#classic william design choices moment | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stargazingellie · 1 year

Text

lazarus is risen

chapter two: garden of the hesperides

(masterlist) (part 1)

hello beautiful people <3 here is the second part of the story i'm also writing on ao3!!

(ellie williams x reader, post-tlou2, useless lesbians, slow burn, cross country road trip, lots of references to greek mythology, etc.)

The Hesperides: Greek nymphs known for their luscious gardens, namely as protectors of golden apples. Also called “Nymphs of the West” or “Daughters of the Evening.”

[Lucy]

“If we’re here, and Jackson is there…” The young woman moved her finger between two spots on a map, the latter of which was designated by a neatly drawn circle. “... then I’d say we’re only a couple hours away now.” She looked up from the backseat to confirm with her companions.

From the passenger seat, Officer Alvaro checked his compass and the watch on his wrist. “Affirmative. About five hours, give or take.”

The young woman sat back in her seat and smiled triumphantly to herself. See? I’m not totally useless, she thought. She turned to look out the window and watched the rolling landscape flicker by. Sure, there were mountains and forests back home, but out here they seemed so much more serene. Empty, almost. She knew better, though; nowhere – even a place as remote as Wyoming – was void of danger.

To her left sat an aging man whose round, wire-rimmed glasses seemed to require constant adjusting. He pushed them up the bridge of his nose and ran his hands through his long white beard in contemplation. “Let’s play a game!” He suggested, raising a finger in the air. Everybody groaned.

“Dad, we’ve already played every road trip game out there. Like three times,” The young woman retorted.

Giving her a light fist bump to the shoulder, he replied, “Aw, come on Luce! Have to pass the time somehow!”

The familiar nickname made her soften. She sighed and gave in, mostly to humor her father, but secretly she did enjoy the entertainment too. “Okay, okay, fine. How about… the Alphabet Game?”

His face lit up in excitement. “Ah, yes, fantastic choice. A classic. Now for a category. Let’s see… let’s do… plants native to North America? I’ll go first. American Bittersweet.”

She thought for a moment, then said, “Okay. American Bittersweet, Black-Eyed Susan. Your turn Alvaro.”

Officer Alvaro looked at the pair in the rearview mirror with a blank expression. “All due respect, sir, but Jacobs and I are trained in military combat, not indigenous plant life. We’re the brawns of this operation, not the brains, remember?”

“Well, technically I’m not trained in plants either,” the older man replied. “I just find them fascinating. But if you want to talk about fungi–”

“What if we just listen to some music?” the young woman suggested, knowing her father would blabber about his research to anyone who would listen unless someone intervened.

The next few hours passed without further game suggestions from the backseat. The young woman dozed off, but woke up as the vehicle came to a lurching stop. She looked around groggily, only to find they were surrounded by a thick, lush forest.

From the driver’s seat, Officer Jacobs switched the vehicle off and opened his door. “It’s on foot from here. Pretty straight shot, shouldn’t take too long.”

As they all dismounted from the military-grade truck, the young woman stretched her stiff joints and breathed in the sweet scent of pine from the surrounding trees. She retrieved her bag from the back of the truck and collected her gun. She hadn’t needed to use it yet, and it still felt heavy and awkward in her hand.

“This way.” Alvaro nodded towards the treeline and began to walk towards it. The older man and the young woman fell in line behind him, with Jacobs bringing up the rear.

As they made their way through the dense undergrowth, the young woman asked her father, “So, have you thought about what you’ll say when we get there? I think you’ll need something better than, Hey, can we take her?”

Her father chuckled. “Well I wasn’t planning on approaching it like that. I figured I would explain who we are, and how we found her, and what she could do with us. I want this to be her decision. I want her to want to come with us. And I think once she hears what we’ve been working on, she will.”

She considered his response. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Well, that’s assuming she’s even here. That Firefly woman’s intel was pretty old. Lots of things could have happened since then. Maybe she has a family, or went somewhere else, you know?”

Jacobs chimed in from the back of the line. “To the best of our knowledge, her information was good. We cross-referenced with some of our correspondents out here. They all knew about the Salt Lake incident, and they all pointed to Jackson as her most likely location.”

“And even if she’s not here, maybe they’ll know something,” the older man added. “And we’ll know one more place where she isn’t. When the hypothesis isn’t supported, regroup and collect more data. It’s all in the scientific process, my dear.”

After an hour or so, the group stopped at a gurgling creek to refill their water. As she knelt down on the bank and held her bottle below the surface, the young woman observed the rocks along the creek bed. Eyeing one in particular, she used her free hand to retrieve it from the water. Perfect, she thought, turning it over in her hand. When her bottle was full, she returned it to her bag along with the small, smooth, gray pebble.

Suddenly, splashing sounds and distant talking became audible downstream. With their guns drawn, the four travelers watched as two people on horseback came into view from around a bend. Deep in conversation, the two riders didn’t notice the strangers until they were only a few yards away.

“I’m telling you Bonnie, that did not–” The rider’s sentence was abruptly cut short when he noticed the group of strangers. The other rider, Bonnie, noticed at the same time, and they both drew their guns in one swift motion. “Hands up!”

“Woah, woah, woah, hold your horses there, buddy” Alvaro said, gun trained on the new arrivals. “I’m no mathematician, but it seems like we’ve got you outnumbered.”

“Who are you?” Bonnie asked. “Why are you here?”

At this, the older man raised his hands in an I surrender motion and slowly set his gun on the ground. “My name is Dr. Steven Reynolds.” He nodded towards the young woman. “This is my daughter Lucy. And these are Officers Alvaro and Jacobs. Please, we just want to talk.”

“Why are you here?” Bonnie repeated through gritted teeth.

Dr. Reynolds slowly reached into the side pocket of his backpack and brought out a laminated identification badge with his name and picture displayed on it. “My daughter and I are part of a group of researchers called the A.R.C.C. – the Administration for the Research and Containment of Cordyceps – an offshoot of the former Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And we believe there’s someone in your community who could be of great service to us.”

The riders considered Dr. Reynolds’ statement. Without taking her eyes off of the strangers, Bonnie said softly, “Greg, what do you think?”

The second rider thought for a moment. “We should probably let Maria decide, yeah?”

“Yeah, agreed.” Addressing the strangers, she said, “Toss your weapons over. We’ll take you to speak with our leader. No funny business.”

Jacobs and Alvaro remained unmoving with their weapons still drawn. Dr. Reynolds cleared his throat and gave them a pointed look.

“Sir, this could be dangerous. We don’t know anything about these people,” muttered Jacobs.

“We need to talk to them. Just do what they say and we can go from there,” Dr. Reynolds pleaded.

After a few tense moments, Jacobs and Alvaro lay their weapons on the ground, shortly followed by Lucy.

Bonnie dismounted her horse and ordered, “Good. Now keep your hands in the air and back up.” She and Greg collected the discarded weapons, careful to keep their attention trained on the four strangers. Once back on their horses, Greg directed the group to walk in front of them back in the direction the pair had come from.

The group did as instructed and made the trek along the creek in silence. By this time, the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon and the shadows from the trees were getting longer and longer. Before long, though, they got their first glimpse of Jackson.

Or, to be more precise, they could see the walls of Jackson, which were so large that they eclipsed whatever lay beyond them. In the growing darkness, large spotlights burned brightly on either side of the main gate.

Lucy squinted in the harsh light. She could make out some dark figures milling about, but couldn’t make out any details beyond that.

From behind her, Greg yelled to the figures, “Astrid, get Maria!”

A woman’s voice came from one of the dark figures on top of the wall. “Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, we’ve got it under control. Just get Maria,” Greg replied.

Within a matter of minutes, the enormous gates opened and a figure appeared. As she watched the figure approach, Lucy couldn’t help but notice the warm glow from string lights adorning the cabins beyond the gate.

As the figure got closer it became possible to make out some details about her. She was an older woman, with shoulder-length, graying blonde hair and a stern look on her face.

“Greg, Bonnie, who are these people?” She asked.

“They’re from Atlanta. Say they’re part of some research group. Wanted to talk to you,” Bonnie explained.

“What kind of research?” Maria asked the newcomers.

Sensing his opportunity had arrived, Dr. Reynolds explained, “We’re with the Administration for the Research and Containment of Cordyceps in Atlanta. I’ve spent my life studying fungi and their reproductive mechanisms, and I believe we’re right on the verge of figuring out how to fight these infections.”

Maria considered his words. “What does that have to do with Jackson?” she asked.

“We believe access to an immune subject would completely revolutionize our potential,” Dr. Reynolds explained matter-of-factly. It could have just been a trick of the light, but Lucy thought she saw a look of uneasiness flash across Maria’s features.

Greg gave an incredulous laugh. “That’s a good one, doc. I think if someone were immune we would know. There’s no one like that here.”

Dr. Reynolds looked between Greg and Maria. “Are you sure? Our records indicate–”

“Stop talking,” Maria cut him off.

“What should we do with them?” Greg asked. “Drag them away? Kill them? They’re obviously crazy.”

“Escort them to my house,” Maria ordered.

“I– what?” Greg asked in disbelief.

“Greg, just do what I say,” Maria told him in exasperation. “I’ll meet you there, I just need to get someone first.”

Obvious confusion lingered on his face, but with a nudge from Bonnie, he kicked into action. “Alright, you four. Follow us.”

After two stablehands retrieved the horses just inside the gate, the newcomers followed Greg and Bonnie down the main path as Maria hurried off in the other direction. After a short walk, they arrived at a quaint cabin in the center of town. As they entered the dwelling, Lucy wondered how many people lived there; it seemed too large for just one person. Rows and rows of books lined shelves along the walls and handmade throw blankets lay draped over the well-worn leather couches in the living room.

Greg crossed the room to throw a log in the fireplace as Bonnie motioned to the couches. “Make yourselves comfortable. She should be back soon.”

Lucy and her father awkwardly seated themselves on the edge of one of the couches as Jacobs and Alvaro remained standing behind them, sentinels on either side of the two sitting down. Bonnie sat at the kitchen table and cleaned her gun as Greg attempted to coax the fireplace to life. Lucy nervously wrung her hands in her lap. No one spoke.

After a few minutes of silence, the front door opened and Maria entered hurriedly, followed by a second person who appeared to be in her early 20s. As the pair sat themselves on the couch across from the group of newcomers, Lucy observed the new girl. Her face was dotted with freckles, and was framed by short auburn hair that hung loose around her shoulders. As the girl crossed her arms over her chest, Lucy noticed the girl’s left hand was missing two fingers. As the girl studied the group of strangers, her piercing green eyes landed on Lucy, who quickly looked away and hoped the girl hadn’t noticed her staring.

“Greg, Bonnie, you can go now. Thank you,” Maria said to the pair of patrols. As they exited the house, Maria cleared her throat and brought her attention to the group of strangers sitting in front of her. She folded her hands tightly and set them on her lap.

“Alright, well… start talking.”

#lazarus is risen // ellie williams #the last of us part 2 #the last of us #ellie williams #ellie williams x reader #pls lemme know what u think i love hearing from people <3333

7 notes · View notes

spiderdreamer-blog · 1 year

Text

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

When Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney in 1994 to form DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, it was essentially seen as a declaration of war against his former compatriots in the company. The first volleys in that war, however, would not come until 4 years later in 1998 with Antz and The Prince of Egypt. Both were bold statements, the former a CGI comedy directly designed to compete with Disney's new comrades at Pixar, the latter a big-budget traditionally animated musical taking aim at the prestige and box office returns of the Disney Renaissance that Katzenberg had helped shepherd at Feature Animation. Both made a strong impression at the time, and while Antz is somewhat forgotten today (especially thanks to the increasing controversy of Woody Allen as a filmmaker/performer and public figure), The Prince of Egypt has held on as a genuine classic. Does it deserve to be? Absolutely.

The plot is certainly familiar in its outlines to anyone who ever attended Sunday school. Hebrew slave Yocheved (the late singer Ofra Haza, absolutely haunting in only a few sung lines) places her baby Moses (Val Kilmer) in a basket and sets him down the River Nile in Egypt to rescue him from a purge commanded by Pharaoh Seti (Patrick Stewart). Moses eventually drifts towards the palace and is adopted by the Queen (Helen Mirren) and raised in the palace alongside his brother Ramses (Ralph Fiennes). They grow up as troublemakers, much to the consternation of Seti and the high priests Hotep and Huy (Steve Martin and Martin Short). When Moses helps free a captured Midian woman, Tzipporah (Michelle Pfeiffer), he learns a shocking revelation from the slaves Miriam and Aaron (Sandra Bullock and Jeff Goldblum): he is their brother. Disturbed by this and the full reality of the purge, he accidentally kills a slave-driver in a struggle, then leaves Egypt. After reuniting with Tzipporah in Midian, he begins to make a new life for himself. One day, when trying to retrieve a sheep, he comes across the fabled burning bush and speaks to God, learning that his task is to free His people from the Egyptians. But it will not be easy, God warns, and you DEFINITELY know the holy ass-kicking coming up next if you've read your Scripture.

First things first: this is in the top 5 of the most beautiful animated features ever made, regardless of country or studio. This is as grand, no, grander than many live-action films in the scope of its vast settings-deserts, palaces, chariot races, plagues of frogs and fire, the Red Sea-yet the tiniest gesture from its characters can have just as much impact. Spielberg brought much of the staff and talent from his short-lived Amblimation studio in London to work on this, and the talent is well in evidence. Animators like Rodolphe Guenoden, William Salazar, and Kristof Serrand give stellar, realistic renderings that avoid much of the scenery-chewing instincts of Western animation. (Katzenberg did some poaching of his own, bringing in James Baxter to do some truly stellar scenes of Moses' acting that anticipate his great realism on films like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron) The CGI is used brilliantly too, even if, like Hunchback, the crowds look a little obvious nowadays if you look too closely. I also want to shout out the direction by Brenda Chapman (another Disney vet), Simon Wells, and Steve Hickner. They guide the story brilliantly in terms of shot choices, such as in a famous scene where Moses goes on his journey across the desert and becomes smaller and smaller in the frame.

Like Hunchback, this is a story that demands a certain seriousness, and it avoids the pitfalls of that film by eschewing goofy sidekicks for more natural character-based comedy amidst all the sturm and drang. Even Hotep and Huy, while they get some funny moments, undergo a darker, hypocritical turn when their power is threatened. While there are changes made to the Biblical story (addressed upfront in my favorite "please don't kill us" disclaimer of all time), they all pretty much work for the story this tries to tell. Moses is reframed as a man desperately in need of a purpose, and God certainly gives him one, but also someone who truly loves his adopted brother and wishes things didn't have to be this way. Ramses, too, is seen with remarkable complexity as a figure who adores Moses, but is simultaneously all too aware of and completely blind to the privileges he holds, which costs him everything. The supporting cast gets some nice moments too; I especially like Tzipporah's subtle shift as she grows to love Moses, even if she never loses her spirit.

(A quick word on the voice cast before we get into the aural end. You would probably not cast the film the way they did today, with predominantly white or non-Jewish actors as Hebrews and Egyptians, and I think that's certainly worth considering even if visually, the characters obviously look much closer than previous Biblical films using very white casts. The main observation I will put forth is that the film WAS shepherded by two of the most powerful Jewish men in Hollywood, Spielberg and Katzenberg. And given that the story was important enough for them to consult an army of religious experts from various cultures to get things like clothing and traditions correct, they presumably could have gotten any cast they wanted. They ultimately landed on this one, and I think that was their right. I do not object to anyone who feels differently, especially as a non-Jewish white guy myself.)

In terms of the soundtrack, Stephen Schwartz possibly outdoes his collaborations on Hunchback with the songs here, aided by an equally great score and arrangements by Hans Zimmer. "Deliver Us" is a powerful opening number that visualizes the plight of the slaves with heartbreaking cruelty. And as said, Haza's vocals cast a spell that will hang over the entire film. "All I Ever Wanted" is the shortest, probably weakest song in the film, but I like how it plays almost as an inversion of the typical "I Want" song in terms of Moses trying to convince himself that this is what he actually wants. "Through Heaven's Eyes" boasts a robust performance from Broadway vet Brian Stokes Mitchell as Tzipporah's father Jethro that is genuinely uplifting in the new spirituality offered to Moses. (Mitchell is so good, in fact, that I wondered why they even brought in Danny Glover for the character's few spoken lines, even if those are well-delivered). "Playing With The Big Boys" is easily the most sinister I've ever heard Steve Martin and MARTIN SHORT, of all people, sound, though I suppose it helps when you back them up with badass chanting. "The Plagues" too is ominous and rumbling, with a heartbreaking counterpoint duet between Moses and Ramses right in the middle. And "When You Believe" genuinely soars as the newly freed slaves embrace life.

