#one because it's funny (oscar's line delivery is so good)

[screechthemighty]

Okay after last night’s commentary about Steven poking holes in the messed up ideology of his opponents I re-watched that scene with Harrow in his little cult compound and just

Obsessed with the fact that after Steven points out that child murder is y’know, wrong, Harrow either can’t argue the point or just decides not to and resorts to threats of violence. What a bitch, lmao

[watchmegetobsessed]

Sorry super busy with the festival and work but yeah… idk. I am going to try to be as spoiler free as I can. Also I hope you actually get this because it’s gonna be long and I’m on mobile rn! The film as a whole was enjoyable and I thought the storyline was interesting, but I do think Harry’s performance was lacking. Overall he did a fine job, and his physical acting was good, but some of the line deliveries were… bland and very “I’m-just-learning-how-to-act”. He was just reciting the lines not actually putting proper intonation behind them. I think he could improve and do better in future roles (hopefully / maybe). His character is very much a himbo, and while I get why Patrick falls for him, I actually don’t get why Marion does aside from Tom is pretty. But that could be because we get to hear Patrick’s internal monologue. The film does do a good job and showing how all these characters are flawed and products of their time, so I think in that sense it was quite well. And as Harry mentioned I do see how they showcase the parts of ourselves we don’t always like. Really my biggest issue with the film is Harry’s acting. I think it’s also more noticeable because the rest of the cast was very strong. Linus Roache as the older Tom did an excellent job showing the bitterness, resentfulness and pain of a what that character would be feeling in the later timeline after going through his whole life, which really juxtaposes with H’s performance. I was sitting next to a press person and me and the girl (also industry) next to me where talking about the fact that we were disappointed in H’s performance and the press lady quietly laughed (rude but oh well) and while she couldn’t agree with us out loud we could tell she was like… yeah I’m definitely talking about his performance in my article. Also unrelated but apparently she had been promised a ticket for in conversation with Taylor Swift and then they took it away. So I just want to point out how much of a mess TIFF has been with tickets this year (and every year) because all of us industry people were complaining too! Now to talk about the actual conference part. I wish the moderator had asked Michael Grandage more questions as the director of the film but that’s coming from me being in the industry and wanting to hear from the filmmakers. I get marketing wise people care more about the actors. We were all also a bit disappointed that we couldn’t ask questions since in other TIFF screenings you often can but this was being recorded and showcased live so it wasn’t for us in the theatre. I did think Harry did a much better job talking about this film that what I saw him saying in Venice for DWD. You can tell he did care about this story a lot. He definitely put lots of thought into it. (Or they talked to him after Venice haha). He was a sweetheart and even blew a kiss to one of the people in the front row (I really wish I had moved closer once the film ended but I didn’t want to be craning my neck during the actual film so I had sat in the middle of the theatre). He definitely was looking at us in the audience though and subtly interacting. It’s funny though because they did ask for us to stay in our seats during the press conference and a bunch of people not only left when the film ended but also midway through the press conference. It does always happen but it is still always rude and bothers me. Don’t come to a screening where the filmmakers are going to be talking afterwards if you can’t stay! Oh and some poor person’s phone went off in the middle which my friend told you could be heard in the live stream lol. Anyways there’s my opinion and experience - E

ah interesting! honestly, i wasn’t expecting an oscar worthy performance from him, he is obviously just starting off so im gonna keep my expectations low lol, give him the chance to improve, im very curious about the movie now!!

[pidayforpi]

4, 15, 18, 23 for the End of Year ask

4. Movie of the Year?

Um...this is simultaneously the easiest and the hardest for me to answer XD

I have watched quite a number of movies this year, both cartoons and non-cartoons (though mostly cartoons because it's me XD). I would say...

Objectively, it's The Bad Guys. I have to mention this one, because I had really anticipated since the promotions started, and it was VERY GOOD when I actually watched it. Everything about the movie is amazing. Cute, funny, CUTE. Especially love the animations and art styles. VERY UNIQUE.

(A small story regarding me and The Bad Guys: I actually thought I had missed the movie and was rather disappointed. Until one day I came across a cinema timetable showing The Bad Guys on it (but I couldn't watch that one show). I then searched for any other screening of the movie, and eventually watched it in late June. Quite a journey!)

But I have to mention another one: DC League of Super-Pets. Yes.

For one, I am not a DC (or Marvel) fan to start with, so I actually didn't know anything about the background stuff (except, well, obvious ones like Superman and Batman). I didn't even know Krypto or Ace before this movie. I really just went to the cinema because I needed any cartoon movies. I didn't expect much, as well.

But then...Oh my god that movie is GOLD.

First of all, give whoever wrote the script a damn Oscar. Because the script is pure COMEDY GOLD. And I don't mean it in a "cringe" sense of funny. The script is unironically funny.

Witty is the best word I can find to describe the entire movie. It has to be one of the most entertaining movies I have ever watched in my life. In terms of the comedy factor, not even The Bad Guys can best this one. It is smart, funny, a bit of feels when needed, but light-hearted all of the time (even in "serious" scenes, which definitely helps to keep the movie feel-good and enjoyable, which is very important to me).

(Looking at you, "juice-box" punch thingie XD)

Another Oscar goes to whoever did the voice-casting (and the voice actors themselves, of course). Best of the best goes to Kate McKinnon and Kevin Hart. Lulu and Ace have to be the funniest of all cast. The delivery of their already funny lines doubles the wittiness. I don't exactly know how to describe it, but the voices are talented, on-point and natural. They definitely make the funny movie even more hilarious.

(Favourite character is Chip, tho)

(Also didn't expect to see Dewey Ben Schwartz there XD At last he doesn't voice a blue character!)

League of Super-Pets is really the surprise movie to me this year. I never expected it to be such a banger. It is smart, quick, funny, and had me making this face the entire movie:

(Ah, accidentally did a mini-review... _(:3 」∠)_)

15. What's a bad habit you picked up this year?

I am not sure how to answer this one...Not sure if this counts as a bad habit, but...

I think I have become more stressed/tense/insecure/paranoid (?) this year. Probably due to me moving to a new place, and perhaps university starting. Sometimes I do feel (and act) overly cautious and skittish, as well as hyper-aware of my presentation...

Hopefully I can get better as days go by. I am...quite slow to warm up (I am already surprised how "okay" I feel before/after moving), so I may need some time to get used to things. Hopefully it'll get better soon.

18. A memorable meal this year?

I would say my last meal at a noodle shop I had been a patron of.

I had been to that place since...7th grade? I don't remember how I started to go to that shop. But it had given me valuable memories throughout the years. My family said that I had become a VIP at that store. The people there could already remember what I usually ordered (I seldom changed).

I remember I used to go there on Sundays after church (just because we needed a place for lunch, though my family usually picked another restaurant). I remember I used to go there for dinner last year, after a long day of work at the old university (especially on Fridays, because I had a tutorial at around 6:00pm).

I also remember one period in 2020 when I thought it had closed down. Turned out it was just refurbishing.

I had my last meal there in May this year. I really didn't know if I should tell them, what to tell them, or how to tell them. My family even suggested that I take a picture with the boss/chef there.

At the end, I just told the waiter/cashier lady that I am going to study abroad. I don't know the boss', or any of the employees' names. They probably don't know mine too.

Before I departed, when one of my friends asked me what I would miss the most (other than the people), I said "food". That place is one of the things I miss, and one of the things I miss the most. I try not to think about it these days, but sometimes I do have dreams about it.

23. If you could send a message to yourself back on the first day of the year, what would it be?

"You are doing great. Stay strong. Be brave. Never despair."

[mtsainthelens]

my thoughts on DUNE (2021)

let me start by saying that overall, I had a really good time. the beginning of the movie was an incredibly faithful adaptation, way better than I expected. they even got the bull.

the set and sound design were also fantastic right off the bat and it wasn’t just CGI’d to death either. the costume design was very precise and distinct, which is essential if you have such a large cast with so many different groups of people like dune does. the bene gesserit were instantly recognizable. hawat and piter had the same eyes, which was a subtle but super effective touch. the movie didn’t spare many details and it made for a very immersive experience. It was almost exactly as I pictured it.

I also have minimal complaints about the casting. Jason Momoa was a delight and for the brief time that we saw him, Oscar Isaac made a great Duke. I wasn’t expecting the changes to Kynes’ character, but I think it was the right choice and was true to what made Liet-Kynes great. Timothee Chalamet also gives a solid performance. I was originally pretty ruffled about that particular casting decision and still think a younger actor deserved a shot at the role, but Timothee’s weird brand of formality and androgyny makes him a pretty solid choice to play Paul. He makes that still-suit work.

There were very few cut scenes from the book, but I felt their loss. The greenhouse is absent, even though it was easily one of the most thematically important aspects of Dune. The dinner party is missing, which I can forgive. Yueh is barely in this movie. Sorry Yueh fangirls, you’ll get ‘em next time. The treachery among Leto’s inner circle is actually pretty understated - the distrust between Jessica and Hawat isn’t mentioned even once.

[Also, can I just say how not surprising it is that Hollywood had to tease the betrayal? The book tells us from the moment we meet him that Yueh is a traitor, but I’ll be damned if blockbusters don’t get their twist villain shoved in there. Damn you Disney. Damn you.]

There’s some mildly interesting moments going on with the writing and line delivery. Timothee’s demeanor makes Paul’s lines feel more natural than they would from an actual 14 year old, but he also says to his mother “Are you good?”. I just thought that was funny. Momoa and Zendaya’s performances are also slightly off kilter because of how much they give the impression that they know about emails. Momoa in particular is just a little too casual. Duncan Idaho is one of the first characters we meet and he speaks in a really contemporary way, so there’s a bit of tonal whiplash when we meet the other characters. I think it’s a little more understandable for Dune fans who already know how formally everybody speaks, but my friend who didn’t read the book mentioned that it felt a little weird to her. I don’t know if this needs to be changed but I felt it was noticeable enough to comment.

My most serious complaint of DUNE (2021) was that it wasn’t a finished movie. I was seriously enjoying myself right up until I checked the time to find we only have 30 minutes left and Zendaya still hadn’t shown. To be clear, I think splitting book one into two parts WAS the right decision. I love the level of detail this part had and wouldn’t have liked to see the entire book crammed into two hours. But I shouldn’t have been surprised that the movie was about to end. There should have been ways to resolve Part One in a way that made it feel like it wasn’t just the first half of a larger story. It should have been able to stand on its own and come to an ending that made sense. I went to see it with my friend who hadn’t read the book and she ended up being really confused about what had just happened and especially what was up with the ending. Because the ending was rough.

Up until some of the very last scenes, some things were omitted, but nothing was really changed. The encounter with the Fremen is the start of canonical divergence. They cucked Jessica in this one, alright? Her and Stilgar’s first encounter was one of my favorite scenes in the book and the movie did it no justice whatsoever. It’s supposed to be such an establishing moment for her character and a testament to her abilities, but it falls really flat when she immediately starts trying to bargain with them to get off-planet. Why? I don’t know. Paul of all people corrects her, saying that they are meant to be among the Fremen. It’s a weird and arbitrary inversion of their relationship in that scene and I dislike it a lot. Another thing I dislike is that the fight with Jamis happens almost immediately after, while they’re still in the basin. Putting aside how impractical that is, the way the movie frames this is actually pretty abhorrent. Paul defeating Jamis is his entry into the Fremen society. He earns his way in through violence. There’s no funeral, if you were wondering. Jessica does not get in her “How does it feel to be a killer?” line. I truly don’t understand how 90% of the movie stayed so loyal to the book and the last 10% starts going blatantly against it.

So yeah, Dune was a great movie but not a finished one and the ending was a little off-kilter. I think once Part Two is out people will have a nice marathon-able sci-fi series to enjoy. In some ways it’s almost a perfect adaptation, in others it’s a little concerning. I think Part Two has the potential to be either really bad or really good and I worry about the lackluster way they’ve adapted the Fremen so far. I don’t think Zendaya is a particularly talented actor or a good fit for Chani, but I won’t break my eggs before they hatch.

Also, nobody clapped when it ended. Dune fans have their dignity about them.

[onesingulartheaterkid]

Hypin up some of my cast members because they’re awesome! (i wrote this before we start shows and things and post-show depression)

ive also scheduled it the day of our second show for no reason.

Jack: honestly so personable and fun. I met him at callbacks and I wanted to be his best friend. Also he’s just so energetic. AND HE DOES SO MANY FLIPS. I CANT. Katherine: Her singing voice is immaculate. She’s so fantastic!!! I barely had many interactions with her, but she seems very nice.

Crutchie: Is fine. He’s pretty energetic.

Davey: He’s really good at acting and just feels like Davey.

Les: Very goofy and fun to be around. Her tap dancing is y e s. Also she just gets lifted in the air during King of New York DOING THE SPLITS and it just blows my mind.

