#Top of the Line

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Matra-Simca Bagheera X, 1977. Towards the end of its model life the 3-abreast sports car became available as a fully optioned X variant with a twin carburettor 1442cc engine. In a near coincidental reflection of the car's engine capacity 1440 were made with both Simca and Talbot badges before production ended in 1979

[burroestelar]

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My part for the @iz.top.of.the.line.project which I forgot to post over here. It has an alternative audio I made before I knew we had an editor for it, but I still thought it could be fun to share it. You can find the official version here.

Invader Zim © Nickelodeon / Jhonen Vasquez

Artwork © Silvia Torres 2021

[seakicker]

i know that “feral monster who just can’t control themselves or fight their innate feral instincts” is a very common theme throughout monsterfucker discussion—and for very good reason, i love me a monster that finds a human’s softness, weakness, and warmth all too inviting and couldn’t even dream of holding back on their human lover— but something i love just as much is the total opposite. i love the idea of monsters that are too gentle with you despite your pleas for them to go faster or harder or deeper because they’re just so afraid of injuring their pretty little human mate. they’re well aware of how much weaker humans are compared to their own species— they think it’s just adorable how humans don’t come equipped with defensive scales, sharp claws, or pointy fangs and are just made up of so many soft curves and squishy edges— and so they treat you as gently as they possibly can as if you’re made of porcelain. compared to them, you probably are, at least.

i like the idea of a monster lover whose big clawed/scaled/webbed hands literally shake as they hold themselves back from being too rough with you, the tips of their claws or fingers just barely grazing your soft skin before they pull away again and gauge your reaction. are they being too rough? are you in pain? did they scare you? are they moving too quickly? i think a super hesitant, nervous, affectionate monster lover who wants absolutely nothing more than to fuck you silly but is far too conscious of your weakness as a human being to be any quicker than a single thrust per minute is just the best.

[lincolnlogsnfrogs]

the three person spider man pointing meme but it's top of the line so just dib and tak both disguised as tenn and then the actual tenn unconscious on the floor lmao

[emeraldspiral]

So I was thinking a little more about the idea of the Control Brains using the SIR units as sleeper agents like the Clone Army from Star Wars and having them Order 66 all the Invaders when they're no longer of use to them. Then I started thinking about the probable episode order of the unfinished season 2 episodes.

We know Nubs of Doom had to take place before Day of Da Spookies because Minimoose is in it, but DoDS has to take place after 10 Minutes to Doom because Dib mentions knowing the purpose of Zim's PAK in that episode, and DaDS likely took place before Mopiness of Doom because Zim's plan in that episode was to make Dib give up on the paranormal, which he does in MoD, only for Zim to realize he doesn't want that.

In the first season, based on the way everything was scheduled, it seems like BoTP was intended as the mid-season finale and the Halloween Special was supposed to be the season 1 part 2 opener. So based on that I would hazard a guess that the Xmas special was originally intended to be the season 2 part 2 opener while a different episode was to be the mid-season finale. Most likely The Trial, since I think that script was for a half-hour episode, and it's the only script we know of that wasn't just a run-of-the-mill Zim episode. The only other possible candidates I would say are When Pants Ruled and maybe Squishy, Hugger of Worlds, which was being written the day the show was cancelled.

Now, all that made me wonder what the season 2 finale was supposed to be. There are a handful of episodes we know of that were only outlines or basic pitches and never written, but I believe Top of the Line is the only script we know of that allegedly had a completed script that was never released, never adapted into the comics, and has very few details attached. Given that it was to see Tak return for the first time since the season 1 finale, it would make sense if they were saving her for the season 2 finale. But the only thing we know about the plot other than Tak and Skoodge being in it was that it was to revolve around a SIR competition. But what about that concept makes it worthy of being a season finale or the triumphant return of two fan favorite characters? Maybe something more important was going to happen in that episode, and that's why the details have been kept under wraps this whole time.

