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if-you-fan-a-fire · 3 years

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"Reciprocity Benefits" cigar

"Uncle Sam - I'll smoke it, you may smell it."

From the Berlin (Kitchener) News Record, September 6 1911

[Context from my pal DN]: The 1911 federal election was the first "free trade" election. In office since 1896, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier's Liberals sought their fifth consecutive sweeping majority. President Taft's proposal of lowering tariffs became the central political issue. Wrapped in the Union Jack, Robert Borden's Conservatives opposed free trade and argued that Canada would be taken over by the United States.

The election was close but the Conservatives came out ahead. The entrenched Liberal machine built around Laurier ensured the Liberals carried Quebec, but with a significant loss of seats to the Conservatives. The Liberals also carried Atlantic Canada, but just barely, signalling the crumbling of the old opposition to Confederation in the 1860s in which it was correctly predicted that losing free trade with New England would result in Atlantic Canadian industry being swallowed up by Montreal capital. The predictions came true, and Nova Scotia in particular suffered through a wave of deindustrializatoin in the 1880s and 1890s as Montreal capital bought up local concerns and shuttered them in favour of greater concentrations of industry in Montreal and the St. Lawrence Valley.

In the new prairie provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Liberals continued to dominate as colonization rapidly expanded the number of farmers who quickly found themselves locked into an east-west trade cartel controlled by the rail monopolies of CPR, Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk Pacific (the latter two would be nationalized and form Canadian National in 1919). The farmers were incensed that they were blocked from trading south to American markets at cheaper freight rates.

The Conservatives cut into Liberal support in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, but the bulk of its support came from Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia - the three Anglo provinces where industrial capitalism had taken hold during the "Second Industrial Revolution" that began in the 1890s. Not only that, but Ontario, Manitoba and BC were politically dominated by the most militant Anglo founders of Confederation. Through the Orange Terror of the 1870s against the Métis and their democratic allies, and a sustained political struggle against French language schooling rights, the bilingual and multicultural character of Manitoba had been legally and politically extinguished by the mid-1890s (and was a contributing factor to Laurier's Liberals winning the 1896 election, ending 18 years of Conservative rule).

Likewise, British Columbia was politically loyal to the project of Confederation. It had been aggressively established as a British colonial outpost in the 1850s for the Empire's project of a united British North America and establishing a British base in the northwestern Pacific. The 1860s was marked by a series of colonial wars and punitive expeditions by British gunboats, redcoats and settler terrorist groups. Colonial victory was achieved with the deliberate smallpox genocide of Indigenous peoples on Vancouver Island which spread to Haida Gwaii and the mainland. Estimates of 15,000 to 30,000 Indigenous peoples died in a year - half the Indigenous population of Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii. White people in Victoria, population 5,000 in 1862, were busy getting vaccinated, the smallpox vaccine having been discovered decades before available in the Pacific Northwest by the 1850s. By 1911, British Columbia had become a major coal and lumber exporter and the terminus of three new transcontinental railroads (CPR at Port Moody and Granville; Canadian Northern at Port Mann and later Pacific Central Station; Grand Trunk Pacific at Prince Rupert).

It seemed like the Conservatives had re-established their once-powerful "National Policy" coalition of British imperialists, Canadian capitalists and the Anglo working class. However, the Second Industrial Revolution, the two new transcontinental railways, and colonization of the prairies had radically expanded and altered the character of the industrial working class and the role of the state in society. The brewing rebellion of farmers, the Vancouver Coal Wars of 1912-1914, the great IWW strike of the Grand Trunk Pacific in 1913, and the success of state capitalist development (Ontario Hydro Commission - 1906, Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway - 1902, King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act - 1907) were all harbingers of radical change that exploded with the pressure cooker of the Great War.

Farmers struck out on their own after the war with farmer parties taking power in Ontario (1919), Alberta (1921) and Manitoba (1922). The working-class insurgency of 1919 shook the ruling class and forged a broad and complex vanguard of radical working-class politics and action that formed a foundation for the great class struggles of the 1930s and 1940s.

The Conservatives, during and immediately following the war, were pressed to concede the vote of women, albeit through opportunistic means to win the 1917 election in favour of conscription, nationalize the CNoR and Grand Trunk in 1919, and lose its popular "producer" base that had won it power in 1911 and undergirded its electoral success during the first 30 years of Confederation.

Ever the opportunists, the Liberals under King abandoned the free trade mantra and spent the next 30 years overseeing the renovation of the Canadian state in the interest of capital while playing a ruthless game of stick, carrot and more stick against the growing insurgency of the "producer" classes which had grown too large and self-conscious to contain within a bourgeois two-party system.

The next seventy years would hold to this pattern until the economic base of the farmer and labour movements had sufficiently crumbled by the 1980s, at which point the Progressive Conservatives (a name courtesy of a 1940s merger of the Conservatives and a section of the farmer-based Progressives) pulled the plug on the National Policy of protective tariffs and home market development in favour of free trade with the United States.

With Mulroney's victory in the 1988 "free trade" election and subsequent refusal of provincial governments to challenge the free trade agreement (Bob Rae promised he would during his successful 1990 election campaign), the old 20th century political arrangements have collapsed. The small farmer class has disappeared to political insignificance. The working-class has been radically transformed since deindustrialization and free trade. The three-party political system that dominated the 1919-1990 period has collapsed and been remade with new coalitions of forces and factions - even if the party names carry forward into a new century.

With one "producer" class still standing - the working class - and the colonial and capitalist failures of Confederation coming home to roost at home and abroad, can a new vision and program for Canada be forged by a new working-class movement?

#canadian history #kitchener #free trade #reciprocity #national policy #canadian politics #1911 federal election #bordern government #liberal party of canada #conservative party of canada #wilfred laurier

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thenerdysimp · 9 months

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Who I write for

And other fandoms I’m in

List of fandoms/fan bases I’m a part of and who I’d write for! Actors are at the bottom! If there’s any questions just ask! (The list may change in the future, maybe I’ll add new fandoms or characters. I might also remove some.)

(The list is long, sorry about that😅)

Dream smp

- Dream

- Karl Jacobs

- Foolish Gamers

Formula 1

Current drivers

- Carlos Sainz

- Charles Leclerc

- Lando Norris

- Max Verstappen

- Daniel Ricciardo

- Pierre Gasly

- Lewis Hamilton

- Logan Sargeant

- George Russell

- (possibly Oscar Piastri)

- (possibly Franco Colapinto) (temporarily)

Retired drivers

- Jenson Button

Hazbin Hotel

- Lucifer Morningstar

- Alastor

The Hunger Games

- Peeta Mellark

- Finnick Odair

- Coriolanus Snow

Zorro the chronicles

- Diego de la Vega/Zorro

MacGyver (2016 reboot)

- Angus MacGyver

Shadow and bone

- Aleksander Morozova

- Kaz Brekker

- Nikolai Lantsov

Stranger things

- Steve Harrington

- Eddie Munson

Kingsman

- Gary “Eggsy” Unwin

Sam & Colby

- Colby Brock

- Nate Hardy

- Seth Borden

Star Wars

- Anakin Skywalker

- Obi-Wan Kenobi

- Din Djarin

Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus

- Percy Jackson

- Luke Castellan

Five nights at Freddy’s (the movie)

- Mike Schmidt

Wonka (2023)

- Willy Wonka

Top Gun

- Pete ”Maverick” Mitchell

- Jake ”Hangman” Seresin

- Robert “Bob” Floyd

Star Stable Online

- Ydris

Marvel

The Avengers

- Peter Parker

- Bucky Barnes

- Loki Laufeyson

X-men

- Alex Summers

The Maze Runner

- Newt

- Thomas

Teen Wolf

- Stiles Stilinski

- Isaac Lahey

- Derek Hale

- Liam Dunbar

Harry Potter

Fantastic Beasts and where to find them

- Newt Scamander

- Theseus Scamander

Pirates of the Caribbean

- Will Turner

- Henry Turner

Lord of the rings/The Hobbit

- Legolas

- Aragorn

Mission: impossible

- Ethan Hunt

Narnia

- Prince Caspian

Free Rein

- Peter “Pin” Hawthorne

Descendants

- Harry Hook

One Direction

How to train your dragon

Avatar

Monster Trucks

- Tripp Coley

The dragon prince

Reign

Wednesday

The Matrix

Grease

Dirty Dancing

Pentatonix

(Won’t write for anyone)

Actors:

- Tom Blyth

- Lucas Till

- Ben Barnes

- Taron Egerton

- Hayden Christensen

- Timothée Chalamet

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denimbex1986 · 1 year

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'"It's a paradox, but it works." This one brief sentence gets at the heart of the new Christopher Nolan film "Oppenheimer," serving as a potentially accidental kind of mission statement. A movie about the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the Manhattan Project during the latter years of World War II and who essentially invented a new form of warfare via the atomic bomb, is not impossible but presents a series of challenges to any filmmaker. Here is a man whose intellect was unparalleled, who rubbed shoulders with many of the most remarkable scientists to ever live, and whose importance to both American and world history is unquestioned. But here is a man whose intellect led to the death of countless thousands of innocent people in service of concluding a world war, and whose intellect then inspired other people across the world to pursue more violent means of warfare.

The paradox of "Oppenheimer" is that the man deserves a full accounting, but that full accounting does not flatter him or those around him; that the three-hour epic is populated by what feels like three-quarters of Hollywood with many actors appearing just for a handful of minutes; that in many ways, the film is centered around the Trinity Test, in which the atomic bomb was first successfully tested in the deserts of New Mexico, but is otherwise an intimate story in which different groups of men debate things in different locations, all presented in crystal-clear IMAX photography. But, to quote Oppenheimer, it works.

In spite of the fact that Nolan (serving also as sole screenwriter, working off the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography "American Prometheus") is dealing with only real-life characters and events for the first time in his career, he still manages to fiddle around with timelines, helping ensure that "Oppenheimer" is never less than propulsive, intellectual, and jittery in its pacing. There are two separate title cards (for the scientific properties of fission and fusion) that appear early in the film, meant to delineate one thread in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is brought before a faux-prosecutorial board of men curious to revoke his security clearances in 1954, and another in which politician Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.) goes through a contentious Cabinet confirmation process in 1959. But there's a third, slightly more straightforward thread throughout, in which we follow Oppenheimer for nearly two decades, from his college days at Cambridge leading up to the fateful morning in mid-July 1945 when the A-bomb was tested in the dark of night.

History as thriller

Headline aside, it's not really a spoiler to talk about American history, especially history of such gravity. It's to Christopher Nolan's credit that he's able to treat a couple of different aspects of the post-WWII downfall of J. Robert Oppenheimer as surprises akin to something in a suspense thriller, both regarding someone in the shadows coming out to speak against a key figure in a public manner. The 1954 hearing against Oppenheimer — which resulted in him losing his security clearance, and helped contribute to his falling out of the public spotlight after being celebrated across America for years as "the father of the atomic bomb" — hinges on a letter written to J. Edgar Hoover by William Borden (David Dastmalchian, 15 years removed from his feature debut role in "The Dark Knight") that calls out Oppenheimer for his left-wing political leanings and his connections to more strident Communists among the scientific community and in his personal life.

For most of the three-hour running time, it's technically an open question for a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) to wonder who in the Atomic Energy Commission gave Borden the classified material to help accuse Oppenheimer. The eventual revelation that Strauss worked with a sour military man (Dane DeHaan) to give Borden the files feels less surprising than perhaps expected, if only because of how effectively Downey, Jr. captures in his performance the frustration and moral impotence he feels between himself and Oppenheimer, a man who he admires but is humiliated by in countless situations. The twist that does work more effectively occurs in Strauss' Senate hearing, as he attempts to win a place in President Eisenhower's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. Much hinges on the testimony of a scientist named David Hill, who we see only very briefly and silently earlier in the film. But since Oscar winner Rami Malek plays Hill, it's no surprise that he has a crucial moment in offering his testimony at the hearing, quickly making clear that he's essentially representing any and all scientists horrified by how the American government treated Oppenheimer after World War II, and accurately accuses Strauss of having spearheaded the attempt to discredit the eponymous scientist.

Haunted by visions

For any criticisms levied against Christopher Nolan in his career about being too cold or calculated as a filmmaker, there's a strong and intense undercurrent of emotion bubbling under the surface throughout every scene. The sequences featuring Downey, Jr. (those filmed from his perspective, both during the Cabinet hearing and in any flashbacks emanating from his remarks, are in black-and-white, a first for IMAX photography) are rife with jealousy, as Strauss desperately tries to be accepted by a scientific community that instantly understands his mental limitations and treats him as second-rate. Of the many recurrent images in the film, one that stands out and serves as the kicker for the story is that of Strauss watching from afar as Oppenheimer speaks with the legendary Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) on the Princeton campus, before Strauss tries and fails to make polite conversation with Einstein, leading the politician to assume the two scientists were speaking derisively about him. And Oppenheimer himself is both charismatic and tightly wound; from the start, when we see him as a young man, it seems clear that for all his remarkable intelligence, this is a man barely holding himself together and frequently coming apart at the seams.

