#I think my favorite is bill. I just am obsessed with the way I drew him | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

hhoneyglasss · 2 years ago

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kill bill

notes: i think our favorite vampiric princess is in order for valentine’s season. hope u enjoy.

pov: alexis solaire — first person limited

pairings: past relationship(?) with alexis/sam, present relationship with darlin’/sam

word count: 2.2k

ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46534081

!! TWs {these begin under the cut} !! unhealthy obsession, physical threats, aggressive language, and graphic imagery. please proceed with caution or do not interact with this work if these topics r triggering for u.

reblogs r v much appreciated!

Time is cruel to those who go against its laws, but it's even crueler to those who follow them.

Time has always been something to rival against—a force that dares test the permanency of the Solaire name. Like all things who attempt the same feat, it is crushed into dust, and Solaire blood reigns victorious once again.

It’s a vicious cycle, but it’s one that’s kept us at the top—crimson crowns spilling red onto those beneath it. It can be ugly, even tragic, but it’s worth it. It’s power—indescribable power.

But it’s a lonely game between us, immortality and I. Eternity is kind to no man, to no creature of the night, and I, a Solaire, am no exception. A night of forever endlessly stretches out in front of me, a path I must travel alone.

Or so I thought.

Sam Collins was something more than the immortal night I was damned to. He was the moon, the stars, that lit up the dark blanket of sky who smothered me in its hold. He was always more than immortality or power—he was alive.

Maybe it was the drumming of his heartbeat in his chest or the way his cheeks flushed rose in the summer sun, but Sam Collins exuded life. He was vitality itself, a man who radiated it whenever he walked into a room. He was the true definition of human.

That’s what drew me to him. His humanity reminded me of the life I had lived so many years ago, those memories now forever captured in this perfect man. A gentleman with a heart of gold, but one who let close to none see it.

I was one of the lucky few.

I was falling—drowning in the river that was him. From his warmth to his touch, he invaded every aspect of my being, and I found myself hooked. Suddenly I saw a brighter future ahead, a future where someone would lead me through the night. I found my own northern star—he was Polaris, and I was the once-lost traveler.

But then his light started to dim. Precession began and suddenly the earth wobbled beneath my feet and Polaris was no more. He laid limp in my arms, fallen from the sky into my lap with a car door lodged in his abdomen. My vision stained red, the moon now blurry, and the future I saw now nothing but a faded fantasy.

I thought of the solution—I found a way to restore the life that had once pulsed through his veins. It’d be different, he’d be different, but he’d still be the same Sam. He’d still be my Sam.

My nails in his skin, his eyes locked on mine, and then my teeth in his throat. I hadn’t ever bitten him before—he said he hadn’t wanted that, so I listened. It was different now, though. He needed this, even when he pushed my hands away and begged me to stop.

My blood then dripped into his mouth, and it was complete. The golden glow of Polaris now shone silver, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. Sam Collins was alive, even if his heartbeat had slowed to an eternal flatline.

He didn’t understand.

One who had once fallen asleep in my arms now refused to even be in the same room. One who used to kiss me good night and walk me home now couldn’t bear to look at me. One whose heart I thought was mine now claimed I was dead to him.

I thought it was a phase. Bloodlust’s bitterness, or whatever you’d wish to call it. I pictured him coming back to me when it was over—that same crooked smile looking down at me, just with canines a little pointier.

But then the days stretched into weeks, then months, and then sooner than I realized, his bloodlust was over and the silent treatment showed no sign of stopping. He continued to avoid me like some foreign plague, but I still watched him, still thinking about the day he’d come running back to me.

The day hasn’t come.

Not yet, anyway.

That first year turned into two, then five, and ten and then fifteen years had gone by without a single look in my direction. Even if our progeny-maker thread had been cut, I could feel his change in breathing whenever I entered the room. The nervousness in it, the tension.

The pure, unbridled fear.

I was now the creature lurking in the shadows, the monster hiding underneath his childhood bed. The leviathan with fangs dripping crimson.

All hope was not lost, though. The moonlight still shone through the end of the tunnel, and I was patient. He would find his forgiveness eventually—Sam Collins is a good man, and good men know how to forgive.

That hope stood strong until I started to see the beginnings of the oncoming dawn.

This dawn made their grand debut at a monthly clan meeting in the shape of a wolf. A damned creation with scars slashed across their skin, beginning right underneath their jaw and wrapping around their arms, torso, and legs.

One of Sam’s flannels wrapped snug around their frame.

I watched them, my knees pressed to my chest as I sat on the stairs. I watched Sam’s hand rest on the small of their back, and I watched the way they leaned into him. I watched the kiss they placed on his cheek in greeting, and I watched the tilted shy smile he gave in return.

I watched all of it. I saw everything.

Ten minutes after my vigil began, Sam left them with a kiss on their forehead to speak with Vincent and William. They now stood alone on the right side of the room, their hands fiddling with the cuff of Sam’s shirt.

They must’ve detected me watching them when their gaze quickly shifted in my direction. I didn’t stop watching—I simply stared back. Their eyes were wide and curious before they crinkled into a small smile.

They waved.

They had no idea who I was.

All they knew was that someone in this wide room of vampires had done something ‘dreadful’ to their mate, something ‘unforgivable’. As far as they knew right now, everyone was innocent—everyone was a smiling face welcoming them into this clan with open arms.

How wrong they were.

I didn’t smile, nor did I wave back. Their smile faded slowly, and they dropped their arm and turned away.

Good. Pathetic chew toys are to be crushed ‘neath a Solaire’s marble heel, not given allowance to make eye contact, let alone smile.

I stood up from my perch on the stairs and walked away. I went past where Vincent, William, and Sam were speaking to one another, and like the past fifteen wretched years, I noticed the muscles in Sam’s arms tense and I saw his fists clench. His back straightened, and he became terrifically still when I walked by.

I paused, then turned to the mutt. Did they notice how Sam had reacted to my presence? Did they see how his posture changed? Did they notice the half-inch that his brows furrowed inward? Did they see it? Did they see him?

When I examined the expression on their face, I knew that they did.

The small smile that had tugged at their soft features had now completely dissipated—their mouth was pressed into a hard, straight line. Their eyes, once liquid sun in the light of the full moon, had frozen solid.

Resentment was in their eyes.

And protectiveness. As expected from a dog.

All wolves are the same—they bark, they bite, and then they die. One by one, they shrivel up and fall. It’s just nature.

I used to feel a sort of sympathy for them, us both being moonbound. I felt a kindred spirit in a way.

Not anymore.

The thing with the mutt was that they would not last. They had a few measly, troubled decades in this world while I had until the end of time.

I had eternity—they had a ticking clock.

There is no room in this world for immature vagabonds with a pension for death. There is no room for wolves who are fatally tied to their own mortality.

They will die eventually, and the Solaire blood will reign victorious. I will wear my crown again.

I went to stand beside the wall, watching once again when Sam made their way back to them. They jumped up to kiss his cheek again. I gagged.

Over the course of the night, I watched them. I saw when they both sat down for the clan meeting to begin. They never stopped touching for the entire night.

I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

If his hand wasn’t against their thigh, then his arm wrapped around their shoulder. If they weren’t leaning against him, then their hand closed over his.

Nauseating, disgusting, vile, obscene—there were a million words in the world to describe the scene playing out before me, but none of them quite held the venom I wanted.

The hour-long meeting seemed to drag on into oblivion until William finally dismissed the clan, a good natured smile warming his eyes as he bid us good night. I got up from my seat and began to stalk towards the door, my coat tucked under my arm.

I didn’t get very far when I heard a voice behind me. “Something tells me that staring at Sam’s partner like a tiger about to pounce isn’t gonna make him hate you less.”

Vincent. I stopped and turned around, but I stayed silent. His arms were crossed over his chest, his glare disapproving as it bore into me.

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Vincent.”

“Tch,” he huffed, “I’m not stupid. Do you think I am?”

I didn’t answer that.

Vincent continued, “It wasn’t just me who noticed, Alexis. I heard them whispering to Sam about it during the meeting. You’re making them uncomfortable.”

“I don’t care.”

His eyes narrowed. “Fine, then. It’s making Sam uncomfortable.”

“You’re saying that to get me to care about their feelings.”

“And what if I am?” He asked, “He’s the only thing that gets through to you anymore.”

I paused. “…Does it really make him uncomfortable?”

He nodded. Silence fell over us.

He broke it. “So you’ll stop?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I’ll try.”

Silence again.

Vincent leaned on the railing of the stairs. “You need to get over him.”

“I don’t need anything,” I growled.

“Yes, you do,” he countered, “It was different when he was single. You could chase after him all you want—he could handle the staring when it was only directed at him—but it’s not like that anymore.”

I braced myself. I knew what was coming.

“He’s with someone now,” he continued, “They’re mates, Alexis, and you know what?”

“What?” I whispered.

“He’s happy,” he said, “He’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him. Maybe you would’ve noticed the change in him if you weren’t so stuck in your own head all of the time, but he’s content now. He smiles. A lot. And he laughs. A lot. He didn’t do that much before.”

Another pause. I started to curl into myself.

“He loves them, Alexis.”

There it was.

The arrow through the Achilles’ heel, a wooden stake piercing my stone heart. Sunlight burned through my flesh until nothing was left but a pile of unlovable ash, blown away in the winter wind.

I didn’t realize how hard I was gripping my coat until my fingers stabbed through the fabric.

I looked up at Vincent. “Say that again, and your tongue will be shoved so far down your throat you’ll be dead before you hit the floor.”

I didn’t wait for his reaction. I turned on my heel and swept through the meeting room’s double doors, ignoring his angry shouts. They were static now.

I made my way around the building, hoping to find my car before I shattered my keys when I saw the two of them in the parking lot.

The mutt had a bundle of flowers in their arms, the bouquet tied together neatly with a red ribbon. They held a card decorated with hearts in their left hand.

Valentine’s Day. How could I forget?

They gazed with awe at the card and flowers, and the brightest smile lit their adoring features.

I could almost see the stupid fucking halo.

Sam rubbed the back of his neck with his palm, a gesture he always did when he was bashful.

It was sickening.

I stared at the bouquet.

There were roses in it.

I looked back up at Sam.

I wondered what I could do with those thorns.

My imagination began to run wild. I imagined snatching the roses from their bouquet and sinking the sharp thorns into Sam’s throat, dragging them through his skin while they tore him open. He’d fall to the ground, his hands around his neck, and his wide, too human-like eyes would beg for help. The dog would scream and scream and scream and I’d scream too, relishing in the noise, and my vision would bleed red just like it did fifteen years ago.

They’d call for help, but no one would come. The hours would tick by and the sun would soon rise. I’d watch from the shadows as Sam’s corpse burned to ash instead. He was the forgotten one now.

The asphalt would bleed red too.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

#© 𝕙𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕪𝕘𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕤 #⊹ ♡ 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕤𝕙𝕒𝕜𝕖𝕣𝕤 #. . * 𝕣𝕖𝕕𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕖𝕕 𝕒𝕦𝕕𝕚𝕠 #҉ 𓄼 𝕜𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕤𝕙𝕠𝕥𝕤 #redacted asmr #redacted audio #redactedverse #redacted alexis #redacted asmr alexis #redacted audio alexis #redacted sam #redacted asmr sam #redacted audio sam #redacted darlin #redacted asmr darlin #redacted audio darlin #redacted solaire clan #redacted fanfic

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weaselbeaselpants · 4 years ago

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Weird week behind me weird week ahead of me but I’ve done a lot of self reflection and came to the weirdest epiphany. The older I get the more I realize all my ‘problems’ with VivziePop - her thoughts on criticism; the choices she makes in story telling; some of the people she’s worked with (not that any of that’s my business; I’m not her mom) really aren’t about Viv, but more about her fandom.

I’m speaking of the preHazbin era Viv here and as someone who’s only watch horny fish jump at the surface rather than jump straight into the Hazbin-fandom, but given my ‘noncritical’ fellow fans have told me that the Vivziefandom now is also terrible - I guess I’ll go over my experience and make the most out of what I do know.

I followed Viv in 2009 and fell off in 2013 cause I kinda just lost interest and found myself wrapped up in other fandoms. I’ve always felt amicable about her content; I could give or take designs or the way in which she wrote characters -- ((Zech represent!!!)) but it’s honestly surreal and really fun seeing this person I recognize make it big and improve so much. Like I’ve said before I am very happy and very impressed with Viv doing all she’s done in the span of TWO YEARS. wow gurl.

Trouble is, there was the particular breed of fan who really made me...uncomfortable. They felt almost possessive of Viv’s attention. They sang praises about her work in a way that just made me want nothing to do with it because I was worried if I drew those characters these people would be like ‘hey, I’M Viv’s fav artist, not you!”. They would unironically write Viv messages like:

“you are a GOD” -- “I’m so not worthy compared to you” --“I wish I was as talented as you” -- “YOU ARE EVERYTHING AND CAN’T DO WRONG VIV”.

The kind of messages which were meant to sound flattering but, intentional or not, came off as gaslighting, like they were guilt tripping Viv about being better than them. This behavior, treating your favorite artist/internet personality like your superior and groveling like Starscream, it strikes a nerve with me; partly because I was this way with my favorite artists and influences back in the day, but also because once I got a taste of that treatment myself I realized just how bad it could be:

There was once a girl on dA who was jealous of me because of the attention I got on my art instead of her. I told her that I wasn’t gonna stop drawing but also that there was nothing wrong with her art and she’d find her place. It was weird being put in that position where someone is very clearly upset at you but also looking for your approval.

The second was some scumball who I blocked in 2016. He wouldn’t speak to me, only write condescending, backhanded comments on my art; check on my profile daily; call me a bootlicker (cuz I took commissions) behind my back; redrew my art and would talk about me in his personal artist notes about how I ‘probably wouldn’t see this’ - oh yeah all the while he did fan art of my characters but again never spoke to me when I replied. When I finally messaged him about his behavior he said he thought I was “really overrated” and “bad for the fandom” cuz I took money and kept him from getting the love he deserved. It took messaging another person within our fandom, one I had been in spats with online before, to finally realize I shouldn't put up with that bs....

That guy who was stalking me btw did so while I was well under 1.K watchers and am still pretty obscure. Anyway, I had one guy unhealthily watching me for the wrong reasons. Just one. This is why when Viv says she “hates creeps” I 150% believe this woman and am not about to call her a liar who just can’t take criticism. Like, if you really think that, I’m sorry but you don’t know what Viv’s gone through from both her critics AND fans.

Of course, a lot of people will be like “I bet you’re just jealous and really just want that kind of attention yourself so you’re preaching to the choir”, but like...no. I am envious of just about any creator who’s the social butterfly I’m not, but, like, if I'm jealous of an artist none of that is that artists’ fault. Ever. It’s my own issues with being comfortable with myself are at stake. If I criticize Viv’s work it’s not because I see her as competition or my Squilliam Fancyson; it’s because I’m a critical fan of animation and cartoons and have my own thoughts to share on the cartoons of an artist I’m familiar with. Jealousy/envy/mixed-admiration/godIwishthatwereme.jpeg feels are totally natural and valid emotions when you’re a creator. Envy becomes a problem when you internalize, weaponize, and scrutinize people on the basis of them being what you aren’t which -yes - some people do in the name of criticism. ((Although, I would hardly say some of the nastiest AntiViv folk are jealous as much as they are angry that this project they think is harmful is getting attention and using that as justification for some really shitty behavior of their own, which no, this post is not a part of by virtue of coming from a critical fan.))

Critique can come from either a good place or bad place; good critique can be used to bad ends and bad critique can come from a well-meaning place, and vice versa. It’s the difference between many a criticalfan having a sour taste in their mouth regarding the Viv’s base but persisting in a critique+admiration separate of that, and this asswipemonster trying to weasel his way into Spindlehorse while also bashing Viv on a public forum for clearly vitriolic reasons. He was a creep.

So yeah um please stop insisting that every Hazbin critic is just jealous’ because a) there are people who have a past with Viv’s base and that clouds their judgement, but in a lot of cases that doesn’t invalidate their feelings or thoughts on her work separate from that, and b) I’ve seen what clingy gaslighting jealous fans are. Spoiler: they’re not so much Annie Wilkes as much as they are Tommy Wiseaus. You don’t want Tommy Wiseau following you.

Another bad vibe I really picked up on that I can kinda confirm is still probably the case now: people think that they know Viv and the Spindlehorse crew and have the right to send them shit they don’t need or WANT to be seeing.