The voice cast is star-heavy, as mentioned, but all are well-chosen rather than distracting, and it certainly doesn't sound like anyone's phoning it in to my ears. In particular, I think this is one of the best performances of Val Kilmer's career, equal to his Doc Holliday in Tombstone, as he goes to the mat emotionally in scene after scene. (He also plays God, doing a wonderful job of making him seem mysterious, unknowable, and sympathetic all at once). Fiennes is his match, tragic and vile in equal measure, though perhaps his cruelest delivery is his most offhanded, a casual "Slaves" when Moses observes their father murdered children. (This echoes Stewart, who goes from sternly warm patriarchy to a truly chilling moment where he tries to comfort Moses by saying "They were only slaves", much to his adopted son's horror). Bullock doesn't get a ton of screentime, but she paints an effective portrait of a woman trying to hold onto hope and faith because that's all she has left. Goldblum gets some proper Goldblum-y comic relief moments as Aaron, but also a crucial cynical beat where he questions why Moses cares so much about them now. And as said, I really like how Pfeiffer gives Tzipporah a lived-in toughness rather than seeming fake (she also gets a priceless reaction when she helps save Moses from a well).

I come to this film from a number of different angles: as an animation fan first, and as someone for whom it was a fixture in a mixed secular-Christian household growing up. I grew away from God as time went on, but stories like this can still take hold in my imagination because of the pictures they paint. There is a genuine sense of wonder here, beautiful and terrible by turns, and I feel it every time I watch. The faith that a true miracle is occurring.

#the prince of egypt #dreamworks animation #reviews #media analysis

2 notes · View notes

adamwatchesmovies · 2 years

Text

Harry and the Hendersons (1987)

I’ve had some bad experiences with Bigfoot movies. I remember enjoying Abominable, which is basically Rear Window with a Skunk Ape. Sasquatch, with Lance Henriksen is so bad you’re better off forgetting it. Most examples of the "genre" either fall into the offensive category. At best you'll get something so bad it's good again (I recommend Nightclaws if that’s what you’re looking for). After all these horror movies, it was a surprise to find a gentle, family friendly and charming Abominable Snowman film in the form of Harry and the Hendersons even more surprising is that it's good!

While on a family hunting/camping trip, the Hendersons – father George (John Lithgow), mother Nancy (Melinda Dillon) and their two children Sarah (Margaret Langrick) and Ernie (Joshua Rudoy) – hit a Sasquatch with their car. Unaware that it’s merely knocked out, they strap it to the roof of their vehicle and bring it home.

Created by Rick Baker, “Harry” is a marvellous special effect. You can’t tell whether it’s someone in a suit and makeup or an elaborate electronic. I’m sure it’s a mixture of both but the creature’s movements, its facial expressions, the way it’s shot make it completely convincing. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear they actually had a Sasquatch on-screen.

This is not a frightening film at all, but if you’re looking to make one, you’ve got to see the way director William Dear handles Harry. You are slowly teased the design. As the Hendersons peer over what they think is a carcass that would send any cryptozoologist into an ocean of ectasy, you see just enough to wet your appetite. You’ll be on your tiptoes trying to peer over the edge of your TV to see Harry’s face and when they finally show the creature in its full glory, you’re blown away. The special effects give Harry a wonderfully expressive face that conveys emotions you instantly relate to. Even without any dialogue, Harry becomes an instantly lovable entity.

The film also features a surprisingly strong character arc for John Lithgow’s character, George. A run-of-the-mill picture would have an obvious change that goes something like this: at first, he doesn’t like Harry. Maybe he wants to kill, or sell the creature for money. By the end, he’d consider Harry a friend or a member of the family. In Harry and the Hendersons, the character is deeper than that. We learn about George's relationship with his father (M. Emmet Walsh), what made him the man he is today and where he’ll go in the future. John Lithgow is a great actor and it’s satisfying to see that he isn’t simply walking around in a dumb role while shenanigans happen around the house. There’s a moment where he spends time drawing a promotional poster for his father’s store and the way that plays out hit a strong cord with me.

There are plenty of laughs and warm emotions found throughout the film. Even the villains are not really that bad and the conclusion resists the obvious, lame decisions we often see in children’s films. Instead, it opts for the right choice and pursues the tone it’s had throughout all the way through.

I’m not going to call the picture a classic. You can’t help but compare the film to E.T. and this just isn't on that same level. Some of the characters are dropped halfway through and not all of the jokes work… but that’s ok. It's the perfect pick for a family movie night that includes both the young and the old. (On VHS, April 24, 2018)

#Harry and the Hendersons #movies #films #movie reviews #film reviews #William Dear #William E. Martin #Ezra D. Rappaport #John Lithgow #melinda dillon #don ameche #David Suchet #Margaret Langrick #Joshua Rudoy #Lainie Kazan #Kevin Peter Hall #1987 movies #1987 films

2 notes · View notes

mcbitchtits · 3 months

Text

well it's been a year since dial of destiny, a movie which isn't bad but much like everything else disney is doing lately is not as good as it could have been. and i mean, i think i'm pretty harsh on it all things considered; that comes of being a fanatic. credit where credit's due, it is a fun movie because it's an indiana jones movie (which isn't, yknow, a given; i think the upcoming bethesda game is going to be deeply uninteresting in this regard), and i think mangold tried very hard to be true to the other four. however, i can never forgive him for the weird fuckery with the score and, uh, frankly, it's just not that funny? it's kind of a downer movie. like crystal skull was bizarre and i wish we hadn't done that particular macguffin, so points for going greek (even if i think the antithykera-as-designed-on-screen was Fugly™), but KotCS was also humorous and fun. Dial of Destiny worked hard but whiffed on a lot of things and i really don't understand how you get john williams to fuck up on a classic movie score. reconsider your choices.

anyway, a fun story from last year (technically a year ago yesterday)

went to the "midnight showing" at THREE FUCKING PM IN THE GODDAMN AFTERNOON, which is a crime against humanity, on a big classic Hollywood theater IMAX screen. audience was uh idk maybe half full; it's a biiiiiig theater, but that was still disappointing. got friends. got snacks. got beverages with fedoras on them. gorgeous silver-era movie palace red velvet curtains open and we get the requisite trailers (let's see if i can remember... one of them was that robot kid movie, and one was oppenheimer; can't recall if there were others. i think we had three or four total though.) possibly the lights dimmed more here. screen rolls into Disney logo and Paramount logo and people are cheering and into Lucasfilm logo and straight into the action. Indy's being dragged around the Nazi castle hooded. THE CURTAIN STARTS CLOSING. people start pointing and chattering. indy is being questioned as the curtains draw over the screen and now we're getting all the action and the english-from-german subtitles all over them. they keep closing. the movie keeps rolling. the curtains move very very slowly. 1944 Voller crops up on screen with the spear of destiny in a crate! the curtains are almost very nearly closed again at this point. we are projecting straight onto red velvet. evil nazi boss whose name i can't remember humors him and says "Do as he says. Open it." and basically the whole audience starts shouting "DO AS HE SAYS! OPEN IT!" "OPEN IT! OPEN THE CURTAINS"

it was a good moment. it's why i miss midnight releases. again, i think disney/lucasfilm dropped the ball on a lot (and continues to) but the whole entertainment sphere seems to have given up on actually making experiences, which is sad. but this moment was hilarious. perfect anecdote.

#a small part of me just enjoys picking indiana jones things to death so even when i hate it i don't hate it.#i learned that lesson once already lol

1 note · View note

thehourmarkers · 5 months

Text

Rare and Unique Watch Finds At MET Gala 2024 Which Nailed The Theme “The Garden of Time”

When Alia Bhatt sashayed down the MET Gala Red Carpet in a floral creation created by ace Indian designer Sabyasachi, which gracefully depicted the theme The Garden Of Time it surely grabbed eyeballs. However, it was watches that were the true showstoppers at this year’s Gala. With a theme that lends itself so completely to the world of watches has been chosen for the official dress code, is it any surprise that the watches of MET Gala stole the show? Many of the attendees on the star studded guest list took the theme literally and displayed an array of beautiful watches that conformed to the set dress code.

Every year the MET Gala, also known as The Costume Institute Benefit takes place in the month of May, and is a fundraiser that benefits the museum's Costume Institute. The famed Red Carpet is a significant moment in pop culture as a slew of celebrities from all across the globe attend the event sporting their most outlandish looks and accessories. This year did not disappoint as we were treated to some of the most stunning creations that made their appearance on the carpet. Read on to see how your favourite celebrities accessorized their looks as they interpreted this year’s theme.

Chris Hemsworth

Chris Hemsworth channeled his inner Thor and sported a strong wrist game with this Chopard Alpine Eagle timepiece. Opting for a more refined and understated watch, Hemsworth chose the timepiece in rose gold with a diamond bezel. Known for his love for bold timepieces, this elegant watch perfectly complimented his neutral toned suit.

Barry Keoghan

Leaning into the theme Garden of Time, Barry Keoghan showcased not one, not two but three timepieces on the carpet, all from the brand Omega. Perhaps the most special of the trifecta is a rare 1930’s Omega Lépine “Sideros” pocket watch in the art déco style. He further accessorized his Mad Hatter style look with a De Ville Prestige in yellow gold, and a Seamaster Aqua Terra in 18K Sedna Gold and diamonds.

Lil Nas X

Lil Nas X went full glam with his choice of wrist candy as he sported a white gold Piaget vintage dress watch with a green malachite dial. The textured bracelet which housed the dial is a Piaget signature making it a true icon among icons.

Usher

True to the Gala’s theme Usher adorned the extremely rare and highly coveted Jacob & Co. Billionaire III Ruby timepiece that redefines extravagance in every way. Set in 18k white gold and stunning rubies totalling 147.65 carats, the watch reportedly costs a whopping $5,00,000.

Ben Simmons

NBA forward Ben Simmons brought his A-game on the red carpet as well as he was seen flaunting a clock briefcase along with a gem-set Patek Phillipe Aquanaut Luce “Rainbow” on his wrist. The technicolored chronograph features a 39.9 mm rose-gold case, a mother-of-pearl dial engraved with the signature Aquanaut pattern, and a red strap.

Serena Williams

Tennis Legend Serena Williams and Audemars Piguet are a classic combination. Sporting the brand new Sand Gold Royal Oak Flying Tourbillon Openworked timepiece by the watchmaker, Williams has made her love for watches from the brand pretty clear. Paired with this ultra-glamorous gold cocktail gown, she dazzles both on the field as well as the red carpet.

Alexander Skarsgård

Succession star Alexander Skarsgård gave tech mogul vibes as he strapped on a Hublot Classic Fusion Chronograph Titanium Racing Grey 42mm. This all black timepiece was a perfect match for his formal black suit that screamed quiet luxury.

Jeff Goldblum

The actor came decked out in Tiffany & Co. brooches, two pairs of glasses, white gloves, a smart black overcoat and more Tiffany on his wrist, with the brand’s Cocktail 2-Hand watch. The timepiece comes with a black satin strap, a bezel set with round diamonds, and a white guilloché dial. Classy and niche, he surely nailed the theme!

Michelle Yeoh

Michelle Yeoh once again owned the red carpet with her new Richard Mille RM 07-01. A perfect marriage between playful and sophisticated the timepiece effortlessly blends the use of ceramic, golds and bright colours. Paired with this silver foiled gown she really added a touch of elegance to her look.

#watches #wrist watch for men #dress watch #pocket watch

1 note · View note

nothingnothingaaa · 7 months

Text

Apple Car’s Crash: Design Details, Tim Cook’s Indecision, Failed Tesla Deal

By Bloomberg, Mar 6, 2023

Tim Cook shut down plans to acquire Tesla before cycling through a junkyard’s worth of self-driving designs over the past decade. The inside story is a case study in indecision.

Around the beginning of 2020, Apple Inc.’s top executives gathered at a former Chrysler testing track in Wittmann, Arizona, to try out the latest incarnation of the car the technology giant had been trying for years to make. The prototype, a white minivan with rounded sides, an all-glass roof, sliding doors and whitewall tires, was designed to comfortably seat four people and inspired by the classic flower-power Volkswagen microbus. The design was referred to within Apple, not always affectionately, as the Bread Loaf. The plan was for the vehicle to hit the market some five years later with a giant TV screen, a powerful audio system and windows that adjusted their own tint. The cabin would have club seating like a private plane, and passengers would be able to turn some of the seats into recliners and footrests.

Most important, the Bread Loaf would have what’s known in the industry as Level 5 autonomy, driving entirely on its own using a revolutionary onboard computer, a new operating system and cloud software developed in-house. There would be no steering wheel and no pedals, just a video-game-style controller or iPhone app for driving at low speed as a backup. Alternately, if the car found itself in a situation that it was unable to navigate, passengers would phone in to an Apple command center and ask to be driven remotely.

This Canoo electric van gives you a general idea of what the prototype car Apple tested in Arizona looked like. Apple’s was white, with whitewall tires and a sliding door.

In the Arizona desert, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams and senior members of Apple’s design team sat in the prototype as it drove itself around a test track. They loved what they saw. But there was a catch, as the car project’s head, Doug Field, made clear: A lot of work still needed to be done before the autonomous driving system would work in the real world. Field, who’d been hired away from Tesla Inc. to oversee the project, proposed scaling back the self-driving goals to Level 3, which requires a human driver to be ready to take over at a moment’s notice, not watching TV or FaceTiming in a backward-facing seat. But Field’s bosses wanted Level 5.

The next year, Field left Apple to take over the electric-vehicle and software engineering efforts at Ford Motor Co. Under Field’s successor, Kevin Lynch, who also runs Apple’s smartwatch software group, the car’s design continued to evolve. It had become pod-shaped, with curved glass sides that doubled as gull-wing doors, and the company considered including ramps that would automatically fold out to make heavy cargo easier to load. The front and the back were identical, and the only windows were on the sides, a design choice with potentially dire consequences in the event that a human needed to do any driving. (Front and rear windows were later added.) Some people on the project called it the I-Beam.

The I-Beam never made it into production, nor did any of Apple’s other designs. Now, it seems, they never will. On Feb. 27, Apple told staff it was giving up on developing a car. That decision, while abrupt, was not a surprise. Over the past decade, the company toiled away on at least five different major designs, drove prototype self-driving systems for more than a million miles, hired engineers and designers only to lay them off, and weighed partnerships or acquisitions with Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen and McLaren Automotive, among others. The car program cost, on average, roughly $1 billion annually (or nearly a fifth of Apple’s research and development budget a decade ago), with outside teams for chips, camera sensors, cloud services and software adding hundreds of millions of dollars more to the yearly spend.

Source: Compiled by Bloomberg. Automakers are the 10 largest companies in the Bloomberg Intelligence Global Automobiles Valuation Peers group

But Apple never got close to realizing its original vision, or any of its subsequent ones. It didn’t get as far as testing a full-scale prototype on public roads. That it didn’t is partly thanks to the enormous technical difficulty of its self-driving goals, as well as the punishing economics of the automaking business. The project was also a failure, at the highest levels of the company, to settle on one thing and do it.

“There are a lot of roads you can take when you have a lot of really smart people and a very big budget,” says Reilly Brennan, a partner at the transportation technology venture fund Trucks VC. “But Apple never had the ability to make a bunch of specific decisions to lead them one way or the other.”

This story is based on conversations with several people involved in the development of the Apple car over the past decade, nearly all of whom asked to remain unnamed because the work was private. According to a longtime Apple executive who worked on the car, it was widely seen within the company as an ill-conceived product that needed to be put out of its misery. “The big arc was poor leadership that let the program linger, while everyone else in Apple was cringing,” they say. Asked what went wrong with the effort, a senior manager involved in the vehicle’s interior design replied: “What went right?”

What emerges is a portrait of the product development process at Apple today. The $2.6 trillion company has a history of hugely ambitious bets, and a track record of upending long-established businesses. It’s been a while since it did that, however. The iPhone is 17 years old and its sales declined last year, and newer products such as Apple’s watch and AirPods, while profitable, exist mostly in its orbit. The jury’s still out on the Vision Pro. Right now, the company is looking for its next big thing, and does not seem sure how to find it.

Cook, Jobs and legendary hardware developer Bob Mansfield, later a steward of Apple’s car project, discuss the iPhone 4 during a Q&A at the company’s headquarters in 2010.

