#I’ve watched a couple good video essays/documentaries about it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

uomo-accattivante · 4 years ago

Text

I recently came across a bunch of press articles and photos about Oscar Isaac that are so old, they appear to be out-of-print and pre-date social media. Considering they were probably never digitally transcribed for internet access, I’m guessing that the majority of current fans have never seen this stuff.

Even though a lot of these digital scans are challenging to read because they are the original fuzzy news print, I think there some gems worth sharing with you guys. Over the next several weeks, I will transcribe and share those gems on this page. Hope you enjoy them!

Let’s start with this fantastic 2001 profile piece done before Oscar was accepted into Juilliard:

South Florida’s rising star isn’t just acting the part

By Christine Dolen - [email protected]

February 4, 2001

As fifth-graders at Westminster Christian School in Miami, Oscar Isaac and his classmates were asked to write a story as if they were animals on Noah’s Ark. Oscar turned in a seven-page play – with original music – from the perspective of a platypus. Then he starred in the production his teacher directed.

He hasn’t stopped expressing himself creatively since. Today, Isaac is one of South Florida’s busiest young theater actors, and certainly its hottest. And not just because he’s a slender five-feet nine-inches tall with an expressively handsome face and glistening brown eyes.

Since making his professional debut as a Cuban hustler in Sleepwalkers at Area Stage in July 1999, he has played an explosive Vietnam vet in Private Wars for Horizons Repertory, a pot-smoking slacker in This Is Our Youth at GableStage, another Cuban on the make in Praying With the Enemy at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the entrancing narrator of Side Man at GableStage, a Havana-based writer in Arrivals and Departures for the new Oye Rep and, most recently, a young Fidel Castro in When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater.

Beginning Wednesday, he’ll be juggling five roles in City Theatre’s annual Winter Shorts festival, first at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach, then at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. But that is not all: During the two weeks he is doing Winter Shorts, he’ll also be playing dates with the punk-ska band The Blinking Underdogs (www.blinkingunderdogs.com), which features him as lead singer, guitarist and songwriter.

Oh, and he just got back from auditioning for New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Drama.

All this for a guy a month shy of his 22nd birthday.

Sure, you could hate a guy who’s that talented, that charismatic, that transparently ambitious. But the people who have worked with Oscar Isaac don’t. On the contrary, they’re all sure he has it – that magical, can’t-be-taught thing that transforms an actor into a star.

Playwright Eduardo Machado, who put in a good word for Isaac at Juilliard, says “he does have that star quality that makes your eyes go to him. It’s great that someone with that talent still wants to train.”

“He has a star quality that’s rare in a young actor,” adds Joseph Adler, who directed him in Side Man and This Is Our Youth. “Without a doubt I expect to be hearing great things from him.”

‘I JUST LOVE CREATING’

Isaac, who also makes short films, can’t say exactly why he was attracted to acting. He just knows it makes him happier than anything, that it’s what he was meant to do. And he’s been doing it since he was a 4-year-old putting on plays in his family’s backyard with his sister Nicole.

“I just love creating, whether it’s music or films or a character on a stage. I love taking people for a ride,” he says. “In Side Man, every night I would love being that close to the audience. I felt like I was talking to 80 of my closest friends.

“I could feel what the audience was feeling.”

His powerful, mournful-yet-loving monologue near the end of the play, he said, “worked every night. I knew it would get them. I’d hear sniffles.

“But it had less to do with me than with the atmosphere [created by the playwright and director].”

You could understand if Isaac, surrounded as he is by praise and possibility, had an ego as burgeoning as his career. Instead, he channels the positive reinforcement into confidence about his work.

“He has such a charm and an ease onstage, but he’s very modest,” says New York-based actress Judith Delgado, who shared the stage with Isaac in Side Man. “He’s hungry. He’s got moxie. I was blown away by him.

“He saved me a couple of times. I went up [forgot a line] and that baby boy of mine came through. He’s a joy.”

FORGING HIS OWN PATH

The son of a Cuban-American father and a Guatemalan mother, Isaac was never a stellar student. But he found ways of turning routine assignments – like the Noah’s Ark story – into creative challenges.

His science reports were inevitably video documentaries underscored with punk music. He acted through middle and high school, though he had a falling out with his drama teacher at Santaluces Community High in Lantana over his misgivings about a character. When she refused to cast him in anything else, he got his English teacher to let him play the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors his senior year.

His skepticism about authority and love of playing the devil’s advocate have long made him resist doing things the usual way. His post-high school “training” consisted of one semester at Miami-Dade Community College’s South Campus (where he met his girlfriend, Maria Miranda), touring schools playing an abusive character in the Coconut Grove Playhouse’s Breaking the Cycle, and working as a transporter of bodies at Baptist Hospital, where he absorbed the drama of people in emotionally intense situations.

“It was the most magnificent dramatic institute I could’ve attended,” Isaac said. “I was able to observe the entire spectrum of human emotion, people under the most extreme duress. I was mesmerized watching the way people interacted with each other in such heightened situations.

“I learned everything about the human condition, and it was real and harsh and brutally honest.”

Yet even given his propensity for forging his own path, something nudged him another direction while he was in New York making his Off-Broadway debut in December. Walking by Juilliard one day, he impulsively went in to ask for an application. Though the application deadline had passed, Isaac persuaded Juilliard to accept his, noting in his application essay that most of the exceptional actors he admires had acquired “a brutally efficient technique” to enhance their talent by studying at places like Juilliard.

Though he won’t know whether he has been accepted until the end of this month, his audition last weekend went well, he says. He did monologues from Henry IV, Part I and Dancing at Lughnasa, adjusting his Shakespearean Hotspur to a more fiery temperature at the suggestion of Michael Kahn, head of Juilliard’s acting program – though not without arguing that Hotspur wouldn’t be speaking to the king that way.

Isaac, not surprisingly, loves a good debate.

Adler, GableStage’s artistic director and a man who is as liberal as Isaac once was conservative, savored the verbal jousting they did during rehearsals for Side Man.

“He knows exactly how to pull my chain,” Adler says with a laugh. “Intelligence is the cornerstone of all great actors, and he’s bright as hell.

“He has relentless ambition but with so much charm. He’s very hard to say no to. He has incredible raw talent and magnetism that is very rare in a young actor along with relentless energy, perseverance and ambition. I see his growth both onstage and off. He’s mature in both places.”

