#Brandon Hardy

[ronavorona]

HP&TPOA vs S&S

[marjanovic]

24-25 DALLAS MAVERICKS

"My First Day of the 24-25 NBA Season" Photoshoot

Part 2/2

[siremasterlawrence]

[letterboxd-loggd]

Babes in Toyland (March of the Wooden Soldiers) (1934) Charley Rogers and Gus Meins

December 17th 2023

[pocketramblr]

We have got to learn more about the Releasers/Dustbringers because the two who left gem messages in Urithiru said "know my husband's and children's name, I love them" and "goodnight, dear Urithiru, Sibling, and Radiants" which are incredibly sweet and focused on connections to other people.... When the order is supposed to be about self-mastery? When their surges are division and abrasion? I'm fascinated, tell me more

[questintheskies]

Things are breaking down more and more with Isiah

[makeitquietly]

[swampflix]

The Bikeriders (2024)

The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellas is that it works.  It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights.  It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kane to throw critics off the scent).  And now…

[arcimboldisworld]

Kidd Pivot: Assembly Hall - STEPS / Theater 11 03.05.2024

Kidd Pivot: Assembly Hall - STEPS / Theater 11 03.05.2024 #steps24 #crystalpite #jonathonyoung #kiddpivot #tanz #assemblyhall #vorstellungsbesprechung #theater11

Wohl eines der Highlights am Steps Festival 2024: “Assembly Hall”, die neue Produktion von KIDD PIVOT – dem Ensemble der kanadischen Tänzerin und Choreographin CRYSTAL PITE – die in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Autor JONATHON YOUNG entstanden ist. Grossartig! Continue reading Kidd Pivot: Assembly Hall – STEPS / Theater 11 03.05.2024

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Inspired by @kajaono's post the other day about Victoria Hamilton, JLM and Austen adaptations, have a list of the actors that have been in at least 2 Austen adaptations:

Hat trickers:

Victoria Hamilton played Henrietta Musgrove in Persuasion (1995), Julia Bertram in Mansfield Park (1999), and Mrs. Foster in Pride and Prejudice (1995)

Johnny Lee Miller played one of Fanny's brothers in Mansfield Park (1983), Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1999), and Mr. Knightley in Emma (2009).

Doubles:

Joanna David played Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility 1972; she also played Mrs. Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice (1995)

Samantha Bond played Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park (1983); she later on played Mrs. Weston in Emma (ITV, 1996)

Bernard Hepton played Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park (1983); he later on played Mr. Woodhouse in Emma (ITV, 1996)

Sylvestra Latouzel played Fanny Price in Mansfield Park (1983); she later on played Mrs. Allen in Northanger Abbey (2007)

Nicholas Farrell played Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1983); he later on played Mr. Musgrove in Persuasion (2007)

Irene Richard played Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice (1980); she then played Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1981)

Robert Hardy played General Tilney in Northanger Abbey (1987); he later on played Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility (1995)

Sophie Thompson played Mary Musgrove in Persuasion (1995), and then the following year she played Miss Bates in Emma (Miramax, 1996)

Kate Beckinsale played Emma Woodhouse in Emma (1996); later on she played Lady Susan in Love and Friendship (2016)

Blake Ritson played Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (2007) and later on Mr. Elton in Emma (2009)

Jemma Redgrave played Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park (2007); she later on played Mrs. DeCourcy in Love and Friendship (2016)

Lucy Robinson played Mrs. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice (1995); the following year she played Mrs. Elton in Emma (ITV, 1996)

Carey Mulligan played Kitty Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005) and then Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey (2007)

Lucy Briers played Mary Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1995); she also played a minor role as Mrs. Reynolds in Emma (2020)

If we include Austen-adjacent pieces:

Hat tricks:

Hugh Bonneville played Mr. Rushworth in Mansfield Park (1999) and later on played Rev. Brook Bridges in Miss Austen Regrets (2007) and then Mr. Bennet in Lost in Austen (2008)

Doubles:

Olivia Williams played Jane Fairfax in Emma (ITV, 1996); she later on played Jane Austen in Miss Austen Regrets (2007)

Also, Greta Scacchi played Mrs. Weston in Emma (Miramax, 1996) and went on to play Cassandra Austen in Miss Austen Regrets (2007)

Guy Henry played John Knightley in Emma (ITV, 1996), and later on played Mr. Collins in Lost in Austen (2008)

Christina Cole played Caroline Bingley in Lost in Austen (2008) and then Mrs. Elton in Emma (2009)

