#(and Joe is most like Ross but i think he was just trying to play it cool lmao)

[souploover69]

Delta Hall

so recently i used ai to generate an episode of Delta Hall Internet Show which the tally hall members are replaced with deltarune characters

(Kris - Rob, Susie - Joe, Noelle - Ross, Berdly - Zubin, Ralsei - Andrew, Lancer - Bora)

The ai made an entire script lmao

Susie: Hey Kris, what's going on?

Kris: Nothing much, just sitting here drinking a diet Dr Pepper and writing my song. What about you?

Susie: Just practicing my singing while I play drums. You think I sound any good?

Kris: laughs Oh man, the way you sing, it sounds terrible!

Susie: laughs Oh yeah?! Just wait until you hear my beatboxing skills, that's gonna make your ears bleed!

[after Susie said that the two begin beatboxing and singing. It's an absolute disaster but they seem to be having fun]

[the clip then cuts to the intro of the Delta Hall Internet Show]

[The scene starts with Kris and Susie playing the accordion and drums respectively. They look really awkward playing them but they're clearly having fun. The music begins playing.]

Susie: (singing) Do you like how we walk! Do you like how we talk! Do you like how our faces disintegra- 

[Berdly abruptly interrupts her.]

Berdly: Hey what's up guys.

Ralsei enters the shot

Ralsei: Hello Berdly.

Susie: Hey.

Berdly: Did you guys know that bananas are a good source of potassium?

[Everyone just stares at Berdly.]

Everyone: No, we didn't know that.

[Awkward silence for a couple of seconds]

Berdly: I'm just gonna go now.

[Berdly left the shot and Kris and Susie go back to the singing/accordion and drums combination but they aren't able to sync up.]

[It then cuts to a clip of Ralsei neatly making a bed, which got ruined by Susie jumping/sliding onto the bed]

[The next scene involves Susie and Berdly attempting to cook a cake. As expected, nothing goes correctly. There is a montage of them making the cake and each section is them making a mistake that ruins the cake.]

Berdly: What's that one cooking tip again?

Susie: No, I think you're doing that wrong. Let me try.

Berdly: Fine.

[Susie's cooking also goes horribly]

[After a while the cake is completely ruined and they are now depressed.]

[It then cuts to a screen saying FIFTEEN SECONDS OF LANCER while several images of Lancer are scattered around the scene]

[Cut to a compilation of clips of Lancer doing funny shenanigans. He's eating cheese, playing with fire, and being a little gremlin.]

Everyone: Yeahh!

[The clip then cuts back to the Fifteen seconds of Lancer]

[Cut to Berdly talking in front of a green screen in front of him. He is talking about video game topics and is being really passionate about it. He talks about stuff like boss fights, game design, and game mechanics. He's even using some hand motions for dramatic effect.]

Everyone: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!

[They're really impressed about the whole presentation and start cheering.]

Jevil: Hello everybody, it is I Jevil! I am here to interrupt Berdly!

[Jevil leaps out of nowhere and starts laughing maniacally.]

Everyone: Jevil!?!

[Jevil looks smug and proud that he was able to interrupt Berdly's presentation.]

Jevil: Did you think you could escape me by using a green screen presentation!? The most devious method of showing a video is no match for my pure chaos!

[Jevil laughs yet again.]

[The clip then cuts to narration]

“Everyone knows that top cakes are a useful item. But, did you know that top cakes are also good for blowing up?????”

[The scene cuts back to Berdly's presentation after Jevil's interruption.]

[Berdly is standing in front of the green screen. He looks visibly annoyed that Jevil interrupted his speech. He has been interrupted yet again by Jevil and now he's just fed up. He doesn't care that the screen is still green anymore and just wants to finish his speech.]

Berdly: Listen, I'm gonna finish this presentation regardless of what Jevil is doing.

[Berdly continues his speech as if nothing even happened even though Jevil continuously tries to interrupt him.]

[Berdly then burst into song, playing the Tally Hall song Greener while the other members of the band jumped out from the audience onto the stage and played the song together.]

[The background is the same green screen of the presentation. The song plays as everyone performs their instruments and dances with them. Susie is playing drums, Ralsei is playing accordion, Kris is playing bass, and Berdly is playing guitar. Lancer shows up unexpectedly and starts playing harmonica. At the end of the song, everyone bows for applause.]

THE END

[boralogues]

i should be doing japanese hw but whatever i managed a 100% on a written test last year ill be fine. anyways, hc's about candi! this time just general relationships w the others >:) Joe- pretty chill. she understands that joe doesn't want to talk to her, or anyone besides bora, and doesn't mind. the two just kinda chill around eachother and bond over a shared dislike of zubin. she tries to help him if he needs it

Zubes- very complicated. y'know how i said she really hates zubin. well she kinda doesn't. she's more upset at her situation and that zubes got her stuck there in the first place, than at him for being the way he is. candi doesn't really talk if he's in the room, but will say a few things. she's very vocal about her frustration and dislike of the situation. she just needs a target for her frustration and it happened to be zubes. she doesn't actually hate him deep down

Andy- neutral. doesn't really mind him, but doesn't know why he likes zubin so much. she has to ask him for most things, since he's the only one who can get them. sometimes, if he bites candi, she freaks out but now she doesn't rlly mind since it happens a fair bit. (also whats with the goop coming off of him in all of that art he's in? i just wanna know what it is)

Rob- concern and confusion, but also friends. really worried and confused as to why he's always crying, but understands it may be something she can't influence or control. she's a pretty good therapist when she wants to be, and just kinda makes sure rob isn't going too badly. she'll talk to him a fair bit since he always wants to talk to joe, and gets denied every time.

Ross- doesn't really know him. ross is by himself, playing the drums most of the time, so candi doesn't really see him all that often. he was her favourite band member before they went all obsessive over MK+A, so is a bit annoyed she doesn't see him more, but she keeps it to herself and understands he might not want to talk to her or the others.

Bora- friends. candi thinks bora is cool. they talk a lot about random stuff they like. idk why but i think bora is good at cooking stuff, so candi might take lessons from him sometimes. she often babysits some of his rats if he can't carry them around or is busy preforming.

Steve- Pretty good friends. candi and steve get along really well, like casey and steve do, since candi's also on the quiet side, and is pretty accommodating for steve's needs. she thinks he's basically just a house cat, but that it's very entertaining. sometimes he'll just be sitting somewhere weird and candi wont mind. she's prolly trying to learn sign language or something similar to more easily communicate with him. she probably vents to him a lot bur feels bad for it

casey- probably the most healthy relationship in the au. casey and candi are both in the same boat, struggling with a lot of the same stuff. the two spend a lot of time chatting, doing random stuff, or being eachother's therapists. candi's got a lot of pent up frustration and sadness, and they only feel comfortable sharing it with casey and steve. they probably have a kindof family dynamic, like cousins or older brother/younger sister relationship since there'd be an age gap. candi is most like their pre-death self around casey.

Ryan- mysterious. seen him like, twice, maybe. thinks he's chill though, but gets scared when he just shows up like "hey lmao wanna check out this letter i got?" all of a sudden

misc head cannons:

candi is biromantic/ace bcz why not. if u gave her a hug she'd be really thankful, the poor girl needs therapy asap. she probably likes hugs a lot, but if someone just suddenly hugged her she'd just be like "wtf get away from me" before realising "damn i rlly needed this" and crying a lot. her hugs are super comforting, but a bit short. she hates sudden loud noises, like slamming doors or sirens, in fact she just hates anything happening without warning. she's super jumpy and gets anxious a lot, and copes by fiddling with whatever she has on her, or just by fiddling with her hoodie. her right eye is a little blurry from the scar over it, but it's not enough to need contacts/glasses. (sorry this is so long lol im hyper fixating on this stuff and im going thru art block but a sudden writing unblock so yh lmao. i might draw the others in the au soon, but i have a swimming carnival soon since im aussie and its still summer and a bunch of tests coming up. anyways, if u have any hc's please do share them im rlly interested in what u think :D)

Joe could totally relate w the zubin&Andy relationship. He Dislikes zubin and doesn't really understand why Andy likes him so much HSHFHD Joe and Candi would def bond over that and Joe would give understanding nods in response to Candis vents abt Zubin.

Oh yeah Andy is a biter HDJDHDHD he will bite anyone who talks to Zubin (especially if him and Zubin were in a convo and were suddenly interrupted) or anyone who doesn't rlly like Zubin (Joe avoids Andy for the most part) and the goop is just goop!!! He's just a melty boy idrk why I made his design like that but I've been drawing two wuv Andy like that since 2018 :p

Awww yeah :( I love the Rob relationship, that is very real Rob will almost all of the time just be like "oh haha okay cool I'm gonna find Joe" and just walk away 😭

AW OMFG I love the idea of Candi taking care/babysitting Boras rats that is so cute 🫶🫶!!!!

Love the family dynamic with Steve/Casey/Candi that is so real :)) they'd def hang out a lot upstairs in the two wuv house (most of them live downstairs) and spend a lot of time venting to each other or chatting about random stuff :)) I think that is very sweet <3

Candi being scared by loud noises is so real I get it. She'd def ask Andy if he can go get her earplugs or like headphones, something to dull the loud noises in the house (Andy eventually is able to steal earplugs from some hunters in the woods)

That's all okay !!!!! I love reading ur headcanons n stuff abt ur oc it's so sick that ppl r so interested in my au it makes me so happy ^w^!!!!! Ooh good luck w ur tests !!! BTW so sorry about how late I responded to this, I've been really busy with midterm (I just finished writing a 4 page paper. Someone get me outta here!!!!!) But it's spring break now so I should reply faster :))

[disappointingyet]

Pavements

Director Alex Ross Perry Stars Stephen Malkmus, Joe Keery, Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg,  Bob Nastanovich, Mark Ibold, Michael Esper, Jason Schwartzman, Alex Ross Perry USA 2024 Language English 2hrs 8mins Colour, black & white

Documentary about the band Pavement – or is it?

Spoilers: Yes, spoilers for something that’s ostensibly a documentary

Ah, Pavement: the 1990s band who were the subject of one of the mansplaining jokes in Barbie that was then frequently mansplained by 45-year-old men.