Part of his growth, of course, will necessarily involve dealing with the rejections that are part of any actor’s life. His career is still too new, his string of successes solid, so it’s anyone’s guess how failure will shape him. But director Michael John Garcés, who picked him for When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba after Isaac flew to New York at his own expense to compete with a pool of seasoned Manhattan actors for the role, believes his character will see him through.

“Oscar is realistic, but he’s so willing to go the whole nine yards,” Garcés says. “He didn’t go out when he was in the show here. His focus earned the respect of the other actors, some of whom have been working in New York for 30 years.

“He hasn’t had a lot of blows yet, when the career knocks the wind out of you. But he has talent, determination and focus, and if he has perseverance – my intuition is that he does have it – he could achieve a lot.”

FAMILY TIES

His father and namesake, Baptist Hospital intensive-care physician Oscar Isaac Hernandez, couldn’t be more proud. (Isaac doesn’t use the family surname in order to avoid, in his words, being “put in that Hispanic actor box.”)

“I’m ecstatic that he’s probably going to be going to the most prestigious drama school in the United States,” he says. “School will help him focus his energies and give him discipline. He’s got the raw material and the drive.”

Isaac’s mother, Maria, divorced from his father since 1992, is a kidney-transplant recipient who acknowledges that she’ll miss her son if he moves to New York. But, she adds, she wants him “to live out his dreams. He amazes me every day. He calls me every day. I’m very proud of him.”

Even the other guys in The Blinking Underdogs are fans of Isaac’s acting, though it could take him away from South Florida just as the band appears to be, Isaac says, on the brink of signing a recording deal (it has already put out its own CD, The Last Word, with songs, lead vocals and even cover photography by Isaac.

“Oscar’s the leader of the band, a great musician who amazes me and motivates us,” says sax player Keith Cooper. “I’ve been to see every one of his plays. He’s a phenomenal actor.

“I completely buy into his role in every play. As close as I am to him, I forget it’s Oscar.”

His South Florida theater colleagues credit that to Isaac’s insatiable desire to learn and grow.

Gail Garrisan, who is directing him in Donnie and One of the Great Ones for Winter Shorts, observes, “It’s not often that you find a young actor who is willing to listen and who doesn’t think he knows everything. He loves the work.

“He really brought the young man in Side Man to life. When I saw it in New York, it seemed to be the father’s play. When I saw it here, I felt it was his [Isaac’s] play.”

Oye Rep’s John Rodaz, whom Isaac calls “the best director I’ve ever worked with,” gave the actor his first important job in Sleepwalkers at Area Stage. They met when Isaac came to see Area’s production of Oleanna and the actor, knowing Rodaz ran the theater, introduced himself.

“He has so much energy and such a sparkling personality,” Rodaz says. “He knows how to move in the world. He seems to take advantage of every situation in a good way; he’s not a cold, calculating person who’ll stab you in the back.

“[But] he wants it so badly. Everything he does, he’s the leader. When I was 21, I was taking naps.”

Rodaz coached Isaac on his Juilliard monologues and found the experience energizing.

“I got chills just watching him. That happens so rarely. I was so exhilarated when I came home that I just had to go out and run. You just know he’s got all the tools.”

Christine Dolen is The Herald’s theater critic.

###

#oscar isaac #vintage #juilliard #blinking underdogs #area stage company #john rodaz #gablestage #when it's cocktail time in cuba #side man #arrivals and departures #this is our youth #praying with the enemy #sleepwalkers #private wars #winter shorts #the miami herald

185 notes · View notes

langblrwhy · 4 years ago

Text

New year's goals

December

This month I created a goal that if I do some stuffs AND do 100% of this list, I would give me the opportunity of getting high or drunk. Shit happened and I gave up on this lol but I made 100% this month :)

Also I was depressed for a week, so I study watching a lot of documentaries (instead with proper online class).

I basically made everything I wanted to do this year, except writing in french and in esperanto (I did a bit of the last one, but not enough), I also still don't know the basic russian lol

I watched around 48 movies, ate 35 new food, read 7 books, etc etc, it was a good year.

1 Try 2 new foods every month (food, beverage, recipe) + no meat for 2 days)

I went 2 days of no meat

1 Vegetable quiche

2 Cipura paludosa (it's a brazilian condiment and I don't know the name in english, it's a type of garlic)

3 Corn nuggets (I don't like corn, but this recipe was delicious)

2 Be fluent in esperanto and active in the community

I'm active on BEJO. I am fluent, I can chat about basically everything in a natural way, I can read, listen and write, it's still uncomfortable, but I do can.

3 Practice having conversations via audio and video

I do this every now and then, I still don't like doing it (but actually I don't even like to have conversations period)

-Bonus: Write a 10k fiction in french and publish it on Wattpad

Nope

4 Try to study russian again and focus on the basic

I did, not enough, but I did.

5 Watch a movie every week and put them on doesthedogdie .com/ (at least the less popular movies)

1 MILF (France and Belgium, 2018)

2 Sorgoi Prakov, my eropean dream (France, 2013)

3 Hannah Arendt (Germany, Luxembourg, France, 2012)

4 The reality of basic sanition on the country (Brazil, 2016)

5 Isle of Flowers (Brazil, 1989)

6 Chernobyl (USA, 2004)

7 Socrate (Italy, 1971)

8 O veneno está na mesa (Brazil, 2011)

Series:

1 The Wilds (USA, 2020)

2 Brazil Wars.doc (Brazil, 2019)

6 Read 5 books

I finished Crime and Punishment and Muddy Strawberries this month.

1 Misery

2 The Bell Jar

3 Man, love and island

4 Steal like an artist

5 The non-designer's design book

6 Crime and punishment

7 Muddy Strawberries

7 Finalize 1 art every month (it doesn’t have to be good, just finished)

It's on my routine, finishing at least everyweek

8 Doing some exercise every week

I've been walking kilometers on the streets every week again.

9 Try to make listening podcasts an habit

Yeah! It's almost an habit when I'm drawing.

-Bonus: Learn toki pona

Nope.

10 Write a fiction in esperanto

I wrote around 600 words lol

11 Try 1 new thing per month

I started using a drawing book to learn anatomy, I never used a drawing book before.

12 Be more proactice and publish my stuff somewhere online (draw, fiction, whatever)

I post some stuff on instagram, reddit, twitter AND I post one chapter of my fiction on wattpad.

13 Sketch every week

I did, and I started using a book to learn anatomy.