When we think of films shot in IMAX — not just the ones presented on the towering screens — we think of action spectacles, such as Nolan's "The Dark Knight" or Tom Cruise scaling the Burj Khalifa in "Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol." But "Oppenheimer," though it does feature some jaw-dropping imagery meant to depict the visions of quantum mechanics and physics rattling around Oppenheimer's psyche (he dubs it being plagued by visions) before leading up to the Trinity Test, is largely focused on the man himself, both emotionally and literally. Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot this in a mix of IMAX and 65mm film (and if you are lucky enough to live near one of the 30-plus theaters in the United States presenting the film in IMAX and 70mm, you must run to get tickets if you haven't already procured them), and so much of what's presented are close-ups of actors' faces.

As much as Christopher Nolan is known for his ability to conjure up spectacle (like one of the magicians from his adaptation of "The Prestige"), he's an excellent director of actors, and the proof is in the six-story images littered throughout "Oppenheimer." Murphy, whose collaborations with Nolan extend to "Batman Begins" when he played the Scarecrow, is the obvious standout, doing so much with a man who managed to be both charming enough to win over the might of the American military and government as well as scientists across the world, while also repressing the very real guilt and trauma he felt at inflicting death and destruction upon society. The use of close-ups on Nolan's part, and the tautly expressive emotions running rampant on Murphy's face recall the silent-film masterpiece "The Passion of Joan of Arc" in which Renee Jeanne Falconetti delivered a masterful performance for the ages through her pained visage. "Oppenheimer" is not a silent film, and Nolan gives his leading man plenty of dialogue to work through, but it's in Murphy's cutting blue eyes and his tightly wound face that so much emotion bleeds through.

With a cast also including (deep breath) Emily Blunt, Downey, Jr., Matt Damon, Malek, Matthew Modine, Benny Safdie, David Krumholtz, Ehrenreich, Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, and Casey Affleck (and many, many more), "Oppenheimer" is as impressively acted beyond the title role, with all actors making such powerful impacts that it's almost unfortunate how so many of them only make brief appearances. But that's the nature of the time-jumping, globe-trotting story.

A fatal humiliation

Of course, the central moment of "Oppenheimer," its true climax, is the depiction of the Trinity Test. Again, since history is history, it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the test works, because the A-bomb would quickly be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, swiftly bringing an end to World War II in August 1945. Much of the hour or so preceding the test has touches and inspirations from Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," as Oppenheimer re-embraces his scientist status after briefly donning a military uniform, setting up an old-fashioned town in the middle of Los Alamos, New Mexico, and all in the hopes of effectively creating an atomic bomb that brings together his theories of quantum physics. The nighttime sequence building up to the Trinity Test, with Oppenheimer nervy and edgy as the rest of the scientists as well as his military keeper (Damon), is remarkably tense in spite of the fact that (as noted above) the test clearly works. Perhaps part of the tension derives from the knowledge many viewers have: that Christopher Nolan, priding himself on eschewing CGI when possible, has stated that his film's replication of the Trinity explosion was accomplished with practical effects.

And though "Oppenheimer" is not an action film, Nolan is one of the finest filmmakers working today who can effectively and clearly create awesome and terrifying action-based imagery. The Trinity Test is no exception; he, van Hoytema, editor Jennifer Lame, and the entire production team have pulled off something here both weirdly beautiful and definitively horrific. That the test works is a validation of Oppenheimer's theories, and of his scientists' man-hours of work over multiple years and multiple billions of dollars. But it also represents — as noted to Oppenheimer by Niels Bohr (Branagh) — a new world, not just a new weapon. Oppenheimer, as intelligent as he is, is also hopelessly idealistic, presuming that by using the A-bomb, America would not only show off its power to the world, but ensure a longer world peace because of it. So when he approaches President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) to share the concern that he has blood on his hands, he's gobsmacked by Truman noting (harshly but in some way correctly) that the Japanese care less about the man who made the bomb than the man (and thus, the country) dropping the bomb.

The ensuing horror Oppenheimer feels (along with the twin revelations of how William Borden got his hands on classified materials, and how Lewis Strauss will fail to get a Cabinet post) culminates in the film's final scene. As Nolan hops around in time throughout the swift three hours of "Oppenheimer," he keeps coming back to the image in Strauss' mind of how Einstein seemingly snubbed him after a brief conversation with our title character. But as Ehrenreich's Senate aide notes, it's always possible that they weren't talking about Strauss at all but "something more important." And aside from being a snide dig, we learn in the end that the aide is right. In the final scene, we get the objective truth of what happened in that side discussion, as Oppenheimer reminisces with Einstein about how the latter reviewed the former's calculations of what would lead to the A-bomb. Einstein noted in that earlier conversation that Oppenheimer could end up destroying the world if he wasn't careful, referencing a possibility that a single A-bomb explosion would lead to a catastrophic chain reaction of never-ending detonation and the world going up in smoke in an instant. Literally, that never happened. But metaphorically, "I believe we did," Oppenheimer intones quietly.

A devastating masterpiece

As devastating as "Oppenheimer" is, and as much as the final moments of the film visualize the terror in the man's mind at the notion of having destroyed the world (recalling the line from the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds" that Oppenheimer used to refer to himself in real life), it avoids being overly didactic or polemical. There's little doubt that Nolan is not treating this man as a savior — perhaps the most disturbing scene of the film comes after the Trinity Test, as Oppenheimer gives a speech meant to rouse a crowd cheering on the end of WWII due to the A-bomb (thus cheering on the death of thousands), but envisions the crowd engulfed by the same bomb, with charred bodies and flapping skin — but he's treating the man with depth and honesty.

Christopher Nolan has made variations on the themes inherent in "Oppenheimer" before, from men rent asunder by warring internal motivations to the horrendous and awe-inspiring power the human mind can wield. But this film feels like an apotheosis for so much of the career leading up to this moment. As befitting its ideal presentation, this is a big, mammoth movie, boasting a career-best performance from Cillian Murphy, a whip-smart script, and other technical marvels. (Jennifer Lame's editing is particularly remarkable, ensuring smooth transitions from timeline to timeline, and sometimes from aspect ratio to aspect ratio.) "Oppenheimer" arrived with huge expectations, and has turned out to be a glimpse into American history that speaks with gravity and weight. This is one of the best films of the year.'

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cherrybvmbx · 1 year

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🥀Maddie🥀

She/They

Taurus sun Libra Moon and Aries rising

Swiftie

Introvert

Hair dye enthusiast

Been writing since I was 11 years old

Gamer 🥀

In multiple fandoms

Sweater Weather

Disney enthusiast /My Little Pony lover

Monster high and Barbie enjoyer

🥀Simp list🥀 (includes fictional characters)

Markiplier

Matthew Gray Gubler

Sebastian sallows

Sapnap

Colby brock

Seth Borden

Sam golbach

Jake webber

Taylor swift

Mikey Madison

Jenna ortega

Amanda raye

Tara yummy

Olivia rodrigo

Sabrina Carpenter

Emma Roberts

Neve Campbell

Morgan Adams

Melissa Barrera

Avril Lavigne

Katrina Stuart

Matthew Lillard

Skeet Ulrich

Dove Cameron

Draco malfoy

Tom riddle

Prince Eric

Mia goth

#get to know me #taylor swift #colby brock #sebastain sallow #jenna ortega

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dankusner · 16 days

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Don Graham The best Texas movies on tape.

Giant

1956 Warner Bros. 3:21

Director: George Stevens

Writers: Fred Guiol, Ivan Moffett

Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Mercedes McCambridge, Dennis Hopper, Sal Mineo, Rod Taylor, Earl Holliman

Although it takes a big chunk of time to watch this big film about Texas back when things were right and the Lone Star State was the biggest state in the U.S. of A., one’s time is well spent, because Giant, by Gawd, has everything: lusty ranchers, colorful wheeler-dealers, acres of cattle, tacky clothes, tacky mansions, miles of gorgeous emptiness, a thumping rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” and a liberal heart-on-its-sleeve subtext about Mexican-Anglo relations. The cast is stupendous: as Bick Benedict, Rock Hudson when he stood foursquare for macho manliness, Elizabeth Taylor at her loveliest even when those barbaric Texans serve up barbecued calves’ brains, Dennis Hopper as Bick’s wimpy son, Mercedes McCambridge as Bick’s sister with the bark on, and, in his last and one of his finest roles, James Dean as Jett Rink, the dirt-poor redneck with a yen for the better things who gets stinking rich and tries to put his brand, JR (please note), on everything in Texas. Required viewing for each new generation of natives and snowbirds.

Red River

1948 MGM-UA 2:05 B&W

Director: Howard Hawks

Writer: Borden Chase

Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan, Coleen Gray, John Ireland, Noah Berry, Jr., Shelley Winters, Harry Carey, Sr., Harry Carey, Jr.

The visual elements inherent in cattle drives go back to the roots of the cinema. Thomas Edison’s boys shot footage in 1898 with titles like “Branding Cattle,” “Cattle Leaving the Corral,” and “Cattle Fording Stream.” All through the silent period and into the bang-bang era of the thirties westerns, Hollywood tried to make the cattle drive story into a national epic. Finally, in 1948, Howard Hawks got it right, with his stirring, powerful, unforgettable big-budget extravaganza based on a Mutiny on the Bounty plot. In one of his best roles, John Wayne plays Tom Dunson, a pioneering rancher forced by post–Civil War hard times to find a market for his cattle up north. Along the trail he clashes with most of the men under his hire and especially with his foundling son, Matthew Garth (Montgomery Clift), who eventually takes the herd away from his tyrannical father. At the end of this one, you feel gritty, and there’s a great rousing fight that allows the two warring males to realize they actually love each other. Peter Bogdanovich paid homage to Red River in The Last Picture Show.

The Last Picture Show

1971 RCA/Columbia 1:78 B&W

Director: Peter Bogdanovich

Writers: Peter Bogdanovich, Larry McMurtry

Starring: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Cybill Shepherd, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Sam Bottoms, Randy Quaid

A black and white tone poem about teenage lust and love in a dusty, desiccated, flyblown Texas town. Many memorable moments. Among them: Sensitive high school boy makes love to sad, lonely wife of jock-scratching football coach; Cybil Shepherd strips on a diving board to prove she’s in deep with a fast Wichita Falls crowd; and Ben Johnson, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, every time he is on the screen. To see how good this film is and how far former wunderkind Peter Bogdanovich has tumbled, tune in to Texasville (1990), a boring, inept update of what has happened to the characters since the early fifties. Except for Jeff Bridges’ rather endearing performance as a Duane grown grayish and paunchy, this dreadful film about middle-aged love and forgiveness is as punchless as Texas’ sesquicentennial celebration.

Bonnie and Clyde

1967 Warner Bros. 1:47

Director: Arthur Penn

Writers: David Newman, Robert Benton

Starring: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J. Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons

It was all style then, and it’s all style now, this artsy look at the live-hard, die-young lives of Texas’ most famous outlaw team. Warren Beatty’s Clyde is infectiously watchable, with lots of cocky posturing and some nifty “business,” such as his love affair with a cigarette, and a raffish Faye Dunaway, whose portrayal of Bonnie seems, as the years pass, more and more like a takeoff, before the fact, of that big, horsey, blond model Jerry Hall’s rise to fame. Everything in this film is for fun, even the close-up red splatters of people’s faces exploding. The violence is supposed to make us aware that, hey, these young kids are dangerous, but what we really hope for is that Bonnie and Clyde will be just like Burt Reynolds’ Smokey of the next decade, always escaping from the Rangers and high sheriffs. Wonderful Depression-era compositions: Okies boiling coffee in tin cans, farms foreclosed on, and Bonnie and Clyde, dressed to the nines, cavorting in Texas fields. In real life, Clyde once wrote a charming thank-you letter to the Ford Motor Company for building such a fine automobile that allowed him to pull his bank jobs, and this film captures that exuberance and panache very nicely indeed.

The Wild Bunch

1969 Warner Bros. 2:07

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Writers: Sam Peckinpah, Walon Green, Roy N. Sickner, Lee Marvin (uncredited)

Starring: William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O’Brien, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez, Strother Martin, L. Q. Jones, Albert Dekker, Bo Hopkins, Emilio Fernandez, Dub Taylor

The closest the western has come to creating tragic emotions, this ultraviolent film has been denounced for bloody amoralism, exploitative sexism, and just about every other ism you care to name. Still, it’s a great film. The opening sequence, a slaughter of the innocents in a little South Texas border town, precipitates the outlaw gang’s flight into Mexico, where they encounter a beautifully conceived tapestry of opposites: a pastoral Mexican village juxtaposed with a corrupt city ruled by an unholy alliance of Mexican despots and German advisers. The time is revolutionary 1913. In sequence after sequence, Peckinpah depicts the gang’s sense of the end of an era that might have been bloodthirsty, whoremongering, and deadly, but one curiously more honorable and meaningful than what faces them as the twentieth century wheels toward its mass-murder destiny. The final Götterdämmerung is one of the profoundly moving sequences in American film history, as a weary, battered William Holden leads his men to retrieve their comrade angel, the only idealist left in Mexico or Texas, we are to believe. Editing, composition, music, acting, directing, all are superb.

