: Yes. We’re in the hardest-working office.

John: This is usually the villains office, we’re just shooting it from the other direction.

Marc: Yes. We just stripped out some stuff. Made it look like it was under construction.

John: Originally a van I believe.

Marc: Originally a van.

Albert: It looks like- was gonna be a van yeah.

John: Which we wound up stealing for the season finale. We ended up taking that idea and using it there.

Chris: Great little sequence of them coaching their- their counterparts at the party.

Albert: Now that was some fun research to do. About all the pickup artist techniques. Which is what Sophie ends up using to help coach Eliot. And so I got a lot of books on how to pick up women, and-

Chris: It’s always great when the wife gets- signs for those from Amazon.

John: ‘Oh hey, what’s from Amazon? Oh…’

Albert: ‘Yeah this is all for work, honey’.

Chris: Search and destroy the- the pickup artist.

John: By the way, that exterior shot - outside the balcony - we’re looking into a gymnasium there, I believe.

Marc: Yeah it’s like a big- a big auditorium.

John: It’s a beautiful green screen replacement. Yes, that was the entire idea, was that we ended up building a fake balcony on the end of an overlook that just looked into an auditorium.

Chris: There’s another- and again notice the Eastern European biscuits.

[All laugh]

John: Oh man that’s gorgeous, little bit of movement.

Chris: That’s a fantastic green screen.

Marc: Yeah we just added a bit of movement to a still shot to make it look like there’s cars or lights are moving.

John: The little laugh Parker does there, I love it’s one of the things that Ken Levine talks about this a M.A.S.H. writer who writes on a website. He says, you know, having characters laugh at things other character say is something that’s not done a lot, but it’s one of the ways you build that they have a relationship. You know they’re usually making jokes off each other, not together. It’s kind of a technique that’s not used a lot.

Marc: Kathleen was a great- great job playing this role.

John: Yeah. So great. So dismissive. Now all the things are techniques you found from your books, is that right?

Albert: That’s right. And no, I did not try them out, but I’m assured that they are all very effective techniques.

John: I swear you tried them out on me one time. I found myself really heavily entranced by you.

[Laughter]

Albert: Was that- was that not talking about it again?

Chris: Was it the- was it the anchoring? The backhanded compliment?

John: The anchoring. I totally took a bunch of these pictures I didn’t really like, but for some reason I couldn’t say no.

Marc: This is the- this is the first day of shooting without any facial damage on Christian.

[All laugh]

John: Really? Amazing that you managed to get around that, I have to say.

Chris: Now from a directing standpoint, was this the most difficult? With all the extras in? Or- I mean we had so many incredible breaking in this show.

John: This is a though show, it’s a bear.

Marc: I mean a lot of the shows are difficult, but I mean whenever you get into a comm sequence, you know you have to double the amount of time you spend shooting because you wanna cover it with their talking and their listening on all sides.

Chris: Yeah, right. So you have your options on what side of the conversation you want to cut to.

Marc: Yeah

John: So if you have a 5 page intercut comm sequence, it’s actually 10 pages of shooting.

Marc: Yeah, absolutely.

John: Which is interesting because that let us - again, welcome to television. Every show evolves over the course of the season; anyone who says otherwise is lying. Is the fact, if you notice that later episodes where we split the team up and don’t have them talk on the comms, they have very specific jobs that they can do, but don’t back chatter a lot. Because we realized we were killing the directors with the coverage.

Albert: Right. But I have to say in the end this sequence worked out great. The whole weaving back and forth, you just felt you know there’s a nice sense of urgency going on and a lot of fun banter.

John: Yeah.

Marc: Well that’s also because- there was so much coaching involved, that it was fun to cut back and forth to see the reactions. And also you know seeing Eliot playing the sophisticated and suave instead of just busting heads.

John: Yeah. That he has that in the toolbox and can you know... There’s actually- Yeah, we were saying, in Homecoming we have a reference where he says, ‘next time I’m wearing the suit…’ And we paid that off in the the Stork Job and in the finale. You know he does get to do the- he does get to wear the tux and be James Bond every now and then.

Albert: And later in this episode we have a sequence where Beth has a fight scene, and that’s another thing we haven’t seen Parker do before. And it was fun to be able to show that our team can take care of themselves, not- and that Eliot’s not the only one who’s...

John: And she has a very specific fighting style that takes advantage of the strength of her legs, and keeping people outside, and either staying outside their reach or stepping inside their- inside their reach. And Charlie Brewer again, it’s really great- I have a lot of fight guys who read my blog and I get a lot of emails from fight guys going ‘what the hell style is Christian Kane using? It’s such a mishmash’ and Charlie has this great vocabulary of fight styles for every situation. And this is- who is this actor?

Marc: David Lee.

Albert: David Hill- David Lee. yeah.

Chris and Marc: He was great.

John: And he really helped us on the language. And this is great - the intercutting, tell me about the intercutting flashbacks.

Chris: It was written this way.

Marc: it was written this way. The one thing I wanted to do was every time I shot the young Parker I said ‘let’s just do one’- I mean every time I shot the young boy, Luca, I said let’s just get one shot with Parker in it just in case it works. And it worked.

John: And it works. Very effective. And I love the idea that, you know, this is something we actually used as a joke in the finale- and right out onto the pad underneath the auditorium.

Chris: I just realized both your episodes she just leaps out of- leaps out of windows. It’s your motif.

Albert: That’s right I have her jumping a lot.

John: Do you have a macro? [laughs] Parker jumps out the window.

Albert: It’s on my keyboard - ‘Parker leaps out the window’. By the way that stunt even though it’s a fake balcony it was probably about a 10 foot drop down to the pads. And the stuntwoman just flew- threw herself out of the window. It was amazing. Afterwards we were all just stunned that she could do that.

John: I was gonna say the- the-

Albert: You’re mesmerized by Nate’s- Nate putting it all together.

John: I am. Nate’s had that moment where he realizes exactly what he needs to do there and moves us into the second con. It was about David Lee and it was gonna drive me crazy…

Chris: Just a little note about the con. People kinda talk about where do we come up with cons. And a lot of the times they are classic cons that we’re kind of adapting for our show. But this episode was interesting because we built our villain, Irena here, and the con kinda came out of the creative decisions we made about her character. So we decided she was a faded model and wannabe actress-

John: Because that would be the kind of place a grifter would come from.

Chris: Exactly. And we look at, when we’re looking at a con - is what’s our characters weakness? And when it’s money, it’s often greed. But in this case we thought her weakness was vanity and that’s what led to the movie - stealing the movie. Which really took the episode from a really dark Eastern European orphanages and brought a lightness to it that really elevated it.

John: There’s the blocking, there’s Mark Roscin blocking out that one side of Christian’s face.

Marc: Of Christians- one side of Christians face, that was fresh.

John: Yeah it was at this point actually that Apollo Robbins - our grifter consultant - he said you guys have become a fully functioning crime crew. You’re looking at the bad- your mark, and carving out around your mark rather than… Oh that’s it, the movie actually comes from, and again you do research, but a lot of the times everybody on the set, particularly the first AD, had worked on an Eastern European film. And we had heard so many horror stories by this point, that it really gave us the natural setting to do the con.

Chris: And Serbia is also, we found out, an emerging place where there’s a lot of film productions.

John: Right. I like the sleazy- sleazy producer and sleazy director, it’s the writers fantasy of how horrible they are. This is- is this shot by Jonathan Frakes or the other shot?

Chris and Albert: No the other one.

Marc: No the- the end shot of Kathleen. That was- we just put a fake ATM machine on the side of the stage.

John: Yeah it was parking- that was the stage and then the parking lot for the other one, yeah.

Chris: Oh here we go.

Albert: Here’s our set. I love this set.

Marc: You know what? So many people did because it reminded them of their early, like, coreman days where a lot of us started out.

Albert: Well the funny thing was is- well the way it was written, this movie that we’re showing -  the set - was supposed to be kinda cheesy and cheap and a little bit B-movie production. And then when it came time to actually be creating it, I found out that our crew doesn’t really- can’t really do cheesy and cheap.

[All laugh]

Albert: They kept wanting to make it better and better and we were in these meetings where they were asking to put more flocking [transcriber clarification: fake snow] on the trees and we were like ‘we don’t need any more flocking on the trees’.

John: ‘I don’t even know what flocking is - what are you people doing?’ It was great because at one point watching this- the set looks so good, at one point watching it was like, you know we could just finish this movie. We could shoot this out and sell it to sci-fi and have it on Saturday nights.

Marc: This is one of my favorite transitions and I have to thank Dave Connell for it.

Chris: Oh, that’s great.

John: This is from the stunt man right?

Marc: Yeah.

Chris: But that was your- wasn’t that- that was your stunt man entrance? I think we were talking about that.

Marc: Yeah we wanted to have-

Albert: It was originally a cut right?

