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tabloidtoc · 4 years

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Us, October 26

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

Cover: The truth about Carrie Underwood’s darkest days

Page 4: Who Wore It Best? Izabel Goulart vs. Alyssa Diaz, Bridget Moynahan vs. Hilary Duff

Page 6: Loose Talk -- North West on how she’d make the world a better place, Eva Mendes’ response to a social media troll who suggested that Ryan Gosling should take her out more, Stevie Nicks on whether Harry Styles would be her type if he were older, Adam Sandler on his pandemic beard, Dolly Parton on posing for Playboy in honor of her 75th birthday in January

Page 8: Contents

Page 10: Hot Pics -- Prince William and Duchess Kate stepped in for Queen Elizabeth to meet with the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky and his wife at Buckingham Palace, Joe Manganiello does his best impression of Rafiki holding up Simba with his own pup Bubbles at an Archenemy screening in Montclair, Macaulay Culkin sent the internet wild when he shared this photo of himself in a mask featuring his iconic wide-mouthed expression from Home Alone

Page 12: Venus Williams turns heads in a bold Louis Vuitton ensemble at the brand’s spring-summer 2021 runway show in Paris, Lily-Rose Depp and her mom Vanessa Paradis at the Chanel show in Paris, Tom Cruise films a scene in a car for Mission: Impossible 7 in Rome

Page 13: Sarah Jessica Parker working at her SJP collection store in NYC, Jordan Fisher steps out for fresh air in L.A., Jeannie Mai

Page 14: Kaley Cuoco and costar Michelle Gomez on the streets of the Big Apple filming scenes for their new series The Flight Attendant, Machine Gun Kelly with girlfriend Megan Fox

Page 15: Christina Aguilera and daughter Summer kick off spooky season at the 2020 Nights of the Jack Friends & Family Night in Calabasas, director Steve McQueen and Letitia Wright greet each other at the London Film Festival premiere of Mangrove

Page 16: Rise and Grind -- caffeine-lovers need their morning fix -- Tan France, Ireland Baldwin in L.A., Jenna Fischer, Nick Viall, Peyton List running errands in L.A.

Page 18: Khaki Craze -- celebs sport fall’s hottest trend -- John Krasinski filming Jack Ryan in Rome, Maisie Williams and Reuben Selby are color-coordinated in Dior during Paris Fashion Week, Irina Shayk works it for Boss in Milan, Olivia Palermo in Milan, Suki Waterhouse in Milan, Little Mix Jesy Nelson and Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Perrie Edwards and Jade Thirlwall in London

Page 20: Petal Pushers -- these stars and flowers are a bunch of beauties -- David Beckham, Simone Biles and sunflowers, Madelaine Petsch and poppies, Hilarie Burton on Mischief Farm in Rhinebeck, NY

Page 21: Jessica Chastain in the sunflower field, Yolanda Hadid and lavender, Travis Scott and daughter Stormi wander in the flower fields

Page 22: Stars They’re Just Like Us -- Jessica Simpson works out, Garrett Hedlund plays tennis, Tyler the Creator dines out

Page 24: Love Lives -- For Artem Chigvintsev watching fiancee Nikki Bella’s postpartum depression was difficult

Page 25: Camila Cabello is Shawn Mendes’ biggest fan, Kelly Rowland is expecting her second child with husband Tim Weatherspoon, Alec Baldwin and wife Hilaria Baldwin never bicker when it comes to parenting

Page 26: Hot Hollywood -- Just weeks after calling off their short-lived engagement Max Ehrich’s team picked up his belongings from Demi Lovato’s house including the engagement ring he proposed with in July -- Max who is currently filming a movie in Atlanta is heartbroken about the split while Demi isn’t looking back and she’s acting as if she was never engaged to Max and that their relationship never happened

Page 27: It’s been nearly 10 years since Jessica Simpson last released an album but a comeback is on the horizon and she’s been working on new music and she realizes her past hits are too old for audiences to relate to so she’s focused on making more current tunes, Kim Kardashian West flaunted her hourglass figure for the first issue of Grazia USA and inside got candid about her challenging year, Katie Holmes and Emilio Vitolo Jr. are showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon and the pair are like young teens in love when they’re together and it shows -- Emilio lights up around Katie and whenever he’s asked about her he blushes and smiles -- the chef’s loved ones have also given Katie their stamps of approval

