#daisy and phoebe in a romance movie when??

[fandomcentralsposts]

This is my multiverse of madness.

[meadowxluna]

(MEADOW LAURENT MOREAU) who looks an awful lot like (PHOEBE TONKIN) has just been seen around Port Whitley!  Apparently (SHE) is a (33) year old (FEMALE) born on (JULY 12) and has been in the city for (1 YEAR) and is a (ROMANCE NOVELIST). If there is a quote to describe them it would be “TO GAIN YOUR OWN VOICE, YOU HAVE TO FORGET ABOUT HAVING IT HEARD” - But we have yet to make up our mind if that is accurate.

Background:

Meadow Luna Laurent Moreau was born in a small town in Mississippi, where her mother and father own and operate a restaurant together. She is the oldest of four siblings who had an unconventional upbringing: their parents, Eric and Daisy, are hippies who never married and aren’t monogamous.

When Meadow was a pre-teen, her mother began dating a man named Miguel. Although it took Meadow a bit of time to warm up to him, Miguel has been in her life for over 20 years now, and she has come to consider him a second father. Its from him that she picked up the ability to speak Spanish.

After graduating high school with great grades, Meadow won a partial scholarship to Duke University. To help pay for the rest, she worked as a cocktail waitress in a strip club, a job that came naturally to her after working in her parents’ restaurant as a teenager. Its there she also picked up the skills to work as a bartender, a job she continued to hold throughout college and for a few years afterwards while she tried to establish herself as a novelist.

Meadow published her first novel when she was 25. It was an urban fantasy romance novel (think the Sookie Stackhouse books) focusing on a sapphic couple. Since then, she has written several sequels and spinoffs in the same universe, all set in the Southern US as well. She has enjoyed a moderate amount of success as a writer, enough so that she no longer has to bartend or work as a waitress but not to the degree of (for example) Stephen King. Part of this is because she refuse to sell the rights to her novels to be made for TV or movies, wanting to maintain creative control over her universe.

Meadow moved to Port Whitely last year, when her younger sister Rikki made the move for job-related reasons. Her decision was primarily motived by a desire to help her sister raise Ashton, Meadow’s nephew. She also hopes the change of scenery will inspire her to write another series of novels, this time set in New England instead of the South.

Headcanons:

Her initials (MLLM) are a palindrome, which she finds amusing.

She has two younger brothers (Lark and Orion) and then her younger sister Rikki.

She’s pansexual, but most of her relationships have been with women.

She’s been in both monogamous and polyamorous relationships.

Her romance novels are all urban fantasy (think vampires, werewolves, etc but living in the world as we know it). They’re also all romance novels that focus on LGBT+ characters.

Although English is her first language, she also speaks French and Spanish.

Writes at least one novel a year, as she believes her job as an author means writing five days a week whether she has writer’s block or not (aside from when she’s on vacation).

Maintains a fairly low profile as a writer, so while people might recognize her name (especially if they’re fans of urban fantasy or romance novels) she’s unlikely to be recognized on the street by her face alone.

Has two cats, Miss Kitty Fantastico (a reference to Tara and Willow’s cat in Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Chewie (a reference to Carol Danvers’s cat in the Marvel comics, and not said cat’s namesake Chewbacca)

[ao3feed-larry]

Dear Haz

by JustMeAndLife (CaramelCreamCoffee)

When US Army Solider, Harry comes home for the summer before re-enlisting , the last thing he expected was to fall for someone.

Much less a gorgeous, sassy lad from Doncaster , Louis , who is spending his summer at his family's beach home... not too far from Harry's dads. The two enter a whirlwind romance... but when Harry leaves for a year, the only thing left holding them together is their handwritten letters...

(Disclaimer) Based off of the movie/book Dear John!!

Words: 1982, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: One Direction (Band)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death

Categories: Multi

Characters: Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Zayn Malik, Lottie Tomlinson, Daisy Tomlinson, Phoebe Tomlinson, Félicité Tomlinson, Dan Deakin, Jay Deakin, Ernest Deakin, Doris Deakin, desmond styles, Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall, Ashton Irwin, James Corden, Orignial Characters, Oli Wright

Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik/Perrie Edwards, Liam Payne/Lennon Stella, Niall Horan/Ashton Irwin, Niall Horan/Jade Thirlwall, Louis Tomlinson/ Oli Wright

Additional Tags: Romance, Sad, AU, Army AU, Soldier Harry, break-up, Love, happiness, Violence, Injury, Character Death, Letters, Family, Strength, Alternate Universe, Young Louis, Older Harry, larry stylinson - Freeform

via AO3 works tagged 'Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson' https://ift.tt/2WZvJWE

[lodelss]

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,500 words)

Isolation is horny as fuck. Not for everyone, obviously, but if you’re single and you live alone. . . I mean, I have never thought this much about sex in my life. Not even in high school. Although this does kind of feel like high school: snacking, jerking off, sort-of working, snacking, jerking off. Or maybe we’re regressing to a point in history when we were exclusively driven by our basest instincts: horny, hungry, trying not to die. In between we binge-stream. And through this fogged up lockdown-induced lens, the horniness of what we are watching is compounded by our own.