Marc: Yeah but unfortunately it- the crane could only go from that height so we had to figure out how we go from-

John: -from five feet to two feet, cinematically.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

Albert: I have to say, of all the things of all the things I had to deal with working on this script, I think I spent the most time coming up with the title of the fake movie.

[Laughter]

Albert: I sat there for half an hour going like, ‘Wolf Wars?’

Chris: It’s absolutely perfect.

Albert: ‘Dog Fights? Dog Fighters?’

John: No seriously, we could sell this.

Albert: We should make Howl Force.

Marc: So many people want to see it.

John: The Howl Force chair backs have become quite the collectors item, actually. To show that you’ve bought the set for Howl Force.

Chris: Nate as a director…

John: This is one of our 360’s.

Marc: Yeah just steadicam-ing the whole time.

John: You didn’t lay track?

Marc: No, just steadicam. You know I was just trying to make the day, and- [laughs]

John: Well actually Mark give a brief- cause your career is kind of the prototypical Hollywood career in its length and oddity. How did you get into the business?

Marc: I actually- my first job I was a PA on Roland and Dean’s first movie- studio movie. Universal Soldier. So I was a PA and I went from AD-

Chris: PA like Parker right here!

Marc: Like Parker right here, yes.

Chris: Couldn’t be a better-

Marc: And I believe I wore that exact same, like, 80’s/90’s headset.

Chris: So kids out there, wondering whether you should take that PA job? Here we go.

Marc: Take it.

John: So PA to AD. Did you do AD?

Marc: PA to AD and then assistant for role and I just kept reading all their scripts. And that’s when I met you, and we brought you in for Carrier.

John: Oh that’s right, yeah.

Marc: And I just doing making notes and giving them to Roland and Dean and they basically said ‘well you’re already doing it, so why don’t you run Development for us?’ And then it was- being on set and saying you know we need an insert of a book. Now we need an insert of a book and a hand. All right now we need an insert of a person grabbing a book and walking. And then it just kept going.

John: Now we need an insert of a person grabbing the book and walking on a flaming train.

Marc: Yeah, yeah exactly. It just kept getting bigger, and you know I was always trying to just give him a little more. Cause the one thing I learned from Dean is, give your editor as many options as you can.

Albert: And this is one of my favorite shots coming up, and I think it was your idea.

Chris: Oh this is great.

Albert: When Sophie floats into view. It’s one of the highlights.

John: And it should be over the top and it’s not. It’s actually perfect. It’s-

Chris: Yeah well you- you put in the wheel sound. Got the ‘eee-eee-eee’

John: She’s being wheeled in.

Chris: We know she’s not actually floating.

John: This is, by the way, a beautiful distillation of how producers deal with scripts. The whole problem Eliot has with the script is that he’s acting like a producer here. ‘You have an effects sequence! You know what this’ll cost us!’

Marc: Even the way he grabs it out of her hands here.

[Laughter]

Marc: I just love it.

John: ‘Fine. Alright. I’ll go fine the first AD and we’ll block this out.’ This is one of my favorite scenes of the entire series.

Marc: Yeah, I really like this scene. It was- and we did it pretty simple.

John: This is our real craft service table.

Albert: I love how skimpy this craft service table is. A little orange there.

[Laughter]

John: Just for a bit. Just to give her something. Eating is always good, actors love to eat. Gives them something to do with their hands.

Chris: She likes to eat grapes.

Marc: I think this is one of my favorite lines in the movie. ‘This is- this is a movie about NATO soldiers being attacked by werewolves. There is no emotional payout’

[Laughter]

John: This is great- I don’t if we kept this, I think it got cut, but she does like a, ‘typical’. Just like the typical director bullshit.

Chris: ‘Typical.’ Yeah, I think that’s in there.

John: Yeah the genuine- the fact that it’s not all flirty, or not all sexual. That there’s a genuine friendship and he really cares about her feelings, it lands in a really nice way.

Chris: Yeah.

Marc: And it was great because the one note I had for Gina was like, this is your world - this is where you wanna be. You know as soon as you walked out of the van in the previous scene, she started looking around and so she really grabbed it.

John: And that’s also the big- the big eyes? The big girl eyes? Where she’s really excited? She doesn’t- we don’t give her that a lot. Cause she’s cunning. The thing is Sophie’s got so many emotional layers between herself and the rest of the team, that in a setting where she doesn’t have them, it’s great to see that that’s what’s underneath.

Marc: And their lines were so good you didn’t notice the snow I had going in front of that big light.

[All laugh]

Chris: Oh wow! That’s beautiful.

John: Wow, that’s beautiful! We’ll take a moment now, and-

Chris: Yeah, that looks great.

John: That is a director who is thinking about their background. I will say that right now man you- you put some depth into that shot.

Albert: This is- this is Sophie’s death scene, which is I think one of the first scenes we shot on the set. And it was one of those things where everyone came down to watch this. All the actors, even if they weren’t in the scene they came down to watch, all the writers, everyone came down and sat there

John: Most of the background photos from this episode, everyone is in it because it’s this scene, yeah.

Marc: Right.

Albert: But it was great because after Gina does this scene, and she does an amazing job with it, and after Mark called cut there was a round of applause. We all just sat there an applauded.

John: Are these the NATO guys or this- is this the flashback to the Nazis? I can never remember.

Albert: These are the NATO guys and no one ever stops to bother- wonder why NATO guys are chasing a nun.

Chris: Well I always thought that she- they thought that she had the infection of the werewolf?

Albert: That’s right - that is the backstory.

Chris: That’s how I always envisioned it.

John: That is a beautiful shot, by the way.

Marc: Yeah, thank you.

Albert: Shafts of light through the bullet holes.

John: Marc- I remember talking about how to pull that off. Like so do we-

Chris: How did you get the shafts of light through the bullet holes?

Marc: You know I don’t remember what movie, but there are so many movies that are done at night, bullets going through the door. And I even think we had some of that at the end, that originally in. Where like the garage was going to be shot up?

Albert: Yeah. we were going to try to do that.

Chris: Do you remember- how many takes was this? Do you remember?

John: Three. Two or three.

Marc: Yeah, no more than that.

John: Cause I was there that day and you got it- she banged it out first time. It was really a wonderful scene.

Marc: And we also had the XD camera pointed at her, so we can actually see what Nate is seeing on the monitor.

Albert: This- this was a really fun day. A really fun day

John: This is when you feel like you’re making a movie. This is when you feel like- when you’ve got people in costumes and dudes in soldier outfits, yeah. It really feels like you’re making a movie. ‘Oh this is great!’

Chris: [laughs] I love him going back to the character.

John: Yeah he goes back to the character after he explains.

Albert: And you got the sense that Tim was channeling, kind of, years of frustrating experiences with directors into this character and sort of paying them back somehow.

John: Yeah. There is some director out there right now who’s watching this and is like ‘son of a bitch!’

Chris: ‘Oh alright maybe I shot a gun to start a scene. It was one time!’

John: ‘One time!’

[All laugh]

John: So how did you do the door thing? I mean our actors are pretty fearless, did you just tell Gina to stand up against the door and blow up some squibs or what?

Marc: Well I said you know we’re gonna have squibs and we can do it with the stunt and then put you in. And she goes ‘well if they’re not gonna be that close I’d like to do it.’ You know, and I just checked with everybody saying, ‘is this cool, is this safe?’ and they said yeah so she went for it.

John: Where’s firearms? He’s off the set. Don’t worry about that it’s fine, she agreed to it.

Chris: Here’s another example, in typical con movies you show- kinda explain what the con is. And we really- I mean we talk a little bit about- in this one we kinda drop the audience in.

Albert: In the movie con?

Chris: Yeah. You know they steal the movie, you don’t know exactly how it’s gonna pay off.

Albert: Right, you don’t know what the goal is here, but part of the idea is kind of you’re having so much fun on the set, and you also, as we saw in the previous scene, Sophie is sort of outside of the con. She’s indulging her own personal weakness really - her desire to make a move. So she’s as much interested in making a movie as she is in pulling off the con. But then as it progresses and you figure out where this is headed, you figure out the team is trying to have Irena pull the kid into the movie.

John: It’s like the difference between an open mystery and a closed mystery. The old Columbo’s a closed mystery you know who did it and it’s just a matter of chasing them down. This is a closed episode. You’re kinda figuring it out as the bad guys would be figuring it out. And we make the choice depending on what works in each episode. Sometimes we’ll try it one way and we’ll flip it in the script in another. Because sometimes you want the audience to know exactly what’s going to happen because it’s about to get horribly complicated and you want to make sure-

Chris: This one’s pretty simple once you solve what’s going on.

John: End of day it’s to get the kid to the set. It’s not rocket science.

Albert: Exactly, right.

John: Where are we? We’re at Long Beach.

Marc: Yeah we’re in San Pedro.

John: We’re in chilly San Pedro, make sure you get the stocking caps because it’s frigid down there.

Albert: Yeah, we spent quite a bit of time at this warehouse.

Marc: Yes we did.

