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mst3kproject · 3 years

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The Astral Factor

This movie has a great deal to offer the MSTie. It was written by Arthur C. Pierce, who did the same job on The Human Duplicators, and it can boast the presences of Leslie Parrish of The Giant Spider Invasion, Frank Ashmore of Parts: the Clonus Horror, and Rayford Barnes from Mitchell. The premise is ludicrous but presented with a perfectly straight face, and the whole thing just oozes 70’s-ness.

Roger Sands is a man of many talents, the most important of which for our purposes is his ability to become invisible in a shower of disco sparkles. This allows him to escape from prison, argue with his mother’s ghost (who apparently throws bangin’ parties in the afterlife) and go on a killing spree. The cops know who they’re hunting because he’s left fingerprints all over the place, but they have no idea how he’s moving around unseen. Fortunately, the prison psychologist knows some psychics who might be able to help them out… but will they be in time to save the various celebrities Sands is stalking, women who remind him of his own neglectful mother?

The main impression one gets from The Astral Factor is that it’s a parade of clichés. The first victim is killed in a bubble bath. Chuck the detective gets dragged out of bed to come investigate the case, which makes his girlfriend pout because she was hoping for sex. The killer is obsessed with his mother. Dogs and birds can sense Sands’ presence when he’s invisible. Chuck’s girlfriend is a terrible cook. That sort of thing. None of this needs to kill a movie, of course… clichés become clichés because they work.

Much worse for the movie is that it isn’t very interested in its characters. Sands’ backstory is that his mother was a movie star who thought it would ruin her career if it came out that she’d been briefly married and pregnant at the age of seventeen. She therefore distanced herself from him, leaving him feeling unwanted and invisible (insert giant blinking neon sign that says METAPHOR) until he finally got fed up and strangled her. This isn’t a bad setup for a movie’s serial killer, but the narrative doesn’t do much with it. Sands has a list of women he wants to murder, but we never find out what makes them good potential victims beyond simply being famous blondes. Surely there should be some moment of recognition, some sin they’ve each committed against their own families, but apparently ‘famous and blonde’ should be enough.

Opposed to Sands is, of course, Chuck the detective. He comes across as kind of a jerk but he does seem to love his empty-headed girlfriend Candy. I think his arc is meant to be that he starts off skeptical of the paranormal but is eventually forced to believe, but this is pretty badly mishandled – when the prison psychiatrist talks about Sands’ interest in psychic phenomena, Chuck seems bored rather than disbelieving, and when a man demonstrates telekinesis in front of him, he accepts it but looks entirely unimpressed. He never seems to be really affected by the phenomena he encounters. Instead of a man whose worldview is shaken to the core, Chuck appears to be merely annoyed that this is yet another thing he has to deal with.

The other possible arc Chuck has is that Candy suggests he get a job with ‘normal hours’ so that she no longer has to make coffee for his co-workers when they come to tell him about a murder in the middle of the night. He says he’ll think about it, but there’s no follow-up.

Finally, there’s Christine, the potential victim that we’re supposed to get attached to and worry about. She’s a spoiled trophy wife who hangs around in her mansion drinking while her husband, who lost all interest in her once she turned thirty, is out of town. The problem with her is that she doesn’t have much by way of a personality. In one scene she’s grateful for the cops protecting her, in the next she’s telling them to piss off and let her go shopping in peace, and then suddenly she’s sobbing in her room. Are these supposed to be mood swings? It feels more like neither the writers nor the actress cared enough to figure out who she is.

I guess that brings us to the movie’s misogyny, which is as rich and gooey as the inside of a lava cake but does not taste like chocolate. First of all, Sands’ problems are said to be his mother’s fault – she abandoned him, leaving him no choice but to murder women who remind him of her! The prison psychologist specifically absolves Sands of responsibility for his own crimes. He cannot be reformed, he cannot be helped, he must be locked up because his mother’s selfishness (more interested in her own career than in raising her son) destroyed his mind. Never mind that there are people with neglectful or even abusive parents who don’t grow up to be serial killers.

The women Sands kills are celebrities – models, dancers, actresses, socialites – because they remind him of his fame-obsessed mother. But as I previously mentioned, they’re not really all that like her. We don’t see any signs of any of them having families they neglect. The only one who even seems to have a husband is Christine and it’s him who neglects her. Perhaps the point is supposed to be that Sands has misjudged them, but we don’t see any signs of them being better than his mother in this respect, either. Most of them seem to have avoided children in order to focus on their careers. Perhaps in the mind of a male writer in the 70’s, this is itself a sin.

Certainly the movie is not interested in these women as characters. I’ve already discussed Christine, but there are others. The first one comes home, takes a bath, and dies. The second one is working on a painting when her dog runs off – she chases it, and she and the dog both die. The third is the dancer at her rehearsal. She has the creeps for no reason, does her rehearsal, and dies. The emphasis is always on their bodies: they’re sexy, then they’re dead. The sequence with the dancer is particularly weird, with her male partner representing the devil dressed in some kind of bondage getup.

The most frustrating thing about The Astral Factor, though, is that it really doesn’t know what to do with its premise. It keeps bringing up interesting ideas about what a psychic murderer might be able to do, and then just drops them.

The opening scene, in which Sands escapes from jail after telekinetically beating up his cellmate with furniture, seems to promise us a much more exciting movie than we get. After escaping, Sands visits the cemetery and his heart-to-heart with ghost mom is interrupted by a security guard. Sands uses his powers to push the guy into an open grave and bury him alive! I wanted to see more of this kind of thing, but after that Sands seems to forget he can do anything besides the ‘becoming invisible’ thing. Later victims are either beaten or strangled, as if they were killed by some loser who doesn’t have any psychic powers. Perhaps he has to strangle the women because that’s how he killed his mother, but he does the same thing to bodyguards and boyfriends when we know he has more creative means at his disposal.

The rest of the movie is also at odds with the title, which suggested this would be a movie in which Sands sits in jail the whole time, astral-projecting himself into his victims’ homes to strangle them. This idea is discussed, but it is in no way what happens so I’m not sure why they brought it up. There are a couple of reasonably effective scenes, as when it’s implied that Sands is invisible inside his first victim’s apartment but we can’t be absolutely sure until he starts interacting with objects. The bit where the dancer is strangled onstage and people don’t intervene because they think it’s part of the show… that’s another cliché but it works all right.

The Astral Factor also has no interest in how psychic powers work. They’re shown to require great concentration for the guy demonstrating them at the institute, but Sands seems to throw things around effortlessly. Why is that? Where did he get these powers? Just by reading about them? Can anybody learn to do this or just certain people? If the latter, what makes Sands special?

In trying to catch his invisible killer, Chuck shows very little creativity. I can think of a bunch of ways to try to thwart an invisible man. What about filling a room with mist or smoke? What about scattering flour on the floor to show his footprints? What about physical tripwires? None of these are ever suggested. Nor does anybody ever come up with the idea of fighting back psychically. If anybody can learn these powers, that could have been a cool thing for Chuck to have to do – not only come to terms with the fact that this exists, but having to figure out how to do it himself! Or if only special people can do it, why not hire one of those psychics the scientists were working with? If a parrot knows there’s an invisible man there, surely another psychic could figure it out!

The way they do eventually catch Sands is by having Christine speak to him as if she is his mother, which prompts him to reply, and the sound of his voice tells the cops where to aim their guns. This works, but it’s not nearly as interesting as some of the other possibilities and does not reveal anything new about Sands himself.

Watching people get ‘strangled’ by something invisible is always fun, and The Astral Factor has a couple of really funny special effects (I especially like the cellmate pretending to be in a fight with his mattress), but mostly the movie is a disappointment. It had potential to be way scarier and way more fun if it were willing to explore its premise a little more deeply, but all it really wants to show us is blonde women getting killed.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the astral factor #70s

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 3 years

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Is It Really THAT Bad?

How many fucking times must I talk about this movie?

I feel like this movie doesn’t need an introduction. Everyone knows this film. Its reputation precedes it. It didn’t bomb and it’s not generally considered one of the worst films ever made (at least on the level of films like Robot Monster or The Cat in the Hat), but this movie is easily one of the most divisive films ever made. This film has generated enough arguments that, if we harnessed the energy of all the flame wars it has caused, we could probably power the entire world until the heat death of the universe.

With the impending release of Zach Snyder’s bloated redo of Justice League, I’ve decided to go back and ask myself of this film here… is it really that bad?

THE GOOD

Here comes the most uncontroversial opinion: the action scenes in this movie rock (or at least two of them do). The standouts are the titular showdown, which almost makes sitting through the rest of the movie worth it, and the epic warehouse fight Batman gets into, which is like something straight out of the Arkham games. It’s so good. And aside from that, a lot of the cinematography in the film is good. The film knows how to look good, though unfortunately it does end up being a lot of style with little substance.

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On the subject of Batman, I think Ben Affleck is a great and inspired choice. I certainly think he’s worthy of standing alongside Batmans like Clooney and Keaton, easily embodying both the Dark Knight and Billionaire Playboy aspects fairly well, though the writing does not always handle him quite as well as it should (we’ll get to that soon enough). Henry Cavill, while still a rather dour Superman, is as good as ever as Superman, and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman was a great choice here, especially since she didn’t have control so that she could insert anti-Arab racism, like some DCEU movies.

Perhaps one of the movies most impressive feats is how, in an uncharacteristic moment of brevity, it manages to condense the backstory of Batman into the prologue, getting it out of the way and not making us sit through yet another Batman origin film. This is literally the only thing the movie has over the MCU; where that franchise just has the character Spider-Man inexplicably in existence without even a hint of his origins, they just get Batman’s tragic backstory out of the way so we can see him beating the crap out of people. If more superhero movies want to take this route and just condense the backstory into an opening montage like this, I’d be down for it.

THE BAD

I really could just say “most of the movie” but that’s such a cop out. Let’s actually look at the problems. Let’s work our way up through the things from least problematic to most, shall we?

The best place to start is what Zach Snyder did to Jimmy Olsen.

Jimmy Olsen is made into a CIA spook who is brutally killed early on, and yes, that was Jimmy Olsen. Snyder put him in to shock audiences with his senseless murder, and also because he felt the character had no place in his series. Does making Watchmen just turn people into joyless husks who like to horribly bastardize iconic characters? Jimmy Olsen is ultimately a small microcosm of the film, but he is the sum total of everything wring with the early DCEU. He is bleak, soulless, and shows a critical lack of understanding about the comics and why people enjoy them.

Now let’s move on to the more exciting problem to discuss: the villains. I don’t even think it’s worth wasting much time discussing what’s wrong with KGBeast. While it is kind of interesting they’d think to use the guy at all, the fact he never dons the costume and dies by the end of the film is unfathomably lame for a character named KGBeast.

Now, onto the main antagonist, and the most infamous part of the movie: Lex Luthor.

Lex Luthor is horribly, horribly miscast. Jesse Eisenberg is a great actor for sure, and he’s effective in movies like Now You See Me, The Social Network, and the Zombieland films. But here he is being asked to play one of the most diabolical cunning geniuses in comic book history, and rather than play him as such, he plays him like a cartoonish twit. This Lex is utterly unrecognizable as Superman’s greatest foe. Does anyone think Lex Luthor would send a jar of piss to someone as a joke before he blows them up? That’s more something the Joker would do on an off day. Lex is not cunning, not intimidating, and not diabolical in the slightest, and yet there are moments where Eisenberg’s acting chops shine through and Lex, for a moment, is almost engaging. Luthor really suffers the way Doctor Doom tends to in film adaptations: the filmmaker clearly doesn’t get why people like the villain, and decide to do some weird, unique take that will only cause to alienate fans.

But perhaps the worst of them all is Doomsday. Doomsday has exactly one claim to fame, and that’s killing Superman, so as soon as he shows up if you have even a passing awareness of the character you know how the movie is going to end, which robs the film of tension for its last battle. The fact he also appears with little buildup and doesn’t have any characterization doesn’t help; Doomsday is just the Big Gray CGI Blob that superhero movies try and pass off as a final boss for the heroes to fight. This has worked precisely once, in Iron Man. The Incredible Hulk and Venom did not make it work, and this film is nowhere close to being in the same ballpark as Venom.

By and far the biggest problem, though, is the movie’s incredible length and its very existence in the franchise at this point in time. This is an epic superhero crossover in which two of the biggest comic book characters of all time fight and then team up… And it is the second movie in a franchise. While they do a good job of establishing Batman rather quickly, Wonder Woman comes out of nowhere. And then at the end, Superman ‘dies.’ We have had one single movie prior to this to make a connection to the guy, and yet here he is getting a temporary comic book death with no buildup whatsoever that we know is going to be reversed sooner than later because the movie telegraphs this to us.

Imagine if, instead of building up the character over the course of a decade and putting him in all sorts of different stories, the MCU went right from Iron Man to Endgame. You go from a simpler, character-driven piece to a massive crossover where a hero dies right away, and it doesn’t give anyone time to care. Tony Stark had multiple films worth of characterization under his belt before they threw him in a crossover, let alone killed him, but Snyder expects you to give a damn about a Superman who just started his career in the previous movie of a franchise.

And the ass-numbing length of the movie is no justification. Even before the director’s cut came out this film was a slog, and the director’s cut really does nothing to earn its existence. All it does is add more runtime to an already tedious and bloated film, leading to the same exact ending and fixing none of the overarching narrative problems of the thing. The problem with any director’s cut is that ultimately the movie is still going to be Dawn of Justice, it’s still going to lead to extremely rushed character decisions, and it’s still going to be a mess. You’d have to redo half of the film to make this into a worthwhile and coherent narrative that’s actually worthy of being an entry in a superhero franchise.

And to top it all off, the movie spends far too much time foreshadowing for its own good. People criticized The Mummy for shoehorning in way too many shared universe elements right off the bat, and if that movie was bad for it, so is this one. The cameos from all the members of the Justice League, while striking, could be excised from the plot with little to no impact, and the Knightmare sequence is just excessive and weird.

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Is It Really THAT Bad?

The answer to this question has never been harder.

On the one hand, this film does have some merit. There is some good casting choices, good cinematography, good action… But then, on the other hand, the film is overly long, pretentious, has poor writing and dialogue, mishandles everyone aside from Superman, and is just incredibly unpleasant.

This film is in many ways the exact problem Christopher Nolan created with his Dark Knight trilogy. Nolan, by grounding the fanciful characters of comic books into a realistic setting, created a climate in which someone could suck any sort of joy or meaning out of comics. The success of his films meant that people would see dark, gritty realism as preferable to joyous, colorful escapism, and the negative effects of his films, however good you find them, are still felt today even as filmmakers are finally shaking off the grit. Dawn of Justice is the zenith of Nolan’s style of superhero film. There is nothing fun, joyful, or engaging to be found here; it is simply the characters you know and love forced into dark, miserable scenarios that ends in death and misery. Where’s the fun? Where’s the color? Where’s the wonder, the excitement, where is any of it? This film paints a bleak and miserable and hopeless picture of a world of superheroes. It really makes me think of this rather famous comic panel:

I absolutely hate this movie, but not because I think it’s bad. I hate it because it has enough good ideas where it should be the best thing ever, but it really isn’t. It’s a miserable slog of a film that does nothing to justify or earn its massive runtime whatsoever. It really does belong somewhere between 5 and 6 on IMDB, because I can almost see why people like it, but it just isn’t even remotely close to being how good its fan say it is. This is not a good superhero movie, and this is not how we should want superhero movies to be. There is a market for serious superhero fare of course, and there’s no reason that these films can’t engage with mature themes or anything, don’t get me wrong. But this is absolutely not the way to do it.

#Is it really that bad #IIRTB #Review #movie review #Batman v Superman #Dawn of Justice #Zach Snyder #Batman #Superman #DCEU

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gigslist · 3 years

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34+ Voiceover Roles & 3 Musician Open Calls - Work From Home - Paid

'F*cking Sober' Podcast

22 + Roles

3 Open Calls for Musicians With Their Own Music

PAID WORK FROM HOME NON UNION

Deadline : September 15, 2021 2:00 PM

Somehow9am Productions // F*cking Sober: the first 90 days Podcast

Katie Mack, coord.

:"A call for artists in recovery for the 2nd Season of The Webby Award Winning Podcast Series 'F*cking Sober: the first 90 days.' We are looking for voice over talent and musicians/music producers for 'FS: Shadai.' 'F*cking Sober' is a semi-comedic mostly non-fictional narrative podcast following Shadai’s first 90 days of getting sober. Thirty-five year old Shadai is the black, queer, strong female in advertising— so what if she keeps shots in her bra for between meetings, right? But after a shitshow holiday party, a fuzzy cop encounter, and a disaster presentation with the new big account, Dry January doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Maybe Dry Forever is better. This is what it looks, acts, and feels like to get f*cking sober. This 8 episode serialized show features music by artists with their own story with recovery. F*cking Sober Season 1: Anita has received 15k downloads since it’s release in Nov 2020, and received a 2021 Webby Nomination for Best Limited Series, and a Webby Win for Best Writing for a Podcast. At this time we are only looking to work with artists who have a relationship/understanding of recovery. Please follow instructions for submitting and what to include in the cover letter to be considered! Thank you! Listen to Season 1 to get the vibe: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f-cking-sober-the-first-90-days/id1538804959?i=1000499155627 And check out: www.fckingsoberpodcast.com @fckingsober90_podcast More information about Somehow9am Productions & Katie Mack (Producer): www.somehow9amproductions.com www.mackstage.com"

Roles

Shadai (Voiceover): Female, 18+WORK FROM HOMEproduction states: "Note: We are only accepting submissions from artists who have their own story in recovery, TY! 35 year old, black, queer, cis gender female attorney with a dry sense of humor, who has strong opinions and shares them sometimes, is a powerhouse and knows it all… until… until she doesn’t. Please note your experience with improv/comedy in your cover letter If you have writing experience or are interested in writing please note this in your cover letter. We will be giving writing credits to the right candidate who desires to contribute to the molding of this character."Required Media: Voice Reel

Other Characters (Voiceover): 20-70

"Note: We are only accepting submissions from artists who have their own story in recovery, TY! We are looking for diversity in every sense of the word, from all genders, to ages, to ethnicities, to lived experiences, to food preferences!! In short, we are looking to cast dope, interesting people. Looking to cast various characters through out the S2 Shadai, including but not limited to:

Dad (black, army veteran, a dad’s dad)

Mom (black, hyper critical, the opposite of Shadai)

Dana (any ethnicity, work enemy)

Coco (white, work bestie)

JewBoo aka Therapist (Jewish, confidant, motherly, with a special sense of humor)

Miriam (black, best friend and ex-lover who tells it like it is)

Galen (white, gay, best friend who is warm and caring and pushy)

15 other characters Please note any experience you may have with comedy/improv if any. Please submit your reel along with your cover letter."Required Media: Voice Reel, Cover Letter

Musicians (BIPOC Artists in Recovery) (Voiceover): 18+ music from BIPOC identifying artists.