Medda/Buttons: ONE OF THE SWEETEST PEOPLE I HAVE EVER MET. And her singing voice is so lovely and her tap dancing is awesome.

Albert: pretty chill dude.

Finch: A cool person to vibe with and interact on stage with.

Race: She’s so nice and her dancing is awesome. And her acting as Race is just 👌.

Tommy: She’s just a fun person to hang out with.

Mush: Her dancing? On point. Her singing? Beautiful. Her acting? Amazing.

Henry/Roosevelt: Honestly very cool. His singing is also very pretty. And the fact he managed to come on stage with a fake mustache that did not match his hair at all and didn’t break character while we were all laughing at him during rehearsal is astounding.

JoJo: I love her so much! She’s so fun to be around and talk to backstage and interact with. Her dancing is so good and seeing her tap dance is so fun.

Splasher/Bunsen: She’s a very nice person to be around.

Spot Conlon: Holy crap yes. She’s honestly so fun to watch on stage and be around. The New York accent is on point. The singing is on point.

Pulitzer: A very chill person to hang out with. His singing is very nice and his acting is a yes.

Wiesel/Stage Manager: Oh my goodness he’s just so fun to be on stage with and off stage. On stage, he just has this presence that makes you wanna watch him. He’s so good at being Wiesel and I hope more people watch him when he’s the stage manager because it’s really funny to see.

Morris/Seitz: He is chaos. He and Oscar have such amazing chemistry together. And his acting is on point. Like he SOUNDS threatening in every line.

Oscar/Nunzio/Mayor: His acting is also really good. How he manages to go from Delancey, to Italian barber, to dignified mayor is beyond me.

Snyder: He really just is so great at playing Snyder. Like his voice is so fitting for Snyder and the way he plays him.

Hannah: The sweetest person there. I love how she acts as Hannah, especially the “and such language line“. It’s a different take than the Newsies Live, but it’s so fitting.

Jacobi/Policeman: With like 3 lines, he just is so awesome. His delivery of the “One for you. a glass of water for you.” Is funny too just because of how he looks around to see who to hand the water to. And his delivery of “How could I have EVER seen that coming.” Is hysterical. He has this laugh after the “Just ask a fish in the desert” line that’s just so great.

Stage Manager: She is literally the BACKBONE of our productions. We would be nowhere without her. She deserves every ounce of respect and much deserved relaxation.

Crew: Amazing. All the work they do behind stage just to get seen at the end of bows is not enough to show our appreciation. They are the reason that scene changes happen and exist. They do so much.

Pit: They are so amazing. They play so well and we wouldn't be anywhere without them.

Tech: Bless em all. They have an outdated lightboard and they make it work. They have to get through 17-18 mic checks. We love em all.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get everyone because they’re in groups (Scabs, Nuns, Bowery Beauties) and are hard to distinguish without giving their names, but they too are amazing and fun to be with! And the show would not be the same without them.

[thehollowprince]

Last Jedi is subversion without substance.

After having seen all three entries in the Sequel Trilogy, I will go to my grave maintaining that THE FORCE AWAKENS was the best or the bunch. Not because of any phenomenal plot or special effects or Oscar-worthy acting, because this movie was just a cheap knockoff of A NEW HOPE with better special effects (more crazy visuals means people won't look too closely at our lack of direction) and the same style of cheesy lines that the originals had, but because of the sense of more it left me with.

I left the theater at the end of TFA excited and hopeful, eager to see where they would go with this new cast of characters, especially after that ending. Rey holding that lightsaber out to Luke, hopeful music playing in the background. But then we cut to THE LAST JEDI and it all went downhill from there.

We get complete reversal of characters and their attitudes, Luke Skywalker - the Luke Skywalker! - tossing aside a lightsaber like it was junk, having given up after one setback, a complete reversal of who he was in the original trilogy. Johnson turned Poe into a hot-headed mansplainer who had to be "put in his place" by the superior white woman (completely overlooking what an ineffectual commander she was) and completely sidelined Finn and Rose by having them go on some nonsensical mission that had absolutely no bearing on the plot

And, of course, let's not forget making the space nazis look sympathetic or funny. Because that's not concerning at all.

Putting all of that aside, this movie did have a nice message under all the shit and character assassinations. That message being, "You are who you chose to be." I don't agree at all with how he went about revealing that message, especially with the whole Reylo "You're nothing, but not to me" gaslighting bullshit, but at the end of the day, we established that Rey was powerful in the Force just because. Not because of any powerful bloodlines, but just because. The message that the Force belongs to all of us, not just those of certain bloodlines was a nice message, as bad as the delivery was.

Which is what makes THE RISE OF SKYWALKER all the more disappointing in their attempt to walk back everything about TLJ in an attempt to appease those rabid, vocal fans that seem to think these movies are just for them.

Of course, all of that being said, that still doesn't make TLJ a good movie. It spends two hours trying to "subvert our expectations" while not really doing much of anything. Finn and Rose have no impact at all on the main plot, and Johnson uses their mission as an excuse to try and turn Finn into a clown, have multiple people tase him, and have Rose explain to him the horrors of the First Order, despite the fact that the movie previously (so like a day or two in the timeline of the movies) we have Finn explaining why he left the F.O. because he realized how evil they were. Poe is slapped a few times and "taught a valuable lesson on leadership" by a woman who was so shit at leading that her crew mutinied on her! He sidelined Leia for most of the movie and tried to build some "romantic/sexual tension" between Kylo and Rey for no reason aside from appeasing a certain group of fans that invaded every possible form of social media after TFA was released.

It's like you said, subversion with no substance.

The very fact that they were able to walk back and reverse almost everything from TLJ in TROS just proves that point.

[lovelytonys]

PLEASE GIVE ALL OF YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS AFTER FFH

I LITERALLY DON’T THINK I CAN DO THAT BC IT’S WILD UP IN MY BRAIN RN BUT LET’S ATTEMPT SOME BULLET POINTS

•it was SO fun. Everyone got me so scared to go see it but instead I had a blast. Sure the emotional parts were a little rough but what no one told me is that the movie put the pieces back together too! It felt very healing as far as Endgame sadness and no one told me it would be like that. Plus I thought it was so funny and Peter & his friends & teachers were GOLD

•I love this MJ. GOD do I LOVE this MJ. Zendaya is wonderful. “Awkward teen” is such a common archetype that it never seems to feel real and miss zendaya waltzes in with her impeccable acting instincts and realistic quirks and mannerisms and just nails this teenaged character with complete authenticity.......wig

•in the same vein I’m head over heels for this version of petermj GOD YES I don’t want perfectly romantic high school couples because things don’t WORK like that!! Why did things ever work like that!! Plus like every version of Peter Parker is a big nerd anyway it’s just unrealistic to expect him to have any game, you know? I love watching Zendaya & Tom play off of each other bc they both have SOLID instincts honestly they’re a joy to watch when they share the screen

•jake gyllenhaal man,,,,,jake gyllenhaal,,,,I don’t even know where to go with this. Mysterio was a cheesy level of evil, like he was ridiculously theatrical, and it would have been cheesy and ridiculous in less skilled hands but INSTEAD mr jake SNATCHED my WIG. He was so goshdarn charming in the first half that I caught myself wanting to like him (when I wasn’t mentally challenging him to fight me in a Walmart parking lot for being such a huge jerk) and that was all well and good but once he got to let his villainy loose? WOOOOOO okay first of all that SMILE that goshdarn SMILE the second Peter left the bar haha oh MAN he just, like, flipped a switch, you know? WILD. Riveting. mr jake’s teeth get 20 Oscars ALSO his villain speech? I can’t get into it there’s a lot to unpack but his delivery was so great. SO great. I loved how he was generally reserved and charming even when evil so that the moments when he had an outburst were scary. Like any time when he got angry and started yelling felt like a Moment bc of how he held back for the rest of it. He was always so deliciously menacing too like ugh sometimes I just love a good old fashioned villain, you know? He’s not terribly complicated, he’s pretty much just evil! Simple as that! Woohoo! And his dying line gave me CHILLS it wasn’t even just the line even tho the words are chill-enducing enough but it was his DELIVERY that just SENT ME like the way he’s trailing off and ESPECIALLY that creepy & deranged little smile AAAAHHHHHHH

•while we’re on the last line I get chills when I think about it bc when remembering the moment you fit the mid credit scene in with it and it’s like,,,,so THAT’S what that means,,,,THAT’S what the smile is for,,,,,THAT’S why you’re so pleased that anyone will believe anything,,,,,W I L D

•and I thought it was so cool how they updated Mysterio. He’s a special effects guy, right? That’s how the story goes when you look back at his origin comic, yeah? So to see him working with modern special effects instead of the practical effects of the era of his debut was so cool. Seeing Jake Gyllenhaal walk around in a Marvel movie wearing a morph suit was kinda meta and I kinda dig it. I thought it was all very creative

•if you had told me years ago that Back in Black by AC/DC would be the thing to set off an emotional outburst for me I literally would not have believed you but here we are

•no joke I was doing a relatively good job of holding it together (and relative is good for me) until AC/DC started playing, then I kinda lost it

•TOM HOLLAND SMASHED IT

•HE JUST SMASHED IT IDK

•THE SCENE IN THE PLANE. YOU KNOW THE ONE. 3000 OSCARS FOR MR TOM real talk I would kill to see him do a legit drama piece and I also can’t even imagine what he’ll be doing when he’s older. I mean. He’s pulling this out in a summer blockbuster of all things before he’s 25.....imagine what he’ll be doing if he gets to the point of having, like, decades of experience behind him

•the part when he was building his suit.......I cried

•as far as the plot...on one hand? Predictable every step of the way. On the other hand? I find a weird satisfaction in watching a movie that flawlessly fulfills basic beat structure and yeah it would be boring if every movie did that but it’s okay sometimes

•the first scene. the first. goshdarn scene. I have never truly known what it was like to laugh and cry at the same time

•MJ AND A MACE!!!! YEAH!

•I like how this movie begins with the question “is Spider-Man the next Iron Man” and proceeds to answer it with “no. He’s Spider-Man and that’s more than good enough.” Tony’s shadow is a huge one to live under and I love that the movie explicitly places Peter outside of that shadow. Like, yeah, he’s similar to Tony in some ways but at the end of the day? He’s his own hero. It’s highlighted even more by the fact that Mysterio is his foil and Mysterio wanted to be the new Iron Man.

•I don’t know what I was expecting from the second credit scene but that......wasn’t it. The two credits scenes threw me through more loops than the entire actual movie did

•J Jonah Jameson got a bigger reaction out of me than anything else in the movie by far

•I swear to you the words “pizza time” were uttered in this film I just don’t remember where

•I literally thought I was going to die when looking at Peter immediately after he got hit by the train

•the consistency with the limp throughout the whole second half really heckin Got Me and also how he touched his ribs in the final battle bc they were injured from the train accident. It’s the little things like that that make Peter seem more human & genuine

•WHEN HE SAW HAPPY AND WAS AFRAID OF HIM BC HE DIDN’T KNOW IF HE WAS REAL,,,,THAT HURT MY GUYS,,,,POOR BBY BOYYYYY but then when he hugged Happy I thought I was going to have a meltdown don’t worry I didn’t

•the scene where Mysterio seriously gets in Peter’s head, you know the one, good golly was that overwhelming. Like. I was feeling the need to jump up and start pacing the floor, you know? It was really well done and it stressed me outtt

•Iron Zombie had me feelin a little queasy if I’m being totally real here lol I was not feelin good about that one

•it took me the whole 2 hours to bounce back from “even dead I’m the hero” oh my god that was SO Tony. I can hear it in his voice. I miss him.

•can’t believe Tony is still out here fully protecting Peter with a whole army of drones from beyond the grave wow the irondad JUMPED out

•BUT OVERALL I FEEL SO GREAT AND EXCITED ABOUT THIS MOVIE WOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[zombiebarbee]

The Sunday Times article

DEMON DAZE

After almost 30 years, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s comic fantasy Good Omens has made it to the screen – and in lavish fashion. Benji Wilson discovers how Pratchett’s dying wish came true

Heaven, as it turns out, is in an industrial park in Weybridge. The old Samsung building, with floor-to-ceiling windows and lighting so bright you have to squint, is the celestial set for Good Omens, the BBC and Amazon’s TV adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s beloved fantasy novel. The floor, in particular, is attracting attention from Jon Hamm, who plays the angel Gabriel.

“Did we put this floor in?” he asks, wearing a power suit and looking more Wall Street CEO than heavenly host. When he looks down, he sees his own face reflected. “I mean, who orders up a silver floor? Of all the choices.” Then an angel rides by on a hoverboard. “This,” Hamm says, “is insane.”