For a band who were as wilfully awkward as Pavement, a straightforward rock doc consisting of interviews with the band plus assorted talking heads would seem a bit inappropriate. Fortunately, Alex Ross Perry – who normally makes feature films rather documentaries* – is here to give us something that’s very far from the conventional portrait of a band.

The conceit is that Pavement’s 2022 reunion is a momentous event that coincides with an exhibition about the band, the production of a jukebox musical and a Hollywood biopic. In what would make him a bit of the Bob Fosse of our times, Perry turns out to be the director of the biopic, the musical and what you’re watching. He weaves together the standard elements of one of these documentaries – rehearsals for the reunion tour (it’s so often rehearsals for that first gig together in decades) and footage from the past – with the making of the musical and film and then scenes from movie, the stage show and the exhibition. 

If nothing else, you have to admire Perry’s commitment to the bit. Setting up and filming several scenes from a non-existent biopic is a lot of work. Getting Broadway-style arrangements and choreography for assorted Pavement songs and getting an actual musical theatre star as your lead is a lot of work.

It is work that pays off, though, I think: Joe Keery (from Stranger Things) is hilarious as Joe Keery, the vain, ambitious, methody and rather dim actor who thinks that playing Pavement singer Stephen Malkmus in the biopic Range Life is going to grab him an Oscar. And the musical numbers from the show Slanted! Enchanted! had me thinking, ‘Huh, these songs actually kind of work in this context.’

The problem is not the elaborate set of jokes this film is playing. No, the problem when we switch back to the standard business of a rock documentary – those rehearsals, on-stage footage, old interviews, new interviews and just the grinding dull story of how one album follows another. If there is anything remotely interesting about the Pavement story, it’s not here.** They were just a bunch of dudes who liked The Fall and Dinosaur Jr and made some snarky songs that sounded like a bunch of dudes from California and Virginia who liked The Fall and Dinosaur Jr. I mean, I think Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is a really good record but I don’t need to know anything about the making of it. 

There’s some mileage in old Malkmus interviews where he’s totally not willing to play the publicity game. It’s passingly amusing, I guess. Maybe less so to me because I was a music journalist in the 1990s and thus one of those people trying to get monosyllabic bands to something, anything, remotely interesting. Maybe that’s just my baggage. 

In the end I was rather left wanting a cut that was just the stuff staged for this project and none of the real footage. Something closer to A Cock And Bull Story, say – than this intriguing but ultimately slightly unsatisfying hybrid. *To tell the truth, although I’ve seen one of his films previously, I mostly think of Perry as a podcast guest. **There's a whole other documentary doing the rounds about the most obviously interesting member of Pavement, original drummer Gary Young. I saw Pavements at the 2024 London Film Festival

[bisluthq]

oh caroline is probably about twigs but not m&yts - it has nothing to do with her and their rs (and it prob don’t even fit their timeline) and it doesn’t match taylor and their story either. but maylors believe that because of the “TS” and because of the brief lyrical parallel with dbatc (which they think is about matty 😭)

it’s more of a fictional song and probably not even entirely about a person and romantic love. matty is just like that

I disagree for two reasons: 1) M&YTS has a lot of similarities to IYTSLMK which Twigs obviously worked on with them. Both have references to the girl like not wearing anything (which is very much in line with how Twigs dresses irl - not literally nothing like in the songs but like she loves see through things and micro crop tops and shit) to the whole basic premise of fantasy/perfection/etc 2) Matty hasn't ever afaik said M&YTS is largely fictional but he DID say that about Oh Caroline - like verbatim he said it's a fictional character that they made up but the cucking thing is something that happened to him lol - so idk. Maylors are crazy and imo ignore what Matty and Taylor both say about their music (which I think we shouldn't do) and also the Joe/Twigs and also the other 75 guy contributions etc of it all (all of which we shouldn't be doing, because while Matty and George write most of the songs - as in lyrics and melodies and again some are primarily George’s - Adam and Ross contribute to the instrumentals a lot and ergo the melodies and vibes too so like it’s a group project??) but yea idk I think M&YTS is largely about Twigs and Oh Caroline might have shades of Twigs (bc breaking up with your fiancee is very sad) and shades of Taylor (because of him saying the being cucked thing is something that happened to him personally and Taylor ditched him for Calvin after 1.0 and was with Joe at the start of 2.0 soooo) but I believe him when he says it's largely made up.

also like this is what I was trying to say to the anon who asked me about it - I think you can know a lot about The 1975/have listened to their full discography/know their dating histories/have listened to and read what Matty's said about shit and come out of it with drastically different opinions on what shit's about because of how Matty and the guys write VERY metaphorically a lot of the time and it's rarely (if ever) explicitly a play by play of something that went down. Frankly I'm not sure Matty himself is always 100% sure what a song's about because like he gets an idea and he presents it to the boys and then something gets made lol and it's not always where he started from.

[youreamonocoque]

Desirae pronounces GIF as Jif I must now unstan please excuse me

[aidanturnerstuff]

Aidan Turner on becoming a dad and his new drama, The Suspect

Three years on from Poldark, the actor wants less scything and more nuance in his roles — and has found it in a new ITV series

The man who for four pectoral-perfect years was Poldark is recalling the moment he felt he had arrived as an actor. Aidan Turner was 27, perhaps 28, and playing both an accidentally lethal vampire in BBC3's Being Human and the more deliberately dangerous Dante Gabriel Rossetti in BBC2's Desperate Romantics. His career was going so well that he rented his first place in London, a flat above Mornington Crescent station.

"I was chuffed with myself. It was the coolest thing, hanging out with cool actors and going to bars and trying to live this hedonistic lifestyle that the artists were living. And I still had the energy every morning to go to work."

I hope, I say, he realises that is all over, now that he is a father.

"Oh, yeah. I don't go out at all any more. I'll be home by nine o'clock or in deep trouble for sure. Hangovers just aren't worth it these days."

Turner, who is a Dubliner and off-screen sounds like one, married the American actress Caitlin Fitzgerald in Italy a year ago. They had met on what was, for almost everyone apart from them, a forgettable low-budget 2018 film, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. Earlier this year, Fitzgerald gave birth, although Turner, who some time ago made the decision not to talk about his private life (it seems to have involved a healthy number of girlfriends but no scandal), asks me not even to disclose the baby's sex. All we know is that he or she is not one of babyland's great sleepers.

"The sleepless nights are a real thing. There's a huge shift for sure. I think every man will understand what I mean by that," he says. Ross Poldark, I point out, was a father, but not even his most adoring fan would accuse him of being hands-on.' "Hardly does anything! He goes to the kitchen, grabs a chunk of bread, then he's up on a horse and he's off again, getting involved in somebody else's business."

Turner is not only a father but also 39 years old. I wonder if he feels grown up. He deftly diverts the question towards his new series, his first for IT V, a psychological thriller - about a psychologist - called The Suspect (and not to be confused with Channel 4's recently derided Suspect starring his Hobbit co-star James Nesbitt).

"Certainly The Suspect feels like a very grown-up role for me and the genre and the tone of the piece too feels like I've sort of broken into a different place," he says in the Soho Hotel in central London before its press screening.

"The scripts that are coming in now, they tend to be like that. Maybe it's being a dad, maybe it's just being that bit older, but there has been a shift of late,which is great."

In The Suspect he plays Joe O'Loughlin, who may or may not have killed a former patient. The five-parter keeps us guessing. Withholding the truth from the viewer, while being true to Joe's character, was not as hard as you might think, he says. Joe could be a murderer, he is certainly flawed.

"That's what I loved about the character: he's complicated. We do these things in life we regret." We're all guilty of something, I offer. "We're all guilty of something," he agrees.

Just as he read Winston Graham's Poldark novels before playing their hero, Turner did due research for Joe. He met a forensic elinical psychologist, Dr Robert Lambert-Simpson, who had worked with dangerous criminals and recommended that Turner master a therapist's empathetic but noncommittal grunt. Joe has been diagnosed with Parkinson's and Turner discussed the condition with Drew Hallam, the same age as him but diagnosed with the disease when he was 35. The point Hallam made was that although he knew Parkinson's would not kill him, he also knew he would die with it. In finding Joe's character, Turner says, Hallam was more helpful than any of the books he read.

Despite the telltale tremor in Joe's hand, the series nevertheless opens with him climbing out of a multi storey building to talk down a suicidal young man about to throw himself off. Turner shot the scene in a film lot and was two, rather than 25, floors up. "But I was dangled pretty high and I'm not good with heights and those gasps and screams are real. I was terrified.'

Did he enjoy playing vulnerability? "That's what I loved about Joe too. He's not just this heroic protagonist who is there to be the stock character we've seen 100 times before - and that I've played 100 times before."

I wasn't going to say it."But that's what really attracted me to him. It doesn't feel cookie cutter and that's where I'm trying to go now with things, roles where there's more layers and it's more complicated and more dense. It just feels right. I had my own accent for this too, which was really interesting. It felt really grounded for the character. And I had a beard, which is what I usually wear. It was closer to me."

It is nevertheless undeniable that Captain Ross Poldark remains the role of his career so far and that Turner brought to it, as well as his beauty, tremendous patrician authority, for which he fielded a more or less RP English accent. But Poldark was not really a complex man. He made mistakes, but they came from the heart - or, at least, the nether regions. I mention the last episode of the fifth and final season three years ago. It was hardly a surprise to learn that Ross was neither cheating on his wife, Demelza, nor collaborating with the French enemy.

A similar lack of nuance doomed Leonardo, last year's eight-part Euro-pudding of a bio-drama shown on Sky. Turner as the Renaissance painter again played a man of passionate virtue, again asserted in public-school English. The artist was trapped in a murder plot but who doubted his innocence? The Guardian called Leonardo "awful"; our own Hugo Rifkind deemed it "not dreadful". It has not, despite what fans may have read, been renewed. "It did get kicked around in the press a little bit. I had no qualms about that. It was a fear I had going in and discussions we had about where the narrative might go, but it was always going to be difficult when you try to change history on a TV show. And there's no need. He has a very, very interesting life, Leonardo, we don't need to fictionalise elements of it, I don't think."

Could it have been done without a murder? "Of course it could. There was no need for it." His sexuality is interesting enough? "Exactly. And we covered some of that in Leonardo. I think we could have gone further with that."

Next he will star in Fifteen-Love, a new drama for Amazon, in which he plays a maverick tennis coach. Ella Lily Hyland plays his star prodigy who makes an explosive allegation against him.