Musicians (Queer Identifying Artist in Recovery) (Voiceover): 18+ music by Queer Artists.

Musicians (Non-BIPOC/Non-Queer Artists in Recovery) (Voiceover): 18+ music from non-BIPOC or non-Queer Identifying Artists in recovery.

"To be produced over the course of October 2021 - January 2022 Shadai’s commitment is estimated at two hrs/wk. Other characters 30mins. Musicians, all work should already exist. Please be prepared to send stems or stripped down tracks."

Compensation & Union Contract Details

Stipend: $25 - $75Production states: "Shadai (Lead Character), $550 for full season. All Other Characters: $25-$50 per episode. Musicians: $25-$75 per song per episode. Sync license contract."

Seeking talent: Nationwide (United States)

Website:http://www.fckingsoberpodcast.com

======================================

'Rain: Series III'

12 Voiceover Roles

PAID WORK FROM HOME NONUNION

Deadline: September 14, 2021 8:59 PM

JKPRising James Klim, filmmaker

Seeking voiceover talent for "Rain: Series III," a web-series, created in the video game Halo Reach on MCC via Xbox/PC. "This series will have a total of 13 episodes. I have many characters to cast, 12 specifically. If you wish to learn more about the show, you can check out my documentary series regarding the show. You can view the first episode here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlzPQvJS3og A little bit about me, I am a freelance filmmaker who actually got into film through making Halo videos as a kid when I was younger. You can check out some of my work here - www.jkprising.com/ I've always wanted to return to my roots & finish a series I was never able to before, but now I have the time to focus on it. This is a paid position. Rates depend on each character as some have more lines than others & vice versa. I am not the wealthiest person in the world, but I will to compensate each voice actor for their performance. My budget per character is between $100 - $300. This again, all varies per character. In this post, there is a video of what the character will look like in the series. I have also attached a single page from a random episode script from the show. The highlighted lines are what the character will say. There will also be non verbal lines highlighted, this is meant to be voiced kind of like an anime, where every movement usually has sounds. Typically, how would you make a sound if you did any of the following, head turn, turns around, surprised gasp, sighs, etc. Since this a paid gig, I am expecting a professional voice audition & if hired, continued professional audio. This means minimum to no background noise. The audio needs to be crisp."

Roles

Chloe Moody (Voiceover): Female, 18-35WORK FROM HOME29. Voice type: English/United Kingdom accent, polite, doesn't get mad often but when she does, she loses it, anxious, low self esteem, hopeful. Chloe Moody used to be a psychiatrist, but after the death of her soon to be husband, she spiraled into insanity. She met someone later on in life named Tom Rains, who looked exactly like her dead boyfriend. She became obsessed with him & tried to get with him, which sunk her further into a deep depression. She finally hit rock bottom, which causes her to seek out help from the very people she used to serve. Chloe meets a psychiatrist named Jennifer, who is able to help herself almost fully recover. Chloe eventually accidently runs back into Tom, which triggers Chloe to try one last time. After a final rejection, Chloe comes to the realization that she is not redeemable & decides to take her own life in front of Tom. Chloe's death, triggers a massive event for Tom Rains, which has massive ramifications for the series. Chloe is a major character and will appear in a couple episodes.Languages:

English

Accents:

British

Australian

Voice Styles:

Soft

Softspoken

Crazy

Compassionate

Sad

Angry

Required Media: Voice Reel

Dark Daryl (Voiceover): Male, 18-40WORK FROM HOME

32, voice type: Very dark presence, evil. sadistic, look at examples like Yami Marik from the Original Yu-Gi-Oh - www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xaa_ycud6o, manic, darkness. Dark Daryl is the darkness of his original persona, Daryl. Daryl accidentally acquired a powerful technology known as an imperium. This caused Daryl to lose himself to it at some point & was taken over by an alternate personality named, The Professor, which caused tons of damage. When Daryl came back to his senses, the damage had been done & others abandoned him, which caused him to grow angry at something that he didn't consciously do. Daryl once again loses himself to the imperium, which turns into Dark Daryl, a representation of all the anger & hatred he endured over the course of his past uncontrollable actions. Dark Daryl is very aggressive, sadistic & wants to destroy the people who wronged him in the past. Eventually, he comes face to face with Daryl & fights to stay as the one who remains in control, even if that means killing Daryl & anyone who gets in his way. Dark Daryl is a character who appears in the second half of the show, & becomes the series main villain. He will appear in many episodes.

Languages:

English

Voice Styles:

Aggressive

Angry

Evil

Commanding

Straightforward

Scary

Dangerous

Intimidating

Demonic

Required Media: Voice Reel

Nikki (Voiceover): Female, 18-35 WORK FROM HOME

25. Voice type: Energetic, passionate, caring, open-minded, loving, positive, independent, fighter. Nikki used to date Tom Rains. She didn't really have much going for her, as she had no ambition at all during that time of her life. After Tom broke up with her, this was quite the shock to Nikki. It caused her to really dive deep within herself & from that moment, she tried to learn more about herself. She discovered a love for storytelling, & so went into journalism. Nikki is now dating Jennifer & they have been together for almost a year. Nikki eventually gets wrapped up in a major conspiracy, which drags many of her friends in with her. She is in for the story of her entire career. Nikki is a major character and will appear in many episodes.

Languages:

English

Voice Styles:

Comforting

Compassionate

Caring

Amusing

Animated

Brave

Heroic

Required Media: Voice Reel

Talent works remotely with professional recording equipment.

Professional Pay: $100 - $300Pays between $100-$300 depending on character.

Nationwide (United States)

Additional Materials

Website: https://www.jkprising.com/

Nikki Audition.pdf - https://d26oc3sg82pgk3.cloudfront.net/files/media/uploads/casting_call/7f95c65b-ab53-43d3-a66b-9e59d1041acb.pdf

Dark Daryl Audition.pdf - https://d26oc3sg82pgk3.cloudfront.net/files/media/uploads/casting_call/00cfdf46-84c1-4da6-9dee-91c7bcdeed3d.pdf

Chloe Moody Audition.pdf https://d26oc3sg82pgk3.cloudfront.net/files/media/uploads/casting_call/186cbe9e-9c7e-4ce5-bcbe-2407a9dec00b.pdf

#voiceover casting calls #work from home voice over work #music wanted online #jobs for musicians #remote jobs for musicians #music writer jobs #gigs for recovering addicts

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denotday · 3 years

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Maybel Rhodes: Protectress

Itchy arms. My armbumps bumps take over life and chew my head off like a black mother. Even the sleeves of this sweater craddle these potholes as an english muffin craddles butter. But I'm more than my bumps and I'd make a quip on Fergie, but I'm no Joan Rivers. I'm small, meager. At eighteen, trying to find myself, live my own life. Typical teen drama, boring narrative, sob story. bored already. But know what isn't boring? I like strawberry shortcake and cheeseless pizzas. I have hopes of becoming a journalist and actually leading a career as moreof a Clark Kent than a Mary Jane or whatever the fuck that bitch's name is. Mary Anne? That used to be the name of one of my teachers. Going off; just thinking these thoughts while skateboarding to highschool.

Stay on the sides, away from cars, on the sidewalk, not too close to the white kids. White kids mean white mess, white messes mean cops who sweep the streets and take all the black kids with them in the process. I'm not a racist, just a black kid trying to stay alive in white america. Thank god I'm a weak bitch, one who cries for black men, one who doesn't face real issues like projected aggression. I'm a butterfly, something that men swat away and don't care about until MeToo movements. Gotta be careful but not too careful, kind but not too kind, firm but not a bitch, bitch but not a faggot. faggots suck.

No one thinks to ask these questions, here this thoughts. They see a black woman, better yet, a black female child. Worse thing to live in a ghetto. Sike; I say that I'm black and in a ghetto and get sob points. Fucking racist. I'm skating to one of those Fresh Prince schools. Didn't move on up, I'm simply moving; parents are mid class well grounded and guess what? My parents are still together. Probably breaking up soon but still breaking barriors of broke baby daddies and black slutty whore mothers who don't believe in abortion.

That's humor in of itself. A black kid skates into a white neighborhood with white sidewalks and doesn't have a nigger daddy and nigger mommy. What can be said by those PTA suburban soccer moms who want to demonise me and my own? Or am I palatable and a token black?

Making good grades, going to class on time. Only thing is, I don't have any friends to call. Even if I had one of those top quality iPhone 411s, I still wouldn't want to burden myself with filling up those high-techy contact lists. It's all bullshit after all, just capitalistic bilge. Something to fill the void without actually trying to let the public know that the void they're filling chalks up to capitalism. But again, those little tangents? "What does this have to do with having friends?" Everything. I don't give a shit, I accept shit. I tell things like it is, speak with lisps or change it up by sounding like an oxford professor.Not going to just abandon stream of consciousness 'cause class just started. This aint sims 4 and life ain't something that can be controlled; sped up or slowed down for the sake of an other's pleasure. I'm learning about shit that I'll never use like economics. That's shit that the government gives the state to teach, a little but not enough for highschoolers to overwhelm the system and decide "fuck student loans".

Not too bad here, though. Not all just "fuck hyschool" and teenaged angst. I go to the library, read books, go on my computer, listening to some Biggie and MFDoom and Tribe. Guess I am a nigger. Nigger-me and my nigger music. Even tththough it's they inspiration for they cracker music. Hate on us enough to keep us down but keep us up enough to steal from us. Today I'm reading some teen dystopian fantasy novel that I don't feel inclined to share with you guys. And no, it's not Hunger Games. It's Gunger Hames, the cousin of the franchise. Whoops just gave ya'll the name sorry. Either way I'm into that. Idea of a not-so-distant-future; humans making mistakes that fuck up the planet---disregarding that fact long enough so that the white main character can get it on with someone from the other side. Modern day Romeo and Juliett.

End of lunch, going back to class. It's back to back all day; boring teen shit that nobody cares about. Raising hands, answering questions, not understanding anything by the end of the day. Getting by is my motto. Long enough to get an A in the class and be on those ivy league watchlists. Even if I have to bust my ass to pay for student loans. Leaving highschool after all that non-work---no friends to lie to, no one to walk with, just me and my skateboard. These white paths not dirtied by brown except for my dirt body moving at the speed that a skateboard will go. Shift right here and there. Move away from rocks so that I don't fall headfirst. It's good shit. Here and there there are stone pebbles, blunts from---ironically enough--- the white kids and sharp object that I can't identify. FUCK. I don't have time to move around it and I can't just run offf. My leg'll get cut by it. Gotta just build up enough speed to roll over. Rolling...rolling...here it comes. Crouch down, focus, focus, pump speed anddddd....it stops my speed and loosens one of my bearings. Now I gotta walk the rest of the way back to my white little house with a white picket fence. Man screw--haha pun---this object. I have to use my 20/20 vision to find some small silver bolt that'll practically blend in with this bright ass sidewalk. Fuck white America.

In a little patch of weeds growing like black fists raising in the air I see the bolt and the responsible party for tossing me off the board. I raise my foot to crush this sonnofabiscuit like a bug so that some white kid's bike tire doesn't get licked---mind you this should be considered community service---and I figure that I won't ruin my rubber soles on the glass, so I'll just pick it up and toss it into the sewer. I put the bolt in my sweatpants pocket to keep it safe. I bend over again to peer at the crack in the sidewalk that I'll punt to the other side of the street where the other half of the street lives. It has tribal markings on it and must be, gasp, an ancient arcane ruin that'll give me superpowers. Kidding, you dumb bitch. "Why am I talking to myself this way? Jeez, some self-improvement classes would be nice". It's a bracelet made of some sort of beads. Kindof pretty but caked up with dirt and sand like no-one's business. I'm no Rocket Racoon so I just leave it. Even if I felt that it was interesting enough, I'd have to clean it off and disinfect it. It would just ruin the material underneath. Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm. Hm. Lemme stop; for real, in this white bread neighborhood, I might be able to get it appraised and pawn it off for some money or at the very least, see if it's worth keeping. I know; "this is the start of every horror movie", every tv show. I get it, but I'll cleanse the jewelry before wearing it. It's fine. It's fine. Hope it's fine. Jeez.

I put the bracelet in my other pocket away from the bolt and walk back home. The soles of my feet hit the white pavement and my feet move in the fashion of jubillee ferris wheels. Slowly rise in a circle, fall in perfect arch. Walking is divine poetry in of itself. Not too long now. A little further. Feels like the day is stretching. Still light outside and the summer-brink of fall--air is warming my rectum. "Oh god, what's with gays and their rectums". You know your g-spot is in your ass, men. It feels good for us too you know. Nice coolness for the butthole----rectum is for men, butthole is for women. I think. See? Not a Cliff Huxtable type; don't know everything. Not an Urkle. Conversations with myself like this are truly golden (ponyboy).

Fondle the silver piece, twist it in lock, get somewhere new. Novel design, simple concept. My rubber soles give me cat-walking abilities and I edge up the stairs. Hear shuffling downstairs in the kitchen. But the smell of musky forest wood with a hint of olive tells me that it's just my father. I'd announce my presence but this isn't a sitcom and I have a phone that I can use to text. Who talks nowadays?

On the table near the keyrack, I scoop into my pockets in search of the goods. The warm cotton touches the cool silver bolt. Set it aside to attach it to the skateboard later. "Why not now?" That'll be a problem for me to solve tomorrow. "Procrastination isn't good" Yeah I know. I've read the same 1990's health pamphlet that the health teachers give out. I hug my side to reach around for the other pocket. Same warmth, same feeling of comfort except...it's a new sensation. Hollow and porous. It's either bone carved into beads or plastic. Hope to...Well, not God, maybe I hope to goodness? Goodness? What am I? A preacher? Maybe that's why I like 16 year old boys. Anyway. It's too white over here for it to be bone. Unless it's some cracker who brought over some hoodoo shit and dropped it somewere. Great. Gonna burn some incense to cleanse it. Then gonna toss it somewhere so that it can't hurt anyone. Wait. It doesn't FEEL menacing. No darkness, no coldness, there's a comfort to be had. I don't see any visible engravings, no bite marks no arcane symbols. It may be safe. Just to be sure, I'm keeping it downstairs for it to curse someone else in the house. I rise up the stairs into the wide landing. Step, rise, step, rise, step, rise. Before I get to the top, I feel funny. Not sick funny or CURSED funny, but someone-is-in-my-presence funny. Strech my neck to look over my shoulder. Not too far to show interest but far enough to see what's going on---it's my dad handling the bracelet.

I whip my body around and I suppose this gives him a start.

"Hey, just got back from school. I'm pretty tired which is why I didn't want to talk. Found that bracelet in the sidewalk cracks before my skateboard broke. I wouldn't touch it if I were you. Don't know if it's cursed or not."

"Cursed? Bee, this is a genuine Sudanese artifact."

"Huh? When'd you turn into a archeologist? Or are you just nerding out about a 'special interest'"

"Har har. Nothing like that. This area used to be an auction town for slaves shipped from Sudan. Martinsville, Pennsylvania wasn't necessarily known for it's 'clean hands' you know. Gentrification made the area look nicer but its history is still pretty shit-covered."

"Ah, I remember now. I heard about this in history class" No I haven't. I don't even have history. Just want to stop talking to him about some dumb bracelet. "Can it sell for big bucks at a pawnshop?"

"I mean, sure if you'd like to get rid of it. Better to give it to the local museum though! It looks to me like it's made out of elephant tusks. Pretty well preserved too! The wearer must've been some warrior. They only wear these types of jewelry if they're the village's protectors. That's what I've read online anyway. You know how the interweb is though. Could be false."

"Oh wow. Ivory? That's a pretty dirty trade. Don't want to give something like that up to white people who continue to promote the trade. This'll just make the ivory market worse. I may keep it; I just wonder if it's cursed or something. I'll ask a local witchcraft practitioner to check it out tomorrow. Can I have thirty bucks for an appraisal along with an after-school snack?"

"Thirty? What're you going to buy? A salmon dinner with asparagus and steak? I'm not giving you Carabbas money. I can do 18. Enough for some street food."

"Not enough for the appraisal!"

"I'm sure the person will be able to work something out for you. You look twelve. You can play the 'Uwu I'm a baby who has no money, please help me out adult!' card. Or, how about this: pretend to be doing a research project for school on Sudanese slaves in the area. Just act like the school lent you the bracelet for the project"

"So lie?"

"I call it embellishment."

"I see"

I reached into his calloused palm and stole its contents, As a thief, I ran upstairs away from the site of the crime, away from the demons that lurked beneath the stairs. That's customary practice when going up stairs, right? To haul ass like there's no tomorrow like we're that black chick from Scary Movie? Sounds about right. I heaved and ho'd swinging my body back and forth up the stairs. Snaking my way into my room where I burrow for my after-school nap. That's what I tell my parents anyway. What I really do is blaze up in my room and turn on the fan. Gotta keep the smoke minimal. "Such a typical teen". Yeah, whatever. Like your generation wasn't popping ass and drinking bathtub wine when ya'll were young, Get outta here.

It's a good high. Kind where you'd listen to lofi and eat peanuts just for the fun of it. Another bong hit. Satisfying. I'm just leaning back on my sofa; it's firm and uncomfy but when I'm blazed, don't none of it matter. I could lose all of my words...give up....let....go.....

"...."

"What is this energy I'm feeling? So warm and electric. Is this love? Am I so sexually frustrated that I'm in love with a bong? Shit, I fuck with that. That's pretty words. 'I'm in love with my bong'. Such nice love. haha."

I'm hungry and it's four am. The weed has worn off. So tired man. Gotta go downstairs for some chips or something. Hungry to the max. Munchies munchies munchies for the weed monster. What a drug.

I creep down the stairs and up once more. My bare footpads cling to the hardwood and leave sweat prints in the shape of my stompers. During my ascent I leave crumbs. Have the house feeling like a Brother's Grimm story. I satisfy my snack desires as I prepare for school in the next hour.

Running water on my arms. Three passes of lotion on arms and legs. Can't be the ashy black kid that look like they an African living in a dirt house. Ain't able to help the rough patches that coat my body but I can help keep my skin moisturized.

A'ight. Got my fit got my board. Just have to screw the bolt back on and find the bracelet. Shit. Left it upstairs. I'm already late as hell. Rushing up the stairs. Search for the bracelet, find it, get out house. Objectives objectives. I spot it from afar and gravitating toward it, put it gingerly in my pocket. Kindof like someone would with a used tissue. Aren't humans gross? I mean, snot? Bacteria-filled snot? Nasty. Thoughts gone, make brain go from thinking to doing. descending now. Board in arm, door opens with the flick of the wrist and just like that, I'm outty. Deck on ground I put my best foot forward and ram it onto the hard cement to push myself forward. Sorry foot, betrayals sure do suck.