Like, I talked with Viv once ages ago. I don’t remember what I said other than we were talking about Frankenweenie, I think. She was nice. Outside of that she said “thank you” to my comments on her deviations but that’s it. I DO NOT KNOW THIS WOMAN AND unless you’ve worked with or are a legit friend/mutual of hers, NEITHER DO YOU. But I don’t think every Vivzie stan/critic knows this. Whether it be people assuming she MUST think they’re headcanon is now canon-canon cuz she liked a comment they made; or some critic thinking they must have seriously hurt her pride because they’ve been blocked by her on twitter (or you know, maybe she and the rest of Spindlehorse is tired of getting @s and don’t have to time to read through your analysis so they’re gonna just block and move on cuz they’re busy).

Just because the creators talk with fans doesn’t mean fans are literally their best friends and have a part in the show’s direction. And yes, critics and reviewers fit that bill as well. Know your damn boundaries people.

If you find/make some kind of contribution as a viewer that’s awesome but you should never expect nor DEMAND the creator see it. The most obvious horror stories involving this and Helluva/Hazbin have been the Instagrams made by the crew being harassed by incestpedo enthusiasts, but it applies even to just @ing creators as well.

I’ve seriously had someone tell me to just take my criticisms directly to Viv and like...no. Why would I do that?

I respect Viv and the artists working with her enough to know that they’re working their asses off on an animated series and should not be bothered. I don’t want them to stop all they’re doing and reply to me. I want them to keep working. Also, that kind of logic makes me wonder how many critics Viv’s found because she found it on her own or if some obsessed fan told her about it - which is really messed up cuz if it IS just good critique you’re, again, just pestering her, and if it wasn’t critique but full on harassment WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU MESSAGE HER ABOUT THAT ANYWAY? I’m sure she doesn’t need to be reminded that people drew and said really awful shit about her on Tapatalk. My point being I’m sure what people think they’re doing is

“OOOoh Viv lookitwut this person is doing in our fandom we need to ban together against this toxic behavior”

but what they’re actually doing, and sounding like, is -

“Hey Viv I know you are working so hard on the show and you’re trying to figure out where to go from here but LOOKITWHUTTHISHATERSAID. LOOKATIT! VALIDATE ME VIV AND PUT’EM IN THEIR PLAAAAAACE!”

TL;DR Viv’s fanbase back in the day consisted of everyman artists and interests but there was this one breed of fan -who I hope was just a vocal minority- that ruined it for everything else.

Call it stanning or ‘simping’ or as it’s classically known, ‘white knighting’, whatever it was it really soured a lot of people on her because of those fans.

That’s why the DollCreep drama got so bad from what I can tell. Doll and Viv had a falling out and then called out eachother online where people who took it upon themselves to speak for them starting throwing mud.

Back in the day I remember Viv used to get mad at artists for ‘stealing’ her style. I think this attitude from Viv directly has vanished but I remember it happening because one of the people she thought was stealing her style did art for me at some point and they were basically shamed/chased off deviantART by a gaggle of these really nasty Vivfans.

inb4> “VIV WAS AWARE AND STILL WEAPONIZES HER FANS THO”

I don’t know that. And honestly, where I’m inclined to believe she’d do something like that then I think Viv is really different and has improved her business and public image from her college days. I’d be very disappointed in her if she was pulling a Butch Hartman or Derek Savage, but I just don’t think she is one, k?

Viv is more self critical and aware than any of these uber protective-gatekeeping fans give her credit for. She said on the Pizzapartypodcast that she knows the Hazbin pilot wasn’t perfect; she’s been able to identify the problems with old Zoophobia; this woman knows that criticism of all kinds need to exist and from what I see she sounds like she’s trying to get used to that. It’s just, you know, when you have nasty antis badgering you, stalkers, obsessive yes-mam’ fans, opinionated shit posters, r34 artists, entitled shippers and the NDAs of a company alongside your own branded image - all that negativity, even the constructive bits, tend to clump together and you just want to scream at it so you can finish the damn cartoon already!!!!

TL;DR: PART TWO

VivziePop/mind is basically indie Tim Burton. Her work is fun, shallow and made with love but is marketed as being for everyone when it’s really not. Parts of it I love to watch; parts of it drives me crazy cuz of reasonswhatev this isn’t a review.

BUT any fanbase where people tell me I should just “expect what’s coming to me” when I’m trying to argue against dragging creators into fandrama is troubling. People have a parasocial bond with fandoms and their creators and they need to learn when to back off.

#vivziepop critical #hazbin hotel critical #helluva boss critical #critical fandom #I'm sorry to all the people I messaged n bothered over the past year bout my stupid thoughts #tw: stalker

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sophfic27 · 5 years ago

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Questions (Have You Ever Wanted to be a Fly on the Wall?)

Summary: By now, you probably know the drill (his name is Bill), on their tenth birthday, the first words a person’s soulmate will say to them appears somewhere on their body. The word "hello" is one of the most common phrases in the world, so when Roman ends up with it on his wrist he decides to get creative. Everyone he meets who greets him with a "hello" he asks them a question. And he'll keep doing this until it's on someone's arm. This is literally my first ever fanfiction that I've finished and posted, so here's hoping you like it.

Pairings: Prinxiety, Logicality (background-ish), Dukeceit (background)

Word Count: 2870

Warnings: One instance of an F bomb, I think that’s it, let me know if it’s not

Notes: I got the idea to write this after scrolling through soulmate POVs on TikTok with my sister for fun. We discussed how one could solve the problem of having a really common phrase, and she said "I'd just ask weird questions, because I'm really good at that." So I decided to write this. Most of the questions Roman asks in this I stole from my sister, because, yes, she really does randomly ask these wackadoo questions unprompted. She's great. Enjoy.

Read on AO3

If anyone was going to describe Roman as anything, it was fanciful. Of course most kids were excited by the prospect of getting their soulmark and meeting their soulmate, but Roman had very big plans for how he was going to meet his soulmate. He grew up with Disney movies telling stories of soulmates and star-crossed lovers and found himself mesmerized by the power of soulmates. The lovely tale of the Little Mermaid, and Ariel trying to somehow convey to the prince that he was her soulmate when she had no voice. The story of Aladdin doing all he could to survive and be worthy of his princess soulmate. When he was eight, he saw Anastasia, a story of soulmates who met before their words appeared. When she lost her memory, she couldn’t have known the boy who saved her was her soulmate, and he knew but thought that she must have died until fate brought them together again. Roman was amazed. With only two years until his words appeared, he fantasized about all the ways he would meet and woo his soulmate, what unique phrase would change his life forever. Maybe he already knew his soulmate and just didn’t know it was them! Roman counted the days until he got his words with impatient anticipation.

Roman was younger than his twin, Remus by seventeen minutes exactly. So there they were, huddling on the bottom bunk with flashlights at 3:11 am only two minutes left until Remus is exactly 10 years old and he receives his soulmark. “It’s going to be something really lame, like ‘you’re annoying’ or something,” Roman insisted. Having grown up with Remus, he found it hard to think he could even have a soulmate, but they both knew he was just giving him a hard time. “Nuh-uh,” Remus squawked in a mocking tone. “Yuh-huh,” came Roman’s equally childish reply. “NUH-UH!” “Shut up, or Mom and Dad will yell at us again!” Roman socked his twin with a pillow. He tapped the screen of the tablet they had snuck into their room from the living room. 3:12:31. They’d been checking the time obsessively, but now there was only half a minute left. They exchanged a sort of giddy look as the clock ticked closer and closer. “10, 9, 8” Remus started to count as the time came upon them. Roman joined quickly, “7, 6, 5, 4.” “3.” “2.” “1.”

They watched as two words drew themselves onto Remus’s wrist: “Um, wow.” The twins blinked at the words for a minute, until Roman broke the silence, “nice going, doofus, you’re going to weird out your soulmate immediately.” ��You don’t know that! Maybe it's a good ‘um, wow,’” Remus protested. “How would that be good? ‘Um, wow, you’re so handsome, ooooh,’” Roman made a mocking kissy-face and was promptly knocked over by another projectile pillow. He laughed, “face it, you’re a weirdo, ‘um, wow’ is not a good thing.” The door swung open with a whoosh and their mother stood there, staring at them. Roman covered the tablet with a pillow to hide the stolen device, and Remus scrambled off of the bunk. “I told you boys NOT to stay up like this,” Carla snapped. Her hair was up in curlers and she had hastily pulled a bathrobe over her pajamas. “But, Mama, our soulmates!” Roman whined. “Yeah, I got my words,” Remus waved his arm around even though the light was too dim for their mother to read the words and she was too tired to humor them. “That’s nice, Remus, but I told you, Papa and I have to work tomorrow, you can’t be keeping us up like this, I told you we’d look at your words in the morning,” she rubbed her eyes, still bleary from the sleep she wanted desperately to return to. “But it is morning!” Roman cried indignantly. Carla fixed her son with a pointed glare and he looked down and climbed under his sheets. Carla sighed, “thank you. Now, you can tell me what your words are in the morning when Papa is awake, but right now I need you, boys, to go to sleep, okay?” “Okay, Mama,” the twins replied in unison. Remus climbed back up to his bunk and got under his covers. Carla nodded and departed the room for her own, her slippers making light scuff sounds down the hall. As soon as the door clicked closed at the end of the hall, Remus poked his head over the edge of his bunk and looked down at his twin, “how much time is left?” he whispered. Roman uncovered the tablet and woke the screen, “ten minutes,” he whispered back. The next ten minutes crawled by painfully slow. Roman lost track of whatever his brother was saying as his thoughts turned to what his words would be. He was pulled out of his trance when Remus broke his silence to ask “how long?” again. This time, when Roman woke the tablet, he saw that it was 3:29:22, and he became overwhelmed by the fact that there was less than a minute left. He reported to his twin and went back to staring intently at the digital clock. Each second felt like an eternity, but they dragged him eagerly forward until- The grandfather clock down the hall chimed the half-hour, and Roman tugged his pajama sleeve down excitedly and turned the flashlight onto his wrist. There a beat of silence until, “so? What does it say?” Remus asked eagerly. Roman sighed, “it says ‘hello.’” Remus stayed quiet for a second, “that’s going to be hard to find,” he offered. Roman collapsed back into his pillow. “Well, I’m going to sleep. Night, bro,” Remus mumbled from above. “Night,” Roman murmured. He looked at the singular word again and switched off the flashlight. “Hello” was one of, if not the most common soulmark in the world, because it was the most common greeting, regardless of language. At least there was that, Roman considered, his soulmate probably spoke English. But that wasn’t helpful. Remus was right, it was going to be hard to find his soulmate. Roman sighed and turned over onto his side. Okay, thought Roman, then I’ll just have to get creative.

It was common practice to try to use unique and specific greetings when meeting someone for the first time to cheat destiny and ensure an easier time finding their soulmate, but with as common a phrase as “hello”, Roman had to scrap all of his fantasies of grand romantic gestures and fairy tale meetings in favor of a way to guarantee his soulmate would recognize him. The plan was simple, if he was talking first to someone new, he stated his name first and foremost. Anyone he approached first, he greeted with “my name is Roman, nice to meet you.” The part where he got creative was with anyone who approached him first by saying “hello.” “Hello!” chirped his friendly new classmate in sixth grade. “If you were an insect, how long would it take you to die?” Roman asked immediately. The girl stared at him before replying shyly, “I don’t… know?” “Darn.” He always made sure to explain his tactic after using it to avoid further alienating new acquaintances. And thus he continued this way with every new person he met, always with a new and random question.

“Hello.” “If you could time travel, who would you meet?” “…Abraham Lincoln.” “Okay.”

“Hello.” “If you could make a new type of snowman that wasn’t made of snow, what would it be made of?” “Uh. Oranges?” “Cool.”

“Hello.” “If a bat flew into your house speaking with the voice of a cartoon, but claiming to be your best friend, what would you do?” “…What?”

Sophomore year, Roman and Remus were fifteen years old. Remus had already met his soulmate, Janus, and naturally, “um, wow” had been a response to Remus weirding him out, in addition to the realization that Remus was his soulmate. Roman, on the other hand was still trying to find his soulmate with random questions, but to no avail. The second semester had begun and Roman’s physics class was changing seats. Roman collapsed into his new spot next to a boy he knew to be Patton, but with whom he had not actually talked yet. Patton was wearing a blue t-shirt with a repeating cat pattern across it. His honey-brown hair was lightly curled, and a pair of round glasses were balanced on his freckle-covered nose. He smiled warmly at Roman. The teacher finished giving his instructions and let the class go to meet their new partners and get to work on their assignments. And thus the cycle began anew. Patton turned to Roman with a grin, “hello!” Roman huffed slightly as he quickly summoned a new question, “what’s your favorite musical?” he asked in lieu of a real greeting. Patton stared at Roman for a beat before raising a hand to his chin thoughtfully, and Roman knew that the boy probably didn’t have his question on his wrist. “Mamma Mia,” he answered finally. “ABBA. Good choice,” Roman chuckled. Patton giggled back, “Why do you ask anyway?” Roman showed Patton his wrist, and he nodded wonderingly, “I get it, you’re trying to have a unique greeting, because yours is so common.” “Bingo,” Roman said, slightly relieved that he didn’t have to explain it all again. “I’m guessing you don’t have my phrase, right?” Patton’s hair bounced as he shook his head. He presented his own wrist, marked with the word “Salutations” in unusually crisp font. “Ooh, you have a fancy soulmate,” Roman said, “that, or they’re a nerd. I’ve never seen such a professional-looking font.” “Me neither,” Patton giggled again. “At least ‘salutations’ isn’t a very frequently used greeting.” Roman nodded, “yes, a nerd like that will be easy to spot,” Roman joked. “I’m Roman by the way,” he said, suddenly unsure if Patton knew who he was or not. “Patton!” he replied with a quirk of his head and a broad smile. “Nice to meet you,” he was aware of the teacher surveying the class to see who was working and quickly added, “maybe we should get started.” Patton nodded and they set to work reading instructions and becoming friends.

Half-way through the first semester of senior year, Patton introduced Roman to his recently discovered soulmate, Logan. Upon meeting him, Roman remarked that he was exactly the kind of nerd he had expected when he had seen Patton’s “salutations” soulmark. He then lamented that he was once again left surrounded with people who had soulmates when he didn’t, at which point Logan informed his that “statistically speaking, most people meet their soulmates in their twenties or thirties.” “Thanks, pocket-protector, but that’s barely comforting. I have the most common phrase in the English language,” Roman complained. “Actually, according to most studies performed in the last 20 years, the most common phrase currently is ‘hi,’” Logan corrected him with a push of his glasses. Roman stared at him in disbelief and Patton giggled at his side.

“I’m telling you Roman, he’s actually really nice,” Patton assured him as they walked down the path towards Roman’s house. Both boys were bundled up in coats, their hands stuffed firmly in pockets to protect against the biting winter wind. Roman had a Christmas party coming up in a few days, and Patton was trying to convince him to invite the fairly anti-social kid who never got of his emo phase, Virgil. In all honesty, Roman didn’t care if Virgil came or not, plenty of Remus’s friends, who he didn’t know, were going, but Patton was determined to make Roman and Virgil friends, and as it was, Roman didn’t think he had anything in common with the emo. “I’m sure he is, Pat, but…” he hesitated, searching for some way to appease his friend without giving in. “But what?” Patton pressed, meanwhile physically pressing against his shoulder. “But you get along with everyone, and everyone loves you. You can find something in common with anyone no matter what,” Roman stalled. Patton’s eyes bore into him. “I on the other hand, don’t think I have anything in common with Virgil. I mean, he’s all surly and dark, and I’m a theater kid straight out of High School Musical,” he gestured grandly before his hand quickly retreated to the warmth of his pocket again. “Have you ever even talked to the guy?” “Well, no, but-” “Then how do you know you have nothing in common?” Patton’s voice lilted. He always gave off the vibe of a dad trying to get his child to try a new food or something. Roman shot him a side-eyed look, and Patton continued, “you like Disney, right? Well, it just so happens Virgil is into Disney, too! See? There is something you have in common?” “Yeah, sure, but… I mean, who doesn’t like Disney?” Patton just shrugged. Roman was being stubborn, but Patton knew he’d practically won. “All I ask is you let me introduce you to him at the party, okay? Just let him say hello. You can even ask him one of your weird questions.” Patton waved a gloved hand vaguely. Roman was suddenly aware that he seemed to know something Roman didn’t, but he ignored the feeling in favor of a childish groan. “Fine, you can bring him to party and introduce him to me,” defeat dripped from his voice, and Patton clapped in delight and cheered as they arrived on the doorstep of the house.

