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wefoundloveunderthelight · 3 years

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Mystery Of Pixie Hollow by GleefullyCaptainSwan Chapter 2/11

Read on AO3: | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

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Stacy's Tortured Crew: @teamhook @kmomof4 @stahlop @lfh1226-linda @ilovemesomekillianjones @itsfabianadocarmo @mariakov81 @qualitycoffeethings @zaharadessert @jrob64 @jonesfandomfanatic @natascha-ronin @tiganasummertree @xarandomdreamx @therooksshiningknight @batana54 @superchocovian @onceratheart18 @ultraluckycatnd @snowbellewells @karlyfr13s @the-darkdragonfly @xsajx @deckerstarblanche @jonesfandomfanatic

Chapter 2: Shared Experience

“Mom.”

Emma ran through the halls, slamming her fists against the glass, breaking each mirror in front of her as she searched frantically.

“Mom.”

Her heart was pounding, each space behind the mirror was a deep black void.

“Mom.”

Arms were grabbing her, pulling her into the void, dragging her deep into the blackness.

“Emma.” She jerked awake, her eyes squinting against the light shining through the window. “Bloody hell, what are you doing sitting in front of an open window? Where’s Henry?”

Emma jumped up from her chair. “Henry.” She said frantically, staring out the window toward Pixie Hollow. Her mouth went dry at the empty lot staring back at her. It was all gone. Everything. He was gone.

“I got your texts this morning, my damn phone must have died while I was working, but they didn’t make any sense.”

“Henry, we were at the park, I couldn’t find him.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t find him? Where’s he at?”

She sunk down on the floor below the window, sobbing. “Gone.” She cried, wrapping her arms around her knees, and rocking softly back and forth as her head made contact with the wall behind her.

“Gone where? Emma you aren’t making a lot of sense here.”

“We were in one of those fun houses, you know the kind with the mirrors. Henry loves those.” She started rambling. “He was playing, he always thinks its funny when I can’t find him. But then he was gone. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I heard him call for me, but he vanished, Will.”

“Vanished. Well surely they had a lost and found, or…”

“No, they didn’t care, they acted like he fucking ran away.” She shouted. “The police told me to come back in 24 hours, but they’re gone, the whole thing is fucking gone.” She screamed, pointing toward the parking lot where the fair used to be.

“Get up, we’re going to talk to the cops. This is bloody ridiculous. Henry isn’t a runaway. No one could believe that for a second. This doesn’t make any sense.”

Will was pacing the floor in front of her before he turned and grabbed her by the hand, pulling her to her feet. “Come on, let’s go find our boy.” He said softly, guiding her to the car as he drove them to the police station.

When they arrived at the busy precinct, the man at the front desk barely acknowledged them, waving them off to wait in the seats by the door. After twenty minutes, Will was tired of waiting, pushing past the front desk and demanding to talk to anyone who would listen to him.

“I want to talk to whoever is in charge, my boy is missing and I’m not going to stop until someone bloody listens to me.”

“Please have a seat.”

“How about you have a seat, Mate.” He said, squaring up to the officer who approached him. Emma stood from her chair, rushing to his side to stop him from doing something stupid.

“Will…”

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you both to step back behind the desk.” The man warned.

“Look mister, my little boy is missing.” She held up the photo of Henry to his face, “He’s all alone, and if you don’t find someone who gives a damn about that, I’m going to stand outside this station, talking to every news outlet that will hear me, until someone pays attention to me.”

“Emma Swan.”

She spun around to see the officer she had spoken to last night and she tugged on Will’s arm to follow her in the direction of the man. “Henry’s still missing. You told me to wait 24 hours, and I know it hasn’t been that long, but the carnival is gone. And he didn’t run away.”

“Someone better tell me they are looking for Henry, or I’m marching out of here to meet with Channel 3 and tell them the Storybrooke police department doesn’t care about the safety of our young citizens.” Will barked and the officer gestured the two of them toward a corner office.

“Wait in here, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“If one more person tells me I need to wait…” Will threatened.

“Sir, I promise you, I will be right there. I just want to get my partner.” Officer Nolan stated calmly.

“Fine.” Will relented, stepping into the office as Emma followed him.

Will sat at the steel table while Emma paced the back wall. “I can’t believe this is happening.” She said anxiously. “He’s never been away from me for this long. He must be terrified.”

“I had a bad feeling about this.” Will mumbled. “I told you not to go without me last night.”

“Don’t you blame me for this. You’re the one who bailed on Henry’s birthday last night.” She yelled angrily.

“Emma, I had to work.”

“You abandoned us. And now Henry is gone.” She screamed, and Will shrank against the table, hanging his head into the palms of his hands. She knew she had gone too far. This wasn’t Will’s fault, but she had to blame someone, Henry was gone. But she knew blaming Will was wrong. This was her fault. “Will, I’m…”

The two men walked into the room, interrupting their discussion. “Miss Swan?” Officer Locksley asked as he entered.

“Yes, that’s me.” She replied anxiously.

“Have you heard from Henry since last night.”

“Would I be here if I knew where my son was?” She quipped sarcastically.

“Ma’am, we’re just trying to help.”

“Sod that, if you were trying to help you would have done so last night.” Will stated emphatically. “From where I’m sitting, it appears you’ve done bloody nothing at all.”

“You must be the boy’s father.”

“Not in the biblical sense, but yes.”

“I’m sorry?” Officer Nolan asked in a confused tone.

“The boy isn’t biologically mine, but in the ways that matter, he’s my kid.” Will said almost proudly and Emma felt a pang of guilt for attacking him earlier.

“Have you been in touch with the boy’s actual father? Perhaps he’s with him.”

Will laughed ominously. “You think he ran off with Neal? Bloody idiot of the year! Not fucking likely.”

“Sir, I can sense some tension regarding the boys father. Do you talk that way in front of the boy about his father?”

Will stood angrily. “Are you serious right now?”

“Perhaps the boy took offense, we’ve seen it happen, home life isn’t always the greatest, kids venture out to find out about the other parent that their live-in parent admonishes.”

“This is ridiculous.” Emma suddenly spoke, she was tired of hearing this crap. They apparently had no interest in helping them find Henry. They were wasting valuable time.

“Does he have contact with his father?”

“I can assure you; it would be a cold day in hell for Henry to be anywhere near Neal Cassidy. He wants nothing to do with Henry.”

“Do you know where we can find him? Perhaps you’d let us do our job and confirm he doesn’t have the boy.”

“I haven’t a clue where he’s at. Why don’t you take care of that, you’re the police. In fact, if you find him, let him know he owes me about five years of back child support.”

Emma grabbed Will by the arm and yanked him out of the station, she wasn’t going to waste a single second more on people that were doing nothing more than judging her. She needed to find Henry.

~*~

“Who’s that?” Henry asked his new friend, Alice. The short haired woman who brought them lunch always seemed nice, if not a bit anxious. Something seemed off about her, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

“That’s Tinkerbell.” Alice said and Henry burst into laughter.

“Like the fairy from Neverland?”

“Yes. She helps Pan. She’s the one who brought you here. But I’m sure you don’t remember any of that. They always make sure the kids don’t remember.”

“You’re serious about all of this. Tinkerbell, Peter Pan. I must be dreaming.”

“I wish you were. I wish we all were.” She said sadly.

“How long have you been here?”

“I lost count years ago.”

“Years?” He said wide eyed. “You’ve been here years?”

“Has to be four or five years now. But I’m not really sure. It’s hard to keep track of the days when you don’t see the light all the time.”

Henry couldn’t imagine not seeing his mom in the next day, much less years. Suddenly he felt the tears start to fall as he thought about the possibility of never seeing her again.

“Please don’t cry, Henry.” She wrapped her arm around his back, pulling him into her side.

“I miss my mom.” He cried softly.

“I know. I miss my papa, but I know one day I’ll see him again, just like I know one day you’ll see your mom again.”

“You really think so?” He sniffled, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt.

“All I have is hope, you can’t let go of that Henry. The moment you give up hope, Pan wins.”

He sighed, resigning himself to that fact that he was stuck here. But, he knew his mom would find him, he remembered the story his mother told him of when he was two years old and wandered off in the department store, his mother searched everywhere until she found him, crying in the middle of a clothes rack. If anyone could find him, it was his mom. She would never give up looking for him.

~*~

Emma sat in a darkened room, the only light coming from the screen of her laptop. She had spent the last few weeks researching the Pixie Hollow Amusement Park and the information she had found was creating even more of a mystery than she could have imagined. Since the inception of Pixie Hollow seven years ago, more than thirty children had gone missing during their stay in the towns they visited.

Based on the news articles, the children were usually from families of single parents, or children on field trips to the park. Most were chalked up to runaways, and the ones that were investigated were still open cases. A few showed that the parent was under investigation for the disappearance, but so far no one had been arrested in connection to any of the missing children.

Emma had collected names of various families she had found and was spending countless hours trying to track down the parents of the missing children. First she began calling the ones she was lucky enough to get information on, but she was always met by an angry voice on the other end of the line that told her to stay out of it and hung up on her.

Emma knew she needed to face these people, plead with them to talk to her about anything they knew. Maybe if they shared their stories, details would start to add up, it might give them a chance to solve the mystery if only she could get someone to listen to her.

The next morning, she woke up with a new determination, today she was going to get something, anything that she could to find her son. He had been missing for three weeks now, and Emma was going crazy.

The only thing the police had come up with was that they had located Neal Cassidy in Tallahassee Florida, but he had no interest in discussing Henry, nor did he seem to have any information on his whereabouts.

No shit Sherlock, she had basically relayed to the officers before hanging up on them.

She looked down at the paper in front of her. Three names were written from the night before. The family members who’s addresses she was able to find through a Google search. Parents with shared experience.

Ashley Boyd – Portland, Maine

Leroy Little – Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Killian Jones – Boston, Massachusetts

“Emma, you can’t just drive all over the coast grilling grieving parents about their missing kids.”

“Tell me something better I should be doing, William!” She yelled into the phone as she slammed the door of her yellow bug shut.

“All of this started because you went off on your own, nothing good will come of this.”

“Don’t you dare blame me for this.”

He sighed, “I’m not blaming you, Emma. I just…” He paused. “There’s nothing I’m going to say that’s going to stop you, is there?”

“No, I don’t need your advice Will, I just need you to support me until I find him.”

“Emma…I will always support you, no matter what you do. Just…” He sighed again and Emma could just see him now, running a hand through his hair. “Be careful and keep me updated today. Dammit, I wish you would have waited for me to come with you.”

“I’ll be fine, I’ll text you all day. I should be home tomorrow unless I find something.”

“Please be safe, we don’t know what’s going on here. Just…just be careful with how you approach these people.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

She hung up the phone and looked at her GPS, her first stop was nearby in the town of Portland. She set the GPS and began her drive to Ashley Boyd.

It was a long drive from her home, a few towns over and she reached the small white home of Ashley Boyd. She had read about her daughter Ella, disappearing from Pixie Hollow two years ago, the police determined that Ashley’s ex husband had taken the child and left the country. The man vehemently denied any involvement in the disappearance but refused to return to the United States for fear of being arrested.

Emma climbed the short stairs to the front door and knocked on the white wooden frame. She waited until she heard yelling on the other side of the door and a small child peered through a crack.

“Hewwo, who are you?”

Emma bent down to introduce herself when a woman appeared, yanking her child up from the ground and shielding her protectively.

“Chelsey, I told you never to talk to strangers.” She looked at Emma, “Who are you, what do you want?”

“Hi Ashley, my name’s Emma Swan.”

“How do you know my name?” She asked nervously.

“I wanted to talk to you about Ella.”

“Who sent you?” She responded anxiously. “Get out of here.”

“Wait, look my son, Henry…” She held up a photo of her son. “He went missing from Pixie Hollow a month ago.”

The girl’s face crumpled before she quickly returned the mask to her face. “I’m sorry for your loss, the sooner you get over it the better. He’s never coming back.”

The woman turned and slammed the door in her face. Emma sighed, writing her number on a piece of paper, and sticking it into the door before she returned to her car.

Emma looked at her GPS on her phone. It would take her an hour to get to Portsmouth. Her next stop on her trip. Her contact was the father, Leroy. His son Stewie had gone missing four years prior during a trip to the carnival. He had been under investigation for years until he was cleared six months ago.

The entire drive she thought about Ashely’s reaction to her. Seeing her with a young child, she could tell that the woman was overprotective, nervous around strangers, distrustful almost. She had given up hope of finding her daughter. Emma never wanted to get to the point that she gave up trying to find Henry. She couldn’t imagine the dark hole that would swallow her up if she allowed herself to get to that place.

She looked up at the tiny shack on the edge of the water that belonged to Leroy Little. It was run down, almost unsafe to live in. Definitely not the place you would ever have a child.

She walked across the uneven planks that lead to the front door, the porch creaked when she stepped foot on it. She heard a noise on the other side of the door.

“Don’t know who you are, lady, but I’ve got a shot gun pointed at you, so get out o’ here before I shoot.”

Emma froze, “My name is Emma Swan, I just want to talk to you about Pixie Hollow.” She put her hands in the air.

The door creaked to a crack. “You a cop?”

“No, I’m just a mom. My son went missing too.” She said pleading with him. “I just want to talk to you.”

He opened the door, the rifle in his hands. “Ain’t nothin to talk about, sister. The kid’s gone. You can stop looking, the more you look, the harder it’s gonna be for you in a few years.”

“You can’t really believe that.”

“Ain’t got no other choice, less I want to go back to jail.”

“Where do you think Stewie is?”

He looked to the ground, then back at her face. “Don’t matter what I think. Now get outta here, I got nothing to say to you.”

He slammed the door in her face, the second time in a few hours. Emma left her number, feeling disheartened and sat in her car and cried.

She was half tempted to just go home, but she needed to finish what she started out to do today. It would take her about an hour and a half to get to Boston, perhaps this Killian Jones would talk to her.

It was harder for her to get information on his case, his daughter was one of the ones who had been missing the longest. Alice Jones had disappeared five years ago. The information she had found only said that he was a single dad, he had taken his daughter to the carnival because of her love for fairytales. She had gone missing that night and Killian was the first person of interest on the case. He spent months in prison while they investigated the girl’s disappearance, only releasing him when they found no evidence that he had anything to do with his daughters’ case. The trail went cold after that. There had been no news at all about his daughter since.

When she got to the address, she looked up at the harbor, she must have typed the wrong information. There were no houses at this location, she was at a boat yard. She got out of her car and wandered to the pier, trying to figure out why her GPS took her here.

A man was standing at the end of the pier, tying a rope to a boat that was docked there. “Excuse me.” She flagged the man down and sped up her steps to get closer to him before he disappeared into the boat. “Sir, I just need to ask you a question.”

The man noticed her, and he tensed, standing still at the end of the pier. “How can I help you, lass?”

“I’m looking for an address, but I think I wrote it down wrong because there’s no house here.”

He laughed, “You are very perceptive, love.”

She handed the paper to him, and he scratched the back of his ear. “’Fraid you aren’t looking for a house, Ma’am. But you did find what you’re looking for.” He paused and stared her down, “Care to share why you were looking for this boat?”

“A boat? I don’t understand. I’m trying to find the man at this address, Killian Jones.”

His jaw tensed. “Is that so? And what business do you have with Mr. Jones.”

“I need to talk to him about his daughter, Alice.” Before she could react the man turned feral, reaching into his back pocket and with a flick of his wrist, brandishing a knife in one hand as he took a step forward and pressed it into her side, twisting her around until her back was to his chest.

“Who sent you? Was it Mills? Just who the bloody hell are you?”

#mystery of pixie hollow #stacy's fics #emma swan #killian jones #captain swan fics #captain swan au #captain swan #captain swan modern au

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betweenthetimeandsound · 3 years

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Three Minutes to Eternity: My ESC 250 (#130-121)

#130: Franco Battiato and Alice -- I Treni di Tozeur (Italy 1984)

“In una vecchia miniera, distese di sale E un ricordo di me, come un incantesimo”

“In an old empty mine, the salt extends And I seem to remember it, like a dream”

Franco Battiato was one of Italy's greatest songwriters, known for his complex songs in a mix of genres. Unfortunately, I haven't listened to most of his discography, but I do know of "Per Elisa", the song he wrote for Alice which won Sanremo 1981 (coincidentially, the first year Italy withdrew from Eurovision, welp). It's thoughtful and its incorporation of Fur Elise is well-done with its synthesizers.

In comparison, I treni di Tozeur is not a song readily caught by first listening, and that’s why it’s not my favorite of its year. This doesn’t mean it’s not a good song, though—it's sounds eerily futuristic even for the synth-based 1980s, and actually timeless. The lyrics seem ambivalent, but I think there’s some philosophical bent towards them. One of the commentaries talk about the train to Tozeur being built in the early twentieth century to satisfy the whims of the King of Tunisia, at a huge cost. Maybe there's some social commentary sneaking in there.

The performance was good, but it seems like Alice had a bit more control of her voice. She did so with style, and I actually liked her outfit.

In addition, the opera singers at the end were the cherry of the cake. A mix of classical and modern, indeed, which earned itself classic status.

Personal ranking: 2nd/19 Actual ranking: =5th/19 (with Belgium) in Luxembourg

#129: Linda Martin -- Terminal 3 (Ireland 1984)

“Staring into a space, searching through every face He's been away too long now, he must have changed”

I feel like there are two types of people in terms of 1984--those who have Alice and Batiatto (#130) as their favorite, and those who have Linda Martin as theirs. As shown by how close they are on my list, I love both, but Linda Martin just eeks it out.

The storytelling aspect of the song is very strong, as Linda waits for her lover to come from an international flight. Ironically, it can't be from Dublin, as no Irish airport has a third terminal. Maybe it's from London's she's waiting for her love? Or the flight is coming to the United States, rather than from it? Mysteries indeed.

(Now my life goal is to be at Terminal 3 at 10:30; one of David Tao's most famous songs is 飞机场的10:30--Airport at 10:30, which deals with the same topic)

The New Wave instrumentation and orchestration add up to the drama too--the brass grabs me from the first beats, and the strings and rock influences remain as the song goes on. It's kind of hard to believe Johnny Logan was behind this, especially considering he's better known for his ballads. If she had to win one Eurovision, Terminal 3 had to be the one.

Personal ranking: 1st/19 Actual ranking: 2nd/19 in Luxembourg

#128: Halla Margrét - Hægt og hljótt (Iceland 1987)

"Kvöldið hefur flogið alltof fljótt Fyrir utan gluggann komin nótt Kertin er’ að brenna upp Glösin orðin miklu meir’en tóm"

"The evening has fled all too fast Outside the window night has come The candles are burning low The glasses have become much more than empty"

As their debut entry was fun and "in-your"face", Iceland’s second entry has an afterparty feeling, but I've heard some comparisons to being a Christmas song. It doesn't sound like it to me, but it's still really serene and beautiful, as if the snow was falling outside (not unlike #213 on this list).

The lyrics are quite gentle and pretty, painting a dainty picture. However, they also contain enough melancholy to add a tinge of darkness to the scene, which is why I don't think it would work as a Christmas song. Halla’s vocals are very pure, and adds enough delicacy to the composition. The piano and orchestration also helps.

What stands out more is the funny notes related to Hægt og hljótt--one refers to the last line of their chorus, which is bufflaxed to "anus in the air" in English, another mentions how Halla's dress is see-through against the white piano, almost as if she was a ghost. Very strange, especially the latter as the lyrics focuses on the upcoming dawn. Or it would make a good fan-fiction, come to think of it.