14 Study spanish, focusing on writing, listening and speaking

Yo participé de algunas llamadas con amigos en español, yo asísti una série llamada La Cuna de Lobos con subtitulos en español. Yo también escribi algunas cositas en español jaja

15 Study french

I watched MILF, a french movie with french subtitles, also some of the other movies I watched was with french subtitles (becase I didn't find english subtitles and I need them even when I'm watching some brazilian portuguese movie lol)

16 Study whatever theories (such as astronomy, lingustics, ecology, whatever)

I'm studying for vestibular and I read a couple pages of the communist manifesto (I'm SOOOO slow at reading lol)

17 Study for vestibular (mathematics, physics, geography, philosophy, sociology, biology, chemistry, history, english, portuguese, brazilian literature and essay).

I made 1 test, wrote essays, studied a lot.

17/17 = 100%

#new years goals #goals #langblr #language goals #glow up

22 notes · View notes

thedeaditeslayer · 4 years ago

Photo

Bruce Campbell talks ‘Evil Dead,’ ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Xena’

The first time Bruce Campbell came across Sam Raimi, they were students at Michigan’s West Maple Junior High School.

“Sam was a year younger than me,” Campbell recalls, “and I remember him dressed as Sherlock Holmes playing with dolls in the middle of the floor. And I remember going way around him. And I found out later that it was Sam Raimi. We didn’t really come into contact until we got until high school.”

What a connection they made. After bonding over D.I.Y. filmmaking, Campbell and Raimi went on to do 1978 shoestring horror-short “Within the Woods” together, which they evolved into 1981 demonic thriller “Evil Dead.”

Campbell would periodically reprise signature “Evil Dead” character Ash Williams in various sequels and offshoots. And appear in Raimi-produced “Xena: Warrior Princess,” portraying slippery “king of thieves” Autolycus on that ’90s-iconic TV fantasy epic.

And then there’s Campbell’s memorable cameos in Raimi’s blockbuster, Tobey Maguire-starring “Spider-Man” film trilogy: the ring announced in the first, 2002 film, “snooty usher” in the 2004 sequel and a maître d’ in 2007′s “Spider-Man 3.”

Of course, Campbell’s made a mark outside that dynamic duo. He drew raves for his portrayal of a nursing-home-bound Elvis Presley in 2002 indie comedy-horror gem, “Bubba Ho-Tep.” Then there’s his role of Sam Axe on USA Network spy drama “Burn Notice.” Not to mention numerous other film, TV, voice acting and even video-game work.

The cult-fave actor will make his first ever trip to Huntsville this week, for Oct. 24 events at Von Braun Center’s Mark C. Smith Concert Hall featuring “Evil Dead” screenings followed by a Campbell-led chat about the film, his life as an actor and beyond. Tickets for these 3 and 7:30 p.m. events start at $32, via ticketmaster.com.

His upcoming projects include a comedy album with actor Ted Raimi, Sam’s brother, called “The Lost Recordings.” Campbell also is readying a book of essays called “The Cool Side of My Pillow,” which finds him riffing on subjects ranging from noise to the environment. He hopes to have both released by the end of this year. More info at bruce-campbell.com. On a recent afternoon, Campbell checked in from his Oregon home for a phone interview. Edited excerpts are below.

Bruce, when you do an “Evil Dead” screening event, do your discussions turn up new things about the film or that you haven’t thought of in a long time?

Every show turns up something new because it puts you on the spot. Someone will say something that will then trigger something that you had forgot. I just sat down the other day before one of these shows with my guy who is my frontman and I was like, “OK, l’m just going to tell the story of making this movie.” It’s not for questions I’m just going to tell you basically what you’re about to see. But yeah, every show triggers some new thing. I’ve seen the movie. I know how it ends. But that is the challenge, finding some new, weird tidbits.

Back in high school how did you and Sam Raimi first bond? Did you share a class or something?

Basically I got into typing class, that’s what started it. I could not believe I was stuck in this stupid class where everyone around me seemed to know how to type. I’m like, “How do you know this?” It was very frustrating. So I went to a counselor for the first time ever – I’d never gone to try to get out of anything.

So I go there and I say, “Hey can I drop this dumb typing class?” She goes, "Yeah, what do you want? I go, “What do you got?” So she comes up with “radio speech.” And I’m like, “Radio speech? Wait they do the morning announcements (at school) and stuff?” and I’m like yeah let me get all over that.

So I got into a class and Sam Raimi was also in the class. And the guy who taught radio speech also directed all the plays. We didn’t know how critical that was. The first year I couldn’t get in anything in my high school. I was auditioning for everything but I didn’t have a class with this guy. By the next year I had a class with him, and then me and Sam were in basically all the plays after that. We found out how the deal worked.

So I met him in radio speech and we’d do the morning announcements together and got to talking about what we do in our neighborhoods. I was making little regular-8 (millimeter film) movies and Sam was making Super-8 movies. So we started to join forces during the course of that high school run, that two or three years in there.

We were very productive. We didn’t really get into trouble because we were too busy like filming parties. We wouldn’t go to the parties we’d film the parties and use them in some way in our little films so it was a great guerrilla filmmaking period.

A celeb or well-known person you were surprised to learn they’re an “Evil Dead” fan?

I heard Charlie Sheen, one of his favorite things was to smoke a doobie and watch “Evil Dead 2,” and Alice Cooper’s favorite horror movie is “Evil Dead.”

If it’s good enough for Alice Cooper it’s good enough for me. You host the quiz show “Last Fan Standing.” What do you make of the mainstreaming of nerd-culture?

Every generation has its deal. In the ’40s most moviegoers were in their 40s and so the actors were in their 40s. Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy and all the guys were in their 40s. You didn’t have to be 21. And then as the audience got younger the actors got younger and the people who run the companies get younger and so they’re really just catering to what’s popular.

Comic books have always been popular but now they’re really popular. Not really sure what that’s all about but yeah social media has certainly helped but I think it’s another form of escapism. Whenever times get weird, people want escapism. During The Depression they did the Busby Berkeley splashy musicals where everyone was happy all the time, when life was really miserable. And some decades where we’re really doing okay, the movies turned introspective and we go after ourselves and figure out why we’re like this and like that. And so I think we’re in a phase where we just want to be taken away to another galaxy and Marvel is very happy to help.

And you’ve been a part of that. In Sam’s “Spider-Man” trilogy, which of your cameos did you have the most fun with?

Well I don’t know it’s hard to lineate because they’re so critical. The first one I named Spider-Man. If I wasn’t in the movie a billion dollar franchise would be called The Human Spider. He wants to get in the theater in the second one, past the snooty usher who won’t let him in because he’s late, because it will spoil the illusion, so I think I’m technically the only character who’s ever defeated Spider-Man. And in part three, a superhero comes to a mortal for help. He wants me to help him propose to his girlfriend so it’s sort of a landmark case where a superhero goes to a mortal for help which is pretty rare. So I can’t delineate because they’re all critical to the “Spider-Man” universe.