"It's worth waiting for the right thing," he says. "I have a child and I don't want to work as much and I really only want to do the work that I'm passionate about and thankfully there's stuff around for me.

"I've done a lot of costume drama and supernatural shows or science fiction and that kind of thing. I've kind of done that for now. More contemporary pieces, especially a psychological thriller like The Suspect- these are shows that I really watch."

The Suspect has a habit of scrutinising Turner's face in intense close-up. In the flesh, with only a light beard, he looks hardly older than when I met him eight years ago in the West Country filming the initial series of Poldark - neither of us, poor fools, guessing at the phenomenon it would become. On screen now with a much heavier beard, and with the creases round his eyes somehow accentuated, he looks tons older and scarcely recognisable. Perhaps that was the idea of the beard.

"You do feel quite hidden. There is a veil there. And for me as well. I think maybe one time in 18 months I got recognised with the beard also adopted for Leonardo. The day I shaved it off, it happened three or four times in town.

How much does he hate that? "I don't hate it. People have only ever been really, really kind, really lovely. And it's only ever fans. I don't love it because

I'd like to not be noticed and I think a lot of actors too quite enjoy people- watching and observing and that goes out the window if you're getting recognised. People are locking eyes with you. It just feels unsettling. It feels a bit creepy."

 Is the attention all from women? "Is it all women? Mostly. Mostly, is the accurate answer. At the height of his torso's scythe-waving fame did he feel objectified? "No, I didn't. I mean, I know it's different for a young guy to show up in some of those photographs or that kind of show, and have that kind of press, in comparison to it happening to a young girl. It's a different thing. I don't fear for my safety when I walk around. My demographic for Poldark was more women."

At the height of his torso's scythe-waving fame did he feel objectified? "No, I didn't. I mean, I know it's different for a young guy to show up in some of those photographs or that kind of show, and have that kind of press, in comparison to it happening to a young girl. It's a different thing. I don't fear for my safety when I walk around. My demographic for Poldark was more women."

I have it on good authority that when he played in Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore in the West End in 2018 female audience members would gasp just at the sight of his bare arms. "There was a bit of that. Some nights you'd hear comments. But then very quickly it would calm down. But that was fun. I mean, every time I do theatre, I just want to do more theatre."

Turner talks so comfortably it is hard to imagine him as a shy child growing up in Dublin, the son of an electrician father and an accountant mother. Although he spent eight childhood years competing at ballroom dancing - he reached international level - the shyness endured, he says, until he went to the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, where his confidence grew "quite quickly". He left and landed a role in a primetime RTE medical drama. Barely four years later, via the vampire and his first great painter, he was in New Zealand filming The Hobbit trilogy for Peter Jackson.

And rather than his typical alpha male roles, he played a small man. "They shrank us. I played a dwarf on that one. But got away with not wearing yak hair beards, which is what a lot of the other guys were wearing."

The only thing he has not done - or not done enough - is comedy, and he is very good at it. On Toast of Tinseltown this year he played Uncle Barney, a lunatic cowboy in pursuit of a rattlesnake. His sibilant, ten-second assault on the word "message" stole a scene clean away from Matt Berry. Perhaps, he muses, another comedy, like The Lieutenant of Inishmore, should be his return to the stage.

 If he is missing solemn old Captain Ross, he must be doing it at a level it would take Joe O'Loughlin to uncover. He does, he will concede, miss riding Poldark's Co Wexford horse, Seamus, but mostly he is missing his child and his wife. Fitzgerald has just left for New York where she is shooting a movie. "It is hard. It's the first time. She's only been gone a couple of days. So yeah, it's difficult, but I'm busy: keeping busy is definitely a good thing for me while they're away."

A decade on from landing in London, Turner now has the luxury of choosing to keep busy or not. Now, that must be what "arriving" really means. The Suspect will be on ITV and the ITV Hub later this month. X

[forfoxessake]

I posted 166 times in 2022

129 posts created (78%)

37 posts reblogged (22%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@oldstuffnewstuff

@girlgerard

@mcrbois

@teachmetokill

@iero

I tagged 164 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

#100 movies challenge - 110 posts

#movies seen in 2022 - 110 posts

#movie review - 89 posts

#100 movies - 22 posts

#oscar nominee 2022 - 18 posts

#review - 16 posts

#gerard way - 15 posts

#my chemical romance - 15 posts

#movies seen in 2021 - 7 posts

#documentary - 7 posts

Longest Tag: 55 characters

#reasons why gerard would make a great newsletter writer

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

[02] Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts

Directed by Eran Creevy, Giorgio Testi,  Joe Pearlman

 As a fan, I absolutely loved this. Of course, there wasn't going to be anything new, it was not the point. It was a time to remember what they experienced throughout those years and it's wonderful to be able to look back and see things from a distance. Unfortunately, due to covid this probably was smaller than could have been but not any less enjoyable.

14 notes - Posted January 10, 2022

#4

[45] Tom At The Farm (2013)

Directed by Xavier Dolan 

 The thing about this movie is that you are constantly waiting for something horrible to happen. The tension is palpable. It's sexually charged, it's angry and mad and without a reason. Tom is at the farm and he can't get out of it.

18 notes - Posted April 12, 2022

#3

[41] Belfast (2021)

Directed by Kenneth Branagh 

 Remembering your own past is a thing that seems to be popular with directors currently. I like this trend, and I like that Branagh did it slightly differently. He goes further back and tries to remember something from his childhood that at the time he wasn't fully able to understand, and he doesn't try to make it make sense to us. It still feels like living in his memories, a bit confusing, sometimes fantastical, often a bit scary. Grown-ups can be magical and so big, almost unreal characters. It's an honest trip down memory lane, one where you don't ask your family to explain things how they really were.

20 notes - Posted April 7, 2022

#2

[14] Pleasantville (1998)

Directed by Gary Ross 

This was one of the movies I always stopped everything I was doing and watched whenever it was on tv after school. I wasn’t old enough to understand what it was talking about or the more complex themes but I still enjoyed it a lot.

I was surprised to still find enjoyment and beauty here, it’s a very original work, filled with practical effects and what is a simple plot at first but it gets more and more exquisite when those tv characters start to feel like real people and you can’t stop the changes. We can’t go back to seeing the world in black and white, pleasant.

24 notes - Posted January 24, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

You know what.

I truly am an #MCR5 believer but I don't think it's happening on #MCRLA5 - specially now that the main buck of the tour is almost officially over. No more tour buses and all.

This #Return tour has been about them reconnecting with My Chemical Romance, not just us, but them relearning nearly all of their songs, giving them new arrangements, new lyrics, it means something different now.

They choose to give us a different set list every single night, it’s incredible rare and precious what they have done, it show us that they are truly committed, it’s far beyond a “let’s make money off people’s memories tour”. They didn’t need to do that to have a successful tour and yet they choose to - even now so close to the end - add songs that they haven’t played yet and even a song they have never played live before.

It’s watching them become a band again, and I really think they needed to learn how to be that again, to learn all of their songs, revisit who they were, to find out who they want My Chemical Romance to be from now on.

Whoever that is going work out it’s up to them, maybe it won’t be as intense as they were before (up until BP), but it will special.

24 notes - Posted October 15, 2022

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[weheartchrisevans]

BOSTON — So you're Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who opposes Roe v. Wade and wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and you get a call from Chris Evans, a Hollywood star and lifelong Democrat who has been blasting President Trump for years. He wants to meet. And film it. And share it on his online platform. Can anybody say "Borat?" “I was very skeptical,” admits Scott. “You can think of the worst-case scenario.”But then Scott heard from other senators. They vouched for Evans, most famous for playing Captain America in a series of films that have grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. The actor also got on the phone with Scott’s staff to make a personal appeal.

It worked. Sometime in 2018, Scott met on camera with Evans in the nation’s capital, and their discussion, which ranged from prison reform to student loans, is one of more than 200 interviews with elected officials published on “A Starting Point,” an online platform the actor helped launch in July. Not long after, Evans appeared on Scott’s Instagram Live. They have plans to do more together.

“While he is a liberal, he was looking to have a real dialogue on important issues,” says Scott. “For me, it’s about wanting to have a conversation with an audience that may not be accustomed to hearing from conservatives and Republicans.”

Evans, actor-director Mark Kassen and entrepreneur Joe Kiani launched “A Starting Point” as a response to what they see as a deeply polarized political climate. They wanted to offer a place for information about issues without a partisan spin. To do that, they knew they needed both parties to participate.

Evans, 39, sat on the patio outside his Boston-area home on a recent afternoon talking about the platform. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans and spent some of the interview chasing around his brown rescue dog. Nearly 100 million people didn’t vote in the 2016 general election, Evans says. That’s more than 40 percent of those who were eligible.He believes the root of this disinterest is the nastiness on both sides of the aisle. Many potential voters simply turn off the news, never mind talking about actual policy.“A Starting Point” is meant to offer a digital home for people to hear from elected officials without having the conversation framed by Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow.

“The idea is . . . ‘Listen, you’re in office. I can’t deny the impact you have,’ ” says Evans. “ ‘You can vote on things that affect my life.’ Let this be a landscape of competing ideas, and I’ll sit down with you and I’ll talk with you.”

Or, as Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who has appeared on the site, puts it, “Sometimes, boring is okay. You’re being presented two sides. Everything doesn’t have to be sensational. Sometimes, it can just be good facts.” Evans wasn’t always active in politics. At Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, he focused on theater, not student government. And he moved away from home his senior year, working at a casting agency in New York as he pushed for acting gigs. His uncle, Michael E. Capuano, served as a congressman in Massachusetts for 20 years, but other than volunteering on some of his campaign, Evans wasn’t particularly political.

In recent years, he’s read political philosopher Hannah Arendt and feminist Rebecca Solnit’s “The Mother of All Questions” — ex-girlfriend Jenny Slate gave him the latter — and been increasingly upset by Trump’s policies and behavior. He’s come to believe that he can state his own views without creating a conflict with “A Starting Point.” When he and Scott spoke on Instagram, the president wasn’t mentioned. In contrast, recently Evans and other members of the Avengers cast took part in a virtual fundraiser with Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala D. Harris.

“I don’t want to all of a sudden become a blank slate,” says Evans. “But my biggest issue right now is just getting people to vote. If I start saying, ‘vote Biden; f Trump,’ my base will like that. But they were already voting for Biden.”

