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stingykei · 4 years

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Haiba Lev x Reader : Well Played

Word Count: 1.3k

Chapter V : Like before

previously on Chapter IV

"I can't, I have something to do after this. Sorry. Lev can come though."

"I missed you too."

+++

15 minutes until the movie

You were playing ball games with Kuroo. He keeps on teasing about your height cos you barely shoot any points. He was laughing like a banshee, you want to him punch because of that.

When you, Hinata, Akaashi and Lev arrive. Everyone was shocked, he just waved hello to everyone, well except Kuroo. He told you he knew he arrived in Japan yesterday but he forgot to tell everyone about it. He didn't know you'll run to him today though. He didn't mention anything about this yesterday since you just recently decided about this.

You told him it's cool. He was looking at you, reading you like a book. Kuroo can easily read you, like an open book.

The other guys bought snacks together with Akaashi. He doesn't wanna leave you but Kuroo told him to accompany Suga because him alone can't handle Hinata, Kags and Bokuto. Tadashi also came with them. You were left alone with Kenma Kuroo and Lev. Kei went to the bathroom.

Kenma was playing with his phone, Lev sat beside him also looking at Kenma's phone. Kuroo was teasing you because you keep on losing to him, "Kuroo stop teasing me! Just help me win this at least once." You unconsciously pouted. You do that when the teasing gets to you, Lev knew that. That's why he stood up to where he was seated, "I'll help you. Stop looking like that to Kuroo."

You were surprised with Lev, "Looking like what?" You asked confused, Lev looked at Kuroo, Kuroo smirked. Lev clicked his tongue. "Nothing just.. I can help you. I will help you. I won't take no for an answer." He said grabbing the ball when the timer started.

You just played with him, he kept on scoring and you barely shoot any. You really hate losing, despite Lev helping you. You're thinking of this as a competition. "You're just tall." You mumbled which Lev heard.

He chuckled, "And you're small. Did you even grow?" He asked when the game finished. You bubbled up your cheeks. "Whatever Lev. You play with Kuroo." You went to Kenma.

Lev just shrugged, the two of them played together. 'This is fine, as long as Y/N isn't playing with Kuroo anymore.' Lev thought.

The others came back, you were able to play the claw machine with Kenma that earned you a lots of cute toys. Everyone decided to go wait in the room where the movie was playing, you were walking beside Kei with all your plushies.

"Give me that." Kei grab your bag of plushies. "I'll bring this." He was bringing a dino plushie then he put it in the bag with yours. You just let him.

You knew Kei is attractive, but he's really good looking right now. He is very attractive, he's also tall like a model. He's also pretty without his glasses, "Kei, you're very handsome." So told him.

He looked at you through his glasses, "Thanks Y/N." He gave you smile, you thought you weirded him out but good thing you didn't.

You arroved at the place then you all went to the top most seat, everyone liked this place in the cinema.

You sat beside Kei, with Tadashi beside him. Beside you was Kuroo and Lev. In front sat Bokuto, Kaashi, Sugamama, Hinata and Kags.

You sat there, you just arrived but you feel really tired. You sit your back and rested you head in your hand. You were getting dizzy, you want to sleep. You noticed Kuroo stand up but you don't care. You just want to sleep. Someone tapped your shoulders, you just looked at him. You know this gray hair. "Rest in my shoulders." You nodded, your are very tired to fight him.

When your head landed in his shoulders, you remembered his scent. Like a cool breeze, your right hand rested in the arm chair. He gently kissed the top of your head and combing your hair. "I'm sorry." He whispered in your head, your dizziness went away and your eyes are wide open, but you didn't move.

You just watched the view you got, everyone is here again but fewer. Like before, just like this you wanted to stop the time, you just want everything to stop here. You closed your eyes, rembering this scene, you want this to be engrave in your memories.

You inhaled then exhaled. You sat there properly, you thank Lev, then the movie started. You focused on the movie Christopher Robins, it's a good movie.

While being immersed in the movie, Lev held your hand. You wanted to stop him, tell him that everything's over for good, but you didn't. He drew circles in your palm still watching the movie. You bit the insides of your mouth, then you intertwined your hands with his. You two were still watching the movie, but Lev smiled.

When the movie ended, Hinata and Bokuto was crying and there were tears in Kageyama's eyes. "IT WAS SO GOOD! I WANNA WATCH IT AGAIN." Hinata exclaimed. You were walking with them, Lev was behind you. "If you're free next time, why don't we have a sleep over in our place? Like before." Lev offered everyone

"That's a good idea! Ireally like Lev's place."

"Me too."

"Let's set a schedule so we'll know if everyone's free or not."

Everyone agreed, "That's fine sugamama, Dadchi will come next time." You teased Suga. He lightly smack you. "Stop teasing Y/N. Daichi's busy since he's working in a police department now." Daichi called saying he can't come because something urgent happened. You haven't seen Daichi since you came here, and you're looking forward into meeting him.

Everyone went on their way, some didn't bring their car so those who did has to send some people home. Hinata, Kags, and Sugamama didn't bring theirs. So they ride with Bokuto and Akaashi. You were left there standing with Lev.

"Sorry, I'll pick you up when I–"

"I'll send her home. I brought my car." Lev cutted Bokuto off. There was silence but Bokuto just nodded.

When they left, Lev told you to wait for him amd a few minutes later, a Porsche stopped in front of you. "Get in." Lev told you when his window car rolled down.

You opened the back door but its lock. "In the passenger seat." He commanded.

You clicked your tongue, he's very bossy and you hated it. "Asshole." You turned to the other side and opened the door. You put your bag plushies in the back. When you were seated comfortably, you sat on your back and closed your eyes. Your head hurts. Lev started driving, "Where are you staying?" He asked.

"Kaashi's" You answered lazily.

"Why? Are you broke?"

"No, Kaashi said I should just stay with him and Bokuto, so why not. His place is clean."

He was quiet and with that you doze off. You opened your eyes when someone was shaking you. "Hey Y/N wake up, we're here." You looked outside still frowning. It was Bokuto's place.

"Okay." Then you reached for your plushie bag, "Akaashi took it. You need to open your eyes." Lev said, but you were too tired to do it.

"Carry." He sighed. He got off his seat then opened yours, he held your legs then supported you by holding you shoulder like a bride.

"Your arms." He said. You clung your arms around his neck. Then he walked, you're still dizzy trying to keep your eyes open but failed. Again.

"Akaashi, where should I put her?" You heard him askeing Akaashi. Akaashi guided him in his room, he placed you in the bed. When Akaashi left the the room, Lev was staring down at you, he caressed you face, your eyelashes and wiped an invisible tear in your face, then after a while he kissed your forehead.

He whispered 'I love you.' He got up and was about to leave when he heard you replied,

"I love you too."

....

Chapter V : Like Before

A/N: I know everything's happening so fast, but it just them playing with their heart's wants.

#haikyuu #haikyuu imagine #lev haiba #lev imagine #lev x reader #hinata #kageyama #kenma #tsukishima #akaashi #bokuto #kuroo #sugawara #daichi #hinata shouyo #sugawara koushi #kageyama tobio #Bokuto Koutaro #Kenma Kozume

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dontbreakstride · 4 years

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I wanted to write about the Tigger Movie so I wrote about the Tigger Movie.

The Covid-19 pandemic, admittedly, has caused me to revisit a lot of older films and shows that I remember watching when I was much younger. I remember one night in the Xth week of lockdown where me and my friends dug deep and searched for all the old intros of shows we remembered on Youtube, just to get that hit of nostalgia, to retreat to features and shows that reflect more straightforward times of childhood where the weight of the world and responsibility weren’t so heavy, or confusing.

Winnie the Pooh itself is a series that bases itself around the finiteness of childhood. Christopher Robin has to grow up. The theme tune suggests that he has already grown up and all the adventures are viewed with that same nostalgia of one’s own childhood. Previous films of the Winnie the Pooh series muse on the What Comes Next of growing up and leaving your childhood fantasies behind.

I’ve not met a person yet who hasn’t been at least slightly familiar with Winnie the Pooh while growing up, whether that be the original stories by A.A. Milne, the animations and films by Disney, or even through online memes. The one feature that I’d say exemplifies how nostalgic the Winnie the Pooh series is to me is Disney’s The Tigger Movie.

The Tigger Movie never really left me, I think. I remember the banner adverts at my local cinema, where the main cast, clad in Tigger-orange-and-black-stripe liveries, were on springs and would ‘bounce’ with every movement behind concessions, and it was one of the last VHS tapes on my shelf before they were all moved about and ingloriously exiled to boxes under the bed. I remember watching it in Screen 1, where I’d be leaning over the edge of the railings and watch as the songs boomed, and the avalanches fell around the cast.

As you can probably tell from the title, lockdown summoned The Tigger Movie back into my memory, and with the advent of Disney+ and the library of Disney and non-Disney stuff it had, it was on my Watch List very quickly.

THE ONLY ONE

The Tigger Movie is pretty stunning because it centers around the deeper existentialism of the character Tigger. Tigger himself is the archetype for chaotically cheerful and energetic characters, a patron saint of upbeat innocent child-like arrogance, a source of optimism, he is the personification of BOUNCE as a word.

But the movie takes the concept of Tigger’s own theme song and tips it on its head. Tigger brags and boasts that the most wonderful thing about tiggers is that he’s the only one. But… is that truly wonderful? Of course it is, he’s wonderful and unique, but… he is the only one. Tigger’s own uniqueness puts him at odds with his more sedate friends who lack his energy, he’s an outsider. Tigger himself was introduced after the rest of the main cast, and as a result was not namechecked in the Winnie the Pooh theme until 2011’s Winnie the Pooh. Even in spite of being one of the most iconic characters from the series, he is still an outsider.

There is an innate sadness in the film through this investigation. The animation of Tigger through the emotional moments uses every line on his face to push his sadness to extremes especially considering that this is Tigger, the established energy ball of optimism. The movie is set in the liminal space of autumn’s change to winter, matching Tigger’s own orange and white palette and giving the whole film a warm, nostalgic glow, but this also allows the film to fully invest into the inevitability of change, and the loneliness of growing up.

FAMILY AND THE PAINS OF GROWING UP

Tigger waits in the snow for a letter that will never come, he walks through a snowstorm, the juxtaposition of Tigger in his height in the warmth of autumn against his low in the cold of winter makes his loneliness even more palpable.

The film’s theme is about family. Tigger wants to find his family - to find others like himself - but doesn’t recognise that he has a family in his friends. Roo looks up to Tigger and hangs to his every word, and wishes he was his little brother. Kanga and the others all decide to be the family that Tigger doesn’t have by pretending to be tiggers like him, their determination to make Tigger feel better supersedes their own preparations for winter.

But it’s also a coming of age story. Tigger grows up. He is exposed to some harsh truths throughout the narrative. He is the only tigger, his friends deceived him through good intentions, the idealised family tree he dreams of is fantasy, he feels the weight of his world on his shoulders… BUT… he is not alone. His friends all come together to remind him that they are always there for him through his highs and lows.

THE SUPERFICIAL vs. THE REALITY

The story also has a lot to say about superficial expectations vs. reality. In Tigger’s Dream Sequence Musical Sequence ‘Family Tree’, Tigger dips into the fantastical history of his imaginary family, which includes Tigger-themed pastiches on the Birth of Venus and other paintings, the Brady Bunch, Jackson 5, Don Quixote, a Marylin Monroe ‘Tiggerella’ Seven Year Inch-ing into the stratosphere from her billowing dress, and ultra-skinny supermodel Tiggers, replete with the Tigger lantern-jaw. The outlandish nature of this pop culture imagery amplifies how much of a superficial fantasy Tigger’s dream is and shows how out of place it is in the world Tigger inhabits.