What if the Control Brains trying to Order 66 all the Invaders was actually going to be a thing? Years before Revenge of the Sith even!

Like, think about it. Does it really make sense to pull all the Invaders away from their missions for a SIR competition? We can assume Zim would show up whether he was invited or not. But why would Skoodge go? Perhaps, as with Hobo 13, because he was hoping that his SIR performing well would get him welcomed back into the Empire? IDK if Tak being a saboteur was actually confirmed to be part of the story, or just fan speculation. But wouldn't it make sense for her to be there if she also thought she had something to gain from outperforming all the other Invaders?

So what if the whole thing was a set-up? What if all the Invaders by that point had either already completed their missions and were looking for new assignments or expecting rewards for their service, or failed their missions and were looking for redemption, and the competition was sold to them as an opportunity to prove their worth to the Control Brains. But in actuality, its purpose was to lure the Invaders into a trap where they'd all be killed by their own SIRs. Tak and Skoodge would survive because they're badasses and if Tenn wasn't already dead she might survive due to her experience dealing with rogue SIRs while Zim, just like in the Virooz arc, would survive because GIR never stays in duty-mode long enough to finish the job. GIR would however accidentally cause the destruction of all the other SIRs, potentially saving several Invaders, but perhaps also causing the Control Brains schemes to go undetected. If however, any of the other Invaders realized what had almost happened, it might lead to them defecting from the Empire. So just like Dib getting Tak's ship at the end of season 1, there'd be an important change to the status quo and a progression of the plot to get people hyped to see the consequences in the next season. Like maybe the Control Brains sending assassins after Zim, or some surviving Invaders coming to earth to hide out and possibly plot a rebellion.

[alite-pinguin]

EliteSingles: Is it the best choice for discerning singles?

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[webinfun]

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Welcome to the world of online dating, where to find thesoulmate has become more accessible than ever thanks to meeting sites. In this digital universe, two platforms particularly stand out: eDarling And Elite Meeting. If you are a Single looking for serious relationships, this article is for you. I will guide you through the specifics of these two dating website to help you determine which one…

[xtruss]

One of the Greatest Westerns Ever Made Is Now Streaming After Decades in the Wilderness

After Years of Inaccessibility, Maggie Greenwald's "The Ballad of Little Jo" Is Newly Available on Blu-Ray And Streaming — Here's Why That's a Cause For Celebration.

— By Jim Hemphill | March 25, 2024

'The Ballad of Little Jo'Fine Line Features

Throughout most of the 1980s the Western was assumed to be a dead genre, certainly compared to the central role it once played in Hollywood’s construction of a national mythology. While there were occasional outliers like Lawrence Kasdan‘s “Silverado” and Clint Eastwood‘s “Pale Rider,” for the most part the responsibility the genre had to reflect and shape American values was taken up by either science fiction movies like “The Terminator” (which fulfilled the Western’s function as an exploration of the changes wrought on society by evolving technology) or urban cop films like “48HRS.” and Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” sequels, which transposed the form’s archetypes and moral questions to a contemporary setting. Although the decade closed out with the successful “Young Guns,” that film was an anomaly whose success probably had more to do with its cast of attractive teen idols.

Then something funny happened in the early ’90s: Right as Hollywood seemed to have given up on the Western, it came roaring back with a vengeance and yielded the most varied, complex, and satisfying group of films since the glory days of John Ford and Delmer Daves. The box office and awards success of Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves” in 1990, followed by Clint Eastwood’s triumphant return to the genre in 1992 with “Unforgiven,” suddenly made Westerns commercially viable again, and filmmakers who had been biding their time were able to will their dream projects into production. Lawrence Kasdan returned to the genre for the underrated and ambitious “Wyatt Earp,” Walter Hill made two of his best films with “Geronimo: An American Legend” and “Wild Bill,” and talented directors like Jim Jarmusch (“Dead Man”), Sam Raimi (“The Quick and the Dead”), and Melvin Van Peebles (“Posse”) made Westerns as different from each other — and as equally nourishing — as one might expect.