(In September, Evans accidentally posted an image of presumably his penis online and, after deleting it, tweeted: “Now the I have your attention . . . Vote Nov. 3rd!!!”)

Evans began to contemplate the idea that became “A Starting Point” in 2017. He heard something reported on the news — he can’t remember exactly what — and decided to search out information on the Internet. Instead of finding concrete answers, Evans fell down the rabbit hole of opinions and conflicting claims. He began talking about this with Kassen, a friend since he directed Evans in 2011’s “Puncture.” What if they got the information directly from elected officials and presented it without a spin? Kassen, in turn, introduced Evans to Kiani, who had made his fortune through a medical technology company he founded and, of the three, was the most politically involved.

Kiani has donated to dozens of Democratic candidates across the country and earlier this year contributed $750,000 to Unite the Country, a super PAC meant to support Joe Biden. But he appreciated the idea of focusing on something larger than a single race or party initiative. He, Kassen and Evans would fund “A Starting Point,” which has about 18 people on staff.

“There’s no longer ABC, NBC and CBS,” Kiani says. “There’s Fox News and MSNBC. What that means is that we are no longer being censored. We’re self-censoring ourselves. And people go to their own echo chamber and they don’t get any wiser. If you allow both parties to speak, for the same amount of time, without goading them to go on into hyperbole, when people look at both sides’ point of view of both topics, we think most of the time they’ll come to a reasonable conclusion.”

“What people do too often is they get in their silos and they only watch and listen and read what they agree with,” says John Kasich, the former Ohio governor and onetime Republican presidential candidate. “If you go to Chris’s website, you can’t bury yourself in your silo. You get to see the other point of view.” As much as some like to blame Trump for all the conflicts in Washington, Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) says he’s watched the tone shifting for decades. He appreciated sitting down with Evans and making regular submissions to “Daily Points,” a place on the platform for commentary no longer than two minutes. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Coons recorded a comment on Judge Amy Coney Barrett and the Affordable Care Act.“ ‘A Starting Point’ needs to be a sustained resource,” Coons says. “Chris often talks about it being ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ for adults.”

It’s not by chance that Evans has personally conducted all of the 200-plus interviews on “A Starting Point” during trips to D.C. Celebrities often try to mobilize the public, whether it’s Eva Longoria, Tracee Ellis Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus hosting the Democratic National Convention or Jon Voight recording video clips to praise Trump. But in this case, Evans is using his status in a different way, to entice even the most hesitant Republican to sit down for an even-toned chat. And he’s willing to pose with anyone, even if it means explaining himself on “The Daily Show” after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posted a selfie with Evans. (Two attempts to interview Trump brought no response.) Murkowski remembers when Evans came to Capitol Hill for the first time in 2018. She admits she didn’t actually know who he was — she hadn’t yet seen any Marvel movies. She was in the minority.“We meet interesting and important people but, man, when Captain America was in the Senate, it was all the buzz,” she says. “And people were like, ‘Did you get your picture taken?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I sat down and did the interview.’ ‘You did an interview? How did you get an interview with him?’ ”What impressed Murkowski wasn’t his star power. It was the way Evans conducted the interview.“It was relaxing,” she says. “You didn’t feel like you were in front of a reporter who was just waiting for you to say something you would get caught on later. It was a dialogue . . . and we need more dialogue and less gotcha.”

“Starting Points” offers two-minute answers by elected officials in eight topic areas, including education, the environment and the economy. This is where the interviews Evans conducted can be found. “Daily Points” has featured a steady flow of Republicans and Democrats. A third area, “Counterpoints,” hosts short debates between officials on particular subjects. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, debated mail-in voting with Dusty Johnson, the Republican congressman from South Dakota.

“Most Americans can’t name more than five members of the United States House,” says Johnson. “ ‘A Starting Point’ allows thoughtful members to talk to a broader audience than we would normally have.”

The platform’s social media team pushes out potentially newsworthy clips, whether it’s Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) discussing his meeting with Barrett just before he tested positive for the coronavirus, or Angus King, the independent senator from Maine, criticizing Trump for his comments on a potential peaceful transfer of power after November’s election. Kassen notes that the King clip was viewed more than 175,000 times on “A Starting Point’s” Twitter account, compared with the 10,000 who caught in on CNN’s social media platform.

“Because it’s short-form media, we’re engineered to be social,” says Kassen. “As a result, when something catches hold, it’s passed around our audience pretty well.”

The key is to use modern tools to push out content that’s tonally different from what you might find on modern cable news. Or on social media. Which is what Evans hopes leads to more engagement. He’s particularly proud that more than 10,000 people have registered to vote through “A Starting Point” since it went online.

“If the downstream impact or the byproduct of this site is some sort of unity between the parties, great,” says Evans. “But if nobody’s still voting, it doesn’t work. We need people involved.”

[aaliyah-babe]

The One With The Butt: Part One

pairings: eventual joey x reader, jamie x reader

authors note: i own nothing from friends, all credit goes to their respective owners. feedback is always appreciated!

feedback is the glue that holds my writing together!

you guys had gotten invited to the play that joey was in, you were sat next to pheobe on the end,

“oh look! look, there’s joeys picture! this is so exciting!” rachel squealed, showing you all joeys picture.

“you can always spot who’s never seen one of his plays before, notice no fear, no sense of impending doom...” chandler trailed off,

“the exclamation point in the titles scares me. you know, it’s not just freud, it’s freud!” pheobe exclaims, and you giggle at her.

the lights went down as you readied yourself for joeys plays, they weren’t all bad, but they weren’t all good, don’t get yourself wrong he was a good actor, he just chose the wrong stuff to act in.

“shh. the magic is about to happen!” ross shushed everyone

“well, eva,” you heard joey say with a german accent and you sighed, knowing it was gonna be another bust. “we’ve done some excellent work here,”

you looked at pheobe and she gave you the same look before you started giggling quietly, and ross gave you a warning look which made you stop.

“and i would have to say your problem is quite clear,” joey said before stopping. a piano intro started playing before joey got up from his seat and began singing, “all you want is a dinkle, what you envy’s a schwang! a thing through which you can tinkle, or play with or simply let hang,”

you looked at ross before whispering, “now can we laugh,” and he started chuckling aswell.

the play went on for what felt like hours, you had looked through the cast around five times, pheobe nudging you to look at joeys dancing and singing at times which made you both laugh quietly, before the show was finished.

everybody on the stage took a bow before you all got up and started clapping, yelling at the cast,

“yes! excellent!”

they walked off the stage as you all groaned, sitting back down,

“oh my god, that was nauseating,” you sighed into pheobes shoulder,

“i feel violated,” rachel agreed,

“did anybody else feel like they wanted to peel the skin off their body to have something else to do?” monica asked,

“ross, 10:00,” chandler nudged ross,

“i’d it? feels like 2:00,” ross groaned,

“no, 10:00,”

“what?”

“there’s a beautiful woman at 8, 9, 10:00!” chandler sighed which made you all look in his direction and see a very beautiful woman touching up her lipstick.

“wow she is pretty,” you agreed with chandler,

“she’s amazing! she makes the women i dream about look like short, fat, bald men,”

“well, go over to her. she’s not with anyone,” monica said to him,

“oh yeah, right. and what would my opening line be? “excuse me..” chandler said before blubbering words,

“oh come on! she’s a person, you can do it,” rachel encouraged,

“oh please could she be more out of my league? ross back me up here,” chandler patted ross on the back,

“he could never get a woman like that in a million years,” ross agreed,

“thank you,”

“oh, oh! but you know you always see these really beautiful women with these really nothing guys, you could be one of those guys!” pheobe encouraged him,

“oh yeah! come on chandler, do it!” you told him.

“you think?” he asked you all,

“oh yeah!”

“oh, god. i cant believe i’m even considering this. i’m very, very aware of my tongue,”

“come on!”

“here it goes,” chandler walked away and started talking to the woman,

he started saying a few things before he started walking back over,

“chandler?” the woman asked, making him go back over,

“wow, go chandler,” you nudged monica.

joey walked out and you all said hey.

“i didn’t know you could dance!” ross said,

everybody else said stuff to him about the play,

“was it good?” he asked, hopeful. your heart hurt for the boy.

everybody was silent before they all said the same things they did before.

“come on you guys, it wasn’t that bad, i was the lead! it was better than that thing with the trolls!” he argues,

“you’re right joey, you are, come here,” you hugged him,

“did you at least like it?” he asked, still hopeful,

“i’m not gonna lie to you joe. it wasn’t the best play,” his face fell, “but! you’re a good actor i just think your always going for the wrong roles!” you said and he smiled a little,

“thanks y/n/n,” he hugged you again, before letting you go not completely and just let his arm drape around your shoulder.

“she said yes! she said yes!” chandler ran over before turning to joey, “awful play man! woah!”

you rubbed joeys back, feeling bad for him a little.

“her names aurora and she’s italian and she pronounces my name “chand-ler,” “chand-ler,” he was proud of himself you could see, “i think i like it better that way- oh listen! the usher gave me this to give to you.” he gave joey a card.

“what is it?” rachel asked,

joey read the card as his face lit up, “estelle leonard talent agency, an agency left me its card!” he smiled,

“told you,” you whispered to him and he smiled at you.

“maybe they want to sign me!” he smiled happily,

“based on this play?” pheobe asked and joey frowned, “based on this play!”

you guys were hanging out at the coffee house and jamie had joined you, and once again joey distanced himself from you and him. what the hell was his problem? it pissed you off that your bestfriend clearly didn’t like your boyfriend and didn’t even try to hide it!

“hey, kids,” chandler walked in, after his date with aurora.

“hey, chandler,” jamie said to him,

“well this line is passion, and this is just a line,” phoebe read monica’s hand,

“wow i can’t believe i’ve been here seven seconds and you haven’t asked me about my date,” chandler said,

“how was your date chandler?” everybody asked,

“yeah, chand-ler?” monica said, making you smile.

“it was unbelievable! i’ve never met anyone like her. she’s had the most amazing life! she was in the israeli army...”

“luckily, none of the bullets hit the engine block. so, we made it to the border. but just barely and i... i’ve been talking about myself all night long, i’m sorry. what about you? tell me one of your stories!” aurora said to chandler, who smiled at the woman in front of him.