The animals of the Hundred Acre Wood all try to come up with a plan to live up to this fantasy. In the song sequence ‘How To Be A Tigger’, the friends spend the first verses musing how to become Tigger to more superficial aspects of Tigger as a character. Upon reflecting, they realise that the reality of being Tigger is not in his stripes, his idiolect of ‘TTFN’s and ‘hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!’s, or his dislike of eating honey, it’s in his ability to fill everyone with happiness with his cheery nature.

Tigger’s family tree itself fits this theme. After a conversation with Owl; Tigger, being naive and innocent, presumes that a family tree is a literal tree for the whole movie, rather than it being the metaphorical branching lineage that family trees actually are. In the final act, Tigger finds a tree striped with snow and determines that it’s his Family Tree, a location he should wait at for his real family.

The stripes on the tree, much like the tigger costumes his friends adorned and the ‘family heirloom’ locket, are superficial. But, in choosing it as his Family Tree, and Tigger using it as their shelter from the avalanche, the literal becomes the metaphor as the tree he chose as his family tree protects his friends, the family that he chose as well. The ‘family heirloom’ locket is also imbued with meaning through Tigger’s own determined attachment to it, and eventual use of it to store a picture of his ACTUAL family. Tigger chooses his family and the things that protect and represent them and I think the finding the meaning in the meaningless things by giving it to them yourself really fits the themes in the movie.

TO ANIMATE A TIGGER

The animation, of course, is wonderful to look at with the more discerning eye of adulthood. Going frame-by-frame through shots allows you to appreciate the artistry on show and understand what it was about it that captivated you as a child.

The rough photocopied line art of the original shorts is reflected in the animation and, much like Aardman’s stop motions having evidence of thumbprints, the imperfections add to the style and beauty. It’s through watching it in not-VHS quality that you notice that Tigger’s stripes have a strobing animation boil texture to them, where each frame has new linework shading of the stripes, which fills him with energy even in his more subtle scenes.

Tigger himself is a veritable powerhouse of animation. Frame by framing his movements, you can see him squash and stretch with every bounce and pounce. The largeness and looseness of his jaw allows for very fluid arcs to be created in his head.

WHOOP-DE-DOOPER BOUNCE OF FAITH

In the final act, an argument between Tigger and his friends triggers an avalanche that threatens all of them. This sequence is the accumulation of the story, with the final scenes of the movie after it being the denouement resolution.

Tigger’s own self-centered search for his family immediately gets put to the side when his friends are in danger, leaping into action and helping his friends to the high branches of his tree. He even waits, arms outstretched to Rabbit, who had called his search for more Tiggers ‘nonsense’ and acted as a catalyst for his upset throughout the film. This puts Tigger’s positive nature on full display, he leaves no one behind, and this is in turn reflected outwards by Roo, who launches after Tigger as he gets swept away in the snow.

Throughout the movie, Roo idolises Tigger and wants to do anything to cheer him up, wanting him to be his big brother. Roo’s decisions and choices help drive the story alongside Tigger, and it’s a lot of his choices that end up building Tigger up for disappointment, but Roo is a child with stars in his eyes. He imitates him vocally and physically, and tries, and fails, to do the Whoop-de-Dooper bounce so that Tigger can have someone like him, tying back into the superficial against the reality. It is only when Roo acts on impulse with the determination to help someone in the same way as Tigger would that he succeeds at ‘being a Tigger’ and accomplishes the Whoop-de-Dooper bounce.

Similarly, Tigger doesn’t pay much attention to Roo, he enjoys his company but is looking too far beyond to see those who he already has as his family. But it’s when they both perform the Whoop-De-Dooper bounce in unison to escape danger and defy gravity that Tigger finally sees Roo properly.

After the avalanche, Tigger still looks beyond the horizon for more tiggers, but it’s when the other characters recite their letter that he is brought back to earth by being reminded of the family he chose. Tigger grows up, he realises he is The Only One, but that doesn’t mean he is without those who care about him and are his family.

He grows past his innocently-self-absorbed mindset and comes to project his energy outwards in a more benevolent and less chaotic manner by providing his friends with winter supplies, and celebrating them. Roo especially. Tigger finally acknowledges him as his little brother, and gives him his ‘family heirloom’ locket. Both characters have grown and have fully realised who their family are.

OTHER NOTES

The movie also works visually to bring Tigger into the main cast so he is no longer an outsider. This film is the first one to my knowledge that shows Tigger’s house, a chaotically hoarded, sporty treehouse, compared to everyone else’s more subtle housing. Prior films in the Winnie the Pooh series had Tigger simply appearing and disappearing out of the blue, but now Tigger has an official location that is his own, like everyone else in the cast.

Pooh, quite rightfully, is often depicted to the extreme of ‘bear of very little brain’. And granted, there are still moments where Pooh falls for the tricks and gets lost sometimes, but in this movie, Pooh is actually quite cunning and devious. He sneaks up a tree to get some honey because he tells the others that they are potential Tigger family members. He is the character Roo goes to when Tigger goes into the snowstorm, and comes up with the expedition to find him. He also knows to get Rabbit to lead as ‘he’s the only one who ever says he knows what he’s doing’. I think the memory of Pooh usually paints him as more ditzy, but it’s nice being able to revisit and relearn that Pooh has an extra layer of emotional depth to him.

Tigger himself is portrayed as being significantly less ditzy than in other Pooh media. He’s not as ‘book smart’ as Owl or Rabbit, but Tigger figures out the exact point he should hit the boulder to make it move, he frisbees records so they land exactly on the pin, he is the inventor of the Whoop-de-Dooper Loop-de-Looper Alley-Ooper Bounce, if the expertise and diagrams suggest anything. Tigger isn’t always a chaotic whirlwind, there are hidden depths of precision. The character is allowed fairly mature growth beyond face value.

Rabbit yelling at the others, who are determined to present themselves as the Tigger family of Tigger’s dreams, for not preparing for the winter by saying ‘At least I haven’t forgotten what’s REALLY important’ got a very loud laugh out of me because it’s such a Rabbit line.

Whenever the book transitions to a new scene, it’s fun to pause and see the story of the film being written out in Milne-esque prose. It even includes the Emphasis Capitalsation to specific Important Things. More on the book, I like Tigger arguing with the storyteller at the start and changing the direction of the story through sheer tiggerific chaotic energy.

The songs are wonderful in this. The decision to give Tigger both an upbeat number (‘The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers’) and a downbeat number (‘Someone Like Me’) is genius. I like that, for his sad song, it is mostly just guitar and piano compared to the fully orchestral theme to emphasize his loneliness.

The songs that surrounded the film are great too. Kenny Loggins’ ‘Your Heart Will Lead You Home’ is one of those things that always gives me shivers from that rusty acoustic string reverb at the start. This is also the film that indirectly introduced me to ThirdEyeBlind’s ‘Semi-Charmed Life’ through the trailers of it.

CONCLUSION

The Tigger Movie will always hold a special place in my heart, and I am glad to have had the time to properly articulate how I feel about it. It is a film that I appreciate a lot more as an adult looking back, given its themes and the way the visuals capture them.

In some ways, in these uncertain times, I feel a bit like Tigger when he’s looking out with uncertainty over the horizon for more tiggers. It’s a lonely and uncertain visual as he looked out for What Comes Next.

And even with this movie acting as a blanket against the coldness of the real world, the moral of facing whatever’s next by protecting those who are your family, whether that’s the family you’re born into or the one you choose, will always be appropriate.

#the tigger movie #winnie the pooh #tigger #roo #disney #long post #thoughts #nostalgia #research #storytelling #essay

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bibhabmishra · 5 years

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The Princess Bride

It feels downright inconceivableI to devote only one chapter in a book about lessons gleaned from eighties movies to The Princess Bride. Why, just off the top of my head, while standing on my head, I can name five life lessons that this movie teaches you that you don’t learn anywhere else: 1. “Never go against a Sicilian when DEATH is on the line!” 2. “Love is the greatest thing—except for a nice mutton, lettuce, and toma- to sandwich when the mutton is nice and lean.” 3. “Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” 4. Eventually, you learn not to mind the kissing parts. 5. And most important, “As you wish” = “I love you.” Such is the depth of wisdom in this film that in 2013, twenty-six years after its release, BuzzFeed devoted a listII to the lessons gleaned from it. A BuzzFeed list! Who needs the Oscars, Princess Bride, when you have that ultimate of mod- ern-day accolades? The Princess Bride is so adored that it’s probablyIII now a clichéd response on Internet dating websites: walks on the beach, an open fire, sunsets, and The Princess Bride. And yet, despite this, love for The Princess Bride is not seen as desperately hackneyed or cheesily safe. The Princess Bride is what you’d need a prospective love interest to cite as their favorite movie for the relationship to progress,IV it’s the one film that would make you rethink a lifelong friendship if you found out your best friend “just didn’t get it”—not that they would ever say that, because I honestly don’t know a single person of my generation who isn’t obsessed with this film.