Personal ranking: 3rd/22 Actual ranking: 16th/22 in Brussels

#127: Raphael -- Yo soy aquél (Spain 1966)

“Yo soy aquél, Que por tenerte da la vida, Yo soy aquél, Que estando lejos, no te olvida,

“I'm that one, Who gives his life to have you I'm that one Who's far away and doesn't forget you”

When I first did this sorter, Yo soy aquel ended up close to being in my top 50. It was a surprise, because despite being one of my favorite songs from Spain, I didn't think about as much in terms of great songs, even though it's a beautiful song.

The opening bars to this song are filled with drama, which gives way to Raphael’s crooning for the one he loves. The lyrics are a bit repetitive, sure, but they still work in how Raphael wants his love to know he will be there. I particularly love the way the song builds, which, combined with his singing, creates a brooding atmosphere. The explosion in the chorus is really effective, which the orchestra compliments and actually amplifies. You could actually feel his passion thanks to those strings.

1966 was an incredible year (especially for a black-and-white contest), and if I could switch one of Spain's wins, I would drop La La La for this in one second (even though there's another song from this year on my top 250). Massiel doesn't hold a candle to Raphael.

Personal ranking: 2nd/18 Actual ranking: =7th/18 (with Yugoslavia) in Luxembourg

#126: Liam Reilly -- Somewhere in Europe (Ireland 1990)

“We should be together, and maybe we just might If you could only meet me somewhere in Europe tonight”

For my European friends, I wish for this lyric to come true! I am sadly ill-traveled, haha.

When I started to consider this top 250, I thought "Somewhere in Europe" would be song #250, because it was pleasant and pretty, but wouldn't trouble the rest of the list. When I was re-arranging the list, this was one of the songs which got a great boost, and now it sits just outside of the top half of this list!

As for this song, I like it a lot. It not only a pretty little ditty, but it also takes the theme of unity and takes one on an adventure. Because of the piano-based instrumental, I keep thinking that it's like a Billy Joel song, as it's quite homebrewed. While I don’t think this would’ve made a better winner than Insieme (or White and Black Blues, for that matter--France winning would bring some new energy to the contest), Liam Reilly proved he was a talented songwriter, and it shines with the orchestration too.

As a result, I keep thinking that it would be a good New Year's Eve song--it's nostalgic yet calming, and seeks out a better future. Unfortunately, Liam Reilly died on New Year's Day this year, which makes it a bit sadder. RIP.

Personal ranking: 8th/22 Actual ranking: =2nd/22 (with France) in Zagreb

#125: Rita -- Shara Bachravot (Israel 1990)

לבוקר הזה יש טעם של חופש זר כמו של מוות או ברכה כי הלכתי ממך”

“This morning, Has the taste of strange freedom Like of death or a blessing Because I went away from you”

(I actually heard of Rita before stumbling on her Eurovision entry--one song I really like is Idan Raichel's Mechake (Waiting), and I searched the web. One of the results was Rita's version of his composition, which compared to Raichel's, is a bit more produced. Still great!)

1990 focuses on freedom in many ways, especially because of the Berlin Wall falling and the end of communism. Shara Barkhovot also talks about freedom, but does so in another way.

It’s basically a tale of a relationship ending, with a woman leaving her partner in the morning. It’s frequently interpreted as running away from abuse, and the imagery involved does a good job in conveying that feeling.

It’s dramatic and passionate, with Rita “emoting” the song rather than merely performing it. Unfortunately, it does go off the rails later on, with her vocals losing out at points. I still like how she played with the microphone stand, though!

Personal ranking: 7th/22 Actual ranking: 18th/22 in Zagreb

#124: Helena Paparizou -- My Number One (Greece 2005)

“You're my lover Undercover You're my sacred passion and I have no other.”

Helena Paparizou was one of those artists that I knew that participated in Eurovision, but didn’t listen to her song until much later. I found out about her with the song “Heroes”, which I played a lot when I was younger (about 11-13 years old), and didn’t think about her in the contest, other than she won and she received a wide ovation when she returned to Greece.

My Number One is all kinds of fun, from the ethnic instrumental to the sometimes silly lyrics. I also love the performance featuring Helena playing a human lyre, which is a definite highlight! A fun and energetic bop (the last of a holy trinity of ethno-influenced dance winners during this time), now I’m a happy fan of hers (I really listened to Kati Skoteino a lot since 2018, for example. Plus her Mambo interval the following year is fantastic.)

On whether this or "Die For You" was the better song, it's hard to tell, especially on how close they are on this list. Whereas 2001 was the weaker year and Die for You had to win it, My Number One was in a stronger year and held its own. And yet it's not my favorite...

Personal ranking: 2nd/39 Actual ranking: 1st/24 GF in Kyiv

#123: Vanilla Ninja -- Cool Vibes (Switzerland 2005)

“Don't want you to come so close to me Don't need you to blow my fantasy But I know that you are livin' far beyond those lies I can see the danger rise in your eyes...”

From my last place in 2004 to my favorite in 2005, what a glow up from Switzerland! Though to be honest, I have a hard time determining why this song in particular is my favorite of its year. I did come in knowing that Switzerland was the only one of the original seven to not win in my timeline, so that may have impacted my thinking.

Cool Vibes a dark rock song, with occasionally dramatic lyrics (though then again, emo rock was getting popular during that time), but an intriguing musical atmosphere. Despite 2005 being known as the "ethno-bop year", there were a number of interesting rock songs (e.g. In My Dreams), and this holds up by its sheer seriousness, versus the occasionally silly vibe of those others.

And with that string motif, it does sound like a song that needs an orchestra to realize its full potential. There's a lot of hidden angst throughout the song, and the multiple key changes actually helps here.

Personal ranking: 1st/39 Actual ranking: 8th/24 GF in Kyiv

Final Impressions on Switzerland: Not one of my favorite countries in the contest, unfortunately. I find most of their entries to be quite non-descript, with some of them being very bad. That said, they do have a number of gems on here, and some great ones that just missed out (Moi, tout simplement; Io senza te; She Got Me especially). And with the track they are now, they could actually win in the next few years. Hopefully with a French-language song. :)

#122: Tanja Ribič - Zbudi se (Slovenia 1997)

“Zbudi se, dobri princ Rada bi ti dala vse Svoje sanje in mladost Da ne bom iz pravljice”

“Wake up, good prince I would like to give you all My dreams and my youth Break the spell of the fairy tale”

Sometimes I forget I love this song. As 1997 is one of the strongest years (if not the strongest year song-wise), there are so many good ones one can't remember all of them. Zbudi se a bit dark and fits in very well with the rest of the 1990s with its mythical character (and might be the first Balkan ballad proper), but Tanja does it so well. And she would later be more known for her acting!

When I do listen to it, it just takes me away. It’s a dark fairytale, with beautiful lyrics and an intriguing atmosphere. The narrator longs for her loved one, filled with magical imagery and dreaminess. I also appreciate the transition between the lyrics and the chorus, which can be very hard to do! And of course, the orchestration, including the harp parts in particular, create a fantastic soundscape.

Personal ranking: 8th/25 Actual ranking: 10th/25 in Dublin

#121: Lúcia Moniz - O meu coração não tem cor (Portugal 1996)

“Dança-se o samba, a marrabenta também, Chora-se o fado, rola-se a coladeira.”

“We dance the samba, the marrabenta too, We weep the fado, and roll the coladeira”

Curiously, for a song which was one twelve away from a top-three finish, O meu coração não tem cor seems a bit less known within Portugal. It even didn't get a studio release, and Lucia is better known for being the love interest in Love Actually. And yet it's still a fan-favorite within Eurovision.

The lyrics call out to everyone in the Portuguese diaspora (or the Lusosphere in general), and welcomes them to engage in their cultural traditions. We have fruit and dance and crying and laughter all at once. All kinds of fun, except when the clips grayscale and I keep thinking of those "in memoriam" scenes.

And it managed impress in another way; it came in 18th in the audio-only pre-qualifer which only appeared in 1996. Thanks to the brazen and fun orchestration, along with Lucia's very sweet voice, it was lifted up in the final to a solid sixth place! Very well-deserved.

Personal ranking: 5th/23 Actual ranking: 6th/23 in Oslo

#eurovision song contest #eurovision #esc top 250 #esc 250 #esc italy #esc ireland #esc iceland #esc israel #esc greece #esc switzerland #esc slovenia #esc portugal #vintage eurovision #three minutes to eternity

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365days365movies · 3 years

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January 21, 2021: The Wages of Fear (1953)

What exactly is a thriller, anyway?

Now, I’ve repeatedly considered having thrillers take up their own month, considering that they’re considered one of the core eleven film genres. However, they intersect so commonly with other genres, that I’ll be incorporating it into other months this year.

The definition of the thriller or suspense genre relies on surprise and intrigue. The audience is made unaware of certain information, giving a sense of mystery to the movie’s setting. The protagonist is often also unaware of these certain things, although that certainly isn’t a requirement.

Sometimes, they’re as innocent as the audience, if not moreso, and may be getting manipulated during the course of the story. Escapes, chase sequences, clear or hidden dangers, all of these meant to build suspense and unnerve the audience. It doesn’t have the overt scares of a horror film, and its action scenes build up to a feeling of building dread. They’re adrenaline-raising, heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat films.

We’ve already covered one of the most prominent subgenres, the spy movie. We’ll cover more during Horror October, naturally, and a couple more this month. Comedy April’s even going to have a comedy thriller or two, while Romance February will pack an erotic thriller in there. Oh, and let’s not forget Crime July and Drama December. Like I said, they’ll be all over the place. Today, though, we cover one of the seminal French action thrillers, similar to our last two entries, but MUCH older. Enter Jean-Georges Clouzot.

Clouzot is one of the old-school French directors, even though he debuted quite late as compared to most, in 1942. A French Alfred Hitchcock, Clouzot’s first solo film was The Murderer Lives at Number 21. And surprisingly, it’s known as a comedy-thriller, and made a splash in theaters when it debuted in 1943. Which is interesting, given that whole World War II kerfuffle at the time. His most famous film, however, came in 1955, and was called Les Diaboliques. And THAT’S a psychological thriller that may end up on my list for October.

But two years before that, he made an action thriller. You know where this is going at this point, so let’s get on with it! SPOILERS AHEAD for The Wages of Fear!

Recap

Before we start, a tiny disclaimer: GIFs were...impossible to find for this one. HOWEVER, I miraculously found a recolored copy that I was able to convert into GIFs. I prefer the black-and-white version, which is how I watched it, but SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE

We start in Las Piedras, a small village in a Spanish-speaking country somewhere in Central America. A group of men speaking French, English, and Spanish are relaxing on a saloon porch, trying to beat the heat. These men include Mario (Yves Montand) and Bimba (Peter van Eyck). His girlfriend (?) Linda (Véra Clouzot, the director’s wife) works as a servant in the saloon.

Eventually, the men are told to leave, with Bimba being told to go to the airport to pick up mail. Arriving on the plane - other than a man with a whole-ass GOAT, which must have made for a fun flight for EVERYBODY involved - is a rich-looking man in a white suit and a fancy fly-swatter.

Our man, who’s French, runs into Mario, who is also French. This is Jo (Charles Vanel), who, despite looking rich, is out here looking for something monetary. Mario, after being weirdly cold to Linda, leaves for his home where he lives with Luigi (Folco Lulli), who speaks Italian. A real polyglot of a movie, this one.

Over the course of a montage of indeterminate time, we find out that there’s no work in this town for the various men, who are stuck in this town because of the desert surrounding it, expensive tickets, and no jobs or employment opportunities. We also find out that since there’s oil, there are Americans.

The Southern Oil Company, SOC, dominates the town due to nearby oil fields. They aren’t the best, though, and they tend to treat the townspeople pretty terribly. Jo inquires for a job there, to no avail, and reconvenes with Jo. After treating Linda and Luigi, to be frank, like ABSOLUTE shit, Mario...WAIT A GODDAMN SECOND

HOLY SHIT, MARIO AND LUIGI LIVE TOGETHER. REALLY?!? Holy shit.

Jo’s a dick, it turns out, which causes a rift between the two Frenchmen and the others. After literally getting the entire saloon angry with his antics, he threatens the nice Luigi with a gun, causing a tense atmosphere with everybody. After literally handing Luigi a gun to shoot him, the dejected man leaves the bar, dejected. Like I said...Jo’s an absolute DICK.

The next morning, something’s happened. The oil field has caught on fire, killing some of the residents who worked there. This causes some anti-foreigner rhetoric, which’ll probably spell trouble for our mostly foreigner cast. The foreman is Bill O’Brien (William Tubbs), who’s asked to handle the situation by his bosses. The only way to put out the fire is to generate an explosion triggered by nitroglycerin. Which seems...backwards, but I don’t know how oil works. They need to transport the nitroglycerin to the field, but the job is too dangerous for unionized workers. Therefore, the idea is formed to bring in some of the unemployed men, especially those that hang around the saloon. And, of course, that includes Mario, Jo, Bimba, and Luigi.

Speaking of Luigi, sad news. Looks like his construction job has resulted in cement powder depositing in his lungs, giving him 6 months to a year to live. Shame, he seems like a very nice guy. And so, considering that this job is dangerous, but follows a lot of money...he doesn’t have much to lose.

One of the people at the briefing immediately backs out upon learning about the job. He notes that this job infects men with fear that they can’t recover from. For that fear, the wages are $2500 per person. Only four people can do this job; two per truck, with one driver and one passenger. After some trials, Mario, Luigi, Bimba, and Smerloff, a German, are chosen. Jo isn’t good enough, much to his own dismay. However, as Bill and Jo are old friends of sorts, they make a deal; if one of the men doesn’t show up, Jo can take his place.

That night, the men (sans Jo) gather in the saloon. One young man, an Italian named Bernando who wasn’t chosen, gives Linda a note to mail to his mother. Sadly, there’s a reason for that that I won’t show here. But while they tell him that there’ll be a next time, he insists that their won’t be. I’ll let you fill in the tragic blanks.

The next morning, Smerloff doesn’t show up, having last been seen with, uh...with Jo. Wonder where Smerloff went. Well, predictably, Jo ends up replacing him. Jo and Mario go first, after winning a coin toss. They drive off hauling their truck loaded with nitroglycerin, and you can feel the fear begin to set in for Mario. As they drive through town, Linda tries to say goodbye, only for Mario to literally push her off the truck, MAN, I don’t like this guy.

As the truck drives, they encounter their first obstacle: Jo. As he’s driving, fear would appear to set in for him as well. He overcomes a couple of large puddles, but begins to shiver and sweat, saying that he’s sick. But no, he’s definitely just nervous, and they stop the truck in a forest of sugarcane so that Jo can take a break. However, they have to get going quickly, as the second truck is close behind them.

In the second truck, Bimba and Luigi talk a bit, with the affable Luigi doing most of that talking. But when Jo and Mario stop for a second time, they tell the pair off and drive past. Because of this, they hit the first real obstacle: a stretch of rough and bumpy road called the washboard. To get over it, one has to go 40 mph to get over the bumps. If not, then the truck will feel the bumps, and the nitroglycerine will explode. Luigi and Bimba get over with some difficulty, finding out that the gas in their truck contains water, and needs to be changed.

As for Jo and Mario, Jo’s nervousness costs them time and energy, as he refuses to speed up to the proper speed before getting on the washboard. They have to back up (inside their own tire tracks), and Mario officially takes over the wheel. And he starts going fast...too fast.

They almost collide with the other truck, but Luigi and Bimba speed up in time. Next obstacle: a road under construction. A K-turn is needed, and that turn requires a flimsy wooden construction to be driven on. It isn’t easy, the very competent Luigi and Bimba manage it all right. Jo and Mario get there, and Jo, predictably, FREAKS OUT.

Mario, on the other hand, is overly reckless. In order to get over the rotted out road, Mario has to drive to the very edge of the construction. Jo, who was guiding him from the back of the truck, ends up tumbling over the side. While Mario thinks he’s dead, Jo instead takes the opportunity to straight-up run away, although Mario does see him. This is a problem, as the truck begins to slide on the wood without Jo’s help. But Mario, ever-resourceful, figures it out. But...

OH SHIT! Mario gets off the construction just as it’s starting to collapse. He makes it forward, and passes the cowardly Jo, who tries to get back onto the truck.Mario, UNDERSTANDABLY PISSED, almost leaves him behind, but finally stops so that he can get rejoin. The two get into an argument, where Mario calls Jo out for once being brave, but now being a coward. Jo tells Mario that he has no imagination, and that Jo’s “died fifty times since last night.” I love that line, honestly.

Back to Luigi and Bimba. They talk about life after the money, even though we’re aware that Luigi doesn’t have much of that left. It’s then that the next obstacle appears: a talus slope, from which a giant rock has fallen, and blocks the road. Bimba has the...bright idea (?) of using the nitroglycerin to blow up the stone. Which I feel like is an...idea.

They make a hole in the rock, then siphon some nitro out of a container. The others catch up, and back the trucks away, leaving Bimba by himself to do the deed. And it is...ABSOLUTELY NERVE-WRACKING HOLY SHIT. After setting up a Rube-Goldberg device and pouring the nitroglycerin into a hole in the rock, Bimba lights a fuse and sets it to blow.

But because they fear they;ve parked too close, Luigi runs back to put out the fuse! Too late, though, as the nitro blows, and rocks fly, almost falling on the trucks in the process. As for Luigi...he survives! Knocked out by the shock from the explosion, but not injured. In the process, the rock is finally destroyed, and Mario and Luigi finally reconcile as friends.

Back on the drive with Luigi and Bimba! We find out that Bimba’s a German, whose parents died at the hands of the Nazis. He himself was in a work camp for 3 years, which is why he is as brave as he is. Behind them, Jo and Mario talk of France, and Jo rolls a cigarette.

...FUCK.

Luigi and Bimba are gone. Like that. This, of course, freaks out Jo, who runs away from the truck. Mario catches up, and beats Jo for his cowardice. They return to the truck, albeit very reluctantly on Jo’s part. They make it to the site of the explosion, where there’s...no sign. No sign of the truck, of the guys, nothing. Just a busted pipe spitting up oil, creating a massive puddle.

Jo goes into the shallow pool to guide Mario through it, but gets stuck in the pool in the process. Mario runs over his leg, and the truck itself gets stuck in the oil. Mario gets out of the truck and helps Jo, whose leg is FUUUUUUUUUCKED up. I mean it, it’s like a busted sausage link, like a sock made of MEAT. It’s not OK, is what I’m saying.

Mario, using a cable, an iron rod, and his wits, manages to pull the truck out of the oil pool. He gets Jo, and the drive continues. Jo, in pain and possibly bleeding out, is close to falling asleep. To keep him awake, the two talk about Paris. Day turns to night, and Mario continues to drive. They finally make it to the burning oil field...but too late for Jo.

Mario’s finally able to get out of the truck, and stumbles towards the fire and collapses. Not dead, just exhausted. He gets all of the money promised to the four, and leaves in the now empty truck to go back to Las Piedras. Free of nitroglycerine and free of fear, he gleefully drives back. In the saloon, the patrons celebrate Mario’s survival while listening to Blue Danube, and so does Mario! And Mario is driving...carefree. And recklessly.

...That’s The Wages of Fear. See you in the Epilogue.

#the wages of fear #le salaire de la peur #henri-george clouzot #yves montand #charles vanel #folco lulli #peter van eyck #action thriller #365 movie challenge #365 movies 365 days #365 Days 365 Movies #365 movies a year #user365 #my gifs #mygifs #moviegifs #action january

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jaimitchell · 4 years

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𝙹𝚞𝚗𝚎 𝟷𝟹𝚝𝚑 𝙲𝚑𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚐𝚘, 𝙸𝙻 𝟸:𝟹𝟹𝚊𝚖

He is desperate. He has no idea what day it is or what time it is other than night, and even then, he lost track of when the sun went down. This was a mistake. He shouldn’t have come here, he should have stayed at Gallagher, keeping himself sober, clean, but all he wanted was to get some money to spend during the Berlin internship. And yet, every single penny he had ‘earned’ (his way, of course), had gone down the drain in pills, rocks, cheap vodka, cigarettes, joints– fuck, even lighters. He had lost three so far. Who knew addicts could be so careless about something indispensable for them.