John: Well we shot two episodes in a row here.

Albert: Right, and then we shot Juror.

John: Yeah, the Juror Job is in the warehouse across the street, right?

Albert: Mm-hmm.

John: And this blow by the way, at the end of this episode was magnificent. It was so big. I was actually in the parking lot because they wouldn’t let us down because it was so big they closed it off.

Marc: Oh yeah?

John: I actually felt it in my car.

Marc: Yeah the heat. I couldn’t believe the heat. And you know, we’ll talk about it later, we even had our actor out in front.

Chris: This- this-

Marc: This is one of my favorite sequences because I was able to get enough coverage to really not cheat it and really feel what Parker was feeling.

Albert: I have to say when I saw that set in real life, it was so grim. The art department did such an amazing job. You walked in and got a wave of emotion.

John: Well they got photos of a Romanian orphanage, did you know that? They went online and got photos of a Romanian orphanage and recreated it on the set.

Chris: But it’s- so what was your approach here, Mark? In terms of making- cause we were having so much fun in this episode, so making sure this landed.

Marc: Yeah I just wanted- I didn’t want to make it too scary, but I just wanted to be in her shoes and use a lot of moving POV so we get the feeling. And just keep it quiet so we could really be with Parker in there.

John: Yeah.

Chris: And the lighting and the color really adds a lot of-

Marc: Yeah we just kept- most of this stuff in this episode, we graded it blue so it’s cold- so it really feels cold.

John: Well in one of the other commentaries, Dean talks about the fact that each episode is sort of color corrected on it’s own theme. And this very much feels like a European orphanage.

Marc: And even you know, our costume designer kept all the kids in gray, drab colors.

John: I suggested drugging them so they’d be more lethargic, but all of a sudden I’m the bad guy for drugging the kids and I wasn’t allowed on the set again.

[All laugh]

Albert: And we ended up dealing- about how many kids did we have again? Like 20?

Marc: 20. 20 kids.

Albert: That’s a lot.

Marc: I started with 8 but Dean said ‘you can’t have an orphanage with just 8 kids’. Okay.

John: That’s like a- a tee ball team.

Albert: That’s one of the great things about working with Dean. It’s like you sit there and think, most producers will come back to you and say ‘let’s make it a little more self contained, let’s make it a little more manageable, use less kids.’ Dean is always like ‘No, let’s blow it up; do a bigger explosion; let’s add more kids.’

John: That’s the great thing about having you know, the studio be effectively your creative partner, is that end of day, he’s going to put the quality of the show ahead of- if it’s a tie between fiduciary concerns and quality of show, quality of show is going to win. Which is not necessarily the situation a lot of other times.

Marc: Yeah and he knows where to spend it on. Which is great.

John: Yeah. Explosions are surprisingly cheap actually. They’re not that pricey. Orphans on the other hand, incredibly expensive. We wound up just going to a supermarket and just grabbing a lot of kids from the parking lot, and returning them at the end of the day before it hit the news.

[Laughter]

Marc: It’s amazing what a bag of gummy bears can do.

John: Yeah, you wanna be in a movie, here’s a bag of gummy bears, and boom. Yeah you know it’s four hours of a day, what are they doing? They’re not doing anything else. And this is also- storing the guns in hospitals and orphanages that’s true, based on a real thing that happened in the first war, during the air war.

Albert: That’s true. This is probably my favorite scene.

Chris: I think that’s something we made up, that turned out to be true.

John: No, no we knew that. We researched that. Albert was a journalist man, he brought the game on this one.

Chris: I feel like we…

Albert: This was probably my favorite scene this episode, it’s such- it was such a delicate dynamic between the two of them, and I remember talking to Beth before the scene saying that I was actually more nervous about this scene than about the explosion which we did earlier in the day, and she was the same. But the two of them together were just amazing.

John: Look at how just delicate she is there, how unraveled she is - how much she’s unraveling there.

Albert: And you never see that from Parker.

John: That kind of dead smile she does, it’s really just the performance- for her it’s the performance of the show, and really the entire season.

Chris: We watched this daily over and over again. We were working on other things and we were all gathered around it.

John: Oh yeah, we had this in the writers room and we must’ve watched it 10 times. Yup. And remember, we’re watching dailies on like a three inch screen on a computer, because we have digital dailies. We’re watching it uncut, only one direction, and we couldn’t stop watching it, it was really fantastic.

Albert: And this was late, this was late in the day.

John: Yeah, well it’s at night guys and you’re outside, duh. [Laughs]

Marc: It was a lot of work, yeah. It was tricky because there was so much noise going on, there were like party boats, and music, and the two of them really hung in there. And Dave did such a good job lighting it, I mean he-

Chris: There were party boats? Like during this incredibly emotional scene there was like ‘Whooo!!!’

John and Marc: Yeah!

John: Behind them, in one of the mixes you can hear [sings].

Albert: Yeah there was some booze cruise going by at one point.

John: That’s one of the things that makes a director really just wanna get a stinger missile and just clear the set.

Marc: Yeah.

John: Remember that chopper? When we shot the pilot? That chopper that just hovered over us that entire outside sequence.

Albert: Oh, in Chicago?

John: In Chicago we had a chopper that just hovered over us for 45 minutes. And it would go away, and we would call action, and it would come back and just circle back over us.

Albert: Was it a traffic copter or-?

John: Yeah. Oh she’s great. Look at her just dissolve when he says that, oh that’s a lovely bit of work. And then she shuts down again. Sorry, I know we have this rule where we’re not supposed to just watch the show, but damn she’s great. And he’s great too, he really grounds it there, you really find there’s a depth to him there and it’s not just a guy with a crush. You know, he’s really trying to help her there.

Chris: And we ride the line between the being flirtatious and brother/sister. There’s always a protection feeling.

John: Well it’s a distinct contrast in that, Nate and Sophie came into this with a sexual component in play. But they had not developed the emotional component, and so it goes wrong on them during the course of the season. Where the entire point was Hardison and Parker come into it from a totally business worker, coworker, and because they have to learn to trust during the course of the season, that’s how their relationship evolves.

Chris: They’re like step-siblings. [Laughs] Could go either way.

John: Step-siblings with a little bit of heat. They’re like Princess Leia and Luke.

Albert: Step-siblings with potential.

[All laugh]

John: Oh man, that’s a really horrible thing. This is great scene that should be incredibly dull, and instead is incredibly interesting

Chris: It’s really dramatically done, with the roundy round.

Marc: Yeah, we did a 360 on this.

John: And again, steadicam or track?

Marc: No, this was track.

Albert: Oh you used the circular track on this, right?

Marc: We used the circular track on this. Cause I think the actors when they first walked into it, they just saw chairs facing each other and were like ‘What? How?’-

Chris: It plays great. You have the equipment-

Marc: I said, trust me the movements gonna make it feel different and that sense of movement is gonna not make it look stale.

John: Now from a directors standpoint, you know how this is gonna cut together. So how do you decide what movement you wanted, how much coverage did you get on this?

Albert: Did you have two cameras going?

Marc: At one time we had two cameras, but they were getting in the way of each other. We had two dollies on the track and then we pulled one. Just because the one- A camera would always have to avoid the B. So you really gotta pay attention, make sure you have a good script supervisor to make sure you’re really nailing every line on camera. Getting two different sizes on everybody, and trying to keep the eyelines right.

John: Yeah. So you- did you wind up doing circular a couple times and then picking up your singles afterwards?

Marc: Yeah.

John: And then just letting Gary hunt, let Gary search for it?

Marc: Exactly. And after, Gary got a feel for the dialogue, he knew when to come off and pick to focus on the other actors.

John: Cause you pull focus a couple times too. And that’s something people don’t know, it’s that the camera operator has to know the script pretty much- better than anybody.

Marc: And god bless, Troy can just pull focus so well, he just nailed so many things.

John: Yeah, there’s a lot of ways that scene should’ve just laid there but instead it’s really dramatic and moving.

Albert: The other challenge we had in this episode was all the different languages we were playing with. We were playing with a set in Serbia, and we had Russians. We had Czechans.

Chris: Russian is sort of the default.

John: Language of crime?

Albert: Bad guys, yeah. We could’ve done that but you know someone out there would’ve complained that we weren’t being truthful.

John: Yeah, no, we got everybody. And the thing is a lot of people don’t know that there’s no central depository for language in film. We have to hunt up people every time and a lot of time-

Marc: Get translations.

John: A lot of actors pretend to be native speakers, but turn out not to be native speakers.

Marc: Well Kathleen speaks fluent Russian so that was helpful. So did David.

John: So did David. So that was great, we really got actors who knew how to speak the language.

Marc: And this is sorta different from Sophie’s, Sophie’s I wanted to be sorta inside the set during her chase, make it feel like it was part of a low budget movie. This we just stepped back and got behind the crew, cause it’s more about the con.

Chris: It’s more about the con. And we’ve sorta seen- we’ve been in the reality of the fake movie already.