Much of Good Omens could be described that way. Were he alive, Terry Pratchett would probably delight in the description. It tells the story of an angel, Aziraphale, and a demon, Crowley, played by Michael Sheen and David Tennant respectively. They have been on Earth since the Garden of Eden, working for their opposing teams in heaven and hell, one lighting fires, the other putting them out. Over the centuries, they have become friends.

We first meet them as the Antichrist is being delivered to Earth – indeed, one of Crowley’s missions is to deliver the Antichrist to the maternity ward. But they both realise this means the end of humanity as we know it, and, as Tennant puts it, “Crowley and Aziraphale have quite a nice time on earth. They quite enjoy the dinners and the wine and the lifestyle.”

So they get together to decide they’re going to try to avert the apocalypse. “But it’s a comedy,” Sheen says. “It’s in the vein of Douglas Adams and Monty Python. When Neil sent me the first draft of the script, it reminded me of Whoops Apocalypse [Andrew Marshall and David Renwick’s 1982 ITV comedy set in the weeks leading up to the end of the world.] I remember watching that when I was a kid and finding it funny but also quite scary. It’s hard to know what my 14-year—old self would think of Good Omens, but I imagine it might be similar.”

This kind of tonal mash-up intermingling humanity’s most momentous concerns with the quotidian minutiae of “where did I leave my keys?”, is notoriously hard to pull off. For a start, there’s the scope of it: Good Omens has been in production since mid-2017 and has had to recreate not merely heaven and hell, but all of Christian history in between. The beginning of episode three features a sequence catching up with Aziraphale and Crowley at the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, the crucifixion, ancient Rome, Shakespeare’s Globe, the crucible of the French Revolution and on, via the world wards, to the present. We see their relationship developing down the aeons. It’s all been done in less than 20 minutes.

“It’s basically a collection of single scenes,” Tennant says when I speak to him in a church in an Oxfordshire village. (He’s about to go outside and take delivery of the Antichrist.) “But for one of those scenes we got Shakespeare’s Globe for a day. For another, we transformed St James’s Park into Edwardian England for a day. For one scene. It’s fantastic to be able to work on something that has those sort of resources. You wouldn’t really be able to tell this story otherwise.”

Resources means Amazon’s money. That, and the allure of Gaiman’s writing, has drawn in a supporting cast including Frances McDormand as the voice of God, alongside Hamm, Jack Whitehall, Michael McKeen and Miranda Richardson. With a Game of Thrones-shaped hole to be filled, Good Omens is supposed to be a very big deal indeed.

Yet Gaiman, who co-wrote the original novel, adapted it for the screen and is the showrunner, would happily not have made it at all. “I didn’t really plan to give 18 months of my life to making a TV show. I’d much rather be writing novels. I would be making a lot more money writing novels. Nobody would be telling me what to do and my wife wouldn’t be complaining about not seeing me. But on the other hand, this,” he says, pointing at the shiny floor and Hamm running through lines as Gabriel, “was what Terry wanted to happen. And he’s not here.”

Good Omens was published in 1990. There followed almost 20 years of fruitless attempts to turn it into a film. Terry Gilliam received a prepublication copy of the book asking for a cover blurb. He misplaced the letter that came with it and thought he was being sent a story that might work for his next film. He loved it, but, as so often with Gilliam’s grand visions, Hollywood got in the way.

“Terry [Pratchett] and I decided that we wanted it to be television six years ago,” Gaiman says. “We went went looking for a writer – both of us were too busy – but basically we couldn’t find one.”

Pratchett died in March 2015. As he was overtaken by Alzheimer’s in his final years, he wrote Gaiman a letter – something he had never done before. “He said, ‘You’re the only other person out there with the same love and understanding and passion for this that I have. I know how busy you are, but I want to see this before the darkness takes me. Will you do this, please?’ In 35 years, he’d never asked me anything before. So I said yes. And then he died. So suddenly I was dealing with a last request. And I’m honouring it.”

Gaiman and Sheen have been friends since the actor mentioned in an interview about a decade ago that Gaiman was one of his favourite writers, across novels and comic books. Gaiman happened to read this, and sent Sheen a selection of special editions with a card saying “From one fan to another.” Since then, Sheen has appeared in Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who, and now stars in Good Omens. Part of their friendship is based on a shared love of science fiction – Sheen only mentioned Gaiman in that interview in order to make a point about genre snobs. Many of his favourite writers, he said, worked in fantasy and SF.

Sheen says the snobbery still pertains - “If you’re of a mindset that anything written in a science-fiction context just can’t be great literature, then I don’t think anything is going to change your mind” - adding that there’s a similar prejudice against comedy as high art.

“Comedy films are always seen as impossible to be great films. They’re rarely winning Oscars. Good Omens ticks both boxes, comedy and fantasy – and I like that. When I was growing up, two of the biggest influences on me in terms of how I see art were The South Bank Show on TV and Kenneth Tynan, especially his profiles. Neither of them made a distinction between high and low art. One week is was Shostakovich , the next Billy Connolly. Tynan would profile Brecht, then Morecambe and Wise. I loved that.”

Just because Good Omens is funny, he goes on, doesn’t mean that it’s glib. “I was looking at a scene today when one of the angels says it’s been written that the end of the world begins with unrest in the Middle East, and the Antichrist is being taken to the Pains of Megiddo. I’ve seen that being written in newspaper articles – Isis are trying to engineer a situation where this battle takes place in a certain location because that’s ‘what was written’. People actually think that Trump is the coming of the Christ. Or the Antichrist. People are actually talking about this in fairly mainstream circles.

“That gives Good Omens a difficult context to when the book came out. You’ve got these two main characters who are very much in their own echo chambers – or should be. Yet the action of the piece requires them to break out of those bubbles.”

Tennant goes further. “We started making this in 2017. We knew it wouldn’t come out until 2019, and did wonder whether the apocalypse might have hastened towards us by then. It does give an added piquancy that the world might not be as stable as we thought it was a couple of years ago. By the time this article is printed, who knows where we’ll be?”

Good Omens is on Amazon Prime Video from May 31 and will air on BBC2 at the end of the year.

[lady-byleth]

I'm the anon who hasn't watched since V5 because I forgot. I was baffled enough by the whole Clover death and Qrow teaming up with Tyrian thing and now I've learnt that Ironwood sHOT A FUCKING CHILD?! Like, I know he's that character type of 'I'll do anything to fulfill my duty' but to go that far?! Doesn't help that I loved Oscar from his first appearance... Can you explain what happened in V7, 'cause I haven't understood a single thing I've seen of it and I'm not sure if I want to watch it...

It's pretty straightforward actually. Team RWBYJNPRQ and Maria arrive in Mantle which has basically been turned into 1984, meet Penny, get arrested by the Ace Ops and brought to Ironwood who reveals he told Penny, Winter and the Ace Ops about Salem

He then tells them about his plan to turn Amity Colosseum into a global communications tower that is going to be so high up in the atmosphere the Grimm can't reach it

Ruby decides to not reveal the whole truth about Salem and the Lamp, presumably because she doesn't fully trust him with how Mantle has been changed, but offers the groups help

The next few episodes deal with Amity, the kids getting their Huntsmen lisences and the council elections both Robyn Hill and Jacques Schnee are running in. They spend their time training and protecting the Amity project, Clover, Penny, Qrow and Ruby have a confrontation with Robyn who reveals Ironwood is repurposing materials for Mantle's outer wall without informing people. Then we get a scene with the Schneesters where Winter shows Weiss the Winter Maiden and reveals she was chosen by Ironwood to be next in line.

This makes Nora pretty testy and on their free day she, Ruby and Ren decide to go to Robyn's premature victory party where Ren and Nora first have a fight, which makes Ruby run off with Penny, then kiss just in time for Watts to tune off the lights and Tyrian to slaughter people to blame it on Penny. Watts uses the confusion to redistribute the votes cast for Robyn to Jacques, who he is working with

This makes Robyn and her Happy Huntresses go full on vigilante and they start robbing military transports for building materials and get the suppliers in Mantle to cut off deliveries to Ironwood

Nora hits a huge rage breaking point and goes off at Ironwood about how Mantle is suffering from his iron fist rule (queen) but he brushes her off as it being "for the greater good" and gives the order to have Robyn arrested

The Bees volunteer but decide to tell Robyn the truth about Amity instead

Jacques invites to dinner at the Schnee Manor to celebrate his victory and make Ironwood defend his actions to the council and literally the whole cast shows up, which is funny. Weiss goes to snoop, finds her mother in her father's office and Willow gives Weiss proof that Jacques was cooperating with Watts who meanwhile turns off the heating grid in Mantle. The unrest that causes draws in an entire horde of Grimm that, surprise surprise, finds the huge fucking hole in Mantle's wall and overrun the city

Weiss exposes her father and Watts, it's revealed that Jacques gave Watts his council access to the system (dumbass) and Watts used that to lock everyone out. With some prodding from Ruby and Oscar Ironwood decides to tell Robyn and the council the truth about Salem while everyone else goes off to fight in Mantle. Oscar and Ruby then decide to tell Ironwood what they learned from the Lamp, that Salem is immortal and presumably the rest.

Ironwood and Robyn then go live together to tell the people about Salem and the military begins evacuating Mantle with out protagonists. Clover gets a call and he and Qrow go to where Robyn is luring Tyrian to her and they kick his ass good.

Meanwhile Ironwood has lured Watts to Amity by revealing its purpose during the broadcast and by lying that it's finished. (It's curious that we don't see Robyn's lie detection Semblance when he does this so we don't know if she knew he was lying or not)

Ironwood defeats Watts but ends up skinning his left arm. When he comes back to his office he finds a black glass queen piece.

He calls the Ace Ops and kids back (JNR go to pick up Oscar at Atlas Academy tho) and shit goes real bad when he starts throwing Ruby's secrets and the Bees telling Robyn about Amity back in their faces and the negativity triggers the Seer Grimm on Watts' bag and Salem projects herself into the room to reveal that she's on her way and also apparently killed Summer Rose herself

Ironwood decides to use the Staff of Creation to lift Atlas into the atmosphere and remove the Relics from Salem's reach that way and reveals that he already sent Winter and Penny to get the powers of the Winter Maiden. Of course Team RWBY are against this. Ruby tries to warn everyone over scroll and gets as far as Salem coming and Ironwood abandoning Mantle before he shuts her off. So the present Ace Ops (Clover is still with Qrow, Robyn and Tyrian) stand in their way and it comes to battle

The girls fight the Ace Ops while Clover gets the message that the kids and Qrow have to be arrested on sight and, for some reason, decides to just go along with that despite what he just heard. Qrow is not happy but he's willing to cooperate but Robyn loses her temper and it comes to a scuffle during which Tyrian is freed, kills the pilot and makes the plane crash. Clover gets out in time (notably without even attempting to help Qrow or Robyn, for some reason). Robyn is knocked out cold and because Clover still insists on attesting him Qrow decides to fight him.

Team RWBY kick ass and defeat the Ace Ops, it's dope as shit. Penny's father and Maria arrive and Maria quips this is the part where the girls ask them for help.

Tyrian comes to, removes his last restraints and then, for some reason, he and Qrow join forces to fight Clover. Clover disarms Qrow, who decides to end the fight without hurting Clover and uses his fists to break Clover's Aura.

Tyrian uses the opportunity to stab Clover through the back with Harbinger. Clover dies, Qrow breaks apart. It's bullshit.

Cinder appears before the chamber of the Winter Maiden, Neo has meanwhile managed to get the Relic from Oscar and assumed his appearance but Oscar knocks her out of her disguise just in time and Team JNR get ready to fight her. She kicks their asses, but Oscar gets the Lamp back and they escape.

Except Neo takes on Nora's form, steals the Lamp back and gets away with it.

Oscar splits off to go confront Ironwood. He tells Ironwood that if he goes through with his plan he's just as dangerous as Salem and Ironwood shoots him off the ledge of the Vault. Ozpin comes back, awakens Oscar just in time to smash a whole through the bottom of the Vault and Oscar goes falling towards Mantle.

Cinder, Penny and Winter fight. Cinder knocks Winter's Aura out and her out of a building. Penny saves her. Cinder goes after Fria, and in her usual arrogant way decides to wake the old lady up before killing her.

Fria is like "bitch I don't think so" and unleashes the powers of a fully realizes Maiden that even Cinder can't stand against. Winter and Penny arrive again but Winter can't get through the cold air without getting frostbite so Penny goes instead.

She asks Fria if she's alright, and then cradles her as her life starts fading. Fria asks her if she's the next one and Penny hesitates to say no, looking back to Winter who she knows will go to open the Vault which Penny doesn't agree with.

Cinder shows up again, furious. She says Fria is hers but Winter interrupts her and cuts off her Grimm arm. Which grows back. Cinder then curb stomps Winter while Fria dies.