It was Steve Jobs who first floated the idea of a car at Apple. In the late 2000s, in a typically grand pronouncement, the company’s co-founder and CEO declared internally that Apple should have dominant technologies in all of the spaces in which people spent time: at home, at work and on the go. For many Americans, being in transit means being on the road, sometimes for hours a day. “We talked about what would be this generation’s new Volkswagen Beetle,” recalls Tony Fadell, who led mobile device engineering under Jobs. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with American car companies on the brink of failure, the Apple chief executive even floated the idea of acquiring General Motors Co. for pennies on the dollar.

That scheme was quickly abandoned, in part because Apple decided it would be a bad look and in part because of the need to focus on the iPhone. But in 2014, seeking a new multi-hundred-billion-dollar revenue stream, Cook began to focus again on cars. Apple executives weighing whether to enter the market joked with one another that they’d rather take on Detroit than a fellow tech giant: “Would you rather compete against Samsung or General Motors?” The profit margins in cars were far lower than in consumer electronics, but Apple was coming off a stretch during which it had reshaped not only the music industry but the mobile phone market. To its supporters, the idea of getting into automobiles had the potential to be, as one Apple executive puts it, “one more example of Apple entering a market very late and vanquishing it.” While the initial prototypes operated like traditional cars, these supporters eventually pursued more radical redesigns, invoking a transportation technology experience they said would “give people time back.” The ultimate plan was a living room on wheels where people who no longer needed to drive their cars could work or entertain themselves with Apple screens and services instead.

But before sketching out its own designs, Apple considered acquiring Tesla. At that point the electric-car maker’s success was far from assured, and its value was less than $30 billion, or a 20th of what it is today. Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of corporate development, held a series of meetings with Elon Musk. But Cook, who’d succeeded Jobs three years earlier, shut the deal down while negotiations were still at an early stage. Apple’s chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, formerly the General Motors CFO in Europe, argued that the car industry’s low margins were something the tech company couldn’t easily overcome.

Source: Compiled by Bloomberg

Although the Tesla idea was abandoned, the ambitions didn’t go away. Apple’s newly minted hardware chief, Dan Riccio, received approval to start building a car engineering team, and he hired hundreds of engineers from the auto industry for what came to be known as Project Titan. The team working on the car was called the Special Projects Group. Within the company, it was difficult to find spare engineering talent, with attention focused on preparing for the upcoming Apple Watch release and, later, the iPhone X, but Riccio managed nonetheless to poach several dozen engineers from other projects. Early on, Jay Leno gave the team a tour of his garage for inspiration and a minor lesson in automotive history. Around this time, Riccio, rallying his troops, often would close with “Boys, let’s go build a car!”

The infighting began almost immediately. Maestri, the CFO, remained a skeptic, as did Craig Federighi, Apple’s software engineering chief, who had to donate personnel to what he considered a vanity project. Jony Ive, Apple’s design chief at the time, was more ambivalent, pushing for full driving autonomy but also expressing doubts about the wisdom of the endeavor. Some car fans on the Apple leadership team, including the company’s marketing executives, were resistant to building a product that didn’t look and feel like a car. Services head Eddy Cue suggested that it might be more prudent to just try to make a better Tesla rather than invent an entirely new category of machine.

Similar disagreements played out within Project Titan itself. Steve Zadesky, a former Ford engineer and iPhone executive in charge of much of the car effort, imagined the company starting off with limited self-driving features that could then be improved. Others held fast to Level 5. Perica, the mergers-and-acquisitions chief who’d pushed to buy Tesla, told the Apple car team that the company should build “the first bird,” not “the last dinosaur.” When the group first began staffing up in 2015, the goal was to bring something to market by 2020.

Under Ive, the microbus design emerged. The interior would be covered in stainless steel, wood and white fabric. Ive wanted to sell the car only in white and in a single configuration so it would be instantly recognizable, like the original iPod he’d designed. At one point, the group briefly discussed a more traditional SUV-like design, as well. The team’s secret facility in Sunnyvale, California, was packed with car cabin prototypes and simulators. “It looked like you entered Disneyland—it was chock-full of toys,” says someone who worked in the building.

The team played with several different ideas for the interior, including installing a pair of specialized touchscreens suspended with brackets from the ceiling to control the car from both sides of the cabin. It also engineered microphones to be placed outside the vehicle to bring external sounds into the cabin, something passengers in non-Apple cars did by rolling down a window. “They would add all sorts of crazy features to the car and then realize those were bad ideas and pull them back out, leading to another cockpit redesign,” says an Apple executive with knowledge of the frequent changes.

Throughout much of the process, Apple continued exploring partnerships. Riccio and Zadesky, years after Cook shot down buying Tesla, met with Musk to discuss ways they could collaborate, including the possibility of Tesla producing batteries for the Apple car. That prospect didn’t advance. Musk, who didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, at one point publicly called Apple a “Tesla graveyard” full of engineers he’d fired. A few years later, he tried to restart talks with Cook as Tesla struggled to build the Model 3. Musk has said the Apple CEO wouldn’t meet.

Talks with Mercedes-Benz progressed further. For a few months, Apple and the German automaker actively worked on a partnership similar to the Tesla idea, but with a twist. Mercedes would manufacture Apple’s vehicle, while it would also sell its own cars with Apple’s self-driving platform and user interface. Apple eventually pulled out, in part because the early work gave its executives confidence they could build a car on their own, people involved in the failed deal say.

At other points, Apple held exploratory acquisition talks with car companies beyond Tesla. The closest it got to a deal was with McLaren. Some Apple executives believed that scooping up the British automaker, which makes a few thousand cars by hand each year and sells them to the super rich, would excite Jony Ive, who’d scaled back his involvement at Apple after the launch of the Apple Watch, and reengage him with the company. The proposed deal, before it fell apart, would have provided Ive with a new design studio in London. Other discussions with BMW AG and, much later, Canoo Inc.—an electric-vehicle startup with a decidedly Apple-esque design aesthetic—went nowhere.

By 2016, Apple hadn’t gotten far, and internal advocates of scaling back its car ambitions began to win out. After the board of directors and senior executives began questioning the program’s viability and asking pointed questions about its costs, there were discussions about shutting down the project. But then Riccio convinced Bob Mansfield, a legendary figure at the company for leading the hardware development of the original MacBook Air and iPad, to come out of semi-retirement to shake things up.

Mansfield was among the car skeptics at Apple. His task, as he saw it, was to find out what could be salvaged from the effort. After a few months of evaluation, he decided to focus more attention on the self-driving system than on a car itself. Autonomous software, he argued, could benefit Apple in other areas, even if the company never made an actual vehicle. Other executives, notably Perica, thought Apple could license such an AI system to other carmakers without dirtying its hands in the auto business itself. Over an 18-month period from 2016 to mid-2018, Apple laid off about 120 people, a significant portion of the car project’s head count, according to people with knowledge of the cuts. FieldPhotographer: Ulysses Ortega

Before Mansfield persuaded Field, the former Tesla executive, to take over for him, he and Cook did manage to agree on an interim direction for the company’s autonomous driving efforts: a self-driving shuttle made in collaboration with Volkswagen for Apple employees to use at its new headquarters in Cupertino, California. That project didn’t come to fruition, either. It was seen as a distraction, and Field shut it down. He also eventually shuttered Apple’s work on batteries and other components he felt Apple could just buy off the shelf.

Field - Photographer: Ulysses Ortega

Under Field, full autonomy continued to be a focus even as it grew to seem less attainable. The Arizona demonstration, which the team spent nine months preparing for, was essentially a proof of concept. The team tweaked the prototype software to take turns and curves slower than usual, to make extra sure it wouldn’t injure Cook. “It was well scripted and well laid out,” says someone involved in its creation. “The intent was to show Tim that if we built this product, this is what it would look like for the customer.” (Apple bought the Arizona test track outright a year after the demo.) The team spent a lot of time working on backup controls for such a car so that a driver could extract it from tricky road situations, such as a complex construction zone. The most fully developed steering wheel substitute looked like the controller that comes with an Xbox. “It should have been either all autonomy or a wheel and pedals,” one person involved in the car’s development says, adding that the company spent a lot of time working on ways to mitigate the issue rather than on the hard problem itself.

There were other, smaller dead ends over the course of the project. Apple started planning a multi-acre engineering campus in Silicon Valley where it would design cars, but never broke ground. At one point, Apple and Ford met to discuss a proposal from the American automotive giant to sell Apple cars from its Lincoln brand, an unglamorous make that’s well-represented in rental fleets, to test the self-driving system. The talks didn’t progress past an early meeting.

For Field, Mansfield and others on the team, Cook’s indecision was frustrating. “If Bob or Doug ever had a reasonable set of objectives, they could have shipped a car,” says someone who was deeply involved in the project. “They’d ask to take the next step, and Tim would frequently say, ‘Get me more data, and let me think about it.’” In that setting, it was hard to retain talent: engineers Apple hired for the project would grow convinced things weren’t going anywhere and find jobs elsewhere. After Mansfield retired, the company tried another leadership change to boost the self-driving system. It put Williams, the COO, and John Giannandrea, Apple’s machine learning chief, in charge of overseeing Field and the project. Field left a year later, in September 2021.

Bloomberg News reported on this photo of a Lexus SUV equipped with early Apple self-driving technology back in 2017. Source: Bloomberg

Under Lynch, Apple never got to a streetworthy prototype. The self-driving technology in the company’s fleet of customized Lexus SUVs did show enough promise that there were plans to expand it to more cities in late 2024, according to people with knowledge of the plan. The idea had always been to sell self-driving as a subscription service, as Tesla does with its driver-support features. Other paid add-ons, such as Apple Music and Apple TV+ streamed to the vehicle, would help make up for the uninspiring margins on car hardware. (Some internal estimates pegged Apple’s cost to produce the car at about $120,000, far more than the $85,000 the company had wanted to charge for it.)

Last year, Apple pivoted one last time. Designs were tweaked to move from Level 5 down to Level 2, the level of Tesla’s current Autopilot, which can control both speed and steering but is assistive technology for drivers rather than their replacement. In keeping with that, the new design also incorporated a more traditional automotive interface: a steering wheel and pedals. “They finally smartened up,” says an Apple executive. “I was like, ‘Guys, you could have done this 10 years ago!’”

But the company had ended up where it began a decade earlier, with a product little different from what was already on the market and a basic, not-great self-driving system. “Kevin Lynch is a sensible person,” says an Apple executive involved in the car decision making. “He tried to bring a pragmatic view to it.” When asked, he made clear that true autonomy might be another decade off. He seems to have finally convinced Apple’s leadership that that was a problem without an affordable or reliable solution in the foreseeable future.

Lynch delivering the keynote address at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in 2019.

Recently, members of the Apple car organization were studying how the company would produce the less-advanced car. It considered working with Magna International Inc., which builds some models for Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes. But the indecision at the top of the company filtered down, sapping morale. Apple declined to comment for this story, as did BMW, Ford, McLaren and VW. The former Apple executives named in this story didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did Canoo or Mercedes.

Around the beginning of 2024, Cook, who’s known for making decisions based on consensus, began seriously considering shutting down the project. “That’s when you started to see members of the leadership of Titan look for jobs at other companies and within Apple,” says someone with knowledge of the matter. People working on powertrains and other car-related engineering products began to depart.

On the evening of Monday, Feb. 26, the roughly 2,000 employees of Apple’s Special Projects Group received an email announcing a 10 a.m. all-hands meeting the next day. On Tuesday morning, the employees gathered in conference rooms and at desks at Apple’s Silicon Valley offices were told that Project Titan was winding down immediately. Lynch and Williams broke the news on a video call, and they didn’t explain the decision.

The meeting lasted about 12 minutes. Both men thanked the staffers for their work and got straight to the reorg and layoffs. Some employees would immediately get shifted to Apple’s AI division, and some would move over to software engineering. A chunk of the team, though, was immediately without a job. Hardware engineers would have the opportunity to apply for roles in other groups, but there aren’t spots for everyone. Other employees, such as the hundreds of car-specific engineers, test track technicians, self-driving car testers and automotive safety experts, received emails with their severance packages. As for the Arizona track, Apple is already working to sell it.

0 notes

birthflowertattoos · 7 months

Text

Rose and Carnation Tattoo: Birth Flower Tattoo

Exploring the Beauty of Rose and Carnation Tattoos

In the realm of tattoo artistry, rose and carnation tattoos stand as symbols of timeless elegance and profound significance. When combined in a single design, these two floral icons create a captivating tapestry that speaks to the heart.

Symbolism and Significance

Roses are renowned symbols of love, passion, and romance, while carnations represent admiration, affection, and purity. Together, they form a powerful emblem of enduring love and deep-seated emotions, making them popular choices for couples and individuals alike.

Design Options

When it comes to rose and carnation tattoos, the design options are endless. Whether depicted in a geometric style, ornamental patterns, or as part of a January or June-themed tattoo, each design choice adds its own unique flair to the symbolism of these flowers.

Versatility and Personalization

From intricate bouquets to delicate single blooms, there's a rose and carnation tattoo to suit every individual's style and story. Tattoo enthusiasts can personalize their designs to reflect their own experiences, relationships, and aspirations, ensuring that each tattoo is a true reflection of their unique journey.

Timeless Appeal

Like all floral tattoos, rose and carnation tattoos possess a timeless allure that transcends trends. Whether rendered in vibrant colors or classic black and white, these designs serve as enduring symbols of beauty, love, and the rich tapestry of human emotions.

As William Shakespeare once wrote, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Indeed, rose and carnation tattoos embody the eternal beauty and fragrance of nature's blooms, forever etched onto the canvas of the skin as a testament to love and life's most cherished moments.

#januarybirthflowertattoo #GeometricalTattoo #OrnamentalTattoo #CarnationTattoo #TrueLoveTattoo #MatchingTattoo #BirthFlowerTattoo #BirthMonthFlowerTattoo #rose tattoo #june tattoo #june birth flower tattoo #rose and carnation tattoo #tattoos #tattoo ideas #tattoo #birth flower tattoo

0 notes

carlepalumbo · 11 months

Text

The Alluring Appeal of Blue and White Bouquets: Capture Your Special Moments with a Seaside Charm

The allure of the blue and white bouquet speaks volumes about its intrinsic aesthetic appeal. The trending blend of these two calming colors is not just soothing to the eyes, but also sets a tranquil tone for any occasion. Is it the elegant color scheme you're looking to buy for a special event? Would you love to know more about these floral beauties? Let's dive in and explore the intriguing aspects of the blue and white spectrum of bouquets.

A Glimpse into the Attraction of The Blue and White Bouquet

A blue and white bouquet is a harmonious fusion that gravitates toward tranquility and class. The blend of these colors projects a serene yet vivid image, infusing grace into any special event like weddings, anniversaries, and more.

How to Choose Your Bouquet Color?

Making a color choice for your bouquet could be based on several factors. The season, personal color preferences, event themes, and even the symbolic meanings of colors are common factors that influence your decision. However, a blue and white bouquet is versatile and can fit into any event or season due to its timeless elegance.

Unveiling the Bridal Bouquet Palette

When it comes to weddings, the bridal bouquet can span from classic whites and vibrant colors to elegant pastels. Yet, a bridal bouquet in blue and white stands out due to its soft and serene vibe.

Do you remember the royal wedding of Kate Middleton? Alongside the traditional myrtle, her elegant bouquet was comprised of the classic hues of Lily-of-the-Valley, Hyacinths, and Sweet Williams, signifying love, trust, and gallantry, respectively.

While your bouquet doesn't necessarily need connections to the royal lineage, blue and white flowers could add a touch of noble elegance to your big day.

Are Blue Flowers Available for Sale?

Yes, indeed. Blue flowers, known for their rarity, are available for sale. These exotic hues can be found in variations like hydrangeas, delphiniums, and irises. They can be combined tastefully with white flowers to curate a gorgeous blue and white bouquet.

We must inform you that the colors and flowers may vary due to seasonal availability and regional delivery restrictions. In case of such variance, our expert florists will substitute with other blooms of similar style and value. Likewise, sundry items, like vases or baskets, may be switched with an apt alternative if necessary.

Blue Blooms: Finding the Rare Gems

The notion that blue flowers are rare makes them all the more attractive. The unique charm of these exotic blooms are sure to leave a lasting impression. From the delicate and charming Forget-Me-Nots, capturing the essence of mystery and anticipation, to the striking and subtle Periwinkle, embodying desire and early affection, the magic of blue flowers will never fail to captivate you.

