#josh hutcherson was a good casting choice he looks good!!

[just--kay]

Bro I am so hyped for the new Fnaf movie it's gonna be so exciting to see Mike on the big screen !!!!!

[ennard-is-near]

As a fnaf movie enjoyer I would be so down to hear your thoughts on it! Like genuinely curious. I like hearing people's other perspectives

Of course! I probably should have clarified anyway. Just know that everything I say is lighthearted. I’m not mad at anyone who likes the movie, I think there’s some stuff about it that is fun, it just really didn’t do it for me personally. This is going to be a long one, so I’m sorry about that. Thank you for the ask!

Of course there are positives:

It looks great! The pizzeria, the animatronics, the sets and actors. Everything is really well done on a technical level. This extends to the casting being incredible. Matthew Lillard was a perfect choice for William Afton, he does insane guy pretending to be regular very well. Josh Hutcherson, Piper Rubio, Elizabeth Lail, the guy who played Doug, MATPAT??? All slay so hard. Everything like that about the movie is good.

Mike and Abby have a cute relationship. All the family stuff is actually really well done. I think it was a weird addition (I’ll touch on this later) but as it is it’s a well done part of the movie.

The little fan service bits are super fun. I shat my pants when Sparky the Dog came onscreen. That one guy being named Carl and getting his face eaten by the cupcake, the use of The Living Tombstone’s song at the end, MatPat. All these moments are great.

Dumb fun. I mean, it’s the FNaF movie. They build a fort! Freddy Fazbear is there! William Afton is there (sort of…)! Vanessa throws Mike’s Xanax or whatever into a lake! That’s hilarious! I enjoy the movie in this regard. As a FNaF fan who is occasionally willing to overlook everything I find disappointing about the movie, it’s fun.

However, it’s still not really a good movie.

I think this movie was pitched as being “For the fans” but aside from the little moments, like the ones I mentioned earlier, it isn’t really that. And it’s not clear enough for someone who has no idea what FNaF is to follow (that’s why critics were so confused). I don’t know how to Segway this into the next topic so here’s a few things that really bugged me from a fan perspective. 

The Aftons are not prominent or interesting at all. This should have been a slam dunk and it wasn’t. I might get in trouble for talking too much shit about Vanessa because people tend to love her for some reason, but she’s so boring. She doesn’t have that much personality or clear motivation and only shows up to deliver exposition or get stabbed. She has a lot of potential, maybe I could over analyze her potential one day, but as she stands she is not interesting. And don’t even get me started on William. He’s in like two scenes, doesn’t have any clear motivation at all and then just shows up at the end to get springlocked. I want to see him!!! Lemme see William! Why isn’t he more of a constant threat throughout the movie? Instead there’s a random child custody based subplot and the antagonist for most of the movie is some random character they made up and not William fucking Afton?? What’s his deal? It’s obviously not remnant because that doesn’t make sense based off his actions in the movie. I think they should have spent more time clarifying the motives for the movie Aftons, because as they stand they are completely different characters from their game counterparts (which is fine) but with no known motivations or personalities. Like you can’t expect me to apply their game motivations to this movie when they’re clearly super different.

The pizzeria isn’t prominent enough either. Mike doesn’t enough know what Freddy’s is despite probably being a child in the 80s. Garrett is kidnapped in the woods (Why did William Afton do that?) Mike spends more time zonked out and dreaming about Nebraska than he does thinking about Freddy Fazbear. It’s a bummer because it’s such a cool location, but the climax could have taken place almost anywhere and would have had the same effect with how few shits Mike gives about the Pizzeria. Which is a bummer because if Mike had just been a Charlie Emily type character then it would have been so easy. His dad was co-owner, his brother went missing there and now he has to go back and confront his demons. Have him freak out a little when the employment office guy tells him he can only get work at Freddy’s. Have him squint with vague recognition at “Steve Raglan” but not be able to put his finger on where he knows him from. Easy, doesn’t add too much and really brings the setting together.

The dream thing is kind of a stupid addition. It would be fine in a regular horror movie, but this is the FNaF movie? And it’s not a FNaF 4 reference because that’s not how FNaF 4 is. I get that they wanted to reference Dream Theory, which is a super fun reference but not enough to be the plot of the entire movie.

Not quite game compliant enough for a couple very specific things. I get that it’s a different media but like…Why can the kids appear in dreams? Why do they respond to drawings? Hey…why is Golden Freddy able to move around and stuff? That’s like his whole thing!

Some Random nitpicks: Wouldn’t it be more fun if the animatronics had beef with Vanessa? Isn’t the whole thing in the games that they don’t really like the kid of William Afton? The cupcake is too violent. The drawing thing is really stupid imo, especially because the kids seem creepy and violent even when they aren’t listening to William. I don’t think what Mike did to Garrett was bad enough idk, like I get that he feels responsible for his death, but he isn’t. Whereas Michael Afton was totally at fault for his brother’s death, Garrett was randomly picked up in the woods in Nebraska. The springlock scene was super lame, literally just period cramps. I get that it couldn’t be too intense because the movie was PG13 but maybe don’t make the movie PG13 if you can’t properly include one of the most iconic things in the games.

(These are the big ones. There’s a billion other things I could say but I think we’d be here all day)

But also, aside from being the FNaF movie…it’s just not a very good movie. The plot is all over the place. Nothing is explained very well. There’s a lot of exposition but not even about the things that matter. I don’t want to say that it wasn’t scary because I don’t personally get scared by horror movies but it wasn’t even intense. How are the animatronics a threat when they can be taken down with a taser? (I get that this is possibly a reference to 5 & 6 with the controlled shocks and such, but in those games they had to be like in a fixed spot and the taser was just a button, this can be taken places.) There are two antagonists and one of them is super random (if you don’t know the games), I’ve got a little facial blindness so if I didn’t know that Steve and William were the same based off prior knowledge I wouldn’t have put it together. It’s painfully slow at some points. The ghost children are underdeveloped. Certain arcs don’t go anywhere. It’s just all over the place.

And I think if it was a bad movie, that would be okay as long as it was a good FNaF movie. Or if it was a good movie, it would be okay for it to be a bad FNaF movie. But it’s not really great at being either thing, so (imo) it’s sort of just a terrible movie.

And it’s sad actually because I really wanted to love this movie. When I saw it in theaters, I left thinking it was a pretty solid movie, actually. Because I love FNaF and I was just happy to see it finally get the movie I’ve been waiting on since like 2015. But then I watched it 3 more times, and I started to realize that aside from the lore for the movie characters I made up in my own head and the fact that OMG Freddy Fazbear it wasn’t really a good movie or a good adaptation. I don’t hate it, though, I just think it’s a terrible movie (if that makes any sense). I’ll still go see the second one though, I’ll probably dress up too.

Final thoughts?

I think that a lot of the love for this movie comes, not from the source material, but from everything we made up afterwards. Headcanons and fan comics and fanfiction and the like. And that’s great! I’m glad people are taking a movie that I think is terrible, really I do. It just personally doesn’t do it for me, and that’s fine. Not every movie is for everyone, no movie could have been made that would satisfy every fan (The one they made just happens to not be for me. There’s a universe not too far from this one where I think the movie was great and you hate it.) And, hey, maybe the sequel will fix all the issues I have with it? Who knows. Only time (Dec 2025) will tell.

TLDR, I guess?

The movie has positives and it’s good fun, but there are so many flaws that make it both a bad movie and a disappointing FNaF adaptation. It’s great if you love it, I truly wish I did, but it just has too many flaws I personally can’t overlook.

Sorry this is an INSANE response to this ask, I have been looking for an excuse to type all this out for so long. Thank you for asking, thank you for reading, heart emoji heart emoji heart emoji.

[gamergirljournalist]

Review: Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) - I actually enjoyed it

RATING: 3.5 out of 5

Warning: this review contains spoilers for the 2023 Five Nights at Freddy's film

For those who have been living under a rock, Five Nights at Freddy's is a 2014 indie horror video game that went through development hell after a film adaptation was announced. After years of waiting, plus it being passed down from Warner Bros to Blumhouse, the movie is now showing in theatres and Peacock.

As of writing, the 2023 film adaptation of Five Nights At Freddy's has an average critic score of 26 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Regardless of what those film snobs say, I actually enjoyed this horror flick. Sure it has its flaws, but for a film adaptation, I think it did a pretty good job.

Warning, I will be spoiling the film and the games, so if you want to watch it blind, steer clear for now.

The film has a proper plot

This movie has a plot, like a real working plot. And no, it's not convoluted compared to the mess that's the franchise's lore. It's about a night security guard who's at risk of losing his sister. To prove that he could still have custody of her, he took on the job as the night guard for an abandoned Pizzaria from the 80's. Little did he know that this was no ordinary night shift gig.

What Blumhouse and Scott Cawthon have done to present this game in movie form was great. It took parts of the first two games, as well as sprinkling in aspects from later titles and the books, to create a cohesive story. The best way to watch this movie is to view it as its own thing. Because if you're going to watch this and find ways to connect the movie to the game's story, many things really don't make sense.

The cast

Five Nights at Freddy's has a tremendous cast. While most of the people featured were smaller actors who appeared in one minor role in TV shows or unknown films, Matthew Lillard and Josh Hutcherson did a tremendous job performing the franchise's iconic characters, William Afton and Mike Schmidt.