Some pop rendition of Jingle Bells played through the house as Roman made his way to the snack table. The table was draped with a festive table cloth covered in reindeer and sleighs, and it featured an impressive array of cookies and cupcakes and other holiday-themed treats. Most claimed that Roman and Remus overdid the party thing, but in truth it was mostly Roman. Classmates and friends milled around dancing, eating, and chatting happily. Roman picked out a tree-shaped cookie that he had made and started to make his way into the living room when he heard someone call his name. Roman turned to see Patton dragging a boy toward him, a broad grin decorated his face and, as usual, outshone the blinking Christmas light necklace he was wearing. They met just to the side of the entryway into the living room. “I know you said you hadn’t met yet, so Roman, this is Virgil,” he gestured to the boy standing next to him. His dyed purple bangs draped just down to his eyes, and he was wearing a dark purple sweater in place of his usual patchwork hoodie. Virgil watched Patton carefully, only looking at Roman when introduced by name. Virgil gave a wave so slight, Roman would have missed it if it was any smaller. His low voice was soft, and yet carried easily over the din of the party, “hello.” “Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall?” Roman said. His response was automatic. Replying to “hello” with a question had become an unconscious habit after doing it for so many years. Virgil stared. That was a standard reaction to Roman, he had hardly registered the question that had come out of his mouth. Patton’s further widening smile, however, was not a standard reaction. Roman then realized that Virgil’s stare was different from others as well. His gray eyes shone with shock instead of the confusion Roman was accustomed to. Suddenly becoming uncomfortable with the silence, he said “… What?” “… I’ve always wanted to ask, and I mean this sincerely, what the fuck kind of greeting is that” Virgil said finally as he started to tug down his sleeve, revealing the words on his wrist. Roman’s face lit up with astonishment and excitement. “No, I’ve never wanted to be a fly on the wall, but thanks to you, I’ve thought about it bordering on obsessively for almost eight years.” Roman finally broke out of his trance. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it worked,” he exclaimed as Virgil stared quizzically at him. Roman showed him his own wrist and explained the logic behind his seemingly random question. Suddenly a thought occurred to him, and he whirled on Patton. “You knew about this, didn’t you?” He shrugged innocently. “I knew that Virgil had a weird question on his wrist and that you have a tendency to ask such questions,” He grinned slyly, “I couldn’t be certain, but it was a pretty fair bet.” “You’re a mad genius,” Virgil cocked his head at Patton. Patton smiled brightly again, “I don’t know what you mean, kiddo, I’m just helping out where I can.” Roman shook his head and laughed, “alright, Pat, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.” “That’s fine, Roman,” Patton clapped him on the shoulder, “I’ve got to go find Logan, so you guys get to know each other,” Patton waved as he stepped away. Roman and Virgil turned to face one another and stared at each other in silence for a few moments. Roman wracked his brain for what to do next, and all he could come up with was, “So… Disney?”

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angelofberlin2000 · 6 years ago

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Photo: Emily Denniston/Vulture and photos courtesy of the studios

Keanu Reeves has been a movie star for more than 30 years, but it seems like only recently that journalists and critics have come to acknowledge the significance of his onscreen achievements. He’s had hits throughout his career, ranging from teen comedies (Bill & Ted’s) to action franchises (The Matrix, John Wick), yet a large part of the press has always treated these successes as bizarre anomalies. And that’s because we as a society have never been able to understand fully what Reeves does that makes his films so special.

In part, this disconnect is the lingering cultural memory of Reeves as Theodore Logan. No matter if he’s in Speed or Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Something’s Gotta Give, he still possesses the fresh-faced openness that was forever personified by Ted’s favorite expression: “Whoa!” That wide-eyed exclamation has been Reeves’s official trademark ever since, and its eternal adolescent naïveté has kept him from being properly judged on the merits of his work.

Some of that critical reassessment has been provided, quite eloquently, by Vulture’s own Angelica Jade Bastién, who has argued for Reeves’s greatness as an action star and his importance to The Matrix (and 21st-century blockbusters in general). Two of her observations are worth quoting in full, and they both have to do with how he has reshaped big-screen machismo. In 2017, she wrote, “What makes Reeves different from other action stars is this vulnerable, open relationship with the camera — it adds a through-line of loneliness that shapes all his greatest action-movie characters, from naïve hotshots like Johnny Utah to exuberant ‘chosen ones’ like Neo to weathered professionals like John Wick.” In the same piece, Bastién noted: “By and large, Hollywood action heroes revere a troubling brand of American masculinity that leaves no room for displays of authentic emotion. Throughout Reeves’s career, he has shied away from this. His characters are often led into new worlds by women of far greater skill and experience … There is a sincerity he brings to his characters that make them human, even when their prowess makes them seem nearly supernatural.”

In other words, the femininity of his beauty — not to mention his slightly odd cadence when delivering dialogue, as if he’s an alien still learning how Earthlings speak — has made him seem bizarre to audiences who have come to expect their leading men to act and carry themselves in a particular way. Critics have had a difficult time taking him seriously because it was never quite clear if what he was doing — or what was seemingly “missing” from his acting approach — was intentional or a failing.

This is not to say that Reeves hasn’t made mistakes. While putting together this ranking of his every film role, we noticed that there was an alarmingly copious number of duds — either because he chose bad material or the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with him. But as we prepare for the release of the third John Wick installment, it’s clear that his many memorable performances weren’t all just flukes. From Dangerous Liaisons to Man of Tai Chi — or River’s Edge to Knock Knock — he’s been on a journey to grow as an actor while not losing that elemental intimacy he has with the viewer. Below, we revisit those performances, from worst to best.

45. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

The nadir of the ’90s cyberpunk genre, and a movie so bad, with Reeves so stranded, that it’s actually a bit of a surprise the Wachowskis were able to forget about it and still cast him as Neo. Dumber than a box of rocks, it’s a movie about technology and the internet — based on a William Gibson story! — that seems to have been made by people who had never turned on a computer before. Seriously, watch this shit:

44. The Watcher (2000) This movie exists in many ways because of its stunt casting: James Spader as a dogged detective and Keanu as the serial killer obsessed with him. Wait, shouldn’t those roles be switched? Get it? There would come a time in his career when Keanu could have maybe handled this character, but here, still with his floppy Ted Logan hair, he just looks ridiculous. The hackneyed screenplay does him no favors, either. Disturbingly, Reeves claims that he was forced to do this movie because his assistant forged his signature on a contract. He received the fifth of his seven Razzie nominations for this film. (He has yet to win and hasn’t been nominated in 17 years. In fact, it’s another sign of how lame the Razzies are that he got a “Redeemer” award in 2015, as if he needed to “redeem” anything to those people.)

43. Sweet November (2001) It’s a testament to how cloying and clunky Sweet November is that its two leads (Reeves and Charlize Theron) are, today, the pinnacle of action-movie cool — thanks to the same filmmaker, Atomic Blonde and John Wick’s David Leitch — yet so inert and waxen here. This is a career low point for both actors, preying on their weak spots. Watching it now, you can see there’s an undeniable discomfort on their faces: If being a movie star means doing junk like this, what’s the point? They’d eventually figure it all out.

42. Chain Reaction (1996) As far as premises for thrillers go, this isn’t the worst idea: A team of scientists are wiped out — with their murder pinned on poor Keanu — because they’ve figured out how to transform water into fuel. (Hey, Science, it has been 23 years. Why haven’t you solved this yet?) Sadly, this turns into a by-the-numbers chase flick with Reeves as Richard Kimble, trying to prove his innocence while on the run. He hadn’t quite figured out how to give a project like this much oomph yet, so it just mostly lies around, making you wish you were watching The Fugitive instead.

41. 47 Ronin (2013) In 2013, Reeves made his directorial debut with a Hong Kong–style action film. We’ll get into that one later, because it’s a ton better than this jumbled mess, a mishmash of fantasy and swordplay that mostly just gives viewers a headache. Also: This has to be the worst wig of Keanu’s career, yes?

40. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Gus Van Sant’s famously terrible adaptation of Tom Robbins’s novel never gets the tone even close to right, and all sorts of amazing actors are stranded and flailing around. Reeves gets some of the worst of it: Why cast one of the most famously chill actors on the planet and have him keep hyperventilating?

39. Replicas (2019) In the wake of John Wick’s success, Keanu has had the opportunity to sleepwalk through some lesser sci-fi actioners, and this one is particularly sleepy. The idea of a neuroscientist (Reeves) who tries to clone his family after they die in an accident could have been a Pet Sematary update, but the movie insists on an Evil Corporation plot that we’ve seen a million times before. John Wick has allowed Reeves to cash more random checks than he might have ten years ago. Here’s one of them.

38. Feeling Minnesota (1996) As far as we know, the only movie taken directly from a Soundgarden lyric — unless we’re missing a superhero named “Spoonman” — is this pseudo-romantic comedy that attempts to be cut from the Tarantino cloth but ends up making you think everyone onscreen desperately needs a haircut and a shave. Reeves can tap into that slacker vibe if asked to, but he requires much better material than this.

37. Little Buddha (1994)

To state the obvious, it would not fly today for Keanu Reeves to play Prince Siddhartha, a monk who would become the Buddha. But questions of cultural appropriation aside, you can understand what drew The Last Emperor director Bernardo Bertolucci to cast this supremely placid man as an iconic noble figure. Unfortunately, Little Buddha never rises above a well-meaning, simplistic depiction of the roots of a worldwide religion, and the effects have aged even more poorly. Nonetheless, Reeves is quite accomplished at being very still.

36. Much Ado About Nothing (1993) Quick anecdote: We saw this Kenneth Branagh adaptation of the Bard during its original theatrical run, and when Reeves’s villainous Don John came onscreen and declared, “I am not of many words,” the audience clapped sarcastically. That memory stuck because it encapsulates viewers’ inability in the early ’90s to see him as anything other than a dim SoCal kid. Unfortunately, his performance in Much Ado About Nothing doesn’t do much to prove his haters wrong. As an actor, he simply didn’t have the gravitas yet to pull off this fiendish role, and so this version is more radiant and alive when he’s not onscreen. It is probably just as well his character doesn’t have many words.

35. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) GIFs are a cheap way to critique a performance. After all, acting is a complicated, arduous discipline that shouldn’t be reduced to easy laughs drawn from a few seconds of film played on a loop. Then again …

This really does sum up Reeves’s unsubstantial performance as Jonathan Harker, whose new client is definitely up to no good. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a wonder of old-school special effects and operatic passion — and it is also a movie in which Reeves seems wholly ill at ease, never quite latching onto the story’s macabre period vibe. We suspect if he could revisit this role now, he’d be far more commanding and engaged. But in 1992, he was still too much Ted and not enough anything else. And Reeves knew it: A couple years later, when asked to name his most difficult role to that point, he said, “My failure in Dracula. Totally. Completely. The accent wasn’t that bad, though.” Well …

34. The Neon Demon (2016)

One of the perks of being a superstar is that you can sometimes just phone in an amusing cameo in some bizarro art-house offering. How else to explain Reeves’s appearance in this stylish, empty, increasingly surreal psychological thriller from Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn? He plays Hank, a scumbag motel manager whose main job is to add some local color to this portrait of the cutthroat L.A. fashion scene. If you’ve been waiting to hear Keanu deliver skeezy lines like “Why, did she send you out for tampons, too?!” and “Real Lolita shit … real Lolita shit,” The Neon Demon is the film for you. He’s barely in it, and we wouldn’t blame him if he doesn’t even remember it.

33. The Lake House (2006) Reeves reunites with his Speed co-star for a movie that features a lot fewer out-of-control buses. In The Lake House, Sandra Bullock plays a doctor who owns a lake house with the strangest magical power: She can send and receive letters from the house’s owner from two years prior, a dashing architect (Reeves). This American remake of the South Korean drama Il Mare is romantic goo that’s relatively easy to resist, and its ruminations on fate, love, destiny, and luck are all pretty standard for the genre. As for those hoping to enjoy the actors’ rekindled chemistry, spoiler alert: They’re not onscreen that much together.

32. Henry’s Crime (2011) You have to be careful not to cast Reeves as too passive a character; he’s so naturally calm that if he just sits and reacts to everything, and never steps up, your movie never really gets going. That’s the case in this heist movie about an innocent man (Reeves) who goes to jail for a crime he didn’t commit and then plans a scam with an inmate he meets there (James Caan). The movie wants to be a little quirkier than it is, and Reeves never quite snaps to. The film just idles on the runway.

31. The Bad Batch (2017) Following her acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour plops us in the middle of a desert hellscape in which a young woman (Suki Waterhouse) must battle to stay alive. The Bad Batch is less accomplished than A Girl, in large part because style outpaces substance — it’s a movie in which clever flourishes and indulgent choices rule all. Look no further than Reeves’s performance as the Dream, a cult leader who oversees the only semblance of civilization in this post-apocalyptic world. It’s less a character than an attitude, and Reeves struggles to make the shtick fly. He’s too goofy a villain for us to really feel the full measure of his monstrousness.

30. Hardball (2001)

Reeves isn’t the first guy you’d think of to head up a Bad News Bears–style inspirational sports movie, and he doesn’t pull it off, playing a gambler who becomes the coach of an inner-city baseball team and learns to love, or something. It’s as straightforward and predictable an underdog sports movie as you’ll find, and it serves as a reminder that Reeves’s specific set of skills can’t be applied to just any old generic leading-man role. The best part about the film? A 14-year-old Michael B. Jordan.

29. Street Kings (2008) Filmmaker David Ayer has made smart, tough L.A. thrillers like Training Day (which he wrote) and End of Watch (which he wrote and directed). Unfortunately, this effort with Reeves never stops being a mélange of cop-drama clichés, casting the actor as Ludlow, an LAPD detective who’s starting to lose his moral compass. This requires Reeves to be a hard-ass, which never feels particularly convincing. Street Kings is bland, forgettable pulp — Reeves doesn’t enliven it, getting buried along with the rest of a fine ensemble that includes Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, and a pre-Captain America Chris Evans.

28. Constantine (2005) In post-Matrix mode, Reeves tries to launch another franchise in a DC Comics adaptation about a man who can see spirits on Earth and is doomed to atone for a suicide attempt by straddling the divide twixt Heaven and Hell. That’s not the worst idea, and at times Constantine looks terrific, but the movie doesn’t have enough wit or charm to play with Reeves’s persona the way the Wachowskis did.

27. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Reeves’s alienlike beauty and off-kilter line readings made him an obvious choice to play Klaatu, an extraterrestrial who assumes human form when he arrives on our planet. This remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic doesn’t have a particularly urgent reason to exist — its pro-environment message is timely but awkwardly fashioned atop an action-blockbuster template — and the actor alone can’t make this Day particularly memorable. Still, there are signs of the confident post-Matrix star he had become, which would be rewarded in a few years with John Wick.

26. Knock Knock (2015) Reeves flirts with Michael Douglas territory in this Eli Roth erotic thriller that’s not especially good but is interesting as an acting exercise. He plays Evan, a contented family man with the house to himself while his wife and kids are out of town. Conveniently, two beautiful young strangers (Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo) come by late one stormy night, inviting themselves in and quickly seducing him. Is this his wildest sexual fantasy come to life? Or something far more ominous? It’s fun to watch Reeves be a basic married suburban dude who slowly realizes that he’s entered Hell, but Knock Knock’s knowing trashiness only takes this cautionary tale so far.

25. The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Very few people bought tickets in 1997 for The Devil’s Advocate to see Keanu Reeves: Hotshot Attorney. Obviously, this horror thriller’s chief appeal was witnessing Al Pacino go over the top as Satan himself, who just so happens to be a New York lawyer. Nonetheless, it’s Reeves’s Kevin Lomax who’s actually the film’s main character; recently moved to Manhattan with his wife (Reeves’s future Sweet November co-star, Charlize Theron), he’s the new hire at a prestigious law firm who only later learns what nefarious motives have brought him there. Reeves is forced to play the wunderkind who gets in over his head, and it’s not entirely convincing — and that goes double for his southern accent.

24. The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988) “You are like some stray dog I never should have fed.” That’s how Rupert’s older hippie pal, Carla (Amy Madigan), affectionately refers to him, and because this teen dropout is played by Keanu Reeves, you understand what she means. In this forgotten early chapter in Reeves’s career, Rupert and Carla decide to ditch their going-nowhere Rust Belt existence by taking his dad (Fred Ward) hostage and collecting a handsome ransom. The Prince of Pennsylvania is a thoroughly contrived and mediocre comedy, featuring Reeves with an incredibly unfortunate haircut. (Squint and he looks like the front man for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Still, you can see signs of the soulfulness and vulnerability he’d later harness in better projects. He’s very much a big puppy looking for a home.

23. The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) Every hip young ’90s actor had to get his Jack Kerouac on at some point, so it would seem churlish to deny Reeves his opportunity. He plays the best pal/drinking buddy of Thomas Jane’s Neal Cassady, and he looks like he’s enjoying doing the Kerouac pose. Other actors have done so more indulgently. And even though he’s heavier than he’s ever been in a movie, he looks great.