One of the best of the ’90s Westerns has also been one of the most difficult to see, but a special edition Blu-ray release in December and a streaming premiere this month have rescued it from years of inaccessibility. When writer-director Maggie Greenwald‘s “The Ballad of Little Jo” was released in 1993, its relationship to the other Westerns of the time was a bit of a coincidence — Greenwald had written the script before “Unforgiven” — but there’s no question that her film, like the best 1950s Westerns of Budd Boetticher, Howard Hawks, and Sam Fuller, benefited from the comparisons and contrasts enabled by being part of a recognizable tradition. Like those directors, Greenwald was brilliant at using the language of the Western as a shorthand, expressing her point of view not only by what she depicted and how but by where her treatment of the material paid tribute to the Westerns that had come before and where it deviated.

“The Ballad of Little Jo” is based on the true story of a society woman (played brilliantly by Suzy Amis in a performance that deserves to be spoken of in the same breath with James Stewart’s work in the Anthony Mann Westerns) who, shunned by her family after giving birth out of wedlock, rides West and reinvents herself as a man – Josephine Monaghan becomes “Little Jo” Monaghan, a successful sheep farmer who, like the characters in “Shane,” “Heaven’s Gate,” and dozens (hundreds?) of other earlier Westerns, defends her land against an evil corporation. Along the way, she sidesteps the advances of a young woman who sees her as a potential husband and carries on a romance with a Chinese laborer (the only person who knows her true gender) while becoming friends with a guide and mentor named Badger, played by Bo Hopkins in a role that can’t help but evoke associations with Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.”

The casting of Hopkins gives the viewer a clue to what Greenwald is up to, as she slyly references and honors not only Peckinpah but a whole history of American Westerns at the same time that she finds new directions for the genre. Much as Hopkins retains the strengths of his performances in Westerns like “The Wild Bunch,” “The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing,” and “The Culpepper Cattle Co.” while also revealing new layers of sensitivity, the film as a whole delivers the satisfactions of Westerns — “The Magnificent Seven,” “The Gunfighter,” “Shane” — that explore both the liberation of a life defined by rugged individualism and its limitations, but deepens and expands on the mythology. Part of this is inherent in the premise, and most of it is due to Greenwald’s probing intelligence and unerring visual sense.

Suzy Amis, 1993, “The Ballad of Little Jo”©Fine Line Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Most Westerns are about masculinity and how America defines what it means to “be a man,” and many of the best entries in the genre have been films that delve into the contradictions and complexities of the question. By telling the story of a woman who lives her life as a man in the old West, Greenwald explores traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity through a different lens than just about every other Western ever made, even ostensibly female-driven works like “Bad Girls” and “The Quick and the Dead” which, while both have considerable strengths, don’t really engage with the issue on a deep level. Like most Westerns, “The Ballad of Little Jo” takes place in a world where maleness is glorified as a source of power and progress, a fact that Greenwald sharply interrogates via the unique perspective Little Jo’s character provides. Greenwald asks the viewer to consider and reconsider ideas many Westerns (and American films in general) take for granted by posing two simple questions: What does Little Jo gain by becoming a man, and what does she lose?

Greenwald uses familiar conventions both the traditional way and with a spin that gives them a whole new dimension. One of the hoariest cliches in the Western, for example, is that of the “redemptive woman,” the schoolmarm or minister’s sister who exists in the movie to civilize the hero and help him assimilate into society. In “Little Jo,” the redemptive woman is a man, but by making him Chinese — and therefore “lesser” and isolated in the eyes of the white men in the film — Greenwald plays with ideas of power, gender, race, and economics (Jo’s lover works as her handyman) and explores how they intersect in fluid and fascinating ways. The ways in which the viewer is expected to understand these issues are irrevocably affected by seeing them through the eyes of a woman who is pretending to be a man; long before the end of the movie, the line between “male” virtues and “female” ones — a defining feature of many classical Westerns — has been satisfyingly and provocatively blurred.