And not just my generation: in As You Wish, a very enjoyable book about the making of The Princess Bride, Cary Elwes—who played Westley the farm boy, of course—recounts being told by both Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton how much they loved the movie, proving that The Princess Bride appeals to saints and sinners alike.V Now, having said all that, I have a confession to make. I was not the big Princess Bride fan in my family when I was growing up. That title instead went to my sister, Nell. Our mother took us to see it at the movie theater when I must have been nine and Nell was seven, and even though the film was— incredibly—something of a commercial disappointment when it came out, the cinema was absolutely packed with kids like us. In my mind, everyone in the audience was utterly in thrall to this tale of Buttercup (Robin Wright), her true love Westley (Elwes), and their battles against Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), and Count Rugen (Christopher Guest), and their eventual assistance from the brave swordsman Inigo (Mandy Patinkin), the giant Fezzik (the professional wrestler known as André the Giant), and Miracle Max (Billy Crystal). Afterward, we stood in the cinema atrium as our mother bundled us back into our coats. “Did you girls like it?” she asked. Standing there in her corduroy dungarees and T-shirt, Nell looked in a state of semi-shock. “I LOVED IT. I WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW!” she practically shouted. Now, The Princess Bride is wonderful, but in order to understand how unex- pected this proclamation was, you have to know a little bit about my sister. Ever since she was old enough to throw a tantrum, my sister refused to wear dresses. She never played with dolls. She refused to let my mother brush her hair and had apparently no interest in her physical appearance. She did not like mushy stories—she didn’t even like reading books. In other words, she was the complete opposite to me. How much of that was a deliberate reaction against me, a younger sibling defining herself in opposition to the older one, and how much of it was simply an innate part of Nell was already a moot point when we went to see The Princess Bride: Nell’s parameters were so firmly set by then that her nickname in our family was “the tough customer.” She would consent to drink only one kind of fruit juice (apple), and buy only one brand (Red Cheek), and only if it came out of a can (never a carton), so there was absolutely no negotiating with her about mushy princesses. Lord only knows how my mother got her to see the movie in the first place. She must have hid- den the title from her. And yet, like the grandson in the film, Kevin Arnold,VI Nell found that, against all odds, she did enjoy the story, just as Kevin’s grandfather, Columbo,VII promises. I think Nell made my mother take her to see the film at the cinema at least three more times. As she wished. When it came out on VHS, we bought it immediately and it was understood that the videocassette was officially Nell’s, just as the videocassette for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was officially mine. When she found out that the film had originally been a book by William Goldman, who also wrote the screenplay, she asked my amazed mother to buy that, too. Nell read it over and over until the pages fell out, so she stuck them back in and then read the book again. The Princess Bride was the book that taught her to like books, as much as the movie taught her to relax some of her other rules. She developed a lifelong crush on Westley and, not long after, she started wearing dresses, too. The reasons why Nell loved this film so much exemplify, I think, why it is universally adored in a way that, say, the vaguely similar and contemporary The Never-Ending Story is not. It’s a fairy tale for those who love fairy tales, but it’s also a self-aware spoof for those who don’t; it’s an adventure film for boys and—for once—girls, too, but without pandering to or excluding either; it’s got a plot for kids, dialogue for adults, and jokes for everyone; it’s a genre film and a satire of a genre film; it’s a very funny movie in which everybody is playing it straight; it’s smart and sweet and smart about its sweetness, but also sweet about its smarts. Unlike, say, Shrek, there are no jokes here for parents that go over the kids’ heads: all generations enjoy it on exactly the same level. It’s a movie that lets people who don’t like certain things like those things, while at the same time not betraying the original fans. But most of all, The Princess Bride is about one thing in particular: “The Princess Bride is a story about love,” says Cary Elwes. “So much happens in the movie—giants, fencing, kidnapping. But it’s really a film about love.” This might seem like a statement of the obvious, but it isn’t, actually. Yes, the film is ostensibly about the great true love between Buttercup and Westley, and their most perfect kiss that leaves all the other kisses in the world behind. Both Elwes and Wright were so astonishingly beautiful when they made the film that, watching them, it’s hard to believe any love ever existed on this plan- et other than theirs. And they, rather pleasingly, were quite taken with one an- other. In his book, Elwes talks at length about how “smitten” he was with Wright, and she says precisely the same about him: “I was absolutely smitten with Cary. So obviously that helped with our onscreen chemistry. . . . It doesn’t matter how many years go by, I will love Cary forever.” Disappointingly, however, Elwes insists that they remained just friends. “Everyone asks if there was more!” he says, sounding a little exasperated, apparently unable to see what everyone else can: namely, that it seems against the laws of nature for two such beautiful people not to have had sex at least once. The last scene that Elwes shot was of him and Wright kissing on horse- back, creating “the most perfect kiss” of all time against a sunset. Surely that was romantic. “Well, not really. Robin and I were friends by that point so we kept laughing, and [the director] Rob [Reiner] was going, ‘Touch her face, touch her face!’ ” He laughs. But Westley and Buttercup’s love is only a part of the film, and only one of several love stories in the film. There is also, for a start, the great love between Inigo and Fezzik. The scene in which a drunken and broken Inigo looks up into Fezzik’s face in the Thieves Forest and Fezzik says a simple, smiling hello is much more moving than the moment when Buttercup realizes the Dread Pirate Roberts is actually Westley (not least because she’s just pushed him down a hill). Even if Inigo does become the Dread Pirate Roberts at the end of the film, as Westley suggests he should, it is as impossible to imagine him going off without Fezzik as it is to imagine Buttercup and Westley being severed. This love between the two men is at the root of one of the film’s subtlest lessons. Bad guys teach audiences how to think of opponents in life, and this is especially true of bad guys in books and films aimed at kids. Because stories for kids tend to be relatively simple, villains in these films are almost invariably evil, and that’s all there is to be said about them. Cruella de Vil, Snow White’s stepmother, the witch in Rapunzel: WHAT a bunch of moody bitches. This is also certainly true of movies for children in the 1980s, from the frankly terri- fying Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the enjoyably evil Ursula in The Little Mermaid. It’s a pleasingly basic approach, and one that validates most kids’ (and adults’) view of the world: “I am good and anyone who thwarts me is wicked and there is no point in trying to think about things from their point of view because they have no inner life of their own beyond pure evil and a desire to impede me.” The Princess Bride, however, does something different. It’s easy to forget this once you’ve seen the movie and fallen in love with the characters but Inigo and Fezzik are, ostensibly, bad guys. When we first meet them in the movie, they knock our heroine, Buttercup, unconscious and kidnap her for Vizzini. We are also told they will kill her. Our princess! In the eyes of children, you can’t get much more evil than that. They are hired guns in the re- venge business, which is not a job for a good guy in any fairy tale. But Gold- man flips it around. We quickly see Inigo and, in particular, Fezzik being ex- tremely sweet with each other, doing their little rhymes together and trying to protect one another from Vizzini’s ire. Their love for one another shows us there is more to these villains than villainy. Goldman then ups the ante even further by having Inigo describe to the Man in Black how he has devoted his life to avenging the death of his father, thus giving him the kind of emotional backstory kids can definitely understand, as well as adding another mission to the movie. Soon after beating (but not killing) Inigo, the Man in Black fights with Fezzik, who we already know has a similarly sad past (“unemployed—IN GREENLAND”). Plenty of villains were once good before crossing to the dark side: Darth Vader, many of Batman’s nemeses, Voldemort. The point in those stories is that the difference between true evil and true greatness comes down to one wrong decision, one wrong turn, and there is no going back from that. But The Princess Bride does something more subtle: it suggests that good people some- times end up doing bad things, but are still good, have stories of their own, and are capable of love. Inigo and Fezzik both killed people in the past for Vizzini, but they’re all still good people. This is quite a message for kids (and adults) to take in: not everything is clear-cut when it comes to good and bad, even in fairy tales. In the original novel, William Goldman goes into much greater detail about Fezzik and Inigo’s friendship, and this is one of the reasons why I—in all hon- esty—pre-fer the book to the film.VIII But the film alludes to it enough in order for audiences to understand the real bond between the men, and partly this happens through the script and partly through the actors, especially one actor in particular. At one point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the role of Fezzik, but, thank heavens, he was already too expensive by the time the film finally started shooting. Where Schwarzenegger is all jarring rectangles and jut- ting jaw, André the Giant was all soft circles and goofy smiles. Where Schwarzenegger palpably punished himself to a superhuman extent to get the body he clearly wanted so badly, the man born André René Roussimoff suf- fered from gigantism due to acromegaly and had no choice about his size, just as Fezzik didn’t, much to the latter’s misery (“It’s not my fault being the big- gest and the strongest—I don’t even exercise”). It would be a patronizing cliché to say André was born to play Fezzik, but he was certainly more right for the role than Schwarzenegger. By the time he made The Princess Bride, André was seven feet, four inches and weighed more than 540 pounds. Easily the sweetest stories in Cary Elwes’s book come from the cast and crew’s memories of the wrestler, who died in 1993 at the age of forty-six, and this is not mere sentimentality. Quite a few of The Princess Bride’s cast have, sadly, since died, including Mel Smith, Peter Cook, and Peter Falk, but none of them prompts the same kind of fondness as that felt for André. “It’s safe to say that he was easily the most popular person on the movie,” Elwes writes. “Everyone just loved him.” Partly this is due to the extraordinary nature of the man. Robin Wright re- calls going out to a dinner with him where he ate “four or five entrees, three or four appetizers, a couple of baskets of bread, and then he’s like, I’m ready for seconds. And then desserts. I think he went through a case of wine and he wasn’t even tipsy.” But it was André’s innately gentle nature that made him so beloved. His “compassion and protective nature,” Elwes writes, helped Wallace Shawn over- come his almost paralyzing fear of heights when they were filming the climb up the Cliffs of Insanity. When Robin Wright felt chilly when filming outdoors, André would place one of his huge hands on top of Wright’s head. “She said it was like having a giant hot water bottle up there. It certainly did the trick; he didn’t even mess up her hair that much!” Elwes writes. When he died, William Goldman wrote his obituary in New York magazine. The last lines were as fol- lows: “André once said to Billy Crystal, ‘We do not live long, the big and the small.’ Alas.” Next, on a smaller level, is the love between Miracle Max (Crystal) and his aged wife, Valerie (Carol Kane). Initially they seem simply like a squabbling old couple, playing purely for broad comedy (and their scene is the broadest comedic one in the film). But it soon becomes clear that Valerie is needling Max only because she wants him to get back his confidence in his work after Prince Humperdinck destroyed it by sacking them, and her little cheer when her husband agrees to make a miracle for Inigo is really very touching. By the end of their scene, they’re working together, finishing one another’s sentences, holding each other arm in arm, and whispering little asides to one another. As a portrait of elderly marriage goes, this one is a pretty lovely one. Finally, there’s the great love story that frames the whole movie: the one be- tween the grandson/Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) and the grandfather/Columbo (Peter Falk). In the beginning of the movie, the grandson is irritated by his cheek-pinching grandfather and can hardly believe that he has to stop playing his adorably primitive-looking computer baseball game to listen to grandfather read a book.IX As the film progresses, the relationship between the grandson and grandfather progresses almost like a traditional love story: the grandson slowly gets more interested, clutching his covers anxiously when Buttercup is almost eaten by the Shrieking Eels; then he gets angry, banging his bed with his fist when it seems like Westley has been killed; and finally, he comes around entirely and tells his grandfather to come back the next day to read the book again. “As you wish.” His grandfather smiles, and the film ends. “That wasn’t actu- ally in the script,” Elwes says. “They came up with him saying that on, I think, the last day, and it really captures the love between the grandfather and grand- son. You can also see the tenderness between Fred Savage and Peter Falk.”

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jupitermelichios · 5 years

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Batman & Robin is the only good live-action Batman movie since 1966. No really.

(To be clear, when I say good in this case, I mean the only good adaptation, not the only well-made made film. Joel Schumacher has never made a competent film in his life, and while I’m fairly sure Christopher Nolan doesn’t have a soul, he is definitely a skilled technical film-maker).

So a quick run-down of live-action Batman movies to date:

1. 1989′s ‘Batman’ desperately wants to be something other than a superhero movie. This will be a running theme in what follows. The decision to focus on the romance to the exclusion of almost every other relationship was a really bad choice that I can only put down to a strong desire to be making a Bond Film instead. Also that version of the Joker is just... really bad, honestly. Mark Hamill’s joker is creepy, Heath Ledger’s Joker was manic, even Leto’s Joker had a kind of dream-like quality to him (which owes more to the camera work than the acting, but I’ll take it). Nicholson’s Joker is just sort of... there. The only compelling thing about him is the score, which is working so hard to try and make us care. (Seriously, try watching any of his scenes with the music off. What little tension there was vanishes instantly).

2. 1992′s Batman Returns. Why is Batman in this movie? Could Burton not get funding for the sexy mental patient fights freak-show survivor movie he actually wanted to be making? So little would change about this movie if you took Batman out of it, but I guess if we did that we’d have to give Selina Kyle a personality beyond ‘outdated and uncomfortable even for the 90s attitudes towards female sexuality’. (Get it, if a woman is sexually available she must be crazy!) I do fully admit this is a fun movie, and I dig the aesthetic it’s going for, it’s just a bad Batman movie.

3. 1995′s Batman Forever. I think we can all agree - fuck this movie. Joel Schumacher is not a good film-maker on his good days, and this is not one of his good days. The script is weak, Val Kilmer won’t stop pouting, Tommy Lee Jones is trying but he’s the only one who is and he’s not trying very hard. The decision to add a Robin was good, the decision to make that Robin in his mid 20s and easily the second worst thing about the movie was absolutely not. Everything Jim Carey does in this movie is terrible. (Everything Jim Carey does in most movies of this era is terrible, because you should only ever hire Carey if you want the film to be about him and absolutely no one else. He does not share the frame well.) Also this movie fucked over Billy D Williams, who had accepted a bit part in Batman Returns on the understanding that he would play Two-Face in the next movie.

4. 1997′s Batman & Robin. The film so bad Clooney would reportedly refund you the cost of the cinema ticket out of his own pocket if you told him you’d seen it. The only good one. Okay, technically this movie is bad. Joel Schumacher had not got any more competent since 1995. However, a combination of performers alternately chewing the scenery and trying not to corpse and a surreal neon asthetic that no one asked for but which would go on to be ripped off by so many video games, make this one of the very few actually fun Batman movies. But we’ve already established fun =/= good adaptation, so why’s it a good Batman movie? Because it gives a damn about its source material, and that source material is not Batman comics of the 80s and 90s (which is good because they were still letting Frank Miller write for them back then) but the 1966 TV Show/movie. The bad jokes, the sudden inclusion of Batgirl, the leotards, the kooky asthetic and ‘everyone’s at least slightly drunk’ tone, the super-styalised version of the Batsuit (like them or not, Bat-nipples are as memorable as 1966′s Bat-eyebrows), all of these can be traced right back to ‘66. This movie is a neon love-letter to Adam West, and it is the only love-letter in the entire Bat-movie canon, which is why it’s the only good one.