Mike has a personality, rather than just a boring character we play as in the first game. Meanwhile, we see William as this cunning character, who managed to fool so many people, to the point he had a different alias.

The children also did an amazing job, even if we rarely see them. They act all scary and not so innocent. Even Mike's sister, Abby (played by Piper Rubio) was shrouded in mystery. She's no ordinary kid, even if she does look like it. Why is she not like the other kids? What's with the drawings? So many questions that my first theory was that she was psychic.

Speaking of theories... MATPAT WAS IN IT!!!! That guy lied to everyone on the internet, only for it to be revealed that he had a minor cameo and said the line. And it's not just him. A few YouTubers were featured and Markiplier could have been in it if it wasn't for scheduling issues.

If there was one character I didn't like, it was Vanessa. Played by Elizabeth Lail, her job was to warn Mike about the dangers of the Pizzaria but wouldn't explain why due to "reasons" explained in the film's climax. The moment that happened, I was like "Okay, that checks out." Blumhouse's decision to implement a character that was introduced in Security Breach was an odd choice. I can somewhat see why it was made, however, its execution made it feel corny at most. 

My thoughts on the film

In all honesty, Five Nights At Freddy's isn't like other great video game adaptations, like HBO's The Last of Us or Illuminations' The Super Mario Bros. However, it's pretty clear that so much love and attention was given to this project. And to be fair, that's to be expected since it's a Blumhouse production.

While it is branded as a horror movie, it felt like I was watching M3GAN all over again. Lots of comedy and the push of the importance of family. Some paranormal stuff here and there, easter eggs from the original games, while also coming up with something original. And I think that's the problem with this film.

Unlike Super Mario Bros, which barely had any lore, Five Nights At Freddy's has a story that spans many of its titles, including children's activity books. If viewed as a standalone story, it's fine. But let's be real, those who will be watching this movie on opening weekend are Five Nights At Freddy's fans. The film did reference stuff from the original story, but many changes were made which had many, including me, reacting with "that wasn't in the games at all." I watched this picture with my boyfriend and he was like "Can you explain x" and I had to tell him "Sorry dude, that's an original thing. Didn't see it in the games."

Regardless, I did enjoy the final product and how it gave some tribute to the content creators that boosted the franchise's popularity. It's still a good film, just expect some head scratches and camp. I bet Matpat is working on something to connect the movie to the overall lore.

[ultrahpfan5blog]

Rewatching The Hunger Games series

So I saw The Hunger Games quadrilogy after roughly a year or so. Its a series that I genuinely enjoy for the most part. When the first movie came out, I had gone because the critical reception had been so positive that I got interested in the film. After the film, I bought and read all three books before Catching Fire came out. This series was the peak of the young adult book adaptation era and was definitely the highest quality of those, even though that isn’t saying much because majority of the adaptations were pretty poor.

When it comes to the movies, the first two especially are damn good. Gary Ross deserves more credit than he gets for the success of this series because he puts the essential pieces in place. He got critical casting choices right on the money with Jennifer Lawrence, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, and Elizabeth Banks being the highlights. The shaky cam technique becomes a little much but it does lend to the gritty feeling of the movie. The film managed to strike the right balance of showing the morbidity of this world but also giving some excitement and entertainment by contrasting it with some truly bright and energetic visuals and characters, lending to the social commentary of the class differences in this world. 

Catching Fire was even better. Clearly, you could tell that the movie got a major upgrade. Francis Lawrence brought a much steadier and cleaner visual technique. I think the expansion of the world and the ensemble cast works in its favor The returning cast were all excellent but the new additions of Sam Claflin, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, and Seymour Hoffman worked wonders. I liked that Lawrence aptly captured the horror of the arena. The poison fog sequence in particular is quite horrifying. The film is kinetic and much more fast paced. It gives a lot more texture to the things going in this world. 

The last two movies are inferior in comparison. Part of that has to do with the source material and part of that has to do with the decision to split the book into two. I do think Mockingjay is the weakest book of the three. Unfortunately Katniss becomes far too reactionary a character in the book. While that may be realistic as a teenager in a war scenario, it doesn’t make for very interesting reading when you are following her POV in the book and in the movie. Fundamentally I am ok with splitting a final book where its warranted. I feel it definitely worked in Harry Potter, but it doesn’t quite work here. In Mockingjay Part 1, you can feel the film trying to fill empty space. Also, with the film almost entirely set in underground bunkers, there isn’t much visual color as entertainment as well compared to the previous film. The film also just doesn’t have a climax that packs a punch. The cliffhanger is handled well but the climax leading to the cliffhanger is fairly dull and again, the main character is never in any real danger throughout the film. 

Part 2 is slightly better but its about as bleak a conclusion to a series that I have seen. It definitely has way more in terms of action. But there is almost no humor in the movie with Effie and Haymitch, the main sources of humor from Part 1, are largely absent. Again, the issues of the book kind of affect the movie as well. Katniss’ mission throughout the movie has no impact on the eventual outcome as she fails to actually accomplish her mission. So the whole mission of her and the team fighting their way into the Capitol feels a little pointless from a narrative standpoint. But it does have a lot more momentum than Part 1. Certainly, the mutt attack sequence is pretty terrifying and the film does earn its ending.

Similar to Harry Potter, one of this franchise’s biggest strengths is casting. I didn’t know much about Jennifer Lawrence prior to the first movie, so she pretty much blew me away and she continued to sustain that level of performance throughout. She’s obviously playing the character a little older than the book version but it really works and she carries the franchise effortlessly. The casting masterstroke of the franchise for me was Donald Sutherland. Reading the books, I honestly can’t think of a better casting decision for the role. He’s perfect as the brilliant snakelike devil of a man. He’s a scene stealer throughout. Woody Harrelson as Haymitch is fantastic. He brings a lot of humor to the table. He is really missed when his role gets reduced in the last couple of films. Elizabeth Banks as Effie is the one major upgrade from book to movie. By giving Effie a much more rounded and sympathetic character arc and having her being a part of the overall story in Mockingjay, the performance and the character shines a lot more. Banks is terrific. Adding heart and humor when required. Josh Hutcherson wasn’t exactly whom I thought when I think of Peeta but he grew into the role really well. I think he improved with every movie and he was pretty fantastic in Mockingjay Part 2. Liam Hemsworth was one who I felt was just ok. To be fair to him, he really doesn’t have to do much other than look good and then pine for Katniss. Sam Claflin and Jena Malone lit up the screen in Catching Fire. Its a pity they don’t get all that much to do in subsequent films though they do get a handful of good scenes there too. Hoffman as Plutarch was a good screen partner for Sutherland and later for Moore. Moore herself came in and delivered really well as President Coin. There was also a nice performance by Maharshala Ali as Boggs. Lenny Kravitz as Cinna was another welcome addition in the first two films. Overall, it was a good pack of actors who were really giving it their all that made the series work as well as it did.

[bunkernine]

why are they all white 😭 what are they onnnnn

this is the pjo fandom's fan casts, why wouldn't they all be white 🙄

tho really this is because visual mainstream media often lacks in popular representation, which is why we can name a million and one white actors to play a role, but fail to when it comes to characters of color without listing the same tiring three names. this results in that repeated, jake t austin as leo, or amandla steinberg as hazel, because they are people's go-to hispanic dude and black girl. that's what people were exposed to growing up- the same few names. however, while there are some definite choices that can come to mind, you'll find that a lot of the white characters (let's say, annabeth, thalia, luke) can have multiple fan cast options... there's a few other reasons why too, of course, but really exposure and needing to see more people properly being represented, and having more actors of color on the main stage are important

as for all the white fancasts for leo 😖 while you and I might see it as a problem of making a canonly hispanic male played by a white actor (let's call this by a term 🤔 how about whitewashing 😌) there are a lot of people who do not see this as an issue. leo's written culture plays into his thoughts and actions, even when some of those things may be stereotypes. some people find leo incredibly true-to-life, others find him a gross and unrealistic caricature. regardless, leo is undeniably hispanic and that's apart of who he is

the problem with making a white person play that role, is that it takes away from all the brown kids who want to see themselves and it swipes away from the culture of leo's. he grew up a bilingual poor brown kid, and that shit looks a lot different from a bilingual poor white kid. josh hutcherson (at his old age 😭😭😭) can't play that role regardless of how good you might think he can act. but some bilingual brown kid can

tl;dr whitewashing is gross and brown kids should be able to see themselves properly portrayed in media by brown actors

[thoughtfulbonkeggbat-blog]

Finding Us - teaser

 Summary: Y/N and Tom meet while filming their new movie, Looking for Alaska. They become friends quite fast.

 Pairing: Y/N X Tom Holland

 A/N: this is my first time posting any of my own work on Tumblr. Sorry for the typos. Please send me any suggestions or thoughts you have I’d love to hear them :)

 Y/N woke up from the chime of a text messages on her phone, “I’m at Starbucks. Do you want nitro brew or green tea?” She squinted at the bright light on her phone waking up from a peaceful slumber. Responding to her texts from Julia, Y/N’s cousin who she hired as an assistant when she turned 18 and had more control over her life. Julia was the perfect assistant for, Y/N. Her type A personality balanced Y/N’s free spirit and ADD. Y/N facetimed Julia.