22. A Walk in the Clouds (1995) Keanu isn’t quite as bad in this as it seemed at the time. He’s miscast as a tortured war veteran who finds love by posing as the husband of a pregnant woman, but he doesn’t overdo it either: If someone’s not right for a part, you’d rather them not push it, and Keanu doesn’t. Plus, come on, this movie looks fantastic: Who doesn’t want to hang around these vineyards? Not necessarily worth a rewatch, but not the disaster many consider it.

21. The Replacements (2000) The other movie where Keanu Reeves plays a former quarterback, The Replacements is an adequate Sunday-afternoon-on-cable sports comedy. He plays Shane, the stereotypical next-big-thing whose career capsized after a disastrous bowl game — but fear not, because he’s going to get a second chance at gridiron glory once the pros go on strike and the greedy owners decide to hire scabs to replace them. Reeves has never been particularly great at playing regular guys — his talent is that he seems different, more special, than you or me — but he ably portrays a good man who’s had to live with disappointment. The Replacements pushes all the predictable buttons, but Reeves makes it a little more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.

20. Tune in Tomorrow (1990) A very minor but sporadically charming bauble about a radio soap-opera scriptwriter (Peter Falk) who begins chronicling an affair between a woman (Barbara Hershey) and her not-related-by-blood nephew on his show — and ultimately begins manipulating it. Tune in Tomorrow is light and silly and harmless, and Reeves shows up on time to set and looks extremely eager to impress. He blends into the background quietly, which is probably enough.

19. I Love You to Death (1990)

This Lawrence Kasdan comedy — the first film after an incredible four-picture run of Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, and The Accidental Tourist — is mostly forgotten today, and for good reason: It’s a farce that mostly features actors screaming at each other and calling it “comedy.” But Reeves hits the right notes as a stoned hit man, and it’s amusing just to watch him share the screen with partner William Hurt. This could have been the world’s strangest comedy team!

18. Youngblood (1986)

This Rob Lowe hockey comedy is … well, a Rob Lowe hockey comedy, but we had to include it because a 21-year-old Reeves plays a dim-bulb, good-hearted hockey player with a French Canadian accent that’s so incredible that you really just have to see it. Imagine if this were the only role Keanu Reeves ever had? It’s sort of amazing. “AH-NEE-MAL!”

17. Destination Wedding (2018) An oddly curdled comedy about two wedding guests (Reeves and Winona Ryder) who have terrible attitudes about everything but end up bonding over their universal disdain for the planet and everyone on it. That sounds like a chore to watch, and at times it is, but the pairing of Reeves and Ryder has enough nostalgic Gen-X spark to it that you go along with them anyway. With almost any other actors you might run screaming away, but somehow, in spite of everything, you find them both likable.

16. Thumbsucker (2005)

The first film from 20th Century Women and Beginners’ Mike Mills, this mild but clever coming-of-age comedy adaptation of a Walter Kirn novel has Mills’s trademark good cheer and emotional honesty. Reeves plays the eponymous thumbsucker’s dentist — it’s funny to see Keanu play someone named “Dr. Perry Lyman” — who has the exact right attitude about both orthodontics and life. It’s a lived-in, funny performance, and a sign that Keanu, with the right director, could be a more than capable supporting character actor.

15. Something’s Gotta Give (2003) This Nancy Meyers romantic comedy was well timed in Reeves’s career. A month after the final Matrix film hit theaters, Something’s Gotta Give arrived, offering us a very different Keanu — not the intense, sci-fi action hero but rather a charming, low-key love interest who’s just the supporting player. He plays Julian Mercer, a doctor administering to shameless womanizer Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson), who’s dating a much younger woman (Amanda Peet), who just so happens to be the daughter of a celebrated playwright, Erica (Diane Keaton). We know who will eventually end up with whom in Something’s Gotta Give, but Reeves proves to be a great romantic foil, wooing Erica with a grown-up sexiness the actor didn’t possess in his younger years. We’re still not sure Meyers got the ending right: Erica should have stuck with him instead of Harry.

14. Man of Tai Chi (2013) This is the only movie that Reeves has directed, and what does it tell us about him? Well, it tells us he has watched a ton of Hong Kong action movies and always wanted to make one himself. And it’s pretty good! It’s technically proficient, it has a straightforward narrative, it has some excellent long-take action sequences (as we see in John Wick, Keanu isn’t a quick-cut guy; he likes to show his work), and it has a perfectly decent Keanu performance. We wouldn’t call him a visionary director by any stretch of the imagination. But we’d watch another one of these, definitely.

13. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

Le Chevalier Raphael Danceny is merely a pawn in a cruel game being played by Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, and so it makes some sense that the young man who played him, Keanu Reeves, is himself a little outclassed by the actors around him. This Oscar-winning drama is led by Glenn Close and John Malkovich, who have the wit and bite to give this 18th-century tale of thwarted love and bruised pride some real zest. By comparison, Danceny is practically a boy, unschooled in the art of manipulation, and Reeves provides the character with the appropriate youthful naïveté. He’s not a standout in Dangerous Liaisons, but he acquits himself well — especially near the end, when his blade fells Valmont, leaving him as one of the unlikely survivors in the film’s ruthless battle.

12. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) In this incredible showcase for Robin Wright, who plays a woman navigating a constrictive, difficult life with more grace and intelligence than anyone realizes, Reeves shows up late in a role that he’s played before: the younger guy who’s the perfect fit for an older woman figuring herself out. He hits the right notes and never overstays his welcome. As a romantic lead, less is more for Reeves.

11. Parenthood (1989) If you were an uptight suburban dad, like Steve Martin is in Ron Howard’s ensemble comedy, your nightmare would be that your beloved daughter gets involved with a doofus like Tod. Nicely played by Keanu Reeves, the character is the embodiment of every slacker screwup who’s going to just stumble through life, knocking over everything and everyone in his path. But as it turns out, he’s a lot kinder and mature than at first glance. Released six months after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Parenthood showed mainstream audiences a more grown-up Reeves, and he’s enormously appealing — never more so than when advising a young kid that it’s okay to masturbate: “I told him that’s what little dudes do.”

10. Permanent Record (1988) A very lovely and sad movie that’s nearly forgotten today, Permanent Record, directed by novelist Marisa Silver, features Reeves as the best friend of a teenager who commits suicide and, along with the rest of their friends, has to pick up the pieces. For all of Reeves’s trademark reserve, there is very little restraint here: His character is devastated, and Reeves, impressively, hits every note of that grief convincingly. You see this guy and you understand why everyone wanted to make him a star. This is a very different Reeves from now, but it’s not necessarily a worse one.

9. Point Break (1991)

Just as Reeves’s reputation has grown over time, so too has the reputation of this loopy, philosophical crime thriller. Do people love Point Break ironically now, enjoying its over-the-top depiction of men seeking a spiritual connection with the world around them? Or do they genuinely appreciate the seriousness that director Kathryn Bigelow brought to her study of lonely souls looking for that next big rush — whether through surfing or robbing banks? The power of Reeves’s performance is that it works both ways. If you want to snicker at his melodramatic turn, fine — but if you want to marvel at the rapport his Johnny Utah forms with Patrick Swayze (Bodhi), who only feels alive when he’s living life to the extreme, then Point Break has room for you on the bandwagon.

8. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Before there was Beavis and Butt-Head, before there was Wayne and Garth, there were these guys: two Valley bozos who loved to shred and goof off. As Theodore Logan, Keanu Reeves found the perfect vessel for his serene silliness, playing well off Alex Winter’s equally clueless Bill. But note that Bill and Ted aren’t jerks — watch Excellent Adventure now and you’ll be struck by how incredibly sunny its humor is. Later in his career, Reeves would show off a darker, more brooding side, but here in Excellent Adventure (and its less-great sequel Bogus Journey) he makes blissful stupidity endearing.

7. The Gift (2000) This Sam Raimi film, with a Billy Bob Thornton script inspired by his mother, fizzled at the box office, despite a top-shelf cast: It’s probably not even the first film called The Gift you think of when we bring it up. But, gotta say, Reeves is outstanding in it, playing an abusive husband and all-around sonuvabitch who, nevertheless, might be unfairly accused of murder, a fact only a psychic (Cate Blanchett) understands. Reeves is full-on trailer trash here, but he brings something new and unexpected to it: a sort of bewildered malevolence, as if he’s moved by forces outside of his control. More of this, please.

6. My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s landmark drama is chiefly remembered for River Phoenix’s nakedly anguished performance as Mike, a spiritually adrift gay hustler. (Phoenix’s death two years after My Own Private Idaho’s release only makes the portrayal more heartbreaking.) But his performance doesn’t work without a doubles partner, which is where Reeves comes in. Playing Scott, a fellow hustler and Mike’s best friend, Reeves adeptly encapsulates the mind-set of a young man content to just float through life. Unlike Mike, he knows he has a fat inheritance in his future — and also unlike Mike, he’s not gay, unable to share his buddy’s romantic feelings. Phoenix deservedly earned most of the accolades, but Reeves is terrific as an unobtainable object of affection — inviting, enticing, but also unknowable.

5. Speed (1994)

Years later, we still contend that Speed is a stupid idea for a movie that, despite all logic (or maybe because of the utter insanity of its premise), ended up being a total hoot. What’s clear is that the film simply couldn’t have worked if Reeves hadn’t approached the story with straight-faced sincerity: His L.A. cop Jack Traven is a ramrod-serious lawman who is going to do whatever it takes to save those bus passengers. Part of the pleasure of Speed is how it constantly juxtaposes the life-or-death stakes with the high-concept inanity — Stay above 50 mph or the bus will explode! — and that internal tension is expressed wonderfully by Reeves, who invests so intently in the ludicrousness that the movie is equally thrilling and knowingly goofy. And it goes without saying that he has dynamite chemistry with Sandra Bullock. Strictly speaking, you probably shouldn’t flirt this much when you’re sitting on top of a bomb — but it’s awfully appealing when they get their happy ending.

4. River’s Edge (1987) This film’s casting director said she cast Reeves as one of the dead-end kids who learn about a murder and do nothing “because of the way he held his body … his shoes were untied, and what he was wearing looked like a young person growing into being a man.” This was very much who the early Reeves was, and River’s Edge might be his darkest film. His vacancy here is not Zen cool … it’s just vacant, intellectually, ethically, morally, emotionally. Only in that void could Reeves be this terrifying. This is definitely a performance, but it never feels like acting. His magnetism was almost mystical.

3. John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter Two (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019)

If they hadn’t killed his dog, none of this would have happened. Firmly part of the “middle-aged movie stars playing mournful badasses” subgenre that’s sprung up since Taken, the John Wick saga provides Reeves with an opportunity to be stripped-down but not serene. He’s a lethal assassin who swore to his dead wife that he’d put down his arms — but, lucky for us, he reneges on that promise after he’s pushed too far. Whereas in his previous hits there was something detached about Reeves, here’s he locked in in such a way that it’s both delightful and a little unnerving. The 2014 original was gleefully over-the-top already, and the sequels have only amped up the spectacle, but his genuine fury and weariness felt new, exciting, a revelation. Turns out Keanu Reeves is frighteningly convincing as a guy who can kill many, many people.

2. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

In hindsight, it seems odd that Keanu Reeves and Richard Linklater have only worked together once — their laid-back vibes would seemingly make them well suited for one another. But it makes sense that the one film they’ve made together is this Philip K. Dick adaptation, which utilizes interpolated rotoscoping to tell the story of a drug cop (Reeves) who’s hiding his own addiction while living in a nightmarish police state. That wavy, floating style of animation nicely complements A Scanner Darkly’s sense of jittery paranoia, but it also deftly mimics Reeves’s performance, which seems to be drifting along on its own wavelength. If in the Matrix films, he manages to defeat the dark forces, in this film they’re too powerful, leading to a pretty mournful finale.

1. The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

“They had written something that I had never seen, but in a way, something that I’d always hoped for — as an actor, as a fan of science fiction.” That’s how Reeves described the sensation of reading the screenplay for The Matrix, which had been dreamed up by two up-and-coming filmmakers, Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Five years after Speed, he found his next great project, which would become the defining role of his career. Neo is the missing link between Ted’s Zen-like stillness and John Wick’s lethal efficiency, giving us a hero’s journey for the 21st century that took from Luke Skywalker and anime with equal aplomb. Never before had the actor been such a formidable onscreen presence — deadly serious but still loose and limber. Even when the sequels succumbed to philosophical ramblings and overblown CGI, Reeves commanded the frame. We always knew that he seemed like a cool, left-of-center guy. The Matrix films gave him an opportunity to flex those muscles in a true blockbuster.

#keanu reeves #keanu reeves movies #ranking #vulture

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cowardsanctuary · 6 years ago

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Into the Object Hole:

Why is Nearly Every Object Show Flash-Animated?

(warning: a big, gigantic ramble generated by the mind of a comic artist)

I’m asking this question because I was bitten by the “Object Show” bug myself! It’s become a niche but easily replicated genre of its own within the animation community. Starting with the eponymous Battle For Dream Island (a show I think we’re all familiar with), we’ve seen many creators follow suit in the seemingly simple formula of having a bunch of inanimate objects participate in a game show-esque competition.

This is not to claim that Object Shows are unoriginal or overdone at this point: on the contrary. With the advent of resources for learning writing, animation, et cetera, I feel there’s a massive amount of potential that this community has, until now, mostly neglected. Battle for BFDI is, from what I can tell, reveling in its own, unique premise in the way it wants to. Inanimate Insanity’s second season has, as of late, recognized its potential to communicate a story about change and growth within individuals and the world around it. Unfortunately, I haven’t watched many shows, but I feel I’ve gotten my point across.

In another post, I asked about shows that didn’t use Flash, so i’m going to be responding to those before I embark on my tangent.

@apcwoc said: djshjksjhhdj most of the shows are probably done on flash because a lot of them were started when the og creators where much younger and flash is the easiest and most reliable to use when people start out animating

that’s a common thread i’ve been finding!! one of the earliest object shows, Animation Island by legotd61, was created a year after BFDI—and at the time, legotd61 was 7 years old. granted the animation & visuals aren’t the most jaw-dropping thing in the world, but they were a kid so it’s automatically charming. in like, a kid sense.

@demi-gray suggested Modern Objects as a non-asset-using show!

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Unfortunately, it still relies on assets for arguably the most important visuals: the characters! They do use the capabilities of Flash more extensively than other shows (that I know of), which makes watching the characters do their thing a lot more fun and engaging. The unique style compared to other shows definitely helps out a lot as well!

@payjayisgod said: i mean, i do frame-by-frame all the time, but for the sake of saving time i’ll be using assets for the bodies (gonna try doing everything else with frame-by-frame) in my own series i’ll be making with some friends ^^“ if you wanna see my animations my youtube is Icedog McMuffin :0c

PLEASE show me your show when you do it, because your animations are!!! really cute!!! also i’d LOVE to see stuff that takes the path of Modern Objects: with asset bodies, yes, but everything else is done according to the needs of the visuals. Use your medium to the best of its ability!

@dottival said: I once saw someone who Wanted to do frame-by-frame, but they never got their show off the ground. Mostly because they never really started??

you can’t just. tell me this. and not say who this person is (unless they want their identity under wraps, which i’ll respect)!!!! I’d love to ask them about their thought process towards their show, unless they didn’t actually plan much. I want to do some... ReSearch....

Speaking of planning, the thing that enchants and haunts me most about object shows is how much is going on behind the scenes. This is for any animated show, really, because as a bitty comic artist, I had no clue where to begin. I’ve started to draft and worldbuild for my own show, but I can’t help but wonder how much of it is done for other object shows.

(this is a thumbnail for a setting on my show!)

The medium, by default, demands attention on the characters at the forefront. The premise generates interest, the aesthetics (aren’t necessary but) lead viewers in, and the subject(s) of the show is what keeps audiences engaged. No matter what the creator(s) choose as the subject, they must make sure it’s polished to their best abilities, while ensuring other elements of their medium is properly balanced.

If you’re creating a character-driven narrative, for example, you’ll want to focus on the development of your characters. And, since it’s easiest to relate to concrete characters, that’s what novice content creators focus on developing as their content’s primary subject (and what professional content creators master).

However, the development of, say, a character is more often than not put into the hands of the viewers. How? Viewer participation: having the audience vote off who leaves a competition.

An interesting concept as, typically, animated shows require oodles of planning in order to convey the story it wants to the best of its ability. This makes the typical object show a challenge (forgive the word-play) to pull off properly, despite being deceptively simple enough of a feat on the surface. Character development can be volatile, as any character can be booted off (depending on how well you can predict a character getting eliminated).

Following this, the difficulty of creating a cohesive and well-written story through the Object Show format is very, very high. After all, you need to place time in your resources as wisely as possible, in order to avoid taking too much time on an end product you may not even like a little while later. The elimination of one character may upset a part or the entirety of the show’s plotline, if a creator is not careful.