5. 2005′s Batman Begins is what you get when you combine a director who doesn’t like Batman with a writer who doesn’t like Batman and a producer who doesn’t care about Batman. It’s a technically competent (if poorly cast) film, that Ayn Rand would almost certainly have enjoyed immensely, and that desperately doesn’t want to be a Batman movie. This is a Serious Movie you guys, not like Batman Returns and Batman & Robin, this movie is above petty concerns like fun or asthetics. The target audience for this movie a) people who don’t like Batman or superheroes in general and b) the kind of Batman fans who claim Stephanie Brown was never Robin because she’s a girl. The sort of fans who purchased All-Star Batman & Robin and TDKR II. The only redeeming feature of this film is Cillian Murphy.

6. 2008′s The Dark Knight. You probably remember this movie being fun, and you’re not wrong exactly, but what you’re actually remembering is Heath Ledger. Ledger is fun in this movie, and he’s so god-damned fun he comes really close to redeeming the entire film. With a different film-maker he probably would have done, but this is Nolan, so instead of being a fun stupid romp, this another Serious Movie. The camp is undercut but the seriousness, the seriousness is undercut by the camp, the script makes no sense whatsoever, and the result is so confused that, like Suicide Squad, viewers find they’ve forgotten a lot of what they actually saw and just remembered the points of interest. Every time I rewatch this film I’m surprised by half of what happens in it, because my brain has blocked out everything that it’s Heath Ledger or Michael Cain, and I’m definitely not alone in that. Also it’s a Nolan movie, so it desperately doesn’t want to be a superhero movie. Superhero movies don’t win Oscars and Oscar nominations are the only way Nolan can feel joy anymore. (Obviously that’s a joke. Christopher Nolan has never felt joy.)

7. 2012′s The Dark Knight Rises is actually my favourite of the Nolan films, despite being technically the worst. The plot is so nonsensical and confused that it actually forgets to be a Serious Movie for whole minutes at a time and becomes something approaching a Batman movie. A lot of that is Anne Hathaway, who is doing the best job of elavating a terrible script through great acting that I have even seen. The fact that you like or care about her character is down entirely and exclusively to Hathaway’s charm and charisma. Apart from that it’s another Nolan ‘Batman is stupid that’s why I made three movies about him’ movie. Also the fight choreography in this is really bad. Like, form an orderly queue inside the shot so we can all atttack Batman one at a time but the audience can see us waiting our turn Bad. The only person doing a good job with the fighting is Hathaway’s stunt-double, who is doing it all in one of the most impractical outfits ever put on screen.

8. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Some people liked this film, and that’s fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with liking a bad film - hell I almost exclusively like bat films. Batfleck was pretty good casting, and Henry Caville looks a lot like Superman. Snyder is for the most part a very good technical film-maker, who has a lot of fun with the camera. Amy Adams is woefully miscast, but it’s not like she’s not a great actor. It’s just... I’m sorry guys, I know that saying a bad film is bad is now seen as a personal attack on the people who liked it, but it’s just a bad movie! The editing is terrible, the script is dire, laughably bad in places, and worst of all, it hates Superheroes. It hates Superheroes so much the only DC canon it could think to adapt was Frank Miller’s extended fuck you to comic-book fans. The picked as the source material for a movie with Superman’s name on it, a comic by a writer who openly hates Superman! Also there’s plot contrivances, there’s plot holes, and then there’s people thinking Superman shot someone. With a gun. When he has lazer eyes. David Ayer has never written a good script in his life, and if he worked in any other industry he’d have stopped getting work two decades ago, but this is probably the worst thing he’s written.

So yeah, Batman & Robin is the only good Batman movie, because it’s the only one that is about Batman. It is totally shameless, high camp that knows it’s high camp, knows Superheroes are inherently stupid and that that’s not the same as worthless or uninteresting, knows Batman is only as interesting as his supporting cast, and revels in it. (And the most frustrating thing is, given a better script this is exactly the kind of movie Snyder would probably have made. More gold and abs and less neon, but kooky over-the-top fun that doesn’t think a film has to be art to be worthwhile. Fucker Ayer and the people who hired him for denying us that.)

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therealkn · 6 years

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David’s Resolution - Day 18

Day 18 (January 18, 2019)

Blade: Trinity (2004)

“In the movies, Dracula wears a cape, and some old English guy always manages to save the day at the last minute with crosses and holy water. But everybody knows the movies are full of shit. The truth is, it started with Blade, and it ended with him. The rest of us were just along for the ride.”

In 1997, Batman & Robin was released to theaters and... well, a lot of people didn’t like it. In fact, many say it’s one of the worst movies ever made. The first part is true as it was slammed by critics and audiences upon release and has cultivated a considerable notoriety for its badness; the second part is false because trust me, it is FAR from the worst ever made. If you unironically consider Batman & Robin one of the worst films ever, please tell me what your criteria are for determining whether a film is “one of the worst ever”, because I think that criteria is lacking. But one thing that is for certain about Batman & Robin is that it, along with the failure of Steel that same year, more or less killed DC Comics’ hold in the box office. They struggled for several years with other films until finally seeing success again with 2005′s Batman Begins, which was a critical and commercial success and started Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight Trilogy” of Batman films.

In between those Batman films, however, Marvel Comics decided to take another shot at movies after some... not-so-great films. And we got Blade. Hell yeah.

Telling the stylish and action-packed tale of the half-vampire Blade (Wesley Snipes) who hunts down vampires and does so in the coolest way possible, Blade - released one year after Batman & Robin - was a critical and commercial success, Marvel’s first in the box office. This was impressive not only because it was a comic book movie and people were questioning the viability of the genre after Batman & Robin, but also because it was an R-rated comic book movie featuring a more obscure character instead of someone more well-known to audiences. Blade was a pretty cool, stylish, badass movie and while X-Men and Spider-Man would become bigger and more famous successes, I’d like to think that Blade started Marvel’s new era of superhero movies and influenced their approach to making future films, especially when it came to looking into more obscure properties to adapt to film like the Guardians of the Galaxy.

And then there was Blade II, released in 2002 and directed by my guy Guillermo del Toro. This was a sequel that was even better than the original in practically every way. The villain was cooler and surprisingly sympathetic (not being mean to you, Stephen Dorff, you were great in the first film, but I’m just saying), the story has some neat twists to it, the characters are great and memorable, the action’s exciting and one-ups the sequences in the first movie, and it has Del Toro’s distinctive visual style for days.

And then came Blade: Trinity, which cocked the whole thing up. In order to properly prepare for this film, I watched the other two films (I’ve seen them before, which is why I’m not writing full reviews for them). I had actually tried to watch this years ago but only got as far as the first act because younger David somehow thought it was that bad. That’s the younger David who would have probably disliked watching sex, lies, and videotape.

This movie’s premise is simple: the vampire world has decided that in order to destroy Blade, they hit the Godzilla threshold and awaken Dracula (Dominic Purcell), the very first vampire ever to exist, to help them fight. And this time, Blade’s not doing it alone. Okay, he wasn’t always alone, as he had his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) in the other two films and- oh, they kill off Whistler in the first act, wow, that’s some bullshit. Well, now Blade has become part of a group of vampire hunters called the Nightstalkers, and accompanying him is the wisecracking Hannibal King (Ryan Reynolds) and Whistler’s daughter Abigail (Jessica Biel). Okay, the stakes are raised - pun unintended, promise - and this is going to be the biggest challenge yet for Blade.

Speaking of Ryan Reynolds... he’s the best thing in this movie ,getting that out there right now. His character, Hannibal King, could best be described as “Deadpool Lite”. He calls his vampire ex a cock-juggling thundercunt, which is one of the greatest insults of all time and that alone makes him great. I can see why some people would find him annoying or grating, but I like to think of it as a dry run for his playing the Merc with a Mouth, which is funny considering that around this time, Reynolds was hearing about the Deadpool character. In fact, after this movie, Reynolds would begin the twelve-year-long journey of bringing DP to the big screen, which would involve playing a character named Wade Wilson in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

I’m sorry, this movie is not great. It’s just a big disappointing letdown. One of the problems with the movie is with Blade. Not the character himself, he’s still pretty cool and Wesley Snipes is great. I mean that this doesn’t feel like his movie. In the other two movies, it was pretty clear he was the guy in charge, especially in Blade II when he made it clear to the vampires he formed a truce with that he was not someone you screw with. But in this one, he just kinda gets shunted off for several other characters. To their credit, Marvel would get better at ensemble films (The Avengers, ‘nuff said), but in this one, it just feels sad. We watched this movie because we want more of Blade. But it feels like they put him in the back seat to focus more on other characters. He’s the title character for fuck’s sake, and yet he feels like he’s a side character in his own movie. Just like what happened with Tom and Jerry...

What doesn’t help either is that the film is one of those “too many things happening for its own good” films. The movie’s got too much going on and it feels confusing. What’s this film about? Is it about Blade fighting Dracula with the Nightstalkers? Is it about the vampire world finally getting the law to crack down on Blade? Is it about the vampire’s plans to completely subjugate the world? It doesn’t seem to know which one it wants to focus on, which really hurts considering that this is supposed to be the biggest threat that the vampire hunters of the world ever faced, and yet Dracula seems like less of a legitimate threat than Deacon Frost in the first movie or the Reaper virus in the second. And it’s not the only third film in a superhero film series to have this problem, as X-Men: The Last Stand had this same problem with too much happening. Again, Marvel at least got better at juggling multiple plotlines in superhero movies with their cinematic universe, so there is that.

There’s a lot of other problems big and small, and a good chunk of them can probably be traced back to Wesley Snipes. The production of this film was pretty screwed up, and a lot of it is due to him. David S. Goyer, who wrote all the Blade films including this one, ended up directing it when no one else wanted to take the job. Snipes was unhappy with Goyer’s decision to direct, and both he and Kris Kristofferson were unhappy with the script, which is probably why Kristofferson’s character is killed off early on. (Reminds me of what they did with RoboCop’s partner in RoboCop 3, another third movie in a series that sucked.) Not only that, but Snipes was hostile to Goyer as well as Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel; at one point, Hannibal King says “He doesn’t like me, does he?”, which was not Hannibal talking about Blade, but Reynolds talking about Snipes. Snipes also apparently refused to leave his trailer for any scenes that didn’t show his face, so his stunt double did a lot of the Blade scenes. His working relationship with Goyer got so bad that he called him a racist several times for no reason and refused to speak to him, communicating only in Post-It notes. The fact that the final film got finished and is... watchable... is pretty impressive.

This film, sadly, killed off the Blade franchise. New Line Cinema’s problems with Wesley Snipes led to them making a short-lived TV show on Spike TV with someone else playing the Daywalker, and then Snipes got sent to prison for tax evasion and the Blade character’s film rights reverted to Marvel during his prison term. He’s been in talks with Marvel Studios to bring the character back, but so far they’ve said they have no plans for the character in the future. Here’s hoping we get more Blade in the future.

I should also mention that the version I saw was the unrated cut, which doesn’t really add more violence or swears or other things cut for an MPAA rating as all the Blade movies were rated R. It has some more plot and character stuff, but that doesn’t help the movie much when compared to the theatrical version. The biggest change is the ending, which includes the infamous shot of Blade’s opening eyes being superimposed over his face when Snipes refused to open his eyes in the scene.

This movie’s a mess, plain and simple. It is without a doubt the weakest film in the Blade trilogy, which sucks because it could have been better. If they had trimmed some of the plotlines and focused more on Blade than his companions, it would have been better. Like Mimic 3, I don’t hate the film, I just find it disappointing with how it could have been better. For what it is, it’s still watchable, but it’s just a muddled mess of a movie. Not sure if I’d recommend it. I’d definitely recommend the other two Blade films.