Do you have any cool mementos from "Evil Dead or elsewhere from your career? Maybe something like the chainsaw from “Evil Dead 2”?

You know, it’s weird I’m not a hoarder, I’m not a collector. My brother, he has the shotgun from “Evil Dead,” but not because he loves movie trivia, he just likes guns. My brother also has I think the set of keys to the original cabin. That’s a pretty good one. Not sure how he got that one.

I have weirder ones. Like I have a prop from a 1989 movie called “Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat.” I have Van Helsing’s holy bottle where he shakes the holy water at them. And I have what I call my tchotchke shelf, where most people would look at it and they couldn’t identify what importance each item is, but there’s a story for each one.

Some of your favorite actors outside the horror genre?

Oh, I l love a lot of the old time actors. William Holden, he starred in “Bridge on The River Kwai” one of my favorite movies. I like the guys who had to work a lot. In the old days and actor would finish a job on Friday he was under contract, he took two weeks off and started a new movie a couple weeks later. Actors kind of just do one or two movies a year if they’re lucky these days and it doesn’t help them refine their craft.

I feel like the guys who worked a lot got good because they got really used to the process. I’m a fan of the studio system. Not all movies were good and not every actor was happy under the studio system, but I think a busy actor’s a good actor.

For your role in “Bubba Ho-Tep,” what was your process for tapping into Elvis’s vibe?

What guy doesn’t want to be Elvis, you know? So I worked with an Elvis impersonator for about a half an hour and then he gave up on me. He goes, “Look, man, you’re never going to get it.” I’m like, “Wow either I suck or you suck as a teacher but somebody here sucks.”

No, but I watched a bunch of footage and documentaries. There’s a good one, all his Memphis Mafia who worked with him, a filmmaker basically got them all drunk one night and interviewed them all and that’s where the good stories are. You learn a little more of the human side of him. But that’s pretty much it. I’ve never been a stage performer so mercifully there wasn’t that much of it, just in quick flashbacks.

And there’s a part of me, in the back of my mind, I want to know that Elvis' descendants, somebody, a daughter, niece, somebody has watched that movie and approved. We’ll see.

I thought it was a cool creative take on that whole Elvis thing.

I agree. That’s why I did it. It was one of the weirdest scripts I’ve ever read But yet it wraps up though. It has a weird premise but it has a really interesting theme of what do you do with old people. Do we forget these old people? And are they still useful in society, old people? And I thought it had a sweet ending, that these two old guys they kind of rally themselves one more time.

What’s a well-known role you’ve turned down?

Turned down? I don’t have a lot of those. I don’t operate in that rarified air of saying, “Oh I turned ‘Titanic’ down.” I tried to get a part in a studio movie called “The Phantom” and Billy Zane wound up getting the part." And it was down to me and Billy, I was number two for the job, but I didn’t really enjoy the process very much because it seemed more political than actually acting. It was amazing how many people you had to audition for, and you had to go up the ranks and each time it got a little more tense as you move up. So I’m good doing these weirdo little movies.

I read the budget for “Within the Woods,” the predecessor of “Evil Dead,” was a princely 1,600 bucks. What was the most expensive line item, you think?

Food and probably fake blood. Tom Sullivan, who did the special effects, probably needed to mold a few things, so he probably spent a couple hundred bucks on molds. A lot of it was footage because Sam Raimi likes to shoot footage, so we probably bought a lot of rolls of film. And we did go to a cabin to shoot it, so had to get in the car and travel so maybe a little gas money in there too. That’s about it.

What can you tell us about the status of the next installment of the “Evil Dead” franchise?

We’re honing-in, circling the building now trying to lock in a partner. We have a couple of bidders and we’re trying to just find the correct suitor and we have a script written and a director picked. Sam Raimi hand -picked a guy named Lee Cronin, who’s a very good Irish filmmaker. And it’s got a very good modern tale. It’s a modern-day urban “Evil Dead,” it’s called “Evil Dead Rise.” And we’re hoping to do that next year.

You were a producer on 2013 “Evil Dead” remake. What’s the key to making a reboot effective?

Well rebooting can be very confusing and frustrating and not always successful. Reboot, sequel, remake we have all these crazy terms. What we’re doing now is we’re saying," Look, this is another ‘Evil Dead’ movie and that book gets around, a lot of people run into it and it’s another story." The main key with “Evil Dead” is they’re just regular people who are battling what seems to be a very unstoppable evil, and so that’s where the horror comes from. It’s not someone who’s skilled. They’re not fighting a soldier. They’re not fighting a scientist. They’re not fighting anybody more than your average neighbor. This one is going to be a similar thing. We’re going to have a heroine, a woman in charge, and she’s going to try and save her family.

Speaking of a female protagonist, when you’re at a con or meet fans somewhere, who has the most passionate superfans: “Evil Dead” or “Xena”?

“Xena” hits them at an emotional level. Like, they’ll come up to me and Lucy Lawless (the actor who played the show’s title role) and just burst into tears, because her character helped them get through a difficult time. “Xena” is more representative of overcoming your struggles in life. “Evil Dead” fans are pretty fervent but they don’t cry as much.

#Bruce Campbell #Evil Dead Rise

10 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 4 years ago

Photo

The Package.

As the bonkers genre thrill-ride Shadow in the Cloud blasts into the new year, writer and director Roseanne Liang unpacks her love of Terminator 2, watching Chloë Grace Moretz’s face for hours, and the life lesson she learned from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Cheng Pei-Pei.

Roseanne Liang’s TIFF Midnight Madness winner Shadow in the Cloud landed with a blast of fresh genre energy on VOD platforms on New Year’s Day. It’s A-class action in a B-grade body, cramming plenty into its taut 83 minutes, including: a top-secret package, a freakish gremlin, a hostile bunch of Air Force dudes, outrageous stunts, dogfights and a fake wartime PSA that feels remarkably real.

Throughout, the camera is focused mostly on one face—Chloë Grace Moretz’s, playing British flight officer Maude Garrett—as she tackles all of the above from a claustrophobic ball turret hanging under a B-17 Flying Fortress, on a classified mission over the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

While the film’s tonal swings are confusing to some, schlock enthusiasts and genre lovers on Letterboxd have embraced the film’s intentionally outlandish sensibility, which “makes excellent use of its genre mash to create an unpredictable, guilty pleasure,” says Mirza. Fajar writes that “it felt like the people involved in this project knew how ridiculous it is and gave a hundred and ten percent to make it work. Someday, it will become a cult classic.” Mawbey agrees: “It really goes off the rails in all the best ways during the final third, and the last couple of shots are just perfect.”