Normal People is the big one. The Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s critically felated millennial romance is softcore for hipsters: an outcast girl and a sensitive jock, both of them equally brilliant (of course), having some messy, bildungsroman-style sex over the years (to Imogen Heap, in Malick-ian light) like that’s all the world is. The sex is hot, but everything that happens right before it is hotter. All that staring, all that sizzle — by the time they actually do it, it’s almost an afterthought. Almost. The same goes for Run, the HBO series by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creative partner, Vicky Jones, about two ex-lovers fleeing their lives to the kind of loin-tingling wit that got us through the Hays Code. Here, once again, the foreplay is the sex. Then there’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the French period piece in which two women, with their eyes alone, strip, fuck, and share a cigarette before they physically do all three.

This is the kind of hot — leg-crossing, side-eying — where you don’t have to say it out loud, you feel it. The kind of hot spun by women from Europe, where sex doesn’t have the same moral implications it does in America. But more than that, it’s a hotness related to a wider move toward women reclaiming their own stories, their own sex. We all know by now that sex under the male gaze tends to objectify women — hotness, in the hands of men, is predominantly naked women getting fucked. Permission is neither here nor there. Under the female gaze, sure, naked women get fucked too, but there’s also enthusiastic consent. Great sex is not orgasm upon orgasm so much as agreement upon agreement, through looks and gestures and breaths and talk — the personification of ongoing accord, no permission slips or questions necessary. The point being that sex isn’t sexy unless it’s between people, not just their bodies; people who change their minds as well as their positions. In isolation, where you have nothing to do but wait for it, it only makes you hotter to watch not only the physical restraint and psychological tease, but every move, every look, every word that says “Yes!” before it’s screamed aloud.

* * *

I have no idea where or when I first heard the term “edging,” but I think it was a couple of years ago. I recall being told that it came from teenagers who used it to describe holding off orgasm deliberately to make it that much stronger in the end, a kind of pleasure binge that seemed to fit that generation (if everything sucks, might as well overdose on suckage). Which is not to say that climax control is new; it goes back to Tantric and Taoist traditions, where it’s less about splooging as hard as you can and more about a kind of physical transcendence. But the idea of mindful sex, of really feeling everything — together — instead of just trying to get yourself off as quickly as possible, didn’t really hit conservative America until the sixties. Masters of Sex reintroduced us to William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the couple responsible for the huge human sexuality study published in 1966 that identified the four-stage sex response: excitement (arousal), plateau (pre-orgasm), orgasm, resolution (post-orgasm). Of course, it turned out that cycle was generally reserved for men, while women across the country were left dissatisfied (and often pregnant). But the sixties and seventies brought heightened awareness of women’s rights along with heightened awareness of sexuality.

Enter edging. “Understanding this new kind of orgasm can be especially difficult for men. When it comes to pleasure, women are the first in line.” This comes from the worryingly titled Extended Massive Orgasm by Vera and Steve Bodansky, a 2002 addition to a slew of slow masturbation and one-hour-orgasm how-to books, all of which fall under the rubric of edging. The Bodanskys emphasize being fully present — fully engaged with yourself and your partner — and aware that the mechanics of sex are not the sole source of pleasure. A human being has a psychological as well as a physical self, and sex also has both elements; eye contact, verbalizing, variations in touch, and breathing responsively aren’t requirements for ejaculation, but they definitely make it more agreeable. Which is why the Bodansky book, somewhat patronizingly, addresses men the way it does. Because sex has been generally dictated by men, it has generally served them and them alone. Putting women first doesn’t mean men are neglected, it means women aren’t.

But Hollywood is still predominantly run by men and men predominantly run it the old way when it comes to heat (erotic thrillers were a brief light at the end of the tunnel, but then the tunnel just kept going). Think of Game of Thrones or anything on Starz: what passes for hot, once again, is conventionally beautiful women with no clothes on being bent over. The physical part may be there, but the psychological part, not to mention the consent, is not. Which is why reality series like Too Hot to Handle (contestants win by not touching) and Love Is Blind (contestants get together before seeing each other) are not particularly orgasmic, though they are positioned as the perfect pandemic watch. The payoff of edging requires real chemistry and it helps to have some real stakes thrown in.

Which is not to say it can’t be fictional. There are nine sex scenes in Normal People. Actually, there are more than nine, but there are nine between the two superficially polar-opposite teens we follow from high school to college. (There are only 12 episodes). Try finding a story about Normal People that doesn’t mention its horniness. You can’t; horniness defines it. Obviously, being particularly susceptible in lockdown to anything related to the possibility of sex has affected how we respond to it, but this is also the kind of hotness that transcends pandemics. Let me explain, with Connell and his little chain.

Connell (Paul Mescal) isn’t just hot because he looks like an animated version of Michelangelo’s David, he’s hot because he looks like an animated version of Michelangelo’s David and is shy. He is hot because he is entirely uncomfortable in his own skin despite inhabiting skin in which he should be entirely comfortable — he is a super-smart, super-handsome, super-athletic white man; how much better can he have it? Connell is hot because despite all of that, he can’t stop staring at the guileless-verging-on-neurodivergent-poor-man’s-Anne-Hathaway Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) when Marcia Brady (that’s not her name, but does she ever look like her) can’t stop staring at him. He is hot because he is charmed as fuck when Marianne, during their second kiss, blurts out the “guy” question: “Now can we take our clothes off?” He is hot because he gives Marianne an out during her first time. He is hot because he takes Marianne’s advice about his future. He is hot because he is inconsolable when he realizes how badly he has treated her by keeping them secret. Connell is hot because as much as Marianne is at his mercy, he is even more at hers.