Experiencing the world of blue flowers is much more than a simple escapade into nature's beauty. It lets you unlock and explore symbolic meanings that carry personal significance. Whether you are after a flame of passionate love symbolized by a blue rose, or a guiding light in seeking the truth mirrored by a blue iris, our bouquet designs have it all.

White Blooms: A Purity Perfection

White flowers in a bouquet are a versatile classic. Symbolizing purity, innocence and elegance, they effortlessly find their place in any event. Imagine a radiant spray of white peonies nestled in your wedding bouquet, or a pristine white orchid centering your dinner table arrangement. The pristine beauty of white blooms can bring a fresh and elegant vibe to any setting.

Adding a sprinkle of white blossoms into your blue flower bouquet can amazingly balance the color palette. It elevates the ensemble, giving it a cloud-like appearance that is both dreamy and calming.

From Selection to Delivery: We're with You All the Way

With us at your side, you're not just purchasing flowers. Instead, you are weaving a bond with nature, carrying bits of the wild into your cherished moments. From picking the most exceptional blooms to arranging them with artistic precision, and finally delivering them with utmost care, we ensure your floral journey with us is pleasant and fulfilling.

Moreover, don't get daunted by the thought of choosing from so many spectacular options. Our proficient team of florists, well-versed with the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust) strategy, create informative descriptions for each bouquet. Feel free to chat online with our team, who are more than happy to assist you pick the perfect floral arrangement matching your need.

Let our world-class delivery service handle the rest as we ensure your beautiful bouquet arrives promptly and in prime condition at your doorstep.

Wrapping It Up

Incorporating a blue and white bouquet into your occasion is a vessel to symbolize calmness, unity, and sophistication. As you embark on this flowery journey, remember that every stem and color has a story to narrate. So, when you hold that bouquet, know that you're interwoven with its charm and grace.

Explore our range of locally sourced, specially curated bouquets, and elevate your occasion to new heights. Step into our world of serene colors, and let's bring happiness one petal at a time.

Get Indulged in a Floral Shopping Experience Like No Other

As you browse our impressive range of bouquet designs, you can anticipate an immersive shopping experience like never before. Understand the beauty of each flower, appreciate the consolidation of colors, and join a memory that is uniquely ours.

Conclusion

Whether it’s for a grand ceremony or an intimate gathering, to express love or convey condolences, flowers have been an age-old way of expressions. Our blue and white bouquets are a gracious addition to your occasion, infusing elemental elegance with a burst of tranquil charm. With these bouquets, you have not only a perfect accompaniment for the day but also a keepsake memory forever. So, why miss the chance? Step into the mesmerizing world and shop your heart out – because moments are fleeting, but memories stay, especially those marked with nature's charm.

0 notes

vancouverkitchenrenovation · 2 years

Text

Luxury Kitchen Design Ideas For 2023

Luxury Kitchen Design Ideas For 2023 You Should Know

Exquisite, opulent, and functional are the three main aspects of Luxury kitchen design ideas for 2023. Luxury kitchens become the heart of a home that dazzles every guest by focusing on sleek lines, high-quality materials, and cutting-edge features.

One popular luxury kitchen design trend to watch out for in 2023 is using smart technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), which can turn any ordinary kitchen into a luxurious cooking haven. These advanced technologies can help optimize workflows and reduce energy consumption while adding convenience to daily tasks.

Another trend is incorporating bold colours with unique textures like wood, metal or glass on walls, backsplashes or countertops. Pops of colour blend with neutral tones and serve as eye-catching accent pieces that add visual interest to streamlined aesthetic designs.

Customization is also expected to be big in luxury kitchen design – consumers will have full control over their culinary spaces down to the smallest detail. Designers will work closely with clients to develop bespoke ambiences that reflect individual personalities through personalized finishes, lighting, and styles ranging from modern minimalist to classic kitchens.

With more emphasis placed on sustainability than ever, it’s only natural for eco-friendly materials like bamboo flooring or recycled glass countertops to make their way into high-end kitchens too. Moreover, solar panels installed on roofs can harness renewable energy while simultaneously reducing both carbon footprint and utility bills – Marrying environmental consciousness with extravagant glamour.

Integrated living becomes necessary because it provides extra space for entertaining guests without sacrificing style or functionality. An open-plan living/kitchen space allows flexibility when hosting social events and magnifies familial bonding moments while preserving seamless visual flow within your luxurious kitchen interiors.

Green is also a major kitchen design trend expected to take off in 2023. It can be used as a neutral colour or paired with other colours to create a sophisticated look.

Key Features

To create a luxury kitchen that’s truly a statement, you should keep a few key features in mind. These include a sophisticated colour palette, minimal design, and smart technology.

The kitchen is one of the most important rooms in a home, and it immediately impacts a property’s resale value. So, if you’re planning to sell your home soon, investing in a design sure to impress potential buyers and increase your home’s value is essential.

Whether you’re building a new home or looking to remodel your current one, the kitchen is a must-have feature for many homeowners. With a few key kitchen design ideas in 2023, you can make your kitchen the home’s showpiece.

Sophisticated Color Palettes

The latest colour trends are a mixture of sophisticated shades and neutral tones. These colours will provide the perfect backdrop for rich metals and other luxury kitchen materials, such as marble countertops.

Those looking to make a bold statement in their design may want to consider embracing a more vibrant palette in 2023. Benjamin Moore’s raspberry blush is a bold, charismatic shade that can transform a space.

Sue Wadden, director of colour marketing at Sherwin-Williams, suggests pairing this bold hue with even lighter tones and woody materials for a soothing feel.

Another sophisticated colour that experts predict will be popular in 2023 is muddy ivory. This colour is an excellent choice for any kitchen design, especially in a traditional setting with wooden cabinetry.

Minimalism

One of the hottest kitchen design trends of 2023 is a lot of minimalism. This kitchen design style is a great choice for homeowners looking to create an elegant and sophisticated space without sacrificing functionality or storage.

Choosing materials and finishes that will complement your space without breaking the bank is also a good idea. For instance, stainless steel counters can dramatically impact without costing a fortune!

Another kitchen design trend to look out for is the waterfall edge countertop. This countertop has a sleek, minimalist appearance, making it ideal for any contemporary kitchen. Moreover, it can be installed in various ways to suit your needs. For example, you can install it as a backsplash, a worktop, or both!

Turquoise

Turquoise is a popular gemstone that has long been valued for its beautiful blue-green colour. It’s also known for its calming and grounding energy, making it an ideal addition to any luxury kitchen design for 2023.

This azure-hued mineral is found in dry climates around the world. It’s mined in the United States, China, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Tibet, among other places.

Typically a sky blue that leans slightly green, turquoise can vary in hue and is often dyed. It’s an incredibly rare copper aluminum phosphate, making it very valuable.

This mystical stone can help to purify the heart and mind, dispelling negative energies and protecting against pollutants. It’s also said to strengthen your connection with intuition and boost communication.

Mid-Century & Rustic

Mid-century & rustic materials and finishes are a great way to bring your kitchen a cozy, warm feel. Exposed wood beams, stone walls and floors, wrought iron fixtures, and various cabinet finishes are perfect for creating this look.

High-gloss cabinets and countertops can also add to a luxurious look. Pair these with neutral colours like black, grey or white for a sleek and elegant design.

Another trend in 2023 is the use of patterns. Whether you choose a bold wallpaper or a more subtle rug, patterns can create an instant focal point and make the room more interesting.

The colour green is another popular choice in kitchens. Natural stones are a huge trend in 2023, with a variety of shades and textures available to choose from.

.video-container {position: relative;padding-bottom: 56.25%;padding-top: 1px; height: 0; overflow: hidden;} .video-container iframe, .video-container object, .video-container embed {position: absolute;top: 0;LEFT: 0;width: 100%;height: 100%;}

youtube

Metro Vancouver’s Premier Kitchen and Bath Renovation Company

Your kitchen is more than just a place to cook; it’s a space that brings people together, connects them, and helps them feel relaxed and comfortable. It’s a space that makes you proud to invite guests over, and it’s a space that lets you show off your personality and style. That’s why Vancouver Kitchen Renovation wants to help you create the perfect kitchen for yourself and your family. Whether you’re interested in updating your existing kitchen or starting from scratch, we can help you turn your dream kitchen into reality. We believe kitchens aren’t just functional spaces; they bring families together, connect them, inspire creativity, and allow them to express themselves. So we strive to create designs that reflect these values, and we’re excited to share them with you.

We understand that to be successful is to stay ahead of the curve. That means staying current with the latest technology and design trends. We always want to improve our products or services without breaking the bank. That’s why we stay connected to the latest technologies of NKBA, National Kitchen and Bath Association. In addition, at Vancouver Kitchen renovation, our primary focus is providing sustainable kitchen design and renovation packages, and we believe in sustainable living. Sustainable living is a way of life in harmony with nature. It is a lifestyle which focuses on the preservation of our environment. Sustainable living is a philosophy emphasizing respect for the environment and concern for its well-being. This means we should take care of the planet and treat it as if it were our home. We should try to preserve what we have and protect it from destruction. If we do this, we will enjoy the benefits of the earth’s resources for many generations. Whether you’re planning a major remodel or adding finishing touches to your current kitchen, we’d love to discuss your project. Book your showroom consultation online.

Main Areas of Service in British Columbia:

Vancouver

North Vancouver

West Vancouver

Burnaby

Coquitlam

Squamish

Whistler

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you remodel a kitchen in your home?

Plan your kitchen remodeling. Consider what you want and how much money you are willing to spend.

Locate a contractor. Get bids from several contractors and choose the one you feel most comfortable with.

Demolition. This is the best part! Take out all the cabinets, countertops, appliances.

Installation. According to your plans, the contractor will install cabinets, countertops, appliances, and other items.

Finishing touches. Add some finishing touches like paint or new hardware, and your kitchen remodel will be complete!

What are the drawbacks of an open-concept cooking style?

Privacy is the most important issue. Open-concept kitchens make it difficult to hide mess from your guests. Also, if you love to cook, the smells might bother people in other Often, there isn’t enough counter space or storage space to accommodate everything. An open kitchen is difficult to keep clean, especially if you don’t have an area for cooking and eating. Lastly, an open-concept kitchen may not be your best option if you don’t have much square footage.

What is the best kitchen layout?

If there is enough space, an L-shaped layout with an island kitchen is best.

Where should pots and pans go in the kitchen?

Pots, pans and other small items should be stored above the stove in a cupboard. You can easily find them when you need them. This also keeps your kitchen’s counters clean and neat. You might also want to consider a pot rack that will help you keep your pots & pans organized and in easy reach.

What should you do not have any regrets about your kitchen renovation?

Remain patient. Renovations take time.

It is a huge undertaking that can significantly affect your daily life. Before you begin, you must do your research and ensure you are prepared for the process. This comprehensive guide will assist you in avoiding any regrets as you renovate your kitchen.

Consider your lifestyle first.

Choose suitable materials according to your goals and budget.

Consider the maintenance of your countertop, not only its appearance.

Make sure you choose the right appliance size and style.

Choose the right backsplash for your needs.

Take a look inside your cabinets and walls.

Communicate throughout with your kitchen designer or contractor.

You can customize your storage solution to suit your gadgets and appliances

Don’t get your lighting lightly.

Don’t ignore kitchen ergonomics!

Make sure you don’t use up any space in your kitchen design.

Choose the right cabinet finish.

Before you commit, plan.

Hire the right people for the job.

You will need to have a place to dispose of your trash.

How does a kitchen remodel affect home value?

A kitchen renovation can increase your home’s value by up to 20%. A major remodel could cost from $40,000 up to $150,000. Therefore, it is important to evaluate your budget and determine if you can see a return.

It is important to choose a kitchen design that appeals to many buyers if you are planning on selling your house soon. To avoid alienating potential buyers, stick with classic styles and neutral colors.

If you aren’t planning to sell your home in the near future, you will have more freedom to personalize and customize your kitchen. Consider the purpose of your kitchen, as well as how it will look and feel. Do you host parties often? A layout that gives you plenty of prep area and allows guests to move around is a good idea. Do you enjoy cooking? You might be tempted to buy more expensive appliances.

No matter what kind of plans you have, a kitchen renovation can increase the value and appeal of your house. For the best results, it is important to do your research and find a trustworthy contractor.

Statistics

Keep 10 to 25 percent of List 2, depending on the budget. (familyhandyman.com)

“We decided to strip and refinish our kitchen cabinets during a heat wave with 90-plus-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity in a house with no air conditioning. (familyhandyman.com)

In the Pacific region (Alaska, California, Washington, and Oregon), according to Remodeling Magazine, that same midrange central kitchen remodel jumps to $72,513, and a major upscale kitchen remodels jumps up $11,823 from the national average to $143,333. (hgtv.com)

It’s a fantastic thing about most home improvement projects: no matter the job. It often seems like the last 20% is the most difficult. (familyhandyman.com)

According to Burgin, some hinges have this feature built-in, but it’s an add-on cost for other models of about $5 retail, adding up to $350 to $500 for an entire kitchen, depending on size. (hgtv.com)

External Links

houzz.com

Houzz

Kitchen Workbook: 8 Element of a Craftsman’s Kitchen

forbes.com

Amazing Kitchen Remodel Ideas to Refresh Your Home

hgtv.com

Choosing Kitchen Appliances | HGTV

HGTV – Creating a Kitchen for Entertaining

homeguide.com

2022 Kitchen Remodel Cost Estimator

Cost to Add A Room Per Foot

How To

How to design a kitchen you’ll love cooking in for years to come

Kitchen designs should be designed with functionalities, aesthetics, and practicality. So that your kitchen is a place you feel at ease, can cook delicious food and entertain friends and family, and where you can unwind after a long day, you should plan carefully.

Here are some tips to help you plan your dream kitchen:

Choose the layout that suits your needs best. L-shaped, U shaped, and galley are the most common kitchen layouts. L-shaped Kitchens are perfect for entertaining, and can easily hold multiple cooks. U-shaped kitchens are perfect for families who spend a lot of time in the kitchen, as they provide ample counter space and storage. Galley kitchens make small spaces more manageable and efficient.

Consider the different options for cabinetry and make sure you are choosing high-quality products. There are many options depending on your budget. You will reap the benefits of investing in high-end cabinets. They will last for a longer time, look better, provide greater protection against temperature and humidity changes, as well as being more durable.

Choose a color scheme that makes your heart happy. Whether it’s your favorite shade of green or pink, find a color palette that will bring color and life to your kitchen. It could be bright colors or soft pastels. Just make sure it matches the rest of the room.

Look for a harmonious balance between beauty, function, and style. It’s not necessary for your kitchen to be beautiful all of the time. Sometimes it is more important to think about functionality than appearances. However, you don’t need to forget about decorative elements. Mixing glass, chrome brass, ceramic, stone or wood can create an interesting focal point.

Create a comfortable environment. Comfort should always be considered when designing your new kitchen. This is where you will spend most of your time. It should be welcoming and comfortable. You can relax after a long day by adding seating and lighting fixtures.

You must not forget about storage. The kitchen should provide ample storage space for all your cooking tools and utensils. If you’re thinking of remodeling your kitchen, add more cabinets.

Include a pantry. A dedicated pantry will make it easier to organize and store food items. You can also store extra supplies in a separate area to prevent clutter building up around your kitchen.

Consider a new flooring option. The flooring you choose will significantly impact your kitchen’s overall look and feel. There are many choices. For small spaces, it may be possible to have the same flooring throughout the house.

Plan for expansion. The biggest mistake people make when remodeling their kitchens, is not allowing enough room for future growth. You can add a walk-in closet or sliding doors to your existing countertop space if you are thinking of expanding.

Allow plenty of light. A bright, well-lit kitchen will allow you to fully enjoy it. You should ensure that your kitchen is well-lit and has plenty of natural light.

Make sure you have energy-efficient appliances. When remodeling your kitchen, energy efficiency is a key consideration. This means making sure that you replace old appliances with newer models that are more energy efficient.

Budget smart. Make sure you do an in-depth analysis of your finances before shopping for appliances, cabinets, and other kitchen items. You will be able to narrow down your choices and save money over the long-term if you know how much you can afford.

Designate a space for entertaining. You can host dinner parties, or entertain friends over cocktails. A designated dining area gives your guests somewhere to meet and socialize.

Add an island. A island is a great addition to your kitchen. It provides additional prep and eating space, as well as serving as a place to store beverages, snacks and other small items.