Chloë Grace Moretz and her top-secret package in ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

To most of the world, Liang is a so-called “emerging” director, when in fact, the mother-of-two, born in New Zealand to Chinese parents, has been at this game for the past two decades. She has helmed a documentary and a romantic drama, both based on her own marriage; a 2008 short called Take 3, which preceded Hollywood’s current conversation about representation and harassment; and Do No Harm, the splatter-tastic 2017 short in which her technical chops and fluid feel for action were on full display, and, as recorded in multiple Letterboxd reviews, established her as one to watch.

Do No Harm scored Liang valuable Hollywood representation, whereupon producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones brought Shadow in the Cloud to her, thinking she might connect with the material. “It did connect with me on a level that is very personal,” Liang tells me. “As a woman of color, as a mother who juggles a lot.” She says Kavanaugh-Jones then went through the process of removing original writer Max Landis from the project. “He felt that Max was not a good fit for this project, or for how we like to run things. We like to be respectful and courteous and kind to each other…”

In several interviews, Liang has said she’s comfortable with film lovers choosing not to watch Shadow in the Cloud based on Landis’s early involvement. What she’s not comfortable with is her own contribution—and that of her cast and crew—being erased. While WGA rules have his name attached firmly to the project, the credit belies the reality: his thin script, reportedly stretched out to 70 pages by using a larger-than-usual font, was expanded and deepened by Liang and her collaborators.

Writer-director Roseanne Liang. / Photo by Dean O’Gorman

That team includes editor Tom Eagles, Oscar nominated for Jojo Rabbit, actor Nick Robinson (the titular Simon in Love, Simon) and Beulah Koale, a star of the Hawaii Five-Oh series. The opening newsreel was created by award-winning New Zealand animation studio Mukpuddy, after a small test audience got weirded out by the sight of a gremlin in a war film, despite well-documented WWI and WWII gremlin mythology. It’s an unnecessary but happy addition. The cartoon style was inspired by Private Snafu, a series of WWII educational cartoons scripted by none other than Dr. Seuss and directed by Looney Tunes legend Chuck Jones.

But the film ultimately hangs on Chloë Grace Moretz, who overcame cabin fever to drive home an adrenaline rush of screen craft, in which the very limits of what’s humanly possible in mid-air are tested (in ways, it must be said, that wouldn’t be questioned if it were Tom Cruise in the role). Liang would often send directions to Moretz’s ball turret via text, while her cast members delivered live dialogue from an off-set shipping container rigged with microphones. “I just never got sick of Chloë’s face and I’ve watched her hundreds, if not thousands of times. You feel her, you are her, she just engages you in a way that a huge fighting scene might not, if it’s not designed well. Giant empty spectacle is less interesting than one person in one spot, sometimes.”

Ambitious and nerdy about film in equal measure, it’s clear there’s much more to come from Liang, and I’m interested in what her most valuable lesson has been so far. Turns out, it’s a great story involving Chinese veteran Cheng Pei-Pei (Come Drink With Me’s Golden Swallow, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Jade Fox), whose film training includes a tradition of remaining on set throughout filming.

Roseanne Liang on the set of ‘Shadow in the Cloud’.

That meant that, during filming of Liang’s My Wedding and Other Secrets, Cheng would stay on set when she wasn’t required. “In New Zealand, trailers are a luxury,” Liang explains. “I said ‘Don’t you want to go to the trailer that we arranged for you?’ ‘No, I just want to sit and watch.’ ‘Why do you want to watch it, you’ve seen it hundreds of times!’ And she said ‘I learn something new every time’. To Pei-Pei, the secret of life is constant education and curiosity and learning. Movies are her work and her craft and her life, and she never gets bored. If I can be like her, that’s the life, right?”

Speaking of which, it’s time we put Liang through our Life in Film interrogation.

What’s the film that made you want to become a filmmaker? Terminator 2: Judgment Day is the movie that is at the top of the mountain that I’m climbing. To me it’s the perfect blend of spectacle, action design, smarts and heart. It poses the theory that if a robot can learn the value of humanity then maybe there’s hope for the ships that are us. That’s perennial, and possibly even more pertinent today. It holds a very special place in my heart, along with Aliens, Mad Max: Fury Road, Die Hard, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional.

What’s your earliest memory of watching a film? I have a cassette tape that my dad made for my grandma in 1981 (he’d send tapes back to his mother in Hong Kong). I was three years old and he had just taken us to see The Empire Strikes Back in the cinema. And he can’t talk to my grandma because I’m just going on and on about R2-D2. I will not shut up about R2-D2 and he’s like, “Yes, yes I’m trying to talk to your grandmother,” and I’m like, “But Dad! Dad! R2-D2!” So it’s actually an archive, but it’s become my memory.

What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s not the sexiest, but it’s the most romantic. That last scene, those last words where she goes “But you’re gonna be like this forever and I’m gonna be like this forever…” and he just goes “okay”. That to me is one of the most romantic scenes I’ve ever seen. It is a perfect movie.

And the scariest? If it’s a horror movie, the most scared I’ve been is The Ring. I was watching it on a VHS and I was lying on a beanbag on the floor and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t move, because I felt that if I moved she’d see me! Also, American Psycho just came to me this year. I caught the twentieth anniversary of that movie, which is a terrifying film, and again, possibly more relevant now than when it was made. The scariest film that’s not a horror is Joker. It scared me how much I liked it. When I came out of the movie, I was like, “I’m scared because I kind of love it, but it’s horrible. It’s so irresponsible. I don’t wanna like this movie but goddamn, I feel it.” Like, I wanted to go on the streets and rage. In a way we’re all the Joker, we’re all the Batman. That duality, that yin and yang, is inside everyone of us. It’s universal.

What is the film that slays you every time, leaving you in a heap of tears? This is a classic one, the opening sequence of Up. The first ten minutes of Up just destroy me every time. I also saw Soul a couple of days ago and I was with the whole family and I, just, if I wasn’t with the whole family I would have been ugly-sobbing. I had a real ache in my throat after the movie because I was trying to stop [myself] from sobbing.