And the sex scenes in Normal People are hot because the director realizes all of this — that the hotness is as much in everyone’s heads as it is in their bodies. “In some movies, they treat sex scenes like they treat car chases or gun fights, like an opportunity to try a different form of filmmaking,” Lenny Abrahamson told the Irish magazine Hot Press. “How I shot, if we were moving from dialogue to sex, there’s no point where we enter a different dimension, it’s just a continuation of their interaction.” The way the show is filmed, the confined settings, the proximity of the camera to their faces, their eyes — all of it magnifies the intimacy. But it isn’t just in the shooting, it’s also in the choreography. With the help of intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, every frisson between Connell and Marianne — from every long gaze and every small touch to all that heavy breathing in flagrante — coalesces into an intoxicating six-hour expression of the fluid physical connection between two characters whose psychological connection (whose verbal agreement, even) came first. It’s like nothing else exists but them. These two are entirely in it with each other.

While Run is less about what’s in their heads than what’s coming out of their mouths, its not-so-brief encounter on a train has a similarly close-quartered intimacy. The HBO series stars Merritt Wever as Ruby, a wife and mom of two, and Domhnall Gleeson as Billy, a Jordan Peterson type. The two exes reunite after 15 years on a cross-country trip to escape their lives. She has her family to lose, he has his book deal. The stakes are slightly uneven, but their banter is not: their edgeplay is their wordplay. Like Normal People, the camera stays close to the two lovers who are already confined in their seats (and, later, “roomette”) shoulder to shoulder, face to face, almost mouth to mouth. Just like we do, they become so hot off each other’s proximity that they are forced to take breaks to secretly masturbate in the bathroom. Both of them. Separately.

But here again, as in Normal People, the woman ultimately has all the power. With a family back home, this is Ruby’s encounter to take or leave, not Billy’s. It is her thirst that fuels the ride, not his. “I turned up to have sex,” she says. And later, “I want to fuck you… now.” These exclamations are all the more pregnant for the person saying them — Wever herself has admitted she did not see herself as a lead in a rom-com (Gleeson had already done About Time). And yet here she is not only in one, but subverting it. A man admitting he wants to fuck a woman who might not want to fuck him isn’t transgressive, it’s a cliché. But a woman admitting she wants to fuck a man (more conventionally attractive than she is, more successful, more single) who might reject her? That’s hot. So will he say yes? Do we even need him to anymore? “Holding back on the sex was always something we knew we had to do,” creator Vicky Jones told Refinery29. “Because it’s not really a will-they-won’t-they, since they do. It’s, will they have sex and how?” But with foreplay this good, the sex can’t help but be an anti-climax.

That upending convention, that the woman dominates really, suggests why the queen of edging is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a queer love story by a queer filmmaker (Céline Sciamma) about a painter named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). There is no dilution here by the well-trod tropes of male sexuality, there is only a pair of  women drowning in each other. The female gaze turns in on itself as Marianne’s view of Héloïse becomes ours. The film’s title summons the slow burn of their relationship, with every new plateau advancing so achingly slowly — Marianne even seeks consent before repositioning Héloïse’s arm as she sits for her, which is the first time they touch — that every act, when it comes, is that much more extreme, the whole thing mimicking that aforementioned menacing “massive extended orgasm.” It takes 13 minutes for the heroines to meet, despite being in the same house, and even then, one of them is only introduced from behind in a black head-to-toe cloak, a funereal tease. This is no meet-cute; it’s the slowest reveal ever, with her cloak fluttering in the breeze until a mess of blond strands escape, which almost make you gasp despite yourself, before the whole hood falls to expose the back of a blond head. And then, suddenly, the faceless woman is running to her death, we think, until she stops right at the edge of a cliff and, abruptly, turns, her flushed face, her great blue eyes, downplaying the grand mort to a petit mort. “I’ve dreamt of that for years,” Héloïse says breathlessly, post-coitally. A pure distillation of the female apex, no wonder the French, their sexual legacy defined by males, thought the film wasn’t erotic enough.

* * *

The hottest scene in Normal People, ergo the hottest scene of my isolation, doesn’t actually include an orgasm. And it, fittingly, takes a while, not arriving until the near the end of the second half of the series, which was directed by Hettie Macdonald. Now in college, no longer dating, Connell and Marianne are sort-of-not-really watching some sports game in Connell’s hot, cramped childhood room in a haze of hormones. Everything is sweating. She stares at him. He stares at the screen. She pretends to sleep. He gets up. “Want some ice cream?” He goes, she stays. He returns. It’s not ice cream, it’s penis-shaped rocket popsicles. And the room is dripping in sex. When Marianne stretches out her bare feet to his end of the bed, I squeak. She says she wants him to kiss her. He says he does too — the pain on his face! — but they always end badly and he doesn’t want to lose her friendship. Fuck. She gets up to leave, telling him not to drop her off at home ‘cause he’ll miss the rest of the match. Olive branch: “I forgot there was a match on, to be honest.” Game on.