“alright, once.... once, i got on the subway, right? and it was at night and i rode it all the way to brooklyn, just for the hell of it,” he said which made aurora laugh and he smiled again,

“we talked till like 2:00,” chandler said, “it was this perfect evening... more or less,”

“all of the sudden we realise we’re in yemen!” aurora exclaims,

“i’m sorry we is?” chandler asked,

“we would be me and rick,” she answered,

“who’s rick?” joey asked,

“who’s rick?” chandler asked her,

“my husband,” she answered.

“ew,” everyone groaned for chandler,

“oh, so your divorced?” chandler asked,

“no,” she said,

“oh, i’m- i’m sorry your widowed... hopefully?” he asked again,

“no, i’m still married.”

“so uh, tell me. how do you think your husband would feel about you sitting here with me, sliding your foot so far up my pant leg you can count the change in my pocket?”

“don’t worry. i imagine he’d be okay with you because really with ethan,” she giggled,

“ethan? there’s an ethan?” chandler asked,

“ethan is my... boyfriend,” she answered

“what?!” everyone exclaimed.

“explain something to me. what kind of relationship do you imagine us having if you already have a husband and a boyfriend?” chandler asked,

“i suppose, mainly sexual,” she offers.

“huh,”

“aw, i’m sorry it didn’t work out,” monica apologised,

“what not work out? i’m seeing her again on thursday,” everyone looked at him confused, “didn’t you listen to the story?”

“didn’t you listen to the story?” you asked,

“yeah, this is twisted! how could you get involved with a woman like this?” monica asked,

“i had some trouble with it at first too, but the way i look at it, i get all of the good stuff, all the fun, all the talking, all the sex and none of the responsibility! i mean this is every guys fantasy,”

“that is not true,” phoebe said, “ross, jamie, is this your fantasy?”

“no,” they both said,

you smiled at your boyfriend before kissing his cheek, he looked at ross before they both nodded their heads, “yeah, it is,”

you glared at jamie.

“maybe somebody shouldn’t be with somebody then,” joey muttered but you heard him anyways, what is his deal? you were so going to talk to him after this.

“so you guys don’t mind going out with someone else, who’s going out with someone else?” monica asks.

“i couldn’t do it,” joey says,

“good for you, joe,” pheobe says to him,

“when i’m with a woman, i need to know that i’m going out with more people than she is,” that made you sigh,

“well, you know monogamy can be a tricky concept. i mean anthropologically speaking...” everybody pretended to sleep and fake snore as ross bored everyone,

“fine, fine. now you’ll never know,” he sighs,

“we’re kidding, go! tell us,” monica says,

“all right, there’s a theory put forth by richard leakey...” and there goes everybody snoring again,

let me know if you want to be mentioned in future taglists!

taglist: @zestygingergirl

[alwaysalreadyangry]

Ok, so here's the kind of poetry I think they would write:

Nile: this one is cheating a bit because I know a few black women in their twenties from Chicago who write poetry & I'm thinking of them. But let's say Morgan Parker vibes with a Chicago bent, but a bit more about religion.

Booker: to caveat, I do like Booker. But he seems like the sort of white dude who leans into personal tragedies in his work, that are really just failed relationships & he gets lauded as literature because he know his way around blank verse & sad white men are ~universal~ obvs

Quynh is experimental & mythic. She writes very conceptual collections. Maybe an epic or two. Cathy Hong Park comes to mind, but so do Anne Carson or Derek Walcott re: long-form poems. Maybe some Tommy Pico but make it Sapphic. She's also the most "fuck it, let's make it entertainment" of everyone.

Lykon gives off Tommy Pico vibes to me. & maybe some Ross Gay because he's also the most optimistic of everyone.

Joe & Nicky I can see going a few different ways & I don't want to step on your toes re: your fic, so I'll hold off on comparisons, unless you really want.

I think I agree with all of this pretty much!

Booker I can kind of see as being a fan of writers like Oppen... like his writing feels like it would be very pared-back free verse to me rather than blank verse (but then I probably couldn’t recognise blank verse most of the time to save my life unless I was really looking out for it). But otherwise basically, yes. Very Sad Man Poems.

Your description of Quynh’s poetry also made me think of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge as a potential reference point. I can see her doing crossovers with visual and performance art. Maybe some verse plays, but decidedly avant-garde. Mythic and spiky.

I’ve actually been thinking of some of the more mythic moments of Anne Carson as a reference point for some of Joe’s poetry; the problem with that is that I’m not a great mimic and it’s very hard to mimic Carson well imo. I am very curious about your ideas regarding Joe and Nicky but might wait to ask to hear about them until after I’ve finished my fic, just because I’m still kind of working some things out and don’t want to start doubting myself.

When situating them within the world of poetry (lol) I’ve been thinking of stuff more in relation to vague schools/groupings of poets, and about how the characters conceive of their work, how it fits into their life, rather than in terms of poets they’re like, but this is also a fun way to think of it, and kind of cuts through some of that other stuff. It’s hard in a way to focus on them as writing students because they’re to a degree unformed, still working out what they want to write - the poems I’m writing for the fic have some intentional problems left in, and I hope I’m not just using this as cover for my own inadequacies. But poetry is, like everything else, a process of learning throughout, I guess. Trying to have fun playing around with that and not psych myself out too much about it.

Anyway thank you very much for this! It’s very fun to think about. And a good reminder to read Tommy Pico.

[liebegott]

365 Days. | Joe Liebgott.

inspired by a prompt by @write-it-motherfuckers​

feel free to send me a request!

pairing: joe liebgott x fem!reader

wc: 1k

synopsis: joe can’t sleep so he takes you out over a hill to talk about stuff! 

a/n: i am definitely not a writer and this is probably the first thing i’ve written in around 4 years. its really short but i just wanted to try and get my brain churning. i hope at least someone likes it !!

i mean no disrespect to the real joseph liebgott. this is all purely based on ross mccall’s portrayal of him in band of brothers.

“Goddamn Joe,” You cursed, pulling the sleeves of your robe over your bare arms as you stomped down your driveway towards his parked cab. “It’s nearly 2am, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” hissing, you leaned down to face Joseph Liebgott, your best friend, and the biggest thorn in your side. He had his head peeking out from the driver side of his cab. 

Flicking away his cigarette butt, the young man shot you a wink, “You look lovely as always, sweetheart. Except for that frown. You comin’ or what?” 

Irritated, you huffed and climbed into the passenger seat of his beat-up cab. You and Joe have known each other since you both had training wheels on your bikes. Before he left for Toccoa, the two of you had spent nearly every evening together, driving around in his cab together, talking about what you’d do to get out of San Francisco. Since he’d be back, he tried his best to bring everything back to normal. Except, you were both glad to still be in San Francisco, and nothing was normal.

“You can’t be honking your horn at 2am,” you exclaimed, hitting his arm gently, “Ma’s asleep!” Joe simply waved this off as you put on your seatbelt instinctively, resting yourself comfortably in your seat for the second time that night. “What do you want?” you looked at him, expecting him to turn off the engine. Instead, he pulled out of your driveway.

“Just calm down alright? I couldn’t sleep.” Throwing you yet another wink, he reached into the backseat and handed you a bag of chips. “Besides, I got you food. Now quiet or you’ll wake the whole town up with your yapping.” 

“You were literally blasti-“

“Hey! What’d I say? Eat your chips ma’am.” Joe scolded, nudging your chin with his finger, “Attitude.”

⋯

You both drove in silence, the only sound coming from your grumpy munching. Joe had the windows down, the cold breeze making you even grumpier that he had called you out in nothing but your robe and nightgown. Your childhood friend had been back for awhile— Back living across the street, and back driving his cab around town, cheating sailors out of their money. That also meant he was back tormenting you nearly every minute of his spare time. Not that you minded. You missed him while he was gone, and looked forward to letters he would send you every now and then.

You watched him now, how his hands gripped the wheel of his car and skillfully maneuvered it up the hill you both sat on every now and then whenever he couldn’t sleep. Joe was still the boy you knew from next door, except he wasn’t anymore. His eyes still crinkled the same way when he laughed, and his lips still curved into a lopsided smirk whenever he was up to no good. Except, Joe looked older now. Much, much older now. Though he stood taller, his chest broader, he had wrinkles in places age often left untouched. 

Staring at him, you never realized he had parked. With a wave of his hand, he asked you to follow him as he climbed out of his seat. As Joe settled onto the roof of his car, patting his side for you to come join him, you could see tonight was different. Different from all the other times he had dragged you out on this hill overlooking San Francisco.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, his voice quiet. “I figured maybe you couldn’t sleep too.”

You let out a gentle laugh, bumping your shoulder with his, “I was very much asleep, Joe. But thanks for thinking about me.” Joe gave you a soft smile that never reached his eyes. 

“Ya know, this time last year, I stepped foot into Bastogne,” he whispered, closing his eyes with a deep sigh, “Sometimes, when its way too quiet, I close my eyes and I still hear them— Them mortars blasting the trees above us.” Joe tried to laugh to lighten the conversation but couldn’t. “Now, a year later, and the whole world seems too quiet for me.” His hands shaking, Joe brought another cigarette up to his lips. He tried to light his cigarette, but when his lighter failed to produce a steady flame, he angrily tossed the cigarette to the ground. 

Joe never talked about the war, and any mention of it would make his smile dissipate. You never asked, because as much as his face annoyed you, you wanted nothing more than to see him smile. But again, tonight was going to be different. 

He turned to you, his voice louder this time, “It’s just weird. I wake up and my bed is warm, I take showers, I go down to my cab and I can see you through your kitchen window.” Taking your hand and squeezing it, he closed his eyes again. “I see you instead of darkness— Instead of the flashing I had to pretend were fireworks. I am where I begged to be, and yet I still hear them. Sometimes they’re so much louder than the traffic downtown.”

“Joseph,” you whispered, cupping his face, “Tell me your most precious memory.” You wiped away a tear from his cheek that had managed to slip out.

Joe opened his eyes, gripping the hand you had on his cheek, “When the train stopped at the station and I saw you, in that yellow summer dress waiting for me. You waited for me to come back.” His eyes softened, “I knew I loved you then, and all this time I was just hoping to see you through your kitchen window again.” 