Blood Simple

1984 MCA 1:36

Director: Joel Coen

Writers: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Starring: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, Samm-Art Williams, M. Emmet Walsh

Honky-tonk film noir shot in Austin on a modest budget by Joel and Ethan Coen, the boy wonders who went on to make such talked-about movies as Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing. A lean, twisted, devious story of motel love, revenge, double cross, a buried-alive body, and knife-through-the-hand pain. Three terrific characters: a leisure-suited, VW-driving sleazeball of a private detective played by veteran backgrounder M. Emmet Walsh in the role of his life; a snarling, angry, betrayed husband played by Dan Hedaya; and a smart, resourceful, and appealing young woman played by Frances McDormand, the only survivor. She looks absolutely real, the kind of vulnerable beauty you might run into in an all-night laundromat, not one of your big-time Hollywood fake-looking beauties. Contains wonderful voice-over narration; worth seeing (or hearing) just for such lines as these: “In Russia they got it mapped out, so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own.”

The Getaway

1972 Warner Bros. 2:02

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Writer: Walter Hill

Starring: Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, Ben Johnson, Sally Strothers, Al Lettieri, Slim Pickens

Sam Peckinpah discovered down-and-dirty noir novelist Jim Thompson years before the current spate of Thompson-based films like After Dark, My Sweet, and The Grifters. The Getaway is a stylish robber-chase film shot on location in, among other Texas sites, San Marcos and El Paso. Steve McQueen is great, Ali MacGraw isn’t (some things never change), and Slim Pickens shows up at the end as a drawling Texas angel presiding over the outlaw pair’s happy-ending escape into Mexico. Dub Taylor puts in a brilliant appearance as a “juicer” desk clerk at a seedy El Paso hotel. A highly watchable film—with Peckinpah’s signature command of involving, kinetic camera work and dreamlike violence.

Terms of Endearment

1983 Paramount 2:12

Director: James L. Brooks

Writers: Larry McMurtry, James L. Brooks

Starring: Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Daniels, John Lithgow, Danny DeVito

Shot in Houston, this film turns the Bayou City into a coastal suburbia, but never mind, the real interest lies in the dynamics of a terrific till-death-do-us-part mother-daughter relationship between Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, with Jack Nicholson’s randy retired-astronaut character thrown in to liven up the neighborhood. Much thinner in Texas ambience than the Larry McMurtry novel on which it was based, Terms goes for the heart, creating an authentic tearjerker that audiences seem to love, whether they’ve ever heard of Texas or not. Harrowing hospital scenes in the cancer ward would wring tears from a serial killer. On the minor side, Jeff Daniels’ excellent portrayal of the grubby graduate student–English professor, Hap, is surpassed only by the gaggle of English professors in D.O.A. (1988), including one who commits murder to get tenure.

The Searchers

1956 Warner Bros. 1:39

Director: John Ford

Writer: Richard Carr

Starring: John Wayne, Natalie Wood, Vera Miles, Jeffrey Hunter, Ward Bond, John Qualen

One of the most influential movies in recent American cinematic history, according to such directors as Martin Scorsese and Michael Cimino. This film’s master plot—a young girl taken captive by the enemy, the racial Other—underlies the dynamics of such celebrated works as Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter. Impelled by Shakespearean-sized emotions and an epic visual style, it has three flaws: the dreadful score and nonperiod music; the too-broad bumpkin comedy of Ken Curtis’ role; and another broad stereotypical comic subplot involving a fat Comanche woman named Look, who tags along after Jeffrey Hunter. Otherwise the film is operatically powerful and compelling. It is also final proof, if any were needed, of John Wayne’s consummate ability as a screen actor. His hatred of Indians makes us believe that he will kill his niece (Natalie Wood), whom he has spent eight obsessive years trying to rescue from Comanche captors, only at the last instant to clasp her in an all-forgiving embrace. Jean-Luc Godard, the French auteur, has spoken memorably of the moment: “How can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?” The metaphysics of family, race, and destiny has rarely been portrayed as powerfully in American films.

Tender Mercies

1983 HBO 1:20

Director: Bruce Beresford

Writer: Horton Foote

Starring: Robert Duvall, Tess Harper, Allan Hubbard, Betty Buckley, Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley

In my opinion, the best of Horton Foote’s numerous essays in Texas filmmaking, this quiet study of a country and western singer on the skids has an authentic flat-landscape feel to it that you need when you’re telling the truth about lives that are as plain as hillbilly ballads. Robert Duvall is simply superb as Mac Sledge, both in his thirties-tough Senecan acceptance of life’s hard knocks and his twangy accent, which is the best rendition of East Texas idiom ever recorded in a feature film. Duvall, who sings his own songs in a perfect-pitch C&W whine, invents a country singer far better than real stars such as Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristoffersen in their Texas movies. Tess Harper is convincing in a stand-by-your-man role typical of the culture being dramatized.

Hud

1963 Paramount 1:32 B&W

Director: Martin Ritt

Writers: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank

Starring: Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn Douglas, Brandon de Wilde, John Ashley, Whit Bissell

Dating faster than you’d expect, but still riveting in a number of scenes, this adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s first novel offers us Paul Newman at his hungry, sad, sexy, existential best. He looks great in this film and, unlike wide-gauged co-star Brandon de Wilde, knows how to wear jeans—and walk. De Wilde’s portrayal of the sensitive-young-male-as-proto-English-major looks weaker upon every viewing. Even worse is the treacly Academy Award–winning performance of the old rancher, Melvyn Douglas, whose sanctimonious uprightness makes him seem like an aged Bill Moyers, always talking about ethics this and principles that. As any hands-on ranch owner knows, there’s no such thing as the good old days in the ranching ethos. At the close, though we’re not supposed to, we end up rooting for Hud to screw everybody, because the film is so nauseatingly smug in championing the simple virtues of soil over oil. James Wong Howe’s austere rendition of Texas landscapes, in art house black and white, remains one of the film’s distinct pleasures.

Urban Cowboy

1980 Paramount 2:15

Director: James Bridges

Writers: James Bridges, Aaron Latham

Starring: John Travolta, Debra Winger, Scott Glenn, Madolyn Smith, Barry Corbin

Okay, so Gilley’s is history, reduced to ashes, and the urban cowboy phenom is as dead as the California medfly, so who cares anymore about this Texas version of Saturday Night Virus? All right, so John Travolta is a lily-livered disco dancer from Jersey. This is still a fetching film for one reason alone: Debra Winger as the sexy, soulful Sissy, a working-class Texas girl who drives a tow truck for her daddy and slow dances at Gilley’s every night. All right, so the plot is stupid and improbable, with a villain imported from Huntsville who dresses in black and eats the worm from a tequila bottle. Yeah, so the whole thing is like a mall western, with most scenes taking place inside the boring, cavernous confines of an overrated dance hall. Sure, there is not one good or authentic country and western song in the entire movie. But there’s still Debra Winger riding that mechanical bull as it was meant to be rode.

Written on the Wind

1956 MCA 1:39

Director: Douglas Sirk

Writer: George Zuckerman

Starring: Rock Hudson, Lauren Bacall, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Robert Keith, Grant Williams

“A splashy sudser,” Variety might have called this knowing melodrama. Fifties audiences wept at the soap opera theatrics of the plot and players, young viewers today laugh at the doings of the rich and impotent, and high-brow cineasts continue to celebrate this film as European-born Sirk’s masterpiece. As in Giant, released the same year, Rock Hudson plays a virtuous Texan, only this time he’s as solemn as a stone. The stand-out performances are those of Robert Stack, a rich playboy scion of an East Texas oil family who falls in love with Lauren Bacall only to have this saving marriage go sour when he proves unable to father a child, and Dorothy Malone as Stack’s sister, a spoiled rich girl who sleeps around because her true love, Rock Hudson, won’t give her the time of day. Eventually the good but boring couple, Hudson and Bacall, are married, while the bad brother-sister combo ends up with the male dead and the female inheriting the family oil empire. Malone won an Oscar for her flamboyant portrayal of sexual energy on the edge of hysteria. The film is full of phallic symbolism (all those oil derricks, don’t you know), emotional posturing, and canny cinematic riffs.

The Sugarland Express

1974 MCA 1:49

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writers: Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins

Starring: Goldie Hawn, Ben Johnson, Michael Sacks, William Atherton, Gregory Walcott, Louise Latham

There’s a gritty, realistic feel to this chase film, directed by Steven Spielberg back before he became the purveyor of E.T. and other fantasy-based fluff. Drawn from a true story, the movie tells of a young mother who in 1969 helped her husband escape from prison. Their goal: to rescue baby Langston, their two-year-old, who has been placed in a foster home by state authorities. Hawn’s Lou Jean is a honey-voiced live wire, an appealing and resourceful survivor; her husband, played by Atherton, has that doomed look about him. The interaction between the couple and the young cop whose car they confiscate is affecting. The movie’s tone keeps the pace light, as though these are just kids on a lark, and by the time they reach Sugar Land, where the baby now lives, they are celebrities cheered by throngs of admiring small-town people. The carnival atmosphere is counterpointed beautifully by Ben Johnson’s law enforcement officer, a sad-faced man who has to make the decision to employ the expertise of two deadly sharpshooters to end the chase once and for all. This video is not so easy to locate in stores: I found it in the Best Moms in Movies section.

The Border

1982 MCA 1:47

Director: Tony Richardson

Writers: Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman

Starring: Jack Nicholson, Valerie Perrine, Harvey Keitel, Warren Oates, Elpidia Carrillo

A modern western with Nicholson turning in a brilliant performance as a border patrol officer named Charlie assigned to duty in El Paso. The drama of his efforts to resist corruption is the center of this film. His tempters include Harvey Keitel, an engaging good ol’ boy on the take, and Valerie Perrine, Charlie’s sexy, gum-chewing, K mart–shopping wife, who longs to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader and spends every penny he makes on trashy waterbeds and tacky sofas. Reluctantly, Charlie accepts the skewed ethics of an everybody-does-it-so-why-not-you system that preys on the dreams of illegal aliens seeking to come to America, but eventually his redemption comes in the form of another woman, an illegal alien, a lovely madonna from Mexico whose baby is stolen by an adoption ring. Though the plot device of the hardened law officer being softened by a mother and baby is as old as William S. Hart’s films, there is enough fast-paced action and hard-bitten location shooting along the Texas-Mexico border to disguise the number being done on our emotions. But most of all, there is Nicholson’s stubborn, convincing refusal to give up his fundamental decency. Note: Since many of the early scenes take place at night, for maximum clarity it’s especially important to secure a good video copy.

Talk Radio

1988 MCA 1:50

Director: Oliver Stone

Writers: Eric Bogosian, Oliver Stone

Starring: Eric Bogosian, Ellen Greene, Leslie Hope, Alec Baldwin, John C. McGinley, John Pankow

An edgy, unnerving look at the creeps, crazies, and merely neurotic citizens who call in to radio talk shows to relay their demented philosophies of what’s wrong with America. Drawing upon a real case in Denver in which talk show host Alan Berg was murdered, Oliver Stone, following the lead of scriptwriter and star Eric Bogosian, switches the setting to Dallas, with chilling atmospherics the result. Stone takes the closed-in world of a radio broadcast booth and, by means of fluid, searching camera movements and angles, creates a vibrant nighttime of paranoid aggression. The hero is immensely unlikable, part of the point, and the disembodied voices that float in the Dallas night are truly scary. One of Stone’s best films because, narratively, he’s not in it and therefore not hammering away in his usual preachy manner.

The Thin Blue Line

1988 Facets 1:36

Director: Errol Morris

Interviewees: Randall Adams, David Harris, Edith James, Dennis White, Sam Kittrell

A film that really matters: It led to the release from prison of a man who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1976 Randall Adams, a drifter, was knocking around Dallas when a policeman stopped the car he had been riding in earlier that night. What happened next is the subject of the film. Either Adams or his companion that night, David Harris, murdered the policeman with a handgun. Harris fingered Adams, and Adams got a death sentence. Through a variety of documentary and quasi-documentary techniques, filmmaker Errol Morris reconstructs the case. We witness real-life interviews done in a stark, face-on style; see dramatic reenactments of the episodes surrounding the murder, including some events staged from different points of view; stare mesmerized at close-up objects—guns, clocks, places; and, in certain nonrealistic moments, watch in wonder as a soft-drink cup spirals upward in slow motion. The result is a highly original blend of documentary and detective story. The end is both satisfactory and alarming as we become convinced that Adams is innocent and Harris, now in prison himself for another murder, is guilty of the crime that put an innocent man in prison for eleven years.