Even though the sex is ultimately abandoned (I won’t spoil it), it doesn’t matter. This prelude is more satisfying than 99 percent of the orgasms I’ve ever watched. Despite all the sexual tension, the woman still ultimately commands the room. Theirs and ours. In that Hot Press interview, director Lenny Abrahamson, who shot the first six episodes, laughed perversely about the show coming out during a worldwide pandemic. “You start to miss the human touch, people’s skin — and that is all over the show,” he said. “God help everybody!” But it wasn’t Abrahamson behind the episode I’m talking about, it was a woman. And while it’s true that thirst can hurt, it can also take the edge off, as that scene choreographed by three women — conceived of by Rooney, directed by Macdonald, managed by O’Brien — proves. No one finished, but it wasn’t about that. Because all the elements were there, all that want and all that permission. And that was enough for me, if for no one else. And what was that line again? “When it comes to pleasure, women are the first in line.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

[frogbutane57-blog]

Best TV of 2019 so far

Back to Life

Daisy Haggard’s downbeat gem took on a tough topic – a woman’s return to her home town after a stretch behind bars – and turned it into a meditation on grief, regret and the passing of time, though with enough gags to keep things zipping along.

What we said: A few episodes into Back to Life, I felt like pushing it away in protest. “No, no!” I cried inwardly. “It’s too much! It’s too good!” Read the full review

Barry

In its second season, this black comedy about a hitman who catches the acting bug took its story into darker territory, with Barry’s attempts to extricate himself from his past life only dragging him further into oblivion. Things aren’t going to end well.

What we said: Though it’s a comedy rather than a thriller, Barry replicates much of what made Breaking Bad irresistible. Read more

Broad City

After five virtually flawless sitcom seasons, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s millennial kweens went out in the same way they came in: with gross-out gags, madcap surrealism and one of the greatest on-screen friendships in TV history.

What we said: This season has given Abbi and Ilana the best possible send-off. It has been joyful, silly and wild, and while it feels like the perfect and necessary time to wrap up their adventures, it is poignant that they’ve done so by reminding you just how good those can be. Read more

A fitting, shocking end ... Catastrophe. Photograph: Channel 4

Catastrophe

Another comedy that went out on a high, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s tale of floundering parents managed to deliver more home truths about the family unit, pay fond tribute to late guest star Carrie Fisher – and offer up one of the most shocking endings in recent TV history.

What we said: From first to last, Catastrophe has been an unremitting triumph. Read the full review

Chernobyl

Already sitting atop IMDb’s top 250 TV shows list before the final episode has even aired, Sky and HBO’s restaging of the Soviet nuclear disaster captures the ineptitude, corruption and horror at its core.

What we said: Chernobyl is a disaster movie, a spy movie, a horror movie, a political thriller, and a human drama, and it spins each plate expertly. The terror is unflinching and explicit, and its images of burned bodies collapsing into putrid decay are impossible to forget. Yet it never feels shocking for the sake of it, only as haunting and horrible as its subject matter demands. Read more

Finally ... David Attenborough lays bare our greatest threat in Climate Change: The Facts. Photograph: BBC/Polly Alderton

Climate Change: The Facts

After years spent hinting at the damage done to our planet by the climate crisis , David Attenborough finally laid out the threat in all its magnitude, in a documentary that may just have turned sceptics into believers.

What we said: This is a rousing call to arms. It is an alarm clock set at a horrifying volume. Read the full review

Dead Pixels

E4’s comedy accurately captured the loneliness and mundanity, but also the sense of community, that comes with picking up a controller. All that, and it was as addictive as an all-night Fifa session to boot.

What we said: This wickedly entertaining new sitcom may have been inspired by the massive success of online games like World of Warcraft but, thankfully, you are not required to know your Azeroth from your elbow to enjoy it. Read more

Derry Girls

One of last year’s surprise hits, Lisa McGee’s Northern Irish comedy didn’t let things slip in its second season, with its quartet still finding teenage kicks in the midst of the Troubles. The scene in which teens from both sides of the sectarian divide unleashed a barrage of stereotypes about each other (“Protestants hate ABBA!”) is among the year’s funniest.

What we said: Derry Girls’ magic remains intact. The evocation of the 90s is as lightly done as ever (Elizabeth Hurley is fleetingly referenced – “She’s a total ride, but she paperclips her frocks together”) and the Troubled setting never overwhelms but simply throws into relief the ordinariness of the girls’ lives in the middle of extraordinary depths of conflict. Read the full review

Don’t Forget the Driver

Bleak comedy … Toby Jones in Don’t Forget the Driver Photograph: BBC/Sister Pictures

Pulling off a state-of-the-Brexit-nation series looked a tall order, but Toby Jones’s understated comedy-drama was taller, finding humour and pathos in its tale of a coach driver who discovers a refugee hiding in his wheel arch and a body washed up on the beach.

What we said: If it is a comedy, it is one with the bleakest tragedy at its heart. But whatever label you put on it, it is a fine, fine piece of work. Read the full review

Fleabag

Back for its second (and, as it turned out, final) outing, Fleabag added a hot priest into the already heady mix of biting wit and family dysfunction – and it built to a heart-rending ending with a wedding, a mad dash to the airport … and a fox. Unforgettable.

What we said: Series two raised the bar. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s risks were so impressive all one could do was shake one’s head in appreciation. Read the full review

Game of Thrones

Unquestionably the TV event of the year ... Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO

Did the gargantuan fantasy drama stick the landing in its final season? That’s an argument for the comments section, but both in the scale of its six episodes, and the fevered discussion they prompted, it was unquestionably the TV event of the year.