Penny becomes Winter Maiden.

Ruby and Weiss arrive to find Fria dead, Winter hurt, Penny with the powers and Cinder right there. Ruby's eyes active immediately and Cinder is so terrified she runs before the light can even get to her.

Winter calls for reinforcements but gives the girls a headstart at least.

Team RWBYJNR, Pietro, Maria and Penny escape in an airship. Qrow and Robyn are arrested, Qrow looks absolutely broken as he looks down at Clover's bloody clover pin and Robyn comforts him.

Winter tells Ironwood the powers are gone. Presumably she doesn't tell him who has them, at least we don't see it

Oscar asks Ozpin how they can save Atlas now.

Salem arrives with a massive Grimm army and a whale Grimm almost the size of Atlas.

The End.

[poesreyofsunshine]

My Thoughts on TROS

I’ve been wanting to write my thoughts on episode ix but i’ve been busy and i’ve gotten the chance to watch the film 3 times now.

SPOILERS AHEAD

(pretty long post)

I’m going to start with what I LOVED/ENJOYED 

Chewie/ Poe/ Finn Falcon- I loved this scene so much well any scenes with Poe and Finn because of the beautiful natural chemistry John and Oscar have with each other. I loved how they both know wookie now. The light speed skip was fun getting to see other planets.

Rey Meditating - My baby girl and her floating rocks, she’s come so far. I love how BB-8 keeps her company during her training. He really loves his Mom. Leia is her master (cried when she called her Master). I love the relationship between Leia and Rey.

Rey Training- Rey doing the training course was EVERYTHING!!!! Her saying that she will earn Luke’s saber like she wants to be worthy to earn it. Never underestimate a droid. (My heart)

Falcon Arriving-  Rey reading her Jedi Text Books she’s so cute and i loved how the other resistance members their reaction to the Falcon coming back and the pilot letting her know the Falcon is here and how she runs to go see her friends.  ugghhh my heart.

THE TRIO !!!!!!- OMG THE BICKERING WITH POE AND REY WOW WE’VE BEEN BLESSED. TO TALLY HANLEIA VIBES. YOU’RE A DIFFICULT MAN. FINN BEING THE MIDDLE MAN. JOHN BOYEGA HAS THE BEST FACIAL EXPRESSIONS EVER !!! OBVIOUSLY THEY’VE BEEN BICKERING SINCE AFTER TLJ AND I WOULD PAY BIG MONEY TO SEE THAT. OK SO BACK TO THE TRIO  IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY THAT THIS IS THE ONLY DAM MOVIE WE SEE THEM AS A TRIO. I’VE BEEN EXPECTING THIS TRIO SINCE TFA WAS ANNOUNCE AND WELL TLJ (don’t even get me started on that movie) YOU CAN FEEL  THAT TIME HAS GONE BY.

PASAANA- MORE TRIO SCENES YES YES YES !!! I loved loved how Poe was getting down to business right away and Rey is taking everything in, she’s like a little kid. That scene with her and the child was so sweet. LANDO’S INTRODUCTION i’ve missed him. THE CHASE SCENE, POE DOING THAT SWERVE THING UGGGHHHHH the NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A DROID  part and Rey’s little smile.

CAVE SCENE- Poe catching Rey and calling her name out first (MY DAMEREY SHIPPER HEART) C-3PO “You didn’t say my name sir but i’m alright” . Poe being jealous of Finn & Rey. “You mean when poe’s not here?” Poe using his flashlight after Rey takes out her lightsaber such a cute funny moment and again Finn’s face. They find the dagger and Rey healing the snake was cool because we can see how advanced she is with her jedi training so that was cool to see.

CHEWIE’S FAKE DEATH- the force lightning (i predicted that in one of my awful fan fics i wrote after tfa so jj i’m waiting for my credit) 

FOR CHEWIE/ D-O- I loved the hand holding scene. Finn is so comfortable with human touch and Poe not wanting to hold his hand then C-3PO joins in and Poe looks annoyed. D-O Rey being so comforting to that droid because she knows she’s been hurt before and now she’s with great people in her life. ugghhh my heart.

KIJIMI/ BABU FRIK- TRIO WEARING THE JACKETS ALONGSIDE C-3PO we stan. When Poe warned Zori and her crew and Rey just kicked everyone’s ass. Zori and Rey moment i loved. Zori sacrificing something that was going to get her out so Poe can help his friends was a really sweet moment. BABU FRIK i’m obsessed. Rey fixing D-O’s wheel so it won’t squeak again. C-3PO sacrificing his memory so he can help Rey. I was so happy how much C-3PO was used in this film.

RESCUING CHEWIE- AGAIN MORE TRIO. JJ REALLY SAID TRIO RIGHTS. I really enjoyed the scenes with Poe Finn and Chewie.

REY IN KYLO’S QUARTERS- I hate reylo but i have to admit this is one of the strongest scenes of these two. Daisy’s acting ugghhhh *chef’s kiss* It was so good. I liked how she was trying to ignore him while grabbing chewie’s belongings.

JANNAH- I had a feeling she was First Order, i loved how she reacted when Finn told her who he was. He really inspired other stormtroopers to leave the First Order. This is the Finn content we’ve been missing.

DARK REY: That was really cool. The teeth. SCARY. I wanted more of her lightsaber duel with Dark Rey.

REY KILLS KYLO- That moment was so powerful to me. She killed this character who has been tormenting the Galaxy. She was scared of what she did she left like Luke did.

BEN/ HAN SOLO: I Know part that hit me uggghhhh i loved that we got to see Ben reborn and at this moment I knew that he was going to sacrifice himself because of what Han said about Leia always fighting for the cause. t was a beautiful moment.

LEIA’S DEATH: Rey & Kylo feeling her die. Well Ben lost his mother and Rey lost a mentor so that was nicely done. CHEWIE’S REACTION TO HER DEATH wow that broke my heart into a million little pieces. I couldn’t stop sobbing.

GENERALS POE/ FINN: Poe asking Lando for advice and Poe asking Finn to command with him and they’re both generals. It was such a cute moment. 

REY/LUKE & LUKE/LEIA JEDI TRAINING: THIS HAD TO BE ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCENES. The Luke that we saw was the Luke I wanted in TLJ. From him giving her Leia’s saber and the small scene we got to see of Luke and Leia training like can we get a series of that PLEASE. Luke using the force to lift his x-wing from the water. His little smirk when he finished, yes YODA would be proud.

REY FLYING LUKE’S X-WING: She gets to fly an x-wing after watching them from jakku and putting on the helmet. Rey deserves the world.

BEN SOLO- I WANTED MORE BEN SOLO AND WE WERE ROBBED. He’s such an interesting character and I wish we would’ve seen more of Ben Solo before TFA. He’s very much like Han. The shooting without looking and when Rey passed him the lightsaber through their bond i was shook. That scene was so powerful. She finally got to see Ben who she’s been seeing in this visions that we never see. Ben & Rey teaming up was awesome. That fighting sequence against the knights of ren was amazing choreography.

THERE ARE MORE OF US/ WEDGE ANTILLES- That moment of poe losing hope it broke my heart we had that moment when he was talking to Zori about he feels like no one is going to help them. He’s apologizing to everyone uggghhhhh and then Lando to the rescue with the main star wars theme song playing in the background. *chef’s kiss* and wedge antilles’s small cameo my heart. I almost fell out of my seat lol i got way too excited.

REY’s & BEN’s DEATHS- I know people hated the fact that she killed Palpatine but I really liked that scene. She used both Skywalker sabers to defeat Palpatine and she had all the jedi with her. It made sense for her to die in that moment. Because Ben rose and wow that scene when he was holding her again this is Adam’s best acting. Again i’m not a reylo but i felt his pain. He finally did what Anakin never did he saved someone he loved and that was so significant. His death made sense to me. Honestly they wouldn’t have accepted him in the resistance because of everything kylo did. He sacrificed himself do Rey can carry the Skywalker legacy. Leia giving him the strength he needed to save Rey was beautiful and both disappearing. He gets to reunite with his family as Ben Solo.

FINN FEELING REY’S DEATH-

TRIO REUNION- Poe and Finn reunion was so cute the way Poe reacted to seeing Poe. Both of them looking for Rey and her looking for both of them.THAT FUCKING HUG WAS EVERYTHING BETWEEN THE 3 OF THEM. FINN BEING IN THE MIDDLE AND HIM CRYING MADE ME SO EMOTIONAL. THERE EACH OTHER’S FAMILY. POE AND REY HAND HOLDING.

TATOOINE- Full Circle, ending where it started was a perfect ending. Her coming in the Falcon and sliding down the sand just how she did in TFA. She buried the skywalker sabers in luke’s home. And ending with her saying she’s Rey Skywalker like yes you are going to carry that legacy and her walking with BB-8 and the twin suns was just in my opinion a good ending. NO SHE DID NOT END UP ALONE. SHE HAS FINN, POE, CHEWIE, ROSE, LANDO, C-3PO, D-O, SHE HAS A FAMILY. THAT WAS SOMETHING SHE HAD TO DO ON HER OWN !!!!!!!!

WHAT I DID NOT LIKE .....

OPENING- With Kylo i hated the way it was show the slow motion it was just unecessary. Exogol was really scary I liked where Palpatine was it just seemed very Sith like. There wasn’t really a clear explanation on how he survived (maybe i missed it) but like how has been alive?????? It would’ve been great to see little clues of Palpatine since TFA. That delivery line of Poe “Somehow Palpatine is back...” was just like okay he’s back accepted without an explanation. Where did all the people for the final order come from. They’ve been inside those star destroyers all this time ?

REY LOOKING AT ? - Um maybe im dumb but what was Rey staring at before they left to Pasaana and Poe asked her what is it and she said nothing.... like okay what was it???? PLEASE SOMEONE EXPLAIN !!!

ROSE?/ CONNIX/ SNAP/ DOMINIC MONAGHAN/ BLACK SQUADRON - So Rose was given like 3 lines um JJ WTF her character deserved better and what about that scene with Rose & Rey why was it cut ???? Same with Connix i really enjoy her character and was disappointed there was barely any Connix. SNAP DYING HURTED SO MUCH. I am a huge fan of the Aftermath series and knowing Wedge was there ugghhhh im so mad he had to die. Dominic Monaghan was a pointless character who had more lines than Rose why was he in this movies he served NO PURPOSE AT ALL !!! AND WHERE WAS BLACK SQUADRON ???????????????????

Lando/ Luke- We should’ve seen them together in TLJ or TFA trying to find the wavefinder or whatever it’s called. Or at least Luke mention it to Rey that he was in search for something or he’s heard rumors about palpatine being alive and he went looking for clues. Why did Luke want to go find it ? Was this after Ben became Kylo Ren? 

REY’S NECKLACE- WHY ARE REYLOS ROMANTICISING KYLO YANKING THE NECKLACE OUT OF REY ???? THAT’S NOT ROMANTIC OR WHATEVER THAT’S LIKE WHAT ABUSERS DO .... 

Finn’s Secret- Poe is one of his best friends and also Rey like why does he want to hide that from Poe. I know Poe would understand and if we were given a scene with the trio and Finn explaining him being force sensitive that would’ve been *chef’s kiss* they would be so supportive and Finn deserves the world.

Chewie’s Fake Death- Rey had a way stronger reaction to his death than Poe and Finn they were kind of like we have to go and didn’t really comfort Rey or seemed afraid or confused it was just kind of ignored like let’s go... idk it was very weird to me the way it was handled.

KNIGHTS OF REN- I WAS SO EXCITED TO FINALLY SEE THEM ACTION TO REALIZE AGAIN THEY WERE A WASTE. I WISH WE COULD’VE SEEN MORE OF THEM. DISAPPOINTED.

FINN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND REY- Rey was starting to piss me off when all Finn was trying to do was understand her and for her to talk to him. The fact that Finn’s story arc in this movie is all about Rey and him chasing her all the time. FINN DESERVED A BETTER ARC

POE BEING A DRUG DEALER- I’M BEYOND PISSED OFF ABOUT THIS !!! YOU’RE TELLING ME THE SON OF 2 REBELS BECAME A DRUG DEALER. I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THIS UGLY BACKSTORY. HE WAS ON A SECRET MISSION THAT WOULD’VE MADE MORE SENSE !!!!!!

FINN NOT WANTING TO SHARE HIS SECRET YET AGAIN- FINN NOT TRUSTING POE ABOUT HIM BEING FORCE SENSITIVE LIKE MAKE IT MAKE SENSE THAT’S HIS BEST FRIEND !!!!

HUX BEING THE SPY/ DEATH- THIS WOULD’VE BEEN MORE SHOCKING IF THIS WAS BUILD UP SINCE TFA BECAUSE HONESTLY I WASN’T SHOCKED WHEN IT WAS REVEALED. HIS DEATH WOULD’VE MADE MORE SENSE.