Page 28: A Day in the Life -- Ruby Rose

Page 29: When longtime Dancing With the Stars hosts Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews were replaced with Tyra Banks many were skeptical about the choice but ABC producers had high hopes but now nearly halfway through the season Tyra’s job may be under fire especially after she announced the wrong bottom two couples during Week 4 -- it’s not going well because Tyra thinks she has so much experience hosting she doesn’t have to prepare and she’s also terrible at taking any feedback or constructive criticism

Page 30: Cover Story -- Carrie Underwood stronger than ever -- the country music superstar is opening up about her trials and tribulations and how she made it back from the brink

Page 34: How legendary supermodel Cindy Crawford stays in tip-top shape

Page 35: Like mother, like daughter -- Kaia Gerber’s a chip off the old block in the health and wellness department

Page 36: Marion Cotillard takes us behind the scenes of her first campaign as the face of Chanel No. 5

Page 38: Kristin Chenoweth shares scary good secrets for hosting the holiday

Page 42: Us Musts -- Shea and Syd McGee bring their unique aesthetic to hopeful clients in a new Netflix series Dream Home Makeover

Page 46: Fashion Police -- Mayim Bialik edition -- the Blossom alum looks back at her style choices from the ‘80s and ‘90s

Page 48: 25 Things You Don’t Know About Me -- Ben Feldman

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spottedtoad · 5 years

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Freud, in the only book of his I’ve read, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that every dream, no matter how unpleasant, represents an unarticulated desire. This has always struck me as more convincing (and useful) as a description of fictions like books and movies than for interpreting my own dreams. Whose unarticulated desire is being represented is a matter for debate of course- the protagonist’s, the author or director or performer’s, the audience’s? Hard to say. Karl Popper said of Freudianism that it wasn’t science because you couldn’t prove it wrong, but literary criticism isn’t astrophysics and a certain malleability goes a long way.

But accept for the moment that movies represent desires (not always unarticulated: I’ve heard multiple four-year-olds say they want to be Iron Man.) What kind of desire is represented by the new movie Joker, comic book in origins but resolutely art house in style? This question was taken to have some social import even before the film was in wide release. A story in which a man (the appellation “young” often added by critics beforehand, though more about that later) finds actualization through psychopathic violence was warned to be a potential instigation to more real life instances of nihilistic violence, of the mass shooter type we’ve seen with great regularity over the last several years. This fear was not, I thought, entirely groundless: a showing of an earlier Batman-related movie, The Dark Knight Rises, was the scene of a 2012 mass shooting, and while as it turned out that killer had not intended his dyed hair to mark himself as “the Joker,” the rumor that he had has persisted. The earlier incarnation of this character by Heath Ledger, in the 2010 The Dark Knight, seemed indeed to embody exactly what makes mass shootings a potent source of terror, in spite of their low aggregate frequency and body count relative to other forms of homicide: The Dark Knight‘s Joker was motivated by chaos for its own sake, often contradicting himself in discussing his motivations and “how I got these scars.” Heath Ledger’s death at 28 prior to The Dark Knight‘s release from a cocktail of abused prescription drugs put a seal on an indelible performance, suggesting the darkness of the character (in a movie that, to be honest, I find kind of a slog whenever Ledger’s Joker is not on screen) came at least in part from real life internal torment as well as the actor, director, and screenwriters’ craft.

If this backstory gave some cause for concern, media outlets were eager to magnify it, with dozens of articles warning that the Joker movie could set off copycat (copying off of real or fictional violence unclear) killings, to the point where it became ambiguous whether these articles were intended to forestall violence, use its threat to boost ticket sales, or, for the benefit of an ideological narrative, call it into existence. Fortunately, we have been spared any accompanying violence related to the film; even last night, there were two uniformed local policy prominently standing at the entrance to my local megaplex when my wife and I went to see the 9:45.