Jai’s hands shake as he digs into his pockets, and yet, he can’t find anything. Did he really ran out this fast? Was he consuming this much, this fast? Was it happening so quickly? Would he even make it to Berlin at this point? His phone vibrates inside his pocket. It’s Cyrus, he doesn’t even have to check. It’s always Cyrus– fuck, he’s the only one who cares, and Jai thinks he shouldn’t. He’s fine. He will be fine as soon as he gets his next fix. He takes out the phone and turns it off, leaves it on the counter as he asks for another bottle of vodka, the smallest one please, he doesn’t have much money. Jai wipes his nose– fuck, he hates some of the effects, smiles and drops ten bucks, then leaves without picking up his phone. There’s no point.

How did he get there? Loneliness? Fear? Or was it just the bad habits that were hard to get rid of? Not even Jai could answer, but he was sure he felt it all. Every single feeling in his heart was there, taking space, making it hurt. And there was love, there was hope, faith– and yet the vacuum of what his life had become since age thirteen followed him. He was a criminal, a drug addict, an alcoholic, and there was no way to escape his record. His classmates would go out to get jobs at the CIA, the FBI, other private agencies, and what would he do if not going back to the street rat life?

Time, distance. Nothing matters. Jai is living his life as if he was reading some sort of comic book, except he always skips the last drawing before turning pages. It should drive him insane, and yet... he keeps on going.

“You know what to give me.” Jai said, his voice emotionless until he’s told the price and realized that with his phone, he left his last couple bills. He has no money, and lots of needs. The tremor in his hands or the sweat in his upper lip are the biggest telltales. Fuck, he needs a shower. And a warm bed. “No money, no goods. You know the rules.” Jai looks down, pats his body looking for anything, bills, coins, but a five doesn’t cover much, and he knows it’s only a matter of an hour or two before it gets bad– Linda Blair bad, and he doesn’t have anywhere to go. He can’t go back to Charles Graves’ place like that, so he needs to fix this. Jai moves his eyes up to meet the other man’s. There’s something in them, a hidden language that he mastered years ago when he was still in New York. It was universal, really. And effortless for a man like him, but he could already feel the weight of his heart after this, of the silence, of his lost phone, of the missing calls and endless voicemails he had ignored in the past couple days.

♦ ♦ ♦

The motel doesn’t seem as scary by dusk than it seemed in the middle of the night, as he got off a car of someone who’s real name he didn’t know. Jai sighs, looking up as he takes a long swig from the bottle of vodka he managed to keep with him through the night. The day seems promising, only a couple clouds in the sky over the peach and lavender tones of the sun rising, and he wishes he didn’t feel the way he was feeling. Sure, there was a part of him that felt relieved, his palms weren’t sweating anymore, the visions had left, his heart was pumping blood at a reasonable pace and yet he felt heavy, incredibly sore, dirty. Fuck, he had left this life before. Moving to Chicago, becoming a part of the Graves’ family and going to Gallagher and all that were supposed to change him, help him get a better life than before, and yet, here he is, feeling him in every step he took, wishing this was just a couple weeks back, and HIM had a different name.

His heart stops, his lungs stop, his entire body stop working and Jai has to drag himself to the next ally because he is sure this is how he dies. This is the moment where it’s all over, and even though there’s some relief, he’s never felt this pain before. And all he thinks about is Cyrus, and Milena, and Scott, and Emmett, and Maia, and Berlin and suddenly he’s sobbing. The pain stops but he can’t stop crying. All of this, for what? For fucking nothing! NOTHING.

“I fucked up. I fucked up. I fucked up.” He repeats to himself with his head between his knees until he can feel the tremble in his hands come back. It is getting dark again, and he somehow managed to lose track of yet another fucking day.

With his legs wobbly and weak, Jai manages to get back on his feet. Were this another night like the one before, he would be making his way back to that corner store, right where the fluorescents don’t shine as bright anymore. But today is different. Today he pulls himself out, and he promises to himself this is the real deal. Because he can’t fail them. Any of the people in his life. So he asks for help.

It’s a new group, one he hasn’t met up with before and that makes him feel safe and unashamed to tell his story. He gets a sponsor right away, an old man who relates to Jai’s story the second he opens his mouth, and volunteers to get him through his worst days. He only has two weeks, he explains, two weeks and then he’ll go after the best year of his life. And even though the old man laughs at him and makes him swear he’ll find a way to keep his head held high, he assures him he’s strong enough to get through this and more. How long has it been since he had a paternal figure? Did he ever have one in the first place? Jai doesn’t know this kind of love or at least he doesn’t remember, and every day after that he goes to bed and thanks every single God out there for this one opportunity, because he deserves better, he wants better. And Jai Reginald Mitchell is a stubborn one, and he will get better.

@gallaghertasks

#gallagher:task #task009 #task #tw: drug use #tw: prostitution #just mentions tho but this shit got too DARK #so im sorry #it ends sort of happily tho

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morbid-n-macabre · 4 years

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Tell me, what is your favorite murder? This is one of mine. If you've been following me for a while you may have seen me post about it before, but I don't believe I've really gone in depth.

If you had seen David Brown on the street, it's unlikely that you'd even have noticed him. The middle aged man was short, flabby, his face was terribly scarred from acne, his hair was thin and always greasy, but he did have a couple of things going for him. David was a well off computer entrepreneur who invented a way of recovering lost information, plus he was a master manipulator. David Brown chose very young and pretty women to groom. He was capable of talking them into doing anything he wanted done - including murdering the people they loved the most.

Back in 1985 David was married to a 23 year old woman named Linda Marie Bailey Brown, and together the couple had a baby named Krystal. Linda had come from a very large impoverished family in which money and food were scarce; she felt that David had "saved" her. Soon after the wedding, Linda's baby sister, Patti, moved in with David as well. Patti was not much older than David's own young daughter, Cinnamon, who lived with her father more often than her biological mother, Brenda. 14 year old Cinnamon adored her stepmother and new baby sister, and 17 year old Patti became like a sister to Cinnamon as well. To anyone looking in The Browns seemed to be a big, happy blended family, but as we know things often aren't as they seem.

When Cinnamon and Patti were first informed that David had overheard Linda and her brother plotting to kill him, the girls didn't believe it. They didn't take the claims seriously, but David insisted; he said that Linda wanted him dead so that she could have David's wealth for herself. Over a period of several months David convinced the girls that Linda was going to have him murdered, and the only way to save David's life would be to attack first! David told Cinnamon and Patti that he was too old, too frail, and too sickly to commit murder; plus, if he were to be busted, he'd never survive prison. If the girls really loved him, they'd murder Linda and keep him safe! David and the girls went over various murder scenarios until one was finally decided on. It was decided that Cinnamon should be the one to physically pull the trigger, since she was the youngest and wouldn't receive any serious prison time. David convinced his naive teenaged daughter that she'd be given nothing but a slap on the wrist, and sent home after murdering her stepmother. It was a small price to pay for saving the life of her beloved father.

During the night of March 18th, 1985, David Brown ventured into the bedroom where where both Cinnamon and Patti were sleeping. He declared, “Girls, it has to be done tonight.” Both teenagers knew exactly what David meant. Cinnamon followed the instructions which her father had given; the teenager downed multiple handfuls of pills, stumbled into the master bedroom where her beloved stepmother lay sleeping, and she shot Linda in the chest. Within a matter of seconds, little Krystal began to cry, and Patti ran to grab the baby. Linda was still alive and gurgling, so a sobbing Cinnamon aimed her pistol and shot once again. Once Linda was dead, the teen ran to a doghouse in the backyard where she collapsed; Cinnamon passed out, but not before violently vomiting up much of the medicine she'd ingested.

While his daughter and young sister in law were home doing his dirty work, David was busy securing himself an alibi. He'd driven to a late night convenience store and picked a fight with the store clerk, ensuring that no one could question his whereabouts. After enough time had passed, David returned home and summoned the police. Both he and Patti immediately blamed Cinnamon; they described her as an angry, vindictive, mentally ill teenager who truly hated her stepmother. Investigators searched everywhere for their suspect, but it was daylight when they finally found her laying inside the doghouse. There was a note pinned to the girl which read, “Dear God, please forgive me. I did not mean to hurt her”. Investigators have stated that they had a difficult time likening the girl David had described to the one they found laying on death's doorstep that morning.

As soon as she regained consciousness, a remorseful Cinnamon admitted to killing Linda; then, after speaking with her father, the teenager suddenly changed her tune. She suddenly had amnesia, Cinnamon claimed to remember absolutely nothing. As for David, police suspected him from the very get go; the man's behavior was completely off. After coming home from the convenience store David had not run into the bedroom to check on his wife, which is the first thing you'd do, right? He didn't seem too heartbroken that Linda was dead, or that his own little girl was responsible. But David's alibi was rock solid; unless Cinnamon decided to talk, there was nothing they could do. Cinnamon was found guilty of Linda's murder, and she was remanded to the California Youth Authority.

While Cinnamon lived in misery, taking the blame for everything, her father was living it up! See, David had taken out quite a substantial life insurance policy on his wife; after her murder David purchased a beautiful half million dollar home in Orange County, and guess who was still living with him? Patti, of course! It would be easy to blame Patti for some of this, but considering the fact that David had been grooming her from such a young age (he'd begun physically abusing this girl when she was just 11 years old) Patti was really nothing more than another victim. After Linda was killed, Patti took on the role of her big sister; she helped raise her niece as her own, secretly married David, and together they had a baby girl. Patti was forced to lie to everyone, she had to claim that the father of her baby had left her when she turned up pregnant. Not that this was in any way possible as Patti was not allowed out of David's sight!

Had David continued visiting Cinnamon in jail, if he hadn't tried to cut her out of his life, it's very likely she'd have stayed under his spell forever. After Cinnamon was found guilty of murdering Linda, David discontinued the visits with his daughter, he didn't write or tell her what was going on with him, and when he moved David didn't even bother giving Cinnamon his new address or phone number! Cinnamon had to call an answering service just to get in touch with her daddy! When Police told Cinnamon about the beautiful new home with the pool, the new cars her father was driving, and the fact that Patti's new baby looked an awful lot like David, Cinnamon finally decided to talk. She told them everything, agreed to convince both her father and step sister to visit her in the correction center, and Cinnamon was going to wear a wire. Over the telephone Cinnamon told David that she was ready to tell the truth, which was good enough a reason for he and Patti to visit the prison. David did his best to sweet talk Cinnamon into keeping her mouth shut, he even told the girls that they needed to swap places! Patti should take Cinnamon's place at prison while Cinnamon came home - because that's how it works, right? Though he did not admit to orchestrating the murder, after a few visits police had enough to arrest Patti and David.

Patti had been manipulated by David for so many years that she didn't know how to survive without him, she even attempted to commit suicide in his prison cell. Patti may have remained closed lipped by his side forever, had her own best friend not admitted that she'd been having an affair with David! Matter of fact, David had done his best to talk this friend into killing Patti, he had taken out a life insurance policy on her as well! Upon learning of this betrayal, Patti awoke from her spell. She finally admitted to her crimes, and Patti worked with investigators to bring David to justice.

While in prison awaiting trial, David cozied up to a badass biker and hitman named Richard Steinhart; Richard was hired to be David's bodyguard, and soon the manipulator began talking to his new best friend about the people in his life who needed to die. David offered to pay Richard a rather large sum of money if Patti, the case's lead investigator, and a couple others were murdered. While Richard agreed to do David's bidding, he was secretly wired up and working with police. Thankfully David couldn't manipulate Richard the way he had all of the young girls throughout his life.

In September of 1988 David was finally tried for the murder of Linda Bailey Brown. It wasn't until Cinnamon was on the stand that she realized how close she'd come to death on the night of Linda's murder. In all reality, David had planned to kill two birds with one stone. Matter of fact, the pills had been a second choice for David; this father had done his best to talk his 14 year old into shooting herself in the head after murdering her stepmother! But just a little bit; he had wanted Cinnamon to "knick herself" in the head with the bullet! Cinnamon had refused, thank goodness, and they had compromised on the pills; still, with the amount that she'd ingested, Cinnamon should have died.

With the testimony from Cinnamon and Patricia, David was found guilty of masterminding his wife’s murder. He was convicted of murder, setting up his own daughter to take the fall, and for hiring Richard to commit multiple murders.

Even with all the proof of what he'd done, David steadfastly maintained his innocence until the day he died in March of 2014; he lived to be 61 years of age. As for the young ladies, Patti was paroled in 1995, at the age of 23. She married a corrections officer, fought to gain custody of Heather, and then she gave birth to twin boys. It seems she's doing well. As for Cinnamon, she had received her Associate of Arts degree while incarcerated. In 1991, at the age of 21 Cinnamon was set free; she married, and has had a couple of children. Cinnamon has done her very best to live her life in complete anonymity; aside from the photo I'm sharing you can hardly find any trace of her anywhere, though she did make the news after her husband committed suicide. I have hunted down her fb page and she seems to be doing very well today; as much as I'd love to share her info I do not wish to cause her any extra stress. She seems well, and is surrounded by her own beautiful children, living in California. Then there's Linda and David's daughter, baby Krystal. She is very easy to find as she's made her presence well known on social media; she seems to be a very sweet person who has endured quite a lot in her life. After David went to prison, Krystal was sent to live with David's parents. Her grandparents never wanted her to know that her father had played a part in her mother's murder as they felt their son had been wrongly convicted. Krystal tells of the moment she realized what her father had done, someone gave her a book about the crime. Her grandparents have since passed away, leaving Krystal alone. Today she is a mother herself, and has reached out to both her sister and her aunt; she has met with Patti, and is still holding out hope that she will get to know Cinnamon in the future.

• This is one of those cases that just pulls you in, you come to care for those involved. I know I'm not the only person who feels that way about these people. The book which Ann Rule wrote about this case, "If you really loved me" is beyond excellent. It is the only true crime book I've read multiple times; yes, it is that good. One chilling aspect, it's said that the house in which Linda was killed is now haunted - in the newer versions of the book there's a photo of the ghost believed to be Linda Bailey Brown! There is also a 3 hour movie, "Love, Lies, Murder" which is also extremely well done. I'll link you, or you can search it on YouTube but keep in mind that it is told from Patti's point of view. I can also link Krystal Hinton's YouTube channel, in case anyone is interested.

Love, Lies, Murder:

https://youtu.be/X29Iio0uEnk

Krystal's YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheKrystalPegasus

#true crime #crime story #California #murder #killer kids

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itsblosseybitch · 4 years

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Well Dunne by Fred Schruers (from Rolling Stone magazine, November 7th, 1985)

The star of ‘After Hours’ knows how to produce a lot of laughs

The day Warner Bros. previewed After Hours at its Burbank, California, studio for a randomly selected public - “People who may have been coming out of Wendy’s on La Cinega” is how Griffin Dunne puts it - leading man Dunne and his co-producer, Amy Robinson, joined a line of cars stop-and-going through the gates to the studio. As he tells about it now, a month later, he mimes the part of a power-buzzed security man clutching a walkie-talkie: “Get these people out of there...Can’t let the audience see you, sir...We’re at Building C, walking the producer and the star over now...”

They hid Griffin in the projection booth till the lights went down. Then he sneaked in and listened. Very happily. “They laughed. Went crazy. You couldn’t hear the dialogue.”

A lot of his best lines got lost in the hubbub then, no? Dunne lets his swivel chair rock down from a perilous two-legged tilt and gives the serious, almost beady-eyed take meant to remind you what an alarmingly hostile world we live in: “Let that be the most serious of my problems.”

In fact, Dunne has hardly any problems just now that stand much chance of knocking him from the embrace of the bitch goddess Success. Costing roughly $4 million and described by director Martin Scorsese as “an experimental, psychological farce,” After Hours took only one September weekend to show it would clamber out of cult status and be recognized as something the studio could platform into a nice little hit.

As a producer, then, the thirty-year-old Dunne is at speed. The grudging credit the industry gave him for co-producing Chilly Scenes of Winter, at age twenty-three, and added to with 1982′s Baby, It’s You (OP NOTE: This is an error. Should be 1983), must now give way to admiration. As an actor, he’s got many people besides the studio guards referring to him as an arriving star. He’s onscreen in virtually every frame in After Hours, and his highly expressive face, which seems to be hastily if handsomely thrown together, accented with dark eyebrows and riveting brown eyes, is undeniably crucial to our comic appreciation of the very odd goings-on during the protagonist’s interminable night among the sexually flawed denizens of artsy SoHo. Whether recoiling from the kinky come-ons of Rosanna Arquette’s Marcy and Linda Fiorentino’s Kiki, feeling mousetrapped by Teri Garr’s Julie, marked for slaughter by Catherine O’Hara’s Gail or imprisoned by Verna Bloom’s June, he’s a catalog of nearly nuanced lab-rat reflexes.

The key to Dunne’s performance is clearly reaction, as Amy Robinson points out: “It was imperative in this movie that the character be very likable. Otherwise, why would you want to spend this hour and a half going through such trials and tribulations?”

Adam Brooks, who directed him in this year’s unkindly received Almost You, judges Griffin to be just the right everyman for this opening up in Scorsese’s work. “He’s alone, like other Scorsese heroes, but not obsessed. He’s more like us - a child of computers and television. Lonely, but not driven.”

“A lot of people say Griffin looks like Dudley Moore, but I think he’s a lot more like Jack Benny - his comedy works when he’s surrounded by a lot of crazy people, crazy events. He’s charming, endearing. What’s great about After Hours is that the charm gets defeated at every point and ends up being a kind of vanity - so you’ve got this nicely mounting hysteria.”

The Joseph Minion script for After Hours - dispatched to Griffin after being handed to Amy Robinson by Minion’s film-school professor, director Dusan Makavejec - caught the actor’s fancy on page 2. He could sink right into the role of Paul Hackett, a lonely and bored word processor who meets an enticing girl at a coffee shop. “I understood the speech patterns, the other characters and the tension. And the situation of a horrible date. Of being with somebody, trapped in a situation. I’m looking around the room, going ‘How do I get out of here? And how the hell did I get in here?’ Which is a pretty funny basis for a movie.”

“My only criterion for directing Griffin,” says Scorsese, “was ‘I don’t believe you. For all you know, you’re pleading for your life. If I don’t believe you, I’m not gonna print this take, and we’ll just continue till I believe you.’ He had to get in touch with something in here, he had to plead for his life. And that was - fun.”

Thomas Griffin Dunne was born June 8th, 1955, in New York City, the first of three children of Dominick and Ellen (known as Lenny). His father was a Connecticut-bred, Williams-educated stage manager en route to producer status; his mother was an actress and model raised in Nogales, Arizona, by her Mexican mother and her cattle-rancher father, Thomas Griffin. Dominick worked on everything from Howdy Doody to Playhouse 90, and when colleague Martin Manulis moved to Los Angeles in 1956, Dominick took his work and family went as well.

They settled in then quaint Beverly Hills (”Not the Iranian gun boutiques they’ve got now,” grumbles Griffin), where Griffin hung out with other showbiz whelps, like Carrie Fisher, until heading east to a prestigious old prep school. One unfortunately whimsical day, under the influence of a notorious Moby Grape album cover, he extended his middle finger toward the camera in the football-team photo. By chance, two years later, the headmaster glanced at the photo; the punishment was five swats.