What we said: The ending was true to the series’ overall subject – war, and the pity of war – and, after doing a lot of wrong to several protagonists, it did right by those left standing. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. Overall, I think, it won. Read the full review

Gentleman Jack

Sally Wainwright travelled back in time for her latest piece of thrillingly human Yorkshire drama, with this real life tale of Anne Lister. Suranne Jones has received rave reviews for her portrayal of the 19th-century industrialist and diarist, who developed a code to hide her lesbianism.

What we said: It’s Regency Fleabag! Because the heroine occasionally breaks the fourth wall and exteriorises her inner monologue. But it’s set in Halifax in 1832, so it could be Northern Jane Austen. Then again, it’s about Anne Lister, who has been dubbed the first modern lesbian, so maybe it’s Queer Brontë ... You can afford to have a little fun with Gentleman Jack; Sally Wainwright clearly has. Read the full review

Ghosts

The Horrible Histories team offered up more unashamedly silly comedy with this spirited sitcom about a group of ghouls going to war with the new owners of a crumbling mansion.

What we said: In making us giggle at the supernatural, Ghosts is very British. But it is American in the sense of having a gag-to-airtime ratio much higher than British sitcoms normally manage these days. Read the full review

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson

This deliriously absurd sketch show from a former Saturday Night Live player was hailed immediately as one of the greatest Netflix shows to date.

What we said: I wolfed down the entire series in one sitting, genuinely incapacitated with laughter. And then I watched it all again. I’m at the stage where I’m cherrypicking sketches now, but I’ve seen my favourites six or seven times. I’m fully obsessed at this point. At its peak, I think I Think You Should Leave might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Read more

Leaving Neverland

A devastating four-hour exposé of alleged child sexual abuse by Michael Jackson. Wade Robson and James Safechuck chillingly and plausibly outlined their accounts of childhood grooming by the man that they, and the whole world, worshipped.

What we said: An astonishing piece of work. Relentlessly spare and unsensationalist, it manages better than any other in its genre not to let its attention wander from the survivors’ testimony. Footage of Jackson is confined almost wholly to that of him with the boys themselves on stage, private calls between them and family snaps. He is never allowed to overwhelm the story. Read the full review

Line of Duty

Complex … Martin Compston and Stephen Graham in Line of Duty. Photograph: BBC/World Productions

Jed Mercurio’s police corruption masterpiece returned for a fifth outing after a two-year wait, bringing with it a stunningly complex performance from Stephen Graham, more urgent exits required … and heartstopping, jaw-dropping action to the last.

What we said: As ever, nothing is wasted; not a scene, not a line, not a beat. It fits together flawlessly – you can imagine Mercurio sitting like a watchmaker at his table with the parts spread before him and fitting the loupe to his eye before assembling the whole thing and listening for its perfectly regulated tick. Read the full review

Mum

Stefan Golaszewski’s sitcom tour de force ended on a heartwarming high. Over three lovely series, Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan as Cathy and Michael gave us the gift of a quietly epic romance that will echo down the ages – and kept the tears in our eyes.

What we said: Mum might have looked like it was just a sitcom, but it had something beautiful to say about love and loss. It’s said it. Read the full review

Pose

Assembling the largest collection of trans actors in televisual history, Ryan Murphy’s big-hearted drama about the voguing scene in 1980s New York had style, grace, swagger and sass for days. What’s not to love?

What we said: Razzle-dazzle showmanship isn’t Pose’s only source of infectious joy. Watching the slow, still-unfolding process of these characters becoming more and more their true selves is as exhilarating as the opening bars of Cheryl Lynn’s Got to be Real. Self-actualisation isn’t easy, but it sure is beautiful. Read the full review

Pure

Frank and fearless ... Pure. Photograph: Sophia Spring/Channel 4

Following a young woman with a form of OCD called Pure O, which manifests as constant invasive thoughts about sex, this comedy-drama was among the year’s frankest and most fearless TV.

What we said: The drama and the gags are never sacrificed to worthy exposition, virtue-signalling or finger-wagging, but, at the same time, the series has so evidently been made in good faith that you can surrender to it entirely, never fearing that it will put a foot wrong. Read the full review

Russian Doll

A hipster Groundhog Day, but also so much more, Natasha Lyonne’s comedy about a thirtysomething trapped in a time loop of death and rebirth proved a truly mind-bending proposition.

What we said: Russian Doll is an acquired taste. But do persist: there is such a fine, idiosyncratic, impressive show nested within. Read the full review

Sex Education

Gillian Anderson starred as Jean, a sex therapist whose son Otis (Asa Butterfield) – though too anxious to masturbate himself – sets up a sex advice service at school. A punchy, horny comedy, with the added bonus of the fantastic Ncuti Gatwa as Otis’s best friend Eric. Worth watching for his heroic prom outfit alone.

What we said: Endlessly and seemingly effortlessly funny, in a naturalistic way that doesn’t have you listening for the hooves of the next gag thundering down a well-worn track but, like Catastrophe, catches you almost unawares and makes you bark with laughter. Read the full review

The Last Survivors

Sam Dresner, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Frank Bright and Susan Pollack ... The Last Survivors. Composite: BBC/Minnow Films Ltd

Arthur Cary’s thoughtful, wonderful and always dignified 90-minute documentary heard the stories of some of the last living people who survived concentration camps as children. A very important work indeed.