Anna Maxwell Martin played Cassandra Austen in Becoming Jane (2009), and then went on to play Elizabeth Bennet in Death Comes to Pemberley (2014)

JJ Feild played Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey (2007) and later on played Mr. Nobley in Austenland (2014)

If we include radiodramas/radioplays:

Hat tricks:

Blake Ritson gets it as he played Colonel Brandon in the 2010 S&S radio drama

Doubles:

Amanda Root played Anne Elliot in Persuasion (1995); she also played Fanny Price in the 1997 radio drama for Mansfield Park

Felicity Jones also played Fanny in the 2003 radio drama for Mansfield Park, and later on played Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (2007)

Robert Glenister played Captain Harville in Persuasion (1995); he also played Edmund Bertram in the 1997 radio drama for Mansfield Park

Amanda Hale played Mary Musgrove in Persuasion (2007) and later on Elinor Dashwood in the 2010 radio drama for Sense and Sensibility.

David Bamber played Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice (1995); he later on played Mr. Elton in the 2000 radio drama for Emma

Robert Bathurst played Mr. Knightley in the same adaptation of Emma; later on he played Mr. Weston in Emma (2009)

Also in that adaptation, Tom Hollander played Frank Churchill; he later on played Mr. Collins in Pride & Prejudice (2005)

Juliet Stevenson played Anne Elliot in the 1986 radio drama for Persuasion; later on she played Mrs. Elton in Emma (Miramax, 1996)

And I'm very likely still forgetting someone.

[siremasterlawrence]

The Eyes Say It All

[littlemagicalstardust]

Darby Allin Singles Career in AEW (So far) First Singles Win: 2019 First AEW Dark Win: CIMA (10/02/2019) First AEW Dynamite Win: Jimmy Havoc (10/09/2019) First AEW Rampage Win: Daniel Garcia (09/03/2021) First AEW Collision Win: Minoru Suzuki (07/29/2023)

First AEW Championship: TNT  First Reign: November 7, 2020 - May 21, 2021 (9 defenses) Second Reign: January 4, 2023 - February 1, 2023 (4 defenses) Second AEW Championship: World Tag Team (with Sting)  First Reign: February 7, 2024 - March 3, 2024 (1 defense) (Sting retired as a AEW World Tag Team Champion with Darby) 

How many singles total in AEW: 95 Out of 95 he has WON: 70

He’s defeated: Cody Rhodes, CIMA, Jimmy Havoc, Brandon Cutler, Sammy Guevara, Preston Vance, Kip Sabian, Serpentico, Robert Anthony, Powerhouse Hobbs, Luther, Ricky Starks, Nick Comoroto, Alex Chamberlain, Bishop King, Brian Cage, Joey Janela, Scorpio Sky, John Silver, JD Drake, Matt Hardy, The Butcher, Jack Perry, Ten, Cezar Bononi, Angelico, Ethan Page, Wheeler Yuta, Bear Bronson, Invictus Khash, Daniel Garcia, Shawn Spears, QT Marshall, Billy Gunn, Anthony Bowens, Marq Quen, Andrade El Idolo, Swerve Strickland, Bobby Fish, Brody King, Jay Lethal, Anthony Henry, Cole Karter, Samoa Joe, Mike Bennett, Juice Robinson, Kushida, Buddy Matthews, Lee Moriarty, Minoru Suzuki, Christian Cage, Nick Wayne, Lance Archer, Jeff Hardy, The Beast Mortos, Adam Page, Evil Uno & Johnny TV 

Total matches in AEW: 167

Longest Timed Singles Match (WIN): Christian Cage (20:34) Longest Timed Singles Match (LOSS): Christian Cage (25:17) Shortest Timed Singles Match (WIN): Brandon Cutler (0:59)  Shortest Timed Singles Match (LOSS): Jay Lethal (9:08)

[tepkunset]

List of Canon Queer Marvel Characters:

(with at least 10 appearances as of current date - no randos included)