(OP NOTE: I actually contacted Fay School about this photo, and they claimed they didn’t have it. In hindsight, I should have tried a different approach because, to quote Mandy-Rice Davies, “Well they would, wouldn’t they?”)

Next stop was a less stodgy boys school in Colorado, where he won a plum role in The Zoo Story as a sophomore and became “Joe Theater” on campus. By senior year, he was preparing for his greatest performance, as Iago in Othello. The evening before the big day, Griffin and a friend were in a dorm room contentedly smoking dope when the door swung open. They smothered the joint just in time to look up at the school’s “one badass” faculty member, who asked, “What’s that smell?” “There was the longest pause,” recalls Griffin. “Finally, I said ‘What smell?’ “ The smoke, he says, “just poured right out - mocked me.”

Griffin, sent packing, hitchhiked home quite certain that his proper trade was acting. He got a bit part in Medical Story as an intern hooking up an I.V. line amid much medical palaver, but they changed the diagnosis on him at the last minute. Frantically trying to memorize the new bit during a five-minute break, he burned his lip trying to light a cigarette and went before the camera lisping, sweating, shaking, and bereft of words. Actress Linda Purl took pity and wrote his lines on her forearm, where the I.V. was to go. “It was such a classy move,” he says.

Still, deciding he’d better learn the trade from scratch, Griffin migrated to New York and joined the legion of struggling actors. He was catastrophically nervous at auditions: when he went before the stern Uta Hagen to apply for her acting class, he “went up” - completely forgot the text he’d prepared from The Catcher In The Rye. So he improvised, giving the story that morning’s trip downtown as Holden Caulfield might tell it. She was alternately rapt and chuckling, and signed him on. But he was soon shown to be the dunce of a class full of working actors. Finally, one day after he set a prop door up backward for a solo exercise, then frenziedly tried to shove it the wrong way through the jamb, she took him aside and told him he was simply not ready for her class. But he begged her one more chance, and the next day he skipped forward several exercises to do an imaginary phone call. He wowed Hagen and the class and went on from there.

As he built off-Broadway credits, Dunne lived in various shabby apartments and worked odd jobs, notably, selling candy and popcorn at Radio City Music Hall, where he was stung by the indifference of the Amazonian Rockettes: “They certainly had no time for a guy in a polyester zip-up baby-blue jacket with a cadet hat and shoes two sizes too big that had belonged to an usher who died of old age.”

He met Amy Robinson, who had gone from Scorsese’s Mean Streets to searching for work, at a party. With a third actor, Mark Metcalf, they became upstart movie producers by optioning Ann Beattie’s Chilly Scenes of Winter. Joan Micklin Silver came in as screenwriter and director, and they got studio financing to make a cult prestige item. It marked the beginning of a time of happy overwork for Griffin. He came back from shooting a TV film called The Wall in Poland (opposite Rosanna Arquette) to do the play Coming Attractions, which he then left to do John Landis’ film An American Werewolf in London.

He had come back to work full-time on producing Baby, It’s You when horrible news came: his sister, Dominique, a promising young actress, was strangled to death at the age of twenty-two by her boyfriend, a chef at Ma Maison.

“It brought all of us who were left together for every moment for a year between what happened and the verdict,” says Dominick Dunne. “It’s never for a moment not a part of you. The point is, you have to go on, you have to cope, to live your life. He threw himself into his work.”

Baby, It’s You was completed that year and dedicated to his sister. Then, even as he helped with script revisions to After Hours, Griffin was before the cameras in Adam Brooks’ Almost You. It’s about a couple suffering from the young man’s restlessness, and though Dunne and Brooke Adams agreed to do it while they were very much a couple, by the time it got financing, they were just friends. “I guess you could say they had a lot to work with,” says Brooks. “but that never interfered with the production.”

Griffin’s been seeing New York actress Ellen Barkin lately; she was on his arm for the New York premiere of the film and afterward was a proud but not proprietary presence as he accepted congratulations well into the night from a buzzing crowd of friends at a downtown restaurant. He was due to head cross-country for promotional chores, but he’s got further plans for his unusually hyphenated career. He and Amy Robinson have optioned the hit play The Foreigner, written by the late Larry Shue. And after the rigors of making After Hours on a nocturnal schedule, Griffin is very happy to have the phone plugged back in and the shades up.

(OP NOTE: As I mentioned in the transcript for the American Film article, The Foreigner never materialized as a feature film, though Robin Williams was attached at one point. That’s all the information I have about that at the moment.)

“I noticed that Griffin is the kind of guy who gets around a lot, parties a lot,” says Scorsese, “and I knew the hardest part of his job was sustaining the anxiety for eight weeks of shooting.” The director pauses for a grin that demands to be called devilish. “So I told him, ‘No sex for eight weeks. We’ve got careers on the line here. I don’t want you up at night talking, wasting your time and your precious bodily fluids.’

“Really, the idea was to contain him and keep him in this night world for eight weeks, ‘cause his performance depended on anxiety, and if he was satisfied, he would never be able to get that.”

Dunne, reminded later of the challenge, tips back his chair and grins to himself. “Aw, that was easy to live up to,” he says, then waits a beat to settle into the deadpan expression that is such a comic weapon for him. “Did you ever try to get a date a six-thirty in the morning?”

#griffin dunne #rolling stone #rolling stone magazine #vintage magazines #archive #journalism #martin scorsese #after hours #amy robinson #after hours 1985

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praphit · 4 years

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BAMFs of 2019

Here's last year’s CHAMP -

THANOS

(Thanos: ”WTF did you just say?” #Mood)

Let's see if he made it back.

But, first, let’s take a look at some honorable mentions, as well as some people who were trying too hard:

Rey -

Of course she is a total BAMF. So, why isn't she on this list? 3 REASONS: 1) She looks like a racist ex that I once dated. How can someone who decided to date you (a black man) be racist? Did y'all see the movie "Get Out"? You didn't know that the story was based off one of my relationships did you? So, yeah, she ain't ever gettin on this list.

2) The force is cheating - their I said it.

3) This last movie sucked. This rap she did didn't help her cause.

ALSO - there’s this - her rapping. I repeat, she ain’t ever getting on this list.

Nic Cage - cuz he's Nic bleepin Cage

Cardi B - cuz she’s Cardi bleepin B

Hooded Justice - if only he had been in more episodes. A black man disguising himself in a hood, as well as white, to fight evil in his neighborhood, that the police force (of which he is a part of) refuses to stop. Hell yeah! I love "Watchmen".

Lupita! - her brilliantly scary performance in "Us" is def BAMF material.

The Rock - honestly, The Rock is so awesome, and has been for so long, that he needs to be extra awesome to make it.

Trying too Hard. Please STOP:

Batwoman -

I like Ruby, but she's like an elf. She's an elf model. It's not bad to be an elf model, but... If a villain in Gotham, let's say "Bane"

has me cornered, and Batwoman shows up to "rescue me", Imma start praying. He'd swing her around by that red hair of hers until her head pops off.

Rambo - He’s like 80! C’mon, Sly. Please STOP.

Dark Phoenix - a movie about her temper tantrum

Joker -

- not with all of that awkward dancing he was doing

NOW, finally, the top Bad Ass Muthas of 2019!

12) Greta -

Say what you will about climate change, but you can't deny her passion and dedication, and how inspiring it is (unless you're Prez Trump or Fox News) to see and hear a kid like her do her thing. I admit that her winning the honor of "Person of the Year" is too much. But, we all wish our kids would be this dedicated to what they believe is positive change. Plus, she has a kickass soundtrack. Gets me hyped every time!

11) Dave Chappelle

Back in the day, comedians used to be brought on stage, tasked with the difficult job of making a room full of different types of people laugh. Now, it's not just about the job of jokes, but you have to do so without offending anyone, and with clean living. When did we start holding a comedian's behavior to a higher standard than we do elected officials? Dave saw this, and kept doing what made him popular anyway. In a world where most comedians are running scared from difficult topics, Dave plunges right in. BAD ASS.

10) Linda Hamilton -

Old as bleep! We have what's-her-face here,

who is kinda badass herself, but despite being a badass cyborg (or whatever the hell she is), she still felt the need to ask for help from Linda bleepin Hamilton. LH traded her Hospice bingo card in for some guns and went to town on some machines! It'd be like if your home was being surrounded by aliens, and despite you having some fire power in your home and 911 at your disposal, everyone's first thought is to call grandma. That'd have to be one BAMF of a granny!

9) Masvidal -

Allow me to describe this brotha to y'all who might not know.

Some guy was talkin smack to Masvidal, and that guy got kneed in the face by Masvidal (fastest knock out in UFC history = 5 secs). Some guy was arrogant enough to say he was the baddest mofo around, and Masvidal scheduled a fight with this dude for a literal baddest mofo around belt. Plus, that same night of the fight, when he was talking to the media after he had won, he started mocking Conor McGregor, talkin bout Conor don't want none of this. He was talking trash, publicly, about Conor, while people were feeding him pizza. BADASS!

If there is ever a fork in the road, and on one side you see The Rock, Jason Statham, and Will Smith chasing after you, and the other you have Masvidal sitting down, eating a slice of pizza, you had better take your chances with the three action heroes over this BAMF.

8) Nunes -

If you don't know who she is, I wouldn't be surprised. The UFC botched her marketing before and after she fought and beat (badly) Ronda Rousey - yeah, RONDA ROUSEY; remember her? Nunes pretty much ended her career.

The UFC was so certain that Ronda was going to win, and so shocked when she lost, that they missed an opp to get behind a fighter who is better than Ronda (though mad respect for Ronda), and is currently holding TWO belts (first woman to do so). ALSO, she's the first openly gay UFC champ in history. She's so sweet too! - well, unless you're locked in the octagon with her, then she turns into a werewolf.

7) MANDO

I don't know about you, but all of this talk of teamwork from comic book movies can be a bit tiresome. The Avengers, The Justice League, The X-Men. Everybody wants to form a band. What happened to solo acts? What happened to lone rangers? People may say "There's no I in TEAM." Yeah, that's the prob! What about I?! Sometimes, you're Justin Timberlake, and the rest of the group is simply holding you back. That's Mando. He's Disney's updated (non-racist, unless you’re talkin drones) Lone Ranger. He doesn't need teamwork (maybe a weekly cameo, and a baby tag-along, but that's it!). He has beaten up gangs of robots, burnt people up, taken people out Jason Voorhees style, cut people in half, blown people up, blown off heads, BUT because it's Disney, we haven't seen any of that good stuff. He'd be higher on this list if they gave my man an R-rating.

6) Capt Marvel -

Captain Marvel is definitely the most powerful person on this list. She is probably also the fiercest person on this list. In Endgame, when she saw her black daddy (Nick Fury) on the screen, talkin bout Thanos snapped him away, and then something snapped inside of her, and she said "I'm going to go kill that mofo." The Avengers accompanied her, but I don't think she would have needed their help. She didn't really need their help in the final showdown with Thanos. He threw her aside, but you know she was coming back, until Tony got in her way. She is so fiery that it wouldn't surprise me if in her sequel, she goes back in time in order to rematch Thanos by herself, to prove her dominance. The reason that she's not higher on the list is because she's so damned destructive. She's just like The Hulk in the fact that she shows up to destroy everything. Now, she's a lot more focused than The Hulk, but she's so powerful that she does more damage. And she doesn't have much of a personality (so far), so it's hard to gauge her badassery of attitude, you know?? Like, if you're a villain, and you get in the way of a gorilla, that gorilla will destroy you in a very spectacularly badass way, but... it's a gorilla, you know??

I’M NOT CALLING HER A GORILLA. Don’t go snitching on me to her.

I just don’t know if she’s a hero or simply has anger management issues. Is she badass or too powerful not to do badass things?

Either way, RESPECT... or she'll come for that ass.

TIME FOR A BREAK -

Let’s break from all of this badassery with some cuteness

Look how cute it is - I CAN’T TAKE IT!

Ok, back to action.

5) Iron Man -

Look, Iron-Man started this shit! Who knows what would have become of the MCU had Robert Downey Jr. blew it. Tony Stark assembled the team (granted, he was partly the reason for the break-up), he gave us Spider-Man (with that suit) (he also gave us Ultron, but let's not get bogged down with details), he held his own against Thanos in "Infinity War",

Dr. Strange thought HIM worthy of saving, and no way time travel would have worked in "Endgame" without him. Plus, in the very end, he out-smarted Thanos, and countered Thanos' one-liner ("I am inevitable.") with his own ("And I... [five minutes later - I swear that's what it felt like] am Iron-Man.").

Paid the ultimate sacrifice. Hell yeah, he's on this list. I felt kinda bad for his wife. After IM3, she was barely around. And when Tony died, she was barely comforted... cuz nobody knew her. Oh, well.. she be aiight.

4) Thanos -

This dude saw his demise coming, and still went straight ahead towards the foes who cut his head off. BADASS! He was exceptionally crafty in playing The Avengers and blowing up their base. Then, he was just sitting around waiting for the main Avengers (Capt, Iron, and Fat Thor). He wanted to gloat a bit first. BADASS! And had Gamora not betrayed him, and had given him the gaunlet, he would have beaten The Avengers AGAIN!

He even died with a cool pose (he took a knee and got his "Thinking Man" on). BADASS!

3) Arya Stark -

This young lady scared the bleep out of me. She has my fear AND respect. I was actually scared for whomever her current target was... I was like "Run, fool! She gonna get ya! Damn, Arya, you didn't have to do them like that!"

Now, I know I talked about Ruby Rose being a ridiculous choice for Batwoman, but if Arya Stark left on a voyage to Gotham and became Batwoman, I'd buy that. I can see her killing Bane very slowly. This woman is a frickin psychopath, and I love it. She's fearless! She also went up against the top cheese of the white walkers. Y'all remember that badass move she had at the end!

YES! I only wish she had said something cool when she took him out, like... "You've been Starked." No, that's terrible, but something like that. I wish she was the one sitting on the throne, but they... you know... did what they did.

2) Capt America -

I think that it's fair to say that Capt America was the rock of The Avengers After the snap, he was the only one to keep his shit together; he actually worked to help others keep their shit together.

Meanwhile, Widow is crying in the dark every night while having a PB sandwich and bourbon dinner. And she just gave up on her hair.

Thor became an alcoholic.

And you could say Hulk was ok, but... was he?

I mean, that ain't right. This is avoidance behavior if I've ever seen it.

But, Capt kept it together. Then, that fight with Thanos at the end was one of, if not THE best one on one fight of the series. Using both Thor weapons, meaning he was both badass on a fighting level and a righteousness level - which ain't easy to accomplish. And when he straped tight his shield in that trailer, and gritted his teeth - hell yeah!

Chills. Capt to Thanos: You motha bleeper"

1) John Wick -

Three movies with no time in-between to shower, sleep, take a piss, brush his teeth, NOTHING! His life for the last few years (it seems like) has been running, lurking, hiding, beating ass.. and beating ass some more. Lord knows what this dude's kill count is up to. His nickname is "Baba Yaga" Have y'all seen what the actual Baba Yaga looks like?

Terrifying. And yet, not as terrifying as John Wick when he's angry at you.

The amount of endurance and focus that has gone into this long stint of murdering (only fueled by rage and a few shots of bourbon from time to time) is uncanny.

In JW3 he makes a guy eat a book (imagine what must be done to a person's jaw for that to happen), he gets shot, stabbed, hit my two cars (seconds within each other)... Nah, y'all ain't hear me! TWO CARS! The people in the cars were trying to kill him! He fought two super ninjas - like IP Man caliber, he beat up an army of soldiers, crawled through a desert, got shot by a friend who betrayed him, fell off of a building (bouncing around a few times before hitting the pavement), and was somehow still good to schedule a fourth movie after all of that - which I assume will pickup right there.

He doesn't have any superpowers (though you wouldn't know), but his tenacity is to be envied, and outdoes everyone else's on this list.

BAMF!!!

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allgirlsareprincesses · 5 years

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Why Jasmine is the greatest Disney Princess

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while and I wanted to do more research before I did, but then the new Aladdin (2019) came out and HERE WE ARE. So this is me winging it with what I hope is still a pretty convincing case for Jasmine being the greatest Disney Princess so far.

What makes a great Disney Princess? Well, you could argue they all have something to offer: Snow White rocked some impressive sarcasm for a 14-year-old, Cinderella was pretty bold for her time, Sleeping Beauty was a dreamer with epic hair, Ariel is spunky and brave, Belle is bookish and kind, Pocahontas is regal and self-sacrificing, Rapunzel is sweet and empathetic, Tiana is passionate and hard-working, Merida is independent, and Anna is loving and faithful. There are others I didn’t include, of course, but the point is that there’s something to admire about every princess, and they all represent the modern woman in their own way. But did they need to be princesses in order to be these amazing characters? With the possible exceptions of Pocahontas and maybe Merida, I’d argue no. These stories would hardly be different, for the character at least, if she was any non-royal woman. And yes, I know Cinderella and Belle only became princesses by marriage, but even then, their stories could have been the same with any powerful man. It didn’t have to be a prince.

Of course, historical princesses and fantasy princesses are not the same thing, and we’re definitely talking about the latter here. Except for a few incredible and very unique ladies, most historical princesses were property whose carefully-preserved virginity was sold for a treaty, land, or a lot of money. They often lived and died miserable, their spectacular portraits notwithstanding. Fantasy princesses are, on the other hand, unabashed wish fulfillment for centuries of women who had little to hope for. These are the beautiful, powerful women we wish we could be, how we might see ourselves if our circumstances were different and nothing prevented us from realizing our potential. Fantasy princesses live the lives we want, and Disney princesses live the most flawless, perfect, clean version of that life. So by that metric, the greatest Disney princess might be the one who lives the most fully realized life that most girls can aspire to.

Jasmine in the original 1992 film

So, let’s talk about what we know of Jasmine (animated by the brilliant Mark Henn) from her introduction in the animated film. The first we see of her, she’s just rejected a suitor, so right out of the gate, we know she’s got no time for egomaniacs. A great trait, but not necessarily unique just yet. Belle also had zero tolerance for pompous douchebags. Next, we get some exposition setting up her conflict (and Aladdin’s) in that she’s legally bound to marry a prince, and she has a deadline. Naturally, she wants to marry for love, which is again sweet but not really original: Aurora wanted to marry for love, too, despite her betrothal. Then, Jasmine mentions that she’s never done a thing on her own, never had any real friends, and never even been outside the palace walls. This seems to be a hint that she might be spoiled and naive, if still sympathetic and appealing.

Finally, we get the line about “Maybe I don’t want to be a princess any more!” Ah, now that’s new. What does this mean? Is she declaring her ultimate goal, to reject her title and birthright, and become something new? Or is this setting up a lesson she’s going to learn about embracing her role? We don’t know, but suddenly we’re paying attention, trying to figure out if this is a spoiled brat or a girl on the verge of becoming a fully-realized woman. The next time we see her, Jasmine follows through on this thought, escaping over the palace wall to take her future into her own hands. We know now that, foolish or not, this is a woman with agency, who’s going to move the plot forward through her own actions rather than sit around and be an object for the hero.

In the market, we see Jasmine’s wonder at the world she’s never seen, but more importantly, we learn that she’s not just a self-absorbed teenager: she has a kind heart. She notices a hungry child and gives them food. True, she doesn’t understand that she needs to pay because she’s never had to do that, which is a consequence of her tremendous privilege. But, for someone who apparently had never before had direct contact with her people, simply recognizing hunger and instinctively seeking to correct it is encouraging. Importantly, this is also the first time we see her actions mirror Aladdin’s: we saw him offer food to a child only a few scenes before. The audience is starting to recognize that this girl is our hero’s equal (if not more).