Tell me your favorite coming-of-age film, the film that first gave you ‘teenage feelings’? Pump Up the Volume. Christian Slater! Off the back of Pump Up the Volume, I fancied myself as a prophet and wrote a theater piece called Lemmings. Obviously the main character was a person who could see through the façade, and everyone else was following norms. “No one understands me, I’m a prophet!” So clearly I have this shitty, Joker-style megalomaniac inside of me. It was the worst play, and I don’t know why my teachers agreed for us to do a staging of it!

Christian Slater and Samantha Mathis in ‘Pump Up the Volume’ (1990).

Is there a film that you and your family love to rewatch? We’ve tried to impose our taste on our children, but they’re too young. We showed them The Princess Bride—they didn’t get it. We literally showed our babies Star Wars in their cribs. That’s how obsessive Star Wars fans we were.

Name a director and/or writer that you deeply admire for their use of the artform. I have a slightly weird answer for this. Can I just give love to Every Frame a Painting by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos? They are my film school. I was thinking of my love of Edgar Wright, but then I thought of their video essay on Edgar Wright and how to film comedy, and his essay on Jackie Chan and the rhythm of action and then their essay on the Coen Brothers and Shot Reverse Shot. I must have watched that 30 times ahead of the TV show that I’m making now. I started out in editorial and Tony Zhou is an editor and he talks about when to make the cut: it’s an instinct, it’s a feeling, it’s a rhythm. I realized the one thing in common that I could mention about all the films I’ve loved is Every Frame a Painting. It’s their love of movies that comes bubbling out of every single essay that they made that I just wanna shout out at this part of my career.

Were there any crucial films that you turned to in your development for Shadow in the Cloud? Indiana Jones was something that Chloë brought up—she likes the spiffiness and the humor of Indiana Jones. Sarah Connor was our touchstone for the female character. For one-person-in-one-space type stories, I watched Locke quite a lot, to figure out how they shaped tension and story and [kept] us on the edge of our seats when it’s only one person in one space. In terms of superheroes, I came back to Aliens. Not Alien. Aliens. You know, there are two types of people in this world—people who prefer Alien over Aliens, and people who prefer Aliens over Alien. But actually I think I vacillate for different reasons.

Can there be a third type of person, who thinks they’re both great, but Alien³, just, no? Maybe that’s the best group to be in. We don’t need to fight about this, we can love both of them! I was having an argument with James Wan’s company about this, because there’s a rift inside the company of people who prefer Alien over Aliens.

Okay, program a triple feature with your film as one of the three. I don’t know. Ask Ant Timpson!

I’ll ask Ant Timpson. [We did, and he replied: “Well, one has to be the Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. And then either Life (2017) or Altitude (2010).”]

Thank you Ant! I used to go to his all-nighters as a university student. He is the king of programming things.

Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Life’ (2017).

It’s strange that we never met at one of his events! Ant would make me dress up in strange outfits and do weird skits between films. (For those who don’t know, Timpson ran the Incredibly Strange Film Festival for many years—now part of the New Zealand International Film Festival—and still runs an annual 24-Hour Movie Marathon.) So what’s a film from those events that sticks in your head as the perfect genre experience with a crowd? It was a movie about a man protecting a woman who was the girlfriend of a mafia boss: A Bittersweet Life. Not only does it have one of the sexiest Korean actors, sorry, not to objectify, but also I actually screenshot a lot of that film for pitch documents. And, do you remember a crazy Japanese movie where someone’s sitting on the floor with a clear umbrella and a woman is lactating milk? Visitor Q by Takashi Miike. I remember just how fucking crazy that was.

Finally, what was the best film you saw in 2020? I haven’t seen Nomadland yet, so keep in mind that I haven’t seen all the films this year. I have three: The Invisible Man, which I thought was just amazing. I thought [writer-director] Leigh Whannell did such a great job. The Half of It by Alice Wu, a quiet movie that I simply just adored. And then the last movie I saw at the cinema was Promising Young Woman. The hype is real.

Related content

Kairit’s list of “She Did THAT!!!” films

Beyond Badass: Female Action Heroes

Up in the Air: The Letterboxd Showdown of Best Airplanes in film

Follow Gemma on Letterboxd

‘Shadow in the Cloud’ is available in select theaters and on video on demand now.

#life in film #letterboxd life in film #female director #directed by women #52 films by women #action film #action genre #chloe grace moretz #wwii film #ww2 film #terminator 2 #chinese new zealander #cheng pei-pei #tom eagles #jojo rabbit #female action hero #letterboxd

4 notes · View notes

nickburn · 4 years ago

Text

Things I Enjoyed in 2020 Despite Everything

Seasons Greetings! This year has felt like an eternity for so many reasons, and before it’s over, I’d like to take a look back on the distractions that got me through it. Along the way, I’ll occasionally point out where I was emotionally at the time and whether I got into a particular thing before or after the pandemic hit in mid March. I hope you enjoy this little retrospective of some of my experience during one of the worst years of human history!

Games & Mods

Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

When I was making my 2020 resolutions list late last year, one of my goals was to play more old games in my backlog and not buy many new games this year. That goal largely went on hold, because, well, I sought out enjoyment wherever I could find it instead of forcing myself to play one thing or another. But before Covid, I was really enjoying my new playthrough of M&M6. I’d made attempts at it before, but it was really GrayFace’s mod that made the game click for me. Modern features like quick saves and mouselook make the game much more accessible, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to try an old-school RPG. It’s a great stepping stone into a mostly-dead genre. I’m hoping to get back to it soon. I just jumped ship to simpler ventures like Doom Eternal after the pandemic hit and haven’t looked back since.

Pathologic 2

I learned about the Pathologic series late last year and have since become a little obsessed with it. Hbomberguy’s lengthy video essay on the original game really intrigued me and lead me to trying the sequel/remake in April via Xbox Game Pass. In a weird way, it was cathartic to be a doctor in an even more dire situation than our current one and still see signs of the townsfolk trying to help each other deal with a supernatural plague and little help from their local government. The game helped me express a lot of what I was feeling at the time, when I was still getting used to working from home and wondering just how long this could go on for. I’ve gone back to it recently, and I’m hoping to finish it someday, if I can find a way to stop dying. Above all, Pathologic 2 teaches you how to make choices in no-win scenarios with little information or resources and still persevere, despite the world going to Hell around you. And that’s maybe the most important thing to practice at the moment.