Also, if any of you are hoping for me to review more Marvel movies as part of this resolution, you may be out of luck, sadly. I’ve seen all the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, as I had to catch up in time for Avengers: Infinity War, as well as all the X-Men films and spinoffs and the 2003 Hulk, which I actually really liked, even more than some MCU films (to which someone will say “it’s okay, you can just say Thor: The Dark World”). ...Although I haven’t seen the Amazing Spider-Man films yet...

Next time: How about a GOOD comic book movie from 1997?

#David's resolution #Blade: Trinity

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sgurrdearg · 5 years

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I got tagged by @brienneofqarth like a week ago and only just got around to it!! IDK who to tag so feel free to do it if you want to?

favourite colour: Purple

top three ships: IDK if I really ship...... Shakarian is the OTP I guess!! And I got REALLY into Bonnie/Enzo on The Vampire Diaries and let me tell you that I am VERY upset right now because I’m only just watching the show for the first time. Anddddddddd uhhhh IDK. Me and Regis lmao

lipstick or chapstick: Chapstick I guess!

last song: Essentially - Japanese Breakfast

last movie: I watched Christopher Robin with my parents last weekend (well like, most of it, I was in and out of the room) on DVD but the last one I saw in the cinema was The Favourite.

currently reading: Ugh....... unfortunately I’m reading Make Way For Dragons which is garbage written by a literally psycho author in the 80s or 90s (no joke, he faked a name and pretended to be from Iceland and is suspiciously obsessed with Scandanavia, and was also clearly a virgin and very upset about it, aka a fucking incel lmao) and I’m livetweeting the terrible experience here if anyone is interested bc there’s some funny among the yikes because it’s also VERY badly written. The cover is so aesthetic tho.

The last book I finished was The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon which I’m just going to plug here bc everyone needs to read it because everybody needs a slow burn lesbian courtly romance in their life especially when it’s 800 pages long and also contains dragons and magic lore and giant mongooses and l e s b i a n s

#meep

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pan0ramy · 6 years

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i got tagged in two ask thingies, so i’m going to combine them both into one post! thank you to everyone for tagging me ❤️

15 QUESTIONS, 15 MUTUALS (i could only find 13 questions tho haha) [tagged by @ind1go13 and @cas1224]

1. Are you named after anyone? i wish i was. it’d make my name somewhat interesting. haha

2. When was the last time you cried? uhhhh last night i think?

3. Do you have any kids? well i have two kittens, they probably count as kids :P but no, i don’t haha

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot? sarcasm is one of those things i use without even realising it, so yes, i do. :P

5. What’s the first thing you notice about people? the way they talk - inflections in their speech, the tone of voice, their word choice, that sort of thing.

6. Scary movie or happy ending? neither. i’m more of a murder mystery person. :)

7. Any special talents? uhhhhh idk man, probably not haha

8. Where were you born? ireland! nothing special there ^^

9. Hobbies? i have way too many tbh - reading, occasional writing, music, art, languages... everything really haha

10. Do you have any pets? yes!!! my two little kittens. they are my bbs and i love them

11. What sports do you/have you played? i’ve never been on any sports teams. i’ve never been good at sport plus nobody picked me cause i was shit anyway so what’s the point y’know

12. Favourite subject at school? english! music was probably my second favourite.

13. Dream job? anything with computers or video games, really. ^^

[tagged by @letsdoaskit]

1. Relationship status? single. which, that’s no surprise. ^^”

2. Favourite colours? the colours of my blog, actually - red and turquoise!

3. Three favourite foods? oooooh probably popcorn, pasta and tea (if that even counts as a food haha)

4. Song stuck in my head? I LOVE YOU LIKE LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

5. Last song I listened to? the same song as above - EXID’s “i love you”.:P IT’S A BOP Y’ALL, GO LISTEN TO IT

6. Last movie I watched? i think it was christopher robin?? yeah, i barely ever go to the cinema cause i’m broke af haha

7. Top three shows? a series of unfortunate events, rick and morty and probably final space rn! (i still need to finish final space tho. oops :P)

8. Book I’m currently reading? i’m not reading anything right now, but i’m going to try and get the FNAF books for christmas! i can’t wait to read those, i love the lore and i’m interested to see what kinda direction they take

9. Last thing I Googled? ...animal crossing guides. :P

10. How many blankets do you sleep with? just one! i have a very heavy duvet so i don’t need that many

11. Anything you want! I LOVE YOU LIKE LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

i don’t want to bother anyone so i’m not gonna tag, but if you see this and want to do it you’re more than welcome to! i pester people with asks and messages at it is, tagging them in stuff just makes it all worse haha :P

#i'm trying to keep on top of ask memes now! that's progress if you ask me haha #15 followers 15 questions #ask memes #answered

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cute-untagged-shit · 3 years

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Omg, look, an original post from me on tumblr??? It's been a hot minute.

But I have androids on the brain these days, I now I wanna make a list of my favorite androids. And my "android" I mean any artifical human shapes life form, so don't @ me about the synths, ok??

This is not a tier list, I can't possibly choose, but I WILL do them alphabetically just because. Here we goooo!

Andrew Martin. Bicentennial Man. Look, full disclosure, I think this movie is... kinda bad. But it's charming, and it's Robin Williams, so how can you not love it? And I love Andrew specifically because he's a rare example of the Pinnochio thing of a robot becoming human, and actually delving into some of the more mundane challenges like farting and aging. Just. Charming.

Christopher Samuels. Alien: Isolation.

God, this robot man gives me all the feels. The notion that he's just been living his android life, working for WY and pushing papers, and then suddenly catching FEELS because one grease monkey never got closure for her mother's death?? God, my EMOTIONS.

And, dear lord, his last words. JUST SHOOT ME IN THE HEART, WHY DON'T YOU.

Connor. Detroit: Become Human.

Connor is a fan favorite, and I am not immune to his charms. He's personable, funny in a deadpan way, and absolutely fucking deadly. He's a killing machine and he knows it, and the choices you make in the game are actually much more likely to make him a brutal character. You have to make very specific choices to make him a morally good character, and that's just very interesting to me.

Danse. (Does he have a first name? Or last name? Honestly, Bethesda...) Fallout 4.

This one is unique, because for the most part Danse doesn't know he's a synth. And he HATES synths. Which leaves him in a really complicated situation when he finds out he IS one. And that just makes for very compelling stories. Alas, the game did NOT deliver on the potential, but I'm certainly tickled. Also, he says "Ad Victoriam!" after you have sex with him, and I find that fucking hilarious!

Data. Star Trek TNG.

Ahhh, my OG android love. I will love him always and forever, amen. I was introduced to him in the deepest throes of puberty, and instantly fell in love. His innocense and naïvete just really struck a cord with me, and watching him evolve was a deeply emotional journey for me.

Dorian. Almost Human.

Look, this show should have had 7 seasons and a movie, istg. It had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, and Dorian was such a wonderful character. Smarmy, witty, emotional (even though he's definitely not supposed to be) and just such a perfect counterpart to his human partner.

I WANT MORE OF HIM.

Nick Valentine. Fallout 4.

God, Bethesda, LET ME DATE HIM, PLEASE!

I have a very adult and carnal love for Nick, and I honestly don't care he's falling apart, I just know he'd treat me right. I KNOW IT. He's honest, hard working, kind, understanding and just a little sad. He's also a brutal flirt, and every time I hear him go "you got a thing for antiques, huh" I mentally give Todd Howard 28 stab wounds.

The T-X. Terminator3, Rise of the Machines.

I'm bisexual, and she's very, very hot. I wish I could say it's deeper than that, but it's not. I didn't even know I was bi when I saw this movie in cinema, but I remember enjoying it VERY much, even though it's objectively not a great movie. But just look at her.

That's it for now, but after going through the depths of the internet to remind myself of all the good androids, it's clear to me that I'll need to make another list of less humanoid looking robots. Coming soon, maybe!

#androids #LDcrap #just having thoughts on artificial life forms #must be a day ending in Y

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forfoxessake · 3 years

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I posted 195 times in 2021

162 posts created (83%)

33 posts reblogged (17%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 0.2 posts.

I added 522 tags in 2021

#100 movies challenge - 138 posts

#movies seen in 2021 - 129 posts

#movie review - 76 posts

#100 movies - 47 posts

#100 films challenge - 29 posts

#film review - 27 posts

#100 films - 23 posts

#netflix - 20 posts

#review - 17 posts

#documentary - 16 posts

Longest Tag: 52 characters

#self made: inspired by the life of madam c.j. walker

My Top Posts in 2021

[79] Silver Skates (2020)

Watching Russian cute movies is going to be my thing, I can feel it. The language sounds so aggressive to my Latin-speaking self and it's so odd to see that in a romantic cutesy context. The film is not terrible in that made for the web/hallmark/Netflix way, it actually has a plot and interesting characters and a woman that gets exactly what she wants in the end.

17 notes • Posted 2021-07-05 20:56:47 GMT

Dracula (2020)

In this alternative spin on the classic book, we see many differences from the original text, but my favorite out of all of them must be making Van Helsing a non-believing skeptical nun. She is the glue that puts together this series. A much bigger start than Jonathan and Nina, or even Dracula himself.

22 notes • Posted 2021-11-09 21:51:35 GMT

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

You don't really need a lot of dialogue when you have Anya Taylor-Joy's expressive big eyes. They constantly saying a thousand words, telling a story in a few seconds. But luckily for us, this is much more than just that. It's a thrilling mini-series about chess, that makes a game hard to understand seem exciting and like a World Cup final at every game. It's also about addiction and the belief that without that thing we learned to rely on we are nothing. Finding out that is not true is hard work.

26 notes • Posted 2021-01-09 13:41:21 GMT

2020 is over. The year in review.

I watched 140 movies in 2019 of my usual 100 goal. This past year, we all got stuck at home due to humanity fucking up the world. So I reached the impressive number of 190 movies.

I started the year with Christopher Robin and ended with Free Solo, in between, there were many rewatches, many movies that I had put off watching for the longest time, many great films, and just as many bad ones.

Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

A Ghost Story - one of the last films I saw in 2020, quiet, delicate, and beautiful. The art of cinema at it’s best.

Dogtooth - crazy, insane, unimaginable film where parents just take away their children’s liberty until they can’t possibly survive in the real world.

God’s Own Country - a film about love, just love understanding.

Holidate - that perfect Christmas movie where is not really about Christmas but truly about adulthood and it’s fuck ups.

Sound of Metal - Riz Ahmed’s future Oscar win. This movie is so loud it hurts, so silent that is peaceful and so touching that you can’t help but understand.

Little Monsters - I don’t know how to explain this movie, is this a kids movies? A romantic comedy? A zombie horror movie? Lupita is singing a Taylor Swift song while looking gorgeous in yellow and gore.

Parasite - 2020 started so great with Parasite absolutely destroying the Oscar’s and it’s the end of the year and I don’t think anything that was released after is as good as this.

1917 - I have seen very few films in cinemas this year and this was the one that I loved the most. I’m glad I got to see it and have the experience that is demanded.

Wild Rose - My favorite musical that is not really a musical. Jessie Buckley is bound to shy, as an actress, or as a singer, preferably both!

Apollo 11 - I always wondered how it was possible for the USA to have reached the moon with the technology that they had at the time and after watching this I understand even less. INCREDIBLE.

Lawrence of Arabia - a classic that took me far too long to see. I have seen a lot of war movies but none that actually gives us a glimpse of the economical reasons for so much death. And a fabulous Peter O’Toole in the role of a lifetime.

The Godfather - yet another classic that now I don’t really understand why I had not seen a thousand times before. I find it impossible now to not stop and watch it whenever I come across it on tv.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu - the art of cinema is an amazing thing, a movie put together so perfectly that every second has something to say, transcending words.