Now, we come to the inevitable Damsel in Distress moment, and this is where Jasmine really shines. Caught off-guard by the abrupt cruelty of the outside world, she’s not quite able to talk her way out of having her hand chopped off for stealing, but thankfully Aladdin steps in to help. Jasmine, rather than being rattled and afraid, is intrigued and doesn’t miss a beat when her savior whispers “Just play along!” She follows his cues and immediately gives an Oscar-worthy performance as his insane sister, getting so into the ruse that she gives a glassy-eyed greeting to a camel as if it’s her doctor. To my knowledge, this kind of quick thinking is totally unique among the Disney princesses, certainly at the time. Even better, as we’ll see, Jasmine uses her smarts and acting ability several more times in the film, so this scene isn’t just a contrived meet-cute.

On the rooftops, we learn more about Jasmine: she’s genuinely grateful, she can graciously take a compliment (her blush when Aladdin tells her she “stands out” is adorable), and she is, in her own words “a fast learner,” at least when it comes to imitating Aladdin’s street sense. Finally, they arrive at his hovel and she’s entranced by his apparent freedom. Upon hearing how impressive he finds the palace, however, we see her sink back into her own problems, focusing on what she doesn’t have rather than her extraordinary wealth and luxury. From the audience’s perspective, this is definitely a flaw, but one that makes sense given her life experience up to that point. Once she and Aladdin connect over their mutual feeling of being “trapped,” Jasmine completely succumbs to his clumsy charms, and they nearly share a kiss UNTIL….

They are surprised by palace guards and the iconic “Do you trust me?” exchange takes place (this will set the tone for their entire relationship throughout all of the animated content that came after, but more on that later). Aladdin is captured and without a second thought, Jasmine reveals herself and in a commanding, regal tone, ORDERS the guards to release him. For a girl who declared only a few scenes ago that she didn’t “want to be a princess any more,” she changed her tune FAST when it suited her. In fact, from this point onward, she embraces her power and wields her position like a weapon, never again seeming to question her role as Princess of Agrabah. When the guards try to question her, she tells them her actions are “not your concern” and when they tell her she’ll have to take her complaint to Jafar, she gives the most menacing glare of any Disney heroine, ever (fight me), with a sinister “Believe me, I will.”

A quick note before we continue our recap of Jasmine’s epic badassery: during production of the animated Aladdin, the crew had a bit of a crisis with Jasmine being so amazing that she completely overshadowed the hero. Studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg (a horrible human who nonetheless brought a few nuggets of wisdom to the Disney Animation Renaissance of the 90s) is on tape saying he understands why Aladdin would like Jasmine, because she’s fantastic, but that he doesn’t understand why Jasmine would like him. At the time, Aladdin was written and drawn younger, scrawnier, more boy than man and more befitting his “street rat” title. There was a song about his mother, which also contributed to the impression of him as a child, and it quickly became clear that the hero was not really worthy of the heroine, as written. Aladdin was completely redesigned by supervising animator Glen Keane to have a more adult, heroic physique (despite the fact that much of his animation had already been completed), the mother character was removed, and Aladdin’s personality was patterned after popular film stars like Tom Cruise. To further “age up” the cast for this new, more adult take on the story, Jasmine voice actor Linda Larkin was trained to record all her lines in a lower register than her natural voice, making Jasmine sound more like a woman than a girl.

So, back to the palace (which, remember, she’d left because she didn’t “want to be a princess any more”) and Jasmine marching right up to Jafar to get in his face about the boy he took from the market. Still with that same commanding tone she used with the guards, the princess wastes no time on pleasantries and invades Jafar’s personal space, demanding answers and admitting no resistance. When he accuses Aladdin of kidnapping her, Jasmine doesn’t hesitate to tell Jafar she ran away, clearly more concerned about the boy’s freedom than any consequences she might suffer for her actions. But when she hears that Aladdin was executed, Jasmine mourns…. Not only for the kind young man who helped her, but for the damage that her selfishness caused. Though she blames Jafar when speaking to her father, Jasmine reveals to Rajah that she feels Aladdin’s death was “all [her] fault.” It’s not supposed to be her story, but we’re clearly seeing the princess learn a powerful lesson about the consequences of her actions. This is why we see Jasmine continue to mourn for multiple scenes, really right up until she realizes that Prince Ali is Aladdin: the guilt she feels is devastating. She’s reaching a new level of moral maturity even as the object of her affections is constructing an elaborate lie to win her back.

When Jafar is chastised by the Sultan for executing a criminal without consulting him first, he makes a silky and obviously insincere apology to Jasmine, who utters possibly her best line of the film: “At least some good will come of my being forced to marry. When I am Queen, I will have the power to get rid of YOU!” And then she marches off. DAMN, GIRL. And the best part is that Jafar takes her seriously. He knows that was no empty threat, and he discusses with Iago whether Jasmine will have him banished or simply beheaded. Tell me, when has a truly menacing Disney villain ever been that TERRIFIED of the heroine? That’s power, people, the kind that most women can only dream about. Jasmine has it and she’s going to USE IT. Jasmine, First of Her Name, Queen of Agrabah….

Sorry, where was I? Oh yes, Jasmine scaring the sh*t out of Jafar like the badass b*tch she is. So anyway, Jafar realizes the only path open to him is to marry Jasmine (and then kill her, of course), so we see that plot being hatched just as Prince Ali comes to town. Unsurprisingly, Jasmine is even less impressed by the princely pomp and circumstance than usual, if that’s possible, and she literally ignores the parade when she realizes what it is. Then she overhears Ali bragging to Jafar and the Sultan that he will “win your daughter” and she snaps with undisguised fury: “How dare you! All of you! Standing around deciding my future? I am not a prize to be won!” And again with the storming off (there’s a lot of that, I mean she’s nearly 18, after all). But seriously, this woman is my feminist icon. She literally just took down a potential suitor, her own father THE KING, and the second most powerful man in the kingdom with one line.

Finally, Ali shows up at her balcony and Jasmine is blunt: “I do NOT want to see you. Just leave me alone.” Of course, when Ali takes off his turban, she recognizes him immediately. She doubts for a moment when he lies to her, and then he starts attempting to impress her. This is the second time we see Jasmine turn to her considerable acting skills, and the first time she uses her considerable powers of seduction to fool a man: she stalks toward Ali like a she-wolf, telling him everything he wants to hear. She takes his compliment about her beauty (and remember, we’ve already seen her blushingly accept that same compliment before) and turns it into a weapon against him, drawing him in only to put him in his place as a “swaggering peacock.”

Naturally, Jasmine is intrigued by the magic carpet and the opportunity to taste freedom again, but it’s Aladdin’s ultimate tell of “Do you trust me?” that finally draws her into his arms and out into the night sky. Love, for this princess, is an expression of her desire for freedom: it’s what she chooses to do with that freedom, more than an end in itself. And both the music and lyrics of “A Whole New World” speak to that freedom as much as or more than romantic love. For two people who feel “trapped,” this song is the ultimate anthem. And as they soar, Aladdin tosses an apple to Jasmine with his signature move, and she’s again certain that it’s him. Rather than confront him directly about his lie, she again uses her smarts and performing ability to entrap Ali into admitting he’s Aladdin. She really lets loose on him once he realizes he’s caught, asking if he thinks she’s stupid. Then, Jasmine demands the truth…. And of course she doesn’t get it. Though this naivete could be viewed as a flaw, we know that their early relationship was built on trust, so it makes sense for Jasmine to bestow this on her suitor without reservation. We’ve seen so much of her harsher side ever since Aladdin was dragged away a prisoner, so this glimpse of her soft heart is refreshing and reminds us of why she is so extraordinary.

Back at the palace, Jasmine is in full teen-girl-in-love mode, having her first kiss and then dreamily humming as she brushes her hair (this is the only time we see her hair unbound in the film, signifying her achievement of freedom through her love for Aladdin). Upon discovering Jafar’s plot to marry her, Jasmine of course refuses forcefully, declaring without hesitation her love for Prince Ali. During the ensuing confrontation, Jasmine is a bit more the object for Aladdin than his equal, unlike in the rest of the film, but this doesn’t last. We next see her excitedly preparing to introduce her betrothed to the kingdom, even as he tries to confess the truth to her. While this analysis focuses on Jasmine, it’s notable Aladdin respects her enough to attempt to admit his lies and reveal his true identity, however belated. This shows how worthy she is, that in spite of the risk of losing her, Aladdin wants to be honest and be her equal partner. This is another theme we’ll come back to later.

When Jafar steals the lamp and makes himself Sultan, he demands that Jasmine and her father bow to him. Once again, she defiantly refuses, even as her own father begins to bend in submission. When Aladdin’s identity is then revealed, Jasmine is understandably startled, but there’s no indication she’s deeply hurt or angry, especially as she’s confronted with a much greater immediate threat in Jafar, and that Aladdin is obviously attempting to protect her. Alone with Jafar and reduced to a slave girl in chains, Jasmine still tries to fight back in any way she can. She pleads with Jafar to show mercy to her father, then throws a goblet of wine in his face when he suggests she marry him. Understandably, she’s terrified when Jafar uses a wish to attempt to force her to fall in love with him. Again, since giving her love is Jasmine’s ultimate expression of her desire for freedom, to be forced to love against her will is the greatest possible threat to that freedom. It’s not just that it’s a heinous thing for any woman or person, but that it’s the worst for Jasmine, specifically, because of what we know of her character.

A quick note here about the similarity of Jasmine’s situation to another princess who has recently joined the Disney family: Princess Leia. Like Jasmine, she is captured and chained by a villain (Jabba the Hutt) and dressed in a “sexy slave” outfit meant to demean her as a sexual object. Also like Jasmine, Leia keeps fighting back, and eventually finds an opportunity to turn the tables on her lascivious captor and use the conditions of her captivity (literally, her chains) to destroy him. In both cases, there tends to be undue audience attention to how sexy the character looks (hello, Male Gaze), rather than how she uses her strengths to defeat the villain.

So then, Jasmine spots Aladdin creeping up the steal the lamp, and this is where she cements her place as the greatest Disney princess, IMO. Just as she has several times before, she uses her wits and her Oscar-worthy acting skills, and makes Jafar believe that his wish has been granted. In a startlingly mature turn for a G-rated film, Jasmine uses her sexual appeal as a weapon against the villain, to enable her lover to defeat him. All undulating hips and shoulders, a sultry purr, and excessive flattery, she slinks toward Jafar, distracting him as Aladdin draws closer to the lamp. When it seems Jafar might suddenly notice his enemy, Jasmine takes the drastic and self-sacrificial step of pulling him in for a passionate kiss. What’s notable about this moment is that Aladdin, in a classically male possessive moment, becomes just as distracted as Jafar, and misses the opportunity Jasmine gave him. It’s another example of how, though Aladdin has many wonderful qualities, the princess really is still out of his league. The filmmakers made her so brilliant that it’s tough for the “diamond in the rough” main character to measure up.

Her ruse having ultimately failed, Jasmine still tries to fight back physically against Jafar, but of course she can’t. But Aladdin can, so he yells to her to get the lamp and she nearly does, until Jafar traps her in a massive hourglass. At this point, she’s back into Damsel in Distress mode since it is after all Aladdin’s story (I guess), but thankfully our hero uses his own cunning to trap Jafar in time to free Jasmine. To his credit, the first thing Aladdin does when he faces his lady after the battle is apologize for lying. Her response is perfect: “I know why you did.” She doesn’t say it’s okay, she just expresses empathy for him, because she doesn’t doubt his feelings for her. His judgement, maybe, but not his love. And then, she doesn’t hesitate to express her love for him, directly. And finally, when Aladdin tells her he must do the right thing and “stop pretending to be something [he’s] not,” she says “I understand.” She accepts that him making the right decision means they can’t be together. It hurts for sure, but she has the moral fortitude to cope with it. Seriously, Aladdin doesn’t deserve this goddess.

So Aladdin makes the right choice and frees the Genie, and then the Sultan changes the law so Jasmine can marry him. Her father’s justification for this decision is that Aladdin “proved his worth,” rather than that his daughter has the right to choose ANY suitor she likes, which is kind of unfortunate. If anyone has proved their worth at this point in the story, it’s Jasmine, who has defended herself, her family, her city, and her lover throughout the film. Fortunately, this is something the creators of the 2019 film recognized and corrected…. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As far as we knew at the end of the original film, Aladdin and Jasmine had married, and I believe that even if you considered ONLY this movie canon, the point that Jasmine is the greatest Disney princess stands on solid ground. But as we know, that was NOT the last we saw of these characters, and all the content since then has only reinforced how uniquely awesome Jasmine is.

Jasmine in the animated sequel content

After the smash success of Aladdin in the theaters, and the Little Mermaid TV show, Disney read the tea leaves and decided to create the first of its direct-to-video sequels. These cheaply-made, poorly-written debacles (often derisively referred to as “cheapquels”) would be a staple of studio income for some time, and were an intense topic of debate as well. That’s a tale for another day, but the point is that the first of these was The Return of Jafar, in 1994.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this film simply because it’s horrible and I have zero desire to watch it again, but I remember Jasmine being a lot more damsel-in-distress and less badass than she was in the original film, right down to her voice being higher than the carefully-crafted and mature vocals she had in the theatrical release. The film was mostly designed to set up the TV show, by removing the obvious remaining threat of Jafar, rehabilitating Iago for additional comic relief, and bringing back the Genie. It did all of these poorly, but the show afterward was better for having these issues resolved before it began. And the series, whatever its faults, had lots and lots of great Jasmine moments.

For example, in only the second episode of the entire series, Bad Mood Rising, Aladdin and Jasmine are sent on a diplomatic mission to a neighboring kingdom, to establish trade. Interestingly, there’s no indication that it’s Aladdin’s mission, merely that the two of them are “the delegation from Agrabah” and the episode starts with Jasmine giving Aladdin crap for his lack of diplomatic experience. They find the kingdom devastated by famine, and discover this is because the king, a young child, is enchanted such that his moods determine the weather. The kid’s boredom and tantrums are causing his people to suffer, so our heroes attempt to entertain him. Only Jasmine succeeds by telling him a story, in a delightfully direct reference to Scheherazade from the original 1001 Arabian Nights. The boy king is so fascinated by Jasmine’s storytelling, he commands her to stay with him forever.

At first, Aladdin and Jasmine try to escape, but when confronted with the suffering of the people, Jasmine agrees to stay with the king. Aladdin of course protests, and Jasmine utters my absolute favorite line ever: “I was raised a princess, Aladdin. And a princess knows: the needs of the people outweigh her own.” Like WHAAAAAT? I was about nine when I saw this and I swear it blew my tiny mind. I loved princesses, but the idea of them having a responsibility to their subjects had never once crossed my mind. Hearing Jasmine declare herself a servant and protector of the people completely changed my perspective on mythical (and to some extent, actual) royalty, and influenced my opinions of fictional princesses forever.

Jasmine freely chooses to go with the young king, even refusing to accompany Aladdin when he comes back for her again, but we see her mourning the life she lost. Even in a cheap and immature kids’ show, it’s clear that she’s made a real sacrifice to save the people. Thankfully, our heroes are able to teach the boy king that being kind feels good, and he releases the princess back to her city. I noticed when rewatching this episode that Aladdin’s first instinct is always fighting and physical aggression, whereas Jasmine turns to diplomacy. This is both a trend throughout the series, and also a setup for Aladdin’s eventual maturation. The show nearly always casts Aladdin’s aggressive stance as mistaken, which is an interesting commentary given the time.

In a much later episode, called “The Ethereal,” Jasmine has a dream foretelling the destruction of Agrabah. She is, of course, extremely disturbed, especially when events from her dream start occurring in sequence. Eventually a sort of Angel of Death called The Ethereal arrives to pass judgement on the city. We are made to understand that this is a very serious threat, as this same being has already destroyed Atlantis, Pompeii, and Babylon. While Aladdin attempts to make a magical spear that will destroy The Ethereal, Jasmine and her father take her on a tour of Agrabah’s wonders, to convince her to spare the city. They show her the fine library, the marketplace, and works of art, but The Ethereal is unimpressed. She begins to rain fire down on Agrabah in a fairly Biblical vision of the apocalypse, complete with smoking rubble and screaming citizens.

Aladdin attempts to use his spear to nullify the Ethereal’s powers, but his efforts fail. Our heroes come to accept that the city will be destroyed, so they turn their attention to saving as many of Agrabah’s people as they can. Jasmine sees a child about to be crushed by falling debris, so she uses the same pole-vaulting move Aladdin taught her at the beginning of the theatrical film (nice continuity, Disney TV writers!) to leap over the rubble and push the boy out of the way. She is then crushed by the falling tower. Just in case you weren’t SURE that they just killed off the princess in a Disney property, they have Aladdin finding her body in the rubble and saying in a devastated whisper, “She…. she’s gone.”

Holy sh*t, Disney, did you just DO that??? What? Keep in mind that this is at least two years before Hercules was released in theaters, in which Meg was also crushed by a falling column when she pushed Herc out of the way. So not only did Jasmine sacrifice herself first, as far as audiences were concerned, but she did so for her people, not just her lover. This is not to say that Meg’s act was selfish, of course, but it’s notable that Jasmine’s sacrifice was for someone she wasn’t particularly close to, yet she acted without hesitation all the same.

As the people of Agrabah visibly mourn their princess, The Ethereal floats down with a smile and says “I have seen what I needed to see. Your princess’s sacrifice makes it clear: she understood.” She restores Agrabah, then resurrects Jasmine, who tells Aladdin “It’s the people. The people make Agrabah great.” The Ethereal then warns them not to forget this lesson, and leaves.

Though these are the two episodes that most stand out in my mind, they clearly demonstrate that Jasmine thinks of herself not as Aladdin’s girlfriend, but as a public servant, a political figure with responsibilities to her people and a genuinely empathetic heart for them. It makes very clear that when the Sultan’s reign ends, Jasmine will absolutely be the ruler of Agrabah. While this is never stated explicitly to my memory, it’s obvious that Jasmine would be the wisdom and power behind the throne, as there is no clear arc built around preparing Aladdin for any kind of leadership. Despite the Sultan’s proclamation in the original film that Aladdin will be Sultan, it seems he’s really more of Jasmine’s consort, which appears to suit both of them just fine.

This leads me to my last point about the TV series, and one that segues well into the “threequel” that ended the animated content: Aladdin and Jasmine’s relationship is treated in a surprisingly mature fashion. What I mean is, though the writing on the show is often cheesy and a little cringeworthy, this is also a kids’ show that uniquely features a committed, long-term adult relationship. They often reference their plans to marry, and frequently say “I love you” to one another. Though there are ups and downs in their relationship, they remain committed and mostly very honest with one another, consistently demonstrating that their bond still rests on that trust that was so heavily emphasized in the 1992 film.

One episode in particular demonstrates this deep commitment, called Eye of the Beholder. In it, recurring villainess Mirage transforms Jasmine into a snake, to test Aladdin’s love. Aladdin determinedly sets out to find a way to break the spell and change Jasmine back. When they are unable to find an antidote, a devastated Jasmine tells Aladdin to leave her, believing that she will be a snake forever. Instead of leaving, Aladdin eats an enchanted fruit that also turns HIM into a snake, declaring to her “If we can’t be together as humans, then we’ll be together as snakes.” A furious Mirage screams “No, this was supposed to tear you apart, not bring you closer together!” And of course the episode ends with them being transformed back into their human forms.