Helpful Resources:

Manufacturers talk 2023 bath and kitchen trends at KBIS

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsDo you place flooring under your kitchen appliances? You can’t ignore the importance of putting flooring under..

13 Standout Products from IBS & KBIS 2022

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhite kitchens are in fashion again? White kitchens are a popular choice for homeowners looking to modernize their..

The New American Home 2023 – Final Phase

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat should I do if my kitchen is being renovated? You don’t have to move out if you’re good with takeouts. However,

New 2023 Amazing Kitchen Design * The Heart of The Home

It’s the center of the Home There will never be a day in your life after you won’t have a reason to enter the kitchen. It’s where your day starts, where you

Rustic Kitchen Design Ideas 2023

Rustic kitchens have a way of inspiring feelings of warmth and comfort. They make a great addition to your home without compromising modern functionality and

Quality Kitchen Cabinets – Vancouver Kitchen Renovation

Looking for the best Vancouver kitchen renovation firm? Our team of experts will work with you in creating the next inspiring kitchen for your family to love.

Smart Kitchen Technology Ideas 2023

Whether you are a chef or just a regular person, there are some innovative and practical smart kitchen technology ideas that can make your life easier. The

All-White Kitchen Ideas

White kitchens are crisp, clean, and elegant. They also provide a great blank canvas for adding other colors that will add character to the space. If

Yellow for Kitchen Design

Bright, cheery yellow is a natural way to add visual warmth and brightness to any kitchen. Known for chasing any chill, this shade of yellow isn’t..

Country style kitchen decor ideas,Decor ideas 2023,Home decor ideas

In this video we will see some furnishing ideas for a country-style kitchen

Amazon product links

1 Bed with drawers https://amzn.to/3KCKMii

2 Pot rack

50+ Beautiful small kitchen decorating ideas 2023 @Classydecorchannel

Portfolio – Vancouver Kitchen Renovation

OUR EXCLUSIVE CLIENT Completed Projects We Have Solutions for All Your Space Related Issues! Featured Kitchen Renovation Projects We’ve been lucky to work with

Mid Century Modern Kitchens

Mid century modern kitchens feature clean lines & spacious cooking areas, often featuring natural materials like wood & plants. They also often use..

Top 100 small modular kitchen design ideas 2023 (Decor Puzzle)

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsYou shouldn’t regret your kitchen remodel. Remain patient. Renovations take time. Kitchen renovations can have a..

Kitchen trends 2023: design ideas and coveted colors set to be big this year

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat are some common mistakes made when renovating your kitchen? You might have a problem installing a new kitchen

Eclectic Kitchen Design Ideas 2023

The eclectic style is a fun and unique way to design your kitchen. It combines different styles and epochs to create a truly personalized and unique look that

Kitchen Trends 2022 | Kitchen Island Ideas | kitchen Design Tips | Best kitchen island layout design

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat are the drawbacks of an open-concept cooking style? Privacy is the biggest issue. You can’t hide your mess from

Blog – Vancouver Kitchen Renovation

kitchen design and renovation experts in Metro Vancouver

BEST INTERIOR DESIGN KITCHEN TRENDS 2023 | Julie Khuu

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhite kitchens are in fashion again? White kitchens have become a favorite choice of homeowners who want to give..

Top Interior Paint Colors for 2023 | How to Pick Paint Colors like a Designer

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat should I do if I need a new kitchen? It would be best to start by creating a list of your wants and needs. This

Best of KBIS | FOTILE Debuts New and Innovative Appliances at KBIS 2023

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsShould cabinets be lighter than walls? There are no guidelines for this. This decision is entirely personal and will

10 Impactful Ways to Update Your Home for 2023 | Our Top Styling Tips

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhere do I start when I want a new kitchen? You should start by writing down your desires and needs. This will..

DIY Small Kitchen Remodel | Before and After Ikea Kitchen | 90s Kitchen Extreme Makeover

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat can I do to make my white kitchen more appealing? You can make your white kitchen even more fun. Add coloured..

Contact – Vancouver Kitchen Renovation

GET IN TOUCH Contact Us We Love to Hear from You! Let’s discuss your kitchen or bath renovation project! If you’re ready to start your kitchen renovation, we’d

Early Spring Decor | Simple Spring Decorating Ideas 2023

Shop The Home Depot President’s day sale now til 3/1 for up to 30% off select furniture, mattresses, & decor. Use code: PRESIDENTS23 for extra 10% off til 2/22.

BATHROOM TRENDS 2023 // Interior Design

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsHow do you style small white kitchens? A small white kitchen requires a lot of creativity. The best way to create a..

DesignBites 2023 | Full Event KBIS 2023

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat are some common mistakes made when renovating your kitchen? You might have a problem installing a new kitchen

TOP 5 Kitchen Backsplash Trends | 2022 Latest Backsplash Ideas | Modern Backsplash Designs

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsWhat should you do not have any regrets about your kitchen renovation? Take your time, the renovations can take some

Innovative “stuffs” from World of Concrete 2023

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsAre Kitchen Remodeling Costs Worth it? Remodelling your kitchen can be a great way to improve the look and feel of..

National kitchen and bath News

Get the latest kitchen industry news from NKBA

Latest Kitchen Designs 2023 || Kitchen Design || Kitchen Cabinet Design || Kitchen Ka Design

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsHow do I work out my budget to renovate my kitchen? These guidelines can help you determine your budget. Begin by..

See What’s New in Construction Materials at IBS 2023!

_______Frequently Asked QuestionsAre open-concept and modular kitchens in decline? The appeal of open-concept designs is not dying. They offer modern

Latest Kitchen Designs 2023 || Kitchen Design || Kitchen Cabinet Design || Kitchen Ka Design

friends is video mein aapko latest modular kitchen ke design

BEST/NEW MODULAR KITCHEN DESIGN IDEAS 2023 | LUXURY KITCHEN DESIGNS FOR MODERN HOME INTERIOR DESIGN

When you are planning to renovate your kitchen or

Kitchen Ideas 2023 – How to Use Open Shelving to Display Your Favorite Kitchen Items

Open shelving is a great way to display your favourite kitchen items. You can also use it to organize your frequently used items. The key is to keep the

KBIS | Home

Source the latest product innovations from leading kitchen and bath brands at KBIS! Discover fresh design solutions, expand your network, and fine-tune your

Interior Design Ideas for Kitchens | Kitchen Design Trends 2023 | Room Design Series Episode 4

This video is the fourth in a series on how to design specific spaces and today we’re talking talking about the heart of the home, the kitchen. We’re going to

Interior Design| Top modern kitchen cabinets design ideas| Amazing modern kitchen designs 2023

Latest modern kitchen cabinets design ideas, kitchen

80 Gorgeous Gray Kitchen Ideas

80 Gorgeous Gray Kitchen Ideas. Today we show you beautiful kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms. If you like decor and design ideas, subscribe and watch

FIVE OF THE BEST DECORATING TIPS AND HACKS 2023 / Interior Design Ideas / Ramon At Home

FIVE OF THE BEST DECORATING TIPS AND HACKS 2023 / Interior Design Ideas / Ramon At Home #ramonathome #interirordesign #homedecor

If you fully obey the

How Much Does it Cost to Renovate a Kitchen?

How much does it cost to renovate a kitchen? You’ll want to consider the time and value-added of a kitchen remodel, the cost per square foot of the work, and

Cabinet Hardware – Pulls and Knobs

Find the largest offer in Cabinet Hardware – Pulls and Knobs at Richelieu.com, the one stop shop for woodworking industry.

Kitchen Paint Colors

The right kitchen paint colours can transform your space into a luxurious paradise. Stroll through any home decor store and quickly realize that paint is

‘Favorable Outlook,’ Slower Growth Seen for Remodeling

PALO ALTO, CA — Companies across all sectors of the residential remodeling market have…The post ‘Favorable Outlook,’ Slower Growth Seen for Remodeling appeared

Appliances Add Warmth

While stainless steel appliances are still the go to, colorful finishes are gaining ground,…The post Appliances Add Warmth appeared first on Kitchen & Bath

How to Estimate Kitchen Renovation Costs in Metro Vancovuer

How to Estimate Kitchen Renovation Costs in 2023 in Metro Vancouver Renovating a kitchen is no small task. It can be costly, time-consuming, and stressful

Types of Layout of a Kitchen

How to Decide the Perfect Kitchen Layout for You Figuring out the perfect kitchen layout for your needs and wants can be tough. With The Definitive Guide to

Miele CA | Premium Domestic Appliances

Bringing German engineered domestic appliances to Canadians. Explore Miele’s full line of premium kitchen and laundry appliances

How to Match Black Kitchen Cabinets With Your Appliances

Black cabinets are a great center point for any design scheme. Enhance their bold presence with contrasting pieces like stainless-steel appliances and white

Vintage Refrigeration

Whether designed for entertaining large crowds or a just few intimate friends, today’s kitchens…The post Vintage Refrigeration appeared first on Kitchen & Bath

The Pros and Cons of Open Kitchen Shelves

What are the Pros and Cons of Open Kitchen Shelves? Open kitchen shelves offer an attractive, modern look while also allowing easy access to items in your

How to Create a Scandinavian Kitchen

What is a Scandinavian Kitchen? A Scandinavian kitchen is a style of design that uses neutral and simple colour palettes to create a modern, relaxed living

Custom Kitchen Cabinets Design Ideas

The hottest custom kitchen cabinets design ideas that make any space stand out. Custom kitchen cabinets are the ideal way to create remarkable spaces. From

Sub-Zero, Wolf, and Cove | Legendary Kitchen Appliances

Sub-Zero, Wolf, and Cove appliances offer powerful performance, design and dependability. Learn about products and find inspiration for your dream kitchen.

Should You Build Your Kitchen Cabinets to the Ceiling?

Whether or not to build your kitchen cabinets to the ceiling is a personal decision. There are several benefits and drawbacks to this option. Read on to learn

Planning Family Kitchens

A family kitchen is a vital space in a home. It provides space for the family to gather and eat together. A table and chairs help to keep the area feeling

Trends of Colorful Kitchens

If you’re a fan of colourful design, here are the Trends in colours in kitchens. These colours are ideal for the modern kitchen, and they can be incorporated

Galley Kitchen Ideas For Smaller Spaces

What’s a Galley Kitchen? A galley kitchen is a cooking space with two parallel countertops that are separated by a walkway. It typically includes an oven,

Resurfacing Your Kitchen Cabinets

If you’re considering resurfacing your kitchen cabinets, there are many things to consider. These include how much it will cost, what materials you can use,

Wikipedia: Kitchens

Search Wikipedia for kitchen

Lighter Kitchen Backsplash Ideas

Are you searching for a unique backsplash design to give your kitchen life-affirming energy in 2023? If so, hand-painted tiles may be the ideal solution. They

Traditional Kitchen Design Features

Traditional Kitchen Design Features in 2023 Traditional kitchen design can make your space instantly feel timeless and classic. These features set the stage

How to Renovate a Traditional Kitchen

Soft and neutral colours are the hallmark of the traditional kitchen, providing the ideal backdrop for family activities and daily meals. Classic wood stains

Storage Cabinet Ideas For the Kitchen, Bathroom and Laundry Room

The Ultimate Compartmentalization Solutions that Will Keep Your Home and Life Organized for Good. Organizing can make your life much simpler and stress-free.

KBIS Continues to Roll

The Kitchen & Bath Industry Show is enjoying a triumphant return to the Las…The post KBIS Continues to Roll appeared first on Kitchen & Bath Design News

Kitchen Renovation Guide – Kitchen Design Ideas | Architectural Digest

Kitchen design Ideas from Architectural Digest

KBIS Final Hours

Las Vegas – The third and final day of the Kitchen & Bath Industry…The post KBIS Final Hours appeared first on Kitchen & Bath Design News

Second-Half 2023 Turnaround Forecast for Housing Market

LAS VEGAS — The housing recession that began in 2022 will bleed into 2023…The post Second-Half 2023 Turnaround Forecast for Housing Market appeared first on

Remodeling Seen Faring Better Than Housing in 2023

LAS VEGAS — The nation’s remodeling sector “remains on solid ground and will do…The post Remodeling Seen Faring Better Than Housing in 2023 appeared first on

Design Contest, Other Award Winners Named by NKBA

LAS VEGAS — More than 30 awards encompassing design and industry achievements were presented…The post Design Contest, Other Award Winners Named by NKBA

Home Design Reflecting Post-COVID Shifts, Cost Struggles

LAS VEGAS — Homebuyer preferences in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with…The post Home Design Reflecting Post-COVID Shifts, Cost Struggles appeared

95 Designer Kitchens That Will Show You How to Make the Most of Yours

So many deliciously chic solutions.

Growing Smart-Home Market Seen Spelling Opportunity

INDIANAPOLIS — The smart-home market continues to exhibit robust growth, with 37% of the…The post Growing Smart-Home Market Seen Spelling Opportunity appeared

2023 DCW Event Draws Record Attendance to Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS — More than 200,000 housing and design professionals flocked to Las Vegas…The post 2023 DCW Event Draws Record Attendance to Las Vegas appeared first

PMI Pushing Nationwide ‘Rethink Water’ Initiative

LAS VEGAS — Plumbing Manufacturers International, the association that represents the nation’s leading plumbing…The post PMI Pushing Nationwide ‘Rethink Water’

KBIS 2023 Delivers the Goods

LAS VEGAS – More than 200,000 housing and design professionals descended on Las Vegas…The post KBIS 2023 Delivers the Goods appeared first on Kitchen & Bath

kitchen island lighting

Perfect kitchen island lighting Are you in the process of renovating your kitchen, and you’re thinking about your kitchen island lighting? Regarding kitchen

Issue Fall/Winter 2022 – Dream Kitchens

All the issues of Dream Kitchens & Baths on our Newsstand. Get the subscription to Dream Kitchens & Baths and get your Digital Magazine on your device.

Transforming a small kitchen into a socializing space

How to Transform a Small Kitchen Into a Socializing Space Designing a kitchen is not easy because the kitchen is such an important room in the house. Our

Best kitchen cabinets in Vancouver

Vancouver is a city where people can enjoy the beauty of nature alongside their homes. The modern architecture and scenery make it one-of-a-kind compared to

Open Concept Kitchens

Open concept spaces are those spaces that allow multiple activities to take place at once. They are usually large enough to accommodate several different

Choosing Finishes For Cabinets

How to choose the right finish for your kitchen cabinets When building cabinets, choosing finishes is important. It’s not just about how pretty the cabinet

How to Update Your Kitchen Without Doing a Gut Rehab

A kitchen remodel doesn’t necessarily mean significant structural changes. There are many ways to remodel a space without altering its function or appearance.

The official publication of NKBA and KBIS

Kitchen & Bath Business is the official KBIS publication. We provide design professionals in the kitchen & bath industry with news & trends.

Mid Century Modern Kitchen Design

A practical approach: Mid-Century Modern Kitchen Design Do you love mid-century modern design? Are you looking for inspiration for your next kitchen remodel?

MDF Kitchen Cabinet Doors

If you’re thinking of redoing your kitchen cabinets or building your own, you will undoubtedly come across MDF as a material option. But what exactly is MDF

High-End Kitchens in Vancouver

Cabico Elmwood Series: High-End Kitchens in Vancouver, BC Not many people can resist the charm of a high-end kitchen. From luxury appliances to intricate

2023 Kitchen design trends

Are you looking to upgrade your home kitchen in 2023 with the latest design trends? Kitchen renovations involve more than just updating décor and replacing

The post Luxury Kitchen Design Ideas For 2023 first appeared on Vancouver Kitchen Renovation.

source https://vancouverkitchenrenovation.com/kitchens/luxury-kitchen-design-ideas-for-2023/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=luxury-kitchen-design-ideas-for-2023

0 notes

brokehorrorfan · 3 years

Text

Blu-ray Review: King Kong (1976)

The recent release of Godzilla vs. Kong revived the age-old debate about which giant monster is superior, but it's not exactly a fair fight when you consider their respective quantity of output. By the mid-1970s, Godzilla had already appeared in 15 films, while King Kong only had a mere four to his name: the 1933 original, its same-year sequel Son of Kong, the 1962 crossover King Kong vs. Godzilla, and its 1967 followup King Kong Escapes.

The first remake of King Kong arrived in 1976 at the behest of Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis (Dune, Flash Gordon, Army of Darkness). Lorenzo Semple Jr. (Flash Gordon) was hired to pen the script, based on James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose's original screenplay, and John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno, Death on the Nile) assumed the director's chair. Richard H. Kline (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Soylent Green) served as cinematographer, while John Barry (Dances with Wolves, Goldfinger) composed the score. The plot largely follows the same beats as the 1933 version, although some alterations and expansions were made along the way.