School begins, in class siting in a chair. All day, several hours. Ah, the beloved system at work. Great to know that there are adults who "work" all day by keeping kids seated in a chair. Very progressive, America. Library break? I think so. On my laptop, I pull out webpages on the pocketed---the word reminds me of 'closeted---bracelet. NOW I'm imagining a gay bracelet. hilarious. Great. Typing 'Gay Bracelet' into the search bar and am getting rainbow plastic bands. Ya know, the ones that they sell at Hot Topic during pride month.

"Damn, I'm getting sidetracked" She mutters to herself. Imagine if life were a story being told by some omnipotent force? omnipresent? Think that's the word.

With a bit of typing and a bit of focus. Swift movement of hunched fingers. All is complete, then some. Ogdle: "common of the Azande warriors were pieces to signify their status such as septum tusks, mouth disks, necklaces and other adornments. Bones and tusks were common materials of such articles."

Crazy how this history is hidden. Power was taken from us and buried so deep. We're the originals but every piece of history buried underground. Hidden, secretive Big Bad America. Tale fit for young people all over. Democracy, boo yah.

Train whistle blowing through the air. No train nearby, just the sound of a change in the block. I put it all away, sweep it into my bag. Everything is so messy, so fast. On schooldays like this, it feels hard to even take time to breathe. But I get by since the system wants me to. Think I'm going to skip. Not that the next two classes even matter in the long run. "Such a poor black baby, representing her race so poorly". Yeah yeah. Not the black chick that highschools would put on a recruiting card.

Just another push....door after door falling at my fingertips. The same once that touch the coarse sandpaper of my board. Foot on, foot off. kick once, twice, thrice, now we surf the cement. Now it's time to visit good the kind old black woman who practices witchcraft on dolls. That's what you'd think right? No, they're native and keep old customs within the community. Everyone calls them---agender--- Sage. Nonbinary native americans are actually more common than people think.

Before selling the bracelet to some old rich white drudge of society, I wanna be sure that the bracelet can be cleansed first. I mean. To give away black history to the white man? Hellll no with multiple "l's". It is a pretty long ride there, even on a board. Rumbly road. Pebbles everywhere. Thousands of little rocks acting as smaller wheels vying to fling me off. It's too much.

Mumbling of my own. "Where's gentrification when you need it?" Alright, yes I get it. It's a bad joke. Of course gentrification is bad. Blah blah. Time to pick up my skateboard I guess. Walking on this ground feels just as bad as suicide. Feaful of getting my ass flung into the afterlife. Few yards left....or at least fifty feet. Forty eight, forty five, forty-however-long.

Ended up reaching it after twenty minutes. This trip better be worth it.

"Hi there, Miss Sage. Mind checking out this bracelet for me? I need to check it for a curse or evil energy. My cheap father didn't give me enough for a full appraisal but what can you do with nine dollars?"

"For nine? Not much, doll? What was your name again? You look young, do you have an adult's approval for this?"

"Oh, right. You've got me. It's for a school project. School each student a historical object to research. I figured you'd be able to help me get an 'A' on the project, you know?"

"Your manners are lacking but you seem young, so I'll let you pass. Allow me to take a look at it, if you please?"

God. Full-fledged adults really are something else. I'm only eighteen, not eight. Guess I look younger than I am----

Sage starts burning this wood that's tied with string. Incense maybe?

"That incense?"

"It's a closed practice really, so I don't want to expose anything. But it is a form of incense that I prefer to use to cleanse the spirit of objects and areas."

"Ah, didn't mean to intrude. I'm glad that there are still practices that you keep to yourself. Nothing like the White Man stripping us of our culture."

I got a soft chuckle out of them. Glad that they're able to lighten up a bit.

"..."

"OK, so here's what I've found. There's immense energy here; the power coming off of this thing is tremendous. There's nothing negative about this piece. How'd you ever come across it, again? School, you said? Shame that you'll have to give it back. Something like this would provide a large power surge to spirituals. I'd pay a pretty penny for this."

"Mhm"

"Wonder how the school even came across this. I tell you what. Ask your school where I can find something like this and perhaps I'll give you a little something for your intel, huh?"

"Oh. Sure. I'll just--uh---"

"Right, right, right. The bracelet, I'm sorry. Really, it's more an anklet truly, but--ya know what? I'm sorry. Here ya go"

"...take it from ya. Thanks."

"No problem. Come back with more info on the anklet. That'll be your payment for my time"

Got 'caught in a lie it seems. Don't know how I'll snake my way out of this one.

"Brrrrrzzzzz"

Shit, it's five. My dad's probably looking for me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter two:

" You skipped class? Bee, I know that you're better than this."

God moms bitch too much. Must be the nursing job coupled with her daily acting gigs that make her so aggro.

"I hear ya, mom. I just had some research to conduct after school..."

"Research? Which kind---?"

"The school kind. I don't know what else you want me to say. I'm sorry for skipping lasses. I got too overzealous and went in over my head. It won't happen again."

"Tskk. Better not. I know that I'm gone almost every hour of the day, but please give me a break, baby. Please just listen to your father and follow the rules. All I ask."

"Mhm, even though he-----you know what, nevermind. Am I dismissed? I have to write up today's school report to type"

Phew. Gonna hit the bong now to calm down from this encounter.

Fuck homework. .... ..... Mhm.

Five minutes passs. Fifteen, twenty. Maybe not minutes. hours? seconds? Time is too funny. With LEDs on, the vibe is fatallll. Still have to open a window to let out the smoke but gosh is this magical.

Mhm magic. Does it even exist? Doubt it. It's all science, right? ....

.....

Right. Like, this anklet. Not real power. Not real magic. Just something people believe in. Like God. It's all faith.

"So, theoretically, I could even put it on my person and nothing would even happen"

"And, so it begins"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT VOICE" and why am I screaming?

Get off, get off, get off! Something's dripping on me.

"Tears, they're tears"

Oh god, I fucked up. I knew that I shouldn't have smoked that much. Knew it'd bite me in the ass one day. Now I'm fear-crying. I NEVER FEAR CRY.

It's all a dream maybe. Go to sleep, Bee. Just take a weed nap.

"Ba ba bang"

A booming voice raspy from coffee withdrawal.

"Everything OK in there Bee? You're about to be late for school."

Shit!

No time for conversation. Move it move it move it.

"'Cmon Bee. I'll drop you off at school on my way to the college".

Bookbag? Check. Board? Check.

I feel the rush of air against my cheeks as I fly out the door and jump into the getaway car. Fast, but atleast I'm not Furious. Dad and I chat it up all the way until the tires cross the smooth pavement of school grounds. Departing words are exchanged along with "I love you's" and "knock 'em deads".

That familiar sound. Principal as the school conductor. "Chooo". Just as it drones, my body moves to the steps of teens dragging their feet toward their dreaded first classes of the day. The light of morning cradles the marble arches of the school entrance until the sun starts to suck in the morning cold to blow out midday warmth.

"So, who are you, voice? What's your angle? Typing ensues. The screen watches my fleeting pupils; left, right, side, side. Wouldn't be surprised if the computer got whiplash from me. One scroll, two, three. Read a page. Nothing. Another website. Up and down; my fingers are cramped now. Nada. New Oogdle search: "Can I hear voices with weed smoking." Now I have a hit; "yes weed can have you seeing voices. Many aren't even your own. Maybe lay off the TV for a while."

"Thanks 'BouncyNina29'. Quora is one hell of a place." Guess it must've just been the drugs then. Hilarious, me hearing some voice. "Gotta lay off the bong smoking".

"Shhh!!" Some nerd in a striped beanie raised a finger to pursed lips.

Sorry, sorry....Jeez. "My bad" You know what? Maybe I can visit----

the train whistle interrupts my 11pm "ball" with myself. "Dammit". OK. Maybe I can bribe one of the delinquents behind the school to take my place in English. Teacher's not there anyway; the sub won't know the difference. Time to go pay someone off.

"..."

"Here ya go, five dollars."

"A'ight and you said what room that English class in?"

"301 B man. It's at the end of the third floor, right wing. Hard to miss and---remember---my name is Maybel Rhodes. Just fake like you're doing some work and no one will even notice that you're not me. I'm a loner, so, that'll work."

"Mhm hmm. I hear ya Maple"

"MayBEL"

"Yeah, that's what I said"

Scoff. In a smooth curvular motion, I plant my feet on the board and race to Sage's before their store closes.

As I approach, they're putting a silver key in a lock. Gah! The store closed.

"Miss Sage---"

"Gah! Don't do that!! Scaring me and sh--I mean, 'crap'. Scaring me and crap. Look kid, I'm closed right now but we open tomorrow. By then, I'll have the energy to discuss your school's anklet with you. Actually, about that. Do you have intel on where the-----"

"Yes, yes. About that, see...I lied. I didn't really get it from the school. I found it on the ground somewhere."

"'Found it on the ground somewhere' is code for 'I don't have money to pay nor do I have anything else to provide'? Am I getting warmer?"

"Look Miss Sage, I'm really sorry. Hey---look at it this way. I'm in debt to you. If you'll just help me with one teensy little thing, I'll ask my dad for some food money and will give you every cent he gives, alright?"

"Kid, that's not how an adult runs a business. Call what I gave you yesterday a 'freebie'. You're banned from the store. Good night."

Wait. "Wait" Their stride is aimed toward their silver camry. Yeah, I know a camry. Did you expect them to be riding a horse? Racist. Sage acts as though they don't hear and gets into their seat, key in ignition. One twist away before exiting the rocky parking area.

"IT SPOKE TO ME" Yup. That is how I yelled it. All caps, woke some birds up even. Just like in those Loony Toon cartoons. Is that why they're called "Loony Toons" 'cause they're loony cart----

Now they exit their car, slamming the heavy metal door. "What did you say? It...SPOKE...to you? What do you mean 'it'?"

Mhm Mhm. Just prepping my throat. "I wore it on my ankle and I heard a voice that has never existed before in the chasms----"

"Stop the theatrics"

"....Chasms of my mind. It was a male. Around your age in old-timey-ness."

"Har har."

"But it's the truth!" Why won't they believe a magical voice but insist that sage, a random plant, purifies the air?

Their chest contracts and expands in a sigh. Sage closes their eyes for a second. I could practically smell the gears turning. Need some WD-40, really. "Fine. Come by the store Saturday. That way, no one will be in to eavesdrop."

"Deal!"

"And bring actual MULA this time or else we won't have our little discussion". Crud.

"...."

"What are you thinking Sage?" No response. I paid one hundred fifty dollars for this after BEGGING both my folks (who think I'm using it to enroll in some after school sport) to slide me some cash so that I can 'better myself as an individual and actually do something with my time as well'. Lies are no good.

"Shh! Let me think, please!" Sage subverts their attention from me back onto the tarot cards laid in front of them----exactly where the bone anklet (bonklet) lay in silence

Ten minutes pass before Sage gives me the break down. "So, as I've said before. The anklet carries some heavy energy, something similar to passion and justice. Very potent stuff. That's what the spirit realm is saying, anyway. When you were---ahem--- HIGH----"

At this point I look away

"...You honed into that energy and that's why you heard the voice"

"Hm. So, how do I hone in on that energy now? Is it something I can control conscious?"

"Look, I dunno kid. Just, be safe. Meditate beforehand so that you are actually able to chime into the anklet's power source. Don't want to darken the talisman's power or anything."

"Sure, sure" I am literally out the door before Sage utters the second part of their sentence. I buzz with excitement at the opportunity and the best part is? I'm basically a super! Hoo ho. This is awesome.

There's an empty industrial facility near by Hawesome Li Cosmetics. It went bankrupt several decads ago. I'm pretty much the only one who knows about the place. Excellent ground to skate on---smooth as butter. Either way, it's empty and no harm will come to anything or anyone nearby. Any damage that I do will be to the building nearby, which no one cares about anyway. "So, it's just me and you buddy." Blunt in hand, I blaze it up. "Time for the magic to happen."

It's a slow high. The high takes as long as a flame reaching the wooden stick of an incense rod for the high to hit. Upwards of thirty minutes. So I wait. It feels like time warps. So I meditate. So I clear my thinking and reach out to the anklet.

"Mhm, Anklet, tell me who you are?"

"What?? You can hear me?"

"Yeah man. Who are you, why you speaking to me?"

"Why would I tell you? I don't even know yer name"

Tiring. It's like talking to a wall.

"Hey, I heard that!"

"Maybel. My name's Maybel. What's yours? Let's start there."

"Nat."

"Like Nat Turner? The rebel slave?"

"Don't know who that is, this 'Nat Turner'. Just knew my master gave me the name." How progressive. "So...I suspect that I'm dead."

It's not easy news. I get it. But hey, the north won. That's something, right?

"Well, I guess it is....you know, I had a name before all of this...."

"......"

"......??"

"......."

So, are you going to tell me?

"You may call me 'Asim'."

"I'll call you Ase."

Don't call me 'Ase'. Too late, Ase. Hey, how old are you anyway? 12? 11? My name is ASIM, nothing else. Fine, grumpy. ASIM. I'll call you Asim, Asim. Where'd that name come from anyway? What does it mean?

"Let's find out, shall we?"

"...It feels electric! (Boogy woogy woogy). Such power, this wade in...glory."

Are you a God?

"Blasphemy!" Then what are you? How are you able to lay such energy unto me?

Look, I don't know either, alright? But what I do know is...we're both negr---

Black. We don't say that word anymore.

"Black, then... Perhaps I'm connected with you due to our shared skin?" We stopped being related millenia ago. Millenia? Not familar with that word.

"Long, long ago. We don't share any common ancestors. It was all a lie." A lie? You don't believe in a God? I'm moreso spiritual; creation is a possibility not something I'm invested in. I believe in forces of the universe. "But not a God? So, this can't be some spiritual connection. We're too different." So perhaps a soul connection? A link between our spirits.... What else do we have in common? A slave and a black kid?

"Hatred of the white man? Wanting justice against them?"

"War. Destruction"

"Yes."

"No, I don't want that. I'd prefer peace." There may be no PEACE without WAR.

"A lie. Violence is not the answer. Kindness is."

"'Kindness' doesn't resolve problems. 'Kindness' doesn't end racism. 'KINDNESS' was the one that slept at my feet while I was lashed! "

"..."

Asim?

"..."

Andddd you're gone. Great. Well, I'm going to head back home, then. We can hang out again tomorrow. "Head back" means leave. All right, see you.

#fiction #original story #writer #writing #tumblr #writers on tumblr #BLM #Politics #Teenagedom #Teen angst #superhero #comicbook writing

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birdlord · 3 years

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Everything I Watched in 2020

We’ll start with movies. The number in parentheses is the year of release, asterisks denote a re-watch, and titles in bold are my favourite watches of the year. Here’s 2019’s list.

01 Little Women (19)

02 The Post (17)

03 Molly’s Game (17)

04 * Doctor No (62)

05 Groundhog Day (93)

06 *Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home (86)

07 Knives Out (19) My last theatre experience (sob)

08 Professor Marston and his Wonder Women (17)

09 Les Miserables (98)

10 Midsommar (19) I’m not sure how *good* it is, but it does stick in the ol’ brain

11 *Manhattan Murder Mystery (93)

12 Marriage Story (19)

13 Kramer vs Kramer (79)

14 Jojo Rabbit (19)

15 J’ai perdu mon corps (19) a cute animated film about a hand detached from its body!

16 1917 (19)

17 Married to the Mob (88)

18 Klaus (19)

19 Portrait of a Lady on Fire (19) If Little Women made me want to wear a scarf criss-crossed around my torso, this one made me want to wear a cloak

20 The Last Black Man in San Francisco (19)

21 *Lawrence of Arabia (62)

22 Gone With the Wind (39)

23 Kiss Me Deadly (55)

24 Dredd (12)

25 Heartburn (86) heard a bunch about this one in the Blank Check series on Nora Ephron, sadly after I’d watched it

26 The Long Shot (19)

27 Out of Africa (85)

28 King Kong (46)

29 *Johnny Mnemonic (95)

30 Knocked Up (07)

31 Collateral (04)

32 Bird on a Wire (90)

33 The Black Dahlia (05)

34 Long Time Running (17)

35 *Magic Mike (12)

36 Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (07)

37 Cold War (18)

38 *Kramer Vs Kramer (79) yes I watched this a few months before! This was a pandemic friend group co-watch.

39 *Burn After Reading (08)

40 Last Holiday (50)

41 Fly Away Home (96)

42 *Moneyball (11) I’m sure I watch this every two years, at most??

43 Last Holiday (06) the Queen Latifah version of the 1950 movie above, lacking, of course, the brutal “poor people don’t deserve anything good” ending

44 *Safe (95)

45 Gimme Shelter (70)

46 The Daytrippers (96)

47 Experiment in Terror (62)

48 Tucker: The Man and His Dream (88)

49 My Brilliant Career (79) one of the salvations of 2020 was watching movies “with” friends. Our usual method was to video chat before the movie, sync our streaming services, and text-chat while the movie was on.

50 Divorce Italian Style (61)

51 *Gosford Park (01) another classic comfort watch, fuck I love a G. Park

52 Hopscotch (80)

53 Brief Encounter (45)

54 Hud (63)

55 Ocean’s 8 (18)

56 *Beverly Hills Cop (84)

57 Blow the Man Down (19)

58 Constantine (05)

59 The Report (19) maddening!! How are people so consistently terrible to one another!

60 Everyday People (04)

61 Anatomy of a Murder (58)

62 Spiderman: Homecoming (17)

63 *To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (95) Of the 90s drag road movies, Priscilla is more visually striking, but this has its moments.

64 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (92)

65 *The Truman Show (98)

66 Mona Lisa (86)

67 The Blob (58)

68 The Guard (11)

69 *Waiting for Guffman (96) RIP Fred Willard

70 Rocketman (19)

71 Outside In (18)

72 The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (08) how strange to see a movie that you have known the premise for, but no details of, for over a decade

73 *Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country (91)

74 The Reader (08)

75 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (19) This was fine until it VERY MUCH WAS NOT FINE

76 The End of the Affair (99) you try to watch a fun little romp about infidelity during the Blitz, and Graham Greene can’t help but shoehorn in a friggin crisis of religious faith

77 Must Love Dogs (05) barely any dog content, where are the dogs at

78 The Rainmaker (97)

79 *Batman & Robin (97)

80 National Lampoon’s Vacation (83) Never seen any of the non-xmas Vacations, didn’t realize the children are totally different, not just actors but ages! Also, this one is blatantly racist!

