#ronen rubenstein

[rosedavid]

9-1-1 Lone Star: S4 E18 Deleted Scene

[angeltk]

TK STRAND IN EVERY SCENE 1.08: monster inside

[tkstrandsource]

TK Strand in 4x10 “Sellouts"

[hotcelebritymenilike]

Ronen Rubenstein with bonus Rafael Silva

[velvet-ink]

It’s a Tarlos thirst trap. That is all.

[chaotictarlos]

I know this is old but it's the first time I've seen it so....

[wandering-night19]

[existential-queeer]

Maybe it's my trust issues talking, but I just can't shake the feeling that Owen lied to TK about getting negative test results. He probably didn't tell him because he didn't want to ruin the wedding and such, but it's gonna come out sooner or later, and it's not gonna be pretty.

Or maybe he's telling the truth. They could easily be telling the truth, and it was just a minor little scare that they had nothing to worry about. But we know that the writers just LOVE drama AND hurting TK, so it'd be a win-win for them if Owen actually lied about it.

[beautifulhigh]

Still thinking 'bout them

[paperstorm]

Thank you for being so 'Ronen is a good actor' positive! I feel like other actors get praised alot more and I see so much unwarranted Ronen hate (especially on Twitter which is a toxic cesspool) and it's like 'what are you guys watching??' (Tbh, I think it's mainly people who don't even watch the show, I've seen a lot of 911 Original/Buck/Eddie fans who just like to bitch about him in every way every day). But it's also Rafa/Carlos fans who actually dislike TK, but say they ship Tarlos, but only because Rafa 'carries' that couple. So all this to say I'm glad people actually think Ronen is decent at his job 🙄 lol. Sorry to rant in your ask box!

Oh Ronen is a FANTASTIC actor!! The elasticity of his face, the choices he makes, the little things he puts into the background that just bring such authenticity to the character, the beautiful expressiveness of his eyes, the things he adds to a scene that definitely weren't in the script and just showcase how much he cares about the character and how much he THINKS about the character. He is so good. He brings TK to life in a way that feels so real and visceral. He can do dark and hurting and tortured just as well as he can do bright and happy and glittery. TK is equal parts a soft little angel made of sunshine and equal parts tragic and traumatized and that is not an easy dichotomy to play as an actor. Ronen hate will never have a place on this blog. He is such a sweet, sparkly, talented little bean and I absolutely adore him.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/20/2022: SMILEY FACE KILLERS

I'm doing this project on movies that claim to be "based on a true story", and SMILEY FACE KILLERS is a really interesting example for multiple reasons. The first is that, while its opening on-screen text declares that it is "inspired by true events", it is actually based very loosely on a rather fantastical theory that attempts to weave mundane, unrelated tragedies into a vast conspiracy. Many movies make the "true story" claim vaguely or spuriously: THE STRANGERS comes to mind as something that leveraged the notion of factuality in order to amplify the terror of its home invasion scenario, but its marketing materials provided no further details that could leave the claim vulnerable to closer analysis. (It seems likely that the writers were thinking of the Keddie murders, but I remember coming up empty when I tried to find out what "true story" was being referenced when the movie was being advertised) But when SMILEY FACE KILLERS talks about "true events", it's really talking about something people think, and not something that concretely happened.

The other point of interest in this "true story" here is that the smiley face murder theory offers an explanation where none is required. When we hear about something like the Dyatlov Pass incident, in which a group of people met bizarre and horrific fates through no obvious means and for no obvious reason, it's completely understandable that conspiracy theories form in order to help us grasp at the comfort of an explanation. If we think we know what happened, then maybe we don't have to worry that it will happen to us. The smiley face murder theory seems to just do the opposite, creating dread and fear where logical explanations already exist. The opening text continues:

"Since 1997, more than 150 young men across US college campuses have drowned under suspicious circumstances. Symbols spray-painted at the scenes have led some to propose these accidents are in fact serial murders. Though many dispute this as nothing more than urban myth, there are many who do not."

The film completes the masquerade of authenticity by dating its events to March 14, 2017 in Santa Clarita, and using a mosaic of yearbook-like headshots to make up its title card. The smiley face murder theory is actually the concoction of authorities who you'd like to be able to trust: retired NYPD detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, and gang expert Dr. Lee Gilbertson. Their concept takes the sadly ordinary drowning deaths of intoxicated, careless, self-destructive, or simply unlucky male college students, and uses their proximity to graffiti of smiley faces to suggest that their deaths were deliberately orchestrated, despite the extreme generality of this "pattern". Last year, WHO identified drowning as the third-leading cause of accidental death worldwide, "accounting for 7% of all injury-related deaths." and it's fair to say that the smiley face, which has been in commercial use since at least the early 1960s, is probably one of the most ubiquitous images in American vandalism, if not across the globe. There is no special need to form a relationship between these two items; you have to really insist. One might further ask why the smiley face murder theory focuses on young men specifically, but the CDC may provide an explanation there, as its website notes: "Nearly 80% of people who die from drowning are male. Many factors might contribute to higher rates of drowning among males, including increased exposure to water, risk-taking behaviors, and alcohol use." The smiley face murder theory faces a further challenge beyond the commonness of its key elements, which is the national dispersal of the deceased. In order to resolve the geographic disparity between the alleged dump sites, the smiley face murder theory proposes a nationwide network of perpetrators. To my knowledge, the theory does not include a motivation for such a thing to exist.

With the movie SMILEY FACE KILLERS, Bret Easton Ellis offers a motivation that, considering the state of this conspiracy theory, is as reasonable as anything else one might think of. It describes the final days of (fictional) college student Jake Graham (Ronen Rubenstein), whose personal life is imploding as his tragic fate closes in on him. The film is directed by Tim Hunter who, perhaps ironically, is most famous for the cult drama RIVER'S EDGE, whose title refers to the watery scene of a murder that transpires within a circle of teenage friends. Where that film describes the need for young people to responsibly accept their harsh reality, the reality of SMILEY FACE KILLERS is elusive, haunted, and unpredictable. When its hero experiences a lapse of responsibility, he is done in not by the direct consequences of his actions, but by a more fantastical form of doom whose true nature is unknowable.

Jake is a haunted young man, alone among friends, and missing a full understanding of his own behavior and circumstances. We, the audience, understand immediately that foul play will become a part of his story, but Jake is already on the verge of a personal apocalypse. Like Mary Henry in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, he fails to connect to the world of the living, and seems to sense that the walls are closing in on him. To some degree, his friends are aware of the spiral he's in, including his girlfriend Keren (Mia Serafino), who discovers that he has stopped taking his mood stabilizers. He acts depressed and paranoid, experiences memory loss, loses track of time, and fails to perform in bed. Meanwhile, he begins to receive threatening text messages from an unknown sender, including graphic images of slaughtered animals and the cryptic phrase "THE WATER WANTS YOU". This feeds right into Jake's existing unease, encouraging him to accuse Keren's lingering ex-boyfriend Rob (Cody Simpson) of messing with his head. As Jake continues to spiral, a worse fate than youthful alienation draws near in the form of a sadistic murder cult that is already responsible for a string of local disappearances.

The other disappearances are never acknowledged by the cast of SMILEY FACE KILLERS, which is consistent with the social disconnect found in Bret Easton Ellis' stories. To my mind, this movie is the single best representation of what Ellis offers as a writer, succeeding with the one element that is missing from most adaptations of his work: a sense of irresolvable mystery, an entrapment in one's flawed subjectivity, and an inability to know the details of your own life. Contrarily, Mary Harron's endlessly lauded AMERICAN PSYCHO is flatly literal; Patrick Bateman's murder spree escapes notice because of the blind narcissism rampant in his time and place. In Ellis' novels, AMERICAN PSYCHO included, things are rarely so simple or consistent, as characters are prone to delusions and hallucinations that are not comfortably identifiable as such, creating an unshakable feeling of isolation and mistrust. The ambitious (and unpleasant, but underrated) RULES OF ATTRACTION makes the mistake of literalizing characters and plot elements that the book leaves as uncomfortable question marks—things that are possibly imagined or dreamed by the main characters, that add up to the sensation that reality is never quite graspable, that one can be pushed to the margins of one's own life, haunting it like a ghost instead of fully living it. These adaptations, along with LESS THAN ZERO, tend to be satisfied with the pat conclusion that their characters are self-centered and shallow, and there is little more to do with them than demonstrate their character flaws repetitively. SMILEY FACE KILLERS succeeds at evoking Ellis' sense of cognitive dissonance and the loneliness that ensues when a person can't fully participate in consensus reality.

The people in Jake's life all seem to be hiding something, and even his best efforts to face situations head on only result in greater ambiguity. He finds evidence that Rob is still pursuing Keren, but no evidence that Keren is responsive; however, when Jake confronts her about Rob's persistence, she refuses to address Jake's material causes for concern, instead reminding him of a frightening blackout during which he wrote her a four-page email that he can't remember. Worse still, when Jake shows Keren the disturbing text messages that he believes Rob has sent him, she accuses him of sending them to himself, urging him to go back on his meds. His only other source of comfort is his best friend Adam (Garrett Coffey), who also has a frustrating reaction to the harassment Jake experiences; he suggests that Jake has a secret admirer, and jokes uneasily that maybe it's Adam himself. "Maybe it's me… Do you ever think about my feelings? How I feel about you?" he teases, awkwardly groping Jake who wants no part of it. It seems highly likely that Adam is in love with Jake, but this is never acknowledged, leaving Jake with the nagging feeling that, like Keren and Rob, Adam has undesirable intentions toward him. We also understand that Jake's mother has been calling Keren behind his back to try to get information on what is happening to him. Despite his mother's concern, her sneaky behavior contributes to a sense of conspiracy surrounding Jake, who suffers from the suspicions and accusations of all of the people who are supposed to care for him.