Hoping to sail into the history books with the biggest oil strike in history, oil magnate Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin, Midnight Run) leads an expedition to an undiscovered island in the Indian Ocean hidden by a perpetual fog. Paleontologist Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges, The Big Lebowski) sneaks aboard the vessel, as he believes an animal occupies the island. In the middle of the ocean, the ship happens upon a life raft with struggling actress Dwan (Jessica Lange, American Horror Story), who quickly hits it off with Jack. Upon arriving at its destination, the crew discovers that the island is not uninhabited when they interrupt the native's ritual. The tribesmen proceed to kidnap Dwan and offer her as a sacrifice to the giant primate known as Kong.

The big reveal is impressive considering the limitations of the time. Per the closing title card, Kong was designed and engineered by Carlo Rambaldi (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Alien), who also constructed it with Glen Robinson (Logan's Run, Flash Gordon), with “special contributions” by Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, Men in Black). Since Rambaldi's attempt at a full-scale electronic Kong failed, however, the majority of creature work is accomplished with Baker in a costume with mechanized masks. It's fairly convincing as such, although the seams of the composite shots are clearly visible in high definition. Perhaps more than any other kaiju, it's important for Kong to be expressive, and this iteration successfully conveys pathos.

Semple's script drops the filmmaking angle from the original plot yet retains that the female lead is an aspiring actress and the human antagonist wants to exploit Kong on stage - which, smartly, becomes a corporate-branded event here. Kong only fights one monster on the island - a bloody battle with a giant snake - but his path of destruction in New York is much grander, rivaling and often upstaging the Godzilla films of the time. Instead of the Empire State Building, Kong is drawn to the then-new World Trade Center this time around, as the Twin Towers parallel his habitat, leading to his tragic downfall and a brilliant final image.

After Barbra Streisand passed on the role of Dwan, De Laurentiis sought to pluck an unknown actress from obscurity and make her a star. He did just that with Lange, who receives an "introducing" credit. It's easy to see why she won out over innumerable other aspiring actresses, as she radiates on camera, and her naivety works to the advantage of her character. Bridges is serviceable as the leading man and has good chemistry with Lange - but the film's focus is, rightly, on Kong and Dwan. Their bond is palpable, although the sexualization of their relationship is an odd choice.

While the supporting roles are largely one-dimensional, they're filled by a number of keen character actors: John Randolph (Christmas Vacation) as the ship's captain, Ed Lauter (Family Plot) as the first mate, Rene Auberjonois (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) as a geologist, Jack O'Halloran (Superman) and Julius Harris (Live and Let Die) as oil drillers, Dennis Fimple (House of 1000 Corpses) as a crew member, John Lone (The Last Emperor) as the cook, John Agar (Revenge of the Creature) as a city official, Walt Gorney (Friday the 13th) as a subway driver, and a young Corbin Bernsen (Psych) and Joe Piscopo (Saturday Night Live) as uncredited reporters.

King Kong has been released on Collector's Edition Blu-ray by Scream Factory with reversible artwork featuring a new design by Hugh Fleming and John Berkey's classic poster. The two-disc set includes the 134-minute theatrical version and the 182-minute TV cut, with its additional footage newly scanned in 2K from the internegative. (NBC paid De Laurentiis $19.5 million for two showings; the highest amount a network ever paid for a film at the time.) It features DTS-HD 5.1 and newly restored theatrical DTS-HD 2.0 stereo audio options.

This version of King Kong lacks the awe-inspiring spectacle of the three other major iterations (the 1933 original, Peter Jackson's 2005 remake, and 2017's Kong: Skull Island reboot), but it has moments of greatness that shine in high definition. De Laurentiis successfully spearheaded a sincere remake that shows reverence for the cinematic icon, and the theatrical cut is smoothly paced despite the lengthy runtime. The TV version doesn't fare as well, as it's padded by nearly an hour of additional footage (along with trims to the more crude sequences). They do little to add plot points, character depth, or anything else of potential value; instead they serve only to fill a programming block at the expense of the pacing. Still, it's nice to finally have a restored version for diehard fans.

King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon author Ray Morton provides a new audio commentary on the theatrical cut. It's very dry but full of information, especially when it comes to the drama between Rambaldi and Baker over the creature design. Having "outgrown the boundaries of a featurette," per disc producer Justin Beahm, an interview with Baker was turned into a second commentary. It's not as long as the whole film, which is fine, but it frustratingly forces the viewer to sit through gaps of the film's audio while awaiting the next soundbite rather than presenting it all in succession. It's unfortunate but worthwhile, as there's a lot of firsthand insight.

Beyond that, there are over 45 minutes of new video interviews with O’Halloran, assistant director David McGiffert, production manager Brian Frankish, sculptor Jack Varner, second unit director William Kronick, photographic effects assistant Barry Nolan, and production assistants Jeffrey Chernov and Scott Thaler. Most are conducted over video chat with mostly fine results (O’Halloran's picture quality is particularly bad), although a few are traditional on-camera pieces, and some subjects are paired together. They all seem proud of their contributions and happily share anecdotes about working on the massive production, even if the experiences weren't always positive.

Other special features on the first disc include the theatrical trailer, seven TV spots, three radio spots, and four still galleries (stills, posters and lobby cards, newspaper ads, and behind-the-scenes photos). The TV cut disc, meanwhile, sports an hour-long panel with Baker, O’Halloran, Kline, Dino De Laurentiis' widow Martha, and Barry's agent Richard Kraft, from a 2016 event at Santa Monica, CA's Aero Theater. Hosted by Morton, it's an entertaining and informative discussion.

King Kong is available on Collector’s Edition Blu-ray now via Scream Factory.

#king kong #kong #jeff bridges #jessica lange #rick baker #carlo rambaldi #scream factory #dvd #gift #review #article #john guillermin #dino de laurentiis #kaiju #king kong 1976

22 notes · View notes

cywscross · 4 years

Photo

From @lightveils on Twitter (free to use wherever!). I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. I definitely have enough fics to fill it lol~

-0-

A Fic You Love Without Knowing The Source Material:

I was born for this by esama (Assassin’s Creed | Altair x Desmond | M)

Juno did her best to lead him to her preferred fate, but the end is coming and Desmond has doubts.

A Fic With A Premise That Shouldn’t Work But Does:

Proposing To Strangers by moonstalker24 (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | G)

At the end of a strained relationship, crime novelist Stiles chooses to hide from the world inside a bar with far too many motorcycles outside it for comfort. Here he'll meet the man of his dreams, eat food and propose marriage, all within the first five minutes.

Peter doesn't know who this kid is, but he's cute and looks like he could use a break. So he feeds him. He's not expecting a marriage proposal, but with what comes after, he doesn't really mind.

A Fic You’ve Reread Several Times:

Hooverville by twothumbsandnostakeincanon (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | E)

Town to town, train to train, tent to tent.

By 1932, the dust had begun to blow and the jobs were gone.

Anonymity was a byproduct of looking for work, which made it both necessary and convenient.

Stiles had enough secrets of his own to know to look the other way when he saw something that shouldn’t be possible.

The ghost of a tail giving enough balance to disembark a moving train.

Near silent Latin whispered on the edge of a tent encampment.

A flash of burning eyes.

He had more than enough to worry about without adding the oddities of others, and besides- having unusually sharp teeth certainly didn’t make a man worse than the ones running from the wife and kids they couldn’t feed.

So Stiles kept his observations to himself. He kept his everything to himself.

Until he met a man. One with eyes so blue they seemed to glow- and then they did.

Stiles tried to look away, but for the first time he was stopped.

“Don’t be like that sweetheart. Aren’t you curious?”

A Fic You Still Remember Many Years Later:

All True-Hearted Souls by mardia (Temeraire | Laurence x Granby | G)

“For God's sake, if someone doesn't talk Laurence out of these constant heroics, I wouldn't bet a farthing on his chances; no, and not ours either.” Four times that John Granby helped save William Laurence's life. Laurence/Granby. Spoilers up to Empire of Ivory.

A Comfort Fic:

Nothing Improper by Bunnywest (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | G)

“How long since someone touched you, sweet boy?” Peter asks, his voice barely a breath in Stiles’ ear. “Days? Weeks? Months?” Stiles nods imperceptibly at that last one.

“After…after everything, after Allison,” is all Stiles manages to get out.

A Cathartic Fic:

Swing by ShippersList (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | T)

Stiles wants to fly.

A Fic You’d Print And Put On Your Bookshelf:

Nose to the Wind by Batsutousai (HP | Tom x Harry | M)

While Harry had been content with his second chance, that didn't keep him from thinking what he could have done different, how many people could have survived if he hadn't been set on the very specific path he'd walked. Third time is the charm, though, right?

A Fic You Associate With A Song (x2):

Strange Duet by BelleAmante, thiliart (thilia) (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | M)

The past three years have been a series of shocking, or not so shocking, successes for 2018 Tony award winner and two time Grammy nominee, Stiles Stilinski. You don’t typically find classically trained opera singers singing alternative folk rock to crowds at Coachella. Nor do you find indie singer/songwriters winning best actor awards at the Tony’s for their Broadway debuts. Stilinski has made it his lifetime habit to defy and exceed all expectations.

-or-

A Steter fic loosely based on Phantom of the Opera

Full Circle by Nike Femme (FMA | Roy x Ed | T)

Edward Elric returns with amnesia. He has lived the past four years as Auric, a Gatekeeper. But there are some battles that only he can fight. Will his friends be able to awaken Ed, and what happens to Auric if they do?

A Fic That Inspires You:

Off the Line by esama (FFVII | Cloud x Vincent | T)

In which Cloud gets a Virtual Reality Dream Console – ShinRa's latest in virtual reality technology. Aaand everything pretty much goes downhill from there.

A Fic That Brought You On Board A New Ship:

Me and Mine by linndechir (Fast and the Furious | Deckard x Owen | E)

The last time they'd spoken, Deckard had told Owen that he was tired of cleaning up his messes. But the first thing he did after breaking out of prison was to take Owen to the other end of the world so they could lick their wounds and start planning their revenge.

A Fic You Wish Could Be A Movie:

Moving In (To Every Single Aspect of Danny’s Life, Including the Boring Bits like Dry-Cleaning) by westgirl (Hawaii Five-0 | Steve x Danny | T)

It felt wrong for Steve to sound unsure of his place in Danny’s life. His place in Danny’s life was at Danny’s side, driving him slowly insane. Steve should feel secure about that.

A Fic That Led To You Making Friends With The Author:

Begin and End by Rikkamaru (Log Horizon x HP | G)

This is how it begins: a boy rejected by his family, a boy reunited with his brother by his sister-in-law's intervention. A boy who found a family in an online game. But how will it end?

FREE SPACE:

Reverti Ad Praeteritum by Batsutousai (Fullmetal Alchemist | Roy x Edward | M)

Unwillingly forced to serve as a human trial for a crazy alchemist experimenting with time travel, Edward Elric finds himself standing across from Truth in the moment it takes his leg from him. Armed with the knowledge of what's to come and burdened with guilt for the choices he'd made as an adult, Ed sets out to fix every mistake he ever made and save every life they ever lost, no matter what it takes.

A Fic You’ve Gushed About IRL:

Designation: Miracle by umisabaku (Kuroko no Basket | M)

It's been three years since seven human experiments, called "Miracles," escaped Teiko Industries, alerting the world to the presence of super-powered children. Now they're finally integrating into society-- going to normal high schools, playing basketball, falling in love-- and trying to find out if it's possible to truly escape their past.

A Fic You Associate With A Place (have to self-rec for this one):

Safe Harbour by cywscross (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles x Chris | T)

Peter didn't think he'd find a home here. He certainly didn't think he'd find a home with two other men.

Chris and Stiles prove him wrong.

A Fic That Made You Gasp Out Loud (kind of? it was suspenseful):

Sanctuary by DiscontentedWinter (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | E)

The Hale Wolf Sanctuary isn’t just for wolves.

It turns out it’s for Stilinskis as well.

A Fic You Found At The Right Time:

slow increments by Areiton (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles)

Peter is enigmatic, egotistical, sometimes barely sane. He's sharp and cutting and takes more time to care for the pack than anyone.And sometimes, John catches him watching Stiles.

A Fic That You Would Read Fic Of:

if you try to break me, you will bleed by Dialux (Game of Thrones | Jon x Sansa | T)

It had been a slash across her chest from a White Walker’s sword that finally ended her life. Sansa’d landed in a puddle of her own blood, and she’d died quickly, quietly.

And then she’d awoken with a gasp, trembling, in a bed that had burned under Theon’s betrayal.

A Fic That Made You Laugh Out Loud:

The Path towards Unwilling Godhood by Sky_King (Bleach | Kisuke x Ichigo | G)

Ichigo has never had the most normal life, and this latest chapter of it is no different.

"I'm not a god!"

A Fic With A Line (Or Two) That You’ve Memorized By Heart:

Atlas by distractedKat (Star Trek | Spock x Jim | T)

Between what was and what will be stands James Tiberius Kirk, in all his fractured patchwork glory. Because saving the Federation was only the beginning.

A Fic That Gave You Butterflies:

The Rest of Our Lives by mia6363 (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | T)

“I don’t know, as a kid I watched a lot of movies, you know? And at first I figured like… I’d be on some great adventure that would take me away from it all, you know? Like Indiana Jones comes around and is all, ‘Hey Stiles, buddy, come with me we’ve got to go save the world.’ Then… you and… everything happened… then I just… I figured I’d die before I was eighteen.”

A Fic That Embodies Something You Value In Life:

The Boy Sleuth by Shey (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | T)

Stiles is eight when he discovers a box of his mom’s old Nancy Drew Mysteries in the back of the guest bedroom closet.

A Favourite AU:

Love What is Behind You by KouriArashi (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | M)

Basically what it says on the label. Hunger Games type fusion. Stiles doing way better than anyone anticipates. Peter finds him intriguing. Ruthless, devious assholes working together to ruin bad guys, as the Steter ship is meant to be.

A Fic You Stayed Up Too Late To Finish Reading:

Of Dwobbits, Dragons and Dwarves by ISeeFire (The Hobbit | Fem!Bilbo x Fili | T)

Bilba has been a slave her entire life. All she knows of the outside world is what she sees from time to time outside the gates of Moria and the stories her mother used to tell her. Stories of a place called the Shire where her mother once lived and a placed called Erebor where, as far as she knows, her father still lives. Stories of dragons a thousand times larger, and more intelligent, than the beasts the orcs rode and of a strange concept called freedom where one was allowed to live as they wished with no one to tell them what they could, or could not do.

The stories meant little to Bilba. The only future she had was to live, and die, as a slave as countless number had before her.

And then the orcs dragged an injured female firedrake through the gates, her rider screaming obscenities behind her as he fought to reach her side...and everything changed.

A Fic That Made You Feel Seen (another self-rec lol):

i am addicted to death (so remind me what it’s like to live) by cywscross (Teen Wolf | Peter x Stiles | T)

Stiles is sixteen years old. He has already died seventy-eight times.

#Fic Rec Bingo #Bingo #Misc Fanfic Rec

153 notes · View notes

thattimdrakeguy · 5 years

Text

ROBIN 80TH ANNIVERSARY - REVIEW!! - The GREAT, the okay, the meh, the wait what, and the freaking awful

None of the stories I’d consider bad in this besides the Super Sons one.

They have flaws, some don’t have any but aren’t that great, and just weird choices, with some disappointments.

I’m just gonna be honest about each story because that’s all I can do.

DICK GRAYSON’S FIRST STORY: Really freaking good.

My favorite story is probably the first one:

Like the art is the best in the whole issue, and the only real flaw is how mean they made Bruce through-out it.

It’s yet again another story of how and why Dick quit (I guess he didn’t get fired this time) being Robin, but it’s just nice. Nice pacing, timing, dialogue, good art, and because the people working on it are 80s writers and artists, it keeps it feeling classic.

Which is great for a little showing of the 80s world, and I’m no big 80s DC guy at all, but it’s a really nice flashback for that.

One thing that was disappointing but I won’t count as a flaw (since it’s really not, just a wasted opportunity) is that this kid didn’t end up being Tim:

It looks like a young Tim, it’s drawn by the first artist on Tim’s Robin ongoing, written by his creator, it’s about the history of Robin, and he’s an overeager Robin fanboy-- like why wasn’t this kid Tim? He even has that dorky bowlcut Tim had when he was little, just less 80s styled.