Your breath hitched, eyes brimming with tears. “I meant of the boys, silly,” you whispered, gently pressing your lips onto his. The two of you sat there, arms around each other, hearts swelling with unexplainable love that grew not only through time but also through distance. You knew you would never understand what he went through, you would never hear what he heard when you closed your eyes, and you would never be able to feel what he had felt, freezing in a foxhole in that forest. All you knew was that he was here. Joseph Liebgott was alive, and he was here in your arms.

Pulling apart and tucking a strand of your hair behind your ear, Joe whispered, a gentle smile playing on his face, “Tell me your most precious memory.”

“Just now. That was the first time I’ve seen a real Joe Liebgott smile in a long time.”

[fullofmelaninsarcasmandepression]

Diced Pineapples~ Chris Evans

IF YOU READ MY WORK, THEN REBLOG THAT SHIT AS WELL! IF YOU THINK THIS MESSAGE IS ABOUT YOU THEN YES TF IT IS! IF YOURE NOT GONNA REBLOG IT, YOU MIGHT AS WELL NOT READ IT!

Chris Evans x Reader

warnings: angst, smut! Some nasty shit! Based off the song Diced Pineapples by Rick Ross ft. Wale & Drake

Know it's easy to get caught up in the moment

When you say it cause you mad then you take it all back

Then we fuck all night 'til things get right

Then we fuck all night 'til things get right, aww yeah

“What the hell else do you want from me Y/N!” Chris shouted. You could hear the echo of his statement bounce off your bedroom walls. This had been you guys third argument this week.

“I don’t know, maybe for you to spend a little time with your girlfriend!” You let out a frustrated groan as you began to stomp up the steps with Chris hot on your tail. You guys rarely argued but when you guys did it tended to get heated.

“Oh so now you want to try and play victim?”

“You know what, go fuck yourself Chris,” you exclaimed before stomping up the stairs loudly. You were so angry you felt like smoke was coming from out of your ears as if you were a cartoon character. You slammed the door loudly so that your boyfriend could probably hear from downstairs.

You sat down on your shared bed and began to sob softly. At this point, you were starting to question your relationship with Chris. So many thoughts begin to run through your mind. Like were you and him gonna last much longer? Why hasn’t he been spending much time with you as of late? Did he have another girl on the side?

An hour later, your thoughts were interrupted by the soft knock you heard at your bedroom door. You looked up and saw Chris enter your bedroom.He came and sat down right next to you. The both of you sat in complete silence for a while. Both of you at aw for words.

“I didn’t anything that I said. Y’know that right?” Chris said as the silence between the two of you was broken. Your tear flooded brown eyes looked into his blue ones. You nodded your head and sniffled.

“I was just mad and I got caught up in the moment. And I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I don’t wanna lose you babygirl,” Chris expressed softly as tears began to fall from his eyes as well.

“I’m sorry too.” You straddled his lap and held his face in your hands. Your dark brown eyes poured into his eyes. You kissed him on his soft lips and he kissed you back. You guys ended getting into one of the most hottest make out sessions ever.

You both stripped down naked and you laid back on the bed. Chris hovered over you and kissed everywhere on your body from head to toe. He started with the nape of your neck and immediately found your “hotspot.” You moaned as he moved down the rest of your body, showing love to every nook and cranny.

He finally made his way to your “kitty”, which was already drenched and he hadn’t even touched it yet. 

You cried out in pleasure as he licked your swollen clit.You let out a sinful like scream as he ate your pussy with no mercy. He let his tongue enter you as he continued to play with your sensitive bud.

“Shit, just like that baby,” you cried out as you gripped upon his hair. You felt that familiar knot build up inside the pit of your stomach as you knew your orgasm was near.

“Fuck, Chris I’m coming,” you cried out as you let your juices flow out onto his face. He let out a sinister chuckle as he lapped most of your juices up.

“Turn over baby,” Chris demanded as he began to stroke his member. You rolled over onto your stomach and arched your back. You heard Chris let out a groan from his throat. You moaned as he ran his dick up and down your wet slit. You both let out a moan as he entered your drenched hole. You loved the filling of him just filling you up completely.

You moaned loudly as Chris began to pound into you. You were on cloud nine just about now. Your eyes rolled to the back of your head as Chris hit your g-spot repeatedly. Your pussy began to grip tightly around his length in response.

“You like when I bottom you out, huh baby,” Chris questioned as he continued his assault on your pussy.

“Shit baby, your gonna make me cum,” you cried out as you felt your second climax of the night approach. You gripped tighter around his length and your juices began to coat him.

“Shit baby, I’m so close,” Chris moaned as his thrusts got sloppier as his orgasm approached him. You moaned out as you felt his warm seed fill you up.

You both collapsed down on the bed and fell asleep in each others arms.

A/N: This probably sucks. But anyways what fic do you guys want next?

Mine-A Travis Kelce Fic

Yes Daddy-A Joe Manganiello Fic

OR

Dance for you-A Florian Munteanu Fic

Let Me Know💛!

tagging: @bellaamor88​ @itsiffysworld​ @honeychicanawrites​ @purpledoritoss​ @blurredlyrics​ @thatgirly81​ @titty-teetee​

LMK if you wanna be added to my taglists for my future fics.

[lgcbenji]

✧ .・゜゜introduction

     HAPPY THIRD MUSE, ME!! hello, all, it’s leaf!! this is my third muse, benji! before we get into the excitement, below the cut, i did want to talk about some sad but, now more than ever, important, stuff, specifically about past hairstyles bang chan has worn on stage. if you are sensitive or do not want to know, please feel free to not read to it’s entirety. if you want to skip past anything a little bit ewwy, just scroll and begin reading where you see bolded text! <3

     now, i know benji’s claim is bang chan and i want to address something people may be wondering or thinking about. in these trying times, now more than ever, i understand that the hairstyle he wore about a year ago was not okay. it is my belief that the company forced him to do so, seeing as he is, as the cool kids say, ‘woke’, and he is an idol who usually does not get to make style decisions for himself.      no matter the reason, the hairstyle worn was not okay and it did appropriate black culture and many black people. i recognize what happened was not appropriate. i will not go further into thoughts and opinions however if you do not feel comfortable writing with or plotting with a bang chan claim, please feel free to ignore any messages sent your way. i do not want force people into something that upsets them. with everything going on, i felt it inappropriate to not address the previous scandal in a direct and honest way even though i am aware that legacy is and should be kept a pure and comfortable place. from now on i will no longer speak about the previous incident but please understand that i felt it so important, just for myself, to address it once and no more.      despite the previous style and the unknown reason for it being worn, i DO want to express my joy for this new character! anyone who has met me knows that i ADORE lgc and all the people and all the characters within so i am VERY excited to be adding a third muse to the roster!!!!      before i list some personality traits i do want to warn people that his character is rocky. i adore hunji and eunji and i think those two have done very very well at not only being themselves but being different. sometimes making one muse after another you find yourself making the same muse twice. with hunji and eunji i think i pulled off the feat of having them be very different. even when they talk, when i write particularly well, you can tell from the dialogue that they are completely different humans.      so, with that being said, i put benji under a lot of pressure. i want him to not only be an amazing character considering he is my, for now, last one i will add to legacy, but i want him to not be hunji. as i thought about his character in my head i thought that he was becoming more and more similar to the only other male muse i have. obviously, this was a little upsetting, but, i did not just want benji to be a play by play opposite version of hunji either.      because of all the reasons above, i as a mun have put benji and myself under a lot of pressure to be as perfect as can be. however, considering how far he has to go, i know his character is not yet anywhere near even good. he is very rocky, inconsistent, and sometimes ‘hard to reach’ when i’m looking for his muse. as time goes on he will become stronger like eunji and hunji but for now he is a little less of an olaf and more of a snowman.      i left a little bit of info at the bottom here so you can kind of pick up on his vibes if you so choose and i left some links so i can open up interactions with lots of characters to hopefully flesh out benji to his fullest!

     - benji is an introvert but friendly. he will rarely strike up conversation but he is easy to talk with and gets along well with everyone.      - benji paints a lot and, so, he paints people things for their birthday. he does not paint faces or people or even things, but sceneries, and rather than paint someone a portrait of themselves, he will often paint what he thinks their vibes are like and translates it into a bob-ross like painting.      - benji, for many reasons, is stuck in this idea that he must become an idol for fame and glory despite recently learning that he does not want game and glory; he gets stuck in his ways but can be persuaded by those who are not himself.      - even though he is stuck in his ways, he does not have a ‘dominant’ personality. he is a very go-with-the-flow kind of person, being pretty okay with doing most things, but he knows where his boundaries lie and is not peer pressured easily (key word, easily).      - he knows where his boundaries lie, however, when it comes to personal touch, contact, jokes, and in general comments, benji’s boundaries stretch much farther than an average joe’s might. comments about bodily fluids, body parts, and general ‘toilet humor’ is exactly his style of conversation (once he is comfortable around close friends).

     wanted connections // biography/info // points      note: things will be added to the wanted connection tag as time goes on.

[nerianasims]

Billboard #1s 1967

Under the cut.

The Buckinghams – “Kind Of A Drag” -- February 18, 1967

The song's about how it's "kind of a drag" when your girlfriend cheats on and then leaves you. Not exactly a heartrending wail of anguish. The song's nothing.

The Rolling Stones – “Ruby Tuesday” -- March 4, 1967

What possessed someone to name a chain of bland American restaurants after this song? They wanted to be associated with a woman who changes with every new day, and needs to always be free? The restaurant Ruby Tuesday's is the opposite of changing with every new day and taking risks. Anyway. When I wrote that the Rolling Stones were almost never nice, I was thinking of this song, on which they are actually nice. The narrator's ex-girlfriend needs to leave to be free and take constant risks, though at "such a cost." It's based on a real ex-girlfriend of Keith Richards', who left him because he wasn't wild enough for her. Really. He ended up going to her parents and warning them that the amount of drugs she was doing, she was gonna end up dead, and they were able to save her. Seriously, she was living such a dangerous life that Keith Richards felt he had to do something. She's apparently doing fine now.

So um. Great song. I especially like the flute. It's a little weird to listen to Mick Jagger sing about a woman who's wilder than him, but the woman really exists (though I don't think she's wild now.) And both Keith Richards and Mick Jagger survived an era many of their peers did not, so they must have known where to draw the line. It's a bittersweet story with a happy ending, which plays against what's normally expected from The Rolling Stones, or really most popular musicians.