As soon as Julia’s face popped up on the screen Y/N smiled. She had been on a run that morning after teaching a spin class and her dirty blond hair was in a high pony, all her fly away were concealed by a black Lulu Lemon head band.

“Jullllliaaaa. Show me what pastries they have this morning pleeeeasse.” Y/N pleaded already knowing the answer.

Julia smirked and rolled her eyes. “Well I would do that but as you already know you have brunch this morning to meet the rest of the cast of Looking for Alaska. And I Know if you eat before you go, you’re not going to touch any of your food when you get there. So no I’m not going to show you the food they have. But I am going to get you a coffee.”

Y/N made a face at Julia and asked for nitro brew with almond milk. They ended the facetime call and Y/N struggled to get out of her comfy bed. She sat up and walked into the bathroom. The cold tiles woke her up a little bit and she plugged her phone into the speaker and hopped in the shower.

By the time Y/N got out of the shower Julia was already back. She put on her bathrobe and wrapped her hair in a towel and walked into the kitchen sitting down at a seat by the black and white marble kitchen island.

Julia pursed her lips, “I was thinking you wear Free People outfit I laid out on the chair by your bed. Free People just sent you a bunch of clothes and you have to post an Instagram wearing them by Wednesday according to your brand deal with them. Plus, it’s just a casual morning and you won’t be too hot in that outfit.”

Y/N sipped her coffee and nodded, “Whelp sounds good to me.” Smiling she looked at Julia and thanked her for the coffee. She took a few more sips before went to her room to dry her hair, do her makeup and get dressed.

About 40 minutes later she walked into the kitchen and grabbed her keys before saying goodbye to her cousin. Y/N hopped into her sleek black tesla and typed the address of the restaurant into her maps.

She arrived in about a half hour and walked up to the restaurant. Y/N was pulling the door frustrated not realizing why it wouldn’t open when a handsome man walked behind her and placed his hand on hers over the door handle. “darling it says push.” He hinted in his smooth English accent. Y/N, embarrassed hid her hand in her face for a moment. She looked up at him and said, “wow, nice to finally meet you Tom. I’ve already managed to embarrass myself but I’m really excited for his film. I think you are so perfect for the role for Miles.” He looked at her licking his lips and laughed, “No-no-no! you didn’t embarrass yourself. Honestly I'm the one who’s a bit star stuck. And by the way I think you’re a proper fit for Alaska.” He opened the door for her and they awkwardly walked side by side to the private room Sony had reserved for the cast.

Steve Carell who was cast as The Eagle, and Josh Hutcherson who was playing The Colonel, had already arrived along John Green, the director and a few producers.

Y/N sat next to John because she had already met him during the casting process and they had become friends. Tom took the seat next to Y/N.

“You know Y/N I know I’ve said this before but I’m just so happy you were cast as Alaska. You really have that same free spirit and confidence that I wrote for Alaska to have.” John looked at Y/N with a warm smile on his face.

A breeze of excitement and pride grew through Y/N’s body. “That means a lot John. I’m really gonna try to portray Alaska exactly how you wrote her to be. I mean I’ve only read the book like 100 times.” She laughed.

Y/N looked at the orange and blue laminated menu placed in front of her and read off her choices.

Well I definitely am getting a mimosa, I got to cool these nerves. She thought as the waiter came into take everyone’s orders.

When every finally placed their orders for food and drink Y/N sat back in her chair a little and looked at Tom. He was so beautiful the waves in his brown hair fell just perfectly and his sharp jaw complimented his face.

  “So are you excited to spend the next six weeks in rural Alabama?” Y/N asked Tom

 “Yeah I guess I am. I’ve never been and it’s always nice to see new places. But, I’m struggling to find a house to rent for the process of filming.” Tom murmured as her rubbed his hand on the back of his neck.

 “I mean I rented a huge house. There’s like five extra bedrooms. And it’s only going to be me and my cousin in there. So you’re welcome to stay until you find a place of your own.” Y/N blushed. Also questioning why she had just offered a semi stranger to live with her.

 “Really?” Tom’s eyes lit up. “That would make things so much easier than staying in a hotel until I find a place.”

 Y/N giggled at his excitement. “Yeah it’s really no problem at all. Plus, with all the filming we’re gonna be spending the next 2 and a half months together. So we’ll have to become close friend’s sooner or later.

 The whole cast and crew had great chemistry which was a good sign to Y/N. They were all already laughing and teasing each other. Steve had an amazing way about him everything he said made everyone smile. By the end of the brunch everyone was pretty comfortable with each other.

 Tom tugged at Y/N’s arm. “You wanna give me your number? Just in case I don’t find a place to stay by the time filming starts.” He said with a devilish look on his face

 “Oh yeah! That might help.” Y/N replied

[prixmiumarchive]

I saw a post about The Hunger Games movies earlier that I pretty much agreed with in terms of their hyper-representation of white people, their lack of attention to the culturally resonant implications of systemic and racist violence, and so on. Basically, it was praising the books and juxtaposing them with the movies as being vastly inferior products because they shaved off all the rough edges to create a much less complex narrative that focused more on the romantic relationship than the societal implications. And all that is well and good. I am waiting for my good Hunger Games Netflix or Hulu series well into  old age. However, I just wanted to say something from my personal experience of The Hunger Games fandom to sort of counter this particular post politely without tacking onto someone else’s viewpoint in a rude way, which is why I’m making my own post.

I got into The Hunger Games back in very late 2011 because I had learned that Jennifer Lawrence was going to be in it. This was on the coattails of my being hyper-obsessed with X-Men: First Class, and this had been my first exposure to Jennifer Lawrence. My first exposure to the name of The Hunger Games series, on the other hand, were meme text posts that were going around when I first joined tumblr in 2011 that were joking about not knowing what “The Hunger Games” were or not having read them. Anyway, basically what happened was that I learned that Jennifer Lawrence was going to be in The Hunger Games movie, and I had enjoyed her in XMFC, and at the time I had a relationship with fandom where I might actually choose to follow and actor or actress’s body of work much more easily than I would now (in fact this is because of THG fandom).

Anyway, I picked up the book and read the back of it and became very excited about the fact that The Hunger Games was set in Appalachia. This was really exciting to me, and because of my own background in Appalachia I always read Katniss as Melungeon. There was a time, early in my experience in that fandom, when I would have died on that hill. Then I realized how sorely underrepresented indigenous peoples are, so while my brain still defaults to Melungeon, I am 100% in support of indigenous Katniss, too. I’m just sharing this for full disclosure, especially if anyone goes back in my THG tags which haven’t been active in a long while even though I still like the story itself in concept. Back to original point, I was excited about a heroine coming from my part of the world in a post-apcoalyptic setting because I tend to think of the south, particularly my part of it, as being kind of erased in fiction and so on.

By the time it became 2012, I had read the first book and was disappointingly convinced that Jennifer Lawrence was a poor casting choice for Katniss. I didn’t really have anyone better in mind off the top of my head, but cornfed, big-boned Jennifer Lawrence was more Glimmer than Katniss. However, I was still willing to watch the movie because i was so excited to have a movie of this thing I had come to love so much, and at the time the only things I knew about Jennifer Lawrence were things about how skilled she was for someone who was within a few months of my age. I was also excited about Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, which is still one of the only casting choices I’m happy with in retrospect.

The point of this post, however, is actually a little word of caution against giving the books too much credit because of their author Suzanne Collins. Now, this is not to say that she did not craft a story that is very meaningful to some people and that perhaps she did not execute her intent with more finesse in certain areas than she was consciously aware of. That happens sometimes, even incidentally. She might have even been aware of her intent and finesse while she was writing the books. That does not account for what happened during the casting and production of the first Hunger Games film, though.

I gobbled up anything I could get my hands on that was about the movie production, the casting, the cast itself, the process behind bringing these books to life. I still have several of the Scholastic tie-in books that I compulsively bought. I bought all the Capitol-based merch being fully aware of how creepy it was. I had a Hunger Games lanyard for years. I was so, so excited about everything. And as I mentioned, the downfall of The Hunger Games behind the scenes stuff and cast and so on in terms of my adoring-respect is one of the main reasons that I don’t actually follow the celebrity behind media I like for the most part now.

While I was doing this, I distinctly remember reading a magazine while walking through Walmart with my mother on a break from college. I cannot remember specifically what the title was except I think it was sort of a special publication, Hunger Games-specific magazine. I can’t quote it directly for you anymore. However, I want you all to be aware that Suzanne Collins actually got a lot more say in casting The Hunger Games movies than most book authors ever get.

In most cases, book authors sell the film rights to their books, and then they are as helpless and waiting with bated breath as the readers/fans of their books are. However, Gary Ross was kind of known as an odd, hands-on director. There are aspects of the unpolished aesthetic of the first film, particularly in District 12, that are far more fitting from the Asheville sets than from the Atlanta ones of the later films, and this is probably greatly owing to Ross’s ~directorial vision~. One of the main reasons they switched directors pretty much immediately after the first film’s success was because Ross wanted to work on a much longer time frame to get the other three movies “right” than the studio wanted to grant him on the coattails of commercial success and 20-something, aging actors playing teenagers.