Aaron Fischer

Aikku Jokinen

Akihiro

Alani Ryan

Aldrif Odinsdottir

America Chavez

Aneka

Annabelle Riggs

Avril Kincaid

Ayo

Benji Deeds

Betsy Braddock

Billy Kaplan

Bobby Drake

Brandon Sharpe

Brian Falsworth

Brunnhilde

Carl Valentino

Carmen Cruz

Cessily Kincaid

Christian Frost

Cullen Bloodstone

David Alleyne

Elle Diwa

Ellie Phimister

Felicia Hardy

Gwen Poole

Heather Douglas

Heather Tucker

Hercules

Hiroim

Ian Soo

Irene Adler

Jake Oh

Jean-Paul Beaubier

Jean-Paul Duchamp

Jennifer Kale

Jerry Sledge

Johnny Clay

Jonas Greymalkin

Jovana

Julie Power

Julio Richter

Jumbo Carnation

Karolina Dean

Ken Shiga

Korg

Kyle Jinadu

Loki Laufeyson

Martha Johansson

Miguel Santos

Morgan Red

Nadia Van Dyne

Nathaniel Carver

Nico Minnoru

Noh-Varr

Phyla-Vell

Rachel Summers

Raven Darkholme

Roger Aubrey

Roxy Washington

Rūna

Sera

Shatterstar

Shela Sexton

Simon Lasker

Solem

Sybil Dvorak

Teddy Altman

Theresa Burke

Tommy Shepherd

Toni Ho

Val Ventura

Victoria Hand

Viktor Borkowski

Viv Vision

Wade Wilson

Xavin

Xuân Cao Mạnh

Zoe Zimmer

And yet Marvel Voices: Pride only ever features like, five of the same characters every time.

[b-skarsgard]

Credits and a very big thank you to @/TheCrowUpdates on IG&Twitter for sharing!

Someone was going to revisit The Crow.

We just didn't know who. Since 2008, fans of Alex Proyas' 1994 dark superhero movie - about a murdered rock musician back from the dead to seek revenge - have watched reports roll in about who was going to do it.

Names of possible stars were attached and detached before it was ever confirmed they were true: Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg (twice), Jason Momoa (that one got as far as leaked test footage). Potential directors included Blade's Stephen Norrington, 28 Weeks Later's Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Corin Hardy, and more.

At one point in 2010, hopes were raised when there were rumours that Nick Cave was doing some form of script revision - The Crow is a graphic novel and a film that held music close to its goth black heart. For a while, everything went quiet. And then: someone actually revisited The Crow.

When Empire asks director Rupert Sanders why, after all these years, it was him, he laughs and says, "Tenacity." He adds, "Sometimes these things just have their time.

They work when they're supposed to work. I just feel that this was probably the right iteration." He also thinks it's a case of how it was made, not why: outside the studio system, for a fraction of the budget of current superhero movies, and far less than Sanders himself has worked with in the past (his first film, Snow White & The Huntsman, cost $180 million). "People are calling it a Hollywood remake and it's really not.

There's nothing to do with Hollywood in this movie at all — it's a very scrappy indie movie," he says. "[And] because of that, we were able to remain close to the centre and the darkness and the violence that's in the graphic novel. The only reason we could do that is because it's not a studio movie."

Given how fervently the fanbase protects the first movie, some might also add another word in addition to tenacity: bravery. This was the film in which Brandon Lee, playing Eric Draven, tragically lost his life in an accident on set with a prop gun at the age of 28. This was the film that wasn't just a film; it remains a hallowed target of worship. If you are of a certain age, you will remember how posters for The Crow hung for a weirdly long time in the video shop, how you wore out the soundtrack on your Walkman, how on more than one occasion someone told you that the set was cursed, actually. For some, the idea of revisiting The Crow is as impossible as waking the dead.

In order for Sanders to get it made, he had to sweep aside all of the cult-film baggage that came with the job. He ignored the "probably hundreds" of versions of the script that were floating around. He had to go right to the beginning and hatch his own bird.

James O'Barr's original telling (the character's self-titled miniseries ran February-May 1989), The Crow is a comic about revenge. Eric and his fiancée, Shelly, are assaulted by a gang of thugs after their car breaks down. Paralysed by a gunshot wound, Eric can only watch as she is raped and murdered in front of him, before later dying himself in hospital. When he is resurrected by a crow — those supernatural beings who can bring people back to put the wrong things right - he wreaks vengeance on those who hurt her. The idea all stemmed from an event in O'Barr's life: when he was 18, his fiancée was killed by a drunk driver.

He put the hate and other feelings on the page. O'Barr later said on stage at Comic-Con that the comic, to him, was a Cure song—Sanders was there at the time and heard him. It was an idea that stayed with him throughout the process. "[The Crow] has that kind of comfort of melancholy," he says. "There's something about listening to a Cure song that makes you feel that it's okay to feel how you're feeling."