The Supremes – “Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone” -- March 11, 1967

The Supremes were no longer in Detroit with this song, and it shows. It's a far slighter song than anything they'd recorded before. And there's more than one embarrassing spoken word section. Most telling, I had never heard this song before doing this list. It's also the first Supremes song I don't think is good at all. Another heartbreak song, a bunch of tambourine, and a bunch of nothing.

The Beatles – “Penny Lane” -- March 18, 1967

I loved this song when I was a kid. It's an adult's hazy memory of their childhood home, with plenty of humorous flourishes. It's a cute song, but there's something sad about it too. It's about nostalgia -- he's remembering Penny Lane, but he's not about to go back and have his memories tarnished.

The Turtles – “Happy Together” -- March 25, 1967

I think I've heard this song too much. It sounds overly polished and hollow to me.

Nancy & Frank Sinatra – “Somethin’ Stupid” -- April 15, 1967

Ew. Who thought Frank Sinatra singing a love song duet with his daughter was a good idea? And this isn't one of those love songs that could easily be sung to anyone you care for -- no, this is definitely supposed to be a romantic song. Ew, ew, and furthermore, ew.

The Supremes – “The Happening” -- May 13, 1967

Horribly produced. Diana Ross seems to be fighting with the instruments to be heard, and I can't understand what she's singing. Looking up the lyrics, the song is apparently about how all her plans fell apart because she lost her love. But musically, the song sounds like it belongs in a circus tent. This is a painfully bad song, which is depressing coming from The Supremes.

The Young Rascals – “Groovin'” -- May 20, 1967

A nice calm song about doing what you like with your s.o. on a calm Sunday. (And not with Leslie. The line's supposed to be "you and me endlessly," though even knowing that, it still sounds like "you and me and Leslie.") It's got a nice beat and motion, so it's not dull. It's just, well, groovy.

Aretha Franklin – “Respect” -- June 3, 1967

All hail the Queen. And her backup singers and band, while we're here. But mostly her.

The Association – “Windy” -- July 1, 1967

This sounds like a sitcom theme song. How does one "capture a moment"? Is Windy a photographer? "Windy has stormy eyes/ That flash at the sound of lies" is a pretty good lyric, even if it also sounds like the kind of thing I wrote when I was twelve. Otherwise, I'd expect to hear this on Nick at Nite.

The Doors – “Light My Fire” -- July 29, 1967

The narrator in this song is a dick talking about his dick. Why does his girlfriend have to light his fire? How much thought has he put into lighting hers? The song is also incredibly repetitive. And yet, it's still sexy, thanks entirely to Jim Morrison. I can't say I like it exactly, but I also can't claim it's not hot.

The Beatles – “All You Need Is Love” -- August 19, 1967

Hating on this song has been the thing to do since I was a teenager myself. Like, come on, you also need food lol dumbasses. Except that's a really shallow reading of the song. Not that the song's exactly deep. But since I've become disabled and totally dependent on my husband, I've understood it a lot better. Now all we need to do is get everyone to feel love for everyone, the "love thy neighbor" type of love that this song is talking about, and everything will work out! Okay well no one said the song was a political platform with practical solutions.

Bobbie Gentry – “Ode To Billie Joe” -- August 26, 1967

I've been sitting here trying to figure out what to say about this song for some time. First, it's an amazing song. It's a story country song, and in this one, the narrator is a part of the story. But no one in her life knows it. No one knows what she and Billie Joe threw off the Tallahatchie bridge (I don't see how it could possibly have been a baby fwiw), but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that everyone in this family may as well be strangers to each other. They're physically close, economically interdependent, and completely without intimacy. It's called Southern Gothic, but it's familiar across the country, and maybe across the world.

The Box Tops – “The Letter” -- September 23, 1967

The narrator's wife has written him a letter saying she wants him back, so he has to get home as fast as he can. The singer sounds old enough to have seen a lot of life (he wasn't), and the music is happy while remaining grounded. Quite good.

Lulu – “To Sir With Love” -- October 21, 1967

No, it's not about a D/s relationship. Thankfully, since it starts with "Those schoolgirl days." This song is about a movie of the same name, which stars Sidney Poitier as a teacher who helps a class of mostly-white troubled students. Can you imagine having Sidney Poitier as a teacher? My crush on him would have been devastating. And the narrator does sound like she has a crush on him, but not like she's trying to get anywhere with it, thankfully. She's grateful for his teaching and guidance. And I'm bored. It's musically soupy -- there needs to be more of a beat. Also, the subject matter of a student feeling grateful to a teacher doesn't move me. I've been grateful to many teachers in my life, but it's not exactly a highly charged emotion.

The Strawberry Alarm Clock – “Incense And Peppermints” -- November 25, 1967

Incense and peppermints are what you keep on hand to cover up pot smoke. So, obviously, this is a song about getting high, even if the lyrics claim "incense and peppermints" are "meaningless nouns." It's about how nothing matters, nothing changes, but everything is connected. Maybe it sounds profound when you're high. Like "the color of time" line. I like it musically, but the lyrics just make me roll my eyes. It's not good nonsense and it's the shallowest imaginable philosophy.

The Monkees – “Daydream Believer” -- December 2, 1967

Musically, the Monkees were usually Davy Jones and some studio musicians. But all of them played and/or sung on this song, and they should have been allowed to on previous ones, because I don't hear a difference. In the song, the narrator's wife is feeling down about life. She was a daydream believer and homecoming queen, and now they don't have any money. Life isn't like her daydreams. But the song doesn't get into that; it's basically an airy love song. It's okay.

The Beatles – “Hello, Goodbye” -- December 30, 1967

I thought this was an awkward song about a relationship dissolving because they can't agree on anything, but apparently it comes from an improvised word game. It sounds like The Beatles, so that's good, but not one of their best efforts. It's as close to nothing as The Beatles got.

BEST OF 1967 -- Respect and Ode to Billie Joe WORST OF 1967 -- Somethin' Stupid, as it's the one that actually grosses me out. even if musically it's not the worst

[joealwyndaily]

Joe Alwyn recently met his childhood hero. The 28-year-old was attending the Academy's annual Governors Awards for the first time, where a who's who of Hollywood had gathered to schmooze with Oscar voters and watch this year's honorees receive honorary awards. The hobnobbing eventually led Alwyn to cross paths with none other than Zorro himself, Antonio Banderas.

"It took everything in me not to challenge him into a sword fight," Alwyn admitted.

Banderas, of course, starred as the masked vigilante in 1998's The Mask of Zorro and its sequel. "I was such a huge fan of Zorro growing up," Alwyn grinned. "That's one of the reasons why I probably ended up acting somehow. I literally just shook his hand and said, 'Hi!'" As it were, Banderas is in the awards season shuffle with Pain and Glory, while Alwyn was out in support of his new film, Harriet.

"There was no competitive element, obviously," he said. Still, the Governors Awards serve as the first pit stop for any potential Oscars contender. "You're sitting there watching these four amazing legends being honored for the most amazing backlog of work, someone like David Lynch and Geena Davis. And then you run into people that you have grown up watching."

Now, Alwyn is the one being watched. After studying at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, as actors such as Sir Laurence Olivier and Andrew Garfield did before him, a then-unknown Alwyn was cast as the lead of Ang Lee's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk in 2015. "That was the strangest experience when it ended," Alwyn said.

"Because it was such a surreal, full-on experience: Going to a country I'd never been to before, being on a film set -- which I'd never been in front of a camera before -- with a group of people who I'd grown up watching, it was the most intense experience I'd had, ever. And then suddenly--" He snaps his fingers. "It's ended. And you are back in London and everyone's still over there and you're back to walking the dog and it's raining and you're trying to compute what's just happened. It was very surreal."

When I met up with Alwyn after the Governors Awards, he greeted me at the door to shake my hand and promptly offered to get me a water. "Or Coke? Or coffee?" he asked, surveying the spread of beverages. All of which is to say, he's polite. And humble, too, whether it be over compliments of his wardrobe -- a peacoat over a cerulean sweater, khaki joggers and great boots ("Thank you! They're not mine!") -- or the trajectory of his career.

If Alwyn's unlikely start feels nearly impossible to match, he followed Billy Lynn with a run of meaningful supporting roles, which were only possible because Lee took a chance on him. "Every opportunity since is because of that," he said, arm draped over the back of the chair. "I owe him everything."

"I felt very lucky to work with someone like him for the first time, and I thought, if I can, I want to keep trying to work with really interesting, great directors and not just jump into something that's a big role or big for the sake of it," he explained. "Trying to find parts in really interesting projects and build that way rather than just blindly jump."

That thinking led to a truly breakthrough year in 2018, with Alwyn appearing in Operation Finale, as the Nazi son of Ben Kingsley's Adolph Eichmann, in The Favourite, as the airhead paramour to Emma Stone, in Boy Erased, as a troubled love interest for Lucas Hedges, and in Mary Queen of Scots, as hand to Margot Robbie's Queen Elizabeth.

All the while he was gaining recognition for his acting, there was another angle of interest about Alwyn, casting him into the public spotlight for his personal life as the longtime boyfriend of Taylor Swift. How, then, was he able to reconcile the two?

"I just don't really engage with anything that I don't want to engage with," he said. "And so if there's any kind of extra noise about things that I'm not so interested in, I'll just turn it off. And so it just disappears, to a degree."

Currently, he's engaged with his return to theaters in director Kasi Lemmons' soulful Harriet Tubman biopic. Harriet is the first time the abolitionist and activist's story has been adapted into a proper biopic, and Alwyn acknowledged that, before being sent the script, "I ignorantly didn't really know much about Harriet. Growing up in the U.K., she's not part of the curriculum. I'd heard of her name, I'd seen the iconic older image of her, but I didn't know really who she was or what she did and what she achieved."

Cynthia Erivo plays the titular role, with Alwyn co-starring as Gideon Brodess, the son of Tubman's enslaver. The Brodess family is a matter of historical record, though Gideon exists somewhere between composite character and fictitious creation. That posed a challenge for Alwyn as he began the process of finding his way into Gideon.

"It was tricky. I mean, he's obviously a horrible person," he said. "And a horrible family. And they stood for something that is impossible to connect with today. For any good human being, it's impossible. The idea of slavery is repulsive and abhorrent, and so trying to find a way in is hard."