While this is definitely more of an Aladdin moment than a Jasmine one, it’s important that her lover is shown being committed to her, because it demonstrates that he is truly worthy of her. Remember that in the original film, it was a major problem during production that Jasmine overshadowed Aladdin, so seeing him grow and become an equal partner is tremendously important to keep the audience invested in their relationship. I appreciate that instead of forced breakup plotlines, the writers of the series chose to show Aladdin and Jasmine growing even closer over the course of the show’s run, making them excellent romantic role models for kids.

Eventually, Disney chose to bring Aladdin and Jasmine’s story to a close, creating Aladdin and the King of Thieves in 1996. Blessedly, this film again featured Robin Williams as the Genie, and some much better animation than what we saw in Return of Jafar or the TV series. The story started with an obnoxiously-Westernized wedding, which was then interrupted by the appearance of the legendary 40 Thieves. We see here the return of Badass Jasmine, who punches out one of the thieves as payback for “ruining [her] wedding.”

Consulting an Oracle, Aladdin learns that his father, whom he had presumed dead, is still alive. There next follows another of my favorite Jasmine moments. She sings a beautiful song to Aladdin, about why she loves him and how special he is to her. The key line is “People like you don’t just come out of thin air.” Aladdin also has a verse trying to describe his painful childhood, including the wrenching line “Your father’s a man who taught you who you are; mine was never there.” I love the acknowledgement there that the Sultan, despite his faults, has been a good father to Jasmine, and that in particular, he shaped her and made her understand her place in the world. At the same time, Aladdin spoke to a generation of lonely kids with Daddy Issues, and there was Princess Jasmine, listening sympathetically and offering support.

The song ends with Jasmine encouraging Aladdin to go find his father: “Our wedding can wait. I think it’s worth a small delay. And won’t it be great to have your father see our wedding day.” No bridezilla here! Jasmine is happy to support her partner and put his needs first. When Aladdin learns that his father is “trapped within the world of the 40 Thieves,” Jasmine tells him “Take as long as you need.” Wow. He really, really doesn’t deserve her.

Aladdin goes off, finds out his dad, Cassim, really did abandon him and his mother, and confronts him about it. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie, but I remember being fascinated by how Aladdin didn’t let his father off the hook, but told him that his family had needed him. In an attempt to rehabilitate him, Aladdin brings Cassim back to the palace, where of course temptation gets the better of him and he gets caught stealing (again). Out of a sense of grudging loyalty to his family, Aladdin frees his father, but at the border of the kingdom, refuses to continue on with him. Cassim points out that Aladdin is a criminal now for helping him escape, and tries to convince him to leave Agrabah together. It’s at this point that Aladdin finally becomes a real man, defiantly shouting at his father, “I won’t walk out on Jasmine!” and turning his back on Cassim. DAMN RIGHT BOI, YOU TELL HIM. And as his father rides away, Aladdin returns to Agrabah to face the consequences of his actions.

Of course, they forgive him immediately and Jasmine even helps Aladdin rescue his dad later, but how great is it to finally see our hero show that he really is worthy of the princess’s heart? After this whole story has been told, this is where we end up: with Aladdin reaffirming his commitment to Jasmine, because homegirl is a damn QUEEN, thankyouverymuch. So Aladdin and Jasmine win the day and are finally married, and while we don’t hear anything of their lives together afterward, it seems like they probably had a wonderful life together, and that Jasmine was a wise and fair ruler with a supportive consort who always put her first. Or at least that’s the headcanon I’ve developed over the years.

Jasmine in the 2019 Live-Action Film

So this brings us to the latest of Disney’s live-action remakes…. BUT FIRST! Some context: I’m pretty lukewarm on this film. It’s fine, but IMHO it doesn’t hold a candle to the original animated version. That said, this rant isn’t about critiquing the film as a whole, so I’m going to set all of my nitpicks aside and focus just on the treatment of Jasmine, and whether she is STILL the greatest Disney princess in her newest incarnation.

Short answer: Yep, she is. While I can’t be certain that the writers for this movie had watched any of the TV series, I was struck by their choice of arc for Jasmine: whereas in the original film, her goal was simply freedom (expressed by loving whomever she wanted), her goal here is to literally rule Agrabah. That’s incredibly bold and of course anachronistic, but remember that we’re talking about a fantasy princess here, not an historical one. As in the show, Jasmine demonstrates an understanding of statecraft when she urges her father to maintain peace with the kingdom’s allies. Since she is interfering with his plans for a coup, Jafar insists she remain silent and enchants the Sultan into agreeing. This leads to an “I want” song for Jasmine, which she did not have in the original, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

While this Jasmine is missing some of the endearing traits of her animated predecessor, like the quick thinking and the acting skills, her ambitions to leadership create a similar problem to that of the original film. Remember that the 1992 filmmakers never quite solved the problem of their Jasmine overshadowing the hero, and now, with a new arc of her own that really has nothing to do with Aladdin, this Jasmine doesn’t really NEED him. Unfortunately, this leads to their two stories happening in parallel, rather than as part of a clear singular plot. Worse, it means that the climax of the film downplays Jasmine’s role in favor of Aladdin, robbing her of that wonderful moment from the animated film in which she tricked Jafar to help her lover. In the end, Jasmine’s achievement is her father formally declaring her his successor, and marrying Aladdin is more of an incidental bonus.

Issues with story structure aside, this Jasmine is much more academic than the street-smart girl from the animated content. She’s clearly well-studied in geography and diplomacy, which is why she has no patience for doltish princes like the one she rejects at the beginning of the film. She even has the self-awareness to recognize how being cooped up in the palace makes her an unfit leader, which is why she’s in the market the day she meets Aladdin. Whereas 1992 Jasmine left for selfish reasons - she wanted to be free of the royal pressures she faced - 2019 Jasmine left the palace specifically to learn how to serve her people. This is a level of maturity that the animated princess does not reach until fairly late in the TV series. While I miss the feisty, sharp-witted girl from my childhood, I have to admit that I love the compassionate, driven, calculating woman depicted in this new film, as well.

Which brings me back to the new song, “Speechless.” First and foremost, it’s fantastically performed by Naomi Scott, who has easily the strongest set of pipes in the cast. The musical style is out of place with the other songs, and the scene itself is a weird music video dropped into the middle of an otherwise tense moment nearing the film’s climax, BUT! It’s such a great girl-power ballad that it really doesn’t matter. Honestly, the lyrics don’t really even reflect Jasmine’s inner struggle THAT precisely, but this is because the song isn’t really about her, it’s about the audience, specifically the young girls in the audience. Disney understands that girls will project onto Jasmine as they do all the princesses, so they’ve given us the new “Let It Go” to belt out when we need to get psyched up about anything. I mean, I could easily hear this being played at a Women’s March or similar event. It might not make a lot of sense in the film, but Jasmine is definitely the perfect character to deliver this manifesto to the young women of 2019.

Point being, the only must-have on my list for the 2019 remake was that it not ruin my beloved Princess of Agrabah, and blessedly, they didn’t. And I think she still holds a solid first place among the princesses of the Disney lexicon, as the only one to seriously treat her role as a head of state. Pocahontas, Merida, and Moana all had moments of service to their people as well, but none with quite the boldness, cunning, and selflessness that Jasmine achieved in all of her many incarnations. I assume that Disney is seeing dollar signs and will put out another live-action sequel at some point, and it will probably be terrible, but honestly I don’t mind seeing more Jasmine as long as she continues to be the example of a powerful princess.

So thanks for reading my first unnecessarily-long Tumblr rant, and if you made it all the way to the end, please comment or reblog and let me know what you think!

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rememberingdaphne · 4 years

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May 13, Messages about Daphne

A message from Gae:

You bring great joy to people's souls.

Camryn, Kaya, and Luke remember having so much fun at your Easter egg hunts. Trey and Ben (Ed's sons) remember playing basketball with Charles, Anthony, and Gordon in the back yard.

Our mom, Edith, cherished you and all the stories you two shared about growing up. Our father, Elvin, admired you, saying you are gifted with ceramics, and marveled at your loving ways with children.

Gae remembers being a little girl who had just had her pigtails snipped off into a new pixie cut, visiting Portville when you and your family were there. Our dad had been away in NYC selecting pianos for the university, and upon returning to Portville, he started picking up and greeting all the assembled children. Gae was in the lineup with the Giampietros and got picked up and hugged before Dad realized she was one of his own.

I remember at every family gathering how much you, your brothers, your sister, and your mother and father had the rest of us doubled over with laughter.

Daphne: Gae and I love you. You are surrounded by the love of your children, family and friends.

Love, Dannie Gae

From her good friend Ann Woroniak:

My dear friend, Daphne. This is Ann and I want to tell you I am near you now in my prayers and my love for you. I know Our Lord is with you ready to lead you on this journey to Our Father. You are my dear friend and I love you always. Ann Woroniak

Matilda to Ann:

Dear Ann, I just read Daphne your beautiful message. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the care, light and love you have constantly showered on my mother and my family. With love and gratitude, Matilda

Ann back to Matilda:

Love knows no distance. I am with you

all I’m my love and prayers. So glad you are there by her side. Give her a kiss from me. Ann

From Vera (Joe and Sharon’s daughter)

Aunt Matilda,

I’m so sorry for your loss of Mama. Thinking of you and sending you our love.

From the children of Chandler and Louise Cowden, our next door neighbors:

From Laura Cowden Jones:

It's so nice to see you all smiling in the zoom photo though!

Please pass love from my mother to yours.

She's praying for her now.

Dear Matilda-

“Tell your mother Anthony and his wife Sue say hello!”

From Anthony Cowden: Sorry to hear about your mother's travails. I have always felt blessed to have had three mothers: Louise, Daphne and Stephanie! (Three women friends and neighbors while we were growing up).

Charles called on FaceTime with Rosellyn, they prayed a Hail Mary with her. Charles woke up around 4:30 this morning thinking that he should start on a coffin.

Mary and Bridget face timed with Mama when they arrived in the hospital parking lot around 6:30. They had wanted to come up but we’re not allowed.

Teresa called and talked to and prayed a Hail Mary with Mama

Joseph called to tell Mama he loved her, she was a beautiful and good mother who brought up all quietly to know the reality of God, he reminded her we would pray the rosary kneeling around her bed at night. He prayed the Hail Mary with us.

From Gordon, her youngest child:

Please tell the old bird that she’s the greatest mother I could have hoped for, and that it’s ok if she decides that now is the right time to fly home to heaven accompanied by the angels.️

Father Anthony called in and anointed her by phone

(sacrament of Extreme Unction) almost as soon as I got here around 5:45. We said an Our Father, Hail Mary and Glory Be to the Father. He told Mama he loved her.

From Linda

Dear Matilda,

I am so very sorry to hear that your mother is not doing well. I appreciate that Father Anthony let me know the situation. I pray for Daphne and for the family. I am going to send a message to your mother through you. Father Anthony says that you are with her and reading messages to her that you believe she can hear. So my message for her will come to you shortly.

Love to you,

Linda

I just had word from your brother that your mother has left us. So very sorry for your loss. She was a great lady. I am confident that she has gone home to The Lord. My prayers are with you and the Giampietro family. Much love,

Linda

From Rachel:

A text message is not sufficient to express all the feelings involved here, and I am sure you are overwhelmed with tasks at the moment. But I cannot express what a profound honor it has been to have your mother, and entire family, as a part of my life. It has left a deep and joyful impact. I am so glad that Matilda was able to be with your mother and that she was at peace. I can only imagine the challenges that lie ahead in moving forward during these pandemic times. Please let me know if there is any way I can help. As always, sending much love and support to you and your entire family. Your mother will be dearly missed.

From Robin Vaughn, executive director at Brandywine: Our hearts are heavy. Daphne will be so dearly missed. We all have so many fond and endearing memories with her. May we all find comfort in knowing her soul is at peace.

Thank you Father - and your entire family for entrusting us with Mom's care.

From Adrian Walker, long long time friend of Mama and Papa:

“I’m so sorry. I loved her.

Both your parents were just beautiful human beings.”

From Isabelle:

Mary Laughlin - a native Portlander- stopped over a while in DC after a stint in the Peace Corps. During that time she took Ceramics at CU from Papa whom she credits with helping her figure out what she wanted to do with her life by inviting her to spend the summer at Alfred with Mama & kids.A few years ago (5 or 6), Mary L & I met “by accident “ at the home of a close friend of hers who is in my walking group. She started to cry - we both did- when we realized our connection. I had no memory of her time with our family.Oh- I also found out that evening that she was a regular visitor to Our Lady of the Rock and told me the chapel there (designed by Joe G- which she didn’t know) was the most beautiful chapel she hade ever been in.

Died today at 11:25 am EDT

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minimin1993 · 4 years

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B/L 29

Warning: Violence.

By the time they landed in Siberia, Linda started to strap up with her old gears that was still on the jet.

“You guys never removed me.” Linda said silently.

“How can we, you were my right hand woman. I was simply waiting for you to come back.” Steve said patting her back before walking over to the opening hanger door standing next to Bucky.

“You remember that time we had to ride back from Rockaway Beach in the back of that freezer truck?” Steve asks looking at Bucky

“ Was that the time we used our train money to buy hot dogs?”

“ You blew three bucks trying to win that stuffed bear for a redhead.” Steve said making Linda giggle.

“Freakin Casanova.” Linda said shaking her head.

“ You still agreed to marry me.” Bucky said smirking at Linda making her playfully roll her eyes. “What was her name again?” He asks looking at Steve

“Dolores. You called her Dot.”

“ She's gotta be a hundred years old right now.”

“ So are we, pal.” Steve said clamping his hand on Bucky's shoulder.

“Excuse me I am actually older than a hundred.” Linda said.

“Technically Luna is, you are barely 100.” Steve said with a smirk on his face.

“He’s right.” Bucky said winking at her.

Steve walks with Bucky and Linda up to the entrance set in rock to find the door is still open.

“ He can't have been here more than a few hours.” Steve said “Long enough to wake them up.”

Steve leads them into the cast bunker traveling down into the depths inside a caged elevator, it stops in the bowels of the bunker, doors slide open. Linda conjures her whip ready for an attack as they walk down the corridor. When they walk up the stairs, they heard a door open behind them causing them all to turn weapons ready at the noise.

“ You ready?” Steve asks

“ Yeah.” Bucky and Linda said in unison.

The door then parts force open by Tony, Linda and Steve stares at him in surprise watching him walk towards them before his suit helmet opens up “You seem a little defensive.” Tony said “It's been a long day.” Steve said walking towards him with his shield covering his body. “At ease, Soldier. I'm not currently after you.” “Then why are you here?” Linda asks “Could be your story's not so crazy. Maybe. Ross has no idea I'm here. I'd like to keep it that way. Otherwise, I gotta arrest myself.”

“ Well, that sounds like a lot of paperwork.” Steve said lowering his shield. “It's good to see you, Tony.”

“ You too, Cap. Hey, Manchurian Candidate, you're killing me. There's a truce here. You can drop . . .” Tony said pointing to Bucky’s gun which was still pointing at him. Linda places her hand on his shoulder as he lowers his gun. Now with Tony on their team the 4 of them starts to explore the corridor together.

“ I got heat signatures.” Tony said as he scans the area with his suit

“How many?” Steve asks “Uh, one.”

They enter the vast chamber the lights come on. Hazy, yellow mist descends within the capsules.

“ If it's any comfort, they died in their sleep. Did you really think I wanted more of you?” Zemo said, Bucky looks inside one of the capsales seeing a single bullet straight in their head.

“ What the hell?” Bucky whispers.

“I'm grateful to them, though. They brought you here.” Zemo said turning on the light in the control room. Steve throws his shield hitting the window but flies right back without any damage. “Please, Captain. The Soviets built this chamber to withstand the launch blast of UR-100 rockets.”

“ I'm betting I could beat that.” Tony said “Oh, I'm sure you could, Mr. Stark. Given time. But then you'd never know why you came.”

“ You killed innocent people in Vienna just to bring us here?” Steve asks as they walk right up to the window.

“ I thought about nothing else for over a year. I studied you. I followed you. But now that you're standing here, I just realized . . . there's a bit of green in the blue of your eyes. How nice to find a flaw.”

“ You're Sokovian. Is that what this is about?”

“ Sokovia was a failed state long before you blew it to hell. No. I'm here because I made a promise.”

“ You lost someone?” Linda said realizing what happened.

“ I lost everyone. And so will you.” Zemo said playing a surveillance footage from December 16th 1991. “An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumples from within? That's dead . . . forever.”

“ I know that road. What is this?” Tony said once he walks over to the screen along with Linda who already knows what was on the tap since it was a memory she saw from Bucky. Linda closes her eyes tearing listening to her once beloved friend Howard get his face bashed in before hearing the cries of his wife next to him. When the video stops Linda steps in front of Bucky between him and Tony before Tony prepares to lunge at Bucky.

“Tony. Tony.” Steve said holding Tony back.

“ Did you know?” Tony asked looking Steve.

“ I didn't know it was him.” “Don't bullshit me, Rogers! Did you know?”

“ Yes.”

“Linda? How can you? You even knew my father.” Tony said.

“He had no control of it Tony. I’m sorry.”

Tony steps back, his chin jutting upwards twitchy before he reengages the Iron Man helmet and punches Steve away. Linda flicks her whip onto Tony arm constraining him but he activated a booster flinging Linda away from Bucky. He then grabs Bucky and flies across the chamber, slams him onto the floor holding down his arms preparing to blast him but Steve tosses his Shield at Tony distracting him before running into him with his shield sending him off Bucky. Tony turns around sending shackles to lock onto Steve legs. Bucky punches Tony who just lifts him and slams him against a machine. Iron Man raises a hand preparing to fire but Bucky twists it destroying the mechanism. A rocket shoots out of Iron Man's arm, but Bucky turns it away from him as it blasts the machine in the lab instead. Linda conjures her second whip and whips them both onto Tony arms pulling them back dropping Bucky before the piller twists and falls around them

“ Get out of here!” Steve said to Bucky.

Bucky bolts Iron Man fires toward him but Linda appears behind Bucky deflecting the shots before Steve lands in front of her. She turns to follow Bucky who hits a control panel and the silo-styled door overhead starts to open. Tony flies up with Jet boot kicking Bucky to the side preparing to shoot him again but Linda whips her whip grabbing onto his arm yanking it downward smashing him onto the lower floor. Linda jumps over to help Bucky up before Steve catches up to them.

“He's not going to stop. Go.” Steve said looking down at Tony before Linda and Bucky runs again, when they were almost at the top Tony blasts the giant hinge holding the hatch destroying it as it slams shut knocking Linda and Bucky down. Bucky got up before Linda grabs a metal pipe to swing at Tony but he blocks it before grabbing Bucky neck from behind choking him.

“Do you even remember them?” Tony whispers

“ I remember all of them.”

Bucky pushes them both from the walkway dropping them off when Linda whips her whip trying to hold them up but Tony fires a blaster right at her causing her to fall as well. Steve jumps into them to deflect their fall, Bucky lands on a platform while Tony, Steve, and Linda land on the concrete floor multiple floors down knocking the wind out of them. Linda tries to stand up but couldn't because a nasty gash on her side and a few misplaced ribs from the blast Tony sent to her. She pulls herself onto the wall waiting for it to regenerate when Steve stands up.

“ This isn't gonna change what happened.” Steve said looking up at Tony who also stood up.

“I don't care. He killed my mom.” Tony said before flying over and punches Steve, they exchanged a couple hit before Tony pins Steve down punching him. Bucky notices Steve Shield near him and picks it up before leaping down to help. Linda whimpers pushing her ribs back into place, as the two super soldiers fist fight with Iron Man the shield changes hands between them until Tony manages to zap Steve who is thrown back into the wall near Linda. Bucky struggles to hold Iron Man at bay as he unleashes an energy beam, then he forces Iron Man against the opposite wall. He grips the glowing core in the chest of the Iron Man Suit until Tony sends a blast of energy knocks Bucky down, metal arm completely blown away, Tony zaps him again knocking him out on the floor. Steve rushes him with his shield up and Iron Man fires right at it before Steve punches Tony back against the wall and goes to town on Tony. After a few seconds, Tony starts to see Steves fighting pattern and starts to counterattack on Steve points where it counts knocking on his knees in front of Bucky.