Sanders didn't rewatch the 1994 film; he reread the graphic novel, once, and then let the ideas permeate. (Sanders is an art-school comic-book guy — he's been trying to to turn Charles Burns' Black Hole, a story about sexually transmitted, grotesque physical mutations in teenagers that renders them social outcasts, into a movie for 20 years.) He even made a Black Hole short film, and says it's the closest DNA in his work to The Crow - you can watch it on his website). He researched the spiritual history of crows across cultures: how they are believed to exist between worlds as messengers between the living and the dead, how they are both symbols of change and harbingers of death. But above all, what Sanders saw in The Crow was not a revenge story at all: he saw a tragic love story.

"We've all lost someone in life, or we all will lose someone in life, and we're all going to die. It was really about losing someone and being selfless in trying to get someone back."

For a love story to work, Sanders needed to find a man who could believably be both "tender and terrifying" — he couldn't cast the monster and work backwards. Having almost worked with Bill Skarsgård on another project that fell through (an adaptation of Tim O'Brien's Vietnam-war book, The Things They Carried), Skarsgård was already on Sanders' radar. When he mentioned the idea to the actor, Skarsgård needed very little convincing. But before he did his self-tape for the casting process, Skarsgard wanted to spend a week with Sanders exploring the character.

"That kind of dating phase was what I needed, to know that I really wanted to do the movie," says the actor. They swapped films, music, and YouTube videos, and worked together to get a sense of who this character is. Sanders suggested Skarsgärd watch Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne's 1990 film about a Vietnam-war veteran suffering from horrifying hallucinations; Skarsgård loved it), a documentary on the SoundCloud rapper Lil Peep ("I wasn't really familiar with that world at all; it came after my teenage-rebellion years"), and a lot of documentaries about drug use and homelessness. It was all in aid of figuring out Eric's journey up until the point we meet him in the movie, when the suicidal man sees his salvation in the love of Shelly. We won't even see this backstory on screen.

In Stockholm, where he was born and still lives, in the depths of pandemic times, Skarsgård made his self-tape in a studio with some friends. There was no script yet, just a couple of scenes. For the final one, he performed it in traditional Crow make-up.

Did he apply it himself, as Brandon Lee does in the broken mirror? "Definitely not!" he laughs. "I had someone help me do it —a professional. I've been down that hole before where I've tried to do my own make-up. It turns out that my skill doesn't translate that well into that."

Skarsgård has also been here before with the white make-up, the cult favourite character, the weight of decades of history —he went through all of this playing Pennywise the clown in It. When asked if he felt the pressure of stepping into a role with so much noise around it, he speaks with the clarity of someone who has been bruised before but is now prepared (and knows to ignore the internet). "I think I would have been more hesitant if it felt really close to the original—but the fact that it felt so different from it, the separation of it [made it feel like I could] make this my own thing, as opposed to trying but failing at something that's already been done."

As soon as he took the job, Skarsgård "never thought about this as The Crow". He was interested in the psychology of the character of Eric — in his journey from suicidal, to saved, to nihilism. "That became very important to me — that it's not just a guy putting on make-up and thinking he's badass and saying catchy one-liners. This is someone who has lost everything, and the only thing that he has left is his hate. And hate is destructive. When he becomes this sort of superhero, he's become a monster that he doesn't want to be." Skarsgård buried himself in the psyche of the character, as he routinely does with every role, possibly to his detriment.

"Honestly, I don't know any other way of doing it," he says. "You have to go there. You do get a little bit consumed with that state of mind. I was kind of burned out at the end of it, for physical reasons, mental reasons, all of it. It was a lot."

But he says it was all worth it: all the hours of tattoo application, the nights submerged in a tank of syrup made to look like oil, and the time-consuming effort of trying to get the continuity of black tar blood-splatter just right. There is only one thing he would change if he could: his... entire body. When he came onto The Crow, Skarsgärd had just finished filming Boy Kills World, an action movie where he plays a martial-arts expert.

He was in insane shape. He was eating raw meat and training six days a week. "I felt very strange being in great shape for Eric as the person Eric, he says, after detailing the extreme training schedule and diet he kept over the nine months that spanned both films. "I wanted him to be really skinny!" he laughs. "He was not a person that worked out, ever. In a perfect world he would have been a lot less fit in the first half of the movie."

In the 1994 version of The Crow, Shelly is dead before the opening credits. The film opens with her, bloodied on a gurney in the rain (it can't rain all the time, but it does in this movie), being loaded into the back of an ambulance. In Shelly-POV flashbacks we see the faces of her violent, laughing rapists.