Overwatch

I’ve continued to look forward to weekly Overwatch nights with my friends every Thursday, and it’s really important to have something like that right now. Even if it’s just a new episode of a show airing, a new video from a favorite YouTuber, or a regular Zoom call with coworkers, it helps so much to have something to anticipate from week to week and month to month. Otherwise, it’s really easy to feel like nothing’s going on besides the entropic deterioration of the universe. Overwatch itself helps with this, because it’s such a positive, bright, and optimistic game, as only Blizzard can create. And it’s improved a ton in the past couple of years, in a lot of ways. If you haven’t played in a while, hop in and check out all the new content with your friends; I think you’ll have a great time. It’s looking more and more like Overwatch 2 is right around the corner, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

I learned how to play Go after watching a documentary released this year about AlphaGo, the computer that beat the Go world champion, and I have a huge appreciation for the game now. I think it’s even more beautiful than chess, though even more insidious to learn. If you haven’t played before, start with a 9x9 board, teach yourself the basics, and try playing with another beginner friend. I guarantee you’ll be amazed at the amount of strategy and imagination that a game ostensibly about placing black and white stones on a grid can inspire. Go’s one of several new hobbies I’ve picked up this year, and those new hobbies have really helped me pass the time in a way that feels productive as well as take my mind off whatever depressing news just got blasted across Twitter.

Doom 64

Doom Eternal was fine, but Doom 64′s where my heart lies. The PC port on Steam is great, allowing everyone to easily play the game with mouse and keyboard. Its levels are tight and colorful, often asking the player to backtrack multiple times through the same areas to unlock new ones and take on whatever new twists await down each darkened corridor. It’s a surprisingly fresh experience. Unlike many modern Doom mods that strive to be sprawling marathons, 64′s levels are short but memorable, and the game is a great entry point to the series for newcomers because of that. Retro FPS’s continue to inspire and entertain me, and Doom 64 is one of my new favorites.

Golf With Your Friends

I’m not usually that into party games, but Golf With Your Friends strikes the right balance between casual tone and skill-based gameplay. The maps are vibrant and devious, the different modes are creative and often hilarious, and the pacing is near-perfect. If you’ve got a squad itching to play something together for a few nights, I guarantee you’ll have a lot of laughs trying to knock an opponent off the course or turning them into an acorn just as they’re about to attempt a nasty jump.

Quake 1 Mods

I probably sound like a broken record by now to a lot of you, but I won’t rest until I get more people into retro FPS’s. The outdated graphics and simple gameplay can be off-putting at first, but it doesn’t take long at all to get hooked after you’ve played the likes of excellent mods like Ancient Aliens for Doom 2 or Arcane Dimensions for Quake 1. And it’s only getting better, with this year marking probably the best year for Quake releases ever. The industry even seems to be taking notice again, with many talented mappers getting picked up for highly-anticipated, professional indie projects like Graven and Prodeus. And while the marketing around the retro FPS renaissance as the second coming of “boomer shooters” should be much maligned, the actual craft involved in making mods and brand new games in the genre has never been stronger. I even contributed four levels to the cause this year, but you’ll have to play them yourself to decide if they’re any good: https://www.quaddicted.com/reviews/?filtered=burnham.

Streets of Rage 4

I had not tried Steam Remote Play before this year, but it works surprisingly well if you have a decent internet connection. Because of Remote Play, I was able to complete Streets of Rage 4 with my friends, and it was very close to the experiences I had as a kid playing brawlers like Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo. The game is just hard enough to make you sweat during the boss fights but just easy enough that the average group of gamers can complete it in a night or two, which is ideal for adults with not a lot of free time.

Hard Lads

Hard Lads is a pure delight of a game by Robert Yang about the beauty of a viral video from 2015 called “British lads hit each other with chair,” which is even more ridiculous than it sounds. It made me smile and laugh for a good half hour, and I think it’ll do the same for you.

Commander MtG

The Commander format for Magic: the Gathering is one of my favorite things, and in 2020, I dug into it more than any other year. More so even than playing or watching it being played, I created decklists for hours and hours, dreaming up new, creative strategies for winning games or just surprising my imaginary opponents. I sincerely believe this little ritual of finding a new legendary creature to build around and spending a few days crafting a brew for it got me through the majority of this summer. I didn’t have a lot of creative energy this year, but I was able to channel the little I did have into this hobby. Especially during the longer, more frustrating or depressing days at work when I had nothing else to do or just needed a break, I could often dive back into card databases and lose myself in the process of picking exactly the cards that best expressed what I wanted to do for any given deck. And it’s nice to know I can always fall back on that.

Yu-Gi-Oh!

I played a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up but never had the cards or the skill to be particularly good at it. I just knew I enjoyed the game and the 4Kids show, but I quickly them behind when I got to high school. Fast forward to 2020, and the game and franchise have evolved substantially, not always for the better. But I do find it so intriguing, with a skeptical kind of adoration. It’s not nearly as well-supported as Magic, but what it does have are gigantic anime monsters on tiny cards with enough lines of text to make your head spin. And it’s so interesting to me that a franchise like that can continue to thrive alongside more elegant games like the Pokemon TCG and Hearthstone. And the further I’ve delved into how the game has changed since I stopped playing, the more invested I’ve become, going so far as to start buying cards again and looking into possible decks I might enjoy playing. An unequivocal win for Yu-Gi-Oh! is Speed Duel, which seeks to bring old players back to the game with a watered-down, nostalgia-laden format with fewer mechanics and a much smaller card pool. So if all you want to do is pit a Blue Eyes White Dragon against a Dark Magician, that’s 100% still there for you, but the competitive scene is still alive, well, and astoundingly complicated. And I think that’s kind of beautiful.

Black Mesa

I wasn’t expecting to have the tech to play Half Life: Alyx this year, so Black Mesa seemed like the next best thing. And it really is a love letter to the first game, even if it’s far from perfect. I even prefer the original, but I did very much enjoy my time with this modern reimagining. If you’ve never played a Half Life game before, I think it’s a great place to start.

VR via the Oculus Quest

Around halfway through this year, I started to get really stir crazy and yeah, pretty depressed. It seemed like I’d be stuck in the same boring cycle forever, and I know for a lot of people, it still feels like that. So VR seemed like the perfect escape from this dubious reality where you can’t even take a safe vacation trip anymore. And you know, I think it works really well for that purpose. The Oculus Quest is especially effective, doing away with cords or cables so you have as much freedom as you have free real estate in your home. I don’t have a lot of space in my studio apartment, but I have enough to see the potential of the medium, which is completely worth it. Next gen consoles are neat and all, but I’ve got my heart set on picking up the Quest 2 as soon as possible.