True Stories

1986 Warner Bros. 1:51

Director: David Byrne

Writers: Stephen Tobolowsky, Beth Henley, David Byrne

Starring: David Byrne, John Goodman, Swoosie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, Annie McEnroe, Jo Harvey Allen

Since the great state of Texas didn’t do anything memorable to commemorate its sesquicentennial except wallow in an economic nosedive, it remained for David Byrne to take up the slack. In True Stories Byrne, the genius of the thinking-man’s rock group, the Talking Heads, measures the metaphysical pulse of “a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas,” an imaginary small town that is preparing a celebration of its “specialness” in the year of the sesquicentennial. What’s particularly special about this hard-to-classify film is the sweet tone of discovery that informs the point of view. Byrne, wearing a wacky black ten-gallon hat and sporting a look of perpetually bemused wonder, takes us on guided tours of boxlike buildings that contain the mysteries of computer chips, to the edge of suburban developments beyond which lie prairies that will be converted to who knows what, to the candy- and magazine-strewn bedside of a lady so rich that she lives in her bed. Using an unpredictable, arrhythmic mix of documentary, amateur theatrics, surrealism, and droll comedy, Byrne somehow, despite a few flat sequences, manages to keep us interested and along the way to give us a unique look at the places and spaces we inhabit in modern Texas. The music, mostly from the Talking Heads, is also a plus.

Fandango

1985 Warner Bros. 1:31

Director: Kevin Reynolds

Writer: Kevin Reynolds

Starring: Kevin Costner, Sam Robards, Judd Nelson, Chuck Bush, Brian Cesak, Marvin J. McIntyre, Suzy Amis

In a place as big as Texas, there has to be a road movie, and this is it. In May 1971, five University of Texas frat rats leave the wreckage of their last bash, pile in a car, and head west, their mission to dig up a bottle of Dom Perignon they buried in the desert. Adventures and youthful philosophizing ensue. Vietnam, careers, marriage, and flight from all three are much on their minds. Near Marfa, they pay homage to the collapsed pile of Bick Benedict’s mansion on the Worth Evans Ranch, where Giant was filmed. The movie mixes moments like this with adolescent pranks, making for an uneven but energetic film of special interest because of the stars-to-be cast. Kevin Costner, engaging and likable before he became the nineties icon of western soft-focus ecological rectitude, is the leader of the pack. Judd Nelson is so wimpy and unlikable, you wonder why they took him along. Director Reynolds, who began this project as a student film, may join his pal Costner as a major Hollywood property if their Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is as big a hit this summer as expected.

The Zapruder Film

1963 The JFK Assassination Center 22 seconds

Although not available in video stores, this 8mm color home movie of the murder of President Kennedy is the most widely viewed and analyzed strip of film in Texas history. While the Warren Commission used it to support its lone-assassin theory, critics of the commission say the film proves just the opposite. The film has done more than any other single piece of evidence to keep the controversy alive. The JFK Assassination Center (603 Munger, Suite 310, Box 40, Dallas 75202) has a silent, eleven-minute video for sale for $29.95.

The most promising unfinished project is The Gay Place. Billie Lee Brammer’s 1961 novel about a Texas governor based on Lyndon B. Johnson’s politics and personality, observed up close by aide Brammer, might have made a splendid movie. In 1963 Paul Newman was set to star as Roy Sherwood, a South Texas liberal who learns the art of the possible in an apprenticeship to colorful, larger-than-life Governor Arthur “Goddam” Fenstemaker (Jackie Gleason was to play the role). Newman would have coproduced with Martin Ritt, who directed him that same year in Hud. Budgeted at $3 million, the film had large ambitions. A location rep for Columbia who came to Austin to scout sites told the press: “This is a big picture. We wanted to give it a great deal of scope, such as the book has, and we needed the wide open spaces of Texas for that.” But like so many projects in Hollywood, this one was not to be. Events in Dallas later that year spelled the end of any immediate possibility of seeing The Gay Place on-screen. Now Brammer’s daughters, Sidney and Shelby, have written a new screenplay, titled Big State, and hope to begin shooting next spring.

Don Graham, an English professor at the University of Texas, is the author of, most recently, No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy.

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ulkaralakbarova · 2 months

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In the 23rd century, inhabitants of a domed city freely experience all of life’s pleasures — but no one is allowed to live past 30. Citizens can try for a chance at being “renewed” in a civic ceremony on their 30th birthday. Escape is the only other option. Credits: TheMovieDb. Film Cast: Logan: Michael York Francis: Richard Jordan Jessica: Jenny Agutter Box: Roscoe Lee Browne Holly: Farrah Fawcett Doc: Michael Anderson Jr. Old Man: Peter Ustinov 2nd Sanctuary Man: Randolph Roberts The Woman Runner: Lara Lindsay Billy: Gary Morgan Mary 2: Michelle Stacy Woman Customer: Laura Hippe Sandman: David Westberg Sanctuary Woman: Camilla Carr Cub: Greg Lewis Timid Girl: Ashley Cox Sandman: Bill Couch Runner: Glenn R. Wilder Last Day Character (uncredited): Joe L. Blevins Sandman Daniel (uncredited): Roger Borden Sand Man (uncredited): Greg Bransom City Dweller (uncredited): Paula Crist The City Computer (uncredited): Virginia Ann Ford Cub (uncredited): Chuck Gaylord Cub (uncredited): Mitch Gaylord (uncredited): Johnny Haymer Confused City Dweller (uncredited): Jessie Kirby 3rd Sanctuary Man / Ambush Man (uncredited): Greg Michaels 1st Sanctuary Man (uncredited): Bob Neill Love Shop Woman with Toy (uncredited): Renie Radich 1st Screamer in Logan’s Apartment (uncredited): Candice Rialson Screamer Party Woman (uncredited): Cheryl Smith Runner Great Hall (uncredited): Ron D. Thornton Film Crew: Director: Michael Anderson Novel: William F. Nolan Novel: George Clayton Johnson Screenplay: David Zelag Goodman Producer: Saul David Original Music Composer: Jerry Goldsmith Director of Photography: Ernest Laszlo Editor: Bob Wyman Production Design: Dale Hennesy Costume Design: Bill Thomas Associate Producer: Hugh Benson Makeup Artist: William Tuttle Hairstylist: Judith A. Cory Unit Production Manager: Byron Roberts Stunt Coordinator: Glenn R. Wilder Casting: Jack Baur Set Decoration: Robert De Vestel Property Master: Jack M. Marino Sound Editor: John Riordan Visual Effects Designer: L.B. Abbott Music Supervisor: Harry V. Lojewski Music Editor: William Saracino Dialect Coach: Leon Charles Script Supervisor: Ray Quiroz Choreographer: Stefan Wenta Second Assistant Director: Alan Brimfeld Second Assistant Director: Win Phelps Assistant Director: David Silver Stunt Coordinator: Bill Couch Key Grip: Martin Kashuk Electrician: Don Stott Associate Editor: Freeman A. Davies Assistant Editor: Chuck Ellison Unit Publicist: Don Morgan Stunts: Dick Ziker Stunts: Jeannie Epper Stunts: Loren Janes Stunts: Beth Nufer Stunts: Alex Plasschaert Stunts: Regina Parton Stunts: Lori Thomas Stunts: Mike Washlake Stunts: Russell Saunders Stunts: Barbara Graham Stunts: Tommy J. Huff Stunts: Sunny Woods Stunts: Paula Dell Stunts: Chuck Gaylord Stunts: Mitch Gaylord Stunts: Rosemary Johnston Stunts: Whitey Hughes Stunts: ‘Wild’ Bill Mock Stunts: Gary Morgan Stunts: Dar Robinson Stunts: Walter Robles Stunts: Angelo De Meo Stunts: Paula Crist Stunts: Dottie Catching Stunts: Bill Couch Jr. Stunts: Gregory J. Barnett Stunts: Craig R. Baxley Stunts: Phil Adams Stunts: Denny Arnold Stunts: May Boss Special Effects: Glen Robinson Movie Reviews: Richard: It’s a ‘Future Vision’ type of movie, plus a bit of an adventure into the unknown. At least for the two “Runners’ who have escaped out of their bubble world. It is fraught with twists and turns in a post Peak-Oil world, where society has finally found a solution to the resources of the planet. The ‘chosen’ few, however have one little catch, their lives have a unique way of ending, until these two discover a new way, and a Lie that was being told to all of the citizens. (Warning for younger viewers,there are scenes where (At the time,) it was considered risque to show people jumping into a freshwater pond and going skinny dipping).

#based on novel or book #domed city #dystopia #Escape #fugitive #killer robot #plastic surgery #population control #post-apocalyptic future #robot #teleportation #Top Rated Movies #totalitarianism #utopia

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docrotten · 2 years

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THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN (1975) – Episode 177 – Decades Of Horror 1970s

“You’re a strange girl, Lizzie, one minute as hard and cold as a grave so, next as loving as any father could wish. Wonder what goes on in that mind of yours, I guess I’ll never know.” Actually, he’s about to find out right quick. Join your faithful Grue Crew – Doc Rotten, Chad Hunt, Bill Mulligan, and Jeff Mohr – as they check out the representation of the most infamous crime involving the numbers 40 and 41 as depicted in The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975).

Decades of Horror 1970s Episode 177 – The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975)

Join the Crew on the Gruesome Magazine YouTube channel! Subscribe today! And click the alert to get notified of new content! https://youtube.com/gruesomemagazine

Synopsis: In 1893 Massachusetts, Lizzie Andrew Borden is put on trial for murdering her father and stepmother with an axe.

Director: Paul Wendkos

Writer: William Bast

Selected cast:

Elizabeth Montgomery as Lizzie Borden

Fionnula Flanagan as Bridget Sullivan

Ed Flanders as Hosea Knowlton

Katherine Helmond as Emma Borden

Don Porter as George Robinson

Fritz Weaver as Andrew Borden

Bonnie Bartlett as Sylvia Knowlton

John Beal as Dr. Bowen

Helen Craig as Abby Borden

Alan Hewitt as Mayor Coughlin

Gail Kobe as Alice Russell

Hayden Rorke as Julien Ralph

Amzie Strickland as Adelaide Churchill

Robert Symonds as Andrew Jennings

Gloria Stuart as Store Customer

The Legend of Lizzie Borden, an ABC Monday night movie of the week, is Bill’s pick. He’s always loved Elizabeth Montgomery and this film blew him away. He describes it as far creepier than most TV fare of the time and though the blood now seems understated, it was plenty enough for the time.

Learning it was a true story after hearing his mom recite the rhyme, Chad then watched The Legend of Lizzie Borden with his mom. It gave him nightmares as a youngster and though not as creepy now, it’s still a compelling thriller. Jeff points out the emphasis on women’s plight – their position in society of the time – given in The Legend of Lizzie Borden. He also loves the well-known character actors in the cast – Katherine Helmond, Fionnula Flanagan, Bonnie Bartlett, Ed Flanders, and Don Porter – and the first reappearance of Gloria Stuart after a 29-year absence from film.

The 70s Grue Crew gives unanimous praise to Elizabeth Montgomery for her Emmy-nominated performance and gives the movie a strong recommendation. As of this writing, The Legend of Lizzie Borden is available to stream from Amazon Prime.

Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror 1970s is part of the Decades of Horror two-week rotation with The Classic Era and the 1980s. In two weeks, the next episode in their very flexible schedule, in a departure from what was originally announced, will be Creature from Black Lake (1976) starring Jack Elam and Dub Taylor and featuring the cinematography of Dean Cundey.

We want to hear from you – the coolest, grooviest fans: comment on the site or email the Decades of Horror 1970s podcast hosts at [email protected].

Check out this episode!

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more--than--anything · 5 years

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Episode Review: "Underneath it all, we're just dealing with good old-fashioned PTSD." [S04E16]

This week, the team closes in on Madeline, Jane gets therapy, and Rich and Boston flirt in weird ways. What did we think of “The One Where Jane Visits an Old Friend”?

Y: The ways in which couples flirt on this show does raise a lot of questions, doesn’t it? Rich and Boston are all about the passive aggressive, and on the other end you’ve got Jane and Kurt flirting while disarming bombs with their lives on the line. But strange flirting habits aside, one thing that is absolutely on point this year is Jane’s emotional and psychological journey which has taken the front seat from the “evil villain du jour” this season. And I for one am not complaining.

L: I didn’t expect the writers to take such a dark turn with Jane (we’ve talked before about how they skirted deep emotional and psychological themes such as Jane’s likely PTSD after her time with the CIA or the Wellers trying to put their marriage back together after the Avery/Clem reveals), but I have to say, I really appreciate the fact that they aren’t afraid to wade into the deep end this time. Bringing Borden back was even more unexpected, but really makes sense the way it played out. Jane’s story is driving this season much more than the Madeline plot, but as long as it’s this good, I am not complaining one bit!