Instead, Alwyn searched for any relatable human qualities he could latch onto. Harriet posits that Araminta "Minty" Ross -- the child who would grow to become Harriet Tubman -- and Gideon Brodess would have been born around the same time, and Gideon might have even considered Minty a friend during their childhood. "Then, suddenly, a line would have been drawn and he would've been taught to hate or told to hate," Alwyn explained.

Their ties are further knotted when Gideon's father dies and he becomes Harriet's enslaver. "Whatever feeling it is he has for her that we touch on throughout the film -- whether it's love that's buried there, or whatever it is -- I don't think there was a language to understand that for himself. So I tried to hold onto some kind of confusion as a human being. Or to an obligation and loyalty to a family, even if that family is completely horrible."

He had the fortune of navigating it all alongside Erivo, with whom he shares the majority of his scenes. Erivo signed on to the project before anyone else and had spent years with it, in addition to the research and physical training she did before filming. Ahead of production, Alwyn and Erivo met with their director for a week's worth of rehearsals, during which they walked through the duo's most difficult scenes.

"It wasn't the kind of film where it would have been helpful to play mind games and go and sit in the corner and not talk to each other," he chuckled. "Because of the nature of it, you want to be in a safe space with each other and give each other a kind of understanding and a reassurance and permission to do whatever you need to do in order to service the scene, service the story in the way that we're trying to tell it."

And that story, he decided, was not strictly about a historical figure and what she was able to achieve in her lifetime. Harriet speaks to what has come to pass, now as much as ever: "If you're scrolling through Twitter or you go on the news, you're inundated with stories of division and prejudice and racism and families being torn apart," he said. "That's something that the film touches on, and Harriet is -- as much as any figure I can think of -- someone who fought and overcame those hurdles and is a shining light against all of those things."

With Harriet playing in theaters, Alwyn's next projects are already lined up: He's playing Bob Cratchit in FX's dark reimagining of the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol, opposite Guy Pearce's Ebenezer Scrooge. Then there is an adaptation of Jojo Moyes' best-selling novel, The Last Letter From Your Lover. And then? "I'd love to do a big war movie," he grinned. "Like a World War movie or something. That'd be cool."

And there are more awards season events ahead, too -- the Governors Awards being only the beginning of the race to the Oscars -- which means future opportunities to proclaim his love of Zorro. Alwyn didn't do it the first time. "I was just like, 'Hello!'" But it's bound to happen sooner or later." As I leave the hotel that day, who should stroll past me inside but Antonio Banderas himself? Perhaps it will be sooner.

[mst3kproject]

The Devil’s Eight

The nasty misanthropic Ross Hagen revenge movies were among my least favourite episodes of MST3K, so it’s no surprise I haven’t done one as an Episode that Never Was.  But this blog isn’t about movies I like, it’s about movies that were or should have been on the Satellite of Love.  The Devil’s Eight is from American International Pictures, and as well as Hagen it features Leslie Parrish, whom you’ll remember as Ev from The Giant Spider Invasion, and Cliff Osmond, whom you probably don’t remember as the Sheriff in Hangar 18.  And on a super-duper-extra-promising note, it was written by Willard Huyck, who did the script for American Graffiti… but also for Howard the Duck.

FBI Agent Faulkner has been assigned to arrest a powerful crime lord.  Several of his colleagues have already tried this mission and been killed, so rather than use fellow agents, he frees a bunch of criminals from a chain gang and forces them to be his underlings, because we’re here to rip off The Dirty Dozen and we don’t care if it makes sense.  Driving specially souped-up cars, this unwashed and unshaven bunch infiltrate the crime boss’ moonshine operation only to realize that he’s set a trap for them.  The movie climaxes in a free-for-all of shooting, driving, and blowing shit up, and I have no idea what was happening for most of it but Ross Hagen got to hug his girlfriend at the end so it must have worked out okay.

My number one complaint about The Devil’s Eight (and I have many) is that there is only one piece of music in the entire film.  It’s a repetitive and obnoxiously catchy two-line melody that is arranged in a dozen different ways, attempting to sound ominous, mischievous, romantic, dramatic, and so forth, but the only thing it ever actually does sound like is comical old west saloon music.  It repeats through the whole hour and forty minutes of the movie and then we have to hear a ditty about the characters sung to the same tune over the end credits.  I can already tell it’s gonna be in my head for days and it’s making me want to stab something.

From the beginning, The Devil’s Eight is very badly constructed.  We start with the prison break, which was probably a good idea, and follow it until the surprise moment when they find the helicopter there waiting for them.  This scene is weirdly reminiscent of its counterpart in Starcrash and I assume both of them stole it from some better movie.  Once they’re in the chopper, however, we segue into a flashback of Faulkner and his boss talking about the mission.  Skipping back in time to a couple of guys talking in an office totally derails the momentum the first scene built up.  We want to know what’s going on, but the same information could have (and partially was) imparted by Faulkner talking to the rest a moment later!

When he does talk to them, he is maddeningly vague about what their plan is.  It involves secretly armored cars and throwing grenades while driving them – we can gather that much from the montages that follow.  The ultimate goal is to find a guy named Burl, who brews his own moonshine and apparently ‘owns’ most of the cops and politicians in wherever this is, and whom we know nothing about until the movie is half over.  When things finally do start happening, we still don’t really know what they’re trying to accomplish, and we’re not sure the characters are.  Faulkner acts like he knows what he’s doing, and the other guys (and the audience) just have to take that on faith.

In addition to telling us what the hell the characters are trying to accomplish, the first third or so of the movie should be spent getting to know them and setting up their arcs.  The Devil’s Eight tries to do this but it’s pretty half-assed about it.  There’s Sonny, the drunk troublemaker, who resolutely refuses to evolve even at gunpoint. There’s Chandler, the guy who is trying to better himself by giving up violence and reading the bible.  He turns out to be the most brutal hand-to-hand fighter of the lot, absolutely creaming half of Burl’s guys in a barfight, but he’s given no resolution to his desire for a pacifist lifestyle and is gunned down moments after admitting he doesn’t know whether to believe in god or not. And there’s Henry and Billy Jo, the black guy and the bigot (respectively), who learn to appreciate each other.  I have to give this arc a couple of grudging points for ending with Henry weeping over Billy Jo’s dead body rather than the reverse… congratulations, guys, you were slightly less racist than you could have been.

The character with the biggest personal investment in this and the one who tries to have a real story arc is Ross Hagen’s Frank. He used to work for Burl until, for unknown reasons, Burl framed him for murder, killed his younger brother, and stole his girlfriend.  He’s now itching for revenge and is personal stake in the mission leads him to take charge and enforce order when the others try to rebel against Faulkner.  That sounds like a pretty good storyline for the main character in a movie.

Then they blow it.  When Faulkner tells him they have to bring Burl in alive, Frank gets mad and insists he deserves to die.  Then, like that other Frank in T-Bird Gang, he gets no resolution for it.  The audience expects him to have a moment of confrontation with Burl and then either kill him or decide not to do so. The final confrontation, however, is between Burl and Faulkner, while Frank just fucking stands there.  It seems incomprehensible when it’s his girlfriend Burl is threatening to shoot.

This scene also has a perfect opportunity to pay off another thing The Devil’s Eight set up earlier – there’s a scene in which Faulkner demonstrates his skill as a marksman by putting three holes in a target without hitting the man who is reaching to take the target off its stand.  When Burl began threatening to shoot Frank’s girlfriend, Faulkner stood up and I was sure we were going to get a payoff for that, with Faulkner shooting Burl in the leg or the hand to make him let go of the woman, without hitting her.  But instead, Faulkner just drops his gun and walks forward to parlay!  It’s a failure of Chekov’s gun with an actual gun in it.

I think Faulkner is supposed to be the actual main character.  He’s in charge, after all, and he’s the one who gets things like flashbacks and climactic confrontations.  The problem with this is that Faulkner never learns anything, never grows, and we get no insights into his character.  He’s just a huge asshole to everybody from his girlfriend to the prisoners to the rookie agent the FBI sent to assist him (this character’s age is never established. He’s implied to be young and naïve, but he’s played by an actor who looks like he’s around forty).  Faulkner’s final line is not to place Burl under arrest, although that’s coming, but to make fun of him.

If Faulkner is a crummy hero, Burl is a terrible villain.  We don’t even meet him until the movie’s half-over, which I guess is supposed to build suspense.  The problem is that until that moment, we have seen nothing to tell us what kind of threat he represents.  Characters have talked about it, but that’s all.  We got a vague impression of a local crime king, but when Burl actually arrives in the narrative he’s a Joe Don Baker-looking guy who lives in a ramshackle log cabin in the middle of nowhere, with a bunch of other hillbillies who differ from him mostly in being dirtier.  All he seems to actually do is sit around eating.  He never comes across as threatening, just as a hick with pretensions.

Without a compelling hero, a threatening bad guy, or much of an idea what this is all even building to, where does that leave The Devil’s Eight?  It’s an over-long movie about dirty men driving huge cars and punching each other. The movie had plenty of time that could have gone into rising action and establishing character and playing up Burl’s threat and so forth, but instead it’s just training montages of driving and punching.  Once the actual plan is in motion that turns out to be just more driving and punching as they run Burl’s moonshine deliveries off the road.  The driving scenes are set to that annoying single piece of music that sounds more comical than exciting, the bluescreen backgrounds are dire, and the actors are utterly incapable of making their fake driving look anything but fake.

Everybody in the entire movie is filthy, by the way. I don’t know if this is actually supposed to invoke the ‘dirty’ part of The Dirty Dozen, or if it’s an attempt to show how rough and tough these guys are, but they’re all grimy, sweaty, and gross.  I could almost smell them through the screen.

MST3K would have had a great time with The Devil’s Eight.  I can picture Crow and Tom trying to make their own moonshine… Mike tastes it and doesn’t like it but tries not to insult them, and then they reveal it’s distilled from things like old o-rings and Joel’s socks.  And I know exactly what the stinger would have been, too.  There’s a bit where Burl and Faulkner are attempting to size each other up over dinner, and Burl orders Frank’s ex-girlfriend to mind her manners and give Frank a slice of her inexpertly-iced cake.  I don’t know why this is so funny, but I don’t know what made half the stingers in the series funny, so there you go.