The pleasures of the film are not merely or even primarily ideological; part of Greenwald’s greatness is how organically woven into the narrative these ideas are. There’s nothing anachronistic about the film, even though, like all great period movies, it’s an equally valuable reflection of the time in which it takes place, the time of its release, and the time in which you’re watching it. Greenwald has the confidence not to force or overstate her ideas but just sets the drama in motion and lets the audience draw their own conclusions.

From left, Rene Auberjonois, Suzy Amis, 1993, “The Ballad of Little Jo” ©Fine Line Features/courtesy Everett/Everett Collection

She also provides a textured and expressive visual experience for the viewer that makes “The Ballad of Little Jo” one of the most purely gorgeous independent films of its era, and also a Western with a distinct look. Other directors had taken pleasure in the small details and nuances of day-to-day living in the old West — Robert Altman in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” Walter Hill in “The Long Riders,” Budd Boetticher in his detailed depictions of what it really meant to be a cowboy tending to a horse — but Greenwald takes it as far as anyone ever did, focusing not only on where Little Jo lives, but how and why, and how the simultaneously beautiful and forbidding landscape informs her choices. The movie is filled with specific pieces of costume and production design that allow the viewer to ponder the frontier existence in all its particulars, not just its sweeping vistas; it’s an intimate approach that perfectly complements Greenwald’s efforts for us to see everything through Jo’s perspective.

At the same time, “The Ballad of Little Jo” has a sweeping, epic quality that belies its limited budget, as well as a giddy embrace of some of the Western’s most basic pleasures. When Little Jo, in a sense, “conquers” her territory and succeeds on both her own terms and society’s, it’s immensely satisfying, and her sense of freedom is intoxicating. Yet just as Gregory Peck in “The Gunfighter” or the guns for hire in “The Magnificent Seven” are trapped in their roles, Jo is trapped by successfully becoming a man — she can’t escape her role any more than Steve McQueen could escape his. Greenwald ends the film with an allusion to another great Western, John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” with her own take on the idea that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Like everything else in the film, Greenwald’s perspective on this topic is complex, ambivalent, and, to a degree, open-ended, inviting the audience to continue the discussion after the film is over.

In a sense, Greenwald is doing what the best Western directors have always done despite the “revisionist” label erroneously attached to the ’90s films in the genre. The best Western directors have always been revisionist — John Ford cleverly subverted the idea of the redemptive woman back in 1939, for example, when he made her a prostitute in the same movie where he made the villain the most extreme representative of capitalist philosophy. Like “Stagecoach” — or “Red River,” or “High Noon,” or “Buck and the Preacher,” or any of the other all-time great Westerns — “The Ballad of Little Jo” looks both back and forward.

Also like those films, it’s a singular personal statement. Given that Greenwald was the first woman to write and direct a wide-release American Western in the sound era, it’s hard not to draw parallels between her own journey and Little Jo’s, forging her way forward in a male-dominated field and choosing what to retain and what to discard — and like her heroine, showing everyone else how it’s done. One doesn’t need to know anything about Greenwald or the production history of her film or even its context as a ’90s Western to enjoy it, though; it stands on its own as a masterpiece that has always deserved to be better known and more easily accessed. Its renewed availability is a cause for celebration and an opportunity to rediscover an American classic.

“The Ballad of Little Jo” is currently streaming at Kino Film Collection and is available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

[cloudabserk]

partially inspired by this post:

[nova-rpv]

doom morph morphing

dont forget ur daily clicks!!

[musubiki]

balor 🥰

[chipper-smol]

star abducted :3

[alite-pinguin]

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[littleguy-pi]

finger drawing I made while laying on the floor (lost my bed)