“He's my friend.” Steve said

“ So was I.” Tony said punching Steve before throwing him away from barns. “Stay down. Final warning.” “I can do this all day.” Steve said struggling to stand up.

Linda stares at Bucky who was unconscious on the floor and something inside her snapped. Linda/Luna stood up and waves both her hands up glowing blue before she blasts Tony with all her might, Tony puts his hands up trying to block the blast but couldn’t feeling his suit getting fried knocking him over before she lands right on top of him punching his mask until it falls off. She stares at Tony who has a shock look on his face before she prepares her glowing hands for a final blow before she hits his suits core draining all its powers.

“I’m sorry.” Linda/Luna said before she grabs her head screaming in pain stumbling off of him before falling on her knees near Bucky. Steve was about to rush over to her but Bucky crawls himself over to her.

“Linda… whats wrong?” He whispered painfully not knowing what is wrong until she opens her eyes and see it flicker from black to normal.

“Linda… I’m.. losing her…” Luna said before passing out.

#bucky x reader #james buchanan barnes #sebastian stan #sebastian x reader #steve rogers #the first avenger #originl character #chris evans #original character #winter solider x you #winter soldier #captain america #infinity war #marvel

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minervacasterly · 5 years

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With the Heart and Stomach of a King, She was a Rock that Bent to no Wind: How Queen Elizabeth I used her femininity to her advantage.

"Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak, you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no weak."~Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland, Governor of the Church of England and longest reigning monarch of the Tudor Dynasty.Translation "do not mess with this bad ass Queen B!"There are many quotes that you can find of Elizabeth I that are simply kick ass and help us understand what she was all about. She used her femininity and the status quo regarding women in power to her advantage and she was often pragmatic on issues of religion and foreign policy which ensured her a successful and long reign.That's not to say that she was flawless. Several historians have been critical of her policies, pointing out where she erred. However; we have to remember that we are looking at these events in retrospect, something that these figures didn't have the advantage of.Queen Elizabeth was born in September of 1533, known as Princess for less than three years before her father annulled his marriage to her mother so he could marry again and sire a son. Elizabeth's only defendant during her childhood years as a royal bastard was her half-sister, the Lady Mary who also became a bastard after their father annulled his union to her mother to marry Elizabeth's. Mary didn't get along with Anne but she came to love her little sister and it was thanks to her advocacy that she was brought back to court and given new clothes after she outgrew her old ones.Elizabeth Tudor had less than an ideal life after that. Relying on her words and silence to keep herself out of trouble and enemy lines. Sometimes she was successful, sometimes she wasn't but one thing is clear: Seeing queens, including her cousin and stepmother, Kitty Howard, fall and annulled, taught her a lot. In her biography on the Tudors and Stewarts and Kathryn Parr, Linda Porter states that it was Henry VIII's last wife that taught Elizabeth everything she needed to know about female power. Kathryn Parr used her intelligence, her love of books, fashion, and cordiality to make herself into a powerful figure that was eventually appointed Regent (the only other one of Henry VIII's Queens to be given that position besides Catherine of Aragon) during his absence.Fast forward to Mary I's reign. Edward VI's reign had been troubling for Elizabeth. Always a lover of fashion and cordial behavior, she soon learned how easy it was for someone to stain her reputation, even when she was an unwilling participant of Thomas Seymour's courtship.While some blame Kathryn Parr for letting this go, it is unclear just how far Thomas Seymour's attentions went. Sources, whether primary or secondary (written many years later and from supposedly eye witnesses accounts) suggest that it did go that far. Elizabeth would wake up earlier than her stepmother and her last husband so Thomas Seymour wouldn't sneak up into her bedroom. When Kathryn Parr died as a result of childbed fever, Thomas Seymour began to conspire against his brother and in no time he found himself in the Tower with a head short.Elizabeth was questioned along with her former governess, Kat Ashley whose husband reprimanded her for her encouraging Thomas Seymour's advances after his wife had died.It is unclear what role she had in the Wyatt Rebellion or in the Grey-Dudley Protestant Regime before that. One thing is clear though, her words were her shield and her silence, her most deadly weapon. By distancing herself from the Grey-Dudley regime, she convinced her sister that she wasn't her enemy. Indeed, she even played a major role during her coronation, riding on a carriage of silver trappings with their former stepmother, Lady Anne of Cleves. But come the Wyatt Rebellion, she was questioned and so where her servants. Elizabeth never forgave her sister for this transgression. It was Philip of Spain, Mary I's husband's intervention that saved her.One can only imagine the stress that Elizabeth went through being lodged in the SAME rooms her mother once was lodged in for her coronation and later during her imprisonment as she awaited her death. When Elizabeth got out she was put under house arrest and carefully watched.During Elizabeth I's reign there were rumors that Margaret Douglas was responsible for Mary I's treatment of her half-sister. It is unlikely that Elizabeth I believed some of her cronies who spread these rumors in an effort to tarnish the Countess of Lennox reputation. There was very little truth in them. Mary I's actions were her own but like her, Elizabeth I couldn't afford to put all the blame of her. A House divided was bad for business. When Mary I rallied the commons and her noble supporters against Jane Grey and her supporters, she laid the blame of Edward VI's actions at their doorstep (especially on John Dudley, given that he had no royal connections unlike Henry Grey who was married to her cousin, Frances Brandon). And Elizabeth I was angry with Margaret Douglas at the time for having conspired against her to wed her eldest son to the Queen of Scots, so she was going to use whatever weapons she had to levy them against her.Elizabeth I's view on Mary's actions can be best examined by what she told the Count de Feria when he visited her at Hatfield, where most of Mary I's court had gathered, eager to please their future queen. She told the Spanish Count that she owed nothing to her sister seeing as she had served her loyally and she (Mary) had rewarded her loyalty by accusing her of the most heinous crimes and locking her in the Tower.While Margaret Douglas rose through the ranks of favoritism after Elizabeth was cast out of Mary's inner circle, it is unlikely that Mary would have ever considered doing what her half-brother did. In spite of her reservations towards her sister, she knew that in order to keep their grandfather's legacy going, another Tudor had to take the center stage and the best way to achieve that was to allow a peaceful transition of power so Elizabeth was kept in the line of succession. On November of 1558, eight months after Mary I had made her will, Elizabeth I became Queen. Like one of her namesakes and her great-grandmother, it is said that she received this glorious news while she was under an oak tree and as soon as she was given the ring of state, she quoted one of the psalms."This is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in our eyes."Elizabeth Tudor became the second Queen Regnant of the British Isles on Sunday, January 15th, 1559.he day began after Elizabeth made her way from the Tower of London, dressed in crimson parliament robes walking on blue cloth which had been laid for her all the way to the Abbey. The Spanish Ambassador, Feria, refused to be present but the Venetian Ambassador,Schifanoya was there and he reported everything he saw. According to him and other contemporary accounts, as Elizabeth made her way to the Abbey, there were stages erected for her that depicted once again her noble lineage through her father and his parents, and included Henry VIII’s collections of tapestries -especially one depicting the Acts of the Apostles based on the designs by Raphael. This symbolized the late Tudor monarch’s devotion and Bess further emphasized hers after she emerged from a curtained sector where she changed into her new clothes, and then was led by the Bishop of Carlisle to the stage where she was proclaimed Queen.The customary question was asked. If the people would like Elizabeth to be their Queen or not, and the people cried “Yea, yea!”. Then the trumpets sounded, the organs were played and the bells rang and Elizabeth and the Bishop descended to the altar where she knelt before it to hear the sermon and then took the oath.After this was said and done, she withdrew to the traverse to change for the final part in the ceremony, the anointing. She emerged wearing a kirtle of gold and silver. Prostrating herself before the altar, leaning on cloth of gold cushions, she was anointed on the shoulders, breast, hands, arms and forehead.Three crowns were placed on her head, after which she was completely arrayed in gold and to everyone who was there, she seemed indeed, seemed not human but like a golden figure, an icon, almost god-like as her father always tried to appear.Elizabeth ever the pragmatist, had intended to create a hybrid of the Protestant Church her brother had enforced on the population and the Marian Catholic reformed Church her sister had also tried to enforce. As Starkey explains:“It was now time of the coronation mass, which followed, with Elizabeth’s personally enforced innovations. The Epistle was read twice, first in Latin and then in English…. Then the bishop brought the Gospel. This too was read twice, in the old liturgical language and again in the Tudor vernacular, which has, to us, become almost as remote, beautiful as the Latin. Elizabeth now repeated her gesture of the day before and kissed the Bible -and, it is safe to guess, the English one.”Furthermore Jasper Ridley adds in his respective biography of Elizabeth:“After he [Bishop of Carlisle] had crowned her, a Mass was held in Latin; but the celebrant, her chaplain, spoke the words of consecration in English and did not elevate the Host.”The Coronation pardon was then given and the Queen traveled from Westminster Abbey to the Palace Great Hall to enjoy her coronation banquet. As she passed the great crowds, she greeted them with that same smile from her accession and it won them over again.Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland continued with most of her half-brother and half-sister's policies while expanding the Protestant agenda. As previously stated, in matters of religion, Elizabeth I took on a pragmatic approach, not wishing to voice her support of the Netherlands or the Dutch, or even the Huguenots in France since they believed in a Republican government and hardly recognized the authority of a King over his or her subjects. Her animosity towards John Knox, the infamous radical Protestant preacher in Scotland stemmed from his controversial pamphlets published in 1558, the year she succeeded her half-sister, in which he condemned female monarchy. While John Knox tried to justify his remarks by stating that his attack was an attack on Catholic female monarchs and other women in power, and not exclusively on her, Queen Elizabeth I didn't let him so easily off the hook and during the remainder of her life, he wasn't allowed to step on English soil.Elizabeth I however, recognized his usefulness against her royal cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and when the latter interests no longer suited her own, Elizabeth I covertly supported the Protestant lords and religious leaders against her.During her last years, Elizabeth I began to disagree more and more with these types of radical preachers. She saw them as dangerous to the institution of monarchy. Parliament's powers had been expanded with her father, and while she relied on them, the two often clashed. Most of her lords sympathized with these radical preachers and when Elizabeth I wanted to punish them by giving them a harsher sentence, they intervened, guaranteeing they wouldn't be executed or spent a long time in prison.Another area Queen Elizabeth I clashed with her subjects was on the issue of her royal cousin. Fiction often portray them as enemies and while they were, for some time, Elizabeth I seemed favorable to the idea of Mary, Queen of Scots succeeding her AS LONG as she married someone that Elizabeth I agreed with. She even sent her favorite, Robert Dudley but this option for Mary Stuart was too scandalous.Why?Because Queen Elizabeth I declared that the best way to ensure a happy union between the two was to move in with her. And as Anne Boleyn played by Natalie Dormer said in the Tudors, you can't have three people in a marriage. You just can't.Tired of waiting for a clear response, Mary, Queen of Scots accepted her other royal cousin's proposal to marry her eldest son, a handsome young man who was also a Stewart through his father and like Mary, descended from Princess Margaret Tudor via her second marriage to the Earl of Angus. The marriage as we all know, was disastrous and ended in tragedy. Mary was blamed for his assassination and in short time married one of his other alleged assassins, the Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell ended up abandoning her and her unborn children when the going got tough and when she was surrounded by enemies and former allies, she miscarried her twins and capitulated to her captors, abdicating in her son's favor.Queen Elizabeth I wasn't directly involved in King James VI of Scotland's upbringing but she received many reports regarding the young King. When the King heard of his mother's sentence, he appealed to the Queen in a way that didn't seem to side too favorable of her, but Elizabeth I ignored his request.In what has been described as one of Elizabeth's clever ways of excusing herself off her royal cousin's execution, she wrote to Philip II of Spain and other monarchs that she never intended for things to go this far and were it had been truly up to her, she would have never signed her execution warrant.The truth is, she did sign the execution warrant and she wasn't coerced or forced. Like with half-sister's actions, Elizabeth I's actions were entirely her own. However, her royal cousin's execution always haunted her. It was a difficult decision to make because she was one who valued royal authority above all else and this action set a precedent for future monarchs to be held accountable to their subjects. Elizabeth I's last years have been under heavy criticism. The truth regarding the Armada's defeat is as much clouded in mystery as it is in propaganda. In the first episode of her documentary series "British History's Biggest Fibs"; historian, Dr. Lucy Worsley describes how successful the Tudor regime was in pushing their agenda and having their version of events become the official story.In his book entitled "Armada", the late Garrett Mattingly aptly described the events based on primary sources, letters and other documents, that resulted in the disastrous Spanish navy's defeat. For one, the Spanish vessels were terribly large which made them slower. The English ships were poised to shoot everything that moved and wasn't English and given the horrible weather, it was easier for them to hit their target.During this time, Elizabeth I gave her most famous speech at Tilbury where she said that while she had the "weak and frail" body of a woman, she had "the heart and stomach of a King" and a "King of England" at that! Like her father, Queen Elizabeth was a good public speaker and like her mother, she was subtle enough to know how to handle foreign emissaries, promising them nothing and also denying nothing.As a lover of fashion, she knew the power behind it and used her public image to replace previously beloved religious figures among the Catholic population. It was during these years that she came to be known as Virgin Queen, and using biblical and classical imagery that compared her to Deborah, Esther, Athena, Artemis and Hera, she used her status as an unmarried woman to become a pseudo-religious icon.But not all was well in paradise. As she got older, her ladies and noblemen began to mock her and considered her efforts to become a nationalistic and religious symbol ridiculous. Some even went as far as to laugh behind her back and Elizabeth I responded equally by mocking them and humiliating them after they refused to obey her orders and tried to outshine her by wearing expensive bright colored gowns.Elizabeth I did her best to cope with loss as she had done with other obstacles. The loss of her longtime favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester affected her greatly and so did her stepson’s betrayal, Robert Deveraux, the Earl of Essex. Before she became 50, her councilors once again continued to pressure her into making a royal marriage and while she continued to make vague promises to would-be-suitors, it is possible she might have entertained a married life but decided against it. Entering marriage would have meant giving up most of her freedoms. It would have meant that the question surrounding female monarchy would have come up again, with some of her husband’s potential foreign allies ruling in his favor, or worse, once she had a male heir, he would have moved against her in the same fashion as Mary Stuart’s last two husbands.Elizabeth I always refused to name an heir. She always gave vague promises, and at times denied nothing nor promised anything, being as subtle as her mother and as you would expect a highborn lady to be. The reason why Elizabeth I never wanted to make her choice of an heir official, regardless of whom she favored at one point, was because she had seen how courtiers had flocked to her like vultures once they realized that her half-sister Mary I wasn’t going to live any longer. Elizabeth I was tired of political intrigue although she continued to fight the good fight and take on her enemies.It was also during her last years that she looked for new allies. Catherine de Medici was one of her strongest allies/rivals, someone who deeply admired Elizabeth. It is possible that Elizabeth I also admired her. What other foreign woman who’d been previously scorned and mocked had achieved so much in so little time following her husband’s death and her sons’ ascensions? As Charles IX became more insecure, Catherine convinced him to appoint her Governor of France. This gave almost unlimited powers, allowing her to give orders in her son’s name, in spite of the fact that he had reached his age of majority long time since then.But regardless of their personal feelings, they were always set these aside in favor of their position and (in Catherine’s case) their offspring.Catherine de Medici had no qualms to act against her enemies, especially her former daughter-in-law’s maternal relative, the Guises who went as far as to encourage Protestant lynching when Catherine sided with Huguenots, including one of their leaders, Jeanne III of Navarre. "... Catherine de Medici had every cause to regret the bull against Elizabeth. Her goal, after all was the reduction of tension, not its increase. On 8 August 1570 the Treaty of St Germain finally brought peace: freedom of conscience and freedom of worship limited to certain locations ..." (Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens)The St. Bartholomew Massacre left a bad taste in everybody's mouths, including Queen Elizabeth I and her councilors. Mary, Queen of Scots' execution had been the catalyst for the Anglo-Spanish war. Following the end of the Valois dynasty and the end of the Bourbon with the late Jeanne III’s son, Henry IV, becoming the new King of France, France once again became England’s ally. Henry IV thanked Elizabeth I for her support but as time went on, he sided with the major Catholic powers forming a Holy League against Elizabeth I that sought to depose her and install Philip II’s eldest daughter, Isabella Clara Eugenia.Not cowed by her country’s forced isolation, she looked to the Middle East for potential allies. The woman who made this alliance possible was none other than Safiye Sultan. Like Catherine de Medici before her she had risen through the ranks due to being her husband (Murad III) chief wife and their son’s regent. And also like the former Governor of France, in spite of Mehmed III reaching his majority, she was still an influential figure who refused to let go of her position as her son’s consultant and adviser. She greatly admired a woman like Elizabeth I who used her single statues to bolster her image, and present herself as a virtuous, nationalistic and religious icon and an ideal substitute for the Virgin Mary -a figure whose cult had been very popular in England. When Elizabeth I became frustrated with her son, she wrote to her mother knowing that Safiye was the true power behind the throne. The two women exchanged gifts and letters, with Safiye congratulating Elizabeth for her victories and he gracious behavior towards her.“…both Murad III and Mehmed III’s reigns notoriously, was ruled mainly from the harem. Elizabeth had employed very similar tactics on Barton’s advice six years earlier in 1593, using Safiye as her intermediary in an attempt to influence the direction of the Hungarian war. At that time, her letter had been accompanied by a few handsome gifts, paid for by the Levant Company. These consisted of a ‘jewel of Her Majesty’s picture’ (possibly a Hilliard miniature) set with rubies and diamonds, three great tilt plates, ten garments of cloth of gold and a very fine case of glass bottles, silver and gilt.” (John Guy, Elizabeth I: The Forgotten Years)Elizabeth I spent her last years looking back at her triumphs and failures, ridding herself of potential rivals and refusing to assure her councilors of anything that would reflect her personal opinion regarding who her successor should be. But she must have sensed the end as she once again saw the courtiers beginning to flock to James VI of Scotland, eagerly waiting for her to give her last breath.Elizabeth I sponsored many artists and play writers, including the famous William Shakespeare whose plays greatly contributed to the English language and gave us many phrases that we still use today. One of her favorite plays was Henry V because of the character of Falstaff. She found him the most likable of all of the play's characters. Like one of her ancestors, she began to identify with Richard II whose excesses led to his deposition and was the catalyst behind the wars of the roses that ended with the destruction of the Houses of Lancaster and York and the Plantagenet Dynasty.At she was quoted to have said: “I am Richard II, know ye not that?”Elizabeth I didn't like the way Richard II had been -and still was- portrayed and her opinion might have influenced Shakespeare to make him into a pitiful character.Besides considering his treatment of his subjects unjust, there was another reason why she might have identified with Richard II. Like her father, she firmly believed in the divinity of Kings and took her role as Head of the Church seriously. When she was told her sister had died and was presented with her royal ring, she quoted one of the psalms, saying that “this is the lord’s doing and it is marvelous before our eyes.” As God's representative on Earth, an act against her was an act against the Almighty. And also like her father, she shared his dislike for those who questioned royal authority. Despite the various plots and opposition against her, Elizabeth I endured but she knew her time was coming and she prepared for it. On February 1603, she settled her affairs regarding her officials in Ireland, ensuring that the next monarch would have complete control of that Isle and that there would be no more disruptions from Catholic rebels or rogue officers. Nevertheless, she refused to appear weak before her ministers insisting that nothing was wrong with her.On the 24th of March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died at Richmond Palace at the age of sixty nine. Ironically it was the same place her grandfather and founder of her dynasty had died ninety three and eleven months earlier.Elizabeth I’s Funerary Procession took place a month later, on the 28th of April. She was carried from Whitehall to Westminster Abbey where she was laid to rest on the Lady Chapel.“It was an impressive occasion: the hearse was drawn by four horses hung with black velvet, surmounted by a life-sized wax effigy of the late Queen, dressed in her state robes and crown, an orb and scepter in its hands; over it was a canopy of state supported by six earls.” (Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I)“Westminster” Chronicler John Stow wrote, “was surcharged with multitudes of all sorts of people in their streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters, that came out to see the obsequy.” After the Mass had ended, her household servants broke their white staves and tossed them at her tomb to symbolize the end of their allegiance.Truly, it was a sight to see and also a reminder than it was the end of an era. Gone were the days of the Tudors, now it would be the Stuarts who reigned.She was buried at the Lady Chapel that Henry VII had ordered be built for himself and his descendants, at Westminster Abbey. It was in this place where her paternal grandparents and great-grandmother and half-sister were also buried.Three years later, King James I decided to rebury her in a different vault and honor her memory by building a magnificent burial. Unfortunately, this monument didn’t include an effigy of the Queen’s sister, Mary I who was reburied with her.The plaque on her tomb reads the following:“Consorts both in throne and grave, here we rest two sisters, Elizabeth & Mary, in hope of our resurrection.”Queen Elizabeth I remains one of the most celebrated figures in English history and considered one of the best monarch in world history. Often she will be reduced to a mere caricature in which she is either an angelic figure who could do no wrong or thrown off that pedestal it in favor of the other extreme that depicts her as Europe's greatest prostitute or as a boy. The "Bisley Boy" legend was first popularized by none other than Victorian and Gothic writer, Bram Stoker. Bram Stoker was fascinated by the legend and took it seriously. A few years ago, a mystery writer said that it was possible she could have been a man and what was his reasoning behind this?Nothing, except the usual "she didn't get married and she never had kids with her favorites". Here's a thought for these people: Do some research! Read the primary sources and then read well-researched books by historians and biographers who've also written extensively on this topic.In Anna Whitelock's biography on Queen Elizabeth I's court, "The Queen's Bed", she quickly debunks this bogus story by offering us an insight of what court life was like. Just think about it.Elizabeth I was surrounded by women day and night. As Queen Regnant, she was dressed by her ladies and undressed by them. She was even attended during her bath. Don't you think some of them would have noticed she was a man if indeed she was? I know people love a good conspiracy once in a while but come on!Also, just because she didn't get married and possibly wasn't intimate with her favorites, doesn't mean she was a man. Her reign was unique given that she refused to marry, but given her past experiences and how England wasn't (fully) used to the idea of female monarchy, we can see why she chose to take this route.Elizabeth I's reign continues to fascinate many people and it is proof that sometimes the impossible can become possible.She became Queen when she was twenty five years old. Her reign lasted forty-four years, outlasting that of her father and the other Tudors.Known as “Glorianna”, “Good Queen Bess” and “the Virgin Queen” for her refusal to marry, she also had one colony in North America named after her. She is the third longest female monarch in English history and to some, one of the most important women in history. In his biography on Elizabeth I, David Starkey says that what differentiated her from her sister was that while Mary “aimed for a heavenly crown; Elizabeth aimed for an earthly one.”Sources:1. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne by David Starkey2. The Life of Queen Elizabeth I by Alison Weir3. Game of Queens by Sarah Gristwood4. Elizabeth I: The Forgotten Years by John Guy5. Tudors vs Stewarts by Linda Porter6. Katherine the Queen: The Life of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's last Wife by Linda Porter7. The Queen's Bed: An Intimate Account of Elizabeth's Court by Anna Whitelock8. Tudor by Leanda de Lisle9. The Private Lives of the Tudors by Tracy Borman