What we said: For an hour and a half, I was crying, especially when Cary followed three generations of Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz, knowing all the time that tears are not enough. Nor guilt. Read the full review

The Other Two

How would you react if you could barely get cast as Man Who Smells Fart in an advert while your kid brother became a Bieber-esque teen hearthrob overnight? That’s the premise of this brilliant satire, which skewers our pop-culture-obsessed society spectacularly.

What we said: It has heart, charm, steel, belly laughs and a gimlet eye. Get on it. Read the full review

The Victim

John Hannah and Kelly Macdonald starred in an intelligent drama about a vigilante attack on a potential child killer that managed to ask ever more challenging questions as its episodes rolled on.

What we said: It is a drama that resonates with its time by asking what constitutes a victim and how much leeway we allow in bestowing that status. Do they have to be perfect? How sure do we have to be? And what happens when the perpetrator becomes a victim too, of a different kind? Read the full review

The Virtues

Shane Meadows reunited with This is England star Stephen Graham for an unflinching drama about a troubled dad attempting to reunite with his long-lost sister and process childhood sexual abuse.

What we said: Unspoken pain infuses every scene, every gesture and expression from Stephen Graham and in doing so lays the foundations to do justice to the suffering of victims everywhere. Read the full review

The Yorkshire Ripper Files

Liza Williams’s three-part documentary revisited one of the biggest – and longest – murder manhunts in British history, taking us back to a time so different it seemed almost foreign.

What we said: At its best, Williams’ series – with its mixture of archive footage and new interviews – is a social document. The hindsight it offers is not primarily about the mishandling of the investigation, but of the grim tone of the times. Read the full review

This Time With Alan Partridge

Appalling company ... This Time With Alan Partridge. Photograph: Colin Hutton/BBC/Baby Cow

The excruciating monkey tennis-pitcher went back to the BBC for a One Show-style magazine programme. Inevitably – and hilariously for viewers – it wasn’t the smoothest of returns.

What we said: We get the heroes we deserve, and as you finish writhing in agony and lie limp from laughter, hatred, panic, despair or in awe at the end of another half-hour in his appalling company, you can only reflect that if Brexit means Alan then the whole business just got more complicated still. Read the full review

Veep

A last hurrah for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s mendacious yet incompetent vice-president, in a political satire that was perfectly attuned for these most buffoonish of times.

What we said: Louis-Dreyfus has won a record six Emmy awards for her role as Selina Meyer, and, frankly, it’s no wonder. She is magnificent, brittle and furiously amoral. In this seventh and final season of Veep, it appears to be getting out while it still has a hope in hell of making its fictional world look more comedic than the real one. Read the full review

When They See Us

Almost unbearably harrowing ... When They See Us. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix

Ava DuVernay’s staggering miniseries about the Central Park Five showed how a group of young boys came to be falsely convicted for raping a young white woman in 1989. It is unbearably harrowing to watch the boys, as young as 13, get violently coerced by police into giving confessions.

What we said: The performances are uniformly astonishing – especially from the central five, Asante Blackk, Caleel Harris, Ethan Herisse, Marquis Rodriguez and Jharrel Jerome, most of whom are just a few years older than the teens they are playing. They capture the innocence, in all senses, of children, and the permanence of its loss. It feels like a great privilege to see them. Read the full review

Years and Years

Russell T Davies’s hugely ambitious drama followed a family through the next 15 years of British life, taking in the migrant crisis, terrifying technological innovations and Trump’s increasingly fraught face-off with China.

What we said: For a series that compresses 15 years into six hours, it seems to pass in the blink of an eye thanks to Russell T Davies’s trademark humour, compassion and the kinetic energy with which he infuses every project. We do not deserve Davies, but thank God he’s here. Read the full review

100 Vaginas

Following her projects about breasts and penises, artist Laura Dodsworth photographed a range of women’s vulvas, then showed the sitters their vaginal portraits and interviewed them for their responses. The result? Intimate, empowering television, unlike anything that has ever aired before.

What we said: A gently but relentlessly radical documentary. It’s not until you see a full set of female genitals filling your screen that you realise how little you see anything of or about them in wider culture. Read the full review

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/03/best-tv-of-2019-so-far

[lodelss]

On the Hotness of Not Getting Any

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,500 words)

Isolation is horny as fuck. Not for everyone, obviously, but if you’re single and you live alone. . . I mean, I have never thought this much about sex in my life. Not even in high school. Although this does kind of feel like high school: snacking, jerking off, sort-of working, snacking, jerking off. Or maybe we’re regressing to a point in history when we were exclusively driven by our basest instincts: horny, hungry, trying not to die. In between we binge-stream. And through this fogged up lockdown-induced lens, the horniness of what we are watching is compounded by our own.

Normal People is the big one. The Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney’s critically felated millennial romance is softcore for hipsters: an outcast girl and a sensitive jock, both of them equally brilliant (of course), having some messy, bildungsroman-style sex over the years (to Imogen Heap, in Malick-ian light) like that’s all the world is. The sex is hot, but everything that happens right before it is hotter. All that staring, all that sizzle — by the time they actually do it, it’s almost an afterthought. Almost. The same goes for Run, the HBO series by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s creative partner, Vicky Jones, about two ex-lovers fleeing their lives to the kind of loin-tingling wit that got us through the Hays Code. Here, once again, the foreplay is the sex. Then there’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the French period piece in which two women, with their eyes alone, strip, fuck, and share a cigarette before they physically do all three.