* Beat Saber

I was most looking forward to trying Beat Saber on the Quest, and I was not disappointed. You’d think rhythm games had reached their peak with Rock Band and DDR, but the genre keeps on giving with gems like this. It’s hard to convey if you’ve never tried it, but the game succeeds so well in getting your entire body into the rhythm of whatever song you’re slashing through.

* Half Life: Alyx

Again, I really did not expect to be able to experience this game as intended this year, and I still don’t think I really have. The Oculus Link for the Quest is admittedly a little janky, and my PC barely meets the minimum specs to even run the game. And yet, despite that, Alyx is one of my top three games of 2020 and maybe one of my all-time favorites. Even as I was losing frames and feeling the game struggle to keep up with all the AI Combine soldiers running around, I was still having a blast. For me, it is one of the best reasons to seek out and own VR and a pinnacle of game design in its own right.

Hades

For me, Hades has mostly been similar to every other Supergiant Game that I’ve played: fun and well-polished but ultimately not engaging enough to play for very long. And there’s always this sheen of trying to be too clever with their dialogue, narration, and music that rubs me the wrong way. But Hades is certainly their best game, and I can’t deny the effect it’s had on people, much like Bastion’s reception back in 2011. And I’m really hoping Hades gets more people into roguelikes, as a more accessible and story-driven approach to the genre. Timing-wise, I wish it hadn’t come out around the same time as Spelunky, because I think it did make some people choose one over the other, when the best choice is to play both and realize they’re going for very different experiences. The precise, unforgiving, arcade-like style of Spelunky isn’t fun for everyone, though, and Hades is thankfully there to fill in that gap. I’m really glad I found more time to play it this year at least to succeed on one escape attempt; it’s a fun game to think about in a game design context. And I do think the game has a lot of merit and is doing some clever things with difficulty that the studio likely could not have honed nearly so well without the help of Early Access. The most impressive part of the game to me is not the story or the music or the combat but the massive amount of contextual dialogue they somehow found time to program, write, and record at a consistently high level. All of this is just to say, Hades is obviously one of the best games of the year, and you should play it if you have any interest in it at all.

Spelunky 2

I’ve spoken a lot about this game on Twitter, so I’m not going to rehash much of that here. For me, it’s been a journey of over 1,000 attempts to learn the intricacies and secrets of a deep and demanding game that’s been as frustrating as it’s been rewarding. But it remains a constant source of learning and discovery as well as mastery and pride for me, and I still have hopes of reaching the Cosmic Ocean and getting all the trophies someday. It’s been a joy to watch other Spelunky players too, even as some fair worse than me and others fair far better. And the Daily challenge keeps me coming back, because seeing my name high up on the leaderboard just makes me feel so damn good (or at least I’ll get a good laugh out of a hilarious death). At its heart, Spelunky is a community endeavor, and I think it succeeds at that better than almost any other game this side of Dark Souls. I think it is my Game of the Year or at least tied with Alyx, I really can’t decide. If you don’t think you’d enjoy it, all I’ll say is, the frustration and difficulty are integral to the experience of discovery and surprise, and your brain is better at video games than you think.

Chess

Okay, yes, I watched and enjoyed The Queen’s Gambit, but I think 2020 had already primed people to get into chess this year regardless. Like Yu-Gi-Oh!, chess was a childhood pastime of mine that I really enjoyed and then quickly left behind as I discovered things like music and the internet. If I had to assign a theme to my 2020, it would be rediscovering old hobbies to remind myself how good life actually is. And now I’m more committed to chess than I ever was before. I’m watching international masters and grand masters on YouTube (as well as the incomparable Northernlion), I’m playing regularly on Chess.com, and I’m even paying for lessons and probably my own theory books soon. Like most fighting games, chess is a complicated form of dueling a single opponent with zero randomness, so mistakes are always on you. And modern chess platforms offer extremely good analysis tools, showing you exactly how, when, and why you screwed up so you can do better next time. Like Hearthstone, it’s a quick, addicting, tense, and rewarding way to train your brain and have fun. And it seems more popular now than ever, in part due to a certain Netflix original TV show...

The Queen’s Gambit

I think a lot of people want to be Beth Harmon, even if they know they shouldn’t. It must feel so good to be the best at something and know you’re the best, even while under the influence of certain substances. It’s what makes characters like Dr. Gregory House so fun to watch, though you’d never want to work with the guy. For me, anyway, I always wanted to be a prodigy at something, and what little success I’ve had made The Queen’s Gambit very relatable to me. More so, it’s easy to relate to growing up in a conservative environment with few real friends and fewer outlets of expression, only to realize you’ve finally found your thing, and that no one can take it from you. That’s mostly what I’m going to take from The Queen’s Gambit anyway, more than chess or the Cold War commentary or the problematic relationships Beth has with her cadre of rivals/boyfriends. The show gets a strong recommendation from me for fans of chess as well as lovers of optimistic coming-of-age stories.

March Comes in Like a Lion

Similarly, March Comes in Like a Lion features a protagonist who is scarily close to a version of myself from like eight years ago. My best friend has been urging me to watch this show for years, and I’m still only a few episodes in. But I love how it portrays a young person who’s moved to a big city away from home for the first time, with nothing more than some meager possessions and the hopes of becoming the best in the world at something. And Rei is not confident in himself or outgoing at all, he’s extremely depressed despite pursuing his dreams and trying to distance himself from his somewhat toxic family. It’s a great reminder that the smallest kindnesses can often change our entire perspective on the world, and that even the people that seem the most well-equipped to handle life often still need help. I’ve been very fortunate to have people like that despite mistakes I’ve made, and I hope to be that person for others too.

Umbrella Academy

I’m pretty burnt out on superheroes, but UA put a good enough spin on them that they felt brand new. The show is rough in places, but it’s surprising in some really clever ways. And the comics are some of the wildest stories I’ve ever read, like Hitchhiker’s Guide meets Watchmen.

HunterXHunter

I binged about 100 of the 148 episodes of HxH this year, which I recognize is not a significant number in the wider world of long-running shounen anime, but it’s quite an undertaking for me to finish a show of this length. The series goes places I never expected and made me care so strongly for characters I thought I’d hate at first. It’s the smartest and most endearing show about a band of misfits going on crazy adventures and punching people for the good of the world that you’re likely to find.

Hannibal

This is the rare show that’s simultaneously comforting and nightmare-inducing if watched for extended periods. I can remember nights after binging a few episodes where I couldn’t get many of the disturbing images out of my head. Fair to say, Hannibal is not for the faint of heart, nor is it without some low points. But for those who enