#I saw it multiple times in theaters!

[assistant-blogkeeper]

...I just realized Rise of the Guardians turned 10 this year

howwww

[carcarrot]

its important to go see a low stakes concert sometimes

[go-go-devil]

Random question, but I need answers:

How many of you have watched Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and what is your honest, genuine opinion on this film?

[captainadwen]

not gonna lie i am disappointed that the trailer music from the wild robot wasn't in the actual movie

[faded-florals]

I've seen a few shows this year so far and I've taken curtain call pictures at all of them… just never got around to sharing! Some highlights of January through April, with lots of fun shows coming in the near future 💖

Little Shop of Horrors (Off Broadway, NYC) Sweeney Todd (Broadway, NYC) Kimberly Akimbo (Broadway, NYC) Hairspray (Tour) Frozen (Tour) Moulin Rouge! the Musical (Broadway, NYC) Spamalot (Broadway, NYC) Opening Night (London) The Phantom of the Opera (London) The Notebook (Broadway, NYC) The Book of Mormon (Tour)

[nctjpeg]

so….. “see myself in a documentary” was an item on my bucket list that i didn’t know i had but can now be crossed off…….

[cowboylikeyouu]

y’all don’t get how much i love going to the movies alone like UGH it’s the best feeling ever i would do it every day if i could

[nataliadycr]

Things I Watched In 2022

Watcher

[dracula-enthusiast]

hi. i thought i was normal but i think i want to see saw x again

[nokikissa]

Oh the age old problem of eating most of your popcorn immediately and then having to try to ration them for the rest of the movie

[geoffreytoday]

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Y'know, there's this gripe I've had for years that really frustrates me, and it has to do with Love, Simon and people joking about it and calling it too-pg and designed-for-straight-people and all the like. (A similar thing has happened to Heartstopper, but that's another conversation.)

I saw Love, Simon in theaters when it came out my senior year in high school. I saw it three times, once with my friends/parents on opening night, once with my brother over spring break, and once with my grandparents.

On opening night, the air in the room was electric. It was palpable. Half the heads in there were dyed various colors. Queer kids were holding hands. We were all crying and laughing and cheering as a group. My friends grabbed my hands at the part where Simon was outed and didn't let go until his parents were saying that they accepted him. My friend came out to me as non-binary. Another person in our group admitted that she had feelings for girls. It was incredible. I left shaking. This was the first mainstream queer romance movie that had ever been produced by one of the main five studios, and I know that sounds like another "first queer character from Disney" bit but you have to understand that even in 2018 this was groundbreaking. Getting to have a sweet queer rom-com where the main character was told that he got "to breathe now" after coming out meant so much to me and my friends.

But also, from a designed-for-straight-people POV (which, to be frank, it was written by a bisexual author and directed by a gay man, this was not designed for straight audiences), why is it a bad thing that it appealed to the widest possible audience? That it could make my parents and grandparents see things in a new light? My stepdad wasn't at all interested in rom-coms but he saw it with me because it was something I cared about and he hugged me when we came out of the theater. My very Catholic grandparents watched it with me and though my grandpa said he still didn't quite understand the whole 'gay thing,' all he wanted was for me to be happy and to have a happy ending like Simon did. My Nana actually cried when Simon came out and squeeze my hand when his mother told him he could breathe.

And when Martin blackmailed Simon, my mom, badass ally that she is, literally hissed "Dropkick him. Dropkick him in the balls" leading to multiple queer kids in the audience to laugh or smile. Having my parents there- the only parents, by the way, out of my group of queer and questioning friends- made multiple people realize that supportive adults were out there. That parents like those in Love, Simon do exist in real life.

When people complain about Heartstopper not being realistic or Love, Simon being too cutesy, I remember seeing Love, Simon on opening night. I remember my friend coming out and my stepdad hugging me and my mom defending us through this character. I remember the cheers that went through the audience when Bram and Simon kissed and the chatter in the foyer after the movie was over and the way that this movie made me understand that happy endings do exist.

Queer kids need happy endings. Straight people need entry points to becoming allies. Both of these things can come together in beautiful ways. They can find out about more queer culture later, but for now, let them have this. Let them all have a glimpse at a better, happier world. Let them have queer joy.

[90stvqueen]

this is so real. the cis people sitting behind me in the theater the other day laughed during the scene where owen tumbles on top of maddy on the football field and then runs away from her (and runs away from the truth, and everything that moment represents). i heard them snickering "run forrest run!" and it made me so sad. it must be so limiting - it must get so dull - to be so irony poisoned that you can't appreciate an earnest, honest, thoughtful movie without creating a layer of distance for yourself (and doing so publicly, performatively, so that all the rest of us in the theater know that you're above it or or over it or whatever). hope they get well soon <3

there is a GULF between me and the person who snickered in the theater on my rewatch at the "industrial freezer" line. cis people over there giggling at the wildest things meanwhile I'm over here being emotionally destroyed by your heart being cut from your chest and you claw yourself up from the dirt and you find what has been taken from you, hollowed out by this hellscape that imposes itself upon you, attempts to obliterate you, but you find your heart, and you find your friend's, and you have to go back to the hellscape to tell her to try and save her - the line fucks me up okay? it's incredibly raw.