The genre which Joker forms a part of is both an unusual one- the art house homage to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy that is also a comic book movie- while it is also immediately adjacent to the preeminent commercial production of our time, the superhero origin story. Almost every superhero franchise and reboot now begins with a portrayal of how the hero gained his or her powers, how he or she became- by magic or mutation or training montage- a god sent to live among men. The origin story is, it would appear, the audience’s entry-point into identification with the superhero; it is not enough that the great ones of the earth have our interest at heart, but that we learn how they were once weak and helpless like us, whether as babies saved from Krypton or as young orphaned billionaire heirs.

More precisely analogous to Joker is 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which sought to portray the origin not of an individual superhero (though it is really antihero Magneto’s film) but of the broader social world of the other X-Men films, of Professor X’s School for mutants as well as Magneto’s competing band of outlaws. What was distinctive about First Class was its temporal setting: casting backwards before the era of the earlier movies of the series, it sets itself in a mythic Kennedy Era of Cold War intrigue (unleashed in the film by mutants rather than ideology) and of mutants’ Civil Rights struggles substituting for black Americans’. While to me one of the most artistically successful of recent superhero movies, First Class is notable in how comfortable its alternative history feels to us; we are used to viewing the era immediately before the 60s counterculture as an ancien regime both glorious and unjust, as Mad Men was fond of showing- we are eager both to revel in the aesthetics and grandiosity of the world of the Baby Boomers’ childhood and deplore its moral failures and unequal civic ethics.

Joker is more unfamiliar and unsettling in its setting. The disintegration of urban America prior to its partial rebirth in the last 30 years is easily remembered, and in the case of New York, where Joker is more-or-less explicitly set, is often if incompletely discussed. But it is an ambiguous and incompletely mythologized portion of our collective narrative. What exactly led to American cities being riddled with garbage, graffiti and crime, near abandoned by middle class families, aesthetically blighted and seemingly spiritually bereft? Why were there over 2,000 murders a year in New York City (when there have been under 300 per year in a larger city in the last few years)? My precinct in my last neighborhood in Brooklyn had 99 rapes in a single year in the early 90s, and only one the year I lived there, 2006. To say that this descent into Tartarus was due to lead poisoning, or white flight, are clearly incomplete; to say this was due to a collapse of civic authority and popular morality begs the question.

Joker is, in its own way, eager to answer this question. The Gotham of Joker is not Tim Burton’s cartoonish 1940s Gothic of his Batman movies, or Christopher Nolan’s Bloombergian circle of shiny glass and steel from the Dark Knight trilogy. It is, instead, an exaggeratedly decayed, almost shattered, version of the 1970s pimps-and-pushers New York of Taxi Driver, with an endless garbage strike reminiscent of several from 1968 to 1977 piling refuse in every exterior shot, over which giant rats crawl, and the filming locations drawn from the sadder and more austere corners of the Outer Boroughs. The movie’s most deliberately iconic image, of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker dancing on the steps leading to his apartment building, is a real staircase in the Bronx several blocks from the school where I taught and which I described in 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip.

In fact, in an ill-fated field trip that didn’t make it into the book, I led my students to and from Crotona Park past those exact stairs to dig up and observe grubs and earthworms. (On the way back, a boy was accused of slapping a girl’s butt, leading to hours of recrimination, between me and the students and between the principal and me). I lived at the time next to a similar, if slightly less filmic set of stairs in Washington Heights, and spent a lot of time in apartment buildings identical in design if slightly less poorly maintained to the one where Joaquin’s character Arthur Fleck, lives. The subway stations and trains are similarly familiar to anyone who has lived in New York, even if the names are changed.

All of which is to say that Joker wants itself to be set in a real-seeming, if mythically nightmarish, New York-turned-Gotham, a 1970s megalopolis collapsing under its own refuse and under the burden of hatred and collective ill will. The first image of the film is a faded, deliberately dated version of the Warner Brothers’ logo, flickering and faltering. The human elements of Gotham are, in general, shown through a similarly harsh lens; while many reviewers describe the Arthur Fleck character as an alienated young man, Joaquin Phoenix is shown as anything but; his face, on screen for practically every shot, is made to seem every minute of his 44 years:

His wasted torso, for which the actor lost over 50 pounds, is similarly contorted, abandoned, presumptively worn down by the character’s nonexistent diet, constant chainsmoking, and cocktail of pharmaceutical meds. There’s something interesting about this visual emphasis on the character and actor’s age. Compare, for example, to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, a youthful 32 playing 26:

De Niro’s Travis Bickle is, implicitly, the “all American kid from New York City,” explaining other characters’ frequent positive affect towards him, and his own social incapacity and descent into violence is, visually at least, the result of the fallen world impinging upon him rather than his own intrinsic corruption. He amiably convinces Cybil Shephard to go out with him on a date, before his incomprehension of the world leads him to take her to an X-rated film. Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck on the other hand, is not only visibly aged and incapable of ordinary conversation, passing into peals of barking laughter and incoherence, but evidently has an inner life constructed only of darkness and destructive images, as shown by the ink-scribbled journal and alleged joke diary he writes in, into which pornographic images are taped and from which inopportunely fall out.

What exactly is Arthur Fleck- or Joaquin Phoenix- doing in this 1970s world, we might ask? While X Men: First Class substituted youthful James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in telling the origin of the characters previously inhabited by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, Joker is about a middle aged man trapped in perpetual boyhood, searching pathetically for father figures, resentful of his mother’s injuries to him, yearning for women with whom he cannot speak. It seems not coincidental that both Phoenix and director/screenwriter Todd Phillips are of an age to have been born roughly at the time of the film’s setting, and that the film’s central axis finds Fleck trying to understand the mystery of his birth, becoming the Joker only when this question is revealed to be unanswerable. In other words, Joker is a Generation X origin story, an attempt to find, in the inscrutable dirt of urban blight, the origin of an inconvenient and extraneous generation like Fleck’s inconvenient and extraneous man.

If the viewer is cast backwards into the past to find their own origins amid 1970s decay, Fleck is equally out of temporal step with his world. A clown is intrinsically a dated persona, even in a 1970s milieu, and much of the film emphasizes that Arthur’s world is itself locked in an inaccessible and unrealized past. Arthur first appears dancing to a ragtime piece, watches Fred Astaire on TV, and the songs referenced up until his transformation into the Joker are either old (“Slap That Bass,” “That’s Life,” Jimmy Durante’s “Smile” ) or deliberately dated despite their 1970s provenance, like “Send in the Clowns.” When Arthur tails Thomas Wayne to the theatre, it is Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times that they- and the rest of the city’s fat cats- are watching and laughing to; just as we as viewers are caught off from the mystery and dishonor of our origins amid 1970s decay, Arthur cannot come to understand his origins in the forgotten and unlearnable disgraces of the 30s.

At the same time, Arthur is, like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, incapable of speech, but expressive in movement. While Travis Bickle’s social missteps are mitigated by his youth and external amiability and the measured tone of his voiceovers, Arthur Fleck is redeemed only in a few moments of physical performance- in the moments before a gang of kids intercedes to attack him or a gun falls out of his pocket, he is clearly a gifted physical performer when in make-up as a clown. While the film concludes with him becoming the Joker, his acts of violence having merged the darkness of his inner verbal life with the grace and self-possession of his clown performance, self-actualized in psychopathy. Suddenly, the film’s dissonance between temporal setting and cultural signifiers disappear- the Joker dances to Gary Glitter’s 1973 “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” on the stairs, and as Gotham descends into the fire and chaos that delights the Joker’s heart, that universal cliche of unchained liberation, Cream’s “White Room” plays a few distorted guitar bars of freedom.

A hidden tension in our culture- starting to become less hidden- is that once Baby Boomers took over the culture, historical consciousness became somewhat fixed and recent eras have been mostly exempt from the myth-making and revisionism that dominate our views of the world before Watergate. My guess is that both MeToo and some of the media controversy over Joker are partly driven by this closed book starting to open and people angling to grab control over what can be written in it and what cannot. For now, it seems telling the story of the costs of post-Sixties liberation and urban blight is allowable, as long as these costs are presented as result of empowering the rich, white, male, and straight to indulge temptations, not a broader breakdown of order that encompassed multiple types of culprit and victims. This creation of historical myth is perhaps what distinguishes the prominent generational cohorts from the marginal ones.