FINN/POE ARGUMENT- I get it friends fight but that was kind of low. “You’re not Leia”

FINN RUNNING AFTER REY- YET AGAIN, I know he cares but at this point I was over it.

KYLO/ REY DUEL- It started off good but it became too long I became bored.

ALL THE JEDI- FORCE GHOSTS OF ALL THE JEDI WOULD’VE MADE THIS SCENE MUCH MUCH BETTER. I loved hearing the voices but just think of the impact if we would’ve seen the past jedi.

REYLO KISS- Maybe because i’m anti-reylo but that kiss seemed very awkward and not in the right place. It felt like it wasn’t needed. That’s my 2 cents.

FORCE GHOSTS AT THE END- I know we only get Luke & Leia but what about Anakin and Ben they are also Skywalkers. If all of them would’ve been looking at Rey when she said Rey Skywalker. SHE IS CARRYING ON THEIR LEGACY !!!

Anyways it seems like I was more of a fan of seeing the trio together and that’s that. A lot of unanswered questions that they completely ignored. Like Maz how did she have Anakin’s lightsaber?????? Who gave it to her???? It was never touched again. They left so many plotholes in this sequel trilogy. 

[redtutel]

Rewatching Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Although I have vague memories of the Episode III promotional material, this is the Star Wars movie where I truly was a part of the hype. December 2015 was a magical time where everyone was just...loved Star Wars. And it created a meme and parody culture that was just as wholesome as the original trilogies. None of that cynical and nitpicky, or in extreme cases sexist and racist, Star Wars fan culture we’re dealing with today.

So much like the first Avengers movie, the magic surrounding its release will make it impossible for me to judge this movie fairy. But I don’t care. I’m still very attached to it. Will this be the viewing where the magic wares off? Or will I find myself considering this better then the film it pays homage to. I’m excited to find out.

Seeing a brand new “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far, Away” and an opening crawl in theaters was just awesome.

“Will not rest until, Skywalker, The Last Jedi, has been destroyed,” Hey, Foreshadowing! I know there’s a ton of debate as to what was or wasn’t planned in advance for this trilogy, but still.

The First Order is Space ISIS/Neo-Nazis, and Leia leads an army to fight it. Pretty simple. I don’t get why people get so up in arms about how little the politics are explored in this movie. It’s probably a side effect of just how lore heavy Star Wars got after the original trilogy.

The opening shot of a space ship completely covering a moon. A new take on ironic Star Wars imagers. A pretty good summary of this movie. But I feel like such new takes make up for just how many recycled plot points this movie has.

The opening action sequence is the first time in years Storm Troopers have been intimidating (Clone Troopers and Stormtroopers are two different things). It’s pretty impressive. It’s a great way to establish how evil the First Order is.

Finn’s introduction is so impressive. A Stormtrooper who in his first fight, completely looses the will to participate in war. We may never know about his friend he saw die, but despite that, we still understand why he lost his will to fight. It might be a bit awkward for Finn and Poe’s friendship if they ever find out Poe shot Finn’s old Stormtrooper friend.

Kylo Ren stopping a laser with the Force. An awesome new way to use the Force. And I love Poe’s quip “So who talks first?” It establishes Poe as a fun, jokey character, which is why I don’t get why people got upset about his sense of humor in Last Jedi. He’s the sort of character that uses humor to relieve the tension of any situation he’s in.

J.J Abrams made this movie to be watched blind, and I really wish I could (but I saw spoilers before I watched it). Where is Luke? Who is this new Sith? What’s the backstory the old man hits at? There’s a good Stormtrooper? He talks off his helmet? Who’s this girl in the desert? I’d love to discover these things for the first time all over again.

I’m found of robot characters that go against their programming. Finn’s not a robot, but the beginning of his character arc has that concept. He does not believe in this cause, and he fights war terrifying. And he wants to escape.

Anakin was a slave, Luke was a farmboy, and now we have Rey, a scavenger, all alone in the world, just tying to service. She quickly establishes herself as incredibly tough, but also a bit cute. 

Of all the protagonists Rey’s backstory is the saddest in my eyes. While Luke had a happy but boring life with his aunt and uncle, and Anakin had a hard life but a living mother, Rey has had to fend for herself since she was a child, holding onto hope that one day her parents will come. She was all alone in the world. But now that’s going to change.

I don’t take any sides in the CGI/Puppets debate, but seeing puppets in a big Hollywood blockbuster again is pretty nice.

BB-8′s so cute. I have too much R2-D2 nostalgia to consider him my favorite Skywalker Saga droid though.

Rey’s relationship with BB-8 establishes that although she’s a survivor, she hasn’t let it harden her heart. She’s willing to help BB-8, and although she wants him to be on his way, she still won’t sell him off (despite being tempted to)

...Poe’s technically the Leia archetype in this movie. This tough rebel who got captured by the villains, and who sent a droid with something important.

The Finn and Poe escape scene has a lot of great dialogue. I’d argue some of the best banter in the series. It’s a pretty good action scene too.

Of all the characters, I like how Finn’s take on his archetype the most. He’s the Han Solo, the deuteragonist who wants nothing to do with the battle, and joins for selfish reasons, but in the end proves to be a loyal friend and hero. But unlike cool and collated Solo, Finn is nervous and cowardly. But that makes his eventual bravery and loyalty all the more satisfying. 

I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard Poe was originally going to die, but Oscar Isaac was so great they kept the character alive. I do believe keeping them separated is for the best, seeing how it makes sure Finn stays around for as long has he does.

Early on we establish that Kylo Ren is abnormally obsessed with Luke Skywalker, to the point where Gnearl Hux questions him.

Finn and Rey’s friendship stars off pretty rocky, but even then they have some good chemistry. At one point Finn’s all beat up, and he asked Rey if she’s okay. He may not be very good at it, but he’s trying to be a gentleman.

I love how the Millennium Falcon gets called garbage. It’s a funny bit of irony, concerning just how sacred everything else from classic Star Wars gets treated.

The first Millennium Falcon chase is another great action sequence. Rey and Finn are figuring things out as they go along, and BB-8′s being cute. And in the end they’re very impressed with each other. Characters becoming friends tough action sequences is a favorite troupe of mine.

Everything from Finn and Poe’s escape to meeting Maz Katana has nothing to do with a New Hope, and thus is a very underrated part of the movie. Although the tentacle monster scene is kind of forgettable.

Both Finn and Rey have no last name. They’ve never had any sort of family before. Heck, Finn didn’t even have a real name until just a few hours ago. They’re nobodies trying to find themselves, which sets of their arc that carries over into the next film

Kylo Ren destroying the console establishes him as short tempered for the first time. He drops his stoic facade and shows his true colors. Kylo looks indimiateing, but deep down he’s an insecure manchild trying his best to inhert a dark legacy. I’m found of this character, as well as similar characters like Berkut and Shiguraki

Did BB-8 give a thumbs up or a bird? The world will never know.

Rey keeps her guard up around people she doesn’t know to well, but she has a very soft and kind side as well. She’s pretty aggrieve to Finn early on, which is probably why....certain people, dislike her. Women and aggression tends to lead to backlash, after all.

I love how Finn slips in a bit of Stormtrooper knowledge. It comes in handy a few times in this movie. Some could say it should come up a bit more, but I think it’s used enough.

“Chewie, We’re Home” What an iconic line. I can still hear the applause.

Seeing Han become the Obi Wan archetype is a very unique direction for the character to take. And he handles the role very well. Harrison Ford may have been sick of this character, but he still brought his A-game. I love that Rey admires Han more for his smuggling than for his war heroics. And it’s very sweet seeing Han admiring just how much Rey knows about piloting. It’s a very sweet father/daughter relationship. In hindsight, Rey and Han don’t even need to be related for this relationship to be this good. Rey lost her parents and Han lost his son, and they can’t help but see each other as a means to fill those voids, even if they deny it to themselves.

The events of the original trilogy are legendary to these characters, which make the “It’s True, All of it” line so cool. It’s pretty interesting how chronologically, the events of one trilogy are legends to the characters of the next one.

Seeing Han be exactly how people remember his is pretty cleverly deconstructed. In-Univse it happened because he needed to escape from the pain of what happened to his son. And now he’s at the point where there’s nobody left to swindle. 

Whenever Rey’s in trouble, she’s always the one to get herself out of it. This is definitely meant as pushback to the fact that in so many things, women always need help while men can aways get out of a situation by themselves.  And I’m all for it. It’s great to see a woman be this strong, but she’s not flawless. After all, she shuts people out and is struggling to accept the fact her parents are never coming back.

Snoke even says “Last Jedi.” Even in this movie, Snoke is convinced that Luke is the hero of this story, and will stop and nothing to stop him. It is interesting that they introduced the Emperor archetype in this first movie, although maybe it was a sign that he wasn’t actually the big bad of this trilogy.

“It the hands of your father: Han Solo.” And the audience gasped (unless they got spoiled first. It’s one of those things we can never un-know). Although if I have to nitpick, I’d be nice if we found out alongside Finn and Rey.

I love that the space chess still looks like stop motion.

Rey doesn’t see herself as the hero. Just the delivery girl. Even Luke saw himself as trying to save a damsel in distress. But though this journy, she becomes a hero.

"Luke felt responsible. He just, walked away from everything.” This was established in this movie? Why did it take until Last Jedi for people to react to that plot point?

“I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy” I love that line. It’s so endearing!

Finn reminds me of Usopp. A liar and a coward, but someone who will always do the right thin in the end. He’s my personal favorite sequel character

“Women always find out.” Han has a ton of great lines in this movie.

“I’ve already been away too long” She’s so convinced her parents will come back she won’t even leave her planet for a few hours.

With Maz Katana, we’re back in a New Hope. I’m found of this character. It’s fascinating to see someone who’s Force Sensitive but not a Jedi. And she offers some great advice to Rey and Finn. I’d love to see her in the next season of Clone Wars.

Kylo Ren sees Darth Vader as the hero, the dark as good, and the light as bad. But he has regrets, and lakes the discipline and fidelity of Darth Vader. Of all the characters, he’s the one most desperate to fulfill his archetype.

“Though the ages I have seen evil take on many forms. The Sith, the Empire, today it’s the First Order.” “If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in many different people.” Of the the sequel’s trilogy’s biggest themes is that history repeats itself. But despite that, it’s still important to fight evil whenever it arises, instead of just sitting back and letting it happen.

It never occurred to me before, but Finn’s cowardliness might be the lingering effects of his brainwashing. Although he does not believe in the First Order’s Ways, he was still convinced all his life that they’re unstoppable, which is why he wants to run instead of fight. I also like how he’s admits the truth, instead of there being this “liar revealed” thing.

Finn and Rey have truly become friends at this point. Instead of just running away, now Finn wants Rey to come with him. As far as he knows, she’s the only friend he has, and he doesn’t want anything to happen to her. Meanwhile, Rey doesn’t want Finn to leave, because he’s one of the few people in her life to stick with her for this long. If he leaves, he might end of like her parents, who never came back.

Wait...how come nobody was demanding to know Finn’s parents. He was taken from a family he’ll never know after all. How come people accept that Finn’s parents don’t matter, but insist that Rey’s does?

Seeing Rey connect to the force for the first time (outside of  the piloting and scavenging skills I assume she she used them for subcoinsously before the events of this movie) is really impressive. We get flashes of her past, as well as Luke’s past and Kylo’s past, and even hear the voices of Yoda and Obi Wan. ok She’s getting her first glimpse at the Force that binds everything together, and she’s terrified of it. It’s also yet another divination from the New Hope plot, which is very welcome.

I forgot that Rey being Force sensitive was once a spoiler. How time flys.

I really hope Obi-Wan appears in Rise of Skywalker. He spoke to Rey when she connected to the Force for the first time, and I’d love to see that expanded upon.

“They’re never coming back.” A lesson Rey, and the audience, finds difficulty accepting. 

“The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.” Such a great line. It’s a great summery of Rey’s arc, and I imagine people with difficult pasts can relate to it.

Maz tells Rey and Finn exactly what they need. Rey need to learn to move forward, and Finn needs to learn to fight for what’s right.

Why does the lightsaber choose Rey? I guess her midichlorian count is just right or something. It doesn’t really matter, and I personally find the idea that the next hero can come from anywhere inspiring.

...Come to think of it, Luke’s the only protagonist who isn’t just some rando.

“Why is Maz so interested in Rey” Probably because of her strong connection to the Force.

Rey rejects the saber. Classic rejection of the call. Can you blame her, after that vision?

The First Order sees the Republic as weak and dishonest. Seems straightforward to me. Maybe people were underwhelmed because Neo-Nazism didn’t get as much attention as it did just a few months later.