Marc: And you’ll see when we track across, we’ll track behind the crew.

Chris: It’s a nice choice.

John: Well, when you’ve been doing it for 20 years.

Albert: The whole idea was that, you know, Irena’s death was supposed to be a counter balance to Sophie’s death. Which Sophie pulls it off nuanced and graceful, and she’s totally over the top and horrible.

[Laughter]

Chris: I love the helmet. Love the helmet.

Marc: Yeah, it was one of my hallmark requests. I had to have the clawed helmet.

John: We got a good 10, 17, 20 minutes of Howl Force, it needs- we really just need like 60 more.

Chris: Now is this- did we have to get a puppeteer?

John: Yes. we needed a puppeteer.

Marc: Yeah this was Pat [Bantor??], our stunt coordinator. We just show him, we don’t even have to hide him.

[Laughter]

Marc: Yeah it’s just like sock puppets and a hat.

John: Because if you have a guy with a sock puppet with a claw on it, that is free.

Chris: What vein did he get? Did he get the carotid artery? What vein did he get?

John: He got the carotid artery. If you have a wolf claw on a stick, that is a union gig, that is a puppeteer, that is an ungodly amount of money.

Albert: One of my favorite moments was when the prop people came over to you with a basket full of claws on sticks. ‘Which is the one we’re going to use here?’

[All laugh]

Marc: Yeah.

Albert: Let’s go with the long claws.

Chris: Takes you back- makes you think back to your days as a journalist, huh?. What a long strange ride it’s been that I’m looking at a basket full of claws.

Albert: Surprisingly I’ve been in news meetings that were very similar.

[Laughter]

John: This is also- I remember when this happened in the writers room cause we were trying to figure out how to end the goddamn show. We realized the trick was to basically end our regular episode in Act 4. And let Act 5 essentially be a free standing act rather than trying to combine the two. Cause remember we came in and took the card off and boom, just that one act all laid out. And then just backtracked for what we needed to set up.

Marc: I thought the woman who played the mom, Stacey Moseley, did a great job. And my buddy from college, David Castellani.

John: Oh, is that the dad? The dad that got his ass kicked?

Marc: The dad that got his ass kicked, yeah.

John: That’s lovely. You can believe that he’d want to go home with her. Everything’s going to be fine. People asked how they get him out of the country. Our guys forged the papers, plainly-

Chris: People have asked that?

John: Yeah, and it’s like do you think the Leverage team does things halfway? No. If they steal an orphan for you, you get all the providence. You get all the documents and yeah. They’re not gonna make you go buy a passport on the black market. That’s half service. And there’s them pretending to be cold in 98 degree weather.

Marc: Exactly.

Chris: Oh yeah, that’s right.

John: And yeah this is where we basically show Parker going off the reservation. And again this is one of the ones that should be seen in the second half of the show, maybe even right after Bank Shot, where you see that they’re gonna start going the extra mile for each other.

Chris: Yeah.

John: And then oh yeah, the choreography of figuring out how she got to the orphanage ahead of them and how far away it was and…

Chris: Yeah it was intricate, it was tricky

John: And that’s why the act break helps. The great thing about an act break in television structure is, it’s like the gutter in a comic book page. The audience- the brain automatically fills in details. That space, by the way, between panels is called a gutter.

Chris: Thank you, thank you very much, I appreciate that. You learn a lot from these commentaries

John: [Unintelligible] guide to understanding comics by the way, it’s a great book.

Chris: It’s the gutter; I didn’t know that. The jump, by the way, from the world of journalism, is the continued page.

John: Really? I didn’t know that.

Albert: Yeah when it says see page A18, that’s the jump.

John: So do you write around the jump?

Chris: You don’t pay any attention to where the jump is.

Albert: No [laughs]. You do pay attention to the fold, on broad sheets, whether it’s above or below the fold.

John: Oh my favorite bit. Bad translation is always amusing.

Chris: It’s always fun.

Marc: Looking in a dictionary,

John: ‘Make your tomato shiny’ and then just going out ‘okay let’s go!’ she plainly has no plan here. Parker is running utterly on instinct which is something she doesn’t do and it’s great to see her out of control. Completely working on emotion.

Chris: ‘Sadden you.’

John: ‘Men will sadden you’ yeah. There you go, ‘c’mon kids, let’s go’. The kids were great by the way, didn’t have a lame kid. One kid was kinda...

Marc: Yeah. One kid was a little problematic, but otherwise.

John: Nothing like firing a five year old.

Chris: This one you probably don’t want them to be too smiley, I’m guessing.

John: Well we told them, actually, that their parents had really died, and that really sold it.

[Laughter]

Chris: Here’s our fight.

John: ‘Oh shiny tomato’. And then there was the whole ‘we can’t do the fight scene in front of the kids’ so we had to move the fight scene outside, yeah. Beth worked hard for this, she did a great job.

Chris: She’s great.

John: That’s- again the actors really love doing this stuff. Because you know what you do in a lot of other TV shows? You carry a briefcase and talk about how the client isn’t guilty as you walk from one house to the other.

Marc: Right

John: And then the star goes and has a good scene.

Chris: And Albert great payoff to the wounding with the fork.

Albert: Yeah, the way she pushes into his shoulder.

John: Yeah a lot of people miss that, that’s actually how she gets the upper hand, is she pushes into the wound from earlier in the show.

Albert: Yeah.

John: Bang! She’s using her knees, using all the hard parts of her body. That’s actually an Israeli fighting style. ‘Okay!’ and then she comes back in and everything’s great.

Marc: ‘Let’s go! C’mon!’

Chris: Here we go, saving an orphanage.

John: No that’s actually the- god what’s it- is it Sabra? What’s the Israeli fighting style?

Chris: Krav Maga?

John: No, it’s a slightly different style, it’s a commando style. It uses all the unbreakable parts of the body that Charlie gave her. Cause that’s what she would use, she would use strike points rather than brute strength. Again, thorough- oh and what would you do with a staircase full of orphans, as the song goes.

Marc and Chris: Yeah.

Marc: We- we cast, as those three thugs, stunt guys, because later on they’re going to be quite close to an explosion. And I thought they did a pretty good job, they made it work.

John: They were appropriately thuggish. They’re men who live by violence, and hence they’re comfortable with it.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

John: I love how- he doesn’t mention he got his ass kicked by a girl there, by the way.

Albert: The internal choreography of this was interesting too because it was one thing to write it in the script, and then you get to the location and you had to readjust it all to make use of the existing architecture there.

John: Yeah, that was you and I in that trailer outside the embassy, once we’d been to the location going ‘okay there’s no second level, there’s no staircases’, yeah.

Albert: Yeah. And then we just adjusted as it works.

Marc: Here we don’t even have to see Eliot kick somebody’s ass, you just know.

John: Yeah you just know he’s kicked an enormous number of orphan stealing, gun running asses. I wanted the door to come off the hinges but you wouldn’t do that for me. That was very selfish of you, just saying. You were too busy blowing up the place to really focus on the smaller details.

Marc: Yeah, exactly.

John: This bus is great, by the way.

Chris: Yeah, really made great use of this bus.

John: There’s the effects moment. And, by the way, she acts the hell out of that.

Chris and Marc: She does.

Chris: She reacts almost as if she’s been hit.

John: And it’s a lovely- I love the little ‘screw you’ read from Sophie, that’s very nice. With the X’s, it’s all set up.

Albert: And I don’t know if I ever noticed that the reason she throws herself against the opening is to protect the kids.

Chris and Marc: Yeah.

John: Yeah it’s one of the little, again, details of your creation. You build a character and even if you don’t consciously register it-

Marc: And you just get the little look from Nate in the rearview.

John: Boom, and that’s kind of a badass move there as Hardison walked in- walked by. That’s nice.

Albert: This thing- we were, what 100, 125 feet from this and the heatwave was unbelievable

Chris: Was it really?

Albert: Oh, it was just-

John: this is the second time we’ve set off a major explosion in the most important port in America with little or no permission.

Chris: Now what’s- this is cork? A lot of that’s-

Marc: Yeah, it’s a lot of cork,.

Albert: The debris was cork, right. But it was a gas explosion,

John and Marc: Yeah.

Marc: But we were initially gonna blow door- fake garage doors, but we just avoided them and just had the explosions go off. And here we make the villain suffer.

John: It’s like somebody does our gloat for us there. Cause usually we have a gloat moment, and it’s really the bad guy- and then we get the money come- by the way, how did you get the money to rain down from the sky? Cause in the pilot, remember when we tried to do that? It took us all day.

Marc: It’s took forever.

Chris: Did you have somebody on a ladder-?

Marc: He was a 12 step ladder, and it was, ‘more to the left, more to the right’.

John: Young directors, don’t have stuff rain out of the sky. It’s not worth the time or effort.

Marc: Yeah

John: You know, it’s one shot. Yes, this is how we explain-

Chris: That bus is perfect.