Inanimate Insanity’s writing was able to excel at its greatest the moment viewer voting was dropped. One of the best shows in this genre (in my opinion), Modern Objects, isn’t even an object show: it’s formatted like a sitcom, and focuses primarily on characters and comedy. The one object show I was able to find that was primarily frame-by-frame animation (thank you, @bfb-basard!), Race to the Mansion of Tomorrow, is 100% script-driven; meaning, no viewer participation. This is the same for a few other shows as well, though I am not aware of them at this point of time.

(a snapshot of my animation process: this is for an animation of my OCs Milt and Malt, put to the audio of Big Bill Hell’s Cars.)

So why Flash? The answer is because it’s just easier. Not in the sense that the animators of these shows are lazier, but because animating in Flash saves time. Unless you’re putting all your stops into your show, or the contestants will always be present / aren’t quite as important to the narrative, you absolutely cannot afford to waste time and energy on things that can get thrown away later. Either that, or you don’t know where a character or a plotline or what have you will build up to, so you want to make sure whatever you do make isn’t wasted.

(Granted, I always feel there’s always time for weird plots to be resolved until it’s the very end, but retcons are also an option?)

You see this video? It’s a pretty simple animation of just a little softball walking around.

It took me 2 or 3 hours, give or take, to finish. Nearly every frame is unique, and I drew them all with my hands and my tablet, nothing else. All moving parts are either animated in 2′s or 1′s—the latter of which being 1/24th of a second. There are 35 drawn frames overall, stretched out onto 127 individual frames that constitute the entirety of the animation.

In other words, this clip is 5 seconds long.

If you want to finish an object show within your lifetime, let alone within 5 years, then Flash will be your best friend. It’s good, revolutionary technology that will make your life easier. With Flash, you don’t have to draw things over and over and focus instead on the motion, not the artwork.

Not only that, but being able to finish in a timely manner will help smaller content creators as, since we’re small and have small audiences, not everyone has a long enough attention span to hang onto you for decades. Certain shows like BFB and Inanimate Insanity have the advantage of popularity, so they can take their time with both the show and life (but they’re still rushed by their audience anyways so it’s a double-edged sword).

If you want to tell a story, consider what medium you tell it through wisely. Animation isn’t the only way, but I know for a fact that, if I get there, my show will be frame-by-frame. Why? Because I consider the artwork and the motion in my story just as important as my characters, if not moreso. You might not.

You can make it 3-d animated, claymation, traditionally animated, digitally animated, Flash, frame-by-frame, what have you. You can write your show as a novel, a script, a screenplay, a radio play, what have you. You can illustrate it as a children’s book, a comic, a graphic novel, or even an illustrated novel.

One of my favorite shows, up there with Modern Objects, is a comic by @swabsbloo called Escape From Abject Reality (which you can read on it’s own blog at @efarwebcomic! Please read it! PLEASE READ IT! PLEASE!!! PL). Swabsbloo takes the premise of object shows and simultaneously puts it on its head while playing it straight: a bunch of objects wake up in an oddly absent field, only to figure out they’ve been trapped in a game show-themed death trap controlled (...?) by a(n apparent) sociopath named Snake Oil. You should read it. You should read their comic.

Hell, does your object show even need to be an object show? You can create stories that are beyond inanimate objects, or stories beyond competitions. Again, Modern Objects isn’t a competition show. You can base your characters off of objects as well, without needing to make them explicitly an object. The show I mentioned earlier, Race to the Mansion of Tomorrow, takes this latter approach for the most part!

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As a storyteller, what I obsess about the most is storytelling. I love seeing all forms of it, and the potential that this community’s genre has astounds and fascinates me. The way in which we view the story doesn’t have to be important, but I find the ones I enjoy the most are the ones that utilize its medium to the best of its ability. It doesn’t have to be the best, it just needs to try.

So what do you want to try?

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a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives · 6 years ago

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The ‘Lost In Space’ Cast Takes Us on a Journey About The Reimagined Classic

Looking for your next binge-worthy series? Look no further than Netflix’s original series,Lost in Space. The show is a re-imagining of the classic 1960s TV series, updated for today’s audiences.

Lost in Space follows the Robinson family, space colonists who crash land on a distant planet. At the end of the first season, they somehow survive their ordeal but find themselves in a precarious position, yet again. I chatted with the cast members of the show: Molly Parker (Maureen Robinson), Toby Stephens (John Robinson), Ignacio Serricchio (Don West), Max Jenkins (Will Robinson), and Mina Sundwall (Penny Robinson). We discussed their characters and their experience on the series.

How did you become part of the project? What drew you to the role, and were you a fan of the original series?

Molly Parker: I did not grow up watching the original series. I didn’t have that much TV in my house when I was little. I remember seeing bits of it. When my agent first called me about it, I thought, “I don’t know if that’s what I need to be doing.” Then, I read the script and I got on the phone with the creator. It was exciting that this character on the show was inverted from the kind of archetypal gender roles of the mom and dad. She’s a hero. She’s coming from this kind of really scientific, engineering, logical brain, and every problem has a solution. She’s not particularly emotionally intelligent, which is not the place that a lot of female characters are written from. Yet lots of women come exactly from that place. I just love that she’s quick to action. My first questions [in playing Maureen] were really like, “What’s wrong with her?” She’s a brilliant scientist and she’s this great mother, but she does all these things. What’s her problem? What makes her interesting? That was exciting about doing it. Certainly, I think people can see her as the sort of American hero, which makes me laugh, but then I’m always trying to scrape out the corners of those places and find where she’s wrong and where she’s flawed and where she’s screwing up. There’s lots of opportunities for that, because basically, for all her good intentions, she is the one that wants to go to space. She’s the one that puts her family in a situation where they’re constantly almost dying. [Laughs.]

Toby Stephens: I wasn’t really a fan of the original series. I didn’t really watch [the show]. I saw a couple of episodes when I was a kid. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, I just didn’t really know it. I was much more of a Star Trek person when I was a kid. That was my meat and potatoes in terms of sci-fi. I watched Space 1999, which we used to have in the UK, and Doctor Who, but I didn’t really watch Lost in Space. Then when this came along, I was dubious only because I had that distant recollection of what it was. I remember the film remake being a bit of a disaster. So, I thought, Is this something that’s going to be worth doing? I read it and then I thought, “This is great. I love this. I love this take on it.” I like that it was very believable, somehow. I believed in this family. What’s great is that it’s a family that is not some sort of perfect apple pie family. It’s this kind of slightly dysfunctional, very real family with real problems that just happens to be in this context of being lost in space. l like the fact that its sci-fi — it’s not a space opera. It’s couched in some kind of scientific reality. I actually found that really interesting. Then I knew Neil Marshall, who was directing the first few episodes and was one of the original creators, spoke to me about it. Then I spoke to Zach [Estrin, showrunner], who talked me into doing it. He told me the story arc of John and Maureen, particularly. I really liked the idea of him being this archetypal character. The strong father, but he wasn’t a very good father. He was learning to be a better father. That really appealed to me. I think what I liked about it was that a lot of parents who are watching it with their kids can really identify with those characters. Most parents are good people struggling to do the right thing for their family, and at times feel like they’re failing. You’re doing this tough job, being a parent and not getting it right.

Ignacio Serricchio: Yes, I was obsessed with the original series because Guy Williams, after he finished Zorro, I wanted to know what else he had done after Zorro. I noticed he did Lost in Space. I wasn’t a fan of space and science fiction, but what caught my eye with this show was that it was so family oriented. My family is absolutely everything in my life. I could relate to that. When I was a little kid, I watched the reruns. I loved the family dynamic. On top of that, there’s a robot and a chimp. Chimps are one of my favorite animals. I think I’m a chimp. I actually think I’m devolving as we speak. I find more hair on my shoulders; I’m walking with my legs open more. It’s a weird transformation. [Laughs.] The project caught my eye, and I got the audition. Immediately, I got super giddy, but at the same time, I told myself to control myself. I said, “You’re probably not going to get it. They’re going to go with a white person. I don’t know why my mind was thinking this way. I thought, Don’t get too excited, because it’s going to be heartbreaking. So, I went into the audition very relaxed, just going to do whatever I wanted to do to entertain myself. I least will get out of it a fun experience. Then, they called when I was in Vancouver shooting Girlfriends Guide to Divorce. My manager called me saying, “They want to fly you down to meet you and read for the part,” and I said, “Do they fly everyone down because they have a lot of money? Or is it like on a special thing?” These are all questions that are going through my head. Then, it turned out good.

Max Jenkins: What got me involved in the project, actually is a funny story. I came home from school one day, doing my normal thing as a sixth grader. I go upstairs and I see this copy of a script on a table. I start reading through it. Then, I asked my mom, “Hey, mom, what’s this Lost in Space?” And she goes, “Yeah, that’s the script but we’ll pass on it because it takes you away from home too long.” And I said, “It has a robot, and I get to be in space. I get to wear spacesuits. I really want to do this.” One thing led to another, and now I am Will Robinson. I watched the original series, and our director for Season 1 recommended a few movies: Black Stallion, ET, and my favorite, of course, The Iron Giant. I also got to become friends with the original Will Robinson, Bill Mumy. That really helped me form my character. We became great friends. We bonded over music, and we bonded over Will Robinson, our love of sci-fi, and comic books. He’s a big Bucky fan, and I’m a big Captain America fan.

Mina Sundwall: I auditioned for the role of Penny. I got a call from my agent that they were doing a remake of Lost in Space and that they were looking for a Penny Robinson. I met with the showrunner, Zack Estrin, and some of our producers and our writers. I was drawn to Penny immediately because I see a lot of myself in her. She can be very sassy and very quippy. She thinks more than she says a lot of the time, in the sense that she is one step ahead of a lot of people, even if they don’t know it, which I was really drawn to immediately. She’s very smart. She’s very generous. I admire her and I respect her a lot, especially after now having been with her in my head for two seasons. I’ve seen her grow a little bit. Immediately, I was drawn to those qualities about her. I did see the original series, and I thought that it was very funny. I love it a lot. It’s definitely different from our version of the show. Yes, it is. It has its own charm that I love a lot.

What can you tell us about Season 2?

Toby Stephens: The next season picks up where we left off, and it just expands everything. What I love about an American TV series is generally if it’s successful, they want to make it even more successful. They want to take all the way, and they’re constantly improving things. That doesn’t necessarily mean you just spend more money and throw more money at it. It’s more about how can we take this and make it better, more entertaining, more fun for the audience, and just make the story more satisfying? It’s really a continuation of where we were, but expanded. Who were the robots? Where did they come from? What is the mythology behind them? What is the science behind them? Who made them? Where is Will’s robot? Are we ever going to see him again? We know all of that stuff. What is Smith going to do next? They’re stuck with Smith; she’s stuck with them. How far is she willing to go to survive? How does this family dynamic develop as the kids grow older? We watch them grow older, and we watched the parents grow. How does that change the dynamic? It just seems to get bigger and bigger.

Ignacio Serricchio: I can tell you that it’s going to be incredibly mind-blowing. Honestly, just from me being on set, I knew that it’s going to be gigantic. I cannot even wait as a fan to watch it when it comes out. I’m a fan of our editors, and I’m a fan of our effects department. Those are things that I have to wait to see until it comes out so I can watch it with everyone else. There’s so much of it that we don’t get to see in the final product. I know it’s going to just blow everyone away. I’m going to react the same way people who were not in the show are going to react. That’s what I can tell you. I’m really, really excited as a fan, not just as an actor.

Max Jenkins: The second season is going to be humongous. It is going to be out of this world, no pun intended. We have an amazing new director. He’s our producing director, and he really led us through this journey. His name is Alex Graves. He directed for Game of Thrones and Homeland. He took us to Iceland, which was really amazing. We spent about a week or so in Iceland, filming from glaciers to waterfalls to black sand beaches. That was really amazing. We went to Drumheller, Alberta, where you see a bunch of dinosaur bones lying on the side of the road. He really helped me build a new Will Robinson, which was amazing. He really helped me age Will Robinson up a little bit. He made him older, a bit stronger, a bit wiser, but he didn’t change who Will Robinson was.

Mina Sundwall: For the family in general, I have to say, look forward to bigger, more scarier, more answers, more questions — exploring much more space, more robots, more creatures. For Penny, as far as growth goes, it’s a lot about finding her position and what she can contribute to the family, given that she isn’t the science one. Towards the end of Season 1, she felt quite lost and a little useless. In Season 2, you see her begin to find what she can contribute and use that to help the situation. I don’t think that her growth is done whatsoever. I think that it’s only started.

The Robinson Family and company will return for a second season. Netflix has not dropped a release date yet but rest assured another season will be on its way. In the meantime, you can stream Season 1 of Lost in Space on Netflix. The complete first season is also available on Blu-Ray and DVD. The Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack features extras and behind the scenes you won’t see anywhere else. Here’s hoping we’ll see the Robinsons soon.

credits to BlackGirlNerd (x)

#lost in space #toby stephens #interview #season 2

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mamaredd123 · 6 years ago

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A Taste of Something...New

A/N: It’s been awhile since I posted anything on here and for that I offer my apologies. Writer’s block and life in general have been wreaking havoc on my creative tendencies. But I do have a brand new little tale to share with y’all and I hope you enjoy it. Not exactly sure how long this one will be but I am already 3 chapters in. Hopefully y’all will stick around and see how it plays out.

WARNING: can’t think of any in this chapter.. if you spot any please let me know and I’ll tag them though

WORD COUNT: 1566

PAIRING: none yet... the best is yet to come

Mama’s Master List

Mama’s Tag List

Just as a gentle reminder, if you happen to enjoy this (or didn’t), leave some feedback or even hit the reblog button. We all know how great it feels to get some feedback from our writings.

‘I'm gonna work late again tonight baby’

She read the text and then sat the phone down almost nonchalantly. Same words, another day. She knew he had to work, had to get the job done to put the money in the bank to pay the bills. Somehow, after seven years of this, it had just become monotonous. It was just words.

Was he actually working? Was THIS job that important? Just last Saturday he had promised to take her out to eat, finally a date night, but work had delayed him and they had missed their reservation. The one question that nagged her more than anything though, even after twenty-three years, was did she even really care?

Glancing over at the phone, with a slight hesitation, she picked it up and texted back her usual response.

‘Ok… try not to be too late.. love u’

Within seconds she got her “love u” text back and she knew he was done communicating with her for the night. She would not hear anything else from him unless he woke her when he came home in the wee hours of the morning.

Recently, she had been having these thoughts more and more when she got his recurrent texts each night, always the same theme, work. It hadn’t always been like that between them. They had met and fell in love early in life, such a joyous thing! He had been so full of life back then. Even after the kids were born nothing had changed. He used to always make sure he was home in time for dinner, he planned all their family vacations, and even surprised her on more occasions than she could remember with small weekend getaways for the two of them.

Presently, she was forty-three, both their kids grown and out in the world on their own. Now it was just him and her. Mostly, it seemed like it was just her. He very seldom was even home at night before she fell asleep. This should be the best years of their lives! They should be enjoying a few years (hopefully about five or nine years) before grandchildren and then spending the rest of their lives entertaining the younger generation with tales of laughter and words of wisdom. With life, there's always some obscure twist of fate though.

Her days and nights seemed to run together, with blurred lines, each one appearing to be a mirror image of the one before it. She would get up each morning, get him dressed and out the door. The rest of the mornings, she spent tidying up the house, maybe a load of laundry, and taking care of any bills that needed to be seen to. Her afternoon’s were just as exciting. Usually, she would make a quick run to the grocery store for a few items and if she really wanted to do something thrilling, she might even stumble into the local Walmart for a little window shopping. Then she would return home and prepare a dinner that would not be eaten hot.

After all of the ‘wife chores’ were done, however, she made the rest of each day her time. In between binge watching and casual surfing on the net, a few months ago, she had stumbled across a website that shared, which was new to her, fan fiction. Between all the things going on in her life, the new obsession of her new favorite show, and obviously her freedom, she was immediately hooked. Fanfiction! Who would have thought! She remembered the eighties and the nineties so she knew all about fangirling over someone, or so she thought.

So here she was sitting alone, again, in the middle of the night. She was all bundled up in the covers of their bed, computer up and running, and scrolling through her new favorite internet site. Reading the stories she stumbled upon drew her back to her high school fantasies. In the nineties, yea she had her crushes on the favorite celebrities but even in her wildest dreams, never had she ever some up with some of the stuff she was reading tonight. That was really saying a lot, really, cause the things that she thought of doing with Marky Mark HIMSELF (and still thought about doing today), well, they definitely made her blush when she thought about them. But.. these stories she read! There were things described in them that she had never even thought possible and she had been married FOREVER, or so it seemed.