The astute reader may have guessed by now that most of the movie is made up of this interpersonal intrigue. However, it remains tense and unsettling, not only because of its atmosphere of uncertainty and discord, but because only the audience perceives the very real and mortal threat stalking the edges of Jake's life. The film begins with a shocking act of animal mutilation that is well outside the bounds of what an audience expects from an essentially mainstream movie. These explicit images of what one can assume are real animal remains let you know that you are never quite safe with this movie, even though the disfigured, hammer-wielding cult leader (RIVER'S EDGE alum Crispin Glover) doesn't really make his debut until almost an hour into the 96-minute running time. However limited it is in duration, the violence in SMILEY FACE KILLERS is profoundly shocking by any standards, leaving the viewer with a feeling of despair as much as revulsion.

Because of its somewhat fractured narrative structure—Jake's life implodes while, on a completely separate and unrelated track, a gang of vicious psychopaths have marked him for death—SMILEY FACE KILLERS tends to represent a worldview rather than a traditional story. Jake's fate is not the result of his actions, yet what happens to him makes sense in a world where parents do not relate directly with children, lovers are stubbornly ambiguous in their commitments, and friends plot to get more than what they have offered one another. A feeling of abandonment and unfairness dogs this film as it uses the smiley face murder theory not to make sense of life, but to hyperbolize its senselessness.

This twisting of the logic of conspiracy theories is especially cruel, as people seem to turn to such theorizing to create order out of chaos, which is comforting even if the order in question is a daunting one. With conspiracy theories, urban legends, and other forms of folklore that challenge our normal understanding of how life works, there must be some personal motivation to invest faith in them; some emotional or spiritual reward for the perilous rejection of conventional thinking. In the case of the smiley face theory, we see a painful need on the part of the bereaved to find meaning in the shatteringly meaningless fate that has befallen their loved ones. The aforementioned architects of this theory—Kevin Gannon, Anthony Duarte, and Dr. Lee Gilbertson—participated in a true crime series on the Oxygen Network that I'm a little ashamed to admit I watched. It's hard to tell if these men truly believe in what they are proposing, or if this has all been a greedy grab for attention and/or cash, but it is abundantly clear that the bereaved parents who appear on the show are grateful for any explanation for the deaths of their children that does not impugn their children's upbringing or good character. The drowning victims that the investigators have chosen to focus on tend to be white, athletic, popular, and academically promising; that is, people who their communities think can do no wrong. It is simply too difficult for the parents of these young men to accept that their deaths, which often involved alcohol, were their own faults, or that they were simply random. Which is worse: not being able to trust your loved ones, or not being able to trust the basic structure of reality? Sometimes it appears that any orderly explanation, however outrageous, is easier than accepting that your concept of how the world works is incomplete, or that you yourself have been irresponsible somehow. When the locus of blame for your loss runs contrary to your personal beliefs, you can simply blame another party. Blame video games. Blame horror movies. Blame heavy metal music. Blame the smiley face killers.

[rosedavid]

"You may kiss your husband.”

[angeltk]

TK STRAND IN EVERY SCENE 1.05: studs

[tkstrandsource]

RONEN RUBINSTEIN 9-1-1: Lone Star Season 4 First Look

[hotcelebritymenilike]

911 Lone Star stars Rafael Silva and Ronen Rubenstein

[argentangelhelps]

71 ICONS OF RONEN RUBENSTEIN IN AMERICAN HORROR STORIES

all icons are free to use with credit to @argentangelhelps !

you may edit to your liking (add borders, psds, textures ect)

do not use for : celebrity/real person rps or paid commissions, everything else is up to user discretion. (don’t make me change this rule)

they are edited (sharpened) in ps, however they are meant to be used under the psd of your choice! if you choose to use them as they are they should work just fine! they are 75px square and do not come with any borders.

all screencaps used are my own, and they are available for download should you be interested (send an ask to this blog!)

FACECLAIM INFO : ronen is white & russian-jewish

TRIGGER WARNINGS : kissing/implied intimacy

link to in the source to the zip file which is free to download on my deviantart!

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