Marc: And notice that we didn’t have children so we just put curtains in the bus so you didn’t have to see them. The first line they say when they get there ‘they’re all asleep’.

Chris: Right.

John: As one would be after escaping from an orphanage and seeing an explosion, right?

[All laugh]

Chris: Sure.

John: You’d collapse in exhaustion from relief.

Chris: Strangers take you away from your orphanage, you’re going to sleep.

John: [laughs] Really? You’re going to sleep, you’re gonna take a nap. Cause you don’t know what’s coming up the next day.

Chris: Oh it works, it works.

John: It’s fine!

Albert: This was the second unit directed by Jonathan Frakes.

John: Jonathan Frakes, who was doing the next episode, was nice enough to pick this up. And that’s basically the shoe string budget that a lot of these movies are made on by the way. It is ATM based filmmaking.

Marc: This is a nice funny moment.

John: Yeah, she wants the footage. For her reel- I love the idea that Sophie’s got a reel.

Chris: Yeah

[Laughter]

John: Oh and so hurt, so betrayed. I think Tim drops it seriously here. We were saying how it started in one episode and it spread throughout all of them.

Marc: Yeah, right here. Here it is.

John: Yeah and Eliot trying to dodge responsibility. And again a nice- a second nice moment up here. It’s tricky you wanna, you know. We’re making pulp. We’re making pulp television, not even genre pulp. You want to do heart but without walking on it, and this is a great scene.

Marc: This is a really nice scene, she plays it well and so does he.

John: Pissed off is the right choice there, it’s actually kind of nice.

Marc: And how can you be mad at that?

John: Except when she misses her calls and then you want to kill her, but… and then the goofy- and that’s the thing he’s got in his acting vocabulary, he’s able to take the edge off the fact that he’s a very imposing, good looking guy.

Chris: Look and the nice ending shot that goes up, and the Haagen-Dazs.

John: Nice shot with the Haagen-Dazs.

Albert: And that’s the Stork Job.

Chris: And anything else?

John: This is where you get to say something- anything you want to say? Oh and ALbert! You- did you have a family member in this episode?

Albert: My daughter was one of the orphans, she was in the red overalls if you wanna go back and check.

John: And by the way we kept saying should we have a Korean orphan,

Albert: There are actually a very large number of Asian orphans in Serbia, they were- we didn’t get into the facts behind it, but it’s factually accurate.

Marc and Chris: Factually accurate.

John: Nothing like using your own daughter to further your career, nicely done. [Laughs]

[arrghigiveup]

I love how we've been getting all these comments on the "greatest prank Fleury's ever played" and they're somehow always different:

When Tom Kuhnhackl was a rookie during the 2015-16 season, he noticed Fleury leave the Penguins' practice facility more quickly than normal but didn't really think too much of it.

His mistake.

Turns out Fleury had swiped Kuhnhackl's car keys, attached a few liquid chalk markers to his vehicle and parked it in front of where the autograph seekers gather and wait for players to leave the parking lot.

"Every single fan there signed my car," Kuhnhackl said, shaking his head. "I couldn't see out of any of the windows."

"Thank God there's a GetGo with a car wash down the road. It only took me a minute to get there, but I remember driving with my head out the window, trying to figure out where I'm going."

The legacy Fleury left in Pittsburgh involves equal parts pranks and good deeds done.

Bryan Rust remembers the time Fleury hung his clothes from the rafters at PPG Paints Arena, while former backup Jeff Zatkoff loves to tell the story of the time Fleury changed the labels on the hairspray and deodorant cans.

Bullano said Fleury once got Evgeni Malkin good when, after Malkin bought a new sports car, Fleury attached pop cans in hard-to-see places so it sounded like there was something seriously wrong.

"He's one of the funniest guys I've ever met," Kuhnhackl said. "A great character guy."

[source]

[img source]

(more under the cut)

During the AMA, Schultz was asked by a fan (Reddit User McCowan-) if he was part of a prank war within the team and what was the best prank that happened to him.

Schultz responded with a wonderful story about being pranked by Fleury shortly after being traded to the Penguins.

"I'm not a part of any prank war. I try to stay away from that stuff so it doesn't happen to me. The best prank that happened to me was right when I got here, my first or second practice. I go out for practice and all my street clothes are hanging up in the rafters thanks to Flower. I would say that was a good one."

[source]

[img source]

In addition to a decorated résumé—he has won more Stanley Cups (three) than the rest of Vegas’s roster combined (zero), and his 115 playoff games outpace any teammate by 35—this joie de vivre made Fleury perfectly suited for an expansion franchise. If the Golden Knights were indeed destined for a rocky maiden voyage, might as well have someone cracking jokes in the galley. (Or performing Fleury’s favorite prank by ducking under table cloths and dumping pasta sauce onto sneakers; rumored victims of the daring “shoe check” include NBC Sports announcer Pierre McGuire in a Philadelphia steak house and actor David Spade over dinner at Penguins owner Ron Burkle’s Beverly Hills mansion.)

[...]

Fleury is again sprawling, pokechecking and cart-wheeling as much as ever. His goals against average (1.77) and save percentage (.942) both rank second league-wide. “He’s a great leader,” Marchessault says. “It’s been 14 years, and he acts like he’s here [in the NHL] for two months.” Pranks were shelved while he healed, but Fleury is coming around there too. Returning to his hotel room during a recent road trip, Marchessault discovered water leaking onto the bathroom floor. Someone had sneaked inside and unscrewed the toilet pipes.

[source]

Crosby on his favorite Fleury prank: "He got stink bombs... They reek. He got at least 4-5 guys' hotel rooms with those. He found a way to pretty much evacuate a floor of the hotel with those stink bombs. He had so many. He kept it loose. There was something like that every day."

[source]

IAN COLE: “We were in L.A. last year. A large group of us went to dinner, and maybe six of us started to walk home, six of us wanted to go somewhere else. [Fleury] was in the group of six that walked home, and they were walkig by a skating rink, an outdoor skating rink. He went and rented some skates, kind of stiff-legged around the ice. Then went really fast, full-speed over the wall, tumbled over the wall and dropped like three feet to the ground, just to see what the security guards would do. They all come flying over, diving over the boards to make sure he’s OK. The other five guys are standing there just cracking up. Got a video of it, showed the boys. It was one of the funnier things I’ve seen, the security guards’ reactions. These high-school kids freaking out thinking somebody killed themselves on their outdoor rink in Santa Monica. It was pretty funny. He’s a character.”

[source]

[vid source]

Plenty of other prankster personalities have preceded Fleury. His first NHL roommate was current Montreal GM Marc Bergevin, a luminary in the field of hijinx. But few possess greater guile or wider diversity than Fleury. Over the years, his greatest practical jokes include:

Filling towels with shaving cream.

Nailing shoes to locker stalls.

Tying Coke cans to the bottom of Penguins center Evgeni Malkin’s new Porsche.

Stuffing Pittsburgh strength coach Mike Kadar’s car with packing peanuts.

Drenching teammates’ clothes in the shower and sticking them in the freezer.

Taping the spray button on a deodorant can, then lobbing that can into an occupied bathroom stall like a grenade. “Not ideal when you’re taking a No. 2,” says Devils assistant coach Alain Nasreddine, who played in Pittsburgh for bits of three seasons.

Hanging new players’ clothes from arena rafters. “If you know the rink security guys,” former Penguins forward Eric Fehr says, “you can accomplish quite a bit.”

[source]

Just. I love him so much.

Bonus #1: 

Ok...can’t make this up.  15 minutes before he takes the ice a very emotional game, Marc-Andre just snuck up behind me and SMACKED me in the back of the head!!!!   Different jersey...same man (...jerk.) -DP

[source]

Bonus #2:

Fleury on if he will prank his old teammates: "I had one in Vegas. I laughed. I can’t say it though, it’s not appropriate. Nothing so far. They should be out of their locker room now right? We’ll see." -SK

[source]

Bonus #3: Not a prank, but a great story all the same

I only spoke with Marc Andre Fleury three times during his tenure with the Penguins. Spending most of my time on the 7th floor while he rarely left the 1st didn’t afford me many chances beyond those few. But we had a funny connection that I can now share with you.

Starting in my first season anytime I introduced the team to the ice, Marc would without fail run down the runway. It took me half a season to realize he was timing his skate hitting the ice with when I said “Penguins”. To be certain, I tested him over two games. I varied my delivery. He changed his pace. Without fail, he nailed it each time.

Once I was certain, I no longer tested. In fact I took great pains to make sure we timed it without him having to kill himself. If we missed for some reason and he had a poor start I would blame myself.

By my rough estimate of four times a game over nine seasons, Marc Andre Fleury and I were in sync a little shy of 900 times.

He and I never once spoke of it. I will miss it greatly.

~Ryan Mill, Penguins public address announcer

[Source: 1, 2 and you can see a video of it happening here]

[mythological-survivor-no-mikoto]

Episode 3 - so sado is HELL ISLAND - Adam

After Sam was sent home a high intensity challenge for reward and immunity was posted. It involved creating Shinsen, by prepping ingredients in individual messages. Hiroku was immediately off to a strong start, gaining a lead over Awashima. This lead continued to grow over night and by morning it was clear there was very little chance of Awashima catching up. Despite Rachael’s best attempts to coordinate and motivate Awashima, it was too late. Hiroku won immunity and reward with triple the score over Awashima. Jay and Josh were initially targeted due to their challenge performance. The majority seemed to be settling on Jay, however there was some pushback from Vi and Marc, who wanted to use Jay as a number. However as the day progressed it became clear that there was no saving Jay, and he was voted out unanimously.

Olivia went on an expedition to the lagoon on Honshu, completed the challenge requiring her to burn paper 

https://youtu.be/oT1gnCfzuDI

She found the rehidden Izanagi Sword, giving her double worshippers the next time she worshipped. 

“Haha sick. Well I know who I’ll be giving that to! (Me). My plan is every other week like boost mine and then take Katie’s down. In the long run it just may work if I keep it up!”

“Fastest way for an alliance to form? Fisting jokes”

“Here we are ladies! I feel pretty good with my position in this game. I really like Rodrigo, yes like my favorite. Jay is cool too cuz he’s a nerd. OH RACHEL my future nurse, looooove her. We talked a lot about nursing school and the career in general. Vi isn’t bad, we just don’t talk much. The first vote off was uhhh Lauren. She was AFK. The vote wasn’t unanimous tho and Adam got some so that was messsssy. I like Adam. He bounced back. Regans annoying but she’s my friend. Cori on the other tribe I did my challenge against and we had a phenomenal rapport omg I wanna work with her. OH AND EXPEDITIONS. Shikoku wasn’t iconic. Main land Japan got me 14 tickets so my ass is gonna feel it’s oats and go on a million expeditions soon lol. BUT we won the challenge and here to slay!!!”

After being exiled mid challenge:  “So sado is the HELL ISLAND”

“The ladies and nikias dominating this challenge? We love to see it”

“I mean it’s just like me and this sweet guy from halfway around the world are playing virtual hot potato with nonsense words like fowl and tray and we’re on this adventure and we’re in a cave and our tribe mates are all asleep next to us and we’re all that stands between us and the evil other tribe from coming into our territory and snatching another one of us up and we’re just two little anxious nerds who get along swell saying random incantations back and forth and it’s raining and I’m so fucking tired does this make sense I’m doing my best to keep our tribe afloat”

“I ain’t even mad. Olivia killed it. Honestly her biggest supporter is a person on the opposing team... 242 with no mistakes what a queen. Rachael is also a queen. Highest scorer for our tribe with 114, 3 mistakes. Fucking jay with his two tries but both mistakes. I literally was sick all day and still did better than half the tribe wth. Adam got a 12 hour penalty so he’s excused and he didn’t mess up.  But josh got 13 with 11 mistakes. Screeching. How do you mess up that badly. It’s just copy paste. I’m so tired I’m not even making any more sense. Good night y’all ima go try to save jay’s ass but idk if I want to”

“we love working for 6 hours without our phone all day and still being responsible for 34% of the work in this challenge on a 9 person tribe. we also love when someone does only 2 points worth...and screws up both of them. maybe this could be best for our tribe long term to purge the people that are not contributing? Idk”

On an expedition, Olivia crushed some fruit and found the idol:

“AHHHHHHHHHHH HOLY FUCK BUCKETS. OH MY FUCKING GOD. THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER

So I have 

20% advantage the next challenge

A sword advantage I just used

A block against the first vote 

AND THE FUCKING IDOL 

Im fuckin loaded wow”

“Nikias making me cry? More likely than you think. I trust him so so much, he is my PERSON. I will defend him at all costs ⚔️”

https://youtu.be/-S0ldA01GLM

“things have been rly quiet since last time, but it seems like a handful of my tribe really worked together and pulled out the win in the shinsen challenge yay!! Some have not had the opportunity to contribute as much but hopefully they will the first chance they get. I still have my voting coin if I need it, but things are definitely super chill in the hiroku tribe for the time being and I seem to have good ties all over.”

“I’m thankful that this round allowed us to win by such a long shot. I believe that we have such a strong tribe, unfortunately however, we just do not necessarily communicate all that much, or at least that’s what it seems like.

Echoing previous confessionals, I still really adore almost everyone on this tribe. I do not have any issues or concerns with anyone at this moment in time, however my eyes and ears are open  just in case, however, I believe I can hopefully stay connected with several individuals in this tribe.

I’m not the best when it comes to challenge performance and I’m the first one that would always say that to myself. That’s why I play such a big social game, because I feel like that although I don’t have any challenge prowess, people will catch on to what my next best thing is. 

It would not surprise me If there was an undercover alliance at the moment just based on certain conversations I’ve had but perhaps that is just a thought and not merely reality. I hope that this upcoming round allows us to win yet another competition and continue to do our best like we always do.”

“HERE WE GO LADIES. Well that challenge sucked. Like, wasn’t fun at all. I personally SLAYED it, with Rachael and Regan. Vi did okay too but like we legit never talk. The people who did the least were Jay and Katie. I’ve had a good connection with Jay since the beginning but he has been MIA. I think he kinda gave up cuz he’s not even fighting at all. Someone said he’s in another game and SIS, me too. But still made time and did what I could. That leaves Katie who I want to go, but it’s not getting traction so I gotta go with the Jay vote unfortunately. RIP BBY GURL. Otherwise I’m still loving Rodrigo and Josh. My ideal 5 some is Me, Regan, Rachael, Josh, Rodrigo. But idk if I can get that to happen.”

“this vote seems too simple it is scaring me. I feel like my social game is lacking. It could easily be better but so is jays like what if he has an idol idk”

“probably Jay going home unanimously tonight unless some funny business happens. He’s lost any kind of fight he had in this game. If everything I know is correct it’ll be 8-1 jay with a vote on josh but who knows.”

“This round went pretty good, i think that kind of tribe wins solidifies a type of loyalty because everyone fight for each other so we can all have a nice week-end with out having to vote anyone out of the game. I think every one loves this tribe the way it is and i kind of wanna push that even more, remain loyal to a tribe is still an option that i have never made before but it is still an option and i wouldn't wanna take away any of my options until it's time to decide. I think right now i am in a good spot, i think if we go to tribal Odd or Zach would be the target which means i am in a good spot. Voting out Sam was a big deal for me because Odd is more beneficial for my game i believe. He is good at challenges and also he doesn't talk to a lot of people so it's something that i can use to my advantage in the future. This is my favorite tribe ever and i wanna keep enjoy this tribe so i would pray to win another immunity challenge”

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior’s Top 25 of 2019

This was such a good year for movies. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The amount of good or great movies and the amount of variety among the better movies made it hard to know where to cut off my annual top 25 and to which movies to give “Honorable Mentions” instead. As has always been the case, I make an effort to see the better movies two or sometimes even three times before deciding where they place, and that was the case with most of the movies below.

There have been quite a few years where I haven’t rewarded a single movie a 10 out of 10, and this year, there are FOUR! Even so, 2019 will forever be known as the year I started to appreciate and even love the music of Elton John and George Michael, although only one of those movies made my list.  Just a reminder that this is a list of my favorite movies of the year and it’s based solely on my own opinion. If you don’t like one of the movies on my list that’s fine – it’s your prerogative – but if there’s something you may have missed and you check it out based on inclusion here and you like it, then please let me know!

Also, if you just want to peruse everything that I wrote this year, you can find all of it at my Weekend Warrior Blog.

25. Wild Rose (NEON)

I’d be remiss if I ignored this wonderful film directed by Tom Harper that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2018 but finally was released this year. It stars Jessie Buckley as a Glaswegian country singer, a single mother freshly released from prison who just can’t get her act together, even though she is a terrific singer with a real passion for country music.  Buckley is such a revelation in the role, and I just loved the songs written for the movie, and I’m not even remotely a fan of country music. (So I guess that’s a third type of music I began to appreciate this year.)

24. Fighting with my Family (U.A. Releasing)

Another terrific and nearly forgotten film this year was this wrestling biopic about WWE superstar Paige, as played by Florence Pugh (she’s gotta be this year’s actor of the year, right?). Written and directed by Stephen Merchant and co-produced by Dwayne Johnson, Paige’s story really is pretty fantastic, as you follow her trying to make her way in the WWE where she’s nothing like the other women wrestlers. The movie was warm and funny and not at all what you’d expect from a WWE Films movie, but it’s definitely the studio’s finest work to date.