Finishing the latest tale of unabashed lust, she shoved the laptop away from her. Leaning back on her pillow, she looked over to his side of the bed. The emptiness of it seemed to weigh even heavier tonight for some reason. She tried to think back on any given day/night when things seemed to change between them. Nothing stood out. Not one single moment. Except this one. A deep sigh escaped her as she realized she really did love him. That was why she was here, alone, every night, by herself. But was that enough? Business was good. She always tried to make sure nothing interfered with that. The kids were as good as they were gonna get. She always made sure he had clean clothes in the morning, a clean house or at least a semi clean house, a cold beer in the fridge, and something to eat when he was hungry. Doesn’t sound like much but that was basically all he ever asked from her all these years. If you thought about it, she really had it made.

Shaking her head, she climbed out of bed and headed to the kitchen. This way of thinking was definitely not a good thing, not if she was going to find a way to find some kind of passion, lust, love, anything to salvage her marriage. She grabbed her tumbler and filled it with ice. Reaching for the cabinet door, a small voice echoed in her head ‘all you do is drink yourself to sleep every night’. Shaking her head again, she reached in the cabinet and pulled out the bottle of bourbon. She filled the cup and mixed in the coke with zero hesitation well maybe a second's hesitation when she rethought about how she was trying to figure away to salvage her marriage. Taking the first sip, however, always felt like a open act of rebellion, even though no one was there to see it. She really didn’t drink much, usually a couple of drinks at night, maybe a glass of wine or two.

The thoughts running through her mind weren’t very productive as she moved from the kitchen and back to the bedroom. ‘Screw him’ was the basic principle of them. Most of these long nights, she felt like she was spinning out of control. One second, desperate to fix her marriage and breath life back into it. The next, angry as hell at him for always leaving her alone. Getting back under the covers, nursing her drink, she pulled her computer closer. She had to get out of her own mind, she thought to herself as she settled down to read some more fanfiction. Instead of going to her notification page to see who had posted another chapter of delicious, flesh devouring, sin ridden fiction, she chose to scrolled the main page. Maybe she would find a few new authors to stalk.

The first thing she noticed was a post from one of her most favorite authors stating that she was attending a comic con, in her state! This woman, oh man, she had been reading her stories since the day she joined the site. There was a lot of hype going on about the convention she realized as she read through the comments on the post. The entire cast of the show was going to be there! Out of curiosity, she opened another browser and looked up the convention. To her surprise, it was actually being held here in town. The thought of meeting any of the cast would be delightful but also possibly meeting her? Would he care if she went? Would he even notice she was gone?

She glanced over at the empty side of the bed and sighed deeply. She longed for romance like the ones she read. She hungered for some passion in her life. She ached from the loneliness. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the emotions, who can really say what compelled her but she clicked on the Buy Tickets tab and bought herself a gold package! He would probably kill her when he realized how much she had just spent but oh well. She very seldom ever asked for anything from him. She finished her drink, tucked her laptop away for the night, and settled down in the bed. Her dreams that night, for once, were not bleak or dismal. Instead, they were full of delicious fantasies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When he came home that night, he found her balled up under the covers with a soft smile across her face. He paused and watched her for a few moments. It had been a long time since he had seen her smile like that. Quietly, he slipped out of the bedroom, gently closing the door behind him. He would sleep on the couch tonight so maybe he wouldn’t disturb her.

Random Tags (gonna try to do an updated tag list soon... maybe.. hopefully)

@megansescape @madamelibrarian @chelsea072498 @jayankles @feelmyroarrrr @docharleythegeekqueen @crowleysdemonknight @motleymoose @sumara62 @mrstheorossix3 @evansrogerskitten @waywardjoy @dwaynii @jensen-jarpad @deathtonormalcy56 @supernatural-jackles @ruprecht0420 @charliebradbury1104 @relmi-llorrac @wonderange @sandlee44 @tom-is-in-my-tardis @kmb99t @summer-binging-spn @posiemax @ohmychuckitssamanddean @thedevilinthedetails @bohowitch @tmccarney @dragon-tail @suli155 @mrsbatesmotel53 @petrovadixon @thewalkingmombie @mogaruke @spontaneousam @uniquewerewolfsuit @firstlady36 @goldenolaf25 @lunarsaturn88 @babypieandwhiskey @impalaimagining @sis-tafics @chaos-and-the-calm67 @inmysparetime0 @idreamofhazel @nichelle-my-belle @firstlady36 @bohowitch @whispersandwhiskerburn @leatherwhiskeycoffeeplaid @ilostmyshoe-79 @roxy-davenport @mrsbatesmotel53 @plaidstiel-wormstache @spn-hetalian-from-Hogwarts @carribear31 @captainemwinchester @watercolor31 @sea040561 @jerk-bitch-and-an-angel @impalaplots @faegal04 @missjenniferb @tardis-full-of-fallen-angels @emoryhemsworth @isnt-the-blog-youre-looking-for @tattooedmomster13 @sardonicpsycho @dwgrl1903 @tankcupcakes @atc74 @like-a-bag-of-potatoes @iwantthedean @paintrider13-blog @d-s-winchester @death2thevirgin @just-a-touch-of-sass-and-fandoms @ellen-reincarnated1967 @just-another-busy-fangirl @waywardjoy @winchesterprincessbride @willowing-love @redlipstickandplaid @mirandaaustin93 @kiranagoya

#A Taste of Something New #mama's writings #new series #spn fanfic

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totoroses · 8 years ago

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i found this lesbian survey and decided to fill it out!

Femme or butch? is this what do i prefer or which i am? im a femme and i have no preference in dating, i’ve been wildly attracted to both and any in between

Do you have a “type”? If so, describe it. the only nearly completely common denominator though my exes are having brown eyes? i have dated only one person who did not have brown eyes. i always feel safer looking into brown eyes then blue. i woudl say i have often gone after the romantic artsy type with good music taste and some kind of signature style about them, ironically none of which drew me to my current girlfriend who i believe is probably defintiely the love of my life

Plaid button-ups or leather jackets? leather jackets! i will swoon over smartly dressed gals in button downs as well as a chill gal in some plaid unbuttoned flannel but the two together make me think of a lumberjack

Describe your style. i usually go for one of two styles- softly dressed forest wanderer, or slightly sassy soft grunge. both include my doc martens, but one is more natural colours and old fashioned dresses and the other is sassy tshirts and 90sish thrift store finds like denim and dark florals

Describe your aesthetic.pressed flowers between the pages of a book on forest spirits, rose milk tea, silver rainy downpours, curly baby hairs, white peaches, a cat sleeping in a library, custard pastries, a circle of mushrooms in moss, opals and furry moths

Favorite article of clothing? my one forever 21 dress ive had since like junior year that i can wear without a bra and it has like a cool cross back i just looooveee ittt, then also my embroidered minty 1930s style qipao sort of dress

Favorite pair of shoes? my doc martens and green chinese embroidered lace up slippers

Current haircut? currently blonde (ugh) and currently my hair falls just past my breasts, the goal is to grow it to my bellybutton!

Any haircut goals for the future? i really wanna get on the thick fluffy bangs bandwagon but i dont think i have the stamina to put up with growing them out again smh

Describe the best date you’ve been on. there was this one date i went on with one of my high school girlfriends where we went to a bookstore and hung out and then stuck googly eyes all over my city on random monuments and street signs, and we also ate thai food and listened to music and it was still one of the most lovely dates. BUT my girlfriend recently visited me in taiwan and we went in a glass bottom gondola ride up a mountain and drank from coconuts and wandered through old streets and had the most amazing tea food with a spectacular view and it was heaven

Describe the worst date you’ve been on. probably the one where i went on a picnic with my first girlfriend who then broke up with me that same day and even though our entire relationship was so awkward and not what is should have been it still hurt so bad

Single? Taken? taken!

If taken, talk about your girlfriend/wife! where do i begin! my girlfriend is a slightly shorter than me girl named lynn who loved korean variety shows, drinking coca cola, listening to cheesy love songs, and playing tricks on people (especially me). she used to be a major tomboy in middle and high school and date all the girls and get slapped a lot, as well as mess with teachers and play pranks on them and steal things from their lunchboxes. more than half of her birthchart including sun, rising, and venus are scorpio, and she wants to start her own streetstyle online brand but has not yet found a catchy brand name!

If single, what are you looking for in a potential girlfriend/wife? :)

Describe your dream wedding my girlfriend says if we get married we need two, a traditional chinese wedding (she is from china) and a western one with a priest since i am catholic, and i couldnt agree more. my dream wedding includes just very close friends and family, extravagant lights and flowers and a reception party playlist chosen by me, catered by the teahouse we went to in taiwan. i know its so silly and superficial but i want the dreamiest dress that i design, wisteria everywhere, and most of all i just want lynn at the end of the alter looking stunning in whatever it is she decides to wear

Do you want kids? YES me and lynn talk about this a lot because we both love kids and both agree on at least 4, no more than 8. and we will share who carries the kids so not just one of us is having our uteruses worn out

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live? guilin, china. but its a fantasy. guilin is real and beautiful but chinese laws make it so that even if we settle down there and build a house it cant truly belong to us, and in china you cant have a private business and it jsut sucks because the drema is to live in the quiet countryside with a simple life and beautiful scenery to explore together and with our children

Favorite lesbian movie? i love so many but im gonna go with the handmaiden!

Favorite lesbian novel/story? i havent read nearly enough, but adore all things by malinda lo and julie anne peters! ash by malinda lo is probably my favourite. i have to still read sarah waters though, i hear she reigns supreme

Favorite lesbian song? don’t pull away by milosh ft jviews (the music video is gay at least, i also love hayley kiyoko)

Favorite lesbian musician? hayley kiyoko probably

What lesbian stereotypes do you fit into, if any? mmmm i dont like softball so that doesnt work...i read a lot of sappho though! and i have short nails? and love buffy? are these stereotypes?

Ever been assumed to be nothing more than a gal pal? ugh yes

If a woman wanted to woo you, what would a surefire way to accomplish that? write me a love letter or make me a mixtape about your feleings something cheesy

Be positive! What do you like most about being a lesbian? girls!!!!

Are you more of a cat person or a dog person? cat but i also love pups!

Turn ons? a musical wonderful voice i could listen to and listen to, easy and stimulating conversations, passion for something that lights up their eyes

Turn offs? rudeness in any shape or form, indecisiveness or feigning indecisiveness because you think i want to make the decisions, despicable movie and music taste, smell

Do you usually ask other women out or do you wait for them to ask you? mmmm in the past it has been pretty even. i have learned though that with women it really is a waiting game more than with guys so with my current girlfriend the tension was killing me so much i had to straight up ask her if something was going on and when she said yes she did like me too i was so relieved because she admitted to having not dated anyone since high school (5 years ago for her) and not asking anyone out while at college so if i had kept waiting for her who knows if we would have gotten together!

What is your dream career? i want to be a stay at home mom and author and perhaps an art teacher or preschool teacher on the side if the books dont pa the bills!

Talk about your interests or hobbies! writing and reading and drawing and singing and hiking and listening to music and watching korean dramas and making lists and studying languages

What is the most attractive quality a woman can have? passion, not necessarily in the sexual wya, but passion for something in general. like if she is an actress you see her on the stage and see how into it she is, and offstage she talks about it in a way that shows she is capable of truly loving something so much and seeing wonder in life. or a girl who seems quiet but then when she starts to show you the music she likes she closes her eyes and knows every lyric and has this expression of true passion and love for the music, i am captivated by women who are captivated by the purest elements of life from music to dance to nature

Do you love easily or does it take time for you to warm up to someone? for women, i fall in infatuation quite easily. i was always more cautious with men of course and now i avoid them altogether. but love is something i’ve been becoming more conservative of somehow. i think because i was so hurt by someone before and gave and gave without receiving and im scared of that happening again. i have to be receiving love to give it, thats something i finally can control my impulses over and protect myself from.

Ever fallen for your best-friend? HA

Ever fallen for a straight girl? HAHA

The L-Word: yes or no? (love it or hate it?) heck to the no i couldnt make it past two episodes

Favorite comfort food? macaroni and cheese

Coffee or tea? tea

Vegetarian? Vegan? None of the above? none but i have tried vegetarian before

Do you have any pets? a chinchilla and a cat!

Early-riser or night-owl? night owl

What is your sign? gemini sun, sag moon, sag rising

What is your Myers-Briggs type? INFP

Who was your first lesbian crush? my first serious lesbian crush was on a girl at my middle school who dressed to the nines every day in vintage dresses and sweaters and she flirted with practically everyone just joking around and always had a boyfriend but was just charming in every way. my whoel day would eb ruined if i couldn’t just see her or say hello once, and i thought i was just obsessed until i was like ‘wait what if she kissed me’ and BAM i knew it was a real life crush

At what age did you know you were a lesbian? im not really sure. i identified as bi/pan from freshman year to junior year i think, but then was realizing i definitely had a preference and didn’t want to be with guys in a relationship at all to be honest but even up until last summer i was really questioning if i was asexual, so its been a journey but i think i finally fully realized i am a happy happy lesbian after meeting lynn

At what age did you come out (if you have)? i was 14 when i first told my parents i was bi, 18 when i said im a lesbian

Are you crushing on anyone at the moment (celebrity or otherwise)? just my girly friend

Talk about how your day went i worked this morning 7-11 after only sleeping 4 hours since i got hooked on ‘tipping the velvet’ the bbc miniseries, said goodbye to a friend, had school and did a presentation on how to make rosemilk bubble tea, i ate at a moomin cafe with my coworker, and now am working on homework and doing this survey and putting off my night cleaning duties eheh

Talk about your dreams/aspirations for the future i just want to have a family and to have my books published, thats all i really need. a loving wife, my sister still by my side as my partner in crime, so many children, so many stories finally told that people are reading. i really want to build a lovely house for my family like my grandparents did once upon a time, with secret rooms and unique hiding places, a house they can pass down as they grow up and it can have our lineage. i want to live by the mountains and trees and water, i want to be able to speak mandarin, cantonese, korean, japanese, icelandic, italian, arabic, and polish fluently

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junker-town · 6 years ago

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The most ridiculous, bizarre and sublime sports video games of all-time

Sports are dumb. Video games are also dumb. But dumb sports video games are the best.

You know what’s good? Sports! You know what also can be (generally) good? Video games! It’s also pretty fun when those two things meet, and even more fun when they meet in the weirdest ways possible.

That happened quite a bit more in the 90s and early aughts than it does now (probably because it costs a whole lot more money to make video games these days, but that’s another story) and while they weren’t always good games, they were usually worth it on their novelty factor alone. And I am fascinated by these games.

I have spent hours playing Ninja Golf on the Atari 7800. I don’t really know why, I’m just so intrigued by the process that spawned such things. I’ve played far too much MLB Nicktoons, because seeing Spongebob Squarepants share a field with Carlos Beltran is still hilarious to me. To use a more well-known example: Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl is something I’ve been playing a lot of. It’s a game that doesn’t relate to Glanville in any way, but somehow has his name on it. Discovering why that is and also, you know, playing the games, has been my mission for a long time.

Hopefully that means my bosses will continue to let me write about the cross-section of sports and video games, with some deeper dives and the like. But until then, as sort of a primer, an appetizer if you will, how about we establish a base? Let’s take a brief look at the WEIRDEST sports games for each major sport!

This is part one, where we’re covering American football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer and golf — I will cover tennis, auto racing, combat sports and some others in a follow-up article.

American Football: Brutal Sports Football (Atari Jaguar)

Honorable Mention: Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl (Super Nintendo)

We’re starting out hot and heavy with, you guessed it, an Atari Jaguar game. Also released for a number of other consoles, Brutal Sports Football is exactly what it purports to be: football, but more brutal than football already is. I’m somewhat obsessed with this game.

Now, don’t confuse obsession with skill, because I am TERRIBLE at it. Part of that is me not having much experience with the Atari Jaguar, and part of that is the game being crushingly difficult. But it sure is fun, and as you can expect, it’s quite violent.

Featuring teams like the Thugs, Slayers and Goats (actual goatmen, of course), Brutal Sports Football is pretty standard football, if pretty standard football included axes, beheading, repeatedly stomping your opponent into the ground, powerups in the form of rabbits (?) and a surprising amount of backstory to its teams.

No, really. Every team has a brief explanation of their history/what kind of team they are. And they’re ridiculous.

Some of those are just ... whew.

Just how brutal is Brutal Sports Football, you ask? Well, you can use the severed heads of your enemies as a weapon to cave in the head of another. So, it’s at least on par with actual football.

There’s something about the gameplay that intrigues me, even though I can’t get a damn thing done in it. It’s surprisingly smooth-feeling for an early sports game, and the rules are interesting. Aside from the murdery bits, the goal is to get the ball into the end zone, which is an enclosed area a bit closer to a soccer goal. You can throw it or run it in, and when you run one it, it feels a good bit like dunking.

I suck at it (a theme you’ll find on this list), and I don’t think it’s an amazing video game. But it sure is weird.

Basketball: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball (Super Nintendo)

Honorable Mention: Michael Jordan: Chaos in the Windy City (Super Nintendo)

I’m going to start this one with a declaration: Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is a bad video game. There, I said it. It’s out in the open. Some people — whom I no longer respect as human beings — claim that it’s a good game and enjoy it immensely. They are horrible people and if you like it, so are you.

Hyperbole aside, WHERE IS BILL LAIMBEER? Much like Jerry Glanville’s Pigskin Footbrawl, Laimbeer has absolutely nothing to do with this video game, and like the game above, it was released under a different title in other regions, Future Basketball. But there is also very little about it that is futuristic, save for the drab, gray arenas, the robots and what the game says are jetpack-assisted jumps, but are actually still pretty lame, standard basketball jumps.

There’s bombs, but nothing about getting them feels good. What baskets do or do not go in seem to have no correlation with where you are and what the opposing players are doing to you, and the “combat” animations are so slight that it’s hard to tell if you’ve hit someone, unless they explode.

The game has bad sound effects, bad music, slow action, a bad camera, and very little excitement. I’m told that some people enjoy it, but as a kid, I’m not sure I’ve ever returned a game faster. That doesn’t make it any less weird though, and the fact that this game exists at all is pretty fascinating. Why does it have Bill Laimbeer’s name on it? Why is he on the cover? Where are the fans?

I’m so confused. I wanted to give this to Michael Jordan’s Chaos in the Windy City, or the fan game, Barkley: Shut up and Jam: Gaiden, but Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball is a little higher profile and I wanted to set the record straight while also pointing out that it’s weird. And dumb.

Baseball: Ninja Baseball Bat Man (Arcade)

Honorable Mention: Nicktoons MLB (Multi)

This is one of those that doesn’t REALLY resemble the actual sport it represents, because it’s not a baseball game so much as it is a 2D beat-em-up arcade game with a baseball theme. And when I say baseball theme, I mean every inch of this game is steeped in baseball stuff.

You fight baseballs. You fight giant catcher’s mitts with faces on them. You’re a robot baseball man who hits other robot baseball men with baseball bats. One of them just uses a giant baseball as a smashing weapon.

The story — yes the game has a story — is that you, the Ninja Baseball Bat Man — or N.B. Batman, as the commissioner of baseball refers to you, have to recover items that were stolen from the Baseball Hall of Fame. You can play as the well-balanced Captain Jose, the speedy Twinbats Ryno, the powerful Beanball Roger or the long-reaching Stick Straw, who stands 7’2’’, officially.

It’s a pretty great game, actually — a fun 2D brawler you can play cooperatively, I definitely played and beat this in multiple arcades with friends of mine.

The game was conceived by Drew Maniscalco, who came up with the idea after reading about the top grossing films of its time — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and one of the Batman films (speculated to be Batman Returns). So Maniscalco wanted to create his own superhero-influenced game. He also liked the word “ninja”, thinking it felt “mysterious,” which was more than enough of a concept to make a video game in the early 90s.

This is the game on this list I can 100% recommend. You should play it if you can.

Hockey: Mutant League Hockey

Honorable Mention: NHL Hitz 2003

So, I actually didn’t want to include Mutant League Hockey on this list just because the Mutant League franchise is so big. That said, there is a surprising lack of weird hockey games. I went with NHL Hitz 2003 as the honorable mention because I think it works surprisingly well for an NFL Blitz spinoff, but I was hoping for something really nuts for hockey.

That isn’t to say that Mutant League Hockey is sane. No, it’s quite weird. It’s your basic hockey, except with robots, undead skeletons and trolls, and lots of things that are quite lethal, like exploding pucks and spikes on the boards.

Getting checked into them is not fun.

There are also random holes in the ice, and you can hit people with your stick. You can get a powerup that turns your goalie into a giant demon face, and if the opponents score on your giant demon face, it explodes.

And it’s oozing with personality, including fake coaching quotes like the one above. Have you ever seen a sideline interview that was actually interesting? Probably not. But they’re plenty interesting in Mutant League Hockey. Also, one of the arenas is the Madness Square Garden (why not Scare Garden?).

Soccer: Inazuma Eleven GO 2: Chrono Stone

Honorable Mention: Battle Soccer: Field No Hasha

If you’re unfamiliar with Inazuma Eleven, it’s a game developed by Level-5, a company responsible for many high profile puzzle and JRPG video games, like the Professor Layton, Dark Cloud and Ni no Kuni series of games. There is also a manga and anime spin-off of the games. I think any games in the series would fit on this list, but I went with this one because it’s my favorite of the bunch.

This is a story-heavy and strategy-heavy video game. The main character (of the series, not this game specifically), Mamoru Endou, is a talented goalkeeper and the grandson of Daisuke Endou, a legendary soccer player. You’re trying to save your team from being dissolved and you do that by progressing a surprisingly deep story, interspersed with bits of tactical soccer gameplay and strong anime cutscenes.

The game centers around the Football Frontier tournament, and includes arenas set throughout time and a final arena in a SKY PALACE. There you play Zeus, another team, who are drinking “ambrosia,” which is basically just a whole bunch of PEDs to make them better at the game. They’re juicing! In this relatively wholesome soccer game!

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Gameplay includes scouting, recruiting new players by beating them in battle. In actual soccer games, when you run into one of the opposing players, it initiates a command duel, which has its own series of moves and actions you can take as part of it. Normal soccer rules apply with substitution and number of people on the field. It’s honestly impressive how deep it all goes. It’s not something I would recommend to non-RPG players, but fans of the genre should absolutely give it a spin.

Golf: Ribbit King (Nintendo Gamecube)

Honorable Mention: Desert Golf (Mobile)

Before I get into Ribbit King, a quick note about this honorable mention — Desert Golf is a simple never-ending golf game that came out on iOS and Android and doesn’t have much going on for it ... which is part of the reason it’s weird. The game has no explanations, no anything but a ball and hole, and some hills. I played it through a couple thousand holes. There are things about it that I will not talk about in case readers want to try it for themselves, but suffice to say when the game became a hit, a lot of people had a lot of discussions about secrets or things hidden in the procedurally-generated game.

Now, back to Ribbit King, an extremely under-appreciated golf game where you play as a person, or what appears to be a picnic basket(?), and you’re hitting catapults holding frogs with your mallet to launch said frogs around a course filled with flies, hazards and extra points. When you hit the frog, it will then hop upon landing, and how much hopping is dependent on powerups you’ve used, your swing, and the stamina of the frogs, which you can replenish with items.

Strictly speaking, since I strive for 100 percent accuracy, I will of course note that the game does not refer to it as golf, but Frolf.

It’s a weird game. There’s a full story mode with voice acting, and it’s as weird as you can expect. You play a carpenter named Scooter, and you’re trying to become the Frolf Champion, so you can win the Super Ribbinite, a fuel source needed to save your home planet. There’s also a sentient rock pile, gumball machine and karate-using panda.

The game is a successor to a Japan-only Playstation game titled Kero Kero King, which I played way back when but never knew about Ribbit King until the past year or so. I’m glad to have found it.

There are so many weird games for these sports I didn’t even get to mention — Cyber Baseball 2020, Mega Man Soccer, Blitz: The League, Zany Golf, like 40 other crazy baseball games and so much more. Sound off in the comments on what I missed and your predictions for the next batch of weird games.

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lalka-laski · 5 years ago

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Alabama: Do you like the movie Forrest Gump? Sure do

Alaska: Would you rather deal with 30 days of day or 30 days of night? I think just for the sake of my depression I’d choose 30 days of daytime. I sleep well in the daytime anyways, so it wouldn’t pose much of an issue for me.

Arizona: Can you handle heat well? Not even a little bit

Arkansas: What are your opinions on Bill Clinton? I don’t feel like getting into it

California: Who is your favorite actor? Favorite actress? Idris Elba, Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon

Colorado: Do you smoke weed? What are your opinions on its legalization? I smoke here & there but for the most part, it’s not my favorite. I do think weed should be legalized though.

Connecticut: Have you ever had a school shooting at your school? Thank God, no.

Delaware: Are you usually the first to do something, or are you more of a follower? Almost always a follower

Florida: Have you ever been to Disney World? No. It’s on my bucket list though. Someone as obsessed with princesses as I am NEEDS to go to Disney World.

Georgia: Would you consider yourself a southern belle? I was born & raised in New York and have NONE of the sensibilities of a southern belle, or anyone from the south for that matter.

Hawaii: What would be paradise for you? Being on the water with a drink in my hand and a good book on my lap

Idaho: What is your favorite way to eat a potato? French fries, perhaps? No, no- curly fries!

Illinois: Did you vote for President Obama (or would you have)? I did although I wasn’t eligible to vote until his second term.

Indiana: Do you like corn? Actually, as of this summer I do! I was never a fan before.

Iowa: Are roses your favorite flower? Nope, Chrysanthemums.

Kansas: Do you like the Tin Man, Scarecrow or Cowardly Lion better? I relate to the cowardly lion so I guess I like him best

Kentucky: Have you ever been to a horse race? Nope

Louisiana: Have you ever celebrated Mardi Gras? My mom is crazy for New Orleans so we always do a little Mardi Gras celebration with king cake and other goodies!

Maine: Do you like lobster? I don’t eat seafood

Maryland: Have you ever been to Washington DC? Yep, 8th grade class trip.

Massachusetts: Are you smart enough to go to Harvard? 'What, like it’s hard?”

Michigan: Have you ever swam in a lake? I just did two days. It’s my happy place.

Minnesota: Have you seen Drop Dead Gorgeous? Never even heard of it

Mississippi: Do you follow college football? I don’t follow any kind of football

Missouri: Have you ever convinced someone to show you their private parts? What a disturbing way to word that? And I’m concerned what this question has to do with the state of Missouri?? What goes on there?

Montana: What is the greatest treasure you have ever found?

Nebraska: Do you eat beef? Nope. No meat or seafood for me.

Nevada: Are you good at card games? Not at all. Plus, they bore me.

New Hampshire: What are your views on gay marriage? I’m 100% on board because I’m not a trash bigot

New Jersey: Do you watch The Jersey Shore? Oh yeah. It was a guilty pleasure in high school and my first few years at college. It was impossible to ignore.

New Mexico: Would you consider yourself a hippie? Nope. Although Glenn calls me a dirty hippie sometimes because I’m always barefoot. And yes, my feet do get dirty :P

New York: Have you ever been to New York City? Would you like to? I’ve only been once on a class trip, so I didn’t get the full experience. I’d like to revisit as an adult although I still think I could only handle a short trip.

North Carolina: Are the Panthers your favorite football team? I don’t even know who they are

North Dakota: Have you seen Fargo? Nope

Ohio: Did you watch The Drew Carey Show? My parents did. I have vague memories of it, particularly the bold & boisterous Mimi.

Oklahoma: What is your favorite musical? Jersey Boys

Oregon: Did you ever play the Oregon Trail game? Nope, that was a bit before my time.

Pennsylvania: Do you watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia? A little here & there

Rhode Island: Who is the smallest person you know? What? Lol

South Carolina: Do you think Aziz Ansari is funny? I guess so. He’s not my favorite but he’s not UNfunny.

South Dakota: Who is more interesting: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln? Teddy Roosevelt was a cool dude, let’s go with him.

Tennessee: Who is your favorite country singer? I don’t care for country music but Shania Twain seems like a fun girl. Plus, she’s Canadian so she’s got that going for her.

Texas: Do you like barbecue or Tex-Mex better? Tex-Mex is probably my favorite cuisine!

Utah: Do you know anyone who is Mormon? Brandon Flowers. I mean, I don’t know him personally but sometimes I like to pretend I do :p

Vermont: Do you get the full autumnal colors in the fall where you live? Oh yes! It’s my favorite.

Virginia: Are you a virgin? No

Washington: Do you like grunge? I like Pearl Jam but that’s about as far as I’ll wade into those waters

West Virginia: Do you like the mountains? I could take ‘em or leave ‘em

Wisconsin: What’s your favorite kind of cheese? Oh God, who could pick just one?!

Wyoming: Do you love westerns? Nah.

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ethanclaxton · 7 years ago

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Compact Living: Quarter One

For any goal to be accomplished there needs to be regular check ins to make sure you are able to accomplish them, right? When I set my 2018 goal to live COMPACTLY I knew it was going to take some really intentional work. I figured I’d try to do my quarterly check ins here on the blog in an effort to encourage you to do the same thing in your own lives with your 2018 goals (even if you’ve already broken every single resolution… get back on the band wagon!).

Compact: Free Time

Living compactly with my free time means being focused and intentional about how I spend it. I want to have the space to do things like go places with each child individually so that they get one on one time. Last weekend I took Elle to a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit after she’d learned about her paintings in pre-school. (You can see my Facebook post about how “successful” our trip was HERE.) I’ve been trying to get out and just go on walks with the four kids after school too… the babies are calm in the stroller and Drew and Elle really open up and don’t fight as we walk. Plus, Drew gets loads of steps on his kid version of a FitBit, which he’s obsessed with, so I see it as a win-win.

Coat (almost 50% off! and one of my favorite things I own… got it in Paris!!) | Skinny Dark Jeans: Gap | Heels (I have the non-patent leather version)

Being compact in my free time also means saying yes to things that I’m really excited about doing… like picking out our bathroom tile and grouting it (after AJ laid it). And it means saying no to things that are fantastic (like a book club my good friends are doing) because it’s smack dab in the middle of the twins’ nap on my day when the other two are in school… I knew I needed free time around the house so living compactly means saying no to even really good things.

Major sneak peek of the new tile! I’m obsessed with how it looks with the vanity!

Tile | Vanity

One of the best ways I’ve found to be smart about my free time, or any time for that matter, is to write out everything for the day in my planner and always have the page open throughout the day. I write down five things max to get done and sometimes I’ll schedule specific errands or jobs around the house into my planner instead of just putting them in the to-do column so I know I can fit them into the day. Writing events or tasks into the hourly time block really helps me think through the day and how I’m going to get done what I need to and fit in important things like naps.

Compact: Finances

The other day I parked myself in our office and paid a bunch of bills. I really took time to figure out what I could be doing better on. It’s amazing how easy it is to just pick up a few things here and there and then eventually those few little things really add up. I’m really trying to be more intentional about that this month.

(Side note: if you have ever thought about purchasing these chairs and the cost was always prohibitive they are on the best sale I’ve EVER seen them at right now… at least a $100 less per chair than I paid for ours!)

Compact: Health

Being compact with help means actually having a compact body… a body without loads of extra fat or weight… and also a mind that’s compact, it thinks about what is good and pure and not obsessing over my body.

About five months ago I purchased Kayla Itsines Bikini Body Guide book. I kept reading testimony after testimony on her Instagram account of real women with real results from her program. At 28 minutes a day it seemed too good to be true… and I just became scared that my results wouldn’t be that good, that I couldn’t do the exercises or that it would be too hard. For five months I made excuses.

And then I was sick of feeling ashamed about the way I was treating my body so I decided to take it slow. The day after Valentine’s I decided to severely restrict my sugar intake, without completely nixing sugar (I did that on Whole 30 and hated it). I love to bake but I always find I eat, to a fault, what I bake. I am terrible at eating in moderation with sugar; I’m so much better at basically an all or nothing approach. So I grabbed some all natural dark hot chocolate and a super dark chocolate bar, broken up into one or two tiny pieces a day, and let those be my sugars at home.

Then after doing that for a couple of weeks I started the program from Kayla Itsines book on March 4. I decided to just go for it even though I was scared of failing. t’s safe to say that three weeks in I’m obsessed with it. There is something more empowering about this program than any other exercise I’ve ever done. I was pretty bad at it the first day and put on my tightest gym shorts so I could get a good “before” shot. I was totally mortified looking at myself in the mirror and feeling like I let myself my bad choices for too long… and I was also really proud of myself at the same time for actually doing something about it. Last Sunday I took my second week progress picture and already notice a small difference. Then tomorrow morning I’ll do the same in the same outfit. It’s not dramatic but doing something challenging like this has completely shifted how I’m looking at myself. I kept reading in the testimonials that the mind shift was the biggest thing and IT’S SO TRUE!!!

I just purchased the book, which includes the workout guide and descriptions, some pink 5 pound weights from Marshalls and a pink yoga mat. I didn’t want to spend extra money and purchase the app or the e-book when this book seemed to cover all the bases. So far I’ve been more than happy with it! I generally wear these lightweight Nikes to do the workout and then my running shoes (I’ve worn Asics since high school) for my cardio days.