A missed opportunity honestly.

The story though shows Dick’s compassion, talent, frustrations as he became his own man, his views on Robin, some of his sense of humor even. So his characterization is pretty great, but it is written by the man that grew Dick his own unique character to begin with, and it’s great to see this story keeps it up. (Prolly gonna find out this is an old script, but hey, it’s a good one.)

A weird retcon story, but it’s a nice callback to the 80s, and I think it’s really well-done beyond Bruce being a controlling grumpy prick to the point it feels like parody.

DICK GRAYSON’S SECOND STORY: It’s just alright.

Where the first story is a flashback to the 80s, this is a direct flashback to he 90s, with the writer and artist that started his ongoing solo.

And it’s good. Like I had a lot of fun reading it, good heroics, feels of it’s era, but like the last story that’s the fun.

There’s nothing really to say about it besides it’s good. There isn’t anything too standout about it.

DICK GRAYSON’S THIRD STORY: It’s forgettable.

I forgot this was a thing in this, and it just feels like a waste of page.

It’s in no way bad that I seen, but it’s so very bland and one note. Titans fight and Dick acts as leader. Very generic.

The art’s really good though.

DICK GRAYSON’S FOURTH STORY: It’s better than that last one at least.

Unlike the last one, this feels like it at least has a point to be here, and it actually feels like it makes sense to be in he 80th anniversary as well.

I’m not a personal fan of the “Grayson” series, it just sexualized Dick too much honestly, made him cheesier again a bit, and the writing was a little on the off-side in a way that just made it all feel empty besides a few moments, but I never read the whole series to be a great judge on it.

But also because of that, I have no idea who these people are for this story to be grand. What makes it feel like it’s worthy of being here though is trying it back to the history of Robin like the first story with these little bits.

Without these moments though, you wouldn’t have a clue why this is there.

Also Dick just suddenly wears this:

Which is super duper off-putting. But Oh-ho gotta have sexy Dick in there somewhere I guess. Just-- wow, was that super sudden.

JASON TODD’S STORY: It’s good but this kid doesn’t look right.

The story is very simple and sweet, and I think it works a lot given Jason and Bruce’s complicated relationship.

It’s even written by Judd Winnick who did Under the Red Hood, which is awesome.

But who is this kid they keep calling Jason exactly? It irrationally bugs me, because all the art has been super spot on till this story. They even write him well, but it just genuinely doesn’t look like post-crisis Robin Jason.

Like to show what I mean--

You read it and this is how the kid speaks.

Super snarky,

a bit of a rude edge to it,

practical sounding but rough teen-ish still

yet still mature enough to feel like he can handle himself.

So you might place this around when Jason was 15 given he’s Robin, and when he was 15 and when they gave him a unique design finally away from a generic silver age Robin, he looked like a young body builder--

Like this is what Jason Todd looked like when they settled his look away from a Dick clone:

A young body builder type, strong jaw, working out, mature features for his age

So who the heck is this?

Like this isn’t what Jason looked like besides pre-crisis, but this is post-crisis Jason. They already settled what he looked like during that 80s run, and this isn’t it. He’s not supposed to look like a generic silver age Robin anymore.

Even beyond it not looking like what Jason’s supposed to, it doesn’t fit the dialogue. He’s written as a practical, snarky, yet in his own way still mature teen. Soooooo why’s he look 5?

It’s so off-putting and it bugs me.

However, beyond that, I really like the story, and at least the artist was good at drawing adult Jason.

Them representing Bruce’s and Jason’s complicate relationship of distant but still caring is something I really enjoy. It’s so much more true to character rather than acting like Jason is just a part of the family like nothing ever happened.

More of that dynamic for them, please.

TIM DRAKE’S FIRST STORY: It’s pretty good, but it’s missing something.

Not the highest praise ever, but I do like this story. I enjoy it’s setting at Tim’s school. High school was a constant setting for Tim’s comics in Robin, and they rarely ever treat it like that so I enjoy this story bringing it back.

I really enjoyed the connection between extracurricular activities and what he does as Robin. It’s that blend of relatability and heroics that really made Tim work as a character. So that’s also great they brought back.

One of my favorite things that they bring up is Tim being into eSports, cuz it reminds me of how much Tim was into video games. It’s a very modern version of him being into the arcades in the 90s. Which is great.

However a downside is that it doesn’t really focus on Tim as a character like the other stories did with the other Robins.

Nothing about his never give up attitude, his insecurities, his underdog likability, how hard he is on himself, or things like that.

In-general this story says nothing about his personality besides a mention that he’s geeky. Which is a pretty big let-down because it keeps it from being any better, despite it already being good.

Freddie William’s art is also very hit or miss. It’s so crude sometimes, and Tim seems so buff compared to before in his actual Robin run. It’s very displeasing given that his early Tim work was top 5 Tim art material. However I still enjoyed that they brought him back even if he can’t draw Tim as well anymore. Tim’s still good in the babyface in most panels at least.

BUT-- this is still a pretty good Tim story. It’s just lacking.

Like it just should’ve been more about Tim as a character since it’s a Tim Drake story.

TIM DRAKE’S SECOND STORY: It’s honestly just pretentious.

Tim doesn’t talk like this. Tynion has a melodramatic tone to his characters that works great for characters like Batman, I’ve actually quite liked his Batman run so far partially because of that, but it doesn’t work for Tim.

This is not what Tim talks like. It’s so very unnatural sounding for a kid. Yet Tim talks in this incredibly dramatic tone except for a few light hearted spots, when I feel like it should be the opposite.

It’s also trying hard to be a character study, but again it’s so unnatural. It sounds like a fan describing their view of the characters, not the characters themselves. Like since have these guys became each others therapists?

And then he has Dick say these things that makes Tim seem like a Gary Stu and the greatest most talented guy ever.

Also having Tim hang out with Jason when Jason’s using guns even though Tim’s insanely against that sort of thing.

They even have Damian talk like a typical fan person who dislikes Tim based off of superficial things for a bit.

The fact it treats that Detective Comics Rebirth part of Tim’s character history as uber important is also a bit pretentious of the writer given he wrote that too. Despite Tim only being in that run for like three arcs and wasn’t even in-character for most of it.

Best part of it, is the vague acknowledgement that Tim didn’t want to be anything else but Robin to me.

Otherwise it just reeks of awkwardly written fan fiction.

Honorable mentions of quality though, is Dick and Tim being brothers train riding, and Damian’s mini-adult coming out. I’m so sick of them making Damian a generic kid sometimes that I actually liked this part even if it’s through a snarky filter.

STEPHANIE BROWN’S STORY: Better than expected, it’s actually pretty good.

I actually really liked this story. Overall I think Steph’s actual Robin run sucked, this is still a good story if I can get past the era it’s set in.

Unlike Tim’s stories, this actually uses her character.

How reckless she can be without it being super exaggerated, her attitude, love that they brought back the diary format for her inner-monologue too.

There’s not much to say besides I’d actually consider this one of the best stories in the thing, except for the fact Steph clearly disobeys Batman and she was said to get fired for that. That’s a decent plot holes for me.

I super love the detail of Tim being so small that Steph can’t fit in his uniform. That cheered me up.

Them bringing back her Robin era artist was also great. Unlike Freddie Williams, their art actually really improved.

DAMIAN WAYNE’S FIRST STORY: The genuine worst story in it.

It’s so-- baaad.

Fan service can work if it’s in good quality. Like being in-character, or a nice homage. The train riding in Tynion’s story was that.

This isn’t that.

Damian and Jon didn’t get along right away, not even soon enough for this “mostly” part to feel right as a joke, because they obviously didn’t get along mostly right away. They fought a lot. They even show it on the full page them fighting, but they downplay how long they did fight just for fanservice. It took a long time, and even when they did it was still contrived.

Then they have Damian and Jon in the same class, when they aren’t the same age for that to make sense..

They even have Jon help Damian on his tests when it’s constantly shown that Damian is a brainiac who wouldn’t need that.

It’s literally even in the history summary at the end that he’s highly intelligent. So he probably wouldn’t even ever need a study partner considering he’s even said to have actual PHDs anyway. Which makes the study partner thing just plain out of character.

There’s also panels that straight up feels like oddly specific deviantart fetish art, which is so nasty. Especially considering that I know damn well that’s there’s pedophiles who make this same kind of oddly specific fetish art on there. So much so I had to stop using the site cuz of the anxiety it gave me.

And they downplay how mean Damian can be too Jon so much that it irks me.

This is the worst story in the whole comic, genuinely. Nothing good is in it, besides some decent enough art.

It’s certainly pandering to it’s fandom, but to certain parts it really shouldn’t be.

(This sort of stuff was still happening in their miniseries. Jon really shouldn’t want this as a brother. That’s stockholm syndrome.

DAMIAN WAYNE’S SECOND STORY: It’s better than the last one, but somethings missing still.

Unlike the last one avoiding talking about Damian’s actual character besides to play it down. This one actually uses it.

It’s just so quick, and empty feeling at the same time that it’s missing something. A bit like an inverse of Tim’s first story. Tim’s story had the setting and interesting story format, but no real character, while this has a lot of usage of the character but no interesting setting or story.

A lot of Damian’s character is that he’s not a natural Robin as far as attitude goes. He isn’t a typical Robin, and I enjoy how they play into that rather than be afraid of that. It’s what makes this actually work for me.

Although it makes you question why he’s still Robin, I consider that a good thing, because YOU SHOULD. You want the character’s to actually acknowledge things as if they’re real and not just ignoring things.

He’s not typical, he’s unique for better or worse. That’s Damian, and that’s what you should show of him.

This goes into why Damian’s the exact opposite of what a Robin normally is. That’s great.

But it’s missing anything memorable about it. However I think that’s cuz it leads into a future issue of Teen Titans which gives it a reasonable excuse.

I’m really hoping it leads into something.

Although i have a feeling they sadly might do the same thing as typical and ignore Damian’s actions more. Avoiding any genuine feelings.

OVERALL

It’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Only two stories I’d actually call bad, which is a lot less than I thought With just occasionally sloppy art, not even what I’d call back, but just crude or not drawing the character accurately which will annoy some more than others.

When I heard of this book I got so worried, but only two stories is actually almost relieving how little that is given the potential ego-driven things they could’ve done, which only those two stories then.

To me, I say it’s worth a pick-up, just rip out a story or two to keep it friendlier to revisit

Mostly was just really missing that extra heart in a lot of the stories.

#Tim Drake #Robin #Dick Grayson #Nightwing #Jason Todd #Red Hood #Stephanie Brown #The Spoiler #Bruce Wayne #Batman #DC Comics #Bat-Family #Batfamily #Bat-fam #Batfam #Teen Titans #Young Justice #Young Just Us

252 notes · View notes

nitrateglow · 4 years

Text

My god-tier Audrey Hepburn movies

I just realized I’ve technically seen all of Audrey Hepburn’s movies-- or rather, all the movies in which she was given star billing.

So, because I’m bored, here’s a list of my top ten personal favorites of her films. The criteria is simple: 1) she had to have starred in it, so nothing from her pre-Roman Holiday career counts nor does 1989′s Always, and 2) this is based on my level of enjoyment of the movie in question.

1. Wait Until Dark

Wait Until Dark possesses many merits, but Hepburn is one of its key strengths. For me, the most interesting performances are the ones able to balance seemingly opposing elements of the character in question. Here, Hepburn balances vulnerability with inner strength, insecurity and terror with courage, angry frustration with budding confidence. She makes her character seem like such a real, vital presence, like someone you would know. Also, having someone as sweet as Hepburn as the target for the cruel mind games and brutal violence of the villains makes the horror all the more terrifying.

Beyond her performance, this movie feels like it was tailor-designed to appeal to me: an intelligent and formidable villain, the everyday setting juxtaposed with a menacing atmosphere, scary scenes that don’t rely on gore, eccentric criminals, dark humor, a tight script without an ounce of fat on it. But you’ve heard me go on, so I’ll leave it there.

2. Charade

Charade is a prime example of how to mix suspense and comedy. The mystery at the heart of the movie is very clever, with twists and turns every other moment, constantly keeping the audience on their toes. Best of all, the film holds up after repeat viewings because of the delicious chemistry between Hepburn and Cary Grant, and the witty screenplay, which has such an elegant and tight structure that I seethe with envy as a writer every time I revisit this glorious thriller.

As in Wait Until Dark, Hepburn is concerned for her life as she’s terrorized by criminals, only here, they’re mostly more humorous in nature, sometimes even lovable (except Scobie, he can just jump off a cliff). She mainly gets to exercise her comedic chops, throwing off quips, sarcastic lines, and screwball banter with wonderful finesse. It makes me sad she never made more films with Cary Grant-- the two have a spark that belies the large age gap between them.

3. Roman Holiday

The character-building, naturalistic performances, and humor make Roman Holiday one of the best examples of romantic comedy. The film has both a gentle touch and a grounded maturity that make it more than just a remix of the earlier and quite similar screwball comedy It Happened One Night. To get a bit literary and pretentious, it reminds me a bit of Romeo and Juliet-- not because of the romance, but in how the movie starts as a standard screwball comedy and ends on a lyrical, wistful note you might not have expected.

Even though this was her first lead role in a feature film, I think Hepburn’s performance as Ann remains one of her strongest. Ann feels regal and dignified while also possessing the naivete and restlessness of a teenager on the brink of adulthood. It’s as fabulous a star-establishing movie as anyone could want.

4. How to Steal a Million

How to Steal a Million is pure fun. Not a moment of this caper comedy is to be taken seriously (which makes it the perfect quarantine movie if you need something to de-stress with). I always regard this movie as Charade’s even frothier spiritual successor: both films are playful, stylish, funny, and packed with romantic banter, plot twists, and colorful 1960s fashions. The main difference is that in this one, there’s no mortal threat involved and the humor gets a little more risque though not crass.

Also, how nice is it for Hepburn to be paired with a leading man closer to her age? Peter O’Toole was only three years younger than Hepburn when this was filmed. The two of them have glorious, cute chemistry.

5. The Nun’s Story

I hate the question of “objective best” anything, but if you put a gun to my head, I would say The Nun’s Story is features Hepburn’s most impressive work as an actress. For those who accuse Hepburn of being too affected, of being a mere clothes’ horse, here she is bare-faced, dressed in a nun’s habit, and playing a very reserved character whose dilemmas are largely internal. She plays her character’s spiritual conflict with an understatement that could only be considered skillful.

The film itself will likely be seen as “too slow” by most and there are a few colonial elements towards the Congo section that date it, but the film’s strengths, both from Hepburn’s performance and the mature way it presents its individual versus the system story, give it classic status. Few movies regarding organized religion are this balanced and lacking in propaganda, either for or against it.

6. Breakfast at Tiffany’s

While still Hepburn’s most iconic role, Breakfast at Tiffany’s gets called “overrated” a lot these days and fans of the original Truman Capote novella routinely dog it for making heavy changes to the source material. There’s also the, you know, gross yellowface a la Mickey Rooney that deflates every scene in which he appears. However, is the move bad? NO. It juggles zany comedy, tender romance, and rather heavy drama too well for me to consign it to the “overrated” bin. Blake Edwards was a fine director and this movie is one of his best.

And Hepburn gives a damn good performance as Holly Golightly, even if she is not the character envisioned by Capote. This character could easily be unlikable if played the wrong way-- she’s a “phony,” rather pathetic, and self-loathing despite her wit and charm. But rather than coming off as an unbearable loser, Hepburn’s Holly is a realistic, relatable loser we all love in spite of her own delusions and lashing out. She might even hit too close to home (or maybe that’s just me).

7. Funny Face

Funny Face took a few viewings to grow on me. It was one of the first Hepburn movies I ever saw (that was back in high school) and I was initially excited because it was directed by Stanley Donen who co-directed Singin’ in the Rain with Gene Kelly, a long-time favorite of mine. I expected this movie to be just as sublime and was disappointed when it didn’t hit that high mark.

Rewatching it later, I now find it very charming. It’s incredibly upbeat and relaxing, the sort of old-school movie musical that doesn’t get made anymore. Hepburn’s singing is a bit rough in the bigger numbers, but she is very sweet, a damn good dancer, and quite attractive to the point where she just takes my breath away. Fred Astaire and Kay Thompson are also wonderful and get a lot of great moments that show off their talent.