The supposed political controversy over Joker is at one level strange; the film takes a basically left-sympathetic view of the horror of Gotham, with canceled social services and rich, sadistic or narcissistic businessmen primarily to blame, and the racial dynamics of Joker are at least at a surface level politically correct. While Arthur is assaulted by a mixed-race group of young hoodlums at the movie’s onset, he explicitly forgives them, in a way he doesn’t the three rich white men who attack him later. The riots by which Gotham is consumed at the film’s end is shown as outsider white men rising up against insider, rich white men. The four main black characters- his social worker, his next door love interest, a clerk at the insane asylum he convinces to share his mother’s file, and a psychiatrist he meets with at the end of the film- are not only sympathetic and kind. They are essentially the only characters, apart from a colleague with dwarfism, to show Arthur attention and concern, and with whom he finds himself eager to express himself in humane terms and show himself to be sane. Not coincidentally, they are filmed in a forgiving and gracious light, at odds with the washed-out and unforgiving appearance of almost all the other (white) characters.

If there is a racial subtext to Joker– and this is America, how could there not be- it is likely that it is, in fact, the desire to sideline racial conflict from the paroxysms of post-60s urban life, to present black Americans as patient, sane, wisely enduring bystanders to class and civic conflict and crime rather than primary participants and victims. Arthur’s visible fantasies- or hallucinations- of a love affair with his next door neighbor are exaggeratedly chaste, in spite of the cutout pictures of naked black women in his notebook. While 1970s films themselves often wished to juggle the social role of blacks and whites in collective consciousness (as Rocky did), or to offer white men a role as instruments of reactionary vengeance without explicitly invoking racial revenge (as Taxi Driver did by making the main target of Travis Bickle’s bloodshed the white pimp played by Harvey Keitel), Joker takes place in a different kind of dream-like world- there is a reason Arthur’s six-shooter revolver shoots nine bullets in his first burst of violence. The dream desire I would guess it seeks is to find an origin story for our own incoherences, inequalities, injustices, that does not make race determinative of whether one is inside or outside the circle of privilege, in the present and in the past. If fictions are defined by pretending to be someone else, perhaps Joker is an attempt by middle aged white guys, to be sure to say that, while they may be- perhaps definitively are- the villain, they can at least choose what kind of villain they wish to be. This choice amounts, according to many in media, and an increasing segment of our most prominent institutions, to the Joker dancing on concrete steps following bloody deeds, an ornamentation of psychopathy that does not and cannot change its character, whether we used to think our story a comedy, but now realize it is a tragedy, or the other way around.

The Generation X Origin Story Freud, in the only book of his I've read, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that every dream, no matter how unpleasant, represents an unarticulated desire.

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always-tilting-at-windmills · 2 years