Shelly is not so much a character as a reason for The Crow to exist: a plot device to give our male hero something to avenge. This is something Sanders wanted to correct in his telling of the story. To him, Shelly was the "emotional engine" of the whole film. It needed a woman so "magical" that we would miss her like a vital organ when she was gone.

"Without us falling in love with her as he does, we can't go on that journey with him," he said. "We can't be complicit with what he does to gain her back." Sanders had only one person in mind for the role, someone otherworldly and haunting enough to carry it: the genreamorphous, avant-garde musician FKA Twigs.

"I felt honoured," says Twigs, on being asked to make such an impression in her first-ever starring role (prior to this, her only feature credit was in Alma Har'el's Honey Boy) and being given only a third of the film to do it in. "But at the same time, I really did know that I could do it."

She and Skarsgård met on a balcony in the hotel in Prague where Casanova used to stay.

They read lines, became friends, and soon Twigs was so invested in the story of Eric and Shelly that she was standing at the monitor on set, watching herself die, sad that their characters were being so cosmically ripped apart.

"[Sanders] would always look at me and be like 'Oh, I know, Twigs! They can't be together!' And I'd be like, 'But I want them to be together!'" she laughs. "He knows I have a real, genuine interest in their love and what love means to a lot of people in the world. I believe that we need more stories like this.

Where two people can love each other so wholly and so beautifully amidst so much darkness and uncertainty. That, to me, echoes almost what we're going through now."

Meanwhile, Danny Huston plays the bad guy in all of this - but he goes to great lengths to explain that unlike other battles between good and evil, the lines here aren't so clearly drawn. "It's messy, it's human, it's inky," he says, remaining mysterious about his character's true desire and identity. (Says Sanders: "The devilish people in your life are the most seductive, the most charming, and the most flattering. There's something about Danny that just really personifies that.")

Huston says the film reminds him most of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death — "That would be the, uh, gentle version of our film," adds Sanders - in which love is tested in the hinterland between the living and the dead.

The character is fascinated by love in the manner of a demigod who is above it. "Love can be flawed. And it can be childish. It can be saccharin. It can mislead you," Huston says. "But yet, it's what makes mortals tick.

It's what makes them sacrifice. Is that enviable? I suppose it is, when you have never felt it."

Rupert Sanders' take on The Crow reportedly cost around $50 million. Not peanuts, but less money than is spent on your usual superhero outings. And a lower budget, like love, can come with sacrifice.

But the cast and crew were tenacious and brave enough to, in the words of Skarsgård, go there, wherever "there" was.

"It wasn't an easy journey, that's for sure," says Skarsgard. While the role took physical and mental tolls on its male lead, Twigs was willing to face her greatest fear to make it work: deep water. She spent days in the tank, with a nose peg on, trying to control her beating heart. Elsewhere, Sanders was inverting severed heads into plastic dummies to get two effects for the price of one, drawing in Eric's sketchbooks, throwing blood around the set, never sitting still. And when the crew's numbers dwindled in the final days of filming, it ended up being just Sanders with a camera, a light, and a guy with a crow on a leather glove. (The director says that crows - in spite of all their dark mythology — are good companions and lovely to work with.)

Later, when it was all over and Twigs saw the trailer, she was surprised. "When we were making the movie I didn't really have a sense of how magnificent the scale is," she says.

"Maybe it's because it's one of my first films, but it's hard to tell when you're in it. It's a huge, wild, big-scale, giant film! But when I was doing it, it just felt like we were in this little family, running around Prague for three months."

Sanders hopes this could help form a new model in how cinema might counter shrinking audiences - not just for comic-book movies, but for films in general.

"You have to be more adept at making things more effciently, that are emotionally resonant, and not just spectacle," he says. "I really hope we're in for another kind of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls period of having to make these more down-and-dirty films that still feel like big epic movies [but] are weirder and stranger."

Inevitably, there will be opinions about the new version of The Crow. Sanders isn't worried. "You can never please everyone when you're working with existing material—but I look at it as Kenneth Branagh doing a Shakespeare play that Gielgud did [before him]," he says. "That was a seminal performance, but it doesn't mean that's it and everything stops." It's been 30 years since the last film, and he hopes that in the same way the film excited 17-year-olds back then, his version will do the same for kids who are 17 years old now.

"This is for this generation. Probably 30 years from now they will be berating anyone who tries to make another version of it because this was the version they grew up on," he predicts. "It's cyclical." At least this time around, fewer cassette tapes will be harmed in the replaying of the soundtrack.

THE CROW IS IN CINEMAS FROM 23 AUGUST