[harryshairclippy]

is Louis bored from having to watch his doc so many times?

[themini-soda]

I JUST HAD THE MOST GALAXY BRAIN THOUGHT

HAS ANYONE DRAWN JAKE SULLY (from James Cameron’s Avatar) AND FIRESTAR (from Warriors) TOGETHER BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE THEY’D HAVE A LOT TO TALK ABOUT

Both:

renounced their old lives to join (the Na’vi/the Clans)

over time worked and learned to be a full member of their respective groups

had some kind of coming of age/rite of passage (Jake taming his ikran/Fireheart receiving his warrior name)

did some great task that won them the respect of their community (riding the Toruk/Brightheart’s naming ceremony)

united their people against a greater threat to the entire community that also had some connection to their old lives (the RDA/Scourge and Bloodclan)

have a badass wife they love so much

I have to go to class but I’ll draw something myself later if I have to

[txttletale]

hey what DO you watch on youtube? seems like you'd have some neat recommendations :3

i really loathe the like super-highly edited sound effect post-mrbeast slop most of youtube is now so i mostly like stuff that's like... calm and sedate. stuff i've been watching lately in no particular order:

northernlion vods and clips. he's an OG. i especially like his react court series, i must have watched all of them like five times.

speaking of OGs i've been watching zero puncutation (now fully ramblomatic) for like ten years and if anything it's only gotten better. best game review content on the internet. been really enjoying his more recent, slightly longer and more thoughtful 'extra punctuation/semi-ramblomatic' series too.

any austin's skyrim unemployment rate videos. instant classics to me, it's just a guy going around in skyrim trying to figure out the unemployment rate in every town. it's a very dry kind of humour, he plays it admirably straight, and it's weirdly calming.

kitten arcader's foot the bill videos. in a kind of similar vein, he watches the saw movies and then produces an itemized bill for everything jigsaw needed to buy to make his traps. it's kind of like... if cinemasins was fundamentally curious instead of fundamentally incurious, it scratches a similar sort of nitpicky detail-oriented quantifying itch but without inimical to the concept of art.

shuffle up and play. it's a magic the gathering play series that has enough editing that the gamestate is actually legible but not enough editing (or at least, not enough obtrusive in-your-face editing) that its annoying. i also like that they reguilarly play non-edh formats like cube and pauper.

spice8rack. i'm pretty picky about video essays but spice8rack has very obviously actually read books and has interesting things to say about the topics it discusses (mostly magic: the gathering). sometimes it has a kind of grating Theater Kid Energy but the fact that it actually meaningfully structures essays and analysis to earn the silly long runtimes is a rare delight from a video essayist.

jenny nicholson is a long-time favourite and another permanent fixture in my rotation. she's just extremely, remarkably funny which makes her the only 'basically just summarizing a thing' youtuber i think is worth the time of day.

i watch some sketch comedy, mainly wizards with guns and aunty donna, who both consistently put out really funny stuff that's kind of ITYSL-adjacent in its barefaced absurdism and contenmpt for concepts like "stopping a joke at the logical punchline". i also really like alasdair beckett-king and binging the old clickhole backlog for short-form comedy on youtube.

wolfeyvgc is right on the edge of the level of editing i find tolerable but as a long-time fan of multiple esports he Has It, he's absolutelyt fantastic at t elling the narrative of a tournament, explaining plays clearly, and generally making competitive pokemon esports thrilling and interesting ti someone (me) who#s never played it and doesn't care about pkoemon that much

i religously watch every elliespectacular/dathings YTP, the absolute best in the game right now, top tier snetence mixing and really good at actually setting up and paying off jokes in a way it feels like a lot of ytp doesn't. verytallbart is also pretty good.

trapperdapper is a channel i recently binged, it's a really fucking funny parody of minecraft challenge content that veers slowly from obvious angles of parody into pure absurdism with tons of blink-and-you'll miss it subtle visual gags.

too much future is a great youtube series where the two guys from just king things/homestuck made this world play through every fallout game and analyze them in that context. extremely funny and also just top-tier very sharp analysis. really good

another one of the rare good video essayists is jan misali. they're really funny and will go into topics that kind of seem narrow or strange to begin with in such depth and make them so interesting that it's consistently astonishing.

oh and finally sarah z makes pretty good videos. 'the narcissist scare' is an absolutely brilliant deconstruction of one of the most annoying pop-psych phenomena of the last couple years. and remarkably well script supervised i think did anyone else watch it and think 'wow the script supervisor on this must have been, a mind geniuse'

ok i think that's all i've been watching lately. hope you like whcihever of these recs you check out :)