81 *Mystic Pizza (88)

82 Funny Girl (68)

83 The Sons of Katie Elder (65)

84 *Knives Out (19) another re-watch within the same year!! How does this keep happening??

85 *Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (10) a real I-just-moved-away-from-Toronto nostalgia watch

86 Canadian Bacon (92) vividly recall this VHS at the video store, but I never saw it til 2020

87 *Blood Simple (85)

88 Brittany Runs a Marathon (19)

89 The Accidental Tourist (88)

90 August Osage County (13) MELO-DRAMA!!

91 Appaloosa (08)

92 The Firm (93) Feeling good about how many iconic 80s/90s video store stalwarts I watched in 2020

93 *Almost Famous (00)

94 Whisper of the Heart (95)

95 Da 5 Bloods (20)

96 Rain Man (88)

97 True Stories (86)

98 *Risky Business (83) It’s not about what you think it’s about! It never was!

99 *The Big Chill (83)

100 The Way We Were (73)

101 Safety Last (23) It’s getting so that I might have to add the first two digits to my dates...not that I watch THAT many movies from the 1920s...

102 Phantasm (79)

103 The Burrowers (08)

104 New Jack City (91)

105 The Vanishing (88)

106 Sisters (72)

107 Puberty Blues (81) Little Aussie cinema theme, here

108 Elevator to the Gallows (58)

109 Les Diaboliques (55)

110 House (77) haha WHAT no really W H A T

111 Death Line (72)

112 Cranes are Flying (57)

113 Holes (03)

114 *Lady Vengeance (05)

115 Long Weekend (78)

116 Body Double (84)

117 The Crazies (73) I love that Romero shows the utter confusion that would no doubt reign in the case of any kind of disaster. Things fall apart.

118 Waterlilies (07)

119 *You’re Next (11)

120 Event Horizon (97)

121 Venom (18) I liked it, guys, way more than most superhero fare. Has a real sense of place and the place ISN’T New York!

122 Under the Silver Lake (18) RIP Night Call

123 *Blade Runner (82)

124 *The Birds (62) interesting to see now that I’ve read the story it came from

125 *28 Days Later (02) hits REAL FUCKIN’ DIFFERENT in a pandemic

126 Life is Sweet (90)

127 *So I Married an Axe Murderer (93) find me a more 90s movie, I dare you (it’s not possible)

128 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (67)

129 The Pelican Brief (93) 90s thrillers continue!

130 Dick Johnston is Dead (20)

131 The Bridges of Madison County (95)

132 Earth Girls are Easy (88) Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum are so hot in this movie, no wonder they got married

133 Better Watch Out (16)

134 Drowning Mona (00) trying for something like the Coen bros and not getting there

135 Au Revoir Les Enfants (87)

136 *Chasing Amy (97) Affleck is the least alluring movie lead...ever? I also think I gave Joey Lauren Adams’ character short shrift in my memory of the movie. It’s not good, but she’s more complicated than I recalled.

137 Blackkklansman (18)

138 Being Frank (19)

139 Kiki’s Delivery Service (89)

140 Uncle Frank (20) why so many FRANKS

141 *National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (89) watching with pals (virtually) made it so much more fun than the usual yearly watch!

142 Half Baked (98) another, more secret Toronto nostalgia pic - RC Harris water filtration plant as a prison!

143 We’re the Millers (13)

144 All is Bright (13)

145 Defending Your Life (91)

146 Christmas Chronicles (18) I maintain that most new xmas movies are terrible, particularly now that Netflix churns them out like eggnog every year.

147 Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse (18)

148 Reindeer Games (00) what did I say about Affleck??!? WHAT DID I SAY

149 Palm Springs (20)

150 Happiest Season (20)

151 *Metropolitan (90) it’s definitely a Christmas movie

152 Black Christmas (74)

THEATRE:HOME - 2:150 (thanks pandemic)

I usually separate out docs and fiction, but I watched almost no documentaries this year (with the exception of Dick Johnston). Reality is real enough.

TV Series

01 - BoJack Horseman (final season) - Pretty damned poignant finish to the show, replete with actual consequences for our reformed bad boy protagonist (which is more than you can say for most antiheroes of Peak TV).

02 - *Hello Ladies - I enjoy the pure awkwardness of seeing Stephen Merchant try to perform being a Regular Person, but ultimately this show tips him too far towards a nasty, Ricky Gervais-lite sort of persona. Perhaps he was always best as a cameo appearance, or lip synching with wild eyes while Chrissy Teigen giggles?

03 - Olive Kittredge - a rough watch by times. I read the book as well, later in the year. Frances Mcdormand was the best, possibly the only, casting option for the flinty lead. One episode tips into thriller territory, which is a shock.

04 - *The Wire S3, S4, S5 - lockdown culture! It was interesting to rewatch this, then a few months later go through an enormous, culture-level reappraisal of cop-centred narratives.

05 - Forever - a Maya Rudolph/Fred Armisen joint that coasts on the charm of its leads. The premise is OK, but I wasn’t left wanting any more at the end.

06 - *Catastrophe - a rewatch when my partner decided he wanted to see it, too!

07 - Red Oak - resolutely “OK” steaming dramedy, relied heavily on some pretty obvious cues to get across its 1980s setting.

08 - Little Fires Everywhere - gulped this one down while in 14-day isolation, delicious! Every 90s suburban mom had that SUV, but not all of them had the requisite **secrets**

09 - The Great - fun historical comedy/drama! Costumes: lush. Actors: amusing. Race-blind casting: refreshing!

10 - The Crown S4 - this is the season everyone lost their everloving shit for, since it’s finally recent enough history that a fair chunk of the viewing audience is liable to recall it happening.

11 - Ted Lasso - we resisted this one for a while (thought I did enjoy the ad campaign for NBC sports (!!) that it was based on). My view is that its best point was the comfort that the men on the show have (or develop, throughout the season) with the acknowledgement and sharing of their own feelings. Masculinity redux.

12 - Moonbase 8 - Goodnatured in a way that makes you certain they will be crushed.

13 - The Good Lord Bird - Ethan Hawke is really aging into the character actor we always hoped he would be!

14 - Hollywood - frothy wish-fulfillment alternate history. I think the show would have been improved immeasurably by skipping the final episode.

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bestworstcase · 4 years

Note

how's everyone in bitter snow feel about the justice system in Corona? also how are the guards in bitter snow, how do these people treat their positions as guards?

okay anon you said “everyone” so like

gonna talk specifically about all the character’s perceptions right now, as of chapter 9, because a lot of these feelings evolve over the course of benighted and also the rest of the series 👍

major characters!

cassandra!

she is well aware of the harshness of the system. her own birth parents were executed for their crimes—we’ll get more into that later >:)—and given who her father is and what her aspirations are, she knows some of the more unsavory details about what guard work can mean. there is a part of her that is… uncomfortable with this, but she rationalizes it as a discomfort related to feeling like she’s trapped in the shadow of the (very serious) crimes for which her parents were executed. she has very much drunk the kool-aid that all of this stuff is correct and just because it’s only being done To Criminals, who of course are not like regular people, who must be protected From Criminals (like her parents, there’s this whole nasty feedback loop of self-disgust going on with this).

she also very much has her dad on a pedestal and doesn’t want to think badly about anything he does, and she wants to make him proud, and in her mind making him proud = succeeding as a guard. so that’s another huge thing tilting her in favor of the coronan justice system.

rapunzel!

i don’t think rapunzel has quite made the connection between the existence of the king’s watch and what they actually do, which is arrest people and feed them into the horrible justice system. she knows that eugene was arrested and nearly hanged, and she doesn’t feel good about that, but she also has not been exposed to this system as a… daily thing with a wider scope than simply being something eugene escaped from. she has a very particular kind of self-centered naivety where it is still hard for her to grasp that people… exist, outside of her life, almost like a lack of object permanence where the concept of Other People is concerned? because she grew up in a tower with nobody but gothel. she’s beginning to develop inklings of this, but it’s not there yet, and with frederic and everyone in the palace actively trying to shelter her from the more upsetting pieces of palace life still, she’s still kind of navigating around obstacles that she can’t see in order to get there.

anyway all of which is to say she’s laboring under the impression that everything in corona is hunky dory. still very much in the homecoming honeymoon phase.

eugene!

eugene is in this weird transitional place where he, by his own actions in the last chapter, has been rather rudely shocked out of his own complacency and now he’s looking around at all the luxuries and privileges he has been granted purely by virtue of being the guy who happened to bring rapunzel home and he’s going: oh. oh i didn’t earn any of this actually.

he knows exactly what corona is like. if you’re a thief in this world you know not to get arrested in corona. and he did get arrested in corona and he came very close to losing his life because of it. for a while there, i think he just fully embraced his pardon and decided to live it up because, well, why not, it’s what he deserves after a lifetime of hard living and fighting to survive… but fundamentally, he’s not an asshole even if he is sometimes an ass, and the more he lets go of the flynn rider persona the more his natural empathy reasserts itself. right now, his focus is on being better for rapunzel, but i think he sort of has in the back of his mind how very, very lucky he got in his brush with the coronan justice system and that inclines him to at least feel… dubious about becoming a cog in it.

lance!

he’s sort of similar to eugene, in that he has this criminal background and he knows exactly what sort of reputation corona has in the criminal world… but there’s also this element of, he’s sort of… adjacent to law enforcement now. thief-takers are sort of like private investigators and sort of like bounty hunters, and they exist in the weird margin between law enforcement and criminal activity and lance has this very personal experience of having been sort of… invited into that space as an opportunity to reform his ways, and that worked for him.

i think he and eugene could probably have a really interesting conversation not too far down the line about how they got out of the thieving business and became better people and ways that could be applied on a broader scale versus just chucking everyone in prison, which i imagine tends to be the default not just in corona but in most countries in this region. lance sees his experiences helping victims of theft as intrinsically linked to his personal decision to never steal again, whereas eugene reformed because rapunzel, specifically, treated him with compassion and dignity. put those two things together and you have a decent platform for a restorative approach to criminal justice.

varian!

varian is a kid. he has no clue about anything but his alchemy lol. i think he probably has a lot of romanticized notions of adventurous thieves in the vein of flynn rider and is accustomed to seeing guards/watchmen as The Enemy through that lens, but he has very very little actual real world experience with either and to him it all has this aura of fiction. it’s something that happens To Other People, not to him.

caine!

caine saw the coronan justice system tear her family apart when she was nine years old, over a petty theft her father committed to feed his starving family. also, she’s saporian, so she has this extra pile of cultural grudges against corona in addition to this personal trauma. she hates corona, and unlike in canon—where the narrative need to make everything About Rapunzel demanded that her motivations be dumbed down—she puts the blame for what happened to her squarely where it belongs, on king frederic’s crackdown and the system backing it. though she’s not a separatist herself, she’s perfectly happy to work with them to attack corona, and she sees her piracy as… sort of a campaign against corona and its allies? in that she targets mostly trading vessels belonging to the seven kingdoms and has definitely liberated coronan prison barges in the past.

as far as she’s concerned corona can just burn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ up saporia

sirin!

…honestly you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who hates coronan justice more than sirin does because [spoilers lol]. she keeps it on a very tight lock, because she is a pragmatist first and foremost and she isn’t interested in expending her rage on a doomed cause. when she acts on her hatred, she wants it to matter. and she’s also a leader, with a lot of vulnerable people relying on her to keep them safe, so she can’t just lash out the way she might want to if she had no other obligations. so she’s cultivated this very cold, very methodical anger and is proceeding with her plan very carefully but also, definitely enjoyed getting her hands bloody in the prologue.

assorted secondary and minor characters (just the ones i feel like talking about, rip to everyone else)

commander peter!

it is peter’s job to enforce the coronan justice system. fundamentally, he has to agree with it. i think he has this ideal of what justice should be in the back of his mind and he sees all the ways that coronan justice doesn’t line up, and he’s trying his best to close those gaps while working from within the system. he cares very intently about his country and its people, and he firmly believes that he’s working to keep everybody safe—even if it comes at the cost of this harsh, sometimes unfair system.

as part of this, he keeps very high standards of conduct for his watchmen. abuses of power do happen—peter can’t always be watching every single man in his force, and while he ostensibly commands the city watches in the rest of corona’s city’s too, in practice his influence tapers off outside of herzingen simply because of distance—but he tries to stamp them out as best he can.

(there’s definitely a big range within the king’s watch itself vis a vis how the guards approach their work. i think, taken on average, they... are cops. their job is to enforce the system first and foremost and they wouldn’t get into that career if they didn’t believe in it; some try to be more compassionate about it than others and some are just in it for the authority but they’re all... working to serve the system.)

arianna!

she’s both a foreigner originally—she was born and raised in eldora, one of corona’s neighbors—and very well traveled, so she has seen a lot of other models of justice in action and this leads to her taking a dim view of the way corona handles things. i think she and frederic probably have a lot of heated arguments about his crackdown in particular, and it’s one of the biggest points of contention in their marriage. she does often succeed in being a moderating voice, and i imagine she is a vocal proponent for reform not just in corona but in the seven kingdoms generally, but unfortunately she has no real authority in corona (because frederic is the monarch, not her) so her influence in this regard is limited.

frederic!

in contrast to arianna, frederic i think truly believes that cracking down harder on crime is the only way to make it go away. he’s thinking about how a criminal in a jail cell is a criminal who isn’t out on the streets hurting people, rather than thinking about where these criminals are coming from in the first place. he listens to arianna—and to ludolf and peter, who are other moderating voices in this regard—but he also has a very hard time stepping out of this mindset of “we just need to take the bad people and put them somewhere else so the good people will be safe.” in a way, i think he has a very similar mindset to rapunzel in that they both tend to engage in black-and-white thinking, but where rapunzel sees only the good parts of the world, frederic tends to see things in the most bleak light possible.

gilbert!

gilbert is a career military guy in a kingdom with no standing army during a time of peace. this… absolutely has an impact on his approach to domestic justice, and in particular he takes the attitude that criminals and dissidents are The Enemy. he feeds into frederic’s worst impulses and fears because in his mind, frederic is too cowardly to do what must be done to quash The Threat. i think… like frederic a lot of this ultimately comes from a desire to keep corona safe, he’s just jumped fully overboard into not considering the “wrong” sort of coronan part of the country he wants to protect. and then him seeing everything through this military lens is fuel on that fire.

ludolf!

he’s a champion of compassion. he hates the existence of the prison barges and the gallows, but i think he also does not have much in the way of actionable alternatives; he’s has this kind of idealized, almost rapunzel-esque idea that if they just apply a little faith and goodwill then the problems can be solved (and this tends to weaken his stance politically, because he runs into the “well then what do you propose we do” problem; he works best in tandem with someone like arianna or peter, both of whom are details people who can come up with real solutions).

quirin!

having been… sort of? the closest thing aphelion had to law enforcement back in the day, i think he has strong opinions on corona’s system—namely that it’s all wrong—but he keeps them to himself because he’s not one to talk about the past in general and he’s also well aware that in corona, he’s just some peasant and his opinions aren’t wanted. mostly, he tries to keep his head down, keep himself and his kid out of trouble, and focus on preserving the simple life he has constructed for himself.

(in aphelion, i think criminality was dealt with through the moonstone cult—this decayed somewhat over the course of the dedication, as aphelionese people lost their strong connection with the moonstone, but the basic philosophy still remained, and the basic philosophy was “work to understand the root of the problem, then shine the light of truth and understanding on it until the problem reveals its solution”)

adira!

adira very much thinks coronans are all a bit nuts and unlike quirin is not at all shy about voicing this thought when it happens to come up on the rare occasion that she stops being a vagrant long enough to talk to somebody. but that doesn’t happen very often. mostly she’s been too focused on searching for the sundrop and fixing the moonstone to care much about what corona does with its criminals, but also if she were directly asked she’d be like “were you trying to create a criminal assembly line? because that’s what you did” lol

nigel!

i think nigel is a very fearful person in general but this also wars with a degree of practicality. the notion of criminals frightens him but he can also recognize that many people turn to crime out of desperation or fear, and he has a tough time navigating this dissonance. on the whole i think he’d tend to lean toward whoever argued the most reasonably on any specific subject where coronan justice is concerned, which in practice means he ends up aligned with peter a lot—he respects peter’s authoritative experience in dealing with criminals, and peter tends toward this reasonable-sounding, incremental reform approach to the system that speaks to both nigel’s fearfulness and his practical side.

feldspar!

he’s in kind of an uncomfortable situation, in that he is saporian but i don’t think he is particularly open about that fact and would really prefer his coronan neighbors not… know about it. because being saporian, he has a clearer view of how the coronan justice system disadvantages his people and how the crackdown landed especially hard on saporia. i think he lives in perpetual anxiety over the possibility of getting in trouble or being accused of a crime and having his whole life destroyed as a result. also with his friendship with cass, there’s definitely a part of him that wants to just. shake her. until she wakes up to the injustices being done; but he’s far too anxious to actually do something like that so whenever she starts going on about being a guard he’s just kinda like :|

xavier!

as the royal blacksmith and thus supplier of the weapons and armor used by the king’s watch, he has this closeness to the law enforcement side of it that definitely biases him a bit in favor of them; they’re one of his primary customers and biggest sources of business. but also, he’s a very intelligent, very well-read person, and i feel like he spent some time traveling in his youth, so he’s in a similar boat to arianna where he knows for a fact that this is not the only or the best way to do things and he could probably be coaxed into a lengthy conversation about it with the right questions.

#bitter snow #anon i hope you didn't just mean the mains lol bc.#Anonymous

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notesonfilm1 · 4 years

Text

Burt Lancaster got his contract with Hal B. Wallis at Paramount on the basis of a test directed by Byron Haskin with Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott for Desert Fury. Lucky for him, the film was not ready to shoot for another six months and he was able to fit in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers(1946) for producer Mark Hallinger at Universal beforehand. Desert Fury started shooting two weeks before the release of The Killers but there were already whisperings of Lancaster as a big new star, and the whisperings were so loud that Hallinger gave him first billing and a big publicity build-up rather than the little ‘and introducing….’ title at the end of the credits that was then typical, and is indeed the billing offered Wendell Corey in Desert Fury as you can see in the poster above. Before Desert Fury started shooting, Hal Wallis knew he had a big fat star on his hands and that his part had to be beefed up so as to capitalise on it.

By the time the film was released on September 24th, 1947,, Burt Lancaster was the biggest star in the film. The Killers hit screens on the 29th of August 1946. As Kate Buford writes, Ít was an extraordinary debut for a complete unknown. Overnight he was a star with a meteoric rise ¨faster than Gable´s, Garbo´s or Lana Turner,¨as Cosmopolitan said years later (Buford, loc 1260). In New York the movie, ‘played twenty-four hours a day at the Winter Garden theatre, ‘where over 120,000 picture-goers filled the 1,300 seat theatre in the first two weeks, figures Variety called “unbelievably sensational.”‘ Brute Force was the fourth film Lancaster made, after I Walk Alone, but it was the second to be released, on June 30th 1947. According to Kate Buford, it too ‘set set first-week records at movie houses across the country’ (loc 1412).

Lancaster’s status as a star is reflected in the lobby card and poster above, where in spite of being billed third, what´s being sold is what Burt Lancaster already represented, the publicity materials giving a false impression that he is much more central to the narrative than is in fact the case. His image dominates in both, and even the tag lines are attributed to him: ‘I got a memory for faces…killer´s faces…Get away from my girl…and get going’, is the tagline in the lobby card. The text on the poster reads, ´Two men wanted her love…the third wanted her life.

In the ad below, he´s billed second, as ´the sensation of The Killers, Dynamite with the fuse lit’

When trying to recapture a past moment in relation to cinema, it´s often useful to look at trailers and other paratextual publicity materials. Trailers hold and try to disseminate the film´s promise to viewers. Of course, its purpose is to sell, to dramatise its attractions so that viewers will go see it. And of course, they often lie, dramatising not what is but what they hope will sell. That said, those promises, lies and hopes are often very revealing.

youtube

As you can see above, the trailer is selling melodrama — violent passions — in a magnificent natural setting filmed in Technicolor. Burt Lancaster’s name is only mentioned 39 second into the 1.41 trailer, after Lizabeth Scott with her strangeness and her defiance of convention and after John Hodiak with his secrets and coiled snakeyness. And Lancaster’s introduced as ‘hammer fisted’ Tom Hanson, erroneously giving the impression that this will be an action film. But note too that by the end of the trailer, Lancaster is given top billing.

According to Kate Buford, in Burt Lancaster: An American Life, Lancaster thought ‘Desert Fury would not have lunched anybody’, later ‘dismissing it as having ‘starred a station wagon’ (loc 1157). The film is really a series of triangles: Eddie (John Hodiak) and Tom (Burt Lancaster) are both in love with Paula (Lizabeth Scott), Fritzy (Mary Astor) has already had an affair with Tom who is currently pursuing an affair with her daughter Paula, Paula and Johnny (Wendell Corey) are both in love with Eddie etc. I have made a not-quite-video essay that nonetheless well illustrates the Johnny-Eddie-Paula triangle, surely one of the queerest of the classic period, which can be seen here:

Tom is really a fifth wheel in the narrative. But by the time the film started shooting, Burt Lancaster was already the biggest star in it. His part was beefed up to take his new status into account, scenes were added, According to Gary Fishgall, the film was based on a 1945 novel, Desert Town by Ramona Stewart, and ‘ Lancaster’s role was an amalgam of two of the novel’s characters: the embittered, sadistic deputy sheriff, Tom Hansen, and a likeable highway patrolman named Luke Sheridan. Neither character was romantically linked to Paula (p.55). But in the film, he ends up with Lizabeth Scott at the end. All these additions probably contributed to the film seeming so structurally disjointed.

In Desert Fury Tom, a former rodeo rider, just hangs around waiting for Paula to get wise to Eddie, leaving her enough rope to act freely, as he does with colts when taming them, but not enough so that she hangs herself, or so he thinks. Really, he’s extraneous. He gets to walk into the sunset with Paula at the end of the film but the film really ends once Paula and Fritzy kiss, on the lips. He certainly doesn’t get much to do during it, except for a couple of great scenes where Fritzy tries to buy him into marrying her daughter (above) and another bit of banter when she thinks he’s come to accept her offer (below). Mary Astor steals both scenes. In fact she steals everything. Every time she appears, her wit, weariness, intelligence, the intensity of her love for her daughter — she lifts the film to a level it probably doesn’t deserve to be in. But Lancaster is good. These are the only scenes in the film where he looks like he’s enjoying himself.

Tom is the closest the film has to a ´normal character’. Indeed, aside from the character he plays in All My Sons (1948) this is the closest he’d come to such a type during the whole of his period in film noir in the late 40s and which includes all of his films up to The Flame and the Arrow in 1950. Even in Variety Girl, which is an all-star comedy where he and Lizabeth Scott spoof the hardboiled characters they’re associated with, the surprise is that they’ve already created personas to spoof in such a short time (see below).

According to Fishgall, ‘Lancaster –billed third before the film’s title — acquitted himself well in the essentially thankless other man’ role. Still, if Desert Fury had marked his screen debut as originally planned, it is unlikely that he would have achieved stardom quite so quickly. Not only did the film lack the stylish impact of The Killers, but so did the actor. Without the smouldering intensity of the Swede and his first pictures’ moody black and white photography, he appeared to be more of a regular fellow, and guy-next-door types rarely become overnight sensations’ (p. 67).

In Desert Fury we’re told that unlike the drugstore cowboys who are now criticising him, Tom used to be the best rodeo rider there was but a while back, whilst wrestling a steer, he got thrown off and is now all busted up inside. Being ‘busted up inside’ is what all the characters Burt Lancaster plays in the late ’40s have in common. He thinks of returning to the rodeo all the time but knows he can never be as good. He used to be a champ, now all he can hope for is to be second best. He knows he ‘ain’t got what it takes anymore’. He’s in love with Paula and she knows it. But she doesn’t know what she wants. He think he does: ‘you’re looking for what I used to get when I rode in the rodeo. The kick of having people say “that’s a mighty special person” I’d like to get that kick again. Maybe I can get it with just one person saying it’. He will, but he’ll have to wait until the end of the movie.

But even in this, Lancaster doesn´t play entirely nicey-poo, true-blue, throughout, and his Tom is given moments of wanton bullying and cruelty where he gets to abuse Eddie just because he’s a cop and wants to. And it´s interesting that it´s that moment, which jives so well with the ´brute force´Lancaster was already known for, and which would attach itself to his persona for many a year, that is the one chosen for the trailer.

According to Robyn Karney, in Burt Lancaster: A Singular Man, ‘As the straightforward moral law officer in a small Arizona town who rescues the object of his affections from the dangerous clutches of a murderous professional gambler, Burt had little to do other than look strong, handsome and reliable. Despite Wallis’ much vaunted rewrites, the role of the Sheriff Tom Hanson remained stubbornly secondary and uninteresting, with the limelight focused on John Hodiak as the villain, fellow contract players Elizabeth Scott and Wendell Corey’ (p.31).

I mainly agree with Robyn Karney except for four points, two textual and stated above: the first is that even in this Lancaster is playing a failure, someone once a somebody that people talked about but now all busted up inside; the second is that that element of being ´busted up inside´leads to a longing that gets displaced onto Paula. If the rodeo is what made feel alive and gave him a reason to live before his accident, now it´s Paula, and the idea that she might also be an unobtainable goal leads to his outbursts of unprovoked violence towards the rival for his affections, Eddie (John Hodiak).

The other two points of interest are extra textual. Desert Fury is gloriously filmed by Charles Lang. A few years later, in Rope of Fury, Lang would film Lancaster as a beauty queen: eyelashes, shadows and smoke, lips and hair (see below):

Here, even with his pre-stardom teeth and his bird´s nest of a hairdo, Lancaster sets the prototype for the Malboro Man:

He looks good in technicolour, and Lang brings out the blue of his eyes:

More importantly, the film visualises him, for the first time, as Wester Hero, a genre that would become a mainstay of his career from Vengeance Valley (1951) right through Ulzana´s Raid (1972) and even onto Cattle Annie and Little Britches (1981):

Desert Fury was not well reviewed. According to the Daily Herald ‘The acting is first-class. But except for Mr. Lancaster as a speed cop, the characters in the Arizona town with their lavish clothes and luxury roadsters, are contemptible to the point of being more than slightly nauseating’ (cited in Hunter p. 27),

The Monthly Film Bulletin labelled the film a western melodrama, claiming, surprisingly, that ‘The vivid technicolor and grand stretches of burning Arizona desert give a certain air of reality to the film’. Hard for us to see this thrillingly melodramatic film, lurid, in every aspect, evaluated in the light of realism. The MFB continued with, ´This reality is however counteracted by the way in which the sharply defined, but extremely unnatural characters act. Everything is over dramatised, and the title is a mystery in that the desert is comparatively peaceful compared with the way the human beings behaved…Lizabeth Scott is suitably beautiful as Paula and Burt Lancaster suitably tough as Tom. (Jan 1, 1947, p. 139)

Thus, we can see that on the evidence above, the film was badly reviewed, Time magazine going so far as to call it, ‘impossible to take with a straight face’ (Buford, loc1293). But Burt Lancaster´s performance was either exempted from the criticism or its faults where attributed to the film rather than to himself. More importantly still, the film was a hit, Burt Lancaster´s third in a row. Finally, as I´ve discussed elsewhere, the film is now considered by many a kind of camp classic, a leading example of noir in technicolor as well as arguably the gayest film ever produced in the classic period.

José Arroyo

Burt Lancaster in Desert Fury: Third Film, Fifth Wheel Burt Lancaster got his contract with Hal B. Wallis at Paramount on the basis of a test directed by Byron Haskin with Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott for…

#Burt Lancaster #Desert Fury #Lewis Allen #Lizabeth Scott #melodrama #noir #post-war cinema #post-war stardom #stardom #Third Film Fifth Wheel #westerns

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knifeonmars · 4 years

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Capsule Reviews - June/July 2020

I didn't read as many comics that I felt the need to write about these past couple of months, but the ones that I did I generally had a lot of thoughts on.

Hawkworld

Back in 1989, DC attempted to revamp Hawkman, notoriously the most confusing character in a stable comprised of confusing characters, with Timothy Truman's Hawkworld, a dark, modern take on the sci-fi version of the character. The result is flawed in the most frustrating ways, just good enough that parts of it feel like they could be coming from a hidden classic of DC's back catalog, but never living up to its potential. The story entirely is set on Thanagar, casting Katar Hol (Hawkman) as a privileged heir who has thrown his lot in with the police force and pines for Thanagar's lost golden age, when men were men and heroes walked the Earth. The first couple of issues do some genuinely excellent work depicting Thanagar as a corrupt and crumbling empire which bears more than a little resemblance to the USA and casting Hol as a well-meaning but ultimately deluded dupe whose role as a cop makes him at best complicit in his culture's worst excesses.

Unfortunately, the second half of the series never manages to live up to the first half, skipping forward in time by about ten years and ditching the systemic critique of its first half. Instead, the corrupt police commander who had previously appeared as a symptom of Thanagar's ills is turned into a literal monster, a strawman for the newly christened Hawkman to soundly thump over the head in place of addressing larger issues. The systemic concerns of the series' first half are never meaningfully addressed in the later issues and Hawkworld ends up falling back into being a simple tale of good cops versus bad cops, despite the first half of the series having been largely unambiguous about cops' nature as agents of state violence and imperialism. It's a shocking and deeply confusing disconnected that I can't tell if it's because I'm bringing modern politics and assumptions to the book or that someone at DC completely lost their nerve halfway through. This is what makes Hawkworld so frustrating to read, on the one hand its insightful and anti-colonial and surprisingly relevant to 2020, but on the other it never commits to those ideas because doing so would be too radical, the end result is a book which is very good right up until the point that it completely wimps out and shuffles back into mediocrity.

She-Hulk

After a long interval of living, unread, in my Comixology files, I finally read She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido. The quality of the series almost goes unsaid; it's one of the best of its era and niche, a part of the a whole constellation of early to mid 2010's "street level" Marvel superhero books which started, more or less with Daredevil and Hawkeye, ran through She-Hulk and Spider-Woman, extended into Hellcat and debatably Squirrel Girl, and then fizzled out several years ago. I try to fight nostalgia back most of the time, but it can't be overstated how good that whole wave of titles was, almost universally fun and approachable, grounded and empathetic, and with top-notch art across the board. Anyway, She-Hulk by Soule and Pulido is fantastic. It keeps to a relatively straightforward procedural style, makes the courtroom antics feel real thanks to Soule's actual background as a lawyer, and connects with the Marvel Universe in ways which set it among the others without ever feeling too overwhelming. The whole deal with The Blue File, the series' overarching mystery is well handled and does something really interesting with Nightwatch, an absolutely nothing character, who I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen turn up again since this reinvention. Reading She-Hulk made me nostalgic for this whole era, of which this series was one of the best.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal

Petals to the Metal is the arc where the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone podcast found its footing and really began to blossom into the series that it would become, so there were a lot of expectations riding on this entry in the graphic novel adaptations of the series. Generally speaking, it continues to nail most of what made the series work and polish the story into something a little more refined and coherent. The narrative trimming and changes done are smooth, the jokes still work, and its able to foreshadow events in a way that the podcast, given its nature as an emergent narrative, could never really do. Carey Pietsch's cartooning remains fabulous, and what makes this story work as a graphic novel must certainly be credited to her. This series remains the defining work of her young career and while I greatly enjoy what she's doing, I do wonder if she's really going to stick around do all seven potential books, especially if they keep ballooning in size. The only criticisms of Petals to the Metal as a comic are much the same as could be made about Petals to the Metal as a podcast and the big one is the main characters are kind of incidental to the story and don't feel like they have an important role in the emotional climax. Such is the nature of trying to tell a story in a DnD campaign, and its something that TAZ would get better at subsequently, but in graphic novel form hard not to think about. Without as clear of a distinction between "player characters" and "non-player characters" it's not quite as strange to see the main trio take a back seat, but without the charisma and speed of the podcast form it's much easier to sit back and say "wait, the main character's aren't even doing anything here". This volume is also noticeably thicker than the first two volumes of The Adventure Zone, and I hope that this series isn't going to swell, Harry Potter-like, with each entry, if only for the sake of Pietsch not keeling over from the effort.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Supposedly the capper to the Batman stories Snyder and Capullo's started telling all the way back in 2011 with the New 52 reboot of the character, though that's a little hard to swallow when they are still very much doing a bunch of Batman stuff in their current Death Metal event series. It's Batman playing in a post-apocalyptic DC universe, bombastic and unhinged, upending the toy box and smashing things like there's no tomorrow. It's fun, beautifully drawn, and incredibly over the top, but it's not going to be for everyone. For one thing, it's a tour of a ruined DC universe, so it's not exactly kind of most characters; there's a lot of death and mutilation and grotesqueness abounds. It's also deeply, deeply, misanthropic. I've got an essay talking about the politics of this book at greater length ready to go up at some point, but the short version is that this is a comic which starts off with an incredibly unsubtle allegory for the 2016 election and then ends with a big, cheesy hope shot that means absolutely nothing.

Even beyond my political reading of it, not everything about the story works. Snyder and Capullo's Batman work has had a ton of Joker in it and his role here is obnoxious and contains a bafflingly unearned redemption arc. More importantly, the book is built on misanthropy and the evil that ordinary people do but is completely unable to actually confront this thematically or narratively. It's a major thematic shortcoming.

I'm reminded of the ending of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc, a similar endpoint to an era of Batman which was fundamentally informed by the rejection of Morrison's vision by the rest of DC Comics. It's a bitter, angry book, but still beautiful and engaging, and fun to talk about.

Batman Universe

The complete other end of the spectrum from Last Knight on Earth, Batman Universe is a glorious romp through the DC universe, exploring the setting and characters and having fun in this day-glo fantasia. Nick Derrington knocks the art out of the park, and the constraints of shorter chapters mean that Brian Bendis' writing is more succinct and energetic than I've ever seen it before. I've idly wondered for years now why there's no current Batman animated series, and Batman Universe seems very much designed as the equivalent of one: the ties to current continuity are nearly nonexistent, the art is distinct and skews away from pseudo-realism in favor of pop aesthetics, and the approach in general is lighthearted.

It's not the deepest book, at least on an initial read, it's pointedly light fare, but it's still incredibly good. It is an unabashed, all-caps SUPERHERO STORY that doesn't feel retro or dated.

#words #capsule reviews #last knight on earth

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littlemisssquiggles · 5 years

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Hello! So, I read your last musing, about Oscar's most powerfuls spell, and it made me realise one thing: in the old Remnant, everyone could cast magic from their hands, but Ozma used a cane for it. Do you think that he may have been handicapped? Maybe he wasn't as connected to the world magic as much as others and he needed to use a medium. We know that he used a cane because he didn't believe in aggression, but what if it was also a sort of magic prosthesis?

Hey Yellow. Ironically that’s something I noticed too to after I finished posting my last Pinehead headcanon. Thus far, Ozma and essentially all of his successors are the only ones who used an object as a conduit to channel their magic

As to why, I’m not sure. I do like your concept of Ozma originally being magically handicapped than other magi from First Remnant. But since you also mentioned the tidbit about Ozma (and technically all the Wizards) preferring to use a sceptre/cane as their weapon of choice as it’s less lethal, it’s making me consider a different new headcanon about Ozma. Here me out:

What if…in his youth, Ozma was a completely different person.

When we were first introduced to his character, he was described as man who fought for righteousness and the people. But what if …this wasn’t always Ozma’s personality? What if …Ozma used to be the complete opposite of who we met him as during his younger teenaged years? Probably when he was roughly around the same age as Oscar is presently.

Since First Remnant was described to be home to kings and queens, what if… Ozma was possibly a young prince in his time. This could be a small little nod to his Oz counterpart of the same name who was a princess. But despite being of noble blood, imagine if…Ozma was rather spoilt and selfish in his youth, caring very little for others which was inclusive of the very people who lived within his family’s kingdom.

And because of this lack of empathy towards his fellow man, Ozma would often abuse his powers. Let’s say…rather than being magically handicapped, Ozma was quite talented in the mystical arts but lacked proper disciple as well as the patience to learn how to properly control it.

Since ‘arrogant’ was a word once used by Cinder Fall (as propagated by Salem) when describing Ozpin; as Ozpin is the current version of Ozma’s soul, perhaps in his past Ozma was very supercilious to a detrimental fault.

Picture…a fourteen-year-old Ozma, crowned prince of a kingdom devastated by poverty and ruled by greed, being the type of cocky adolescent whose vanity was only outmatched by his lack of self-control in using his own abilities.Like imagine Young Ozma being the type to walk around proclaiming that he was the greatest magi in all the land because of his abilities, having come from along line of powerful witches and wizards on both sides of his family.

Picture…Ozma being the type to cockily challenge others to a duel of might and magic since he’s arrogant enough in his abilities to know that he’s strong enough to wipe the floor with any opponent (or so he believes) whether his opponent was willing to participate or not. As a matter of fact, picture a scene where Ozma is training with his royal tutor using servants as his sparring partners. However Ozma keeps disobeying his master’s orders and going overboard with his magic to easily win his matches since the boy is fully aware that his lesser magically incompetent servants can’t put up much of a fight against.

Pretty soon the easy wins start to bore Ozma and he demands a proper challenge; to which one servant responds that there are no more servants for Ozma to fight since he’s beaten most of them while the rest were to scared to face him. Ozma then challenges his tutor to a duel claiming that since he was such a so-called powerful warlock then he’d be provide the challenge Ozma craved. At the first the tutor refused Ozma’s challenge after acknowledging the destruction and pain he had caused he past targets. However when Ozma begins mocking his tutor and belittling his abilities, he finally conceded for a chance to teach Ozma a much needed lesson.

Long story short, the tutor, of course, wipes the floor with Ozma much to the astonishment of the feeble spectators who all rushed to help their beaten prince. However Ozma wasn’t finished. Despite the tutor voicing that the match was won in his favour, the humiliating defeat angers Ozma to the point that he loses control of his magic, unintentionally summoning a much darker power which he unfortunately unleashes upon his tutor.

Of course the tutor masterfully dodges Ozma’s attack only for it to collide with the ceiling of the training room, causing debris to cave down on top a pair of servants caught in the crossfire.

This of course badly wounds both of them and Ozma is genuinely stunned at what he had done. You ever noticed how Salem is mostly the only magic we’ve seen to use dark magic whereas Ozma (and the Wizards) don’t? I’d like to think that dark magic by RWBY terms stems from the power of destruction derived from the God of Darkness.

I’d also like to think that in his youth, Ozma learned just how devastating such type of magic could prove in the wrong hands, in more ways than one.

Anyways, as the injured servants are whisked away and as Ozma was still recovering from the shock of using the forbidden dark magic, his astonishment is short-lived as he was suddenly pulled aside to be scolded by his tutor, infuriated for his behaviour and his sudden misuse of the dark arts.

This in turn only serves to further annoy Ozma as he claps back at the older warlock, threatening to have his father—the king—behead the man for so much as daring to speak back to him in such a manner. As a bold reminder, Ozma even tells the tutor wizard that he was a servant of his kingdom and as a servant of his kingdom, he bows down to Ozma. And as you might expect, this threat causes the tutor wizard to resign as both Ozma’s mentor and a servant of his kingdom; joining the rest that came before him.

I’d like to think of Ozma being such a poor student that he racks up mentors faster than the servants can find one willing enough to take the job. Beside I like the satire of Ozma formerly being a pretty terrible student in his first life as compared the humble teacher he comes to be in later lives.

Both as Professor Ozpin and his predecessor—the King of Vale since he founded the huntsmen academies and I’m still holding onto my hunch that the Warrior King—King Phadrig as I dubbed him—trained the very people who fought under him during the First Great War; including Great-Grandpappi Arc ( Jaune’s ancestor) according to my theories.

I know these theories more or less paint a different and less likeable version of the Ozma we know, but again hear me out again. To me, I find characters who start off being one way and slowly evolving into another way kind of fascinating to follow.

Like for example, a story about a timorous street cop, who desired to be promoted to detective but was a pushover for most of his career, slowly transforming to become the most intimidating crime bosses in the city; using his previous experience and knowledge from working in the force to outsmart his previous peers. It was originally meant to be an undercover gig that the cop wanted to use as means to rise in the ranks and finally achieve respect from his fellow cops who would look down on him. But what it leads into is a narrative that makes the audience question whose side this cop character really is many times throughout his arc as he does shady things that makes you wonder where his loyalty lies. Is he still the good cop working to stop the criminals or has hereally switched sides finding the life of a vicious crime lord his true calling since it brought him the satisfaction and respect he always craved? Doesn’t thatsound like a compelling character to follow?

Or, in the case of my small theory here, picture a hero’s journey about anarrogant little prince who cared very little for others outside the family thatspoiled him rotten ultimately growing up to become one of the most virtuousheroes in all the land whose chivalry and devotion to protecting mankind endsup transcending time and history.

The beginning and end stories are such a stark contrast that you’re left wondering how on earth did said character come to be so different in the end, thus lending to the ongoing intrigue of watching the chapters that contributed to this change. You’re left interested in following along to see how the storyreaches this ending in a sense, if you get what I mean.

That and I also like the juxtaposition of Ozma formerly being one of the worse students imaginable in the younger years of his first life but ultimately growing to become a humble man who now passes down his years of knowledge to guide others.

Anyways, let’s continue with the theory idea:

So Ozma is boy who desires to be great like his family but lacks the patience to be one as well as earn the respect of a mentor willing to teach him to be the person he desires to be. At least, not until Ozma meets someone— an old, wise nomadic wizard hailing from a faraway land unknown who ultimately became theperson who changed Ozma’s life forever. For the sake of this headcanon of mine, I’m going to dub this old wizard as Merlin; and going off the name alone you can probably tell or ready where I’m going with this.

Now let’s say, in a land of powerful magi blessed by the Gods there was one fabled to be the most powerful wizard in all of First Remnant—believed to have descended from the First Man created by the Brother Gods.

But in spite of being this legendary mage, no one knew anything of this true identity. Each legend spoke differently but they all shared one common detail—a mystical staff that was said to be the weapon of the legendary mage believed to have been bestowed him by the Gods themselves. Or something like that.

There was not a single child born into First Remnant who didn’t grow up hearing the legendary stories of the nameless great and powerful wizard. Among them was Ozma but he always believed the tales were all hogwash. Glamourous fairy tales of one powerful wizard who travelled the world using his magic to aid others in need yet no one has ever seen him before? How ridiculous, were the thoughts of a teenage Ozma.

And the fact about him fighting with a staff when magic is available by the mere snap of one’s finger just made the stories even less enticing to the boy’s ear ears.

Now in Ozma’s kingdom, like I said, there was this bum—as Ozma referred to him. He wasn’t actually a bum. He was in fact a humble nomad proclaiming to hail from a land far away—a land of light as he described and his travels eventually brought him to Ozma’s kingdom.

The only reason Ozma addressed him as a bum was because the strange newcomer’s attire matched the lower class that lined the streets of his kingdom in droves making the stranger blend right in.

Let’s say…poverty was quite rampart in Ozma’s kingdom since the kingdom royals—his family— did very little to help its citizens and they raised their son to do the same. But this bum—the nomad— peeked Ozma’s interest.

From his home, Ozma would always observe the man. Each day the bum would perform the same routine—come into the kingdom from his temporary abode outside in the forest, sit in the same spot, pretend to accidentally drop a couple of lien into the hands of the starving poor folk who needed it (or perform some other type of good deed) and when the day was done, he would return quietly to the forest from whence he crawled out of only to return again the next day.He was a strange one, as Ozma would often say to himself but in a strange way, Ozma couldn’t help but be oddly fascinated by said man.

Who was he anyways?

The most interesting thing about the man is that he carried a strange sceptre. Ozma always found the sceptre to be the most outlandish thing about the bum since it contradicted with everything else about him.

To fast-forward this idea a bit, let’s say—one day, another kingdom attacked Ozma’s under the pursuit of conquering his throne.

Unfortunately they succeeded. In the span of a single night, Ozma lost everything he once knew. His family. His home. His crown and dignity as the royal heir. He almost even lost his life when the assailants came after him. In spite of fleeing into the forest, Ozma eventually found himself cornered on a lonely bridge suspended over a deep canyon.

Outnumbered, injured and outmatched, Ozma was like a rat trapped in a maze and it’s not like his magic was enough to help him this time. His lack of trainingin control of his powers came back to haunt him as he was easily overpowered by the more experienced assailants.

One of the attackers even resorted to using dark magic to restrain Ozma, twisting his body with the malicious intent of killing him slowly. But in his moments of pain, to the young boy’s astonishment he is rescued by an unlikely saviour.

It was the bum who arrived to protect Ozma from the assailants. And that’s not even the most surprising part, the bum was also a magi. But not just any magi. He was the great and powerful wizard of legend: Merlin the Myth.

I know that Merlin is the legendary sorcerer derived from Arthurian Legend. So imagine if there was a RWBY character inspired by him who played a pinnacle role in Ozma’s Origin story and was the man who made him into the champion of justice we know he came to be?

I know it’d probably be more in character to have Ozma start off as the type of eager hero archetype willing to fight for the people, as we saw with our main RWBY heroine: Ruby Rose.

However, as I;ll say again I like the contrast of Ozma coming from privilegedbeginnings governed by greed and selfishness only to ultimately change to become a better man as a result of all the life changing experiences he endured during his youth while attaining the companionship and guidance of an old soul who left a lasting impression on him.

I like the idea of Ozma formerly being a spoiled prince who initially started to go down a path of revenge when his family is murdered by another kingdom that conquered his own. I like the idea of Ozma being taken under the wing by a legendary yet kind wizard who genuinely saw good and greatness in him and wanted to help him in some way.

Using this idea, imagine young Ozma practically begging Merlin to be his mentor upon learning that the legends about him were real. Picture Ozma boldly demanding that Merlin teach him how to become a powerful magi like him for the sake of returning to his conquered kingdom and slaughtering the people who took it from him out of revenge for what they did to him and his family.

Unfortunately Merlin wasn’t having any of that and refused to teach Ozma at all if his intentions were to use his teachings for harming others. It is only when Ozma agreed to Merlin’s way that the old sage took him in with a smile.

(Side Note: If I also had to depict Merlin the Myth, I’d picture him something like this image above while sometimes adopting an animal form in the shape of a brown owl or white owl. A lot of the images and art I find on Merlin have him featured with an owl of some kind.

Since we know magic in RWBY can be used to turn people into animals, perhaps Merlin used his to shape-shift into an owl and that’s how he traveled from place to place and explains why no one could ever saw his face. He’d always transform and fly off before they could. Just an idea).

Resuming: Since Ozma was desperate for Merlin to teach him, he agrees to temporarily abandon his vendetta for the sake of learning from Merlin. However, truth be told Ozma had merely lied to Merlin so that he would provide him what he needed.

The boy still hungered for vengeance and when Merlin learnt this, he told Ozma that if revenge was his path then there was nothing he could teach him that will be of benefit to him. Enraged by the old wizard’s words, Ozma storms off and attempts his vendetta anyways.

Using what little he had learnt from Merlin, he returned to his kingdom and tried to stage a one-man attack. Ozma had planned to singlehandedly take back his throne by killing the new king and his family just like what he had done to him and his.

However, what made Ozma stop in his tracks is when he soon realized that the new conquerors had young children—four innocent little princesses who were absolutely oblivious to what their father—the king—had done.

In order for Ozma to enact his revenge, it would mean taking the lives of these four girls. In spite of his anger clouding his judgement. In spite of every fibre in his body screaming at him to defend his family’s honour, Ozma…couldn’t do it.

So basically Ozma fails in his vendetta. He believes he is done for when he is caught by the new king. But to Ozma’s surprise, Merlin appears and comes to his aid a second time.

In a nutshell, Merlin protects Ozma and when questioned by the young boy about why he came back for him, Merlin simply replied that despite his impulsive, bratty behaviour—the old soul could still tell that there was a kind heart behind it. In spite of only knowing Ozma for a short time, Merlin was willing to place his fate in the more honest soul he saw in him.

In Merlin’s eyes, he believed that Ozma was destined for greatness. All he needed was proper guidance. Sure he was more than a little rough around the edges but in time, Ozma could be great if he was willing to put in the work to becoming a better person. Perhaps even the type that others could even call a hero.

Ozma scoffs at the very thought of it .Him? A hero? Impossible. He wasn’t even a prince anymore. He had no crown. No kingdom. His own people didn’t even miss him, not like he had ever given them reason to. Ozma was a nobody now and from here, where was he supposed to go? Who was he supposed to be now moving forward?

That’s when Merlin would prompt him with the statement, “Well that’s what you get to figure out. This is your chance to decide your path, young Oz. Your future. You think you lost everything but in actuality, you’ve been given a tremendous opportunity.”

“For what?” Ozma would ask.

“To start over,” Merlin replied optimistically, “begin a new leaf. Before you believed you had to abide by a destiny that was handed to you from birth. Now, you get to decide it for yourself. To forge your own path and decide the type of man you want to be in time.”

“But how am I supposed to do that?” Ozma would then inquire, “I am a prince without a crown or kingdom and a child without a family. I’m just…a boy. How am I supposed to do anything now?

“…Well I never said you have to figure it out right now,” Merlin would reply casually, “and I never said you would be going forward alone either.”

Basically in a nutshell, Merlin agrees to give Ozma a second chance. He agrees to stay by his side and continue training him as his mentor; so long as Ozma gives up his vendetta entirely and devote himself to

And this time, Ozma agrees after realizing finally, that regaining his kingdom was a lost cause.What would even be more interesting is if the reason why Ozma came to this conclusion is because he came to the startling realization that he and his family were in fact the bad guys in all of this. Ozma’s family were tyrants who treated their people like garbage. Ozma used to notice it but at the time, he never cared much for it since at the time he was raised to turn a blind eye to these things. It would be an interesting twist if the new conquerors were good people. Another kingdom who learnt of Ozma’s family tyranny and decide to conquer it in order to help the people who were suffering. Now the people were happy with its new rulers.

Consider it a stained victory—one where neither side is black nor white. They’re each right and wrong in their actions and their reactions to the given circumstance. A starving kingdom was finally freed and living in prosperity under the reign of better, compassionate rulers. However at the same time, an innocent child lost his family in cold blood shed and has his life nearly taken by these same people.

I dunno if that makes a lick of sense at all. I just like the idea of it. I kind of like the idea of Ozma abandoning his title as prince upon learning the truth about his kingdom and what his family used to really do. After that, he was taken in by Merlin who practically raised him like a surrogate father. Together, the two travelled Remnant Merlin mentoring young Ozma on the ways and disciples of how to be a proper powerful magi through righteous rather than sheer talent alone or something like that.

It is through Merlin’s teachings where Ozma learnt the reason as to why he chooses to fight with a sceptre. RWBY has described the Long Memory as being very special to Ozma and essentially all the Wizards that came after him. Through the Lost Fable, we got a sense this is the case since as fans saw from the episode, the sceptre has been with Ozma since his first lifetime.

What was even more interesting is that even after he died the first time, even Salem still held onto the staff. I’d like to think that during their time together, Ozma must’ve told Salem the history behind his signature staff and why he held onto it for so long which in turn contributed to Salem cherishing it after Ozma’s death since it was the last thing she had of him.

I also found it pretty interesting how Salem even held onto the staff after humanity had been restored, after she had become corrupted by the Grimm Pools of Darkness. Not only has the Long Memory sustained time with Ozma (and essentially his descendants) but also with Salem pre-Ozma reincarnation. Wouldn’t been interesting if this somehow lent to the magic within the sceptre.

Like imagine if…the Long Memory was a mystical archive that secretly stored memories from Ozma and all of his lifetimes which is inclusive even of the time he spent with Salem—from the time he met her, to their travels, to the day he died to even before when Salem had the sceptre in her possession and Ozma was able to learn from the cane of Salem’s loneliness, depression and anger after losing him. Or…something like that. Mostly spit balling here.

Once upon a time, I shared a theory about the Long Memory being Ozma’s cherished weapon because it was a gift to him by someone very important from his past. At first, I pegged it had been given to him by the original Four Maidens during his lifetime as the Hermit.

Mind you, this was pre-V6. Eventually I settled on the theory that the weaponwas given to Ozma by an old relative/ mentor who helped him become the man he was.

I figured the Long Memory was either made for Ozma by his old mentor or passed down to him after he set out to start his own journey. To add an extra layer of sentimentality to the Long Memory, I thought it would be nice if the weapon originally belonged to Ozma’s past mentor who then gave it to him upon completing his training as a sign that he was ready. For me, I kind of like the concept of Ozma inheriting his master’s weapon as a symbol of his growth into an outstanding magi, not to mention the everlasting bond he shared with his mentor.

A passing of the torch, so to speak.

Plus it’ll add more significance to the weapon being called the Long Memory having been passed down from Ozma’s former mentor him to him and eventually he passed it on to his next incarnates. This is where I going with the idea of a Merlin-character in RWBY for Ozma’s Origins.

Resuming my theory concept, if a Merlin-inspired character did exist in Ozma’s past, then I like the thought of this character training Ozma fromsince he was a very young teenager; fulfilling the role of the gentle sagewhose wisdom and guidance aided Ozma throughout his life well into his adultyears.

And even after Ozma was forced to depressingly part ways with said mentor (like perhaps he passed away by the time Ozma was older), the lessons and fond memories he shared with his man stayed with and still continue to guide him in some sense after all this centuries.

I like the idea of Ozma transforming from the snobbish boy he used to be to becoming a righteous soul by the time he was a man all through the teachings of the old soul who never lost fate in him and stood with him through thick and thin.

I really like the idea of a Merlin-esque wise old mentor character raising and loving Ozma like a son. And by the time Ozma was finally ready tostart his own journey, Merlin was ready to live this world on the peace of mindthat he had lived long enough to see Ozma grow up into a great young man.

Then following his mentor’s death, Ozma inherited his iconic weapon choosing to fight with it as a means of carrying on his mentor’s legacy in a way. This could add another layer as to why the Long Memory is special to Ozma. Not only was it his weapon but it was also the weapon shared by the kind-hearted old soul who shaped him into the champion he became. I like the idea of the Long Memory not only being symbolic of the memories Ozma shared with his fellow Wizards during their lifetimes. It’s not even symbolic of the years he spent with Salem.

No I’d to think that in addition to these memories, the Long Memory additionally chronicles the memories Ozma shared with the man who trained him. It is a memoir of the times they shared together, journeying, training, living, laughing. More than that, the Long Memory is also a remnant of that mentor since he has wielded it since it he was around Ozma’s age. It was the weapon that Merlin’s mentor trained him with and it is also the same weapon that Merlin used to pass his lessons onto Ozma.

The Long Memory is special to Ozma since it’s something he shares not just with his successors but also the man who was essentially like a second father to him. His hero and it’s his way of remembering him always no matter how many lives he’s lived.

Or…y’know, something to that liking XD This doesn’t necessarily need to happen for Ozma’s story. I mean, Ozma doesn’t really need to have his own mentor. However, since part of his reincarnation cycle does involve his past self imparting guidance onto his present self, it’d be interesting if that ties back to Ozma’s history. I dunno. It’s just an idea XD

And…yeah, I believe that’s all folks. That’s my answer. Sorry if this response turned out longer and took longer than usual to edit and submit. Nevertheless, I hope it was at least enough to actually answer your question, Yellow. I know I deviated from what you originally asked me but let me know what you think if you can. Until then, as always, take care.

~LittleMissSquiggles (2019)

#yellow-eyed-green-crocodile #squiggles answers: rwby #rwby ozma #oscar pine #professor ozpin #rwby theories

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marvelmom · 6 years

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Sebastian Stan Is Being Wasted In The MCU

Via Alex Leadbeater @ Screenrant

Sebastian Stan is being underserved by the role of Bucky Barnes in the MCU. His character has one of the best arcs in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far and is one with the most potential as the franchise moves into Phase 4, but that barely scratches the surface of the talent that Stan displays in his non-superhero outings.