8. My Fair Lady

When considering what would go on this list, I was honestly shocked to realize how much I like this movie. I’m in the camp that considers Hepburn miscast, I find George Cukor’s direction rather stiff, and I really don’t like how the ending is changed from the original play. In spite of all this, I still really enjoy this movie for the songs, costumes, and what remains of Shaw’s brilliant satire on class and gender relations. Those three hours go by and the movie never outstays its welcome.

While I think Hepburn wasn’t the number one best choice for the part (I don’t really buy her as a crass flower girl in the beginning), she isn’t a disaster by any means. She’s still charming and sympathetic, and once she makes her transformation, you have to wonder how Higgins held it together, she’s so gorgeous. And I love the relish with which she approaches the “Just you Wait” song or the way she delivers the “move your bloomin’ arse” line at the races.

9. Sabrina

I think producers figured because of the fairy tale appeal of Roman Holiday, Hepburn would be perfect for this modern take on Cinderella, set in 1950s New York. Just like in Roman Holiday, Hepburn gets to undergo dramatic character development and show her comedic skills. It’s a cute movie, with a very charming William Holden and gorgeous black-and-white cinematography. It’s also shockingly uncynical for a Billy Wilder project.

About the closest thing this movie has to a flaw is Humphrey Bogart as Linus, the guy who Sabrina chooses in the end. This is a role Cary Grant could have played in his sleep, but Bogart clearly is not enjoying himself in some scenes. However, he isn’t movie-breakingly bad by any means. His character is meant to be a hidden softie and far more dependable than his handsomer brother, so I can buy that Sabrina would warm to him in the end.

10. They All Laughed

People tend to argue what the last “worthwhile” Hepburn movie is. Most argue it’s 1976′s Robin and Marian, while I’ve seen some go as far back as How to Steal a Million in 1966. They All Laughed, a Peter Bogdonavich comedy from 1981, gets my vote. This is a love letter to screwball comedies much like Bogdonavich’s 1972 classic What’s Up Doc, only with a far more melancholy edge.

Hepburn does not become a major presence in the movie until nearly halfway through. However, she approaches her role with a mature dignity that makes me wish she’d done more work along this line towards the end of her career. Her character comes off as an older, sadder Princess Ann from Roman Holiday. This makes the movie sound morose, but it isn’t: it ends with life going on and the characters accepting that with grace.

#lists lists lists #charade #roman holiday #how to steal a million #the nun's story #breakfast at tiffany's #funny face #my fair lady #sabrina #they all laughed #audrey hepburn #thoughts #wait until dark #old hollywood #i'll probably make more lists like these with other actors i like #so expect a buster post guys

124 notes · View notes

watching-pictures-move · 3 years

Text

Put On Your Raincoats #15 | Rainbows in the Dark

To the extent that a porn director crossed over to the mainstream, Gregory Dark would be it. Certainly, there have been directors who did one or two porn features early in their careers, like Abel Ferrara, William Lustig and Wes Craven, but they're known almost entirely for their mainstream work. There are also porn directors who did maybe one mainstream movie, like Gerard Damiano, but their careers were relegated to porn for the most part. Dark is the rare director who was prolific on both sides, so to speak, starting with massive hardcore hits like New Wave Hookers, moving on to directing softcore, thrillers and softcore thrillers with some regularity and eventually becoming a popular music video director. My initial plan was to explore the full gamut of Dark's career. I wanted to get a sense of each phase of his work and to see what elements of his style translated across them. Essentially I wanted to understand Dark as an auteur. But then something miraculous happened. I got lazy. (Also I had a muted reaction to some of his movies and became more interested in another director in the meantime.) So I decided to limit my exploration to a few of his early movies and call it a day.

The first one I watched was New Wave Hookers, his best known hardcore title and considered a classic in the genre. What I expected going in and what worked for me can be deduced from the title. Dark's visual style very much brings to mind the "new wave" in the title: big hair, fog machines and neon lighting, all of which are first seen in the opening credits, in which the female talent almost ritualistically present themselves to the camera. There's some stylistic precedent in the work of Rinse Dream AKA Stephen Sayadian (the artist I got more interested in as I delved into Dark's work), but Sayadian's aesthetic feels culled from the art underground. (Dark reuses a few of Sayadian's actors in some of his films.) Dark's style feels more commercial, almost packaged for MTV. (Dark intended his film as a reaction to hardcore porn features of his era, although I'd argue that his choice of camera angles still feels in line with other films of the era.) This is a movie that looks good and, thanks to some choice music courtesy of the Plugz (whose song "Electrify Me" accompanies the opening credits) and the Sockets (who provide the theme song), sounds good too.

What I gelled to much less was the sense of humour. The movie opens with two buddies played by Jamie Gillis (wearing a tie over a t-shirt) and Dark regular Jack Baker shooting the shit and watching another Dark production. ("That fuckin' guy looks exactly like you. Is that you?") Baker starts expounding on his thoughts about pimping and "programming" women to fuck with music. Baker also notes, "a pimp calls a chick a bitch". They doze off, and when they wake up they find themselves inexplicably in an office. Baker is wearing a yellow tracksuit, Gillis is sporting an East Asian accent, and there's a guy on the floor substituting for their phone. (Gillis asks: "Why do we not have a regular telephone?" Baker explains: "He got the power, the second sight.") As the movie proceeds to make good on its premise, wherein women have sex after listening to new wave music, we're treated to a steady stream of racial taunting. Baker grouses about black music being ineffective for their purposes, dropping the N-bomb. Gillis continues with his accent. The two get into racially charged arguments. A middle eastern client is served in a tent and barks like a dog after he's finished. At one point, Gillis wants sushi and is served by Kristara Barrington while East Asian style music plays on the soundtrack. I recognize that a lot of humour from the era is extremely politically incorrect and has aged poorly, but there's something about Dark's use of racist and misogynist humour that feels especially confrontational. I admit I was a bit bothered by all of this.

Still, there are moments of humour that did work for me. One of the headsets that the characters use has dildos protruding from both earpieces (pointing outwards, of course), and the production design, while not always stylish, is at least endearing in its blatant cheapness. To their credit, Baker and Gillis have undeniable chemistry and do sell the material as well as they can. (I laughed when Gillis, when confronted by the vice squad, drops his accent and exclaims "I used to work in your fuckin' office, and now I'm rich, I'm satisfied, and I'm Chinese, you assholes." Am I a bad person? Probably.) And in terms of how it meets genre expectations, I do think Ginger Lynn and Kristara Barrington have a real magnetism in their scenes.

Given the racial content in New Wave Hookers, it probably won't surprise anybody that Dark was a pioneer in interracial pornography. I am not a sensitive enough writer to begin unpacking all the implications of the concept, but I did watch one of his movies in the subgenre, Black Throat. This was a shot-on-video effort and looks considerably cheaper and uglier than New Wave Hookers, but shares some other qualities. It opens and closes with a punk song that references that film as well as Let Me Tell Ya Bout White Chicks, Dark's first interracial feature, and to be honest, the song is pretty fucking catchy. The movie follows Roscoe, a man who wears yellow sunglasses and both a polo and a Hawaiian shirt and his friend Mr. Bob, a talking rubber rat. He's searching through the garbage while arguring with Mr. Bob over what to eat when he finds a business card. "Madame Mambo's House of Divine Inspiration Thru Fellatio!" (All of the characters pronounce fellatio differently. Mr. Bob says "fell-uh-tee-oh" and calls Roscoe a "fuckin' honky", to which he responds "Fuck you, Mr. Bob!")

Roscoe insists he has to find her. "If I don't find her, I'm gonna die!" (When asked why, he responds, "I dunno, it sounded kinda dramatic, I guess.") Mr. Bob enlists the help of a "young urban professional pimp" named Jamal, played by Jack Baker. (He prefers the term "flesh broker" and describes upgrading his diet, clothes and investments.) Roscoe, Mr. Bob and Jamal go from scene to scene, watching other characters having sex in different racial combinations, asking them where they can find Madame Mambo. (Sometimes they ask the characters directly, other times they talk to their private parts.) The best of these scenes, in my humble opinion, is a light domination flavoured sex scene featuring Christy Canyon. Perhaps because of the dynamic, there's an element of actual acting involved here, and because Canyon is, uh, pleasingly proportioned and has a certain magnetism, I found this scene more engaging than the others, at least until it turns into a regular sex scene.

Eventually they go back to Roscoe's place and find a voodoo ritual taking place where a black woman with multicoloured hair (think the George H.W. Bush rainbow wig from the Simpsons, but straight, not curly) is jumping on their bed while a bunch of white dudes in hats, capes and sunglasses jack off around her. This of course is Madame Mambo and at this point the movie makes good on the title while drumbeats and funk play on the soundtrack. Given the premise, this movie proved (thankfully) lighter on racial humour than I expected going in. There is an element of racial critique in Baker's character, and Madame Mambo is certainly exoticized, but the racial content otherwise is limited to the interracial couplings and doesn't overload the dialogue. However, this is a fairly ugly looking movie, shot on video, featuring unimpressive camerawork and lighting as well as extremely cheap looking production design (although the movie does mine this for laughs). I also found the sex scenes overlong and the music a bit repetitive. I imagine if you were jerking off to this back in the '80s it was easier to get through, but trying to watch it now as an actual movie, despite some decent humour throughout, proved a bit of a challenge.

The next one I watched was White Bunbusters, which despite the first half of the title is not particularly racially charged. The theme song here, crooned in the style of early '60s rock'n'roll, explains that the movie is about anal sex, as the second half of the title suggests. We begin with Tom Byron thrusting into his wife Shanna McCullough (while wearing his glasses) only to be disappointed by her refusal to take it in the butt. The next day at the office (decorated by construction paper all over the walls, drawers sketched in magic marker and a crude sign with their business' name "Acme Proctology"), he hears an ad for the "A-Busters", an enterprising duo who will convince your wife or partner to let you put it in their butt. We cut to the A-Busters office and see them in yellow shorts, lime green suspenders and orange baseball caps, fiddling with their hi-tech instruments (which include an "anal listening device"). Soon we see them go to work on Jack Baker's girlfriend, taking a cash payment after the fact.

Meanwhile, Byron's friend Greg Rome hears about his woes and offers to let him fuck his wife Keli Richards (Rome is named Bob and Richards is named Bobette). Of course Byron takes advantage of Rome's generous offer, but later gets annoyed when Rome insists it was a "one time deal". They're interrupted by Jennifer Noxt, who asks about a secretarial position for the law office next door. Rather than correcting her, which would be the right thing to do, they have sex with her, which is absolutely not the right thing to do. ("So do I get the job?" "We'll call you later, baby.") We go back to the A-Busters, who go to work on a pornstar warming up for her first anal scene (the movie is called Hershey Highway to Hell). Eventually, Byron decides to make use of their services, and in the climax, when he's having a nice dinner with his wife (complete with plastic cups and paper plates), they crash the party and get to work. After it's all over, Byron thanks the A-Busters and shakes one of their hands, only to promptly wipe it off on his suit.

This is as lo-fi as Black Throat, and features a lot of raunchy humour, but thankfully no real racial content outside of the title. Perhaps because the focus is on a specific set of acts (threesomes, anal sex, double penetration), the execution seems more consistently energetic. The ratio of the threesomes is a little off from what I prefer, but I was not unmoved by the scenes involving Keli Richards, Jennifer Noxt and Shanna McCullough. I realize there are more dignified ways to spend one's time than watching in its entirety and singing the praises of a movie called White Bunbusters, but sometimes the lizard brain takes over. I feel compelled to report the facts, and the facts are that this is good at what it does. As an actual movie, there isn't a whole lot to this, but were I to rate this on the Peter-Meter as the filmmakers intended, it would fare respectably.

Where Gregory Dark's style and the sum of his provocations really worked for me was in The Devil in Miss Jones 3: A New Beginning and The Devil in Miss Jones 4: The Final Outrage, a two-part odyssey through hell. (Attentive viewers may note that the original Devil in Miss Jones takes place before the heroine is sentenced to hell, but this is not a direct sequel. There is also a second part by Henri Pachard and later sequels directed by Dark that I did not see. The narrative in the third and fourth entries feels pretty self contained.) The movie begins with close-ups of our heroine, played by Lois Ayres, taking a shower while "A Christian Girl's Problems" by the Gleaming Spires plays over the soundtrack, her interiority hinted at with an astute song choice. (It's worth noting that this was not an original song made for the movie.) The structure intersperses her story with a series of interviews with those who knew her: an ex-boyfriend who "had a disagreement about the relationship" (he slept around); a woman speculates that Ayres was "a closet lesbian" and that "she probably went to live in one of those lesbian islands in the Caribbean"; a girl who knew her as a prude back in high school, a priest with a thick accent who offers a eulogy; her brother, who speaks in new age euphemisms and resents that she was the favourite growing up; and a blind ex-boyfriend who claims she was the loveliest person he knew "after Helen Keller". (This last character describes his sex life as very "normal": no peeing or dogs, wouldn't fuck pizzas, etc.) All these people knew her, but they didn't really know her.

The actual story follows her after she breaks up with her boyfriend (over the phone, as he shaves another woman's pubic hair while feigning innocence). She heads for a bar, brushing off a stereotypical black pimp played by Jack Baker who mistakes her for a prostitute, and promptly orders a "taco" (a draught beer, a Bloody Mary, and a draught beer in three separate glasses). Beside her is a man asleep on bar in tuxedo, who turns out to have been stood up at his own wedding. They hook up, leading to a sex scene scored by a blaring saxophone that I assume was practice for Dark's softcore work. The scene ends when the heroine knocks her head against the headboard and wakes up in a pitch black space near a grave. In comes Jack Baker, riding atop a woman, to tell her what the situation is. "You are dead, you got no clothes, and this is hell!"

The rest of the movie follows them going through different rooms, the heroine being unable to comprehend her fate, as they watch the different punishments endured by the denizens of hell. There's the room full of "peepers", virgins doomed to only watch sex for all eternity. (One of them explains: "I showed my tits to a guy to get a Gucci purse. He went off an overpass.") There are characters doomed to fuck until their genitals wear out or are ravaged by venereal disease. Baker gives Ayres a raincoat "to keep the come off", but the moment she forgets about it she finds herself getting gangbanged and promptly has to be rescued by Baker (okay, not that promptly, we get to enjoy this for a few minutes). Along the way we're led to believe from the interviews that the heroine might have a fetish for black men, and the conversation between Ayres and Baker grows increasingly heated and racially charged. This idea culminates in a trip to the "racist room", where a white man with a swastika armband is having a threesome with two women of colour while a white woman is sucking off two black men in tribal makeup. Ayres and Baker have a final confrontation on the subject.

"What about all the black racists?"

"Look bitch, when a black man hits a white man, we don't call it racist!"

"What do you call it then?"

"Smart!"

"That's ridiculous, there are plenty of black racists!"

"No dig, you stupid ass white bitch!"

"Look, you're even one of them, calling me a stupid bitch and a white bitch!"

"We'll you're stupid, you're white and a bitch, so what is your motherfucking problem?"

"You're crazy, negro, and you're one of the sickest people in here!"

"That's right, I'm a crazy negro! I'm so crazy I'll eat my own arm!"

This is a deeply uncomfortable scene, and what follows is even more disturbing, as we learn the true nature of the heroine's relationship with her father, a reveal that Dark plays for maximum shock value in depicting "The Ordeal of the Taboo Breakers".

In some ways this isn't all that different from New Wave Hookers, but Dark's direction seems more purposeful here. The stylized depiction of hell, with its black backgrounds and harsh neon lighting, imbue a real sense of menace into the proceedings. With the exception of two scenes, the sex isn't all that outrageous, but Dark's mise-en-scene has a way of rendering it almost as horror. It's not exactly scary and probably still "does the trick" if you're watching this for those reasons, but there's an undeniable charge here. Likewise, the dark humour and the racial content seem to work in tandem here, and Ayres and Baker really sell their adversarial chemistry. (It's worth noting that even by the standards of the video vixens that appear in Dark's movies, Ayres has an amazing hairdo.) Dark may not have entirely thought out his thesis along these lines, but the movie is provocative in its handling of this content, and unlike New Wave Hookers, not in a way that hurts it. At a combined 2+ hours, this probably runs a bit too long, but it does shape the usual procession of sex scenes into a structure that carries an uneasy momentum that matches the heroine's trepidation. We might not like what we're seeing, but we also can't help but keep looking.

#film #put on your raincoats #movie review #gregory dark #new wave hookers #black throat #white bunbusters #the devil in miss jones 3: a new beginning #the devil in miss jones 4: the final outrage

4 notes · View notes