Starkiller Base. It’s cool looking power-creep. On one hand, since we don’t know anyone from those planets, it’s not as impactful as what happened to Alderan. But then again, we actually see people on that planet die. So It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall.

Finn’s not going to leave until he knows Rey is safe. How touching.

TR-8R. I miss that meme.

Seeing Poe’s triumphant return is pretty great.

Seing Rey’s trying to fight off Kylo Ren with a gun is very tense. This the the first time she looses a fight in this movie. Seeing someone so strong get captured really raises the stakes. This is where they first meet. Their relationship is standard Hero vs Villain in this movie, but things are going to change a LOT in the next one.

Despite how scared he is, Finn still rushes in to try and stop Rey from being capture.

Seeing General Leia for the first time is awesome. Han and Leia’s reuinon is so touching as well. C-3PO’s back to disturbing Han and Leia moments as well, which is pretty funny.

Seeing BB-8 and Finn get reunited with Poe is also very touching. 

Finn is helping the Resistance for the sake of Rey. He’s not quite a hero yet, but he’s getting there.

So the movie did established R2-D2 had the map in his back-up data in the actual movie.

Han and Leia went back to what they know best after the loss of their son. It’s such a tragic moment. 

Kylo almost has the depth  in one movie that took Vader two or three movies to get. I feel like that should be discussed more often.

Kylo’s face is removed to reveal...a normal person. Ben didn’t get any external injuries to turn him into Kylo Ren. It was all manipulation

Rey takes on the Leia role when capture, and Finn briefly takes on the Luke role, But when she frees herself they go back to being Luke and Han, respectively.

Even in this movie, Rey and Kylo are using the force to get to know each other, although mainly on accident. Maybe that’s where Snoke got the idea in the next movie.

After seeing Kylo using the Force, Rey decides to use it in order to escape, although she’s a bit hesitant to do so. It takes her three tires to do the Jedi mind trick, after all. I do wonder where she heard about it. Maybe she figured that if you can read minds, you can change minds.

Rey is a very fast learner in any situation, be it piloting, shooting or using the force. Maybe it’s her midichlorian count. 

Starkill base makes very little logical sense, but its still a very cool concept, and seeing day turn into night serving as a ticking clock is a very cool visual.

“No matter how much we fought, I always hated watching you leave” “That’s why I did it, so you’d miss me.” All these years later, and that still have such great chemistry. 

“That’s not how the Force works.” I love that line, but people misuse it.

Finn is doing something very heroic, putting himself on the frontlines and disabling the shield. But he’s only doing this for Rey. Despite that, he stays true to his word and disables the shields. I love seeing him stick it to his old boss. It’s a fun moment.

The Rouge One “Womp” is even in this movie! How did I never notice it until after Rouge One?

“As Long as there’s light, we’ve got a chance” A classic symbol, but one that still works.

Seeing Rey and Finn reunited is just another very touching moment. “We came back for you.” For the first time in Rey’s life, somebody actually came back for her. I love how Rey describes how using the force to escape was “Something I can’t explain, you wouldn’t believe it.” In general I love how the Force is depicted in this movie.

“We’ll meet back here” No! That was their last moment together!

Ben and Han’s confrontation is another utterly fantastic moment. Ben is tempted to go back to his father, but he’s too devoted to Snoke’s teachings. On top of that, he feels like it’s too late to go this far. He figures that to get rid of these regrets, he has to kill Han Solo. I love how the sky gets dark, leaving red as the only light source. It really makes Ben’s lightsaber stick out when he kills Han. And yet, Han still touchings the check of his son, showing that even despite this, he still loves him. Instead of letting the past die by killing his father, Kylo is left more conflicted than ever.

Meanwhile, Rey lost a chance to have a father yet again.

The snowy forest at night is such a great setting, and leads to an awesome lightsaber fight. Rey gets knocked out, so Finn has to protect her with a lightsaber duel. Kylo is beating himself, increasing his pain to increase his dark power. Finn puts up a valiant effort, but in the end, he gets knocked out, and Rey has to save him. But still, he bought her time, and gave her the strength to use the force to stop Kylo. Seeing Rey grab the lightsaber for the first time using the Force is just awesome. She’s barely holding her own, but true to the character, she’s a fast learning. Meanwhile Kylo is still injured, and maybe a bit worn out from fighting Finn. At the cliffside, Rey is at the ends of her seat, but when she trusts in the force, she manages to beat Kylo after he overpowered her during the rest of the movie.

Finn ends with the movie more devoted to Rey than the Resistance, but he still proves himself to be a loyal friend and a hero. I was worried about him for the two years between Force Awakens and Last Jedi

There’s no words between Leia and Rey. They both just know, Han is dead, and they both loved him. And that’s enough for them to mourn him together.

But in the midts of dealing with the loss of Han, there’s is hope. Specifically, the New Hope.

Seeing Luke for the first time in this movie is such a fantastic cliffhanger.

Overall, I still love this movie as much as when I first saw it. It’s got great action and effects, the new characters are some of my favorites in the series, and the old characters give some of their best performances of all time. Sure it messed with a happy ending, but I’m still investing in seeing how characters old and new are going to try and get that happy ending back.

[justincaseitmatters]

Contagious Vacations: Sarah Vowell on Hawaii’s History

Rewind from KCActive.com by Dan Lybarger

In her books, audio essays (for public radio’s This American Life ) and speeches, Sarah Vowell may be the only person on earth who can describe her vacations or recall historical events without making listeners sleepy.

That’s probably because not many vacationers frame their tales as entertainingly as she can. Vowell uses her journeys to explain how our country has developed, and she resurrects the fears, excitement and intrigue that our ancestors faced.

In her latest book, Unfamiliar Fishes, she explains how the past and present meet in Hawaii. When she comes to Unity Temple on The Plaza, 707 W 47th Street, Kansas City, Missouri at 7 p.m. on Sun., April 3 (tickets are available at Rainy Day Books), don’t be surprised if she makes you want to visit the same places she’s been or dig through the same musty documents she’s read.

Contacted by phone in San Francisco before her Kansas City appearance, Vowell explains, “Doing a reading is different from writing a book. You have to be cognizant that people are sitting there wanting to go home. That’s what most audiences are, people who want to go home. They have laundry to do, dinner reservations, whatever.

“Because I’m an audience member, I want to go home myself. There are certain sections of the book that are better out loud, things that are perhaps a little funnier that merely informational.”

A Nephew’s Help

It probably doesn’t hurt that she often joins her fraternal twin sister Amy and her outspoken young nephew Owen on her trips. The lad often says things during the journeys that wind up in his aunt’s books and essays.

She recalls, “It wasn’t really an intentional thing. I don’t know how to drive, so his mother has always been kind enough to come with me on some of my reporting trips to drive me around to places that have less than adequate public transportation. When Owen was born, you know how kids need their mothers, so he would just come along.

“When he first started talking, he would say a lot of quotable things. Some of it was the joy of childhood malapropisms. I needed his mom to drive me to Ohio when I was writing about assassinated presidents (in Assassination Vacation) and going to the cemetery where President Garfield is buried. After he got home from that trip, he told his mother he wanted to go to the cemetery. He called it, ‘a Halloween Park.’ He captures the weird appeal of cemeteries because they are sort of park-like.”

Even as he matures, Owen remains a valuable collaborator. “Sometimes he brings me down to earth because I get so sucked into what I’m researching.”

When she recalled to him how whaling ships frequently stopped by Honolulu harbor, the youngster was horrified by the slaughter of the animals and didn’t share his aunt’s obsession with Moby Dick. “He couldn’t stop being offended by the entire thing. So when I told him to lighten up because pretty soon that petroleum would be discovered in Pennsylvania and then the whole world would go ape for fossil fuel, he just said, ‘Good.’

“He didn’t know anything about whaling, which means to me that he didn’t really read the Moby Dick popup book I game him,” she adds.

No Dry Text

In all of her work, Vowell attempts to make recalling the past in a more visceral manner than history teachers did in school. Vowell is a huge fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, and her own tales have much of the same intrigue.

In The Wordy Shipmates, she expertly recalls how Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, left Massachusetts in order to escape deportation for his radical beliefs (he felt church and state should be separated because the latter would corrupt the former). He wound up receiving an urgent but secret warning.

“He was (Williams’) friend. When the official militia wants to stick him on a boat and send him back to England, (Williams) wasn’t at home because someone had warned him. It was later revealed that that someone was (John) Winthrop (the Massachusetts governor and the leader of that militia). I would do that for a friend, even one I disagreed with. It made them seem less far away or a Puritan cartoon. That made them seem like they were two guys who were buddies.”

Similarly, in recounting how June Carter Cash came to co-write her husband Johnny Cash’s hit song “Ring of Fire,” she makes listeners feel both their forbidden desire (both were married to others at the time) and their very real fear of facing fire and brimstone. Reese Witherspoon may have won an Oscar for playing June in the movie Walk the Line, but Vowell’s account of their relationship is far more powerful than the film. In case you doubt me on this, got to the This American Life site to hear for yourself at the 47:30 mark.

Vowell can also make seemingly staid subject matter hysterically funny. Her high-pitched nasal voice and her droll, deadpan delivery make anything she says sound more amusing. Even in print, she’s a riot. In Assassination Vacation, she attends the musical 1776 in the same theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot. While liking the performance, laments, “Going to Ford's Theatre to watch the play is like going to Hooters for the food.”

In Unfamiliar Fishes, Vowell recalls how 19th century Hawaii went from being an isolated kingdom to part of the United States. She recalls how both whalers and New England missionaries fought over the destiny of the islands. Naturally, she finds an engaging way to retell the feud. In describing how a French voyage to the islands included collecting data on social diseases spread by previous European sailors, she muses, “Typical — the only thing more European than spreading VD is documenting it.”

Toward the end of the monarchy, one almost begins to side with the colonists because King Kalakaua was paying for his massive gambling debts with the public treasury. It’s no wonder the kingdom fell two years after he died in 1891.

Before you start to celebrate his demise, Vowell cautions that Kalahaua also preserved important aspects of Hawaiian culture like hula dancing which could have been lost because missionaries disapproved of them. She adds, “Yes, he was corrupt and inept. But his contemporary over here, President Grant, happened to be presiding over one of the most corrupt administrations in our history. It was ‘The Gilded Age.’ There’s this golden sheen over an ugly face.”

Forced Diversity

Our current president, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii, and his multi-ethnic ancestry is actually typical of the region. With the 19th century rise of sugar plantations, the owners recruited from around the globe to find the multitudes needed to grow the labor-intensive crop. According to Vowell, it wasn’t political correctness that made them recruit workers from Japan, the Philippines and other remote locales.

“The reasons the plantation owners wanted all these different kinds of people were that they intentionally built their own little Towers of Babel in the Pacific because they didn’t want their workers to be able to talk to one another because they didn’t want their workers to organize against their overlords.”

A Woman of Many Faces

If you’ve never heard of Vowell or her books, there’s still a good chance you’ve either heard or seen her. She’s been on dozens of talk shows and has appeared on the TV show Bored to Death and in the movie Please Give. In that film, Catherine Keener can be spotted reading The Wordy Shipmates, and then Vowell can be spotted as an indifferent customer in Keener’s shop.

Most people, however, know her as the voice of the invisible Violet Parr in the Pixar classic The Incredibles. Vowell says that she prefers to be typing her books instead of appearing on camera, but says her readings and acting career help her find new readers for her unusual but rewarding texts.

“Being a salesman enables me to keep writing the little books I do. Part of the reason I can write these books that sound like ones that nobody would want to read,” says Vowell. “I went to graduate school and wrote a graduate thesis, and I think one guy, the one who was grading it, read it. I couldn’t contain my rage that this was something only one person would read. It seemed like such a waste to me. Before I’m a writer, I’m a reader. A book doesn’t exist unless someone’s reading it.”