Of course, Sebastian Stan is best known for playing Bucky Barnes, later villain The Winter Soldier and now redeemed hero White Wolf, in the MCU. It's quite possibly the best movie role in the entire franchise; whereas Captain America and Iron Man are icons rooted in the comics, so much of what makes Bucky great lies in how he's been worked into the cinematic universe. The Captain America trilogy is more his story than Steve Rogers, allowing Stan to explore an all-American hero turned bad, struggling with his past, identity and place in society.

And Marvel knew he'd be big. When he first signed on for Captain America: The First Avenger, Stan signed a massive nine-movie contract. For comparison, Chris Evans was initially only locked in for six appearances as the titular Star-Spangled Avenger. In fact, at that point, only Samuel L. Jackson had a comparable contract as Nick Fury. This has, with the help of comic book precedent and a few teases in the films themselves, led to rampant speculation he'll be the next Captain America.

However, after his third appearance in Captain America: Civil War rounding off the Winter Soldier arc and making him a hero, Bucky's been in something of narrative stasis. He sat Black Panther out despite a tease in Civil War's mid-credits tease (a smart move for the Wakanda movie) and had very little to do in Avengers: Infinity War beyond shake Steve Rogers' hand and turn to dust. There are still four movies left on his original deal after Avengers 4, but even then there's the question of how he'll be used; after overt Cap set up, recent discussion has begun to shift towards frenemy Sam Wilson aka Falcon.

It's outside of the MCU where you've recently been able to see Sebastian Stan at his best. While Bucky's been going through a tortured MCU arc, his actor's been using the increased status to slowly build up a strong filmography of supporting roles. He played Jeff Gillooly, the poor schemer of an ex-husband to figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) in last year's I, Tonya, and in the upcoming Destroyer is just as captivating as Nicole Kidman's undercover cop partner. Both of these movies see Stan get completely lost in layered renditions of simple archetypes that exist primarily to serve the arc of the female protagonist. They are the definition of great supporting roles, the type that flies under the radar but are more than worthy of awards consideration.

Hopefully, both sides of Stan's career grow. He is evidently capable of a lot more than he is currently being given and, if provided with the lead role in a key movie, could waltz into the awards discussion. Thankfully, the future is bright. Once he's inevitably resurrected from Thanos' snap in Avengers 4, Bucky is rumored to have a Disney+ show with Falcon, one that will put the spotlight on the Captain America support and (hopefully) explore them as characters outside of potential Steve Rogers' replacements. And on the non-Marvel side, he's currently set to lead multiple interesting films that should finally give him the spotlight.

Forget it being a great time to be a superhero fan - it's going to be a great time to be a Stan stan.

#Sebastian Stan #Bucky Barnes #Winter Soldier #Sack up Marvel #BuckyCap

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samwinchesterisourhero · 6 years

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Sam WInchester: The Reluctant Hero

When we wonder in frustration, as to why Sam seems to suffer more than Dean does, instead of being angry at a narative bias, or assuming the show runners hate Sam, take into consideration that Sam and Dean, though equally heroic, are different types of heros Dean is a willing hero. He has been proud of his job as a hunter since he was young, even if sometimes he was bored with it, or would have liked to persue a career as a machanic. From what we see in flash backs, Dean was boasting “Im a hero!” since high school, where Sam just wanted to be like every other kid. Sam’s first choice in life is not to be a hero. Not directly anyway. He was studying to become a lawyer. Azazel said he was becoming a Tax Attorney, but Dean saw him as a Criminal Justice Attorney in What is and What Should Never Be, which I think is more fitting for Sam. The indirect hero that would get justice for the victims. He would make a wonderful psycholigist also. Dean would be a very good cop, or soldier, or first responder. This is not to say Sam wouldnt run into a burning building to save a family, he most certainly would, but his interests seem to lie mostly in long term after care. So for Sam to be in the front line with Dean, is something he does because its the right thing, not because it’s his chosen life path (early life anyway. he has stated in his later life that he did chose this life for himself) and this makes him a reluctant hero. The problem with that though, is that in literature, the reluctant hero always suffers the most.

Its no argument that Dean suffers too. Both brothers have broken my heart on many occasions, but Sam’s suffering over any event, stretches far past the season he suffers it in. This is so we, the viewers, have an idea as to how much of a hardship Sam is willing to endure to save Dean and to save the world. Sam and Dean both willingly went to Hell, but their experiences were greatly different, and unfolded on the show wildly unbalanced. Dean sold his soul for Sam, so Sam would live. He didnt want to go to Hell, but he did it willingly. in Dream a Little Dream, Dean said to his dream self, that he didnt deserve to go to Hell, and even though he made the choice on his own, I think we all feel like it’s a horrible punishment for a guy who just wanted his little brother to live. I know I hoped they could find a way to get him out of the deal, but unfortunately, he didnt. He stayed in Hell for 4 months, or 40 hell years. He was tortured by Alistair for 30 years until he became a torturer himself. Cas raised him out of Hell, completely whole, even old scars were gone, but we didnt know for a while that the memories were haunting him. How did we find out? Because he told Sam. He tearfully confessed to Sam on more than one occasion, what happened, what he did, what it felt like at the time and how it was hurting him then. What came of it is that he got to confront his torturer, and even though he couldnt kill him himelf, Sam killed him for him. Dean got justice. Sam on the other hand, also willingly went to Hell to save the world, but he felt like he was mainly at fault for breaking the world in the first place, when it was expressed that it wasn’t only him, and he was completely unknowingly breaking it when he did. He obviously didnt want to go to Hell, but he felt it was the right thing to do. What he got for that though, was his soul in Hell, canonically, for 1.5 years, 180 Hell years. He was torured by Lucifer himself in the most brutal ways imaginable. Cas raised his body, soon after he went to the pit, but we arent given an exact amount of time, whether it be an hour or so, or a few weeks, we just know he was physically out for the majority of the year, but I can’t imagine 10 minutes in the cage with Lucifer is a picnic. However, he came back incomplete, without his soul, which endured unimaginable torture. If that’s not enough, while soulless, Sam did things he wasn’t proud of when he got his soul back, and suffered with this, Once he got his memories of Hell back, a whole new level of suffering began. How was this handled? To our knowledge, he never told anyone the details of his Hell tour. All we know about it, was shown in flash backs and hallucinations, that ended up driving Sam insane. Sam was “fixed” by Cas, by simply shifting the pain to himself, not by Sam talking about it, or confronting his torturer, or anyone killing Lucifer. Sam didnt get justice in any sense, and he still carries all of this with him. He has even had to work along side Lucifer to try to stop Amara. No one even brought this up, even though Sam had very recently been back to the cage and had to face Lucifer and the trauma all over again. Season 13 and still Sam hasn’t been given justice or seen closure when Dean’s was answered in only a few episodes. How can we not see the imballance? Well, when we look at it as Sam is the long suffering Reluctant Hero, suck as it may, it makes more sense. It plays into the narrative that the pain piles on Sam, and Sam stuffs it down. We ourselves may forget this happens, if the show itself didn’t bring it up. The case of Tracy Bell for example. A girl that pops up out of nowhere in 9x2 for no reason than to remind Sam that he let Lucifer out and people got killed. I know a bunch of you blame the writers of the episode for that, as though they hate Sam or Jared, but that was part of the Gardreel story. Something that the producers must have told the writers they wanted. “Bring something painful up from Sam’s past, so that when he feels good at the end of the episode, we can be reminded that theres an Angel healing him from the inside” is probably close to what was said in the meeting. We the viewers need to be reminded that Sam never lets things go, at the same time as he never really speaks of them either. It took 13 seasons, but Dean confirms for us in 13x4 that Sam doesnt admit things or it makes them real, and then he has to deal with it. Sam even confirms it himself in 12X3 when he says he knows Mom is burying herself in hunting instead of dealing, through years of personal experience. Now that we understand this is part of Sam’s character, we can better understand why we dont get to see his emotional POV very often, and his traumas rarely get worked out. The differences between Sam being the reluctant hero, and Dean being the willing hero, manifest in many ways. Dean gets very antsy if its been a few days that they havent had a hunt to go on. Sam however, is content to stay home researching. Their short time of trying to live a domestic life with their girlfriends shows reluctant vs willing also. While Sam was with Amelia, he had nothing to do with hunting except reading the news paper and believing other hunters were taking care of things. He refused to tell Amelia about that part of his life. Dean didnt hunt, but he kept it at arms reach. He kept devils traps in the door ways, a rosary in water under the bed and a gun nearby, and he let Lisa know all about that part of his life, and even tried to live it and maintain a life with her. Dean is the kind of guy who will show you every scar and tell you the details of how he got it, while Sam will hide his scars. Dean suffers when innocent life is lost, but he holds on to the fact that he’s saved more people than he’s hurt and it can help him make it day to day. Sam feels like he failed if he didnt save someone. This is precicely why Sam suffers the burdens of his wrongs for years, and Dean doesnt. Dean did a lot of crap while he had the MoC but he hasnt had to visibly suffer from it after the fact. Sam however, is reminded of his poor choices for seasons after the fact. Now since its not a matter of Sam goes to jail for things and Dean doesn’t, we only need to realize its part of maintaining a character trait for us, so we dont forget that Sam never forgives himself and suffers for years over what he considers failures. Now, this willingness vs reluctance shows in their relationship also. Im not going to try to prove one loves the other more, because I am convinced that Dean is #1 in Sam’s world and Sam is #1 in Dean’s world and they love each other as much as any two people can love each other (to steal from the mouth of JP) they both take care of each other, and neither had to be told to do so. Even when Sam was too little to actually take care of Dean, he still did the best he could by wanting to be with him, and giving him gifts. Dean didnt have to learn 100 ways to make mac and cheese, he did it because he wanted to make Sam happy. That being said, lets move on… Sam’s reluctance in their relationship, isnt that he loves Dean less, or doesn’t want to protect him, but his biggest fear is letting Dean down. He can save Dean’s life a million times but considers himself a failure if he let Dean down. Dean’s biggest fear however is Sam dying. He can let Sam down, he can piss him off, but if Sam isnt alive and well, Dean considers himself a failure. When Sam assumed Dean was dead in S8 and didnt look for him, he was going on a promise that he wouldnt look for him. Since we didnt get enough insight to Sam’s state of mind at the time, Im going to assume that Sam was crushed that Dean was dead, but for himself, it was more important, that he didnt let him down by breaking that promise. He saw how angry Dean was when Dean thought he made a deal that raised him from Hell, so he “knew” Dean would be disappointed if Sam looked for him now. Dean however, needs Sam to be alive, so he will risk Sam being disappointed and possibly hating him, as long as he’s alive. So now in S11 its brought up again, that Sam didnt look for Dean in Purgatory, and Sam hadnt forgiven himself for it, its not the writers hating Sam/Jared, its showing us that Sam still hasnt gotten over letting Dean down. He’s a long suffering character, and doesnt see that he was justified in his actions, but instead blames himself for inaction. This fits right into Sam not finding a Win in a case where he couldnt save everyone. He knows he helps more people than he hurts, but the fact that he hurts people at all outweighs the good in his eyes. There will be a time Im sure, and hopefully soon, given the events of the last 2 seasons, that Sam may collapse under all this weight. Maybe he will have some time to voice how badly things hurt him. But if he doesnt. try not to write it off as no one caring about his character, but understand his character feels like a burden if he unloads to people, even, and especially to Dean, who Im sure he believes has enough burden on his shoulders, without Sam sharing his. So try to be patient my friends. This would come out differently if it was a written story. The writer would be able to show us inside Sam’s head easier than they can this way. The only way into Sam’s head is through someone vocalizing it. If Sam does, then we dont see him burying things, if someone else does, it sometimes looks like hes being picked on for no reason…. but there is a good reason. It’s to keep his character consistant as the longsuffering reluctant hero. By @missjackil

#Sam Winchester #Letters #supernatural #Sam Winchester is our hero #missjackil #submission

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daresplaining · 6 years

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Daredevil Countdown: 3 Days

D.A. Foggy Nelson

As depressing as Matt and Foggy’s break-up was in Season 2, it has set up some really neat stories for Foggy. In the comics, as in the MCU, it is important for him to step out of Matt’s shadow, because this allows him the freedom to build his career and self-confidence. One plot point I’ve been dying for since last season-- which, it seems, is actually happening-- is Foggy running for District Attorney! This is a really interesting plotline as far as Foggy’s character arc is concerned, and as a bonus, it’s a reference to a period of Daredevil comics that doesn’t generally get much attention.

Matt and Foggy have been friends for a long time, and as with most long-term relationships, their dynamic has evolved over the years. When discussing their law partnership, 616 Foggy once referred to Matt as the inspiration and himself as the perspiration. And this seems like a pretty accurate assessment. While Matt is a naturally brilliant lawyer, a charismatic speaker, and is also neglectful of his day job thanks to his superheroing, Foggy works hard to build up his reputation. He’s not a great public speaker. He lacks Matt’s flair. But he is devoted to his career and is, in a quieter way, a brilliant lawyer in his own right.

But when he is first introduced in the comics, he exists very much in Matt’s shadow. When discussing the newly-formed Nelson & Murdock in the very first issue, he attributes the firm’s future success to Matt brains and his (Foggy’s) father’s money. And in the early issues, this fits with his narrative role. He is there to hold down the fort, to run the firm and be the boring, less talented partner against whom Matt’s awesomeness can be compared. The possibility of his becoming the D.A. is teased very early-on, in issue #10-11... but it turns out to be a supervillain’s ruse and nothing more.

Foggy: “Well, that makes me the prize chump of the year! He sure had me fooled!”

Matt: “Chump nothing! You were the first to suspect that the picture of the Organizer on TV was a phony... taken in advance to throw suspicion on Monroe! You’ve proven you do have what it takes to make a fighting D.A., mister!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #11 by Stan Lee, Bobby Powell, Wally Wood, and Sam Rosen

As gullible as this makes Foggy look, it introduces an important character element for him at this early point: his aspirations. Poor Foggy may be treated as a loser by the narrative, he may not have Matt’s talents and main character advantages, but he still has big dreams. It’s thus satisfying that forty issues later, he runs again for real... and wins!

Foggy: “Me and Daniel Webster! --What a laugh! It’s Matt who should have this job-- not me! He was the real brains of ‘Nelson and Murdock’! I was just-- the work horse! But, they say a man can sometimes grow into a job-- maybe this will be my chance to prove myself! My chance to finally get out-- from under the shadow of Matt Murdock!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #50 by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, and George Klein

At this point he is conflicted-- both excited by this boost to his career and nervous about stepping out of his comfort zone. He and Matt had a huge fight during the campaign and so they are no longer speaking at this point... but they get over it, and Foggy decides to fix his nerves by bringing Matt on board has his special assistant.

Reporter: “Howzabout a shot of you two together, Mr. Nelson? It’ll go great with our story of your declared war on Crime-Wave!”

Foggy: “Even better than you think, friend! ‘Cause I’ve got a surprise announcement to make...! Namely, I’ve just invited Matthew Murdock to become my special assistant... for the duration of the current investigation!”

Matt: “It’s true all right, newshound! I’ve joined the team!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #58 by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan

(How great is this page? Love that Gene Colan art.)

But even this, with Matt working as Foggy’s subordinate rather than partner, is a huge shift in the balance of their dynamic. For once, Foggy gets to take the lead, with Matt dropping by the office when he has time to consult on cases. As District Attorney, Foggy is directly interacting with politicians and the press, and he is the first person people come to for help. And then Matt runs off to San Francisco with Natasha Romanov and leaves Foggy all on his own.

Since this is Matt’s comic, this separation means that we don’t see much of Foggy during this period. But when he does appear, he is notably changed. He is extra serious, extra busy. His wardrobe gets snazzier.

Daredevil vol. 1 #114 by Steve Gerber, Bob Brown, and Stan Goldberg

And he becomes more deeply embedded in The Establishment. He is forced to handle tough ethics cases: corruption, student protests, and the ever-present NYC topic of superheroes, about whom he has always had mixed feelings. (This is 200+ issues before he finds out about his best friend’s double life.)

Matt: “Great! Competence lives in Fun City! Sorry about the mess, friend, but I’m sure our crackerjack sanitation department can make it all tidy again-- or at least as tidy as the rest of New York. Which isn’t saying much.”

Foggy: “Not so quick with the flippancy, Hornhead. I think it’s time the police questioned you about a few matters. I’m getting a bit sick and tired of you long underwear types swinging up and down Fifth Avenue like you owned it.”

Matt: “I never thought I’d say this, ‘Mr.’ Nelson, but methinks you’re more interested in your re-election than you are in justice. But I think it’s a little bit too late to begin a crusading D.A. image now.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #127 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Petra Goldberg

And Foggy matures, becoming a more jaded and world-weary version of himself. After getting shot while on the job, he starts rethinking his career. This is a neat mental shift when placed next to Matt’s own superhero philosophy. Foggy has now had a taste of doing what Matt does as Daredevil-- protecting the city-- and it is wearing him down. If only he and Matt could actually speak candidly about this shared experience...

Matt: “You sound a little bitter, Foggy. Are you still upset about the shooting?”

Foggy: “Frankly, Matt... I am. You spend a chunk of your life trying to help this city-- trying to make it safer, a decent place for people to live-- you put up with the crackpots, the bad cops, the crooks-- and then WHAM you get the city’s thanks-- a crummy bullet from a third-hand Saturday Night Special. So sure-- I’m bitter, Matt, this has been building up in me since it happened. I’m bitter as hell.”

Matt: “You’re forgetting good things, Foggy, the good cops... the good people... Don’t do yourself and them an injustice. Have a little faith.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #118 by Gerry Conway, Don Heck, and Petra Goldberg

When his re-election campaign rolls around, Foggy fights hard. His opponent is the charming, charismatic Blake Tower, who Foggy ends up liking and respecting in spite of himself. In the end, and thanks to some supervillain intervention by expert media manipulator the Jester...

TV Foggy: “Fellow citizens, as much as this pains me to say, I am forced to admit that I consider myself unworthy of being re-elected. Please bear with me as I give my explanations.”

Foggy: “What? It’s a lie! I never said that!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #130 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Michele Wolfman

...Foggy loses. Tower, a genuinely good guy and superhero supporter, goes on to have a long and successful career as the new D.A. And Foggy, as hard as he fought for re-election, discovers that he is glad to have escaped from such a stressful job. Matt invites him to join his new private practice, and he gratefully accepts.