Instead of a tattoo, this week’s case arrives in a hail of bullets and a string of dead bodies. How does our team figure out what’s going on?

L: This week’s case starts, fittingly, in Mad Maddie’s office, where Tasha is scouring every nook and cranny for evidence the FBI forensics team might have overlooked. Reade points out—correctly—that the reason she is so determined to find something is because if Madeline gets away, everything that Tasha went through—all the bridges she burned, every morally repugnant thing she did to gain favor with Madeline—would be for nothing. Not to mention the fact that her future is still up in the air, pending the outcome of this investigation. And frankly, if I was her, I’d probably want to take a sledgehammer to Madeline’s whole office, not just one tile in the floor. There has to be some job satisfaction in that for Tasha. (And I can’t be the only one who thinks there has to be something about the weird tree in Madeline’s office, since it seems like someone comments on it in almost every episode, right?!)

But instead of finding anything, Tasha and Reade nearly get themselves perforated by a hail of bullets through the window from across the street. (And wow, the slow-motion photography in that scene is intense!) The team jumps on the case and figures out that the shooter was Alonzo Cortez, chief hitman (and cousin of the leader) of the Sabinito drug cartel. Which answers our question about how Franco Cortez is taking the loss of his top hacker: Not well, not well at all. Two more HCI executives turn up dead under gruesome circumstances, which makes me even more relieved that Tasha and Reade escaped unscathed. Rich worries that Boston might be a target as well, so they bring him in, and he helps them find the hitman before he can take out any more HCI execs. (I honestly can’t figure out if it would have been a good thing or a bad thing if the cartel had managed to off Madeline before the team could bring her in. I mean, it might stop her plans before she has a chance to carry them out, whatever they are. But it also might leave Tasha hanging, if the FBI isn’t able to prove that Madeline is guilty of the crimes Tasha says she is.)

Three more HCI executives are killed after they take Cortez into custody, and the team realizes that there is another killer on the loose, this one working for Madeline, taking out everyone who knows what she is up to before they’re tempted to share that knowledge with the FBI. (Which makes me wonder, not for the first time, who the hell is running HCI Global right now? Mad Maddie is on the run, a bunch of their top executives are dead, and the rest are in hiding if they have any sense at all. I still don’t see how this organization is such a threat. If there was ever a time for someone else to step up and take over HCI—as Tasha told Reade the CIA was afraid would happen—this would be it, right? But apparently they are just worried about Madeline.) Patterson finds a list of past and present HCI executives in the fragmented data that Tasha retrieved in Zurich, along with the word “Helios.” They arrive too late to save the last person on the list, but in his desk they find a number for Madeline’s personal pilot, James B. Kelley.

Tasha calls J.B., but he doesn’t want to talk. She tells him that Madeline is killing everyone who might be able to produce evidence to incriminate her. Tasha promises that the FBI can keep him safe, but J.B. is the kind of smug asshole we love to hate and is only willing to come in if they pay him $10 million in bitcoin. Fortunately, the FBI has Rich Dotcom, hacker extraordinaire, who makes it appear as though the money has been deposited into J.B.’s account without actually dipping into the FBI expense budget. J.B. tells them that he’s supposed to fly Madeline out of the country, so the team heads to the airport to lie in wait. Only Madeline is late, and J.B. is much too calm about it, so Boston has Tasha tell him that Madeline has arrived, startling him into giving away the ruse; he was just stalling them while Madeline made her escape some other way.

Reade gets the FAA to ground all the flights (and I agree with Patterson: “That is impressive.”), but Weller realizes that medevac helicopters are still flying, and J.B. used to be a medevac pilot. Rich cross-references the pilots in the air with J.B.’s flight history and discovers that one of them is J.B.’s old co-pilot, en route to a hospital in Brooklyn. The team storms the hospital, but Mad Maddie brought a full complement of heavies with her, so they have to fight their way to the roof. (And okay, Jane’s improvisational use of the MRI machine to disarm the bad guys was seriously cool.) Tasha corners Madeline and arrests her, but we barely get a minute to revel in that before Dominic shows up dressed as an EMT and jabs Jane with a syringe filled with an extremely fast-acting tranquilizer (she couldn’t even gasp her husband’s single-syllable name into her comm before she passed out) and drags her off to parts unknown.

So today is a weird “win” that doesn’t really feel like one. They bring in Madeline, but Dominic takes Jane. Our team definitely got the worse end of the deal in that trade. Tasha and Reade escape their attack unscathed and bring in Boston before the hitman can get to him, but Mad Maddie manages to kill absolutely everyone who would have been able to tell the team what she’s up to. So now they have Madeline, but no hard evidence or witnesses they can use to put her away for good, and we still don’t have any idea what she's up to. And the whole promo for the next episode has me so worried about Jane that I am having trouble focusing on what happened in this one!

This episode was very fast-paced and the case was really fun, but honestly, Madeline is making less and less sense to me. I think Tasha kind of summed it up for me when she was talking to J.B., asking him if Madeline would really protect him. “And all her other allies she killed today? What happens when you outlive your usefulness?” This is the question I keep asking: Why are any of these people still loyal to her? Madeline is like a rabid dog; even if she was looking out for you yesterday, she could turn on you at any moment. After seeing the all the dead bodies that accumulate around her, it seems like anyone with basic survival instincts ought to say, “It’s not worth whatever she’s offering to pay. I should go hide somewhere she can’t find me!” What is she doing that makes people so willing to follow her, even at the risk of likely death or imprisonment? Unlike Shepherd or Crawford, she doesn’t have that righteous fervor that pulls people to follow her on her crusade. She just has employees that she threatens into submission, which seems like a far less sustainable model, long-term. I’d like to believe that with her in custody, we can wrap up this plot, but there are too many episodes left in the season, I suppose, to do that just yet. (And we get a convenient flashback at the start of the episode to remind us that Weitz is in Madeline’s pocket now, so I guess we know what “get out of jail free” card she’ll be playing next week.)

Y: Madeline having Weitz in her pocket and Jane in, I’m assuming, Dominic’s trunk at this point really does turn what appears to be a win for the team into something that will definitely make things worse for them. Even without having captured Jane, just the fact that Weitz is under Madeline’s thumb would have ruined this win for the team. There’s no way she is spending the night in custody. And knowing Weitz, he will get her out without getting any dirt on his hands, but he will make things worse for the team, mostly Tasha, and make taking Madeline down in the future even harder.

But having Jane gives Madeline an extra advantage because she’ll be playing Kurt Weller too. We know Kurt is the most by-the-book agent out there, but we have seen him cover up some things in the past to protect people. He covered up for Mayfair and Daylight. He covered up the truth of what happened to Taylor. And now with his wife’s life on the line? We know Kurt will do anything to protect Jane. And at this point I’m really worried about just how far he will go and what it will do to him to protect her.

But back to Madeline for a minute. We’ve been talking a lot this season about how Madeline may be a little crazy and a little evil but all of this still doesn’t seem to be founded in anything. And that is still the case. Her crazy is getting crazier and her evil is getting more evil, but we still don’t know what her endgame is. And we’ve talked about how this has made her a much less compelling villain than Shepherd and Crawford ever were. And in comparing her to the other two, this episode also showed just how sloppy she is. She made a mess and left a trail and didn’t care to clean it up. Crawford and Shepherd were never like that. They were meticulous and careful and calculated, and the team were never close enough to catch them, or if they were, those two always were a step ahead or had another card up their sleeve.

I’m not sure where all of this Madeline stuff is going or if she’s meant to be this sloppy villain without something grounding her that’s based on a firm belief or goal or higher purpose. But at least the plots of Jane’s story and Tasha’s story are compelling and interesting enough as character-driven plots to keep this season just so good.

Our team is back together, and they even pull Boston back into the fold with them this week. What shape is our tangram in this week?

Y: This tangram of ours keeps shifting and changing and evolving, and it’s a great thing to see because it forces these characters themselves to evolve and change and adapt. Boston coming in every once in a while forces certain shifts in how the team works and the dynamics. Similarly when Keaton is there or Weitz pops by or less-frequently recurring characters like Dave. It’s great when characters are constantly forced to face changes and shifts in their comfort zones. But for at least one of our faves, this season has been altogether lacking of any comfort.

L: Poor Tasha. We’ve been so focused on Jane lately, with all that she’s going through, that it’s easy to overlook that Tasha is walking around with her own Madeline-induced case of PTSD. We can see how frayed around the edges she’s become when she’s tearing apart Madeline’s office. But what Tasha does have in her corner is Reade. He understands—maybe better than anyone else—what Tasha had to do to maintain her cover and how much it is eating away at her. He knows what’s on the line for her, and how desperately she needs to bring Madeline in. And he is willing to do just about whatever she says, whether it’s taking a sledgehammer to Madeline’s office or calling J.B. and pretending to hand over $10 million. Or diving instantly to the floor to avoid being gunned down. He might have told her he couldn’t trust her anymore, but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words.

Y: Tasha’s storyline has been fantastic this year—minus the whole flakiness of the CIA hunting her down part—but the focus on Tasha’s psychological and emotional journey has been great regardless. For three seasons we’ve been waiting for Tasha to step out of the awesome sidekick position she’d found herself in and enjoy her moment in the spotlight, and what the writers have given her this season has been nothing short of brilliant. It’s true that it is sometimes overshadowed by Jane’s story arc but I think those two plot lines have been the driving force of the season, and thanks to the amazing writing and beyond phenomenal performances of both Audrey and Jaimie, this season has not disappointed on that front. Tasha’s finally getting her moment, and what a storyline it has been. It has torn Tasha apart and left her so bare and vulnerable, having to rebuild herself and her relationships and rediscover who she is and what she stands for. It’s been a struggle and a true hero’s journey and while she had to go some of it on her own, it is quite the relief that she’s finally welcomed people who love her back in her corner.

It’s the season of badass women having to rediscover themselves and reinvent themselves and allow themselves to break down and reach rock bottom, but nothing is more satisfying that watching them fight their way back and refuse to give in or give up.

L: Amen. I know we’ve said it many times before, but I really love how this show writes their female characters, and the actresses who portray them just keep knocking these scenes out of the park.

Which isn’t to say that the male characters are any less developed. We talk a lot about Rich’s amazing arc, and this week we see fan-favorite Boston return to the FBI to bicker with Rich (and also assist in the investigation, but really, we’re here for the excellent snark). Is it weird that I am rooting for Rich and Boston harder than I am for Reade and Tasha? Their relationship might not be exactly conventional, but it in a weird, dysfunctional way, it works for them. “I love us,” says Rich. And frankly, so do I! Close second to that relationship, though, is Rich’s friendship with Patterson. I love how she doesn’t hesitate to call him on his bad behavior. “I know you. You are your own worst enemy.” Everyone needs a friend like Patterson, who is willing to call you on your bullshit.

And really, this kind of friendship is what sets this team apart and makes them the incredibly effective unit they are. As Reade said at the end of season two, this job “gives us family.” Nothing illustrates how close this team is more than the moment when Kurt told them that Jane was meeting with Borden. He’s obviously hesitant to drop this bomb on them, especially Patterson. There’s a brief pause while they digest this news, but Patterson, Reade, and Tasha immediately voice their support for Jane—“whatever she needs”—without hesitation. Jane being able to cope with her past and function as a part of their team is more important to them then their own past hurts and grudges. And that moment shows us so beautifully how much this team cares about each other and look out for each other.

Honestly, I think my only disappointment with this episode is that Patterson doesn’t say, “Stardate” when she is dictating into her log. (You can’t tell me that there isn’t an outtake somewhere of Ashley saying that.)

Y: I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Patterson recently and how unlike previous seasons, this year she’s more in the background than we’re used to seeing her. At this point in previous seasons, Patterson would have had a few centric episodes and a long arcing storyline, whether it was with David in season one or with Borden in season two. But this year, she still hasn’t had that. But don’t get me wrong, she has not been any less incredible and any less the LeBron of the team. It’s just that she’s been quieter. And in many ways, it’s a good thing. For one thing it has allowed Tasha to be in the forefront. But also, after years of suffering so much and going through so much pain, it’s great to see at least one character has found some sort of peace and balance in their life. And this episode highlighted that perfectly when she learns that Jane has gone to see Borden. It showed that Patterson has found closure and moved on and is in a much better place in her life.

But that moment wasn’t important just for that. It also showed us how supportive Patterson has been this year of all her friends—and like L mentioned, her friendship with Rich has been an amazing thing. Rich’s journey from smug dark web shady person into reluctantly reformed good guy has been one of the most rewarding storylines on this show, and watching how Patterson has been there by his side as a supportive friend who won’t let him get away with his shit is just a testimony to her own development and character. None of these people would be here without her—and not just in the field.

What I want now is to see more Patterson and Tasha interaction, though. Those two were unbelievably close friends and right now… not so much and that sucks. I need those two to interact more—to talk and be as close as they once were!