Little Women - I have seen this twice and loved both times equally as much. Greta Gerwig turned a novel that I sort of enjoyed into a feminist manifest a la Jane Austen.

Jojo Rabbit - Taika Waititi is Hitler and there’s a little Nazi kid who we love, why? Because adults are shit and children should always be protected.

The Tale - I have seen many movies on the subject this year but this one with Laura Dern hurts the most. Pedophilia needs to be talked about, if we don’t our children will forever be vulnerable.

Morte a Venezia - I didn’t really like reading this Thomas Mann novel, it just didn’t click with me, the movie, on the other hand, is absolutely sublime.

Hotel Mumbai - I thought I was watching a white-savior movie but it turned out to be a movie about a real tragedy with real heroes that does a wonderful job not criminalizing religion or personal beliefs.

Romeo and Juliet - I was shocked to finally have read this play and realize it’s nothing like popular culture had me believe. Sure, it’s two very young people thinking that they found the love of their lives, and other teenagers going on with a fight that they really don’t understand. The tragedy of youth.

Dracula - Francis Ford Coppola can also be fun and irreverent while at the same time delivering amazing shots and insane use of shadows and references.

Amadeus - I thought this was bad at first and Mozart annoying with that loud laugh of his, but then his genius shine, and you can’t help but feel the touch of God.

I have read 95 books this past year of my usual goal of 70. In 2019 I read 76 novels, short stories, and graphic novels.

I started the year with Warleggan (The Poldark Saga #4) by Winston Graham and ended with Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster. Read many series, audiobooks, audioplays, plays, short stories, graphic novels, and bad historical romances.

Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

Excalibur (The Warlord Chronicles #3) by Bernard Cornwell - this entire trilogy is amazing but the ending surpassed all my expectations.

Ayoade on Top by Richard Ayoade - I adore audiobooks read by the authors and this one had me in fits of laughter. Richard is great, even greater when he dedicates an entire book to a terrible movie.

See the full post

35 notes • Posted 2021-01-01 15:48:10 GMT

[53] The Father (2020)

Directed by Florian Zeller

A heart-wrenching, deeply touching movie. I don't think I have ever seen a movie about dementia/Alzheimer's quite like this. It's unnerving to be experiencing the point of view of someone who has lost himself in time and space, who can't recognize his surroundings, the people that he loves, who is constantly vividly reliving things that are long past. Anthony Hopkins is a fantastic actor, with many excellent films, but The Father is his true masterpiece.

37 notes • Posted 2021-05-03 23:11:16 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #495

Top Ten Non-MCU Post-Credit Scenes

Oh look, two MCU-related posts in a row! Delightful. Well, kinda. Because this week is a fake-out; it’s not really about the MCU! In fact, it’s almost anti-MCU! How wicked! Because ever since its inception, one of the quirks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – something it’s become famous for, in fact – is its use of a post-credit scene. From the moment Nick Fury stepped out of the shadows to mention the “Avenger Initiative” after all the names had scrolled on by in Iron Man, the ongoing films were almost defined by their last-second teases and delights. You can tell, in the cinema, the fans and non-fans, as they get up and clear off, leaving the True Believers in their seats, wondering how these people could possibly vacate the theatre without really seeing the ending. In fact, as the franchise has gone on, the number of people staying put has – in my own rough reckoning – increased considerably, to now be about fifty percent of the audience. And why not? You’re really not getting the full picture! As these entangled narratives have unfurled before us, we like the connective tissue of the end-credit tease; the reveals of new characters or locations, the subtle hints at what’s to come. Loki has possessed Selvig! The Collector has the Aether! The ant’s playing the drums!

“To challenge them would be to court Death!”

Anyway, MCU films have post-credit scenes. But of course they’re not the only ones. Having a scene after the credits – or, sometimes, during the credits – is fairly common in the history of cinema. I think it’s become a lot more common this century, partly because of Marvel popularising it as a storytelling device or method of connecting disparate films in a franchise, but also (I believe) because CG animated films have often used it as a comedy trick. I’m not sure why or where this really began in earnest, but I think the old Pixar “out takes” was partly to blame, as was the whole “Shrek Dance Party” phenomenon. Anyway, as you will see, there are a few here that fit that bill.

Because that’s what this whole list is! It’s films that have great post-credit scenes, but aren’t Marvel! Or, at least, aren’t officially part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Some of them are classics of the form, thirty or forty years old; some are newer and fall into the categories I’ve mentioned above. Some follow a similar pattern to most MCU end-scenes – comedy skit or tease an upcoming movie, but stuck at the end of the credits – whereas some interfere with the credits throughout. I’ve been wary of scenes which aren’t really post-credit, but if we all the “mid-credit” scene in the MCU – or the multiple scenes from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 – then we can allow some of the ones below.

So there we are! Nowt more to it. Let’s roll the credits...

Airplane! (1980): early in the film, our hero Ted Striker (Robert Hays) leaves his cab just as a fare gets in the back. Telling said fare to wait, Striker dashes after his girlfriend Elaine (Julie Hagarty), ends up on her plane, and, well, the rest of the delightfully silly and surreal plot unfolds. The film ends, the credits roll, and then we cut back to the abandoned cab, where the poor unfortubate fare is still sat in the back seat. “I’ll give him five more minutes,” he says, looking at his watch, “And that’s it.” I mean, it’s just sublime.

Deadpool (2016)/Deadpool 2 (2018): where to start? Whether it’s the first film’s Ferris Bueller-aping dressing gown skit (delightfully informing us that Cable will be in the next film) or the sequel’s multiple time-hopping gags – including undoing the film’s unfortunate fridging of Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) and killing Ryan Reynolds (“you’re welcome, Canada”) – this series really knows how to keep you engaged until the very last second. Can’t wait to see what he does when he’s part of the MCU.

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985): it’s funny, but looking back, I can probably trace any interest I have in Sherlock Holmes to this film and Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Anyway, this is a seminal film by any yardstick, featuring as it does one of (if not the) first example of a CGI character interacting in a real environment. But the end credit sting! The film’s Big Bad (Anthony Higgins), having somehow survived, checks himself into a hotel under the name of – you guessed it – Moriarty. This was, arguably, the first example of an end-credit scene teasing a future film! Setting up the Young Sherlock Holmes Extended Universe! Sadly it was a bit of a flop and they didn’t make any more.

Masters of the Universe (1987): Young Sherlock may have been interesting, but I’ll be honest, other people had to tell me who Moriarty was for me to understand the significance. The ending of Masters, however… well, it’s not quite as nuanced or revelatory, but the seemingly-dead Skeletor (Frank Langella) popping his head back up to yell at the camera “I’ll be back!” was a fantastic and exciting shock. We were guaranteed more He-Man! There’d be another film! There was not another film. Still cool, though.

A Bug’s Life (1998): I alluded to this earlier, and we’re only tenuously in “end-credit” land here (these scenes play over the credits, technically), but it still merits a mention. For A Bug’s Life was the film that began the (actually very short) Pixar tradition of showing us “outtakes” from the movie. And some of these first ones are among the best, with characters corpsing or forgetting their lines; subsequent films would lean more towards practical jokes and outright gaggery, whereas I personally prefer those that further the “it’s a movie being filmed” illusion. Anyway, the legend began here, not a sentence you can often say in relation to A Bug’s Life.

Frozen II (2019): in recent years Disney have made end-credit gags a tradition, and they’re pretty good at it. Moana’s fourth wall-breaking catchup with Tamatoa nearly made the list, but I’m giving the spot to Olaf. After recapping the plot of the first film earlier in the runtime, he’s now telling the story of the film you’ve just watched. The kicker? He’s telling the story to Marshmallow and the creepy little snow-brothers! From the first Frozen! And Frozen Fever! They’re at the ice palace, remember? It’s not only a funny bit, it’s also a nice nod to those kids (and their parents) who’ve mainlined anything Frozen-related for the past couple of years.

Winnie the Pooh (2011): a very underrated little gem, this; just so charming. One of the plot threads is the apparent disappearance of Christopher Robin, who leaves a note saying he’ll be “back soon”, but which is misread by stuffy know-it-all bird Owl, and leads to an amusing song of fright and alarm Pooh, Piglet and the gang all believe old Chrissie Rob has been abducted by a monster called a “Backson” (“They use their horns to put holes in your socks!”). Obviously this is a misunderstanding, it’s all resolved, happy endings all round. But then, at the end of the credits, who should rock up, but an actual Backson (who turns out to be very nice). What’s great about this, other than it just being a neat gag, is that it’s playing with the expectations of a young audience; it’s introducing them to a kind of comedic rug-pull. I can attest to the fact that nippers find it very entertaining.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2019): I’m a bit concerned about being too superheroic (I nearly had the Flash/Superman race from Justice League in here, actually, which I like because it’s one of the few moments in either version of that film where the characters act like the characters I know). I’m also wary of leaning into the whole “sequel tease” thing. But hey, this one’s fun; it feels like a sequel tease, another alternate version of Spider-Man voiced by a famous actor. Then it warps into the classic sixties Spider-Man, and references the whole “pointing” meme to boot. It has its cake and eats it, and it’s great.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990): the Gremlins films are great at breaking the fourth wall and poking fun at themselves, and this is no exception. The great Daffy Duck – who introduced the film, and whose anarchic style is a great precursor to the Gremlins themselves – pops up several times to comment on how long and boring the credits are, before finally asking the audience, “Don’t you people have homes?”. There should be more Daffy in movies.

Shrek 2 (2004): there were a few things I could have included in this list: Crank’s 16-bit game homage is quite fun; the Ferris Bueller bathrobe bit is iconic, although personally I find Ferris so unappealing as a character that I wouldn’t want to include it. So we have Shrek 2, one of the first of a whole raft of CG animated films to have a funny scene at the end. And the reason I’ve included it is because, well, it’s quite weird. Basically you find out that Donkey and Dragon have had babies that are, er, half donkey and half dragon (“Look at our little mutant babies!” says Donkey). I mean. There are connotations here that I’d rather not mull over.

So there we are. Now I didn’t want to include this as it’s not really a scene, and if I’m just doing “funny things in the credits” then we’re going to get onto stuff like the Naked Gun movies and all sorts of other weirdness, but I do want to shout out to An American Werewolf in London’s “any resemblance to persons living, dead, or undead” legal disclaimer at the end of the credits.

#top ten #movies #films #end credit #post credit #mcu

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imagineonlyproductions-blog · 6 years

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‘Christopher Robin’ Receives Moderate to Pretty Damn Good Reviews

I plan to review this film as soon as I can; not because I am a fan of the source material (I’m really not), but because I feel like there aren’t enough family films out there as it is.

Christopher Robin is a film about the now, middle-aged human lead character in the Winnie the Pooh series of books, shows and movies.

Pooh was never a big part of my childhood in particular. I watched the show from time to time on Toon Disney, but besides that, I have no major connection to it. Primarily, I want to see if this film turns out to be a family picture that really has heart and effort put into it.

It seems that movies, shows and games are more and more catered to older audiences. This wouldn’t be a bad thing per-say, if not for the lack of quality of the few things that are made just for kids. I remember there being just so many games to play when I was a kid. Now, If you’re not into Lego, you’re kind of out of luck.

I want to see what they come up with in kid’s entertainment. It is a very important art form that too many companies overlook. The Emoji Movie can not be the benchmark of child cinema!!!

#Christopher Robin #Movie #Kids #Entertainment #ImagineOnly Productions

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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The Weekend Warrior Home Edition 7/31/20 – THE SHADOW OF VIOLENCE, SUMMERLAND, THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM, SHE DIES TOMORROW and More!

As I started to gather what’s left of my wits for this week’s column, there seemed to be fewer movies than usual, and I was quite thankful for that. Then, a few of the movies scheduled for some sort of theatrical release this weekend were delayed and I discovered a bunch of movies I didn’t have in my release calendar to begin with, so this is a little bit of an odd weekend but still one with 8 movies reviews! I went into most of the movies this weekend without much knowledge of what they were about, probably was the best way to go into many of them, since it allowed me to be somewhat open-minded about what I was watching.