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brookstonalmanac · 2 years

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Events 11.14

1680 – German astronomer Gottfried Kirch discovers the Great Comet of 1680, the first comet to be discovered by telescope. 1770 – James Bruce discovers what he believes to be the source of the Nile. 1812 – Napoleonic Wars: At the Battle of Smoliani, French Marshals Victor and Oudinot are defeated by the Russians under General Peter Wittgenstein. 1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, is published in the USA. 1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days. 1910 – Aviator Eugene Burton Ely performs the first takeoff from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia, taking off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher. 1914 – The Joensuu City Hall, designed by Eliel Saarinen, was inaugurated in Joensuu, Finland 1918 – The Provisional National Assembly of the new republic of Czechoslovakia meets to devise a constitution. 1920 – Pesäpallo, the Finnish version of baseball developed by Lauri Pihkala, is played for the first time at Kaisaniemi Park in Helsinki. 1921 – The Communist Party of Spain is founded, and issues the first edition of Mundo obrero. 1922 – The British Broadcasting Company begins radio service in the United Kingdom. 1938 – The Lions Gate Bridge, connecting Vancouver to the North Shore region, opens to traffic. 1940 – World War II: In England, Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed. 1941 – World War II: The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal sinks due to torpedo damage from the German submarine U-81 sustained on November 13. 1941 – World War II: German troops, aided by local auxiliaries, murder nine thousand residents of the Słonim Ghetto in a single day. 1952 – The New Musical Express publishes the first regular UK Singles Chart. 1957 – The "Apalachin meeting" in rural Tioga County in upstate New York is raided by law enforcement; many high-level Mafia figures are arrested while trying to flee. 1960 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first Black child to attend an all-White elementary school in Louisiana. 1965 – Vietnam War: The Battle of Ia Drang begins: The first major engagement between regular American and North Vietnamese forces. 1967 – The Congress of Colombia, in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Policarpa Salavarrieta, declares this day as "Day of the Colombian Woman". 1967 – American physicist Theodore Maiman is given a patent for his ruby laser systems, the world's first laser. 1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to the surface of the Moon. 1970 – Soviet Union enters ICAO, making Russian the fourth official language of organization. 1970 – Southern Airways Flight 932 crashes in the mountains near Huntington, West Virginia, killing 75, including almost all of the Marshall University football team. 1971 – Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars. 1973 – In the United Kingdom, Princess Anne marries Captain Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey. 1973 – The Athens Polytechnic uprising, a massive demonstration of popular rejection of the Greek military junta of 1967–74, begins. 1975 – With the signing of the Madrid Accords, Spain abandons Western Sahara. 1977 – During a British House of Commons debate, Labour MP Tam Dalyell poses what would become known as the West Lothian question, referring to issues related to devolution in the United Kingdom. 1978 – France conducts the Aphrodite nuclear test as 25th in the group of 29 1975–78 French nuclear tests. 1979 – US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive Order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis. 1982 – Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment near the Soviet border. 1984 – Zamboanga City mayor Cesar Climaco, a prominent critic of the government of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, is assassinated in his home city. 1990 – After German reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland sign a treaty confirming the Oder–Neisse line as the border between Germany and Poland. 1991 – American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103. 1991 – Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk returns to Phnom Penh after thirteen years in exile. 1992 – In poor conditions caused by Cyclone Forrest, Vietnam Airlines Flight 474 crashes near Nha Trang, killing 30. 1995 – A budget standoff between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress forces the federal government to temporarily close national parks and museums and to run most government offices with skeleton staffs. 2001 – War in Afghanistan: Afghan Northern Alliance fighters take over the capital Kabul. 2001 – A magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes a remote part of the Tibetan plateau. It has the longest known surface rupture recorded on land (~400 km) and is the best documented example of a supershear earthquake. 2003 – Astronomers discover 90377 Sedna, the most distant trans-Neptunian object. 2008 – The first G-20 economic summit opens in Washington, D.C. 2012 – Israel launches a major military operation in the Gaza Strip in response to an escalation of rocket attacks by Hamas. 2016 – A magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes Kaikoura, New Zealand, at a depth of 15 km (9 miles), resulting in the deaths of two people. 2017 – A gunman kills four people and injures 12 others during a shooting spree across Rancho Tehama, California. He had earlier murdered his wife in their home. 2019 – A mass shooting occurs at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, resulting in three deaths, including that of the perpetrator, and three injuries.

#Events

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racingtoaredlight · 7 years

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Profiles in IMDb Greatness: Matt Ross

I love the Internet Movie Database. If I’m looking to Instagram stalk the pretty Italian lady from the second season of Master of None it’s a great outlet to find her real name. As such I enjoy looking over random performer pages and arbitrarily judging the scope and quality of their careers to determine if they merit entry into my vaguely defined IMDb Hall of Fame. Today’s enshrinee: Matt Ross

Fate and the Home Box Office television network conspired to serve up a perfect actor for inclusion in this hallowed Hall when as the fourth season of Silicon Valley was up and running while it seemed like American Psycho was on twice a day (and then like a month passed without my actually doing the post but it’s here now so leave me alone). Anyone who can both legitimately unnerve Patrick Bateman and make hostile corporate takeovers hilarious is working with a full deck as a performer.

First Listed Role: I already know this profile is going to be a winner since I’ve seen his first credited role, 1994′s PCU.

It’s been a great long while since I’ve seen PCU (so long ago that even with the picture I can’t remember what exactly Matt Ross did) but I recall it being entertaining enough while still thinking my buddies oversold the hell out of it. It’s a fun movie to look back on as a reminder that even with all the crybabies today annoyed they can no longer use racial slurs decrying political correctness is not a new phenomenon.

Also George Clinton rocks pretty hard in it if memory serves.

Most Recent Finished Work: The great Silicon Valley. That show sneaked up on me during the second season when I had a realization that I looked forward to it just about as much as any other show on TV and would regularly have your faithful writer laughing loudly like an idiot multiple times an episode.