#Tudor #history #Queen Elizabeth I

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mccartneyandwings · 5 years

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Interview: “Denny Laine talks Wings, ‘Wild Life,’ Linda McCartney and more”

Denny Laine had a short interview with Mark Hinson from Tallahassee Democrat on September 21, 2017. The original link is here.

Before Denny Laine joined Paul McCartney & Wings in 1971 for a solid decade of hit singles and albums, he and the poodle-eyed Beatle had been pals for several years.

After all, Laine was a member of The Moody Blues in the early days before the band shifted into symphonic art rock. In 1965, Laine sang lead on The Moody Blues’ hit “Go Now,” a cover of an American R&B tune originally recorded by Bessie Banks.

“I knew Paul,” Laine said during a recent phone interview from California. “We used to go out and see people. We’d go out and see Dylan or Jimi Hendrix or The Lovin’ Spoonful or whatever. We’d go see American bands that came over to England just because we were curious. So, I had pretty much [of] a friendship with him because I was in London at the time. And that’s how I got to know him. George Harrison was also our neighbor when I was in The Moody Blues. ... They(The Beatles) used to come by and play us their demos and their acetates. We were pretty close with them. We were both fans of each other. ... We all started out together as kids, really.”

Expect to hear plenty of Laine’s work with Wings, as well as The Moody Blues, when he performs on Friday night with The Cryers at The Junction at Monroe Street.

“We take a modern approach to the songs,” Laine, 72, said. “I’m not trying to sing like Paul, I don’t like copying people. I don’t like to live the past too much.”

Even though Wings racked up some of the biggest hits of the ‘70s — “My Love,” “Silly Love Songs,” “With A Little Luck,” “Live and Let Die,” etc. — the group got off to a rocky start with the critics. The spare, stripped-down Wings debut album “Wild Life”(1971) was dismissed by Rolling Stone magazine as “rather flaccid musically and impotent lyrically, trivial and unaffecting.”

Laine thinks “Wild Life” has stood the test of time.

“People like it a lot more now because of its rawness,” Laine said. “The point was we were just trying out the band on that album. It was just a case of let’s just rehearse a few songs and go in the studio. Let’s not get too big time about it. I like that album.”

To get into the back-to-the-roots spirit, Wings rented a bus and dropped in on various universities around England to play surprise concerts for the students. No press. No hype. No expectations. Just let it rip.

“The reason the critics knocked it(‘Wild Life’) was because they were expecting a big production,” Laines said. “But you know, you have to understand that when a band is just starting you’re not in the mood to go in and do that. We were not trying to follow The Beatles or The Moody Blues, we were just trying to do our own thing. The fact that we went out and started turning up at universities just to play meant that we needed to play live to an audience to get into the feel of the band. Get into the confidence and the rest of it. So that album really was a result of that band where we were at that time. You know it was a take-it-or-leave-it type of attitude.”

Plenty of critics and Beatles fans also scoffed when McCartney recruited his wife to join Wings. Laine is quick to defend Linda McCartney, who died of cancer in 1998.

“Well, I liked Linda a lot,” Laine said. “She was a great influence on him, so that made it easy on me. I didn’t know Linda until I was in Wings. She was very good for him at that time because he was going through a lot of Beatles’ legal problems, the whole Allen Klein situation. It all made him literally retreat to the hills of Scotland. She was his support system. I liked her for that alone. But I also liked her because she was very honest about things. She was not trying to be some big star. She got pushed into that more than she wanted to be. She was not a musician and she was the first one to own up. She didn’t want to be in the band. But he got her into it. ... She wasn’t trying to be a rock star.”

He added: “She was misjudged by people a lot, I think. Really deep down, she was a good lass. She had his back, which was great. It wasn’t an easy time for her at all.”

In 1973, Laine and the McCartneys headed to Lagos, Nigeria, to record Wings’ official masterpiece, “Band on the Run.”

“Paul had his cassette of the rehearsals stolen, so we had to start from scratch,” Laine said. “It was a very badly equipped studio (in Africa). We made the backing tracks there and then came back to London and finished them off. That’s about it, really. ... It was just me and Paul, really, in the studio. We just wanted to do something really raw and get the feeling right. It was what worked.”

“Picasso’s Last Words” from “Band on the Run” featured Laine singing the opening lines and a little percussive help from Laine’s old friend, drummer Ginger Baker. Before the Wings stint, Laine performed with Ginger Baker’s Air Force band (as well as The Electric String Band). Baker is notorious for having a hot temper (please see the documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker”) but Laine did not share any red-headed horror stories.

“I don’t have problems with Ginger,” Laine said, and that was that.

McCartney always encouraged Laine to write and co-write songs for Wings, such as “No Words” and “Again and Again and Again.” In 1977, Laine and McCartney hit pay dirt with a sing-along song called “Mull of Kintyre.” The collaboration became an instant classic.

“He had an idea for a song,” Laine said. “I went around to have breakfast with them up in Scotland. ... I heard the chorus and I said that’s a potentially hit song. So the next day we went and finished it off. We sat down and wrote the lyrics and put it together. Then we brought in the Campbeltown Pipe Band and they were all excited. It was the first time they’d ever been in a studio and it was fun. We recorded the pipes and drums outside so we got the echoes off the mountains. It came out at Christmas and it was a big hit (in England). It was a B-side over here.”

McCartney’s infamous pot bust in Japan took the wind out of Wings at the dawn of the ‘80s. Laine took off to pursue a solo career. He just released a new single, “Meant to Be,” on vinyl and he has an album, “Valley of Dreams” on the way. In 2016, the University of Fredonia in New York state presented the United States premiere of Laine’s musical “Arctic Song,” which focuses on climate change and environmentalism.

#denny laine #interview #2017 #original post #wings #paul mccartney and wings #linda mccartney #paul mccartney #wild life

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tabloidtoc · 3 years

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Globe, November 30

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: The palace lured Princess Diana into death trap

Page 2: Up Front & Personal -- Sienna Miller shooting Anatomy of a Scandal, former soap star Wanda De Jesus and longtime partner Jimmy Smits take a walk in Brentwood, Mama June Shannon gambles on plastic surgery

Page 3: Billy Dee Williams may walk with a cane but he doesn’t let that stop him from taking the wheel in West Hollywood, Joey Fatone at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, Ariel Winter lugs around a massive roll of bubble wrap in L.A.

Page 4: Courageous Al Roker has battled health problems for years and now his new devastating prostate cancer diagnosis seals his rep as the unluckiest man on TV

* Patrick Duffy and Linda Purl are proof that love can be just as wonderful in your golden years and now pals predict their whirlwind romance will lead them to an elopement -- the former Dallas star was heartbroken after his wife of 43 years died of cancer in 2017 but Happy Days alum Linda brought joy back into his life -- the greying sweethearts plan to spend the holidays with both their families and then go house hunting for their own place

Page 5: Kanye West thinks he’s so smart and wonderful and creative he’s showering bucks on a project to make a posse of his own personal mini-mes and he sees his clones as his gift to the world claiming it’s his duty to keep himself on the planet at all costs long after he’s gone so death doesn’t have to be the end of Kanye -- Kanye’s wife Kim Kardashian has given Kanye permission to double down on himself -- he’s also fascinated by cryogenics and no one would be surprised if he arranges to have himself stored in a chamber when he dies so he can be revived years later

Page 6: Britney Spears is having another family feud because she wants her dad Jamie Spears suspended immediately from his role as co-conservator of her estate claiming he installed a new business manager to run her $60 million fortune without consulting his daughter in what she brands a blatant attempt to get full functional control of her assets and books and records in the face of Britney’s objections

* Ryan Seacrest is turning into a bloated recluse as career and personal problems have worried pals thinking about an intervention -- he’s so devastated by his breakup with Shayna Taylor and the end of cash cow Keeping Up with the Kardashians that he’s shutting himself away for days on end and ignoring calls from friends and co-workers and only responding to texts and he’s stuffing his face with junk food and sloppy takeout and pizzas and he’s come close to belching on camera a few times

Page 7: Devastated widow Paulina Porizkova who her bitter husband Ric Ocasek cut out of his will even though she took care of him in his final days suffered a shocking collapse -- she had gone to Costa Rica with her sons for a change of scenery following the death of Ric who was divorcing her -- she says she had a total nervous breakdown in the airport and they had to put her in a wheelchair to take her back to the plane

* Abby Lee Miller is learning to walking again -- the former Dance Moms star had been using a wheelchair after undergoing chemo for Burkitt lymphoma and having life-saving spinal surgery but she’s now cancer-free and recently underwent an elective operation to help regain mobility -- even though Lifetime canned her plan spinoff Abby’s Virtual Dance Off over charges she’s racist she claims to have a scripted show and two reality series in the works

Page 8: Mike Tyson says he once used a prosthetic penis loaded with his infant son’s pee to pass a drug test during his hard-hitting heyday in the ring and although he swears he never took performance-enhancing drugs he has been blunt about his history of toking weed and snorting cocaine

* Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond reveals she has a foster son named Jamar -- Ree who has four children explains she couldn’t talk about Jamar until he turned 18 and state agency restrictions no longer applied

Page 9: Beloved Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek went to his grave harboring a bitter grudge against talk star and game show rival Regis Philbin -- Alex and Regis began their feud in 2000 when Alex slammed Regis’ Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as a game show for dummies and Regis was deeply hurt by the dig and shot back that face to face if Alex says anything about Millionaire he’d just look him in the eye and say is that your final answer, Alex?

Page 10: Inside the modern Mafia -- blogs and blunders and killer cops

Page 12: Celebrity Buzz -- Adam Brody shows off his bod in Malibu (picture), Lamar Odom was seemingly back on a marriage track to wed fitness instructor Sabrina Parr next year but Lamar’s engagement was abruptly called off amid ominous sparks of ongoing trouble for the athlete and Sabrina sad she’s no longer able to be by Lamar’s side while he seeks the help he so desperately needs, Mina Starsiak of Good Bones wants a postpartum tummy tuck pronto, things got bristlier than an old broom for Anne Hathaway groveling her way out of massive fan backlash for her appearance on The Witches remake for the insensitive way she portrayed a three-fingered witch with split hands, behind the scenes at The Tonight Show where Jimmy Fallon recently extended his lucrative contract to host the struggling late-night talk show past 2021 but his head writer Rebecca Drysdale lasted six months of butting heads with Jimmy and his cronies before getting dumped

Page 13: Katie Holmes and boyfriend Emilio Vitolo Jr. (picture), Sean Stewart in a leg cast in Beverly Hills (picture), Busy Philipps puts on lip gloss on the NYC set of Girls5Eva (picture)

Page 14: Dave Grohl got scared stiff recording an upcoming album in an eerie L.A. home reportedly rocking with paranormal activity and when he got nosy about the place’s past he apparently got answers from the landlord along with an NDA form meant to keep him from spilling secrets, RHOBH star Kyle Richards’ half-sister Kathy Hilton is joining the show; socialite Kathy cold-shouldered Kyle and her husband Mauricio Umansky when he left her husband Rick Hilton’s real estate company to launch a rival biz

* Fashion Verdict -- Jana Kramer 7/10, Michelle Dockery 4/10, Gretta Monahan 3/10, Charlize Theron 2/10

Page 16: Ailing pop star Phil Collins is being so publicly humiliated by his two-timing ex-wife Orianne Cevey who dashed his dreams of a permanent reunion by secretly marrying another guy pals now fear for his life -- Phil is currently battling Orianne in court over his $38.6 million waterside Miami mansion which she and new husband Thomas Bates have now agreed to vacate but Orianne is demanding half of the home insisting Phil promised her a 50 percent share when they moved into it in 2016 -- Orianne also claims that Phil became a hopeless addict in 2017 hooked on booze and pain pills and after two years of drug hell he was incapable of having sex and he stopped showering and brushing his teeth and had become a hermit

Page 17: Troubled Jonathan Rhys Meyers crashed his car in Malibu and failed a field sobriety test and was slapped with a misdemeanor DUI

* Teresa Giudice has found new love with business man Louie Ruelas just two months after divorcing deported jailbird Joe Giudice -- the Real Housewives of New Jersey star who has four girls with Joe hooked up with the dad of two and digital marketing whiz and both are very happy

Page 19: 10 Things You Don’t Know About David Giuntoli

* Sophia Loren says early in her career she told a director to buzz off when he suggested she surgically alter her nose -- she recalls telling the meddling moviemakers her nose is going to stay there forever and it has a lot of personality

* Parkinson’s patient Michael J. Fox admits he may be forced to say goodbye to Hollywood because his short-term memory is shot and acting is getting tougher to do

Page 20: True Crime

Page 21: Desperate to salvage his tarnished reputation and career Johnny Depp is hoping to hook up with another Hollywood outcast in former co-star Angelina Jolie -- Johnny and Angie first flirted while filming The Tourist in 2010 but at the time Johnny was with Vanessa Paradis and Angie was with Brad Pitt -- Johnny recently reached out to Angie to jumpstart their friendship and he’s been sending her poems written with her in mind and suggestions for book to read and music to listen to and they’ve exchanged a series of emails and texts and talk on the phone quite a bit so Johnny has hope to win her heart and they’re making plans to meet in L.A. very soon but the ball is in Angie’s court and she’s open to having a little fun but don’t count on anything getting too serious

* Johnny Depp’s career has taken another hit as he’s been axed from the Fantastic Beasts film franchise after a British court determined he beat ex-wife Amber Heard at least a dozen times

Page 24: Cover Story -- Princess Diana was lured to her death by a twisted dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by the palace -- acting at the direction of Queen Elizabeth’s hard-case husband Prince Philip British intelligence officers mounted a clever operation to drive Prince Charles’ emotionally fragile wife to the breaking point and they knew she was frantic and suicidal and vulnerable and played on her worst fears -- Diana’s own brother Charles Spencer has also broken a 25-year silence to expose a plot against the People’s Princess and he reveals forged documents and a whisper campaign hinting at treacherous betrayals fueled her paranoia and desperation and despair and pushed her into a decision that ultimately cost her life

Page 26: Health Report

Page 30: Rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis vowed to keep wailing ‘til the end but the 85-year-old stroke victim now spends his days listening to his old hits and staring out the window and his health has taken a tragic turn for the worse since he was clobbered by the stroke last year -- he’s hunched over and seems confused and he’s forgetful and can’t remember some of the lyrics to his oldest hits; he tries to play the piano and just can’t because his hands are so stiff and don’t move the way he wants them to

* Mel B claims she’ll go bankrupt if a judge doesn’t lower the $500,000 she’s been ordered to pay her ex-husband and if the sum isn’t modified she will in all likelihood have to file for bankruptcy -- Mel and ex Stephen Belafonte divorced three years ago and have been slugging it out in court ever since

Page 44: Straight Talk -- lifestyle queen bees Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow are at each other’s throats but their furious feud is hard to understand because they’re not really in the same business -- Martha is the ultimate homemaker peddling recipes and furnishings and decorating tips while Gwyneth’s New Age-style Goop website is a sleazy sex shop with items normally found in tacky joints along West Hollywood’s sleazy Santa Monica Boulevard

Page 45: Sinead O’Connor is taking a break to enter a one-year trauma and addiction treatment program after losing a loved one and she admits she’s been addicted to weed for 34 years but became briefly addicted to another drug following her loss

* Sean Connery’s wealthy widow Micheline Roquebrune could end up behind bars and fined a whopping $28 million if convicted of stiffing the Spanish taxman -- the tax-cheat case spans back to 1999 when Sean sold their Marbella mansion on the glitzy Costa del Sol; Connery’s lawyer and the mayor of Marbella and six other elected officials were jailed over a tax-cheat scam involving the property but in 2014 Sean was told he wouldn’t be prosecuted but now Spanish bigwigs say the case has not gone away and want to indict his widow for tax fraud

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