When we last saw Jane, she was breaking down, and this week, she seems to have hit rock bottom. She’s nothing if not a fighter, but even badasses need a hand now and then. How does she get the help she needs?

L: Jane has been through a lot, and even through the worst of it, she still kept on swinging. This is the lowest we have ever seen her, which is really saying something for someone who found out she wiped her own memory to bring down a team that had become her best friends, killed her former fiancé after he shot her boss who died at her feet, spent three months being tortured by the CIA and eighteen months on the run from hitmen, tried to arrest both her brother and adoptive mother, found out her husband killed the daughter she didn’t know she’d had, and received a fatal diagnosis and almost died. Whew! The last time we saw Jane call in sick to work was, what, season one, after Oscar told her she’d done this to herself. And even then, she only made it half a day before she went back to work. So to find out that she’s been hiding out at home for several days is... unsettling, to say the least.

It’s a step in the right direction for her to admit that she can’t cope with all this on her own. We have always seen that Jane is the type of person who will keep struggling along on her own, rather than asking for help. Calling a therapist illustrates both how far she’s fallen, but also how far she’s come in her character arc to be able to reach out and ask for help when she needs it—which in turn makes it even more heartbreaking when two different therapists aren’t able to help her.

The two scenes with the therapists are funny but also sad. (My favorite moment in this episode might be while the second therapist was trying to get all the details straight, and Jane just looked at the camera and sighed. So much said with no words at all!) I love that the writers are able to laugh a little at the insanity of everything that they’ve put Jane through in four seasons. It is... a lot. But at the same time, my heart breaks for Jane, because it does seem too much for anyone, even our badass ninja warrior goddess, to be able to recover from.

It does make a twisted sort of sense that she would turn to Borden. He’s a doctor with training in psychiatry. He’s familiar with Jane’s case, with the extent of her memory loss, and also knew her as Remi. But I think it’s that last bit that is the most significant here. It’s not just that he knew her as Remi. Remi and Borden formed a bond from what they went through in Afghanistan. Both of them experienced significant losses there; Borden lost his wife, and Remi lost her whole unit. They were both lost and grieving and traumatized, so they joined together to help each other through and to do what they could to prevent other people from experiencing the pain they were going through.

The first time I watched this episode, it bothered me the way Jane bullied Borden into helping her. She is one of the people who put him in prison; he doesn’t owe her a damn thing. She demands that he help and runs roughshod over his objections, and honestly, you wouldn’t really expect good help from someone you treated that way, would you? But that’s viewing this only through the prism of their relationship as we viewed it from Jane’s perspective. These two have a history that predates all of that, and Jane remembers it all now. She knows what they went through together. And the more they talk, the more it becomes clear that Remi encouraged him and helped him find a new purpose when he was lost after his wife’s death. So asking him to do that for her now, to return the favor in essence, when she is the one who is so lost and adrift, doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

We are used to viewing Borden as a monster, but he was simply carrying out the task that Remi asked him to do. We see him as the person who betrayed the team, but all the while he was simply staying loyal to Remi. And he helps her today—without asking for anything for himself in return. When Kurt went to see Hirst, the first thing she did was ask what she was getting out of the deal. But Borden doesn’t do that. We’re so used to thinking of Borden as “the enemy” (I know I did, even in the review for the last episode!) that it seems odd to think of him as being selfless, but in these scenes, he is. As he says to Jane, “It feels good to be needed, doesn’t it?” The work that he and he wife did in Afghanistan was clearly needed, and Sandstorm needed him to play a role that no one else could. Even at the FBI, he was needed—both by Sandstorm and the FBI.

Pardon me, I need to go have a small existential crisis. First I started empathizing with Keaton. Now Borden. Where will this madness end?? What are these writers doing to me?!?!

It is clear that Borden does know Jane, by whatever name she is using, and he is willing to help her. He leads her, step by step, to the acknowledgement that she and Remi are in fact a single person. We saw a hint of this in 4.09, in Jane’s ZIP hallucination. But if I complained about that being a little too pat of a resolution for this schism, I take it back now, because this is the moment that first, small step was leading us toward. The way Borden leads her to this realization is so masterfully done. Like Dorothy in Oz, he couldn’t just tell her how to get home; Jane had to come to this conclusion on her own. “Doesn’t it feel better to talk about yourself as one person?” he asks once she gets there. Because you can’t apologize for something that someone else did; that’s meaningless. In order to truly atone, you first have to own whatever you did, to accept responsibility for your own actions. Then and only then can you say, “I’m sorry,” as Jane does, and have it actually mean something. She has to accept that she is Remi, which means that she alone is responsible for everything that Remi did. As painful as that it is, it frees her to apologize and opens the door to atonement.

And it is beautiful to see where this acceptance takes her: Once she accepts that she has always been one person, she can see that her motivation hasn’t really changed. As both a member of Sandstorm and as an FBI agent, she’s been trying to see that justice is done, that the innocent are protected and that the people who would exploit others for their own ends are punished. (And I have to wonder if, even though he was loyal to Sandstorm, did Borden, like Jane, get caught up in the satisfaction of the work the FBI was doing?) Remi’s motivation was the same as Jane’s, but Remi was manipulated by Shepherd (and I still think she needs to recognize this in order to fully forgive herself), whereas Jane was encouraged the follow a more legal path by the people she encountered at the FBI. Same person, different circumstances, leading to different outcomes.

And this also goes back to what we were talking about last week with regard to Shepherd—as evil as she might have been, the goal of the initial tattoos was always to unmask corruption and bring the perpetrators to justice. As this show points out so masterfully, the difference between the good guys and the bad guys isn’t as great as we’d like it to be. Sometimes it just depends on the perspective from which you are viewing the story. (In fiction, the best antagonists are always the ones who believe themselves to be the protagonist of the tale, which is one of the reasons that Shepherd was such a phenomenal villain. From her viewpoint, all of her actions were justified and necessary to stop the abuses she had witnessed.) In the hands of less skilled writers, showing us all the terrible things that Remi did might have made her seem unsympathetic and unrelatable and turned us against her. But these writers (and Jaimie Alexander) are so good: They took this character, gave her all of these dark, hidden depths, and then made us feel every bit of her agony and remorse. It’s a redemption arc of epic proportions, rewarding both Jane and the viewers for four years of torments.

The final message delivered is no less powerful: Instead of focusing on the whole beach, on the whole of Remi’s transgressions, Jane should just focus on the things she can do now. She cannot go back and change the past, but she can move forward, continue the work she’s begun with the FBI, stopping the Madelines (and the Shepherds and the Crawfords) of the world from hurting innocent people in pursuit of their own gains.

We’ve been rooting for Jane since the moment she climbed out that bag, and we will continue to root for her—hopefully for many seasons to come!

Y: Oh boy… what else can I add to this masterpiece right here? L’s killing it every week in the Jane section, isn’t she? I can just sit back read this and applaud and sit anxiously waiting for everyone to read it and join me in being in awe of L, her analysis of Jane and of Jane’s arc this season and of course of Jaimie’s incredible performance every single week. Honestly, this is all just a thing of beauty.

I loved that they brought back Borden for this episode, and I may have thrown my arms in the air and sighed “Finally!” because I have been waiting for them to get him involved since Jane first started showing symptoms. I mean he is the most glaringly obvious person that they should go to. He was obviously Sandstorm’s go-to guy when it came to the whole ZIP scheme, and if anyone should know anything about the medical consequences it should be him. But I guess it does make more sense to bring him in the psychological part of the consequences rather than the physical. He was singlehandedly, for some time, responsible for creating and morphing this nameless woman who came out of the bag into Jane Doe. A lot of what drives Jane, or at least what drove her in the first season or so, was a direct result of things that Borden had told her and convinced her of. In so many ways, Shepherd’s plan when it came to Borden’s role was just as manipulative as you’d expect it to be.

And here we are once again going back to just how deep-rooted the effect of Shepherd’s actions are in Jane’s life and in the heart of this show.

But back to Borden, I think it was brilliant how he was brought back and why, and the entire process of breaking Jane down. And at the same time, allowing Borden himself to be exposed revealed once again that while we might see him as a villain in our view of the story, he too was in many ways a victim and a person only trying to seek justice and do the right thing. It was absolutely heartbreaking listening to him and remembering everything he went through and realizing just how useless he feels right now. I agree with L that he too may have been slightly falling into the good things he was allowed to be a part of while at the FBI, and I cannot help but think back to the episode with young Maya and how incredible he was in that episode. A part of me wants to believe that that was the truest we saw Borden be—that if all the horrible things that happened in his life including being manipulated into being a terrorist—that is who Nigel Thornton really is. He is a man who genuinely cared about helping others, but he was just… it was just never meant to be… at least so far.

One last thing before I wrap up this very long section. I think we all need to take a moment to appreciate just how unbelievably amazing Ukweli and Jaimie were in every single second of every single one of their scenes together. There was nothing to fault in those scenes, not in the writing and not in their performances. I swear, if this were any other show, those two would be up for Emmys for just those scenes. I cannot stress it enough just how dedicated and phenomenal these actors are, and these two were just out of this world in their scenes. So if the rest of the world won’t appreciate it, then our little mighty fandom will do it, because dammit it’s been a long time since I’ve seen two actors take such scenes and knock them out of the park so brilliantly.

No matter what happens, Kurt Weller continues to be the most supportive husband ever. Is there an award for Best Husband, and if so, is there a limit for how many times in a row he can win?

Y: He deserves it. He deserves a thousand million times and then some.

And if subtlety has been the key to how Patterson’s story is being told this season, and how her acts of awesomeness are still so loud and yet so subtly written, then the same in some ways can be said about Kurt. As the core leads of the show, Kurt has been by far overshadowed by Jane—or at least his main arc has been—this year, but that does not take away anything from Kurt’s story or his arc. It is just as important and impressive as it has ever been. And the growth and development of his character has taken leaps forward even if he has not been the focus. And once again, that is excellent storytelling right there—to allow a character to take a step back but still manage to put them through an amazing arc and allow them to grow so much takes a lot of talent and really impressive writing.

What they are making Kurt go through with Jane and within her main arc is something that reaches to the core of who he is and what his character is all about. They’ve designed his arc this year and his journey to be woven into hers, and the apparent passiveness of it is very much his own struggle and his own monster that he needs to slay and overcome.

L: Oh man, yes! And it shows that you don’t have to give every single character a major crisis every season, soap-opera style. Characters can still grow and change in the course of supporting other characters through their crises (which is also, not coincidentally, how successful marriages work).

If we are worried about Jane’s behavior, just think about how freaked out her devoted husband must be. His fearless, badass wife is refusing not only to go out in the field (the one place where both he and she feel comfortable, as she told him in 1.05), she’s apparently not even willing to leave their apartment. As we talked about last week, this is an enemy Kurt can’t fight, and that must be almost as terrifying for Kurt as it for Jane.

My favorite thing about the moment where Kurt gives Jane the therapist’s card (which implies that he’s either met with the guy or stopped in at his office or something; he’s not just giving her a phone number handwritten on a post-it note) is the way he leaves it up to her. He doesn’t tell her that she needs therapy, he doesn’t schedule an appointment for her, he just hands her the card and leaves the ball in her court. It shows how much he respects her and shows how much confidence he has in her to do what she needs to do. (Although, yes, with true mental illness, sometimes the person who is struggling needs someone else to take the wheel for a little while to get back on course.) And yes, therapy doesn’t work if it’s not really the idea of the person getting therapy. But I still love the way Kurt doesn’t try to pressure or guilt her into going by telling her how worried he is. He just gives her the number and goes to work, and lets her decide what she wants to do.

But he doesn’t abandon her. He goes home to check up on her. And when she tells him she wants to see Borden, we don’t see him voice any objection (although we see his obvious discomfort with the idea when he tells the team). He is willing to do whatever it takes to help Jane become happy, healthy, and whole once again. And that right there is our ship (and our team): willing to do whatever it takes so that all of them come through okay in the end.

Which is why, as freaked out as the clips of Jane in the promo for the next episode make me, the clips of Kurt are somehow even worse, for this poor control freak who has already dug up the body of one person close to him in the course of this series. Excuse me, I need to go buy all the chocolate in a three-state radius before Friday...

And last, but never ever least, our favorite badass power couple has been through a lot, but the happily ever after they deserve still seems elusive. They’re still setting #relationshipgoals anyway, though, aren’t they?

L: We’ve already talked about how supportive Kurt was, first finding Jane a therapist, and then agreeing to her going to see Borden—and being the person to tell the team about it. I really loved that moment, because it made him a party to Jane’s decision, accepting any of the heat that might have resulted (I’m still so proud of our team that there wasn’t any). And it underscores that these two are a team: Jane may be the one with the past full of demons, but they are fighting them together.