[krokodile]

jesus it’s been like fifty movie since i’ve done one of these.

sunset boulevard - just a favorite i go back to every few years.  i can recite at least half the dialogue with it (and i often do.  what can i say?  the comedic delivery is so perfect - i feel like not enough people appreciate how witty and just plain funny this movie can be.  @songstressofnotionsgonewrong i’m sure you’re the exception though!)

pet sematary - i liked it more than the original, but i really don’t like the original, so...that’s not saying a lot.  it did have good points, though.  making the undead child ellie instead of gage was a smart movie, and jete laurence is terrific in the role.  john lithgow is perfect (he’s john lithgow, after all), and i love the relationship he has with ellie.  besides giving jud a reason to resurrect first church and then ellie, his love for her makes her death that much more heartbreaking.  i loved them both, i didn’t want anything bad to happen to either of them, even while i knew what was coming.  i couldn’t give a shit about gage or anyone else in the original.

but the obvious trailer fodder with the masks was pure cringe (admittedly, it looked good, but...come on), the writing isn’t great (i mean, neither is the original’s screenplay...nor is the novel) and john lithgow had one line delivery i would really like to know the thought process behind because it seemed like a weird choice.  zelda wasn’t nearly as terrifying in this one, and her death was accidentally hilarious.  jason clarke is fine but he’s majorly outclassed by the other actors (including the little kid).  it’s fine; it’s a five out of ten if i were doing number ratings.  i was the only person who thought this needed a remake, and i’m happy enough with what i got.  it’s an improvement.  it’s just still not that great.  

the darkness - i’m 99% sure that the boy was originally written to be about four, but they realized they didn’t want to deal with all the shit that comes with hiring a kid that young, and figured no one would notice if they made him a middle schooler, because he’s autistic; that’s the same thing as mentally challenged, right??  sigh.  movie itself wasn’t good, but i’ve seen worse.

child’s play - i’m just gonna say it.  i like it better than the original.  the only older chucky movie i have a soft spot for is bride of chucky and that’s mainly jennifer tilly/tiffany anyway.  unlike pet sematary, i don’t think it really needed remaking, but i thoroughly enjoyed it.  older andy was a great idea - very young children absolutely can be very capable actors, but a thirteen year old is going to be a more interesting character than a six year old because he can actually do things on his own.  the friends they gave him were a lot of fun, mike and his mom were great characters, aubrey plaza’s being aubrey plaza.  mark hamill’s voice was perfect.  and i liked that the main character was allowed to be hearing-impaired without it being a plot point.  i’m guessing it was intended to be at some point, but i liked how it ended up being handled.

crawl - so much respect for kaya scodelario.  she picks some weird/bad movies, but she gives her all every time.  wasn’t a fan of this one, but  i’m not huge on creature movies to begin with.

a silent voice - i guess i’m the only person who didn’t like it, but the one main character was nauseatingly perfect, and the other was forgiven way too easily.  i get why people liked it, but i didn’t.

the favourite - if i’d known who directed it i wouldn’t have bothered; i just never enjoy this guy’s films.  great performances though.  god help me but i’m starting to love emma stone, and rachael weisz has never given a bad performance that i’ve seen.  was less impressed with the lead, but she got an oscar for it so clearly i’m in the minority there.

along came the devil - sydney sweeney needs to fire her agent.

velvet  buzzsaw - hated it, but kind of expected to.  

inside - hey, rachel nichols!  in another thing with this title!  movie was a pile of meh.  predictable but i guess not offensive.

[whythehellnaut]

Why’s Lion King (2019) review

I watched my favorite animated movie, the original Lion King a couple of days ago to prepare to see the remake so I could compare the two, and I have to say the original is my preferred version by far, by a rather disappointing margin.  I can respect what Disney was trying to do with this remake, and I certainly enjoyed myself and can give praise where it's due, but there's so much that doesn't work in this as a result of going live action.  I can say that what does work best is the visuals.  I honestly can't tell that these aren't live action animals.  They move realistically and every hair on their bodies can be seen swaying with their body motion.  If anything can beat Alita: Battle Angel for the best Visual Effects Oscar, it's this.  But, in spending all of their time and effort on this, they seem to have skimped or gotten lazy on a lot of other areas.The main complaint I've heard, which came about during the trailers, is that the characters don't emote enough.  In trying to be realistic instead of cartoonish, Disney forgot that actual animals provide more facial expressions than what they show in this movie.  This complaint is true, and a major fault in the film, but the problem actually goes further than that.  Sometimes the mouths don't sync well with the voices or their movements don't match the actors' tone of voice.  Zazu will say something in a panic, but will continue bobbing his head around in the same way that he does when he is calm, like nothing is wrong, almost as if they were real animals filmed by nature documentarians and then hastily given voiceovers from actors who weren't seeing who they were portraying.  Sometimes they will recreate a scene where a character takes less action than in the original.  For example, in the animated film, when Mufasa asks to speak with Simba alone to scold him, Simba's eyes go wide and he crouches down in fear, as a real cat would.  In the new version, he doesn't even move.  I don't understand why they would spend so much time animating these characters to be realistic, then cheap out and exclude a very basic, yet still realistic motion.  This is only one example.  It's aggravating how static they are over the course of the movie when the characters and even backgrounds were always dynamic in the original, which made it the masterpiece it was.The performances aren't even particularly good.  Donald Glover seems bland and generic for the most part, leaving no impression that Matthew Broderick didn't leave first.  JD McCrary as young Simba sounds like she's reading directly off a script for the first time, always either overacting or underacting like she doesn't know the context.  John Oliver is funny in his delivery, and a good choice for Zazu, but seems to have been directed to only mimic his comedic voice he uses in Last Week Tonight, which is a pundit show much different from a movie.  It ultimately doesn't fit, and feels very awkward, but I blame director Jon Favreau more than Oliver.  Beyonce has about ten lines in total as adult Nala, and makes it clear she was only cast to sing "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?"  Chiwetel Ejiofor sounds good as Scar, but in the iconic line from one of my favorite scenes in the original (and in cinema in general), where Jeremy Irons dramatically whispers "Long live the king," and tosses Mufasa off the cliff, Ejiofor botches it and makes it sound, again, like he's reading off a script, resulting in an underwhelming death scene, both due to Scar's voice, and his lazily animated movement.  Seth Rogen is fine as Pumbaa, but all I can hear is Seth Rogen playing himself, as usual.  Even James Earl Jones, the same actor who played Mufasa in the original, sounds tired and less emotional than he previously did, either due to age or bad directing.  The only performance I enjoyed more than the original is Billy Eichner as Timon.  He is less exaggerated than Nathan Lane but perfectly pulls off the personality and updates the humor of the movie with his performances that almost sound like well made adlibs.  He is the best part of this movie, in my opinion.The third big problem I have is that almost nothing has changed.  75% of it is a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake, which is especially noticeable having seen both movies within days of each other.  This makes the poor performances all the more aggravating because they literally just had to mimic the original and call it a day, and still couldn't come close to matching that.  Some of the shots are neat, impressive homages, like in Circle of Life, but it can get boring when so much is exactly the same but with less emotion and movement.  Even the background music and instrumentals, while I expected them to be similar, often seem ripped straight from the original.  Circle of Life, I am quite certain, is the same exact song recorded in 1994, but with a new vocalist.  That's sad if they couldn't be bothered to remake even that.But what has changed, and how much of it is good?  As I mentioned with Timon, the humor is updated.  The silly puns were expanded on to make funny quips, sometimes poking fun at the original, the live bait scene is genuinely laughable without the hula dance, as they reference another Disney movie and a hilarious way, and the In the Heat of the Night reference is replaced with an "I hate bullies," exchange, which is more appropriate and relevant now.  The musical numbers are dumbed down.  I Can't Wait to be King is no longer presented like a colorful art exhibition, but instead a stroll through the watering hole, and Be Prepared is limited to the final verse that Jim Cummings sang in Irons' place, and excludes the geysers and goosestepping, for example.  The chemistry between the hyenas has changed, with Shenzi now a regal leader with a little more dynamic with Nala, but Bonzai and Ed are now replaced with nameless Hyenas played my Keegan Michael Key and Eric Andre who bicker about personal space, which can occasionally be funny, but they rarely bounce off of Shenzi or even interact with Scar.  About half an hour of run time has been added with mostly needless filler.  Some of it is good, like showing the turmoil the lionesses go through under Scar and the Hyenas' rule, better explaining what went wrong, and a fun scene showing how Rafiki discovers Simba is alive, but lots of it is pointless nature show style shots, like spending three minutes following the mouse that Scar tries to eat in the intro.  As I said, I can respect that they tried to go for a nature show inspired look, and some shots do work, but it mostly brings down what should have been a great movie.Reviewing a remake is difficult because you have to take into account whether the movie is good when you ignore the original.  In this case, it's alright, but the original is such a classic that almost everyone in the country has seen it.  It's freakin' Lion King.  I can't help but spend most of my time comparing the two versions.  Overall, I believe the first is far, far superior, but I think many will appreciate the new look, and some may even prefer it.  However, my final verdict is that watching the original at home or at a rerelease (which seems to happen fairly often with such a stellar work of art) is a better time to spend an evening.

[luminous777]

Introducing a Major Character Mid-show: Oscar Pine vs Maria Calavera

So before you keep reading know this know some of what I am about to say might make some of you angry. This post is how I feel new characters should be introduced to a major cast after a significant amount of time has passed when the major cast has been viewed as whole for a good deal of time, in this case adding Oscar and Maria into the RWBYJNR + Q gang.

I am going to be separating this into categories based on characteristics I feel are important when introducing new characters as best I can and how Oscar and Maria fall into them. Note due to nature of some categories they may mix together as to not repeat certain things.

Unique Character Traits

A character should have major traits about identity clearly defined and different than other characters in the existing group. Otherwise a feeling of "we have you already" or "really we are doing this again

Oscar: One of my big issues with Oscar comes from this. Oscar is a big mash up of Ruby and Jaune's early characters. Socially awkward being basic. One from Ruby being a person younger than everyone else being put into the fray because they possess a special unique ability, bonus points because it was Ozpin that put them into it. Jaune his weapon isn't a fancy mechshift weapon that is fancy but rather an old one passed down from one person to another. Here is a big combo one: Oscar had dreams of being more than a farm hand from there he went onto go fight Grimm and villains despite not knowing aura, semblances, and he had zero combat experience, however, (due to his special power) he was basically a prodigy and he learned skills extremely fast enough to take on Leo, who was a headmaster with barely a month of training.Maybe the idea that Oscar has no identity of his own is on purpose because of the whole he is slowly being lobotomized thing but who knows.

Maria is a sassy Grandma, she is old admits it but she doesn't take shit from anyone and can command control of a situation. One could make an argument that she is a mash up of characters, Qrow and Nora or Qrow and Yang but at the same time she is very different. She is a broken Ace she was the best there was but she lost her eyes and her confidence and gave up, and now she is old and even if she wanted to be active she can’t, more on that later. She is funny light hearted character like Nora but in a completely different way one is goofy and silly the other is snarky and sassy. While the sass and snark could be similar to Yang along with broken Ace they are a flipped coin in the broken Ace way, Maria said so herself. They both lost the source of their power eyes and fist, but Yang didn’t give up where Maria did.

Role

In a similar vain of “we have you already” a character should have pseudo unique role or purpose that doesn’t step on the toes of another character.

Maria has a perfect unique role that no one else does and in reality they couldn’t do in a better way, Ruby’s silver eyes teacher. She was someone with silver eyes but doesn’t have them anymore. However she still knows how to use them. Maria is old and partially blind she will not be in any battles in the future taking the spotlight of the RWBYJNR gang we have known for so long and want to see how their powers, techniques and specialties have grow. Examples are Weiss’s summoning, Yang’s fighting without relying on her semblance as a crutch, Jaune’s new semblance and his and Ruby’s strategies and tactics have improved since the beginning. She has no active role in Grimm fighting but she does have a vast wealth of knowledge on their abilities, she knew what the apathy were, what they did and how dangerous they could be but she didn’t whip out fighting techniques to beat them no she wanted to warn the girls and then she taught Ruby how to use her powers. She is inactive in combat but is a wealth of knowledge 

Then there is Oscar who at this point like in a fan letter to Bryan Cranston a line read “i don’t know what your role will be”. At this point all he has served as is an Ozpin delivery system. But now that Oz is having a pity party and running away from confrontation. Oscar has shown no signs of being able to access the Osma collective conscious, I thought he did at the end of vol 6 and hoping that would help his character but no it was just Ozpin telling him what to do. The idea of put him in a team with JNR is weak and pointless because 2 reasons. 1 why do they need teams the entire gang is working as a larger unit not two separate teams so having a RWBY JNPR at this point makes no sense. 

Focus and Development

In a show or any work characters need to develop and grow and they to share focus to show this, minor hot take Blake has had far too much of this at this point and now that Adam is dead lets take the spot light off her for awhile. Now we have a large cast so they need to share focus and share development time and evolve their characters. Weiss has already grow from stuck up tsundere elitist to down to earth kind girl but the climax of her arc is just about to come. 

Oscar is a character you would see in the beginning of a show but introduced late game. Every other character has grown in some way and had some focus on who they were or their past. Oscar’s past was actually Osma’s past not his own. The only way I see with his current character from his dialogue is him accepting that he is going to be Osma and admittedly that could be cool if done right, but I know thats not what Oscar fans want.

Maria won’t develop, she is old an her role is teacher, she isn’t going to change and evolve heck her “development if you want to call it that is deciding to help teach Ruby and the new generation as best she can.