MY REVIEW

23. Plus One (RLJE Films)

One of the nicer surprises out of Tribeca this year was this twist on the rom-com by filmmakers Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer, starring Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine as two best friends who decide to attend all their weddings together to act as wingmen to help each other hook up. It’s a plan that works out well at first but starts to falter once they realize they might have feelings for each other. It’s classic rom-com territory but the movie is hilarious (Erskine is an absolute gem!) and you’re on board even when it goes to somewhat predicable places. (Some of the wedding speeches given by Jon Bass, Beck Bennett are particularly funny.) This is a movie that I’m bummed I haven’t had a chance to see a second or third time, as I’m sure it might be higher up on my year end list if I had.

22. Spider-Man: Far from Home (Sony)

You can’t argue when the fans are right but when Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios came on board to produce Spider-Man: Homecoming, it actually was pretty good and you had to have confidence they could make a sequel just as good or better. There was a lot to love about this one including the decision to take Spider-Man out of New York, which makes sense when you realize all the space-faring he’d been doing in Infinity War and Endgame. Then there was Jake Gyllenhaal as “Mysterio,” a fun and twisty take on the classic Spider-Man villain that also allowed director Jon Watts to play with some of the ideas introduced in Avengers: Endgame, while also giving Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury more to do than he has in many movies. I can’t wait to see what Tom Holland’s Spider-Man gets up to next!

MY REVIEW

21. One Cut of the Dead (Shudder)

The Japanese META zombie movie that’s been winding its way through the genre festival circuit for most of the past year, it’s an amazing bit of mind-fuckery where you think it’s merely about a zombie attack on a low budget movie but as we learn after the first 30 minutes, there’s a lot more going on than what seems… and that’s about all I can say, because it’s the kind of movie that’s more amazing when you go in not knowing what’s happening. And yet, you probably should know that there’s a lot more going on since the first 30 minutes on their own aren’t very good.

20. The Irishman (Netflix)

Don’t get me wrong. I really liked and appreciated Martin Scorsese’s reunion with De Niro and Pesci, as well as their pairing with Al Pacino to tell the story of the man responsible for the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, but just not as much as other movies. Granted, Scorsese continues to be one of the best filmmakers working today but it did feel like he and De Niro were returning to familiar and popular territory to try to claim back their cinematic throne. I guess it worked, because The Irishman is a great film, and heck, I’d watch it a thousand more times on Netflix if I didn’t have other things to watch.

MY REVIEW

19. Little Women (Sony)

I just wrote about Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Louisa May Alcott last week, and I’m probably more surprised by most about how how much I loved this movie, maybe even more than Lady Bird. Those performances by Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Timothée Chalamet just makes this film so wonderful at times and heartbreaking at others. It’s always been a great story but Gerwig found an original way into it that made it a wonderful follow-up to Lady Bird.

18. Sword of Trust (IFC Films)

I’ve been a Lynn Shelton stan for a number of years now, mostly from Your Sister’s Sister, but I generally like much of her work, whether it’s all improvised like that one and Humpday, or scripted like her pairing with Jay Duplass for Outside In. This one was really special, as it paired her with her Glow star Marc Maron and a trio of really great actors to bounce off of, including Jillian Bell and Michaela Watkins (from the almost equally great Brittany Runs a Marathon), as well as Jon Bass. The interaction and improvisation between these four actors as they deal with a sword from the Civil War with a controversial past makes this one of Shelton’s more entertaining movies, deserving of its placement in my year-end list.

Thoughts from My Column

17. Good Boys (Universal)

You’ll notice that I have quite a few comedies on my Top 25 this year, and that shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone who has read my reviews over the years. I love comedies and I love to laugh, and this high concept comedy about three 6thgraders, one of them played by Jacob Tremblay, just cracked me up so much. No surprise that it’s from the mega-comedy-kings Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who produced this movie from the team of Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who are best known for “The Office” and a number of not-so-great comedy hits like Bad Teacher. Like Booksmart (see below), this one involved a fairly simple all-in-day quest by the three main characters but it led to some absolutely hilarious situations. Totally reminded me of myself when I was their age. Can’t wait to see what Brady Noon and Keith L. Williams get up to next as they’re amazing.

16. Late Night (Amazon)

While Mindy Kaling’s feature film might have come out of the whole SJW virtue signaling movements that surfaced post-Trump, her movie loosely, based on her own experiences working on the staff at a late night show, was a beautifully insightful look into the business. It starred Emma Thompson as veteran late night host Katherine Newbury, who is forced into diversifying her writing crew by hiring the less-than-experienced Molly (Kaling’s character). Over the next few months, Molly tries to make her way through the ins and outs of writing for late night, dealing with sexism and even some racism, even from Newbury.  Unlike the recent Bombshell, this is a comedy and both Kaling and Thompson were both terrific, to the point that it was a bummer that Amazon decided not to give this any sort of awards push by sending out screeners with some of their other movies.

MY REVIEW

15. Peterloo (Amazon)

While I’ve been a fan of filmmaker Mike Leigh almost as long as I’ve been writing about movies, I always seem to be in the minority when I’m not as into some of the movies my fellow critics love (like Mr. Turner), but this amazing movie about the political climate of England in the 16thCentury and the violence spurred on by a peaceful protest is an amazing bit of writing/directing by the British master. This is another movie that I wish got a lot more attention because the writing and cast were so good, and it just seemed to come and go without much fanfare. A real shame.

MY REVIEW

14. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Sony)

I probably won’t have too much to add about Tarantino’s movie beyond my earlier review, but this is a movie that I liked quite a bit the first time and even more the second time I saw it.  It’s just a fun portrait of Hollywood in 1969 through the eyes of a filmmaker who was six years old at the time. The performances by Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie drove this film about what it was like trying to make a living as an actor in the climate of the late ‘60s with peace and love… and brutal murder in the form of the Manson Family. And yet, Tarantino found a way to give the Sharon Tate story a happy ending. Go figure.

MY REVIEW

13. Pain and Glory (Sony Pictures Classics)

Pedro Amodovar has been a bit hit or miss in recent years, so seeing him reunite with his regulars Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz to write his best (and possibly most personal?) screenplay to date made Pain and Gloryone of the year’s nice surprises. Despite doing a lot of questionable movies in recent years, Banderas once again proved his worth as an actor, giving a performance as a has-been director that hopefully will get him his very first Oscar nomination.

12. First Love (Go West USA)

Another filmmaker whose work I’ve loved but who has also made some real dogs is Japan’s Takashi Miike. His latest take on the crime genre ended up being one of his best movies in twenty years. It may even be better than Audition, which celebrated its 20thanniversary this year. It’s a simple story of a young Japanese boxer who encounters a young woman who has been sold into sex slavery, but in helping her to escape, they get caught up in a gang war that includes some of the craziest characters to ever appear in a Miike movie. But as the title says, this is a love story more than anything, and that helped Miike prove that he has not gone soft, but still knows what it means to be human.

11. The Two Popes (Netflix)

I just wrote about this dramatic two-hander, written by Anthony McCarten and directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God), last week, after putting it off for far too long. (It’s hard to get inspired to write reviews of movies when you’re not being paid to do so, let me tell you.) It’s an amazing film about the relationship between Popes Benedict and Francis, as played by Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce. While you wonder how McCarten researched a movie between two very private public figures, neither of whom have written about this meeting, this is another great film from Netflix this year that’s proving that the studio is not going away and it’s going to produce quality films as great as the big boys.

10. Avengers: Endgame (Marvel Studios)

It shouldn’t be too big a surprise that a Marvel movie has made my top 10, as there have been others, like last year’s Ant Man and the Wasp, Iron Man, Thor, Guardians of the Galaxy. Oddly, only one of the three Russo Brothers movies made my list – Captain America: The Winter Soldier – but with Avengers: Endgame, they managed to create a culmination of everything that’s come before but also made a Marvel movie that is the most like the Avengers comics I love, even to the point of having various members going off on their own missions. I’ve seen this movie three or four times now, and I still love some of the big moments like Captain America stating, “Avengers Assemble!” (finally) and this more than made up for Infinity War, which was good but not great.

9. Waves (A24)

A rather late addition to my year’s best is the new movie from Trey Edward Schutts, which delivered another amazing performance by Kelvin Harrison, Jr, who was also fantastic as the little-seen drama, Luce. The energy Schutts gives the movie with the use of music is fantastic, but it’s just an interesting character portrait that halfway through, throws you for a major loop before switching gears to follow the characters played by Lucas Hedges and the equally talented Taylor Russell. And then on top of that, you have Sterling K. Brown giving a moving performance as Harrison and Russell’s characters, who just doesn’t know how to deal with what’s going on with his family. There have been some great teen coming-of-age dramas over the years but Waves is one for the ages.

8. Book Smart (UA Releasing)

Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut has been compared both favorably (and sometimes unfavorably) to a female Superbad, but I think a better comparison would be a modern-day Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Like Good Boys, it was a single night movie where two best friends (Beanie Feldstein, Kaitly Dever) decide to spend their last night in high school rebelling against their overly studios nature by going out to a party and have fun. What happens to them and the crazy characters they interact with makes this one of the funniest movies of the year. What was really amazing, besides the entire cast, was that I could watch this movie and see stuff that would have happened in my own high school days (which was more in the Ridgemont High days), and to see that high school just doesn’t change despite the technology and all the different standards and morals that come along.  Wilde is one filmmaker who I can’t wait to see what she does next and same for her entire cast. I’ve been saying since seeing this that I’d love to see Wilde do another movie with the exact same cast, all of them playing different characters, as I think we’ll see that these actors can do anything.