On the show Ross has helped create one of the great villains of television Gavin Belson. Think a more insecure, outwardly evil Bill Gates whose tech giant company Hooli is a constant cloud over the doings of the show’s, for lack of a better word, heroes. A common trait with Ross’ best roles is being able to possess a certain oily sleaziness. Gavin Belson as CEO of a major corporation is more polished than the Alby Grants he’s portrayed but the running bit with animal props as board meetings is a perfect showcase for a hilarious lack of basic morality.

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CSI/Law & Order/NCIS Guest Spots: In furthering being the perfect IMDb HOF entrant Matt Ross has a double dip of CSIs (no Law & Order surprisingly, but he does do more film work than a lot of the others so less available time I’d imagine).

From CSI: Miami we have Silencer.

Horatio and his team investigate a double murder at a concert, but unraveling the mystery becomes difficult when leads take them in two directions: the Mala Noche gang, and a pharmaceutical company.

Difficult to say where Ross’ character Paul Burton falls into this mess but if I had to guess I’d wager he’s aligned with the pill pushers than the Mala Noche gang. Being a shady pharmacy lab tech feels just right for him. I just hope it was George Clinton concert that claimed those two souls as a bit of an Easter egg to Matt Ross’ early work.

And then there’s CSI: Original Recipe with Meat Jekyll. As first I got excited thinking Ross was playing a character named Meat Jekyll before realizing it was just the title of the episode. An even bigger disappointment is not using Ross’ aforementioned ability to play sinister to be the Hannical Lector of the episode.

The crime lab reluctantly brings in imprisoned serial killer Nate Haskell after he claims to know the identity of "Dr. Jeckyll." Meanwhile, clues revealing his next and perhaps final victim are mailed to Dr. Langston.

Instead they gave that *sunglasses* MEATY role *yeah* to That Guy who was in Eight Men Out as one of the few players who didn’t get kicked out of baseball. Can’t trust a man who won’t take a gambler’s money in this reporter’s opinion.

Hall of Fame Ballot Submissions: Twelve Monkeys (maybe my favorite treatment of time travel as a concept and how you wouldn’t be able to change anything since it’s already happened in the future), Face/Off (I only watched about 20 minutes of this and shut it off but it’s such a famous goodbad movie that I included it, just couldn’t buy in to Nic Cage’s skin fitting around Travolta’s giant head), Oz (this post’s winner of the biggest “Oh shit, really?” work, he was one of the guards killed in the riot), American Psycho, The Aviator, Good Night and Good Luck, Big Love, Silicon Valley.

Big Love was a bit of a stretch here since by the last couple seasons I was outwardly hating it but Ross’ Alby Grant is probaby still the role I most associate him with when he pops up elsewhere due to how devastatingly creepy he was. Also I included Big Love for Bill Paxton so in the name of consistency it’s here again, plus this adds to Ross being the king of HBO.

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The Aviator was another flick that HBO brought back into the rotation in the last few months that I hadn’t seen in forever and I’d forgotten he was in it. In a weird turn his character Odie is simply a competent airplane mechanic without any degenerate character tendencies, I’m sure it was his hardest role to pull off.

And what’s left to say about his turn in American Psycho, he’d know better than anyone that too much praise can be grating.

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Miscellaneous Credits: New rule, if you play Johnny Cash in something, it gets mentioned here like with Lifetime’s Ring of Fire.

Suppose you’d have to ask someone else why this was made when Walk The Line had come out eight years earlier but hey, if they can keep rebooting Spider-Man this century than certainly the Man in Black should be celebrated as often as possible.

Highest Rated IMDb Entry: Goddamn right, the Silicon Valley episode Optimal Tip-To-Tip Efficiency that pulled the whole first season together and hinted at the heights it could reach. 9.4 stars, this episode fucks. I love this one sentence from the episode description:

The guys break out into a ridiculous argument

Yes they did, IMDb plot recapper, yes they did.

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Lowest Rated IMDb Entry: I’m not about to go through every other post in this series to check but 5.4 for the worst (according to IMDb users) production one’s been in might be the new high water mark. Take a bow, A Deadly Vision. I’ll be keeping my eyes open to see if the Lifetime Movie Channel re-airs this.