Foggy: Once the vote became apparent, I just couldn’t stick around any longer. I had to get away--to be by myself to think. But I’ve come to some conclusions, Matt. The first is that I’m happy I lost, and the second-- Matt, I’ve never begged before, but Matt-- I need a job now... do you need a rather tubby loser hanging around here?”

Matt: “Do you still have that business card I gave you, Foggy?”

Foggy: “Sure, I was too busy to look at it. Why?”

Matt: Just read it. Whether you won the election or not, Foggy, you always were, and you’ll always be-- my partner. Welcome back, buddy. It’s been awhile.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #130 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Michele Wolfman

Many writers since have written Foggy back into Matt’s shadow-- and that’s tough to avoid, since Matt is the main character. But this story arc first introduced the idea of Foggy as a force in his own right, someone who can succeed without Matt around, which is an attitude that has largely stuck around to this day. It presented a welcome and permanent shift in the way writers, and thus Daredevil readers, viewed his character and role in the comic.

While MCU Matt doubled down on his DD activities in Season 2, prioritizing that side of his life over his legal work, Foggy plunged headfirst into his career-- mostly because he had no other choice. With Matt neglecting the firm, Foggy picked up the slack. He spent the entirely of Season 1 putting himself down, emphasizing Matt’s skills over his own, and showing an intense lack of self-confidence regarding his abilities as a lawyer. But Season 2 showed him, in ways that he could not ignore, that he was actually damn good at him job. He realized that he could still achieve his law school (or possibly undergrad...) dream of having a high-powered legal career... even without Matt by his side. And so when the chance to make that dream happen was presented, he leapt at it.

It has been an absolute treat to see Foggy hop around to the other shows, further developing his career, getting used to hanging out with superheroes, and generally demonstrating a level of confidence in himself that is new and wonderful. His life isn’t perfect-- there’s no question that he would rather be doing this with Matt-- but it’s still a big deal for his character development. From here, there are several ways his D.A. aspirations could go. It could be a great thing-- further boosting his career, giving him a new set of challenges, and showing us a side of Foggy we’ve never seen before: a Foggy in a position of power, trying to cope. Or it could end terribly. He could lose. He could win, but end up butting heads with Wilson Fisk. Since Fisk named Foggy in Season 2 as someone he was aiming to take down, that confrontation is going to happen no matter what-- but if Foggy were the D.A., this takedown might involve bribery and blackmail as part of Fisk’s bid for power. I’m really excited to see how this plotline is handled, and feel confident that-- just like in the comics-- this separation will be a good thing for him, and will end with the recreation of a new, better, stronger Nelson and Murdock.

#Daredevil spoilers #Daredevil vol. 1 #Netflix Daredevil #Foggy Nelson #Commentary #DD Countdown

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starsailorstories · 6 years

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I’m going to remake Singin’ in the Rain, the movie that made me gay, as a double gay love story and here’s how

@a-buncha-hoopla I feel like you’d appreciate this.

So we still open with Don Lockwood on the red carpet giving a shoutout to Cosmo and telling his heavily embellished life story that the flashbacks make clear is embellished.

Except now, in addition to that, the flashbacks make it clear that Don and Cosmo were childhood sweethearts and had started to honest-to-heck fall in love when they arrived in Hollywood, but when Don’s career started blowing up they had to look innocuous for the paparazzi (I know the 20s were more of a lax time for gay couples in public but they’re basically hiding for the same reason Don and Cathy have to hide in the original i.e. the studio has a narrative to sell, they have to “keep their stars looking ridiculous at any cost”) and Cosmo sort of...faded loyally into the background. Don telling Lena there’s nothing between them while they play a happy couple for the cameras becomes a lot more of a hmmmmmmmm moment.

Don still jumps into Cathy’s car and that whole scene goes down almost the same except that Cathy’s rebuke slightly implies that it’s not just movies she’s not so into, but men (IT KIND OF ALREADY SOUNDS LIKE THIS TO ME BUT I’M WATCHING WITH LESBIAN GOGGLES SO).

The whole scene at the party is also basically unchanged, with Cathy jumping out of the cake and seeing Don, except The Cream Pie Incident has a few lines making it clear Cathy’s disdain for them all extends to Lena to so it’s more of a confrontation between them. In the next scene on the lot of the new movie, Cathy shows up, “believe me, it was MEANT for mr. lockwood” etc. which Lena can maybe...react to a bit? There’s an “I like her spirit” there.

Idk if the whole thing of Lena getting Cathy fired stays or not...actually you know what! It stays. Lena is petty and I want to keep her petty. But here’s some other things about her that interest me:

She was famous before Don was, he basically owes her his career

Everybody thinks she’s stupid and doesn’t respect her at all AND YET she seems to know the ins and outs of the business better than anyone including the head of the studio and has loads of connections

Yes she’s petty and yes she’s a backstabber but it’s understandable that she wants to maintain what little respect she can get with the way all the men treat her

This will all be relevant later, but at this point: can we have Lena hanging around Significantly during the “Beautiful Girl” number? YES, YES WE CAN. Also, all the fun numbers that Don and Cosmo have together stay fun, but become flirty as well.

Don and Cathy make up but it’s not a falling-in-love scene, he gets her work and she becomes friends with him and with Cosmo, they go to the disastrous preview together and we get “Good Morning, Good Morning” as the inevitable aftermath of a bunch of theatre gays staying up too late together. They hit on the realization to make a musical and have Cathy sing and talk for Lena, all is pretty much as is.

Afterwards, Don and Cosmo say goodbye to Cathy and walk home together. They’re reminiscing about the good times in the vaudeville circuit together and start singing “Singin’ in the Rain” sort of absentmindedly and naturally and sync up and it becomes a romantic dance number between them. Cosmo leans in for a kiss, but The Same Cop who breaks Don out of his reverie in the original shows up, and remembering why they tried to chill their relationship out in the first place, they part ways on the wistful end of the song.

Now the whole Broadway Melody dream sequence is about Don coming out to himself. The random Cyd Charisse character is a beautiful drag queen who sheds their wig and transforms into some kind of ethereal grecian twink and he’s still left with is head spinning but emerges more confident and secure. After they pitch The Dancing Cavalier, they walk out and he confesses his love. Cosmo melts with relief and they kiss.

A FEW DAYS LATER. Lena storms in, not to the final wrap but onto the set, and tells Cathy she knows what’s up. Don and Cosmo go to bat for her but Lena and Cathy are determined to handle this between themselves. “Listen kid,” Lena says, “I’ve been where you’re at. I know it’s hard to make it in this town. But you’re gonna have to find somebody else’s coattails to ride. Times may be changing but I’ve paid my dues, and I’m not going back in the damn cake!”

Cathy doesn’t realize what’s going on between Don and Cosmo--via a series of misunderstandings she still thinks Don’s got it bad for her (when actually he’s genuinely just trying to make up for what a jerk he was to her). Lena thinks she’s gonna fight her on this but actually she’s like “fine, you know, a job’s a job but at this point it’s probably best to distance myself from this whole thing.”

Lena’s like “Really?” and then pauses for ages and is like, “Um. Here’s the thing...if you’re not doing the movie that’s great but I have to learn to sing and dance. Fast.”

So Cathy teaches her.

Lena apologizes from the bottom of her heart for getting her fired and promises to pay her well and help her career where she can (but not if it’ll cost her own career at all). Maybe there are musical numbers here, maybe it’s a montage, I don’t know. But the point is they get to know each other very, very, well, until finally one day,

“Cathy there’s...something I’ve been meaning to say to you but...I’m such a ham. I don’t know if I can do it without the proper setting.”

So they steal into that empty soundstage together, and Cathy figures something out:

Lena can’t sing, and she can’t act, and she can’t dance...

but she can direct.

(This scene is very meaningful to me as it furnished my 7-8 year old self with my first “””””””””””””””from the guy’s perspective””””””””””””””””” gay fantasies, so forgive me if I linger on it).

She creates a magical story and scene around Cathy, puts her up on a balcony to hecking worship her, floods her with artificial moonlight, and when she’s done, Cathy says, “Now that you have the proper setting, can you say it?”

Lena looks up with eyes full of adoration and struggle and whispers, “You’re my voice, Cathy. If this is truly what you want...you’ll say it for me.”

And Cathy stands there with her dress fluttering around all angelically and “Life was a song...you came along...I laid awake the whole night through...” melts from her throat.

So ok, that all having happened and both couples more or less official, the movie is set to release soon and the rumor mill is swirling. The studio wants Cathy AND Cosmo off the lot--nothing to interfere with the power couple the media knows them for.

Cosmo finally starts suffering and writes that symphony. Don and Lena Are Not Communicating, they both think the other is out to get them/out to get Cathy. This means that Lena still gets to go OWN in the head of the studio’s office in that bomb ass outfit and tell them she can sue them if they take Cathy off the film, and this time since she’s doing it For Love it gets to be the righteous comeuppance to all the men who condescended to her that it ALWAYS KIND OF WAS if you’re not watching it in 1955.

And then on the premier night Cathy still ends up singing behind the curtain for Lena and the guys, misunderstanding what’s going on because Lena and Cathy have been overcompensating so much in trying to keep their relationship a secret (they’re like “for all intents and purposes we hate each other” “ok sounds like a plan”), reveal that it’s her, but Lena is the one who tells the audience to stop Cathy from running away and tells them she’s the one whose voice they loved.

And then she turns to Don and Cosmo and says “Don’t just stand there, do something” and having finally gotten the picture they strike up the band and Don sings “You Are My Lucky Star,” TO Cosmo but FOR Lena and Cathy’s benefit.

And at the end, it’s that exact same billboard from the actual movie that says “Starring DON LOCKWOOD and CATHY SELDEN”

except

underneath

it also says

“Produced and directed by LENA LAMONT - Original songs by COSMO BROWN”

and both couples are underneath embracing.

+FADEOUT+

#singin' in the rain #this started as shower thoughts and got incredibly out of hand #musicals #long post

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carlos-penavega · 6 years

Photo

Some people really hate The Boys in the Band. The play, a seminal work that some credit with helping spark the Stonewall Riots, takes place at a birthday party, in which nine gay men gather, before the event devolves into an airing of grievances. And while it was considered revolutionary when it came out in 1968, many believed it should have stayed there. Vanity Faircritic Richard Lawson called the new production a “thoroughly hateful relic that serves zero purpose now.” For some, the only thing the play can do in 2018 is exacerbate stereotypes the gay community has fought hard to kill.

“I feel like a lot of people just have a problem with this show,” Andrew Rannells says, who stars as Larry, a bratty and rebellious man who’s a constant headache for his boyfriend, Hank. However, he thinks that might have more to do with the viewer than the work. “I think it can be looked at as a rather bleak depiction of what your life as a homosexual would be like. I think it got a bad reputation for a while. But I hope that this revival is at least in some way showing that it's actually funnier than people give it credit for, there’s more love between those characters than people remember.” We also have the benefit of new context, 50 years later. “It's not a representation of every gay person. It's a representation of nine people on this one night. At the time, it was a symbol for all gay people. It doesn't have to be.”

Rannells feels like at once like a rarity and like exactly the type of person works like The Boys in the Band were auguring—an out gay man who hasn’t been pigeonholed into playing the goofy gay best friend, but someone who hasn’t shied away from playing gay characters. He knows his history, he’s proud of it, and he wants to use it to do... well, everything. He’s dominated Broadway in shows like The Book of Mormon, Hamilton (heard of it?), and Falsettos. He’s starring in an upcoming Showtime series, Black Monday, about the stock market crash of 1987. He’s writing a memoir. But if there’s one thing many of his projects have in common, it’s a layer of controversy. And he’s not worried about that at all.

Rannells wants me to notice something. He gestures towards the photograph at the end of our booth here at Julius’, an iconic gay bar in the West Village. The black-and-white shot shows a group of men, all white and dressed in ties and sport coats, leaning over the bar as the bartender covers their drinks with his hands. It’s a shot from a “Sip-In” that took place in this bar, Julius’, in 1966. “Dick Leitsch is in that picture,” he says. “He started the Mattachine Society...That's a big part of the reason I wanted to do this photo shoot here, because he's been an amazing man and sadly passed away this past weekend.”

Rannells got to meet Leitsch a few weeks before his death, when friend and artist John Cameron Mitchell brought him to see The Boys in the Band. But Rannells has another connection to Julius’, the oldest gay bar in New York. In the 1970 film adaptation of the play, Larry and Hank are first shot having a drink there. “He was in this physical space,” Rannells says. “It's a piece of our history and that history.”

It’s impossible to watch The Boys in the Band without thinking of how much has progressed in the past 50 years. The anachronisms in the show (the references, the language, the stereotypes) serve to highlight just what has changed—and what has stayed the same. For instance, Rannell’s character, Larry, is living with a serially monogamous divorcee, Hank. But while Hank just wants love and commitment, Larry can’t be tamed.

“I feel like that's a conversation that couples still have today about monogamy and the idea that, as gay people, monogamy is something we should subscribe to—this heteronormative lifestyle and those rules and that shape of things,” he says. “I feel like that's still a very timely conversation that people have.” Another familiar trope? That the most effeminate of the group is the one who is disrespected the most. “There's an awareness in gay culture now, I think, of reconciling your feminine side with the masculine side, and being okay with the fact that whatever that means, however you interpret that, it's not that Masc4Masc thing that people talk about. Especially with younger gay guys, that's more of a thing that they're embracing. I think it's good. It's very good.”

At face value, The Boys in the Band could certainly seem to enforce outdated ideas of gayness. But a new generation also may not understand what was a stereotype and what wasn’t. In the show, Michael, played by Jim Parsons, is a depressed alcoholic who turns into the ringleader for the night’s chaos. In the '60s, it was more obvious to viewers that Michael was depressed because he’s gay. But now that’s not the case.

“We had a group of high school students come. None of them equated Michael’s character, his depression and alcoholism, with being gay,” Rannells says. “They were just like, ‘He's depressed,’ which I thought was some sort of progress, that they were not like, ‘Well because he's gay, that's why he's so messed up.’ They just thought he was a depressed person who happened to be gay.” Michael was no longer a symbol of the gay experience. He was just Michael.

Larry is tricky. Larry is bratty, constantly insulting his partner, threatening to leave or cheat, flirting in front of him to incite jealousy. It’s easy not to like Larry, because, as Rannells puts it, “you’ve either dated a Larry or you were a Larry.” But getting to the heart of these tricky men was an act of understanding history. “There's a sign somewhere in this bar actually, that says, I think, the law was one woman for every three men on the dance floor,” Rannells says. “The stakes just to socialize were so much higher, that that's something we talked a lot about in rehearsal.”

This illegality is hinted at in the play. Emery is roasted for getting arrested in bathhouses. At one point someone knocks on the door, and a character yells “Lily Law!” (polari for cops) and tells everyone they need to be three feet apart. And for Rannells, learning the role of Larry meant feeling that pressure, that paranoia, and knowing that it has to find a release, even if it’s not in the healthiest way. “We're very lucky that for all of the troubles, the fights that we still have to fight now, there's some fundamental things that are just much better for us now 50 years later,” Rannells says. “That's not to say there's not still a ways to go, but when you look at what those guys were doing 50 years ago, it's like, I can freely hang out with my friends at any bar, it's fine."

You wouldn’t know Andrew Rannells is almost 40. He’s got a smooth, boyish face, all cheeks and lips, and bouncing, thick hair. He’s ready to laugh at the slightest provocation, and moves with ease and excitement. His youthful energy is maybe what makes him so compelling—there’s a depth and wisdom that you don’t expect to come from it.

Right now, Rannells is channeling a lot of what he’s learned during his theater years into a memoir. The idea for the memoir began after he wrote a piece for Modern Love in the New York Times about his dad passing away. Transitioning into writing about things like family and hookups has taken some adjustment. “It's an interesting process to go through though, because you do have to be aware of the fact that you're telling your version of events,” he says. “You just have to be sensitive of the way that you portray it.”

Though it covers a lot of his life, much of his memoir will focus on his first seven years in New York City. Rannells moved here in 1997. He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, attending Catholic school and waiting for the Tonys to come around every year. “It's hard to explain to kids now, but the Tonys only happen once a year, and there was no magical Internet YouTube where you couldn’t just be like, ‘What's a clip from a Broadway show?’ I really had to wait for a year to see. I would record them and then watch the same clips over and over. To get that new wave of shows, we had to wait until the following year. I didn't see my first Broadway show until I was 18.” For the record, it was Rent.

Rannells attended Marymount College for two years, at first living in a midtown dorm that fell apart on the students, and then in Brooklyn Heights. But after two years, he devoted himself to acting full time, and landing roles in animation voice work, regional theater, and as a Broadway understudy.

While many narratives are quick to frame the move to New York or Los Angeles as the “I got out and I’m going to make it” moment, the truth is there’s a lot of bad theater you have to go through before finding success. “My career didn't start with The Book of Mormon. I had a lot of time, things I was very proud of—maybe not huge successes on a larger scale, but they were a big deal to me,” Rannells says. “I think that's important to realize and to celebrate those things, because they're happening. It all does lead you to where you're going.”

It’s his ability to appreciate the weird and the small that’s perhaps made him so difficult to typecast. Though he’s spent most of his time in theater, the role he might be best known for is Elijah on Girls, a character that could have easily stayed the trope of the gay best friend, but who morphed into his own complicated, fully-formed person.

Rannells has learned how to be judicious about the roles he chooses. As Elijah, he “got to say some sassy one-liners, but I also have a full-internal life going on. But since then, anything that comes up, I do get offered a lot of gay friend things.” Which is not to say he only wants to play straight. He wants any character he chooses to be, you know, an actual person. And actually, it’d be cool if they were gay. “Before Girls, I really only played straight parts. I liked doing it. I was happy to get to be a part of their shows,” he says. However, “It's nice getting to play gay guys as a gay guy. I was going to say authentic, but that's not quite right either. It's more personal.”

Like The Boys in the Band (and The Book of Mormon, and Hedwig and the Angry Inchbefore it), Girls wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But that’s part of the appeal. “Those are the things that I like to watch,” Rannells says of being a part of productions that push boundaries. “I'm attracted to those stories—[Book of Mormon creators] Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Lena Dunham, I think they have a lot in common, in that they write from their gut, they know that somebody is going to find this and get it. Not everybody does, not everybody respects it. But when people do get it and people locked into what Lena was doing, people love it.”

The thing is, Rannells has emerged unscathed. Sure, you might have hated Girls, but you liked him. You’re excited to see him in whatever he’s doing, both because he’s good at what he does and because you’re not going to see him doing the same thing twice. And now that he’s in the position to keep taking the interesting roles, he’s not going to stop. “I want to be in things that I want to see as well,” Rannells says. “I guess it’s as simple as that.”

#Andrew Rannells #The Boys in the band #TBITB #HELP I LOVE THESE PHOTOS!#ew he's so precious and pure!

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