The first surprise of the week is that we’re getting another decent film from the one and only Saban Films, so maybe the VOD distributor has been using the pandemic to step up its game as well. Directed by first-time feature director Nick Rowland, the Irish crime-drama THE SHADOW OF VIOLENCE (Saban Films), based on the book “Calm with Horses,” stars relative newcomer Cosmo Jarvis as Douglas Armstrong, known as “Arm,” the enforcer for the drug-dealing Devers family. Douglas also has a young toddler with local woman Ursula (Niamh Algar), but when his handler Dympna (Barry Keoghan) orders Arm to kill for the first time, he’s forced to rethink his career.

Much of the story revolves a member of the Devers family caught making a lurid pass at Dympha’s 16-year-old sister, leading to consequences, as Arm is sent to beat the crap out of him. For head of the family, that isn’t nearly enough and soon, Arm is ordered to kill the man. (This aspect of the story reminds me a little of Todd Field’s Little Children, particularly the Jackie Earle Haley subplot.)

As I mentioned above, I watched this film with zero expectations and was taken quite aback by how great it was, despite not having been that big a fan of Keoghan from some of his past work. On the other hand, Cosmo Jarvis, in his first major role, is absolutely outstanding, giving a performance on par with something we might see from Thomas Hardy or Matthias Schoenaerts, at least in their earlier work. Barely saying a word, Jarvis instills so many emotions into “Arm” as we see him playing with his young autistic son, Jack, trying to keep his jealousy over Ursula under control, while also being there when Dympna needs him. Even as you think you’re watching fairly innocuous day-to-day stuff, Rowland ratchets up the tension to an amazing degree right up until a climactic moment that drives the last act.

Despite the film’s title, The Shadow of Violence isn’t just about violence, as much as it is about a man trying to figure out how to change the trajectory of his life. If you like character-based films like The Rider, this movie is definitely going to be for you. Another surprise is that the movie will be available only in theaters this Friday, rather than the typical VOD approach Saban Films generally takes, so check your local theater if it’s playing near you.

The faith-based drama THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM (Lionsgate), starring Katie Holmes and Josh Lucas, is directed by Andy Tennant (Hitch, Sweet Home Alabama) and adapted from Rhonda Byrne’s self-help book, The Secret (which is based on a 2006 movie also called The Secret). Originally planned for a theatrical release, it’s now being released as PVOD, which seems to be the way that so many movies are going now. In it, Holmes plays Miranda Wells, a struggling widow living in New Orleans with three kids who on a stormy night meets a kind stranger (Lucas) who tries to pass on his philosophy of using positive thinking to get whatever you want in life.

Mini-Review: I don’t usually buy into some of the faith-based movies that are released every year, but that’s mainly because I rarely get a chance to see any of them, so why bother? I was ready to go into The Secret: Dare to Dream with a healthy amount of skepticism, because it seemed to be another movie about grand miracles… but in fact, it’s just a bland movie pimping Rhonda Byrne’s New Thought technique from her New Age-y self help book.

The idea is that positive thinking is all that it takes to get anything you want, something no less than Oprah quickly glommed onto. While the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with such a message, and “God” is only mentioned once, it also just doesn’t seem to offer much in terms of storytelling to maintain one’s interest.

Katie Holmes does a fine job playing an amiable single mother who meets Josh Lucas’ Bray Johnson as a huge storm is about to hit New Orleans, and he seems like a nice enough fellow as he helps her replace a broken bumper (after she rear-ended him, no less) and then fixing up the house after the storm. But Bray has a secret (hence the title) and it’s in an important envelope that he hesitates to give to Miranda.

The film’s biggest problem is that there never is much in terms of stake when it comes to the drama, because Bray seems to be there to fix everything and make everything better. Miranda’s only other real relation is an awkward one with Jerry O’Connell’s long-time (presumably platonic) friend Tucker, which only gets more awkward when he surprises her by popping the question. She says “Yes” without talking to her own kids first. The whole time while watching the film, I was expecting some sort of big Nicholas Spark level romance between Miranda and Bray, so when Tucker proposes, it throws a real spanner in the works, but only for a little while.

Incidentally, the “secret” of the title that Bray resists telling Miranda until pressured isn’t particularly groundbreaking either. I won’t ruin it. You’ll just be annoyed when it’s finally revealed.

The Secret: Dare to Dream is as generic and bland a tale you can possibly get, one that really doesn’t accomplish very much and feels more like a Lifetime movie than something particularly revelatory.

Rating: 6/10

Jessica Swale’s WW2-set SUMMERLAND (IFC Films) stars Gemma Arterton as fantasy author Alice Lamb, quietly living on the South of England in a small beachside town when she’s presented with a young London evacuee named Frank (Lucas Bond) for her to mind while his father’s at war. Alice lives alone but many years earlier, she had a friendship with a local woman named Vera (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) that turned into something more, despite the taboo of their relationship during those times.

This was another nice surprise, and as I watched the movie, it was hard not to compare it to last week’s Radioactive, since they’re movies intended to appeal to a similar audience. This one seems to be more focused, and Arterton does a better job being likeable despite being as persnickety as Pike’s Marie Currie. Although this isn’t a biopic, it did remind me of films like Goodbye Christopher Robin and Tolkien, and possibly even Finding Neverland. (Incidentally, the Summerland of the title is a mythical place that Alice is writing about, which adds to the fairy tale angle to the film.)

As the film goes along, there’s a pretty major twist, of sorts, and it’s when the stakes in the film start to feel more dramatic as things continue to elevate into the third act. The movie actually opens in 1975 with Penelope Wilton playing the older Alice, although I’m not sure the framing sequence was particularly needed for the film to work the way Swale intended.

Summerland is generally just a nice and pleasant film that stirs the emotions and shows Swale to be a filmmaker on the rise.

Another really nice indie film that might involve a bit more searching is director Sergio Navaretta’s THE CUBAN (Brainstorm Media), written by Alessandra Piccione. It follows 19-year-old Mina (played by Ana Golja), a Canadian pre-med student who lives with her aunt, Bano (Shohreh Aghdashloo), who pushes her career in medicine, although Mina would rather be a singer. At her part-time job at a long-term care facility, Mina meets Luis (Louis Gossett Jr.), a quiet elderly patient who sits in his wheelchair never talking to anyone until Mina discovers his love for music, and the two bond over that, although Mina’s employers don’t think she’s helping Luis despite his obvious change in nature.

This was just a lovely film driven by Golja, who is just wonderful in the lead role with an equally terrific cast around her, and while it gets a little obvious, I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying this film that harks back to some of the great earlier work by Thomas McCarthy, as it follows a touching story that mixes a number of cultures in a surprisingly fluid way. It turned out to be quite a pleasant and unexpected film in the way it deals with subjects like dementia in such a unique and compelling away, especially if you enjoy Cuban music.

The Cuban already played at a couple Canadian theaters, but it will be available via Virtual Cinema and in some American theaters Friday, and you can find out where at the Official Site.

I was pretty excited to see Amy Seimetz’s new film, SHE DIES TOMORROW (NEON), since I was quite a fan of her previous film, Sun Don’t Shine. Besides having played quite a fantastic role in recent independent cinema through her varied associations, Seimetz also cast Kate Lyn Sheil, a fantastic actress, in the main role. It’s a little hard to explain the film’s plot, but essentially Sheil plays Amy, a woman convinced she’s going to die tomorrow, a feeling that starts spreading to others around her. I’m not sure if you would get this just from watching the film, because it’s pretty vague and even a little confusing about what is happening despite the high concept premise.

For the first 15 minutes or so, the camera spends the entire time watching Sheil as she cries and hugs a wall, while listening to the same opera record over and over. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams) comes over to check on her, she finds her vacuuming in a fancy dress. Amy tells her friend that she’s going to die tomorrow, and she wants to be turned into a leather jacket. Soon, after we’re watching Jane, a scientist, going down the same wormhole as Amy. That’s pretty much the running narrative, although the film opens up when we meet some of Jane’s family and friends, including Katie Aselton, Chris Messina, Tunde Adebimpe, Michelle Rodriguez and more. Soon after we meet them, they TOO are convinced that they’re going to die tomorrow. Incidentally (and spoiler!), no one actually dies in the movie. Heck, I’d hesitate even to call this a “horror” movie because it takes the idea of a pandemic that we’ve seen in movies like Bird Box, Contagion and others and sucks all the genre right out of it, but it still works as a character piece.

The thing is that the film looks great and also feels quite unique, which does make She Dies Tomorrow quite compelling, as well as a great vehicle for both Sheil and Seimetz. Even so, it’s also very much a downer and maybe not the best thing to watch if you aren’t in a good place, emotionally. You’ve been warned. It will open at select drive-ins this weekend, but it will then be available via VOD next Friday, August 7.

Next up, we have two fantastic and inspiring docs that premiered at Sundance earlier this year…

In recent years, Ron Howard has made a pretty amazing transition into respectable documentary filmmaker, and that continues with REBUILDING PARADISE (National Geographic), which takes a look at the horrible fires that struck Northern California in November 2018, literally wiping out the town of Paradise and leaving over 50,000 people homeless and killing roughly 85 people.

It’s really horrifying to see the amount of destruction caused when a spark from a faulty transmission line ignites the particularly dry forest surrounding the town of Paradise, destroying the hospital and elementary school and displacing the homeowners. This is obviously going to be a tough film to watch, not only seeing the fires actually raze the town to the ground but also watching these not particularly wealthy people having to contend with losing their homes. (It’s even tougher to watch now since you wonder how COVID may have affected the town as it’s in better shape now then it was last year.)

Using a cinema verité approach (for the first time possible?), Howard finds a small group of people to follow, including the town’s former mayor, the school superintendent, a local police officer, and others. It’s pretty impressive how much time this doc covers, and often, you may wonder if Ron Howard was there at all times, because it seems like he would have to have been embedded with the townspeople for an entire year to get some of the footage.

As I said, this is not an easy film to watch, especially as you watch these people dealing with so much tragedy – if you’ve seen any of the docs about Sandy Hook, you might have some idea how hard this movie may be to watch for you. But it is great, since it shows Howard achieving a new level as a documentary filmmaker with a particularly powerful piece.

Produced by Kerry Washington, THE FIGHT (Magnolia Pictures) is the latest doc from Weiner directors Elyse Steinberg, Josh Kriegman, this time joined as director by that film’s editor, Eli B. Despres. The “fight” of the title is the one between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Trump administration that began shortly after his inauguration in 2017, his Muslim travel ban that quickly followed, and going up until mid-2019 when a lot of obvious civil rights violations were being perpetrated by the U.S. government.

This is a particularly interesting doc if you weren’t aware of how active the ACLU has been in helping to protect people’s rights on a variety of fronts. The doc covers four particular cases involving immigration, LGBTQ rights, voting rights and reproductive rights, and we watch the lawyers involved in four important cases, including a few that are taken right up to the Supreme Court. In following these four particular lawyers, the filmmakers do a great job helping the viewer understand how important the ACLU is in keeping the conservative right at bay from trying to repeal some previous laws made to protect Americans’ rights.

Of course, this film is particularly timely since it covers a lot of dramatic changes, including the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which ends up being ironic, since he was the judge presiding over an earlier ACLU case involving a pregnant teen immigrant who isn’t allowed to get an abortion. The movie doesn’t skirt the fact that often the ACLU is called upon to help the likes of white supremacists and potential terrorist factions, since they’re about protecting everyone’s rights. I would have loved to hear more about this, but it does cover the backlash to the ACLU after the Charlottesville protests went horribly wrong in 2017.