7. Yesterday (Universal)

Here’s a surprise for you all, but again, if you realize how many Danny Boyle movies have been in my top 10 over the years, you’ll know what a big fan I am of the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Teaming him with Richard Curtis for a high concept comedy where the world has forgotten the Beatles’ music and a young busker named Jack (Himesh Patel) who remembers them starts to make a career for himself by claiming the music as his own. I loved the lead, but it was especially his friendship/romance with Lily James’ Ellie Appleton that made me love this movie enough to put it in my top 10.

6. Marriage Story (Netflix)

While I really appreciated Noah Baumbach’s latest movie quite a bit when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival back in September, it was my rewatch on Netflix more recently that really made me appreciate what Baumbach has accomplished after nearly twenty years making movies. Granted, the movie might be seen as a bit of a downer, but you know what? Sometimes, I have to even out all the laughs and humor with something more serious.  Having a friend who went through a (far less litigious) divorce with a small child, I couldn’t help but thinking how much worse it could have been. As much as this was about Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson’s characters and the change in their relationship, it was a good lesson in how ugly things can get when lawyers get involved with Baumbach having a powerful trio in Laura Dern, Ray Liotta and the wonderful Alan Alda in those roles. This created a beautiful bookend to Baumbach’s earlier film The Squid and The Whale, based on his parents’ divorce, but this didn’t seem autobiographical as much as it showed the work of a mature filmmaker who has created his most personal and best work.

5. Knives Out (Lionsgate)

Speaking of dysfunctional family relationships, Rian Johnson’s look at the death of a wealthy mystery author’s (played by Christopher Plummer) and how his greedy family might be responsible, as investigated by Daniel Craig’s “gentleman detective” Benoit Blanc and the author’s maid, played by Ana de Armas. Besides putting a clever a spin on the ensemble whodunnit typified by the work of Agatha Christie and others, the movie was insanely funny thanks to the cast assembled by Johnson, which was literally an all-star team doing some of their funniest work. Really, there wasn’t a weak link in delivering Johnson’s best screenplay to date, and I look forward to seeing if we’ll get another movie in this realm. As with most of the movies in my Top 10, this is a movie I could see repeatedly and get more out of each time.

MY REVIEW

4. Rocketman  (Paramount)

And here it is, the Elton John movie that made me a fan of Elton John’s music after nearly 40 years of mostly shunning it. What director Dexter Fletcher and star Taron Egerton did in telling John’s story though his music, essentially creating an original jukebox musical on screen was the perfect way to frame the music and story. A lot of people compared this to last year’s Bohemian Rhapsody– which I also liked, mind you – but however much work Fletcher did to finish that movie after Bryan Singer’s firing, this was clearly something he had a clear vision of from beginning to end. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen this year three times, and I’ve been going down the Elton John rabbit hole of music ever since.

MY REVIEW

3. Ford v Ferrari (20thCentury Fox)

When I reviewed James Mangold’s Le Mans racing movie, starring Christian Bale and Matt Damon, back in October, I gave it a 9.5/10, and then I saw it again in IMAX and for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I took off half a point. The movie is just about perfect.  This is such a great story and the way the action is framed by the relationship between the former’s Ken Miles and the latter’s Carol Shellby with all the other players in the mix just made the movie one that was extremely watchable. And boy, those racing scenes! I haven’t seen action that exciting in years and that includes some of the best recent action movies, including Baby Driver and some of the “Fast and Furious” movies.

MY REVIEW

2. 1917 (Universal)

This was almost my #1 because it’s such a masterful achievement in all aspects of filmmaking that it also earned a rare 10 out of 10. Granted, I’ve been a Sam Mendes fan for many, many years, and he probably has had a few movies in my top 25 over the years, most notably with his second film, The Road to Perdition, which was actually my #1 movie that year. I’ve generally followed Mendes’ career with interest with only one or two movies just not working for me, but with just eight movies in 20 years, it’s amazing that it took that long for Mendes to be back in the Oscar conversation after winning for American Beauty. Frankly, I think this is unequivocally one of the best movies of the year between the screenplay, co-written with Kristy Wilson-Cairns, and the performances by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, making it a movie that’s a wonder to marvel at how they achieved such a powerful cinematic experience to behold.

MY REVIEW

1b. The Biggest Little Farm  (NEON)

As with every year, I like to pick one documentary as my favorite and best of the year, but instead of deciding where it fares among the narrative features, I just make it a tie for #1. My favorite doc of the year was John Chester’s movie about show he and his wife Molly decided to move out to a farm and try to get it work fiscally despite tons of issues, some they could control, others they couldn’t. While I also liked Apollo 11, and I’m sure that will win the Oscar, the way Chester told this story was done in such a wonderful way that it was far more enjoyable and entertaining than most docs. (And as you know, I do LOVE docs!)

1a. The Farewell (A24)

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed me on Twitter, where Lulu Wang’s China-set dramedy has been my profile picture almost since I first saw it in June – I’ve seen it three more times since then, each then having the same emotional reaction. Based on a story from Wang’s own life, it stars Awkwafina as Billi a poor starving New York artist who travels to China when she learns her Nana (the terrific Chinese veteran actor Shuzhen Zhao) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her family has decided not to tell Nana that she may be dying, but they all return to Mainland China under the guise of a wedding for Billi’s cousin, but she knows the truth and has to skirt around while trying to spend possibly her last time with her beloved Nana. The movie was emotional but also quite amusing and entertaining, really showing what life in China is like in a way that was far more personal and human than last year’s Crazy Rich Asians i.e. that was more fantasy than this movie’s reality.

Some More Thoughts

Honorable Mentions: Motherless Brooklyn, Les Miserables, Honey Boy, Long Shot, Toy Story 4, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (As I said above, it was tough to leave a couple of these out of my top 25.)

Top 12 Docs

Not going to write too much about all of these but this was a pretty fantastic year for docs, and if you have a chance to watch any of the below, I would jump on it, especially since some of them barely got a theatrical release.

1. The Biggest Little Farm

2. Apollo 11

3. The Cave

4. WRESTLE

5. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice

6. Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love

7. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

8. 63 Up

9. Agnès on Varda

10. One Child Nation

11. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy

12. Love, Antosha

I used to do a TERRIBLE 25 as a separate thing, but this year, I’m just going to list six movies, although a few of these I saw so long ago, I barely remember why they sucked so bad.

In fact, Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s REPLICAS was one of the first movies released in 2019 picked up by Entertainment Studios from TIFF the year before. It’s funny how much love Keanu Reeves got this year for John Wick: Chapter Three and other stuff, but everyone seemed to completely forget that he started the year with this stupid high concept sci-fi thriller about a man obsessed with bringing his family back from the dead.

Also, not many people saw Joe Chappelle’s AN ACCEPTABLE LOSS, which opened just a week after Replicas, but it was a political thriller starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Tika Sumpter that was so poorly written and so boring that I felt bad for Sumpter, who was giving her all.

I probably have said as much as much about Tom Hooper’s CATS as I plan to – you can read my review over at The Beat– but it’s also the most recent of this year’s bad movies, so it’s the freshest on my mind on how awful it was. I’m not going to pile on any further.

It’s been a while since I saw Tim Story’s SHAFT sequel/reboot, and as excited I was to see Samuel L. Jackson and Richard Roundtree back in the role, it’s Jessie T. Usher’s presence as John Shaft, Jr, meant to be the main running gag of the action-comedy that made it one of the worst movies of the year.

Another remake that really didn’t need to happen was this Neil Marshall remake of HELLBOY, and sure, maybe I was a bit biased, having loved Guillermo del Toro’s movies, particularly Hellboy: The Golden Army, but this just wasn’t a good movie as hard as it seemed to try. (You can read my review of that here.)

And yet, that wasn’t even the worst movie of the year. No, that would be Rob Zombie’s 3 FROM HELL, a movie so abhorrible that I couldn’t believe what I was watching. I called it the “worst movie of the year” back in September, and that sentiment didn’t change.

Before we wrap things up, here are some of my favorite records of the year. You may have heard of a few of them. Maybe not others? Most of them should be on Spotify.

1. Smiley’s Friends - In the Sixth Sense

2. Kevin So - S.O.U.L.

3. Pixies - Beyond the Eire

4. The Alarm - Sigma

5. Silversun Pickups - Widow’s Weeds

Best concert of the year? Easy one. Dave Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets with my buddy Jonathan Baylis when former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters shows up to perform one of the classic Pink Floyd songs! Possibly one of the best concert moments of the last couple decades!

That’s it for 2019... onto 2020!