This is the kind of hot — leg-crossing, side-eying — where you don’t have to say it out loud, you feel it. The kind of hot spun by women from Europe, where sex doesn’t have the same moral implications it does in America. But more than that, it’s a hotness related to a wider move toward women reclaiming their own stories, their own sex. We all know by now that sex under the male gaze tends to objectify women — hotness, in the hands of men, is predominantly naked women getting fucked. Permission is neither here nor there. Under the female gaze, sure, naked women get fucked too, but there’s also enthusiastic consent. Great sex is not orgasm upon orgasm so much as agreement upon agreement, through looks and gestures and breaths and talk — the personification of ongoing accord, no permission slips or questions necessary. The point being that sex isn’t sexy unless it’s between people, not just their bodies; people who change their minds as well as their positions. In isolation, where you have nothing to do but wait for it, it only makes you hotter to watch not only the physical restraint and psychological tease, but every move, every look, every word that says “Yes!” before it’s screamed aloud.

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I have no idea where or when I first heard the term “edging,” but I think it was a couple of years ago. I recall being told that it came from teenagers who used it to describe holding off orgasm deliberately to make it that much stronger in the end, a kind of pleasure binge that seemed to fit that generation (if everything sucks, might as well overdose on suckage). Which is not to say that climax control is new; it goes back to Tantric and Taoist traditions, where it’s less about splooging as hard as you can and more about a kind of physical transcendence. But the idea of mindful sex, of really feeling everything — together — instead of just trying to get yourself off as quickly as possible, didn’t really hit conservative America until the sixties. Masters of Sex reintroduced us to William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the couple responsible for the huge human sexuality study published in 1966 that identified the four-stage sex response: excitement (arousal), plateau (pre-orgasm), orgasm, resolution (post-orgasm). Of course, it turned out that cycle was generally reserved for men, while women across the country were left dissatisfied (and often pregnant). But the sixties and seventies brought heightened awareness of women’s rights along with heightened awareness of sexuality.

Enter edging. “Understanding this new kind of orgasm can be especially difficult for men. When it comes to pleasure, women are the first in line.” This comes from the worryingly titled Extended Massive Orgasm by Vera and Steve Bodansky, a 2002 addition to a slew of slow masturbation and one-hour-orgasm how-to books, all of which fall under the rubric of edging. The Bodanskys emphasize being fully present — fully engaged with yourself and your partner — and aware that the mechanics of sex are not the sole source of pleasure. A human being has a psychological as well as a physical self, and sex also has both elements; eye contact, verbalizing, variations in touch, and breathing responsively aren’t requirements for ejaculation, but they definitely make it more agreeable. Which is why the Bodansky book, somewhat patronizingly, addresses men the way it does. Because sex has been generally dictated by men, it has generally served them and them alone. Putting women first doesn’t mean men are neglected, it means women aren’t.

But Hollywood is still predominantly run by men and men predominantly run it the old way when it comes to heat (erotic thrillers were a brief light at the end of the tunnel, but then the tunnel just kept going). Think of Game of Thrones or anything on Starz: what passes for hot, once again, is conventionally beautiful women with no clothes on being bent over. The physical part may be there, but the psychological part, not to mention the consent, is not. Which is why reality series like Too Hot to Handle (contestants win by not touching) and Love Is Blind (contestants get together before seeing each other) are not particularly orgasmic, though they are positioned as the perfect pandemic watch. The payoff of edging requires real chemistry and it helps to have some real stakes thrown in.

Which is not to say it can’t be fictional. There are nine sex scenes in Normal People. Actually, there are more than nine, but there are nine between the two superficially polar-opposite teens we follow from high school to college. (There are only 12 episodes). Try finding a story about Normal People that doesn’t mention its horniness. You can’t; horniness defines it. Obviously, being particularly susceptible in lockdown to anything related to the possibility of sex has affected how we respond to it, but this is also the kind of hotness that transcends pandemics. Let me explain, with Connell and his little chain.

Connell (Paul Mescal) isn’t just hot because he looks like an animated version of Michelangelo’s David, he’s hot because he looks like an animated version of Michelangelo’s David and is shy. He is hot because he is entirely uncomfortable in his own skin despite inhabiting skin in which he should be entirely comfortable — he is a super-smart, super-handsome, super-athletic white man; how much better can he have it? Connell is hot because despite all of that, he can’t stop staring at the guileless-verging-on-neurodivergent-poor-man’s-Anne-Hathaway Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) when Marcia Brady (that’s not her name, but does she ever look like her) can’t stop staring at him. He is hot because he is charmed as fuck when Marianne, during their second kiss, blurts out the “guy” question: “Now can we take our clothes off?” He is hot because he gives Marianne an out during her first time. He is hot because he takes Marianne’s advice about his future. He is hot because he is inconsolable when he realizes how badly he has treated her by keeping them secret. Connell is hot because as much as Marianne is at his mercy, he is even more at hers.

And the sex scenes in Normal People are hot because the director realizes all of this — that the hotness is as much in everyone’s heads as it is in their bodies. “In some movies, they treat sex scenes like they treat car chases or gun fights, like an opportunity to try a different form of filmmaking,” Lenny Abrahamson told the Irish magazine Hot Press. “How I shot, if we were moving from dialogue to sex, there’s no point where we enter a different dimension, it’s just a continuation of their interaction.” The way the show is filmed, the confined settings, the proximity of the camera to their faces, their eyes — all of it magnifies the intimacy. But it isn’t just in the shooting, it’s also in the choreography. With the help of intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, every frisson between Connell and Marianne — from every long gaze and every small touch to all that heavy breathing in flagrante — coalesces into an intoxicating six-hour expression of the fluid physical connection between two characters whose psychological connection (whose verbal agreement, even) came first. It’s like nothing else exists but them. These two are entirely in it with each other.