Ross and Collins were both directly involved in helping with the casting direction. I remember very clearly reading that Collins said that she would have hired Josh Hutcherson to play Peeta had he been a purple dragon with six-foot wings or some description of this nature. Basically, she was saying that his “inner spirit” and understanding of the character was right to the point that it did not matter if he looked like Peeta, let alone even human, to play the role. Now, this might be a nice enough thing to say about Josh Hutcherson when there is absolutely no reason to believe that Peeta can’t be a white, blond boy. However, I think that it is really telling about Collins’s overall approach and attitude toward her allowed input on the casting of the films.

I am a white person. I have never been a published author, a director, or a casting director. Saying that, I think that the casting of The Hunger Games shows a very, very white attitude toward “color blindness” and mixed race people of color in particular. I just kind of want to bullet point a couple of things that I infer kind of must have gone on in Collins’ mind / that go on in some white authors’/creators’ minds unless they examine their own privilege and attitudes about race:

The Hunger Games books literally never once use a word that indicates a current, modern race or ethnic identification.

However, there does seem to be a fair amount of racial segregation between the districts with one or two ethnic or racial groups being typical of each one rather than a lot of diversity.

It was fanon in the pre-movie book fandom that Wiress and Beetee were probably of Southeast Asian appearance because Katniss observes that they have “ashen skin and black hair.” This itself might have been symptomatic of a racism or stereotyping either on the part of the fandom or the text because Beetee and Wiress are from the “technology district” (District 3). I wonder what stereotype that could be, hm. In the films, they are portrayed by a white woman and a black man respectively.

Cinna does not have any particular descriptions about his skin color that I recall. They cast Lenny Kravtiz and I liked this casting choice. However, if you go back and watch The Hunger Games films, you might notice that there is a conspicuous lack of any diversity beyond having white actors and black actors. It was good that they did cast black actors in a few notable roles, I have no doubt, but in my gut I always got this sense that it was a kind of “look at us, we’re being diverse!” rather than an actual attempt to reflect the diversity that was clearly suggested in the text.

Again, Collins said she would have hired Hutcherson had he been a purple dragon.

Collins also said that she had absolutely 0 doubts about Lawrence’s casting as Katniss. I believe that I did once read someone asking her about Katniss’s appearance being described as significantly different from Lawrence, and as I recall, Collins suggested that perhaps there simply were no actresses who looked the way she imagined Katniss to look while the casting call literally only called for white women.

Collins also said in an interview once that she based The Hunger Games concept on her emotional dissonance flipping between channels and finding things like American Idol on while there was coverage of the Iraq War on another station. I’m not saying it’s unfair to give her some credit for having compassion for the child survivors in war-torn areas. However, I might also suggest that anything she has said since about 2011-2012 about it might be kind of her building on a previous thought that she did not necessarily have before other people prompted her thinking. At the time, though, she was saying that it was very much a kind of not-very-thoroughly-researched reaction to popular culture and current events. Now, if she’s grown about it, that’s great, but I’m just saying in terms of this discussion of the movie vs. film quality and diversity thing.

From my understanding, Collins had little to do with the production of the films after the first, but Ross did call on her opinion and input frequently during all stages of the production of the first film.

All of this is getting around to me saying that I think there is a thing that some white people do to imagine a post-racial utopia (or even dystopia, in this case) where racial descriptions and ethnic divides have fallen by the wayside. It’s sort of horrifying, but The Hunger Games to me almost presents a scenario in which the spirit of it might be read to suggest that ethnic identity no longer really exists having been supplanted by District identity. In District 12, there are those who live in the Seam and those who are a part of the “small merchant class.” There are physical descriptions but never identifying words that we recognize. (Collins, as a note, played with this a lot; there was actually a glaring inconsistency where Katniss didn’t know what a monkey was called in one of the later books when she did in the first one, or something.)

Collins, in her public statements around the time she was having an influence on the direction and shape of the films-of-her-books, seemed to suggest that the people who lived in the Seam were the result of racial mixing of some form or another. She also seemed to suggest that they would not be identifiable by any term that we currently have. The Seam residents were imagined as the ultimate, isolated conclusion to a “melting pot” in which varied ethnic identification washed away which is one of the very specific reasons that I originally identified Katniss as a Melungeon in my personal reading. However, to Collins, it seems as if she imagines these post-ethnic people as something mythical and futuristic, like a future evolution of human beings or a fantasy creature like an elf (or a purple dragon!). Collins’s personal responses always read, to me, as being completely oblivious to the very idea that she had extrapolated that maybe someone like Katniss actually did exist in the very area which District 12 was supposedly based on to this very day and that this was not a once-and-future kind of reality that no longer existed in present-day America.

Tl;dr I really like The Hunger Games, and I hope I’m not stepping way out of my lane to talk about this as a white reader. However, I wanted to talk again after all this time about how yes, the movies erase a lot of the things that make the books meaningful (political and social implications, representation of diversity and disability and so on), but suggesting that the books innately present something a lot better and richer has a little to do with Collins. On the other hand, I suggest that there is a little bit of death of the author involved in your wonderful readings of this text because Collins herself seems to have directly refuted some of the nice things you might have to say about authorial intent in terms of diversity and representation.

[tobns]

SNOWED IN: A (Tragic) Christmas Story — part two.

In Which Jennifer Proves to Everyone That She Really Has Gone Off the Deep End This Time

Josh Hutcherson has perhaps risen past every imaginable evil on the top of my hit list within nine hours flat, solely for doing the one damn thing I’d hoped he hadn’t done – jinxing us.

Jackie, Jack and I all wound up sharing a room – the original setup was for Alexander and I to share one of the guest rooms, but the second that was announced, Jackie grabbed my wrist and told Jen, “Over my fucking bloody corpse” – which I wasn’t too enthused about, seeing as how I didn’t really want to third wheel any more than necessary. Fortunately, Jackie is an even better best friend than she is a girlfriend and banished Jack to the sleeping bag, her and I sharing the full-size bed. If Jack had a problem with it, he didn’t voice it. Truth be told, I think he was so mentally exhausted from his journey through the supposed underworld that Jackie could have given him a blanket and pointed to the closet and he wouldn’t have complained any.

I’d been rudely awakened somewhere around eight, mostly to the sound of Jackie tripping over Jack as she stumbled to look out the window. Apparently, she wasn’t playing around when it came to buying our plane tickets out of here – she was hellbent on getting out of Colorado before the sun set, even if it meant she flew the plane herself. I’m not sure why she’s got her foot on the gas pedal with this one; if anyone would have gone behind our backs and orchestrated the Hunger Games cast reunion of the decade, I would have pegged it to be Jackie. I just don’t think she appreciates being lied to, and she doesn’t want to have Alexander’s blood on her hands when Dayo goes in for the kill and she gets her fair share of swipes in.

No need to set an alarm clock when with Jackie, she makes a good enough one all on her own.

“Are you fucking kidding me?!”

“Can you fucking keep it down?!” Jack had moaned. “I’m trying to dream about sleeping on a mattress and not this godawful carpet.”

The sound of curtains violently moving around filled the room, along with Jackie’s mumbling to herself under her breath about how she was going to strangle Josh once she saw him at breakfast.

“Where’s the fire?” I’d mumbled, still half asleep as I sat up. Even through bleary eyes, I could see Jackie standing in the glow of the window, everything white around her and a halo of strawberry blonde hair.

She’d simply turned around, frown settled on her face and the creases on her forehead deep. “Oh, there’s no fire,” was her mocking reply. “There’s too much snow on the ground for that to ever fucking happen here!”

Breakfast was an interesting affair; Josh was waltzing around the table giving everyone pancakes the sizes of our heads while we all glared at him. I think he begged Jen to give him that job for two reasons: number one, so he wouldn’t have to worry about any of us poisoning him (accidentally or purposeful), and number two, so he was always just far enough out of reach that he didn’t wind up with a butter knife in his side.

“Eleven inches of snow,” Dayo had mumbled into his glass of milk to no one in particular. “That’s just enough snow to bury Josh in and no one will ever be able to recover the body.”

Jackie nearly spit her orange juice clear across the table at that one.

After breakfast, the unspoken consensus is that we are all going our separate ways in this gigantic house to do our own thing while we wait for the heavy and blowing snow to settle. Jen, however has other ideas.

“Whoa whoa whoa,” she says as soon as Leven and Willow start to get up. “Where are you guys going?”

“Back to bed,” Willow replies.

Leven juts her thumb out in Willow’s direction. “What she said.”

Jen looks appalled at this revelation. “No, I’ve got stuff for us to do!” she exclaims, sliding her chair back. “Go nowhere.” With that, she darts back off into the kitchen.

Jackie leans over in my direction. “What are the chances that I can go outside and not die of hypothermia or frostbite?”

“Very slim,” I inform her.

“Might be worth it.”

Jen returns almost as quickly as she vanished, and perhaps it’s because I’m still exhausted (Jackie is still a kicker when she sleeps) but I’m having trouble discerning what it is that Jen has gone to do. That is, until I realize she is now wearing a shirt that has my face on it.