Be warned that there are moments in this film where the waterworks will start flowing since seeing the ACLU succeed against oppression is particularly moving. If you’ve been following the country’s shifting politics keenly and want to learn more about the ACLU, The Fight does a great job getting behind closed doors and humanizing the organization.

The Fight will be available on all digital and On Demand platforms starting Friday, and you can find out how to rent it at the Official Site.

Vinnie Jones (remember him?) stars in Scott Wiper’s crime-thriller THE BIG UGLY (Vertical) about a pair of British mobsters who travel to West Virginia to make an oil deal in order to launder money. Once there, they encounter some troubles with the locals, particularly the sadistic son of Ron Perlman’s Preston, the man with whom they’re dealing.

Sometimes, as a film critic, you wonder how a movie that has so much potential can turn into such an unmitigated disaster, but then you watch a movie like The Big Ugly, and you realize that some bad filmmakers are better at talking people into doing things than others.

That seems to be the case with this film in which Jones plays Leland, who comes to West Virginia with his boss Harris (McDowell) to make an oil deal with Ron Perlman’s Preston, only for the latter’s son “PJ” (Brandon Sklenar) causing trouble, including the potential murder of Leland’s girlfriend. Of course, one would expect to see tough guy Vinnie Jones out for revenge against the endless parade of sleaze-balls he encounters, and that may have been a better movie than what Wiper ended up making, which is all over the place in terms of tone. (It was only after I watched the film did I realize that Wiper wrote and directed the absolutely awful WWE Film, The Condemned, also starring Jones. If I only knew.)

Jones isn’t even the worst part of the cast, in terms of the acting, because both McDowell and Perlman, two great actors, struggle through the terrible material, though Perlman generally fares better than McDowell, who doesn’t seem to be giving it his all.

There’s a whole subplot involving one of PJ’s friends/co-workers (recent Emmy nominee Nicholas Braun from HBO’s Succession) and his relationship with a pretty local (Lenora Crichlow) that goes nowhere and adds nothing to the overall story. Once PJ is seemingly dealt with, there’s still almost 35 minutes more of movie, including a long monologue by Perlman telling a sorely wasted Bruce McGill how he met McDowell’s character. Not only does it kill any and all momentum leading up to that point, but it’s probably something that should have been part of the set-up earlier in the film.

The fact this movie is so bad is pretty much Wiper’s fault, becuase he wrote a script made up of so many ideas that never really fit together – kind of like Guy Ritchie doing a very bad Deliverance remake before deciding to turn it into a straight-up Western. Wiper then tries his hardest to salvage the movie by throwing in violence and explosions and leaning heavily on the soundtrack. (The fact that both this and the far superior The Shadow of Violence used a song from the Jam was not lost on this music enthusiast.) Regardless, The Big Ugly is a pretty detestable piece of trash that couldn’t end fast enough… and it didn’t. (It played in drive-ins and select theaters last Friday but will be available on digital and On Demand this Friday.)

Available through Virtual Cinemas (supporting Film Forum and the Laemmle in L.A) is Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni’s documentary, Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, about the Canadian singer-songwriter who changed people’s impressions of Canadian culture, covering Lightfoots’s greatest triumphs and failures.

Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema will premiere Koji Fukada’s Japanese drama A Girl Missing (Film Movement) on Friday, while New York’s Metrograph Live Screening series continues this week with Manfred Kirchheimer’s Bridge High & Stations of the Elevated starting today through Friday, and then the premiere of Nan Goldin’s Sirens (with two other shorts) starting on Friday. You can subscribe to the series for $5 a month or $50 a year.

Premiering on Disney+ this Friday is Beyoncé’s Black is King, her new visual album inspired by the lessons from The Lion King, as well as the new original Muppets series, Muppets Now. Since I haven’t seen either Lion King movie, I’m definitely looking forward more to the Muppets returning to "television.”

Launching on Netflix today is Matias Mariani’s Shine Your Eyes about a Nigerian musician who travels to Sao Paulo to look for his estranged brother and bring him back to Nigeria, as well as Sue Kim’s doc short, The Speed Cubers, set in the world of competitive Rubik cube solving and the friendly rivalry between two young “speedcubers.” Also, Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy will premiere on Netflix this Friday.

Premiering on Shudder tomorrow (Thursday, July 30) is Rob Savage’s Host, the first horror movie made during the quarantine about a group of six friends who decide to hold a séance over Zoom.

Amazon’s drive-in series continues tonight with “Movies to Inspire Your Inner Child,” playing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Hook.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

#TheWeekendWarrior #SheDiesTomorrow #Summerland #TheCuban #Movies #Reviews #TheFight #RebuildingParadise #TheShadowOfViolence #VOD #Streaming #TheSecretDareToDream

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khany82 · 7 years

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Top 13 Films of 2017

2017 was a really good year for film, like incredibly good, even though I still haven’t seen all of em I think I’ll provide a pretty decent list here. 1. Logan - So I couldn’t speak when I came out of the cinema so... can’t believe the entire mutant race died and all Logan could do was make sure the last few kids had somewhere safe to live. Seriously it’s not feasible to bring back a species with so few people and the anti mutant serum out there. 2. Get Out - Didn’t expect such a cleaver and twisted modern Twillight Zonelike film, bravo Jorden Peele. 3. Okja - Such a gritty remake of Babe Pig in the City, I like all the parables to organic foods XD and the consumerism consuming all parts of society even marriage is comodisised into a expensive Gold Pig. 4. Mudbound - Sure there might be an anti-ideological state apparatus message, but I still like it, cinematography, performances the nyce people involved! 5. Florida Project - How can I not feel emotionally involved in a film that feels so real and reflects so much of the poverty upbringing, and the performances! 6. Batman & Bill Documentary - That documentary got emotionally gut wrenching and made Batman even more of a mystery in real life, must watch if you are a real Batman fan. 7. War for the Planet of the Apes - Ceasar’s tale ends in this trilogy, Andy Serkis needs a nomination. 8. Goodbye Christopher Robin - Anything with winnie-the-pooh has my undivided attention since I got such a high mark for it in my dissertation, so when the performances were so strong I have such feels. 9. Thor - I admit I am totally biased in this one, since I met Jeff Goldblum by accident and he made me laugh so much during Thor Press and Taika films are always so good and the rewatch value of this is so effective no contest. 10. Ingrid Goes West - It’s not as much as it is emotional as it is cleaver. The roles of social media and defining an identity based on a social media success rate, is dark, funny and put you rooting for someone in it. It’s a very manipulative film. 12. Silence - The editing alone deserves an Oscar and I find I really like religious films for some reason, although I probably am not seeing it as Scorsese wants me to see it. One religion being used as a foundation of control in a society violently rejecting another, a tale as old as time. 13. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond Documentary - Jim Carrey as he slowly falls into madness becoming the role of Andy Kauffman, acting like him on set, with his family and the experience everyone had to deal with him, it’s a good view on acting and method.

Special mentions Limehouse Golem, The Big Sick, Blade of the Immortal I still haven't watched Wind River, Coco, Phantom Thread, Dunkirk, Shape of Water or Kedi

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screenandcinema · 5 years

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Coming Attractions - May 2019

Five years ago today, here on the S&C, we presented for the first time a list of the movies what would be hitting your local cinemas that month. That initial list included The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Chef, Godzilla, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. Every month since then over the course of five years we have done the same rundown of movies coming soon and you have been there to read them all along the way. Thank you for that. We thought this was a special day to reflect on in the history of the S&C.

With that said, here are what movies are coming out this month:

May 3rd

Long Shot - Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron star as an odd-couple in this upcoming comedy, him an unemployed journalist and her a candidate for President of the United States. Long Shot premiered to great reviews at South by Southwest in March and I for one can’t wait to see it.

UglyDolls - Quick! Is UglyDolls an original film or one based on existing IP? Do you know the answer? I don’t. (Well I do now, cause I looked it up, but I didn’t know when I asked it.)

The Intruder - Meagan Good and Michael Ealy star in this thriller as a couple who buys a house from Dennis Quaid’s character, and he refuses to let go off his long-term home. The film hails from the same screenwriter as 2009′s Obsessed and 2008′s Lakeview Terrance, so audiences should know what they are getting into with The Intruder.

Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil and Vile - If you are keeping score at home, it is now Ted Bundy: 1, Oxford Comma: 0. Zac Efron stars as the notorious serial killer in this new film coming to Netflix this month. Reviews of the film have been fairly solid since its premiere at Sundance earlier this year.

May 10th

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu - Though I have never been a fan of Pokémon in the least, Detective Pikachu looks to me like the film I wanted The Happytime Murders to be, a noir-ish fantasy mystery made in the same vein of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And while I have no interest in the film, I do have an 8-year nephew who does.

The Hustle - Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson take the lead in this comedy film that is a remake of 1988′s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels starring Steve Martin and Michael Caine, which is itself a remake of 1964′s Bedtime Story starring Marlon Brando and David Niven. Still one remake shy of a full A Star is Born.

Poms - In this comedy, Diane Keaton starts a cheerleading squad at her retirement community and her friends played by Jacki Weaver, Pam Grier, and Rhea Perlman, join up!

Tolkien - Nicholas Hoult is J.R.R. Tolkien in this biography of the famous author. Like similar more recent works Finding Neverland, Goodbye Christopher Robin, Becoming Jane, and half of Saving Mr. Banks, audiences will surely seeing Tolkien’s future works come alive in his life experiences through his time as school and World War I.

May 17th

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum - John Wick is back for installment number 3. The John Wick film series has been a surprising revelation and it is always good to see Keanu Reeves back on the big screen. Prepare for war.

A Dog’s Journey - This is a sequel to 2017′s A Dog’s Purpose. Did you see that one? Oh, you didn’t. Then my job is done.

The Sun is Also A Star - It is a race against time for two young students hoping to fall in love before one of them is forced to leave with her family forever. My prediction? She is an alien.

May 24th

Aladdin - Disney’s 1992 beloved animated classic is back with a live action version directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Will Smith as the Genie. As a kid, I remember seeing Aladdin in theaters five times and it was a personal favorite. Unlike some of the recent and forthcoming Disney remakes, Aladdin doesn’t appear to be a scene-for-scene rehash of the original, which is extremely refreshing.

Brightburn - James Gunn produces this superhero horror film written by his cousins Mark and Brian Gunn. “Superhero horror” might be the best genre name imaginable. Essentially, Brightburn is a twist on the familiar Superman story - what if a child gave from space with amazing abilities and instead of trying to save us all, he tried to kill us all. Count me in!

Booksmart - Olivia Wilde makes her feature film directorial debut with the coming-of-age comedy in Booksmart. In the film, two smart good girls try to make four years worth bad dumb decisions over the course of the night before high school graduation. The film premiered at South by Southwest in March to fantastic reviews.

May 31st

Godzilla: King of the Monsters - On the surface, it is hard to tell how much of King of the Monsters is a sequel to 2014′s Godzilla and how much of it is set-up for 2020′s Godzilla vs. Kong as Legendary Entertainment continues to build their MonsterVerse. As much as I enjoyed Godzilla and 2017′s Kong: Skull Island, nothing about King of the Monsters is really exciting me at this point, which in itself is disappointing.

Rocketman - The music biopic craze continues with Rocketman starring Taron Egerton as Elton John. The film is directed by Dexter Fletcher, who you may or may not know as the guy who came in and finished directing Bohemian Rhapsody after Brian Singer was fired. Rocketman looks to be everything Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t, including an actor who sings throughout the movie and a historically accurate portrayal of the musician's life and times. Fans of music who were disappointed by Bohemian Rhapsody should be eager to take a ride with Rocketman.

Ma - Octavia Spencer stars a lonely woman who befriends a group of mischievous teenagers only to viciously turn on them in this upcoming thriller from Blumhouse. Watch this one with the lights on.

Now for a quick look ahead to June, my top picks for next month are Dark Phoenix, Men in Black: International, and Toy Story 4.

-MB-

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