While Run is less about what’s in their heads than what’s coming out of their mouths, its not-so-brief encounter on a train has a similarly close-quartered intimacy. The HBO series stars Merritt Wever as Ruby, a wife and mom of two, and Domhnall Gleeson as Billy, a Jordan Peterson type. The two exes reunite after 15 years on a cross-country trip to escape their lives. She has her family to lose, he has his book deal. The stakes are slightly uneven, but their banter is not: their edgeplay is their wordplay. Like Normal People, the camera stays close to the two lovers who are already confined in their seats (and, later, “roomette”) shoulder to shoulder, face to face, almost mouth to mouth. Just like we do, they become so hot off each other’s proximity that they are forced to take breaks to secretly masturbate in the bathroom. Both of them. Separately.

But here again, as in Normal People, the woman ultimately has all the power. With a family back home, this is Ruby’s encounter to take or leave, not Billy’s. It is her thirst that fuels the ride, not his. “I turned up to have sex,” she says. And later, “I want to fuck you… now.” These exclamations are all the more pregnant for the person saying them — Wever herself has admitted she did not see herself as a lead in a rom-com (Gleeson had already done About Time). And yet here she is not only in one, but subverting it. A man admitting he wants to fuck a woman who might not want to fuck him isn’t transgressive, it’s a cliché. But a woman admitting she wants to fuck a man (more conventionally attractive than she is, more successful, more single) who might reject her? That’s hot. So will he say yes? Do we even need him to anymore? “Holding back on the sex was always something we knew we had to do,” creator Vicky Jones told Refinery29. “Because it’s not really a will-they-won’t-they, since they do. It’s, will they have sex and how?” But with foreplay this good, the sex can’t help but be an anti-climax.

That upending convention, that the woman dominates really, suggests why the queen of edging is Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a queer love story by a queer filmmaker (Céline Sciamma) about a painter named Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). There is no dilution here by the well-trod tropes of male sexuality, there is only a pair of  women drowning in each other. The female gaze turns in on itself as Marianne’s view of Héloïse becomes ours. The film’s title summons the slow burn of their relationship, with every new plateau advancing so achingly slowly — Marianne even seeks consent before repositioning Héloïse’s arm as she sits for her, which is the first time they touch — that every act, when it comes, is that much more extreme, the whole thing mimicking that aforementioned menacing “massive extended orgasm.” It takes 13 minutes for the heroines to meet, despite being in the same house, and even then, one of them is only introduced from behind in a black head-to-toe cloak, a funereal tease. This is no meet-cute; it’s the slowest reveal ever, with her cloak fluttering in the breeze until a mess of blond strands escape, which almost make you gasp despite yourself, before the whole hood falls to expose the back of a blond head. And then, suddenly, the faceless woman is running to her death, we think, until she stops right at the edge of a cliff and, abruptly, turns, her flushed face, her great blue eyes, downplaying the grand mort to a petit mort. “I’ve dreamt of that for years,” Héloïse says breathlessly, post-coitally. A pure distillation of the female apex, no wonder the French, their sexual legacy defined by males, thought the film wasn’t erotic enough.

* * *

The hottest scene in Normal People, ergo the hottest scene of my isolation, doesn’t actually include an orgasm. And it, fittingly, takes a while, not arriving until the near the end of the second half of the series, which was directed by Hettie Macdonald. Now in college, no longer dating, Connell and Marianne are sort-of-not-really watching some sports game in Connell’s hot, cramped childhood room in a haze of hormones. Everything is sweating. She stares at him. He stares at the screen. She pretends to sleep. He gets up. “Want some ice cream?” He goes, she stays. He returns. It’s not ice cream, it’s penis-shaped rocket popsicles. And the room is dripping in sex. When Marianne stretches out her bare feet to his end of the bed, I squeak. She says she wants him to kiss her. He says he does too — the pain on his face! — but they always end badly and he doesn’t want to lose her friendship. Fuck. She gets up to leave, telling him not to drop her off at home ‘cause he’ll miss the rest of the match. Olive branch: “I forgot there was a match on, to be honest.” Game on.

Even though the sex is ultimately abandoned (I won’t spoil it), it doesn’t matter. This prelude is more satisfying than 99 percent of the orgasms I’ve ever watched. Despite all the sexual tension, the woman still ultimately commands the room. Theirs and ours. In that Hot Press interview, director Lenny Abrahamson, who shot the first six episodes, laughed perversely about the show coming out during a worldwide pandemic. “You start to miss the human touch, people’s skin — and that is all over the show,” he said. “God help everybody!” But it wasn’t Abrahamson behind the episode I’m talking about, it was a woman. And while it’s true that thirst can hurt, it can also take the edge off, as that scene choreographed by three women — conceived of by Rooney, directed by Macdonald, managed by O’Brien — proves. No one finished, but it wasn’t about that. Because all the elements were there, all that want and all that permission. And that was enough for me, if for no one else. And what was that line again? “When it comes to pleasure, women are the first in line.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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