So these are my thoughts Maria was a far better done late game character introduction than the farmboy. My opinions may differ from yours butI feel my points are very valid in both the praise and criticisms department.  One last bit don’t pull the “potential” BS on this post because guess what just as much as good potential he could have it could be shitty potential too or even wasted potential so please none of that

[chiseler]

GERALDINE PAGE: Octopus Lust

In her first lead film role in the John Wayne western Hondo (1953), Geraldine Page takes the space around her physically in a very definite way, but her squinting face and high, persnickety, slightly whiny voice don’t quite have the same authority as her body does yet. She was 29 years old here and already known as a promising theater actress, and she gets a special “introducing” credit for Hondo, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar even though she is Wayne’s unconventional leading lady.

“I am fully aware that I am a homely woman,” Page tells Wayne in Hondo, almost boastfully, or at least in a way that seems proud of her own self-awareness. Hers was not a face or even sometimes a sensibility made for the camera, but as a middle-aged and then older woman she made the movies respect her talent. At the Actors Studio in the 1950s, she worked and worked on her thin voice until it became a notably flexible instrument that she could use for practically any effect she wanted.

In a somewhat sparing feature film career, Page would rack up eight Oscar nominations in all, four in the supporting category and four for lead actress, and at least three of her supporting nominations don’t make too much sense. There isn’t much for her to do in Hondo, and she has even less to work with during her jokey short appearances in You’re a Big Boy Now (1966), where she is a cartoon smother mother in an oversized black wig, and Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972), where she is a society matron in an oversized blonde wig that gets pulled off by Carol Burnett during a low comedy catfight. (Page does have one genuinely funny moment in Pete ‘n’ Tillie where an official asks her age and she gets stuck behind the sounds “For” and “Fi” until she finally collapses, the sort of comic routine that lands precisely because of how overdone it is.)

Page was known for her love of acting, her zeal for it, her lack of shame, and sometimes her lack of control. Critics occasionally chided her mannerisms, the way she strangled words when she was angry or broke them up into separate syllables for hammy emphasis, and as she got older she couldn’t seem to keep her hands off of her face: cupping her cheek, rubbing her eyes, fluttering her hands up and away, almost disconnectedly, from her own deep feelings. She sometimes crosses her eyes slightly when she’s mad but pops them in moments of extreme stress, and she tends to sink into her knees as she walks, as if bright spirits were always being weighed down by worry. Page often falls into physical and vocal grooves and can’t seem to get out of them, and at her worst (and even sometimes at her best) she wallows in peculiarity and freakishness.

She liked food a lot (she called herself “Greedy Gut”), and she made many meals of scenery, too. In the performance that won her a fourth and richly deserved supporting actress Oscar nomination for The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), Page has only two scenes as former cleaning lady and racing enthusiast Mrs. Ritter, the first of which is a brief interaction with her son. In the second scene, which lasts a show-stopping three minutes and 42 seconds, the police are interrogating Mrs. Ritter about the death of her son. She does not want them to go through his room, and so Mrs. Ritter uses every intimidation and distraction tactic she can think of to keep them out. Page smokes a cigarette here and blows the smoke out of her mouth with a steam engine puff for emphasis, and this isn’t her only prop; she also fingers and kisses a rosary to show her piety and sips from a glass of whisky to show her Irish toughness. Page pours a very broad Noo Yawk accent all over her dialogue and enjoys the outlandish sounds she can make with it, particularly when she says “yoose.”

Page’s Mrs. Ritter looks over and away from the cops but then stares straight at them when she wants to scare them. “My Walter was as tough as a bar of iron…and he didn’t get that from his father,” she warns. In the last 20 seconds of the scene, violins on the soundtrack alert us that she will drop her mask once the police leave, and for about 16 seconds Page shows us Mrs. Ritter’s grief, which is still fairly tough, for this is a woman who exerts control over everything, even her own feelings. Page’s Mrs. Ritter is virtuoso work, like the performance that finally won her a lead Oscar the following year, The Trip to Bountiful, and it is simultaneously absurd and riveting, campy yet also deeply real and imagined.

There is a similar reality to another brief performance she gave at this time that did not get Page an Oscar nomination, her dying poet Jean Scott Martin in I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can (1982), a Jill Clayburgh vehicle about Valium addiction. Page has about twice the time for her Big Scene here as she got for Mrs. Ritter’s Big Scene, and so she really shoots the works and practically shuts the whole movie down with it. A hole seems to open up in the film during this scene and everything else that happens later falls right into it.

Page’s Jean has just watched a documentary Clayburgh’s Barbara has made about her life, and at first she is quietly livid at its sentimentality. But then she begins to tell Barbara off in very profane language, and her anger starts to build and expand, and Page makes the shock of this expansion truly scathing and harrowing, and inescapable. Jean (and Page) can do a lot with words, sticking them like knives and then twisting them, or making them land, explode, and destroy until Clayburgh nearly seems to swoon in response. We see Jean later in the film and she makes up with Barbara, but this doesn’t diminish the intensity of Page’s tirade, or the rage this woman feels about the prospect of dying and then disappearing.

Page had a wide range, but she was typecast when she was young as neurotic spinsters, a trend that began with her performance on stage as Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke in a 1952 production credited with spurring the whole Off-Broadway movement in New York. In the 1950s, Page played on stage with James Dean in The Immoralist and played lovelorn spinster Lizzie Curry in The Rainmaker while making occasional appearances on TV. At 37, she was allowed to play Alma on screen in a 1961 movie version of Summer and Smoke that suffers from the casting of Laurence Harvey as her unappealing leading man and love object.

Page doesn’t let Harvey get in her way in Summer and Smoke, and this is a good case of what might be meant by the word “technique” when it comes to acting. Harvey doesn’t give Page anything at all to work against as a scene partner, but she stays focused and listens and hears what she is supposed to be hearing from him, somehow. She delivers her Alma to the screen with care and tact and occasional sensual detail, helped along by a sensitive score from Elmer Bernstein and the pale blue colors of her clothes, the frozen ground that her Alma retreats across in the penultimate scene, and the florid writing itself.

When she played the faded movie star Alexandra Del Lago on stage in Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Page penciled lines on her face and seems to have emphasized the grotesque and solemn side of the play. But in the 1962 movie version, Page made a crucial adjustment for the screen, steering her part into imperious comedy and doing lots of nutty things with her eyes and with her vocal delivery. The redheaded, egoistic Alexandra is supposed to have been “the sex symbol of America,” and Page almost makes you believe that she was that, but not quite. Daring you to think she is miscast, Page laughs and howls full-throatedly here, always staying highly conscious of her outré effects because Alexandra is conscious of them too, even when (or especially when) she’s drunk or stoned. “The camera doesn’t know how to lie!” Page’s Alexandra cries, but she herself puts the lie to that statement, for this is a risky performance dedicated to tricking the camera, routing it, leading it on a wild goose chase with sinuous poses and emphatic declarations. Everything Page does in the film of Sweet Bird of Youth is primed to make you ask, “Who is that?” or even “What is that?”

This is one of the campiest performances in film history, every word underlined three and sometimes four times in purple ink. Speaking to Paul Newman’s gigolo Chance Wayne, Page’s Alexandra purrs, “Make me almost believe that we are a pair of young lovers…without any shame.” He smiles at that, and it’s easy to smile along with him. Chance in turn amuses her Alexandra, and she is even modestly touched by him, but only modestly, and Page is scrupulous about showing the smallness of that feeling, even when Alexandra is drunkenly calling his name outside their hotel room, each “Chance!” more plummy and piss elegant than the last. Page gives this role an opulent sort of size, festooning it with cheerfully unaccountable and facetious vocal pyrotechnics, but she also somehow grounds it in a recognizable psychological reality, and this balancing act is no small feat.

In her last big scene on the phone in Sweet Bird of Youth, when Alexandra finds out from the columnist Walter Winchell that her latest movie comeback was a success after all, Page overflows with vulnerable yet blissful “I knew it all the time!” nervous relief, and this phone monologue is a real star turn that again is grounded in emotional truthfulness. Page shows that you can go as high, wide, and handsome with over-embroidered acting as you want as long as you have done the work beforehand to make the character real and specific underneath. “Page beautifully intertwines inner steel and insecurity, cannily conceived as two sides of the same coin,” wrote John DiLeo in his 2010 book Tennessee Williams and Company. “Beneath Page’s flourishes of self-centered bravado is the more fragile Alexandra, the woman mired in the indulgences of self-pity and self-gratification.”

Page turned down the role of Martha in the original 1962 theater production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a large mistake on her part. On screen, she played a high-strung spinster with incestuous longings for her brother in a film of Lillian Hellman’s Toys in the Attic (1963), giving the kind of overbearing, headlong performance that doesn’t work well for the camera, though it might have had some power on stage. She was a spinster again in a much softer key for the modest romance Dear Heart (1964), and then she went back to TV to deliver what might be her finest performance of all, the kind and loving Sook in adaptations of the Truman Capote stories A Christmas Memory (1966) and The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967). She won Emmy awards for both.

The remarkable thing about her work in those Capote TV movies is that Page never emphasizes the fact that Sook has the mind of a child, which Capote himself tells us in his narration. She makes Sook mischievous and sly, a good-hearted hedonist like Page herself was, a lover of pretty things and movie stories, and there is never any pathos in her interpretation; she doesn’t underline or show us Sook’s childlikeness but embodies it, a much more difficult thing to achieve than her colorfully overstated yet grounded work as Alexandra Del Lago. In the last scene of A Christmas Memory, when Sook is flying a kite and talking about life and death, Page breathes quietly and totally opens her face up to the camera until a purely soulful expression steals across it, like the sun slowly moving behind clouds, and she lets this happen rather than making it happen, as she does in some of her lesser work.

The Beguiled

On stage she played Olga in the disastrous Actors Studio production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and the recording of it shows that she is the only member of the cast who gives an even remotely acceptable performance amid much reckless self-indulgence from the others. She took a rewarding, even daring lead on film in Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), a psychosexual western where she presided over a band of lusty young ladies after the manhood of Clint Eastwood as if she were running her own school for neurotics. Her character is horny for Eastwood but she also has a thing for one of her charges, played by Elizabeth Hartman (at one point she kisses Hartman full on the mouth). After that Page’s career deteriorated for a while to guest shots on TV shows like Night Gallery, The Snoop Sisters and Kojak, where she could be relied on to act up a storm while wearing caftans and frowzy wigs.

But in 1978 Page picked up another lead Oscar nomination for her subversively funny performance as another neurotic in Woody Allen’s Interiors, where she plays Eve, a perfectionist in the domestic sphere who finds herself abandoned by husband and children. In the back of a cab, with her hair pulled back tightly and heavy make-up on her face, Page’s Eve resembles a weary female impersonator. A micro-managing tyrant, Eve descends to grotesque twitches and facial collapse shortly after her husband of many years, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), tells her he is leaving her, but her self-pity and self-destructiveness often retain a kind of physical elegance even in the midst of breakdown.

When Eve attempts suicide after taping up her windows and turning on a gas oven, Page spreads herself out on a divan to await death in an amusingly sulky, almost sexy way. “I have an inner tranquility!” she insists at one point, and the comedy here comes from someone vehemently denying the most obvious reality. When Eve is watching TV by herself and drinking some wine, Page allows her the open face that she gave Sook at the end of A Christmas Memory, because this woman is only free to be like that when she is alone. And Page memorably rises to the grandstanding moment when Eve smashes candles in a church after Arthur squashes her notion of reconciliation for good.

There were small film and TV roles after that, often as exuberantly frumpy women, and these were sometimes little more than bits, but then came the movie she knew would win her that elusive Oscar, The Trip to Bountiful, a 1985 adaptation of a Horton Foote TV play originally done with Lillian Gish, expanded with all the trimmings for Page’s swan song. Her Carrie Watts is a stubborn old woman who runs away to her hometown of Bountiful after living in bickering discontent in a two-room Houston, Texas, apartment with her weak son Ludie (John Heard) and catty daughter-in-law Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn). Page’s hand-to-face mannerism is out of control here sometimes, but such surface idiosyncrasies do not distract from her inventiveness, her heightened emotions of elation and relief, and the specificity of her performance, the way she can make you see and hear a person from Carrie’s past, as if Page has done extensive back story work for every name Carrie mentions.

Page had a stormy marriage with bad boy actor Rip Torn (the card on the door of their Manhattan townhouse read “Torn Page”) that produced two talented actors, Tony Torn and Angelica Page. In Nazi Hunter: The Beate Klarsfield Story (1986) for TV, Page clearly looks ill and tired, and she died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 62 while playing Madame Arcati on Broadway in Blithe Spirit. At a tribute shortly after her death, Anne Jackson said that Page “used a stage like no one else I’d ever seen. It was like playing tennis with someone who had 26 arms.” And in her best movie work, Page finally made the camera bow to her octopus talent, her greedy, gutsy ardor for acting.

by Dan Callahan