I don’t even want to know how much it cost her to get it made, but Jen has made herself a giant sweatshirt with the giant cast picture we all took for Vanity Fair back in Concord. Willow wasn’t present for that shoot and Liam was, but since Liam is not here but Willow is, Jen has taken the creative liberty to photoshop Willow’s face over Liam’s body. As if the shirt couldn’t look any more ridiculous with that addition, Jen spins around to show off the back – in between the shoulder blades, exposed thanks to her sloppy bun and in giant, orange letters, reads, ‘DIRECTOR OF FUN.’ Out of the corner of my eye, Dayo’s hand twitches a little bit closer to his fork, presumably to gouge out his eyes.

“I’m almost scared to ask why you have that on and what ‘director of fun’ could possibly mean,” Jack starts warily.

“Then I’ll save you the trouble,” Jen finishes, a smile that no one who has only gotten a handful of hours of sleep should be able to don reappearing on her face. “Since we’re stuck inside until later tonight at least, and you guys are kinda right about us all having grown up and gone down our different paths, I figured we could do some fun stuff with each other today! We can rediscover our bond.” She flourishes her end statement with a set of jazz hands.

Everyone is deathly silent, until Amandla speaks up. “That is the most ridiculous, whitest shit I have ever heard of.”

“Thank you,” Jen replies, and either she doesn’t see the insult in it or just elects to ignore it. “We haven’t hung out all together in ages, and I feel like we need to learn who we are now in order to be as close of friends, so bond we shall!” She then protrudes her cell phone out of the pocket of her pajama pants. “Now, I may or may not have stolen all of these things from the Camp Hi-Ho counselor training, but I think they’ll be just as fun.”

“Fun?” Dayo repeats. “You know what would be fun? Going back to bed. That heating blanket was everything.”

“That’s not on the checklist of fun,” Jen shoots down. Jack groans.

“There’s a checklist of fun too?”

“What do you take me for, Quaid, an unorganized moron?” I can see his answer perched on his lips even with Jackie sitting in between the both of us.

“Alright,” Jen continues, clapping her hands together after she shoves her phone back in her pocket. “I’m giving you losers an hour to take showers, brush your teeth – especially you, Hutcherson – and to pull yourselves together however you so need. I expect all of you sitting down in my basement by eleven to have fun.”

“The basement?” Alexander whispers as he leans in closer to me – he’d happily swiped the seat next to mine the very second I sat down, thinking he had beaten Jackie out. He had been a little deflated ever since Jackie swept me away to room with her. “Is she planning to off us one by one where they can’t hear our screams?”

“If we disobey, yes,” I mutter back, never taking my eyes off of our self-proclaimed director of fun.

When none of us begin to move from the table, Jen starts clapping wildly. “Come on people, let’s look alive!” she yells. We startle forward, grumbling our way out of our seats and leaving everything for Josh to clean – again, to keep himself out of the line of fire from everyone else for jinxing us.

“I’m pretty sure Jen was a drill sergeant in a past life,” Amandla muses when I find myself standing next to her as we wait for Jack to shimmy on up the stairs.

“Maybe that’s what she’s been doing in her free time,” I say, shrugging.

“Jen a drill sergeant, you an athlete,” she points out. Our eyes meet, and I can see the glimmer in them as she looks up at me with a cheeky little smirk on her face.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised by that too,” I warn. She quickly lifts one of her hands in mock arrest, the other settling on the banister as we start upstairs.

“All I’m saying is that I was the one who saved Alexander from going to prison when he tried to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after you fell off that platform.”

My eyes widen into a glare right about the time Alexander’s head pops in between us. “What’s this about me going to prison?” he asks.

Amandla simply reaches forward and pats him on the shoulder. “Nothing you need to worry about, bucko.”

Jackie exiles Jack from the bedroom after he offers to shower with her and save water – I want to crawl under the covers and die when he makes that suggestion, their coupledom can be a little disturbing to think about – leaving the two of us to get changed and pull ourselves together in peace. She asks that I braid her hair after we change out of our pajamas, perched on the edge of the bed while I sit on my knees, weaving strands of her hair together as delicately as I can.

“This is gonna be a fuckshow, I’m sure,” I say, and Jackie snorts.

“Ya think? Twenty bucks says Dayo tries to kill Alexander, Alexander hits on you, Jack manages to break a limb, Leven breaks a nail, Amandla escapes through the fucking air ducts, and Saturn falls out of orbit.” She then makes a circular gesturing motion. “All before lunch.” I simply hum my agreement, and Jackie continues talking.

“Speaking of Alexander, what the hell were you two talking about on the plane last night?” she asks. “I swear, you two liked to have never shut up.” It’s a very good thing we aren’t in front of a mirror and Jackie has no choice but to look straight ahead, because I can feel the heat beginning to rise into my cheeks.

Jackie and Jack had been diagonal to Alexander and I on the plane, Jackie’s need for the window seat overruling the need to monitor Alexander and I. “Hands to yourself,” she’d warned him before ushering on in, and he’d simply rolled his eyes.

“She’s not changed any,” he told me as we walked into our little row of seats, waiting for me to slide past him into the window seat – he’d been happy to offer it to me.

My reply was every bit explanation as it was remark. “It’s Jackie.”

Despite having a decently-sized arm rest in between our seats, Alexander had offered to share his USC blanket with me as an alternative to using the shitty one provided by the airline, as well as his earphones and jumbo bag of Sour Patch Kids. I think most of it was simply an excuse to talk to me, which ultimately worked in the long run.

Somewhere over Illinois and around the fifth Black Keys song that had come on shuffle thus far, Alexander had glanced over at me, smirk riddling his face. “You still only eat the red ones?” he’d observed, head tilting in the direction of the half-empty bag of Sour Patch kids.

I’d nodded. “The others still taste like medicine.”

“The green ones do not taste like medicine,” he countered, and I’d rolled my eyes.

“They’re lime flavored, which is a sin within itself.”

A quiet laugh had fallen past his lips as he looked right at me. “You haven’t changed any, either.”

“Oh, god, I don’t know about that,” I’d mumbled. “I mean, I can now drive a car, buy cigarettes, get tattoos, and buy lottery tickets – I’m a breath away from legally ordering shots at a bar. I’d say a lot has changed since our Hunger Games days.”

“Okay, well if you look at it like that, then yeah.” Alexander ran a hand over the top of his head, smoothing down his hair. “I’m just referring to…well, you, I guess. Your personality. You’re exactly how I remember you, maybe a just little bit feistier.”

“Coming from the grown man who has no qualms about exposing his bare ass for all of Instagram to see.”

“You saw that?” he asked, a slight guffaw slipping out. I merely shot him a look.

“How does one not see that?”

Underneath the blanket, his arm reached over the arm rest and he nudged my arm with his elbow. “Hey, you can’t say too much – there’s no way I’m ever gonna unsee that Joshua Tree picture you posted a little while ago.” My cheeks immediately started to burn; that picture had only come about from a dare courtesy of Madeline, and hadn’t bothered me any when she posted it. There was no shame or embarrassment to be had, up until then at least. All it seemed to do was amuse him. “Yep, still modest – I’m telling you Iz, you haven’t changed a bit.”

The conversation rolled on through how school had gone for each of us (we had fallen out of contact by the time I made it to my senior year) to recent projects, past what family vacation we’d last been on and crushing right through the political climate of America before touching on our individual meanings of life based on what the last few years had brought our way. Eventually, we just decided to be courteous to the majority of the cabin around us and shut up, the both of us pulling books out of our carry-ons and diving in. Part of me felt compelled to take a picture of it, since I knew Jackie couldn’t see it and she wouldn’t believe me when I told her Alexander was reading a book not entirely composed of giant words or pictures of naked girls. It had been nice just coexisting next to him for a little bit, the version of him that felt a little more subdued than the one I’d known back when I was fourteen. For god’s sake, the man wore reading glasses now. It was enough to make me overlook the revolving door of shitty girlfriends he had for just a little while and appreciate the human being next to me, skipping over all of the country songs because he knew how much I loathed them.

“Oh, nothing really,” I reply to Jackie quietly, voice a little squeaky.

She scoffs. “Yeah, I’ll bet it was.”

I finish off the braid, moving the hair tie up my wrist and tying it off. Patting her shoulders to signal I’m done, I fall back on my ankles. “Listen, I could have grilled you about your sex life now that Jack has finally fucking left us alone, but I didn’t, so count your blessings and hold your tongue.”

The whole way downstairs, Jackie drills holes into the back of my head for that comment.

Everyone save for Jack and Willow is already downstairs in the basement, which has been renovated to be a giant recreation room. Jen’s pushed the pool table against the back wall, the TV above it reflecting her Spotify account as she plays the aptly titled ‘Fun-ger Games’ playlist (it’s currently playing Sister Sledge’s We Are Family). A bunch of beanbag chairs, random storage chests, and stray couch cushions have been lined up against the long wall, where everyone else is sitting, looking less than pleased. Jackie and I exchange glances, both of which have a unanimous mood: death is nigh.

“Fuhrman, Emerson!” Jen chirps, meeting us at the doorway. “What, no Jack?”

“Why would Jack be with us?” Jackie replies, to which Jen’s face falls.

“You’re hilarious, Mrs. Quaid,” she teases, and Jackie’s eyes darken. “Go sit down, we’ll start in a minute.”

As we saunter past Jen, Jackie sidles up to me. “Don’t you dare tell him this, but Jack was right yesterday,” she hisses through my hair and into my ear. “That airport was the gate to hell, hell being this.” All I can do is nod in agreement.