If I’m honest, the only moment that really had me worried about them (aside from the last twenty seconds of this episode, which I am endeavoring to forget until April 5th) was the opening scene, when Kurt knocked on his own bedroom door and said “Good morning” to Jane, implying that he’s been, what, sleeping on the sofa? While she’s been holed up in the bedroom (but coming out long enough to brew a cup of coffee)? That might have alarmed me even more than Jane apparently not leaving their apartment for days.

Y: Okay, that is an absolutely random thing to pick up on, and I cannot stop laughing that this is what you took out of the episode. But yes, #relationshipgoals does seem to be Jeller’s thing this year, and dammit they are setting the bar high. Just when you think their unconditional support for each other has reached the maximum possible, they go and take it up a notch. They go from being fiercely supportive to adorably domestic, and then you take them out in the field and they kick ass like no one’s business, and when all is said and done, they make things worse by being all flirty and adorable over open comms.

How are we mere mortals supposed to deal with this? How are we expected to compete? This is just stupidly unfair at this point.

That’s all from us! What did you think of Borden’s return? On a scale of “one” to “the season two nuclear finale,” how freaked out are you by the promo for the next episode? Can we all get some group therapy to help us cope?? Or should we just panic quietly and eat more chocolate? Come talk to our ask box!

—Laura & Yas

#blindspot #blindspot: episode review #character: jane doe #character: kurt weller #character: patterson #character: edgar reade #character: tasha zapata #character: rich dotcom #character: boston arliss crab #character: Robert Borden #ship: Jane/Kurt #ship: Rich/Boston

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janiedoe · 6 years

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you know, it breaks my heart every time I see Borden’s face when he tells to Jane “it feels good to be needed doesn’t it?” because he used to be useful to Sandstorm, regardless of his true purposes, he was there to, somehow, help the woman he knew a year ago, on her transition to a new person; he became a doctor because he wanted to help people and he especially became a psychiatrist because of that. He used to have a wife, who was also a doctor, who also wanted to help people and died doing so. But now he’s locked out in a prison where the only thing he can do is wait... wait for his life to be over because he won’t get out of there, not even on parole. However, then Jane appears and asks for help, and he does help her, even if he didn’t want to at first, but he ends up helping her to understand herself, to make her see that she’s the same person who brought him to the states and who changed his life. He had a lot of reasons to resent Jane, maybe he does a little, but all of that vanished after they exchanged some words and some truths were told and after some apologies were said. He wasn’t a Sandstorm operative while he was talking to Jane, he wasn’t a terrorist, he was just a person, a doctor, a psychiatrist helping a person, someone who once was his patient, because even though Jane and Borden never really had a doctor-patient relationship like he said, he unknowingly helped her to get through all of her issues, to go through, maybe, the most difficult time in her life, when she had to accept that she had no identity and had to make one on her own for herself. Even though it wasn’t his job, even though he didn’t want to admit it right there, Borden helped Jane, he was and always has been, her doctor and they’ve always had a doctor-patient relationship.

So that’s why all of those scenes of Borden and Jane going through a session break my heart, because he misses being needed, he misses doing the thing he was born to do, and even though he misses all of that and regrets his wife’s death and maybe being part of Sandstorm and resents Jane, he stills puts everything aside and is able to forgive her in order to help her.

He’s needed again.

#blindspot #robert borden #jane doe #ok now I'm crying #sorry not sorry #THESE CHARACTERS ARE SO COMPLEX OMG

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visionsofmagic · 2 years

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⎯ stories with song lyrics [requests are open/a request post]

Explanation: I was thinking about writing stories with some song lyrics I am in love with. Below, you can see these lyrics [some will be added as well from time to time] and characters/people’s name that I like and can write stories about them. So, you can message or ask me with a lyric [or more than one] and a specific character/person [it can be two character at one time a well]. Then, I will write it. ^^ Feel free to add your own imagination as well. Also, you don’t have to use lyrics to ask a requests.

Stories can be one-shorts, series, headcanons.

important notes: i really want to write about jk, tae [from bts], peter parker, wanda maximoff, and bucky barnes [from marvel], bats [from dc]. so, this ones will come sooner because i already have some ideas about them with some of these lyrics. so, you can request it as well or you can wait me for to write this without any request. ^^

྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾ ྾

↬ for example: “I want to read a story about Jungkook with 1st song lyric.”

[or] “I want to read a story about steve rogers x reader x bucky barnes with 41st song lyric.”

[or] “I want to read a story about peter parker with 9th and 45th song lyrics.”

Warnings for requests: please identify what gender you want it to be; female reader or male reader and please describe what you want to read, so, I can really understand your wishes. ^^ [also, it can be an original character as you wish, will created by me of course.]

◆ Characters/People

⌑ dc ⌑

Bruce Wayne/Batman [every version of him, especially robert p.], Clark Kent/Superman, John Constantine [movie version]

⌑ marvel ⌑

Steve Rogers/Captain America, Peter Parker/Spiderman [tom h. and andrew g. versions], Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier, Loki, Thor, Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlett Witch, Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange

⌑ tv series ⌑

The Boys (2019-) Billy Butcher, Homelander, Soldier Boy, Queen Maeve

The Sandman (2022-) Morpheus/Dream/The Sandman, Corinthian/Nightmare

⌑ movies, movie series ⌑

Star Wars (not specific movie) Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader, Obi Wan Kenobi [tv series’ version as well]

Uncharted (2022) Nathan Drake - also game version too.

Twilight (all of them) Edward Cullen, Alice Cullen

In time (2011) Raymond Leon

American Psycho (2001) Patrick Bateman

John Wick (whole series) John Wick

The Prestige (2006) Alfred Borden

⌑ idols, actors, actresses ⌑

bts [especially jk & tae], chris evans, elizabeth olsen, sebastian stan, tom hiddlestion, tom holland, chris evans, robert pattinson

◆ Lyrics

1. A little bit older. A black leather jacket. A bad reputation. Insatiable habits. He was onto me, one look and I couldn't breathe. Yeah, I said, “If you kiss me, I might let it happen.” ▸my oh my, camila cabello [m]

2. Our secret moments in your crowded room. They've got no idea about me and you. & Say my name and everything just stops. I don't want you like a best friend. Only bought this dress so you could take it off▸dress, taylor swift [m]

3. I'm not here for games. I told you what it is, you chose to stay, oh. Baby, you chose the pain. 'Cause you don't know me, you just know my name, oh ▸renegade, aaryan shah [dark theme]

4. You don't know what you did, did to me. Your body lightweight speaks to me▸under the influence, chris brown

5. Please understand that I'm trying my hardest. My head's a mess but I'm trying regardless. Anxiety is one hell of a problem▸consume, chase atlantic [angst]

6. Bend it over slow 'cause daddy I know how you like it. Backseat of the 'Rari pullin' over just to ride it. Make you get down on your knees. Can't always havе what you please. This bitch ain't comin' for free & you know I carry a knife. You should be scared for your life. 'Cause you know I don't play nice▸oh mami, chase atlantic ft. maggie lindemann [m]

7. Don't worry, my hands. They're only warm for you. If I'm ruining you right now. Please forgive me. Because I can't live without you▸pied piper, bts

8. Someone told me stay away from things that aren't yours. But was he yours, if he wanted me so bad? Pacify her. She's getting on my nerves. You don't love her. Stop lying with those words.▸pacify her, melanie martinez

9. And all the kids cried out, "Please stop, you're scaring me". I can't help this awful energy. God damn right, you should be scared of me. Who is in control? ▸control, halsey [villain vibe]

10. There's parts of me I cannot hide. I've tried and tried a million times. Cross my heart and hope to die. Welcome to my darkside▸darkside, neoni [villain vibe]

11. And if somebody hurts you, I wanna fight. But my hands been broken one too many times. So I'll use my voice, I'll be so fucking rude. Words they always win, but I know I'll lose▸another love, tom odell [angst]

12. Terribly like terrible, she's the villain. One as sweet as caramel, she's my saint. Think I'm getting butterflies, but it's really. Something telling me to run away▸inferno, bella poarch & sub urban

13. I could be a better boyfriend than him. I could do the shit that he never did. Up all night, I won't quit. Thinking I'm gonna steal you from him. I could be such a gentleman. Plus all my clothes would fit▸boyfriend, dove cameron [from this lyrics, I am getting a big vibe of wanda x f!reader, so, you know what I mean]

14. I keep forgetting I should let you go. But when you look at me. The only memory is us kissing in the moonlight▸can’t remember to forget you, shakira & rihanna

15. Yeah, we danced on tabletops, and we took too many shots. Think we kissed, but I forgot last Friday night▸last friday night, katy perry

16. Don't blame me, love made me crazy. If it doesn't, you ain't doin' it right. Lord, save me, my drug is my baby. I'll be usin' for the rest of my life ▸don’t blame me, taylor swift

17. Call me in the morning to apologize. Every little lie gives me butterflies. Something in the way you're looking through my eyes. Don't know if I'm gonna make it out alive▸teeth, 5sos

18. Six feet tall and super strong. We'd always get along. Alright, alright. Ooh, he'd pick me up at eight. And not a minute late. 'Cause I don't like to wait, no. Kind and ain't afraid to cry. Or treat his mama right. That's right, that's what I like▸guy.exe, superfruit [fluff]

19. I'm in love with a fairytale. Even though it hurts. 'Cause I don't care if I lose my mind. I'm already cursed▸bad blood, taylor swift [note for this one; I added these part but I will write with whole lyrics because this song’s every lyric is amazing for an au, or a love story]

20. And you're startin' to bore me, baby. Why'd you only call me when you're high?▸why’d you only call me when you’re high?, arctic monkeys [protective or possessive vibe]

21. But you didn't have to cut me off. Make out like it never happened. And that we were nothing. And I don't even need your love. But you treat me like a stranger. And that feels so rough▸somebody that i used to know, gotye

22. Right now, I'm shameless. Screamin' my lungs out for ya. Not afraid to face it. I need you more than I want to▸shameless, camila cabello

23. We laugh together, we cry together. These simple feelings were everything I had. When will it be?. If I see you again. I will look into your eyes. And say, "I missed you"▸still with you, jungkook

24. She said, "Fuck me like I'm famous", I said, "Okay"▸slow down, chase atlantic [m]

25. You're too late. Had your girlfriend at my house for two days. Should be obvious, the reason she stayed with me▸too late, chase atlantic [m]

26. Where have you been? Do you know when you're coming back? 'Cause since you've been gone. I've got along but I've been sad▸reflections, the neighbourhood [angst]

27. And I've heard of a love that comes once in a lifetime. And I'm pretty sure that you are that love of mine.▸dandelions, ruth b. [fluff]

28. You'll never know the psychopath sitting next to you. You'll never know the murderer sitting next to you. You'll think, "How'd I get here, sitting next to you?" But after all I've said, please don't forget ▸heathens, twenty one pilots [dark theme, like mafia au]

29. But mama I'm in love with a criminal. And this type of love isn't rational, it's physical.▸criminal, britney spears [this one is like mafia au too]

30. Oh, dear diary, I met a boy. He made my doll heart light up with joy. Oh, dear diary, we fell apart. Welcome to the life of Electra Heart.▸ bubblegum bitch, marina

31. Come on, don't be silly. I beg of you, stop. I'm sure that he doesn't reflect. What he really is▸ainsi bas la vida, indila [dark theme]

32. I can't be your Superman. Can't be your Superman & Don't get me wrong, I love these hoes. It's no secret everybody knows. Yeah, we fucked, bitch, so what? That's about as far as your buddy goes & I never loved you enough to trust you. We just met and I just fucked you▸superman, eminem [so much homelander vibe]

33. You think I'm crazy, you think I'm gone. So what if I'm crazy? All the best people are. And I think you're crazy too, I know you're gone. That's probably the reason that we get along▸mad hatter, melanie martinez [dark theme]

34. I'm tired of being home alone. Used to have a girl a day. But I want you to stay. ▸ lost in the fire, the weekend [playboy vibe]

35. We found each other. I helped you out of a broken place. You gave me comfort. But falling for you was my mistake.▸ call out my name, the weekend

36. Give it to me daddy, that's what she keeps screamin'. Give it to me daddy, She love the way I beat it.& Lights down low, time to get naughty. ▸lights down low, maejor ft. waka flocka flame [m]

37. You can say what you like, don't say I wouldn't die for you. I, I'm down on my knees and I need you to be my God. Be my help, be a savior who can.▸ train wreck, james arthur [angst, mainly]

39. We used to be close, but people can go. From people you know to people you don't. And what hurts the most is people can go. From people you know to people you don't ▸ people you know, selena gomez

38. One: Don't pick up the phone. You know he's only callin' 'cause he's drunk and alone

Two: Don't let him in, you'll have to kick him out again

Three: Don't be his friend. You know you're gonna wake up in his bed in the mornin'

And if you're under him, you ain't gettin' over him.▸new rules, dua lipa

40. Saw you there and I thought. "Oh, my God, look at that face. You look like my next mistake. Love's a game, wanna play?" ▸blank space, taylor swift

41. I know I can treat you better than he can. And any girl like you deserves a gentleman. Tell me, why are we wasting time. On all your wasted crying. When you should be with me instead? ▸ treat you better, shawn mendes [love triangle vibe]

42. Only love can hurt like this. Must have been a deadly kiss & But every time you're there I'm begging you to stay. When you come close I just tremble. And every time, every time you go. It's like a knife that cuts right through my soul▸only love can hurt like this, paloma faith

43. I heard from a friend of a friend. That that dick was a ten out of ten ▸ need to know, doja cat [m]

44. Evil, I've come to tell you that she's evil, most definitely. Evil, ornery, scandalous and evil, most definitely ▸ doin’ time, lana del rey

45. Baby, I'm a sociopath. Sweet serial killer. On the warpath. 'Cause I love you just a little too much ▸ serial killer, lana del rey [dark theme, dark!nat and wanda vibes or dark!mc/reader with a pretty boy like peter p.]