A waitress who has psychic visions of murders before they happen is asked by a police detective to help find a serial killer.

Making this all the better? Matt Ross is indeed the killer and is billed simply as The Killer, just like with The Joker a menace can be more terrifying without any sort of tether to humanity. I’m now wondering to myself just how good Matt Ross could be as The Joker in something. Him and Ben Affleck are pretty much the same age so why not make him the Clown Prince of Evil for any standalone Batfleck film instead of Jared Leto’s ass. Just something to think about, Hollywood bigshots.

IMDb Fun Fact: Matt Ross is 6' 0½" tall.

I feel like I was pitching a perfect IMDb HOF post and then the Trivia section stepped to the plate and laid down a bunt that hugged the third base line of uninteresting tidbits of a great actor’s career. Shame.

IMDb HOF Members: Even though the ad wizards have decreed that only video is worthy of internet bandwidth it sure would be swell if the dear readers clicked back on any old posts they haven’t read yet and tell me how these used to be better before I became cynical and jaded beyond recognition.

Bob Balaban

Jim Beaver

Clancy Brown

W. Earl Brown

Reg E. Cathey

Gary Cole

Keith David

Cary Elwes

Noah Emmerich

Jami Gertz

John Hawkes

John Michael Higgins

Toby Huss

Allison Janney

John Carroll Lynch

Margo Martindale

David Morse

Joe Morton

Robert Patrick

Bill Paxton

Jon Polito

Alan Rickman

Stephen Root

Matt Ross

Alan Ruck

Peter Stormare

Daniel von Bargen

Next Time: Should I just do an actual Jami Gertz one? She’s been in there so long I can hardly remember what inspired the running gag in the first place.

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#imdb hof #matt ross #silicon valley #american psycho #big love #johnny cash #oz #csi #i want you patrick

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kaysofourlives · 7 years

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Flower thing!//

send me a ✿ and I’ll generate a kiss! | Accepting

7. Firm kiss

Aradia’s life as an heiress revolved around protocol. She’s told you as much, on more than one occasion, and her disdain for them is fairly blatant. Always rules to be mindful of, always some proper etiquette to consider. Even the company she keeps is policed to an extent, and the rules on who can enter and when she can exit are pretty strict.

Your visit, for example. She told you it had to be requested in writing, so you make plans to stay for a length of time so she wouldn’t have to put the request in more than once. Just over a weekend, nothing serious. The first thing you do when you get there is gawk, just a little, first at her hive’s interior, then at her. Pictures really didn’t do her proper justice! The second thing is to jostle a bag on your wrist, full of movies and novels, and grin.

Your first night is fantastic. Aradia grows on you quickly with how sharp she is, she’s already familiar with some of the books you brought and a solid two hours are spent talking about them before you move onto movies. As it turns out, you have many mutual favorites, and you’re quick to find things to debate. Eventually you relax into a casual cuddle, watching something of Tim Burton’s.

Imagine your surprise when you’re awoken by Aradia’s entourage of guards the night after. You’re promptly told she’s disappeared, and as such, you’re being detained until she’s found. You couldn’t care less about the two burly trolls who watch your every move for the rest of the night, you’re just worried about your friend.

By the time she’s returned, you’ve all but burned track marks into the floor with your nervous pacing. Her head is hung, her lips set in a pout. Her escorts brush it off as “teenage rebellion”, apparently she’d snuck to a day club. Your relief is palpable when you see her safe and sound. Disregarding the guards, you march right up to her and take her face in your hands, planting a firm kiss on her lips. It only lasts a few moments before you’ve got your arms around her.

“Congratulations, you may be the first troll in history to give an undead pusher a pump attack.”

#ic #rammeup #Asks

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aiiaiiiyo · 8 years

Photo

First plane to take off from a carrier: Eugene Burton Ely flies his Curtiss pusher biplane from USS Birmingham (CL-2) with USS Roe (DD-24) in the background. 14 Nov 1910 [740 x 573] Check this blog!

#fing_lizard_king #historyporn #history

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stormyalbiston4-blog · 6 years

Text

Total Online video From Sridevi's MEMORIAL SERVICE With Family members Video Recording.

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