She and I sit down on one of the trunks next to Dayo, who is watching the weather like it will suddenly reflect the very thing he wants to see – melted snow and free roadways. Jackie leans over my lap to try and get a look at what he’s scrolling through. “You looking at the website for a funeral home?” she asks, their eyes meeting knowingly after she flickers her gaze in Alexander’s direction.

Dayo scowls. “Nope, that was last night’s light reading.”

Her lips curl up in a thin smile. “How I’ve missed my kindred mind.”

Jack and Willow finally come traipsing down, Jack wearing the exact same outfit he was wearing last night on the plane. “Okie doke,” Jen announces, producing a little bucket out of nowhere. “Before we get started, fork over any and all cellular devices.”

“Have you lost your mind, woman?” Jack asks as she juts the bucket out in his direction first. She simply blinks, unfazed. The two of them engage in a little stare off, to which Jack finally caves in on. Her face brightens.

“Hand ‘em over, rest of you.”

Each of us puts our phone into the bucket begrudgingly, giving Jen a look as she makes her way down the line. After she’s collected the last phone, she pulls her own out of her pocket and sets it on top – at least she’s committing to it as well, I guess – before walking across the room. I hadn’t noticed the gigantic fucking safe sitting on top of the counter until she stops in front of it, putting the bucket inside and slamming the door shut.

Jackie leans a little closer to me as she whispers, “She really wants to incite the real-life Hunger Games, Iz, Jen has gone full-blown kamikaze.”

“Well, let’s get this show on the road, shall we?” Jen proclaims, turning away from the safe and back towards us.

“I’d like to get on the road to the airport,” Dayo mutters under his breath. Jen hears this, shooting him a glare in response.

“Anyways,” she draws out, cutting her eyes away from him. “Like I said, I swiped most of this from Camp Hi-Ho, but I think it’ll work just as well! Normally, we’d start off by introducing ourselves and sharing one fun fact with each other, but I think that’s a little bit uncalled for in this situation. I think we’ll just jump straight into the human knot.”

“The human what now?” Leven repeats.

Jen gestures for all of us to stand up, arranging us in a circle. I’m standing shoulder to shoulder with Amandla and Alexander, who all but shoves Jackie out of his way so he could stand beside me, Amandla and I exchanging pained glances and murder flickering in Jackie’s eyes. “Alright, so everyone has to grab hands with someone that isn’t standing next to you,” Jen explains. To make an example, she reaches across the way and grabs my left hand with her right, and Jack’s left hand with her left hand. “Commence the tangling.”

With my free hand, I grab onto Leven’s, while everyone else around us reaches over and tries to grab hands with the minimal amount of grumbling. At least the objective here is to tangle together, because that is exactly what happens. I think Alexander purposefully grabs onto one of Jackie’s hands, which, to her displeasure, only has the realization until after there’s a mass of arms above their intertwined hands.

“Now what?” Amandla asks after we’re all closer than we ever thought we’d be in 2017.

“Now we untangle ourselves before twenty minutes goes by,” Jen replies. “And you can’t let go of anyone’s hands, or we have to start over. All the way over.”

Already I see this not going well.

Instead of untangling ourselves any, I think we only make things that much more complicated. Jackie and Josh take the leads in dictating where each of us ought to go, and how we ought to move, which meets varied reception from all of us. Some of their ideas work, and others absolutely do not. Whatsoever.

“Isabelle is going to have to get out from between Jackie and Alexander somehow, they need to be beside one another.”

“That might not be a good idea, I value my life a little more than that.”

Josh looks across the circle at me. “Izzy, how good are your limbo skills?”

My eyes narrow. “Um, not very.”

“Y’know, it’s a very good thing we didn’t do this where some of you weren’t allowed to talk.”

“You want us to complete this before we ring in the New Year, right?”

“Okay, on what fucking solar system do you expect me to be able to dive between the tiny gap that yours and Dayo’s arms create?” Jack asks Josh after he makes the suggestion, his eyes narrowing.

“Well, we gotta get you through here somehow, dude.”

“We can just not and say we did, thank you very much.”

“Guys, time is running out!” Jen warns.

Willow rolls her eyes. “Jen, you’re deluded to think we can do this in under two hours, much less twenty minutes.”

“I believe in you guys,” she argues. Dayo snorts.

“Well that is some misplaced faith, sister.”

We don’t beat the twenty minutes, of course, but Jen insists we keep on going until we figure it out. After an extra twenty minutes of the human knot comes the hypothetical plane crash, where we have to work together to think of what twelve items within Jen’s basement we’d find most useful in the case we were all stranded on a desert island. After that comes the game of three truths and a lie, which is about as disastrous as one could expect – we spend a solid ten minutes debating on whether or not Alexander accidentally told two lies instead of just the one, and I lose my appetite upon learning much more about the sex lives of my former costars than I would ever care to know. Jen finally lets us break for lunch after that, which is subpar due to the fact that she wasn’t anticipating a blizzard to trap us here and prevent Dominos from delivering. The only bright spot is the Christmas cookies that are low in number and in high demand. I come close to breaking one of Jack’s fingers trying to get the last one.

As Josh goes around and collects our trash, Jen starts up with yet another prelude to what I can only imagine is an equally as horrific as the others we’ve been subjected to.

“Okay, I think the next thing on my list was the blindfolded maze—”

Alexander raises his hand. “Uh yeah, I can tell you right now that blindfolding me and sending me on a journey of disorient ain’t gonna end well, can we push that one back?”

“Or just not do it at all?” Jackie adds hopefully.

Jen’s face draws up into full-blown resting bitch mode. “We’re doing it, Emerson. But,” she concedes, her shoulders slouching. “I guess we could do something a little less action-y.”

“That would be splendid,” Dayo remarks.  

“Can we do nap time?” Josh asks, lifting his hand in question. “Because I think we’d all be in agreement that naptime is the perfect bonding experience – we’re all in one another’s presence while we sleep relatively peacefully.”

“Naps are for chumps.”

“Says the girl who fell asleep standing against a tree.”

Jen rolls her eyes, taking a sip from her water bottle. “Okay, so this next bit is called the purposeful mingle.”

The guys all groan at that. “Purposeful mingle?” Alexander whines.

“I already know all of you, why do I need to mingle and more importantly, why does it have to be purposeful? There’s nothing purposeful about mingling!” Dayo insists. “The two contradict one another entirely!”

Out from her back pocket – I’m really going to have to ask Jen where on earth she bought these sweatpants, because these pockets have to be bottomless pits – Jen withdraws two Camp Hi-Ho bandanas and holds them out. “I can always blindfold you,” she offers. Dayo shuts his mouth very quickly, and Jen smiles.

“Purposeful mingling,” she says. “Blaine told me he had to do this once at a leadership development thingy and that it was utter bullshit, but I figured out a way that we can make it fun.”

Under his breath, Jack mutters, “Heroin would be more fun.”

“I may or may not have stolen part of this from One Tree Hill, but basically I’m gonna pair all of you losers up with someone that you don’t see all the time—" Jen shoots a pointed look at Jackie and Jack, to which they both react with a frown “—and you’re gonna mingle. Purposefully. Anywhere in the house. Just talk about stuff, bond and shit! The person who I think has the most purposeful mingling is gonna win something spectacular,” she promises.

“And how are you gonna determine who mingles the most…purposefully?” Willow asks.

“Like I’m gonna tell you – you morons cheat the system enough as it is. I gotta keep some cards up my sleeve.” She begins to look around our little circle, cogs whirring as she tries to decide who to pair up. I can already kiss any hopes of being with Jackie a fond farewell.

“Okay,” she says slowly, lifting her pointer finger. “Dayo and Jack. Amandla and Josh. Willow and Jackie. Isabelle and Alexander.” Jackie begins to mutter something rather colorful under her breath. Alexander’s already got his eyes locked on me, a hopeful smile on his face when he catches my glance. “And then me and Levvy.”

“You said we can go anywhere in the house?” Josh repeats for clarification.

“Yes,” Jen replies, and then she backtracks a little. “Well, anywhere within reason.” Her eyes then drift over towards Alexander. “I don’t need to see the future youth of America in the contraception stage when I come to gather you all for the regroup.”

From beside me, Jackie’s face is fifty shades of murder as she gleefully assists Jen in shooting Alexander a warning glare. He merely rolls his eyes.

“For fuck’s sake, you people act like I don’t know how to keep it in my pants.”

“You don’t,” Amandla replies, masking it in a cough.

Jen claps her hands, breaking up the conversation. “Alright people, get to mingling. Purposefully! But not too purposefully, Isabelle-and-Alexander-in-particular!”

As I stand up, tugging down the hem of my shirt, I tell Jackie, “You know, maybe the whole hypothermia and frostbite situation won’t be that bad.”

She simply lifts both of her eyebrows, as if to say, ‘I told you.’

Alexander is quick to meet me halfway, rubbing at his chin sheepishly. “They’re insane,” he mutters quietly, what I suppose is his apology on the rest of our nutcase friends’ behalves.

“You’re just now figuring that out?”

His hands burrow down into the pockets of his jeans as he glances around the room, watching as everyone else scatters and Jen and Leven set up camp in the corner of the room. “Where do you wanna go to do this thing?” he asks me.

“I might have an idea or two.”

                                                              ...

“Okay, I don’t know anything about women’s fashion, but this cannot be Jen’s.”

“I don’t even think that could be her mother’s.”

Alexander looks down at the sweater he’s held up to his chest, another laugh falling from his lips. “I wonder if they’d notice if it went missing – this would win me every ugly sweater contest there ever was.”

“You mean ugly Christmas sweater?” I try to correct, my hands fiddling with the rogue lid of a shoebox.

“No, Isabelle, I mean ugly sweater. All of them. This is their king.” Alexander returns it back to the rack in the same place we pulled it from before sitting down cross legged in front of me. “What made you think of coming in here again?”

I shrug. “Tell me, if you were a rabid, anti-Alexbelle Jackie looking to keep an eye on the two of us, where’s the last place you’re gonna think to look?” He concedes, tilting his head towards me. “I dunno, I figured we’d get a little privacy in the master closet, no successful spying attempts occurring for the first few minutes anyways.”

To that, Alexander rolls his eyes. “I’m sure Amandla and Josh have already made it their personal mission to sniff us out.”

“Them or Dayo one.”

A shadow falls over Alexander’s face, and I instantly want to withdraw that statement. It’s so easy to forget that Dayo is a raw nerve for Alexander and vice versa – it’s incredibly easy seeing as how I don’t know the full story behind that. “Why do you think they’re so hung up on the thought of us being together?” I try to reroute the conversation, my voice a little higher than usual.

“They probably bought into that huge fucking fanfiction craze back in the day. Surely you remember that.” His voice is a little lighter, which I’m taking as a good sign.

“How can I forget? I’m the one who sent you links to them half the time,” I tease, cracking a half-smile.

“Will literally followed them for years,” he continues. “I caught her reading one when we went out to lunch one day.”

“Will and Mandla might as well have championed that craze,” I muse. “I still remember the texts I got from them when that Castro posted that stupid list.”

“You know I’m sorry about that, right?” Alexander says softly, and once again, I have singlehandedly managed to derail the conversation to a place I really wasn’t expecting to go to.

I wave my hand around in dismissal. “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, of course. It’s water under the bridge, Zander. That happened so long ago…”

“I know, but it doesn’t change the fact that that was super shitty of them and it changed things between us. They knew what they signed up for when Nic got involved with me, the whole fan thing – I told them that they had a thing for the two of us together and it never meant anything other than them just being passionate about something fictional. Still pissed her off though.”

“That wasn’t why you two broke up though, right?” I ask nervously.

He shakes his head, scoffing lightly. “Nah. Nic was an iceberg. We might have had a tiny problem on the surface, but it extended miles beneath it.” His shoulders fall as he sighs. “The relocation Vikings wanted out of me wasn’t something she wanted to commit to, amongst other things.”

My eyebrows furrow together. “Other things?”

When Alexander’s eyes meet mine, I start to feel little punches right to my diaphragm. The vulnerability reflecting in them is the same as if he was standing here in front of me naked – not the kind in which he frequents, but the kind where he’s entirely exposed. No little schticks to hide behind. “Life, I guess,” he admits. “Being the dudebro douchebag can’t last forever, y’know? I burned out with that act faster than I got started with it, it just…wasn’t really me. And that was what she wanted, the parties, the sex, the alcohol, all of that. But I wanted to mature up. Get serious with work, do something that gave me the leeway to get married and have kids.”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear my ears were deceiving me. I try not to let the shock color my face as I speak. “Is that still what you want?”

One of his hands drags down his jaw, and his eyes cast back down at the carpet. “Yeah, ‘course it is. I’m ready for that.”

“But?”

“But,” he sighs. “I just don’t feel like I’m…I don’t know. I still don’t feel like I’m in the right place for it, even after ditching all the dead weight I possibly could. Everything I do just feels like one misstep after the other.”

“Hey, that’s not true,” I insist, reaching out and resting my hand on the top of his knee. “As far as I’m concerned, the only missteps you ever took were Liv it Up and Grownups 2.”

Blue eyes flit back up at me. “I was an idiot, huh?”

“Please, this might as well be the cohort of idiots,” I reassure him. “We’ve all done stupid stuff.”

“Gimme a break – you’re perfect, Belle.”

“And you’re full of shit.” One of my eyebrows raises as I grin. “Wanna hear a secret?”

“Isabelle Fuhrman has secrets?” Alexander asks incredulously, and I roll my eyes.

“I’m gonna retract the offer,” I warn.

He shakes his head, sliding a little closer to me. “No, tell me. I’m all ears.”

“Airplane,” I tell him bluntly. He stares at me puzzled.

“Airplane?” It doesn’t seem to click with him as he repeats it out loud, and I give him a pointed look. Even if he didn’t want to, he took away more from the dudebro douchebag act than I think he realizes, seeing as how he can’t take a damn hint or comprehend loaded statements. It takes a second for what I’m actually saying to arrive on his doorstep, and the look on his face when it comes to him is priceless. His face lights up, a shocked laugh echoing through the closet. “Isabelle Gretchen Fuhrman,” he gasps.

“It wasn’t like...the whole shebang,” I clarify. “Just almost.”

“I don’t know who you are anymore,” he says in the midst of what I hope is feigned shock. “Never in a million years would I have ever thought—”

“Yeah, well, welcome to the year 3000,” I tease.

Alexander wallows in his surprise for a minute, the two of us just breaking out into laughs about it once he regains control over his ability to emote beyond wide eyes and jaw dropped. Our bubble is popped right about the time someone starts knocking on the door. “Go away, Jackie!” I call out.

It’s Jen who yells from the other side of the door. “Are your clothes on?”  

“Oh my god,” I groan. “Yes.”

“She’s lying!” Alexander yells out, and I swiftly deliver a punch to his shoulder. “Jesus, you can still pack a punch.”

“Magic, I guess.”

Jen cracks open the door, sliding in a tiny little polaroid camera before shutting it back. “You guys are the last ones to get it – take a cute little picture of each other however you best see fit to commemorate, and for the love of god, if you do nudes—”

“—we are not—“

--definitely gonna do nudes—”

“—then please retrieve them and hide them where I will never be able to see them. Ever. Just bring it with you when you come downstairs, we’re meeting back up in ten.”

I scoot back on the carpet, grabbing the camera as I hear Jen’s footsteps recede away from the closet door. “Take a polaroid to commemorate our time in this stupid walk-in closet,” I repeat, turning the camera over a few times in my hands.

“Oh, I’ve already got a great idea for yours,” Alexander insists, hand expectant as he reaches out for the camera. “Gimme, Fuhrman.”

I sit with my hands in my lap as I wait for him to take the picture, and he very quickly shakes his head. “No, no, no. You aren’t getting off that easy.” He stands up, perusing through the aisles of clothes around us, and all I can do is watch him confusedly. “Was Jen’s grandma a flight attendant in a past life?” he asks, eyes sparkling as he glances back at me.

“Alexander,” I hiss, eyes growing wide as I realize where he’s taking this. “Stop it.”

“Put this on,” he finally says, holding out a navy blazer, pencil skirt and a pair of black heels.

“You’re fucking insane.”

“It’s adorable when you swear,” he comments. “And it’s not like anyone’s ever gonna see this aside from me anyways. I’ll just lie and tell Jen that we did the nudes.”

“Alexander!”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Seriously though. No one’s gonna see this. I might put it in my wallet or some shit though, just to…y’know. Commemorate.”

“You’re ridiculous,” I grumble as I slip off my jeans and switch it out for the pencil skirt. The blazer covers up my white sweater alright, and the heels are two sizes too big – I feel exactly how I look, like a little girl playing dress up in someone’s closet. Alexander also finds me a tie from the men’s side of the closet, helping me tie it around my neck before backing up a little.

“Oh yeah, definitely the flight attendant aesthetic. This is so going in my wallet.”

I frown, flipping him off.

“C’mon, Belle, lighten up. Strike a stupid pose or some shit,” he persuades.

I figure I have nothing to lose – if anything, Alexander will forget where he even puts this picture. So I force an overly cheerful smile onto my face, giving a little two fingered salute as I pop my hip out. He laughs as he takes the picture. “Gorgeous,” he compliments playfully.

“If that ends up on Instagram, I will bury you,” I threaten as I kick off the heels.

I shimmy out of Jen’s mom’s clothes, who I hope will never notice that they’ve been disturbed, Alexander putting them back up on their hangers while we wait for the picture to develop. “You gonna get your payback on me?” he asks.

My lips purse together as I sift through a few potential ideas, most of which involve just that. “Mm, nah,” I finally settle. “I’ll think of how to do that later.”

“Oh god,” he mutters. “That might be even worse.”

“Okay, shut up and do as I tell you.”

I position Alexander where I want him and he does so without complaint – a much better model than I will ever be – and I raise the camera up to my face. “Gorgeous,” I mimic him, lowering my voice as I press down on the button. He breaks into laughter right as I do so, and I already know that that’s exactly how the picture will develop.

When we leave the closet and start to head back downstairs to the basement, the polaroid of Alexander is tucked safely into the back pocket of my jeans, far away from Jackie’s prying eyes. She swoops in right next to me when she spots me walking past the kitchen, which is apparently where she and Willow stayed the entire time. “How was it?” she whispers.

“It was fine.”

“Any attempt of penetration?”

My jaw drops a little, and I shove her. “Jacqueline!”

“What?!” she protests. “I had to ask!”

The vibe in the room seems to have shifted a little, some of the edge deriving mostly from hostility having dissipated. We all go back to sitting against the wall, Jen leaning up against the pool table and messing with the cue ball while she waits for us to get settled and shut up.

“Alright Jen, I purposefully mingled my ass off,” Dayo tells her. “How are you picking the winner?”

“See?” she muses to no one in particular. “You guys are so much more motivated when there’s a tangible incentive involved – I should have done this three team building exercises ago.”

“Yeah, no kidding.”

Jen pushes a piece of hair out of her face, peeling her body off of the edge of the pool table. “Okay, kiddos. I want to see how much purpose you actually mingled with. Everyone’s going to go around and tell one fun fact that they learned about their partner. Person with the most interesting, not-surface level fact gets a check for a thousand dollars.”

Jack begins to choke on the very air he’s breathing.

“A thousand dollars?! For a fun fact?”

Jen looks like the cat that ate the singing canary as she nods. “Yep. So you better make it good, motherfuckers.”

“Do I get a thousand dollars if I pretend to like this whole team building shit?” Dayo asks, Jen’s face quickly falling.

“No. I only bust the checkbook out for worthwhile bribes.” She then wildly gestures towards all of us. “Somebody go!”

The thousand dollars on the table most definitely changes the vibe in the room – this is the first time since we realized we had the curtain pulled over our eyes that we’re actually on board with this whole get-together. Everyone is so excited about this, in fact, that we all start talking over one another.

“Dayo got drunk at a Shades of Blue wrap party and sang Jenny from the Block in front of J-Lo!”

“Dude!”

“Jackie’s on a first name basis with the president of Germany!”

“Amandla babysat Blue Ivy!”

“Josh was still sitting on a phone book to reach the gas pedal his senior year of high school!”

“Isabelle almost joined the mile-high club!”

I’m so prepared to spring everyone with the little tidbit that Ludwig, Manwhore Extraordinaire actually wants to settle down in the next year or two and have kids and watch that thousand-dollar check come my way that I almost miss Alexander’s voice shouting out the fun fact about me. Almost.

It’s Jackie’s turn to choke on the very air she’s breathing, her head whipping in my direction so fucking fast that I don’t know how her neck breaks. I, however, beat her to the punch.

“Excuse me!?” I screech, the room going deathly silent. The gravity of what sort of mistake this has been hits both Alexander and Jen square in the face the minute my voice rings out in the quiet, Jen slowly backing up into the pool table and making her way underneath it so it serves as cover. No number of zeroes is going to deliver us from this level of hell.

“Belle—”

“Dude, too far.” Jack says quietly, shaking his head. “The sex life is always off limits.”

Jackie is nearly purple in the face as she spits out the words at Alexander like they’re knives. “With who, you?”

“Jackie, get a fucking grip, of course not,” I snap, only letting my eyes stray from her for a second before I round back on Alexander. “That was personal, Ludwig.”

“I know, I know,” he starts to backtrack. “I’m sorry, Belle, it just…slipped.”

Everything that happened in the closet between us is beginning to slide down a very slippery slope, becoming more and more lackluster by the second. Leave it to Ludwig to ruin it. Should have seen it coming, really. “Just slipped,” I repeat dully. “That’s wonderful. Really.”

“I’ll give you the thousand dollars, I swear—”

“I will set fire to your bank account, Jennifer, if you pay him.”

“I like you better anyways, Belly,” Jen rushes to confirm. I nod, pulling myself off of the ground and dusting off my hands. I start walking around the room, rummaging through random trunks and drawers along the wall lined with cabinets.

“What are you looking for?” Leven asks me. “Ludwig’s sanity is nowhere to be found, babe.”

“I can hear you!” Alexander snaps.

“A knife,” I reply. “I’m curious to see how well my skills have held up after all this time.”

And with that, team building activities for the rest of the day get postponed. Indefinitely.

[agentnico]

The Disaster Artist (2017) Review

Oh hi, Tumblr!

Plot: When Greg Sestero, an aspiring film actor, meets the weird and mysterious Tommy Wiseau in an acting class, they form a unique friendship and travel to Hollywood to make their dreams come true.

So there is this film that exists which goes by the name ‘The Room’. No, I’m not talking about ‘Room’, the Oscar nominated Brie Larson starring movie, but the 2003 movie that was written, produced and directed by this vampire-like guy named Tommy Wiseau. Oh, and yes, he also stars in that movie! To summarise that film in a nutshell, its known as one of the worst movies ever made, however its not like any other bad movie. With a bad movie, you watch it, have a terrible time and then never watch or think about it ever again. With ‘The Room’, it’s a special kind of deal. Its bad, don’t get me wrong, there are so many wrong things about it, yet I have rewatched that movie so many times, and had a great time doing so every single time. It’s just strangely entertaining. ‘The Room’ is the definition of a movie that is so bad that it is actually good. Hilarious dialogue, so many weird directorial choices, endless pictures of spoons (for some reason!), characters so bad that they become so memorable and some of the most quotable lines in cinema history. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” So if you haven’t seen ‘The Room’, watch it. Get some friends together and watch it, and you’ll have one hell of a night! Also watch it for the sake of ‘The Disaster Artist’, as even though ‘The Disaster Artist’ stands well on its own, watching it is a lot more enjoyable if you have experienced ‘The Room’ beforehand, trust me on that one. Anyways, let’s actually talk about ‘The Disaster Artist’, or else I’m going to end up going on an endless tangent of discussion about ‘The Room’!

So ‘The Disaster Artist’ is a behind-the-scenes look on the making of ‘The Room’, more specifically about these two friends, Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, who move to Los Angeles to pursue their dreams of becoming actors, and when after a lot of effort fortune doesn’t go their way, they decide to make their own little movie, ‘The Room’, however the results of that film were nothing that they could have possibly imagined. And being that ‘The Disaster Artist’ is brought to us from the likes of James Franco and Seth Rogen, who are known for making stoner comedies, it was obvious that this film was going to be a comedy at least partially, and boy is it funny! This film is easily one of my favourite comedies this year alongside ‘The Death of Stalin’, as the laughs are endless, and it is was really rare for their to be a joke pop up that wasn’t in some way entertaining. The way ‘The Disaster Artist’ infused comedy was through the was Tommy Wiseau acts around others, how he is different from everyone else, however at the same time the film celebrates the individuality and uniqueness of every person, including Wiseau, and how that in the end can work for their benefit. And also the film has a lot of fun re-imagining the iconic scenes from ‘The Room’ with all these new actors, which again is a cause for much laughter. However even though I really appreciated the comedic moments, it was the deeper emotional moments that I connected with more. This film is mainly about two things: friendship and fighting for your dreams. The friendship between Wiseau and Sestero is very interesting to unravel, whilst the whole idea of achieving and not giving up on your dreams is a lesson that anyone can learn, as if you never give up, you will get somewhere, maybe not the way you wanted it to, but like with Wiseau, Sestero and ‘The Room’, in an unexpected way that still works out very well. And when the film focuses on these moments, this is where it truly shines, and that is why I also have a slight complaint, as I feel like the film should have delved a bit more deeper into the emotional side of things. The emotion is there, but I feel like there definitely was space for more. That is one of my two slight issues with this film, however I’d like to emphasise that both this and the point I will discuss later didn’t detract much from my enjoyment of this film. I still very much loved it, but I also felt like I’d very much need to address these minor issues.

The cast assembled for this film is literally superb. Both James Franco and Dave Franco fit perfectly into the roles of Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero, and since these two actors are brothers in real life, their on-screen friendship felt even more real. Also, Franco nails the Wiseau accent, whilst at the same time adding his own little spin on it. All the people playing the cast members of ‘The Room’ are some of the best casting of the year. Ari Graynor was very accurate as ‘Lisa’, Jacki Weaver as ‘Claudette’ was very funny, constantly asking if the infamous “I have breast cancer!” line will have any follow up later in the story, Josh Hutcherson is hysterical as the creepy ‘Denny’, and Zac Efron is unrecognisable as the drug dealer ‘Chris-R’. Then the behind-the-scenes of ‘The Room’ crew all did great, however special mentions to Seth Rogen and Paul Scheer as the script supervisor and director of photography, both of which have a superbly done confrontational scene with Franco’s Wiseau. And Jason Mantzoukas has a great little cameo in the film too. Now we come to my second negative for the film, with Alison Brie as the weak-link of the cast, well more her character rather than her, since Brie does good with what she is given, however her character felt very lackluster and wasn’t given much to do, whilst I think with her being Sestero’s girlfriend, there was room (get it?) for more confrontation with Wiseau, since the movie hints at this, but never goes all the way, which I think was a missed opportunity.

As a whole, ‘The Disaster Artist’ is a very well done film, with some surprisingly great cinematography work (probably the biggest surprise of the whole film for me), a great script from screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber that adapted Sestero’s book, solid comedy with lots of one-liners (though none as memorable as those from ‘The Room’ itself!), and the emotional parts are done well, though as I said earlier, there was room for more.

Overall score: 8/10

TOP MOVIE QUOTE: “Oh hi, Mark...Oh hi, Mark...Oh hi, Mark......Oh hi, Greg!”