So that’s how my goal is going thus far… I’ve definitely not been perfect at it (did you read about the five month procrastination on the work out program?) but it helps to know that I told people what my goal was, that I chose something manageable and that I know that what I chose is something that will really benefit me and my fam.

Hope you have a great weekend, Friends. Check in with yourself on YOUR 2018 goals!

The post Compact Living: Quarter One appeared first on Migonis Home.

Compact Living: Quarter One published first on https://vacuumpal.blogspot.com

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tinymixtapes · 8 years ago

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Feature: Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York 2017

Red Bull Music Academy returned to New York this year for yet another well-curated series of performances, lectures, club nights, and workshops. As is tradition now, TMT sent a few writers to cover some of these events, which included a hip-hop piano bar show, Brazilian bass music, a showcase for one of our favorite labels, an interdisciplinary performance piece/meditation, and a couple lectures from two vital artists of our time. --- Solange: An Ode To Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool After the late performance of An Ode To had ended, Solange Knowles took some time to speak to the audience about the piece she had just performed for us, her development as a musician, and the space she had just occupied for her work. Referring to the Guggenheim Museum’s atrium, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed “temple” that has been home to countless exhibitions and performances of significance, Solange spoke of wanting to “immerse my work in the daylight,” of “having a show where I can see the faces” of the people there to see her. This quality of light was one of the most striking things about Ode: the combination of bright sun from the building’s skylight (both of the show’s performances were scheduled in the afternoon) and flat, even museum lighting gave the work a context that immediately made it something different than just “Solange playing in a museum.” And it was true, you could see everyone’s face in the small crowd that was brought in, dress code and all (those in the audience who did not heed Knowles’s request to dress in all white were few, and easily spottable). This, and the fact that much of those in attendance were seated on the ground just feet away from the band, gave the event an incredible sense of intimacy; in staging and tone, An Ode To felt almost private, a personal work by a young artist both in development and at the top of her game, wildly talented and still growing. This piece was a substantial step in that growth: billed in the program as “an interdisciplinary performance piece and meditation,” Solange took elements from A Seat At The Table and rebuilt them, framing them in new ways — often stripping the arrangements down to their absolute minimum, at others exploding them with a new, startling sense of size. The core band was skeletal, augmented by two backup singers and a recurring cast of dancers and horn players — and though the music was the center of the performance, Solange seemed just as committed to exploring the work physically, leading her ensemble in precise, often beautiful choreography (done in cooperation with dance coordinator Eloise Deluca) and expressive a capella breaks that were, more than just a compliment to the songwriting, as much a piece of the work as her music. Photo: Stacy Kranitz / Red Bull Content Pool At times it felt like Solange was ripping open her album and re-examining it on a microscopic level, and the evening’s trajectory from its hauntingly minimal opening numbers to the explosion of feeling in her dual performances of “Don’t Touch My Hair” and “FUBU” (through which Solange walked through the crowd to sing directly to those gathered, causing at least one man she approached during the show I attended to have a complete ‘Oh my fucking god solange is standing right next to me’ meltdown — one of the few instances where the close-quarters of the room served to amplify the singer’s goddess status) felt like an investigation of what exactly the limits of this music were. Embracing the atrium as a necessary component of the performance — having her players descend down the ramp to the performance area, hiding her horn section under its walls, or more concretely using the chamber’s space to amplify the echo of basslines, solitary snare hits, or the complex three-part vocal breaks, almost dub-like in their hugeness — Solange built something site-specific and yet with resonances beyond this set of concerts. This, and Solange’s ability to fill the historically white space — figuratively and literally — of the Guggenheim with persons of colors (whether her entirely black and brown band or the vast majority of those in attendance) resonated as both an assertion of Solange’s power, and the ability for change within music to ripple out as broader, Earthly changes, and in some way an echo of the work’s broader exploration of expression voiced against its opposite. –Dylan Pasture --- Sacred Bones 10 Year Anniversary Photo: Colin Kerrigan / Red Bull Content Pool Sometimes I want to be devastated. The morning of the Sacred Bones 10 Year Anniversary showcase, I drew the ten of swords. How fitting. One for each year. The ten of swords is about hitting rock bottom and falling apart. Mine depicts a bull stabbed in the head. One sword even pierces the eyes. Usually I read this card as a warning. Get outside your mind before it eats you alive. I know I should have at least tried to be more vigilant. Instead, I turned to my friend and said that it felt perfect for Sacred Bones. What I mean is, I entered Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse thinking about collision. A giant moon hung from the rafters. I became aware of the space as malleable and tried not to understand. I wanted to feel it. Emotionally and viscerally. How else can I describe the experience other than to call it spiritual? Perhaps it has to do with juxtaposition. Like being ripped in half while watching Uniform and again while watching Marissa Nadler. Both strangely meditative. Uniform wrought havoc in the form of relentless noise. Like a vicious cycle indicative of how frustrating and limiting it can feel to live inside a body as the entire world burns. How everything seems impossible, at least everything but clawing up the walls and screaming into a void. Nadler described that void. Glimpsed it and shed light upon the center when she sang, “I can’t go back, I don’t wanna go back, to that house or that life again.” I felt my heart break like a window thrown open in the middle of a storm. Like I was listening alone in my bedroom. Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool I want music to fuck me up and scrape me out and leave me wondering where to go. This is why I love Sacred Bones. Watching The Men play with all of their original members, I thought about how it felt to discover Sacred Bones when I was on the radio in college. I had just begun listening to more dissonant and intense music, and pretty much anything released on Sacred Bones would freak me out. And I loved it. I still love it. Jenny Hval wore black velvet with a hood. She wore a black wig. She said we would all become family through blood ties. She moved through fog. She received a haircut while singing. She snaked her arms around her collaborators. The line between song and manifesto disappeared, which left me considering the body and the idea of ceremony. Magic as political. I had been inhabited and transformed. Part of me was somewhere else. Blanck Mass made the ritual of noise and light so huge that it was like the whole space had been swallowed. Zola Jesus ended the show with kinetics. I mean, pop so shattered and frenzied I felt hypnotized. Oscillating between the cathedral and the rave. Between gothic and cosmic. It was an ideal culmination of the energy swirling all night inside Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse. Like a vibration powered by obsession with darkness and weirdness. I felt a shift inside my body upon leaving. Simply existing was totally different. –Caroline Rayner --- Piano Nights: Gucci Mane and Zaytoven Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool It’s a cliché meme for someone to say “I am the American Dream,” and in an era with such little room for systemic romanticization, such a proclamation is also politically problematic at best. Nevertheless, Gucci Mane is the American Dream. If you’re like me, or any of the numerous other hip-hop devotees who’ve eventually come around to Guwop, the first time you heard him, you couldn’t understand a word he was saying. “Mumble-rap,” as it’s now called today, may be stylistic affectation for some, but there was no such phrase back when Gucci started doing it; probably because not since Rakim had a rapper put so many words together so poetically while sounding so close to falling asleep. In some parallel world, an alternate version of myself would never dare to use Rakim and Gucci’s names in the same sentence, but here we are. Rap is “mumble-rap,” the phrase itself is an anachronism functioning primarily as an age identifier of the writer who writes it, and this 31-year-old writer has watched Gucci Mane perform some of his most popular songs in a swank cocktail bar on the Lower East Side, accompanied by his producer Zaytoven on live piano. Photo: Carys Huws / Red Bull Content Pool Forget arrest records, jail bids, shootings, rap beefs, Twitter meltdowns, Harmony Korine courtings — forget all that, because it’s not what I’m referring to when I say Gucci Mane is the American Dream. I’m not talking about the American Dream of the bootlegger turned politician or the drug dealer turned real estate mogul. I’m not talking about the American Dream of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby or DiCaprio’s. I am talking about the American Dream of American music. Arguably our greatest cultural achievements, jazz, blues, rock, and hip-hop music were all originally perceived as amusical by the critical powers that be and eventually recognized as expressions of “higher art,” whatever that may be. I’m not trying to absolve myself here. When I first heard Gucci Mane, I might not have gone so far as to say it wasn’t hip-hop, but I definitely didn’t hear what others heard, simply because I had never heard anyone rap like that before. I literally didn’t understand what he was saying. I can only speak for myself , but I’ve personally witnessed yesterday’s proto-“mumble-rap” become today’s instantly sold-out black-tie affair of the millennium — dress code for the event called for attendees to wear their “finest formal wear” — and as far as I’m concerned that’s the American Dream. –Samuel Diamond --- A Conversation with Alvin Lucier Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool Perhaps the best story told at Alvin Lucier’s intimate gathering in the basement of Red Bull Arts was his response to the question of what, if any, recent versions of his legendary work “I Am Sitting In A Room” have been most meaningful to him. As Lucier described it, after a concert performance of the piece at MIT, a 10-year-old boy came up to the man and declared: “That’s cool!” The boy then later went home and recorded his own version of the work on his laptop and emailed it to the legendary composer. This, Lucier said, was a version he liked a lot. Watching Lucier speak, it seems much of what gives life to his work — even at its most conceptually adventurous — is this very down-to-Earthness, an embrace of the everyday, the generosity of spirit and lack of pretense that allows the experiments of a child to stand alongside that of a “legitimate” performance venue. Elsewhere, Lucier explained that he wrote his own text for Sitting in lieu of adapting a poem because he didn’t want to use anything “high falutin’.” Though possessed with perhaps one of the most refined imaginations in experimental composition, he insisted that he was uninterested in “theory.” In Lucier’s words: “My decisions are real.” Through a life-spanning conversation moderated by Red Bull’s Todd L. Burns, Lucier returned to this theme in many forms. When discussing his coursework as a Professor (preserved, in some form, in his text Music 109) he spoke of trying to “demystify” music for his students, of telling them he was not interested in their opinions, but in their “perceptions.” And as he dove into his own use of perception in his work — whether in using the echolocation of bats as a reference for his use of delay, or how his refracted Beatles arrangement “Nothing Is Real” was meant to capture the sense of remembering “where you were when you heard a song for the first time” — one had the feeling of an artist trying to demystify the senses for himself, grounding the mysterious in something sturdy and real. Evocatively describing how those bats use sound to travel in the dark, Lucier slipped us a kind of statement of purpose: “You can’t cheat if you’re trying to survive.” Threaded through these discussions of technique were lovely anecdotes of the artist’s large and impressive circle of acquaintances, dishing on everyone from John Ashbery and Nam June Paik to Morton Feldman and, of course, John Cage, who was revealed to have apparently inspired (and/or peer-pressured) the first performance of Lucier’s brain-wave piece “Music For Solo Performer” into existence. Though anecdotally anchoring himself among many of the greats of 20th century art, Lucier left the intimate group gathered to listen to him on an appropriately humble, un-elevated note. When asked by an audience member if music had a “spiritual meaning” for him, he answered, simply: “No.” –Dylan Pasture --- Fluxo: Funk Proibidão Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool This year’s Red Bull Music Academy takeover of NYC began with the announcement that MC Bin Laden, the headliner for the inaugural evening’s Brazilian bass event, would not be able to perform for reasons out of his and the festival organizers’ control. I found out from a friend that this meant he’d been denied entry at the US border, presumably an exercise of ideological power by immigration officials. RBMA itself embodies corporate accumulation of cultural capital, a late phenomenon toward which discerning ravers maintain a healthy ambivalence, suspended between cynicism and the notion that maybe, particularly if the artists can gain control of it, this type of power could be better than the kind that preceded it. The announcement, emailed via the ticketing agent the day of the event, brought a latent global power strata to the fore that framed the event: the admittedly neoliberal post-nation-state RMBA agenda versus the utterances of the deep-state monolith, which you only find out about through texts from a friend who knows a friend of someone who was at the border. And so RBMA NYC 2017 began. Even with MC Bin Laden not present, though, the Fluxo event was stacked with a formidable range of Brazilian bass DJs and emcees, strung together under the banner of maximalist sonic valence with NYC party mainstays Venus X and Asmara, Detroit ghetto house forbearer DJ Assault and the indefinable entity that is Chicago’s Sicko Mobb, who themselves are Red Bull-sponsored artists. Photo: Krisanne Johnson / Red Bull Content Pool After being encouraged by the coterie of Red Bull chaperones near to the door to enjoy my evening, I entered the venue to find Sicko Mobb bobbing and jack-balling amidst one another on stage, Ceno wearing a bright red T-shirt with “BALMAIN POWER” printed in shiny bold Impact font across the front. My friend and I quickly situated ourselves behind a car whose interior was rigged with overzealous strobe lights, one of several props situated throughout the venue that upon reviewing the event literature I realized was intended to be a simulation of “the neon-lit car stereos lining the local block parties [in the favelas of Brazil] known as fluxos.” Despite being obfuscated by a thick wall of smoke-and-strobe that would give Dean Blunt a run for his money, Lil Trav and Ceno breezed through a seemingly arbitrary selection of their metallic, sweet-sad bop songs, still a sound without any real parallels in hip-hop: “Own Lane” and “Go Plug” from the Super Saiyan Vol. 2 mixtape, throwbacks like “Fiesta,” “Hoes Be Goin’,” and “Round and Round.” In lieu of a DJ, an associate played tracks from an iPhone, and following in the tradition of cutting songs short he simply stopped the playback at random points, the music giving way to the sound of smoke and low chatter in the absence of DJ wheel-up sounds. DJ Assault took the stage shortly thereafter, living up to his name by starting the set out at a casual 145 bpm and playing “Let Me Bang” almost immediately after getting on stage. The venue was only beginning to fill as he warmed up the crowd, plunging headfirst into the obscene territory of booty music blended together with cumbia and proibidão. Obscenity and disorientation seemed to be forming as obvious mantras seeded by the party organizers as I went into the port-a-potty nested inside the warehouse and found it was resonating on beat with the bass, which only served to highlight that there was no respite from the building disorientation of the space. Venus X and Asmara played the mid-event set, rolling out a hip-hop-heavy set that felt somewhat obligatory to the context of the party, and MC Carol did not take the stage until very late, at which point the crowd was not well-positioned to entertain a set of emceeing. We left and hung out in the park, and talked about the slightly off feeling we were left with, and wondered if it was the party or us who was off. –Nick Henderson --- A Conversation with Werner Herzog On Music and Film Photo: Stacy Kranitz / Red Bull Content Pool [This lecture review is to be read in the voice of preeminent German filmmaker Werner Herzog: I do not care if this offends him or you; it is critical.] I was not sure if I would be able to make it to the lecture on time. As it was being held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in one of the many areas of Manhattan with notoriously limited street parking, I elected to take the Long Island Rail Road, which picked me up directly behind my day job in Garden City. Inevitably late, the train did not leave me enough time to reach the venue via public transportation, and because this would have required that I transfer between multiple subways and a bus, I instead hailed a taxi in front of Penn Station. I knew this meant I would have to pay more, as these cabs are permitted by the City to charge extra for the premium pickup location, but I did not care. I had somewhere I needed to be and no way to get there sooner. Looking at my phone during the 50-block cab ride, I learned President Trump had fired FBI Director James Comey. Also, the publicist facilitating Tiny Mix Tapes’ coverage notified me that the doors were closing. I was dismayed but not altogether discouraged. When I arrived at the event, a discussion with Werner Herzog on music and film, the gentleman admitting ticketholders and press-listees told me the lecture had only started about five minutes ago. My name being confirmed, I proceeded up the museum steps to a dark auditorium where I was ushered to an empty seat not far from my point of entry. I saw erected on the stage a faux living room similar to Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns set, but more fully furnished, with couches and a film-projector screen hung above and behind them. At stage right, shrouded in cinematic shadow, stood a tall man looking up at the screen. When the film clip ended, the lights came on revealing him to be Herzog. He seated himself on the couch at center stage and spoke with a nebbish film-critic-type about music in films, his and others. He indicated he chooses the music for his films almost exclusively by feeling. He cited Fred Astaire’s dance routines as a prime example of the marriage of music and cinema, though in far less romantic terms. He reminisced about teasing Popol Vuh founder Florian Fricke during a friendly soccer match over his interest in New Age thinking and going home badly bruised for it. He said he hadn’t heard the phrase “krautrock” until just a few days earlier. In the Q&A portion of the event, he found occasion to reassert his argument that Elon Musk is acting foolishly in his pursuit of Martian colonization, that humanity would be better served conserving and protecting its home on Earth. He admitted that though there is no purposeful allusion to so-called spirituality in his films, some of his early religious teachings most likely had a lasting effect on his viewpoint and that he always strives to evoke a sense of poetry with his filmmaking to “elevate” the thinking of his viewers. On my way out, a Red Bull employee offered me a drink from a tray holding multiple colored cans. I took one at random; “Acai Berry”-something, she called it. “Save it for the morning,” she said. Thanking her, I cracked it open and exited to the cultured darkness of New York City’s Upper East Side. –Samuel Diamond http://j.mp/2qxIPYU

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