46. Guys my age don't know how to treat me. Don't know how to treat me. Don't know how to treat me. Guys my age don't know how to touch me. Don't know how to love me good ▸ guys my age, hey violet [mature, sugar!daddy/mommy theme]

love, rose <3

ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perseprose/profile you can request in ao3 too. i will publish this in there too.

[masterlist]

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adamwatchesmovies · 2 years

Text

The Prestige (2006)

Revenge and obsession make for great storytelling topics, as The Prestige demonstrates. Based on the novel by Christopher Priest, director Christopher Nolan - who co-writes the screenplay with his brother Jonathan - unites a powerhouse cast to offer us a true mind-bender. This film's ending is so unexpected I've heard several people say that it couldn't possibly work the way it's presented here and instead propose all kinds of increasingly unhinged fan theories.

In 1890s London, magician Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) is selling out shows thanks to his amazing “The Real Transported Man” trick. His rival, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman), is obsessed with discovering how it’s done and copying the act to get the top spot in their long-running feud. Years of spying, imitating, theft and sabotage have left them ready to kill each other.

Some twists in The Prestige you'll figure out a little ahead of time – though I think you’re supposed to, as the film is told partially in flashback -, others you decipher seconds before they’re revealed. Some are so wild you'd need superpowers to predict them. None of these surprises are cheap. They’re all focused on the characters, whose rivalry is so intense you can’t understand its severity without seeing the film. In every cinematic sleigh of hand, you learn something new about them. These new bits of information shock, excite, terrify and depress you all at once.

Like in Miloš Forman’s magnificent Amadeus, this is a story of men who should’ve been friends, who - had they chosen to cooperate - could’ve, through their talents, ushered us into a new age of wonder. Instead, their passions only fuel animosity. While Borden and Angier's obsession makes them fascinating. The ones you’re worried about are the side characters, the ones most likely to become collateral damage: Borden’s wife Sarah (Rebecca Hall), Angier’s assistant and confidante (who is up to her own tricks) Olivia (Scarlett Johansson) and Michael Caine as John Cutter, a stage engineer who suffers from the magician’s rivalry in more ways than one.

As it explores this bitter rivalry of stage magicians, The Prestige becomes downright diabolical. It's so sinister you feel wrong for seeing it play out but can't look away. There’s another level of enjoyment as well. When you see an actor like Hugh Jackman on-screen performing magic tricks, it's not like seeing a live act. You know there’s trick photography at work, probably some special effects added after the shooting was done, all sorts of things to make the impossible happen. Because the film centers around an "impossible" trick, this artifice becomes an asset. You’re removed from the action taking place. You know it's all some kind of sleight of hand… just as Angier does. You feel the way he feels and desperately want to know the truth behind it.

Once the picture concludes, The Prestige offers you much to discuss thematically. The meaning of secrets, competition & sacrifice, the way certain actions mean one thing at first and then another once we know the ending, and more. Every aspect, combined with the fabulous cast and the performances they give make for a sophisticated picture that demands to be seen more than once. (On Blu-ray, March 3, 2018)

#The Prestige #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #Christopher Nolan #Jonathan Nolan #Christopher Priest #Hugh Jackman #Christian Bale #Michael Caine #Scarlett Johansson #Rebecca Hall #Andy Serkis #David Bowie #Piper Perabo #2006 movies #2006 films

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spookyfbi · 3 years

Note

what did cody said about klave?

Omg Anon okay so, twitter user umbrellaacademy invited Cody to do a twitter space with them which they did yesterday (8PM Friday EST) and Cody stayed for OVER TWO AND A HALF HOURS answering fan questions and saying SO MANY things about Dave and Klave and I am still so overwhelmed. I have recorded it and I’ve sent the video to the host and they’ve said they’ll release it soon (although the file is massive so I suspect they’ll have a bit of trouble wrangling it like I did so it might take longer). In the meantime, some highlights under the cut:

- Dave’s favourite thing about Klaus is his openness. He’s charismatic because he’s unafraid to be himself. Cody also finds it endearing that Klaus marches to the beat of his own drum.

- He likes the idea that the briefcase brought Klaus to Dave because of fate/destiny. Dave is the missing piece of Klaus, he fills a void in Klaus. He’s as interested as we are to find out if the timeline loops back in season 3

- Dave is soft spoken. There are qualities of Dave that have grounded and soothed Klaus but also Klaus has pulled Dave out of his shell. Klaus’ openness was like an invitation to Dave to open up and be goofy and strange, and this was a vibe Cody got from Robert as well in the bar scene, but then the dynamic shifted later and he felt that Dave was the one who was opening up first.

- Dave would go with Klaus to be with his family. He would want Klaus to take the reigns and would trust Klaus re- what kind of life they could have together post Vietnam. Although there would be no hesitation from Dave about his love for Klaus, there might be hesitation about planning a life together because of the time period they were in. There’s a sense of peace and wanting to settle from Klaus. Cody just basically being solidly on the Klaus bringing Dave back to 2019 to meet his family train.

- There is a sensitivity and self awareness to Dave, Cody thinks he accepted his sexuality but just was careful about advertising it because of the time period. He also says that his Dave in season 1 didn’t have the experience we saw in season 2 with his uncle and that might have made him more open (I am staring directly at my reverse George McFly theory).

- Dave’s love for Klaus is unconditional, he loves him for exactly who he is. Dave’s unconditional love is a foil for the conditional love Klaus gets from his family. Klaus doesn’t really know what love is and then he gets fired this laser beam of love from Dave.

- Cody that been in a play where his character was in a relationship with a guy but he thinks Rob hadn’t done that before. The director set the tone that the kiss scene was an intimate and tender scene. He feels like there was a reassurance from Dave to Klaus in that moment.

- Dave was holding 4 shot glasses in the scene where he’s holding them with both hands.

- Cody describing Dave in 4 words - kind, sensitive, empathetic, soft. Dave would describe Klaus as free spirited, open, unfiltered, unexpected (he also put forward chaotic but didn’t stick with it and replaced it with unexpected).

- Dave’s first thought when he woke up and saw Klaus was “Is this a dream... We’re not sleeping much so this could be a dream, I wouldn’t put it past my brain” Also “The dream coming to reality but maybe not necessarily looking like what he thought.”

- He thinks Klaus probably took the dogtags off Dave after he died as a way to remember him rather than them exchanging them

- He wants Klaus and Dave’s storyline to end with love prevailing. He also floats the idea of Dave taking a dark turn and Klaus has to be the redemptive person to bring Dave back.

In preparation for playing Dave he watched the Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary series on Netflix and also looked up online about the Vietnam war. He also listened to music he thought Dave would be into from 1965-1968: He mentions Motown and Stones (Cody said he himself likes Motown)

- Cody’s favourite thing about Dave is the quality of how he loves Klaus. He describes it as pure and unconditional and simple and he talks about he thinks people need to love each other fearlessly - not just romantically but in friendships as well, especially with what’s happening now (and this sort of clarifies to me why he was talking about love over fear so passionately in the clever klaus q&a and what he meant by that)

- Cody is a fantasy nerd

- He would love to see Dave giving Klaus some agency

- He thinks that Klaus has some guilt about Dave’s death

- He would like to play a Commission agent (Commission Dave rights!!)

- Robert is very open and unassuming and funny and it was easy to have an immediate rapport with him. Cody also talked with Tom Hopper (about their mutual friend Bradley James). He also briefly met Colm and Robin and he also remembered he met Aidan (who here had a theory about a deleted scene with Aidan in the attic?)

- He doesn’t know how time works in the afterlife or how Klaus’ power works but Dave would have waited 50 years for Klaus

- Calem joined the space and they said that they hadn't interacted before but they had a bit of a chat. Calem said that his filming in season 2 was 4 days but about 1 month apart. Calem’s internet kept cutting out and then he disappeared.

- If Dave was one of the 43 children his power could be the care bear love blast and he could fire hot beams of love out of the hole in his chest. He would give Dave a more passive power to round out the more active powers the other Hargreeves have, like a healer

- The scene in the tent was filmed at the studio. The scene on the bus was shot outside. The scene in the trench was partly shot outside but some of it was shot in the studio as well (I wonder if he’s confusing that trench scene with the hallucination at the Rave though?)

- He said the scenes were beautifully lit (I beg to differ, Cody!)

- Klaus helped unlock that part of him (I think he means Dave’s sexuality) and he also says that Klaus was a very specific target to Dave’s love. Klaus seems like one in a million. When you love someone there’s something specific about them that pulls that out of you.

- Calem returns! He was in his room where the internet crapped out on him but then he went downstairs. Cody asked what it was like for Calem to come in and play an established character. Calem said he purposely didn’t talk with Cody about the character before playing him because he’d done the audition without knowing anything about the character so he didn’t want to risk doing something too different from what he’d done in the audition, but he did watch season 1. He also said he was a bit anxious about what the audience would think of him playing the character, and Cody went into acting mentor mode and said that he doesn’t think the job is about appeasing the fans but about trying to be as true as possible. He also said that Calem did a good job and he shouldn’t be hard on himself but Calem then said that he quickly got over it and he wasn’t thinking about it on set, just afterwards. Calem mentioned that he creeped Cody’s IMDB and he said that his dad was a camera operator on Lizzie Borden Chronicles this Cody guest starred in an episode of.

- Dave loves music like Cody. He mentioned Four Tops as another band and then Motown again. He thinks the bar scene shows Dave’s love of music but he wasn’t thinking about that at the time.

- Dave would be overstimulated at first if he came to the future because we’re bombarded with a lot more stimulus than in the 60s. The internet and iPhones would blow his mind. He let’s a “we’ll see” slip, which he then quickly corrects to “we would see”

- The kiss in the bar was definitely the first kiss and he thinks it happened a couple months into the tour. He thinks the feelings were mutual quite early, but that it would have taken some time to act on them and to be able to gauge if each other were really giving off the signals that they like each other.

- He’s appreciative of the fan love and he tries to make a connection with everyone he can

- Dave is an optimistic force who thinks that love will prevail so he would have wanted to do something to make it work despite the obstacles they faced

- Cody doesn’t know how close to the vest Klaus kept the stuff about his powers and the time travel etc but he did see Klaus appear so he does know there’s something strange about him. Dave trusted Klaus and even if it wasn’t explicitly talked about there was enough trust to go “wherever you go I’ll follow, wherever that leads.” When Klaus conjures Dave, Dave is excited to see him but isn’t really surprised or put off by any of the circumstances that Klaus is in.

- He thinks that Dave is more the listener of the relationship, but he could certainly see Dave telling Klaus about Dune and Klaus indulging him.

- Rob is very genuine, very unassuming, very immediately open, very funny, definitely puts you at ease, incredibly thoughtful, very considerate, good dude (wow it’s the complimenting Rob speed run! 8 in a row!)

- The aspect of Dave that Cody connects to most is his non-judgemental quality

- Dave would connect with Vanya’s softness and Luther’s moral compass (he said Diego’s moral compass in the cleverklaus q&a so not sure if he just mixed them up). He thinks Dave might be a bit too sincere for Five and Ben would appreciate being able to unload Klaus on Dave.

- He thinks Dave is not a tattoo guy but Klaus is impulsive so getting a tattoo really aligns with his personality. He thinks that Dave’s actions speak louder than words written on him

- He connects to the fractured family theme of the show on a personal level

- Dave being jewish was something he only learned about through looking at the dogtags, it wasn’t in the script or anything

- Dave might have studied Philosophy if he’d gone to college instead of joining the military, he feels like there’s a dreamer quality to Dave

- Even though Dave was pressured into joining the military, he thinks that Dave believed he was going the right thing by enlisting

- Colm is a Canadian Hall of Fame actor and Reginald is such an intense character so Cody would love to do a scene with him. He would also love to do a scene with Elliot.

- Cody remembered waiting on set to film the scene in the club and he, Rob and Tom were in an 80s hotel with a heart shaped jacuzzi (??? oh was this the set with the Handler and Agnes maybe?)

#the umbrella academy #dave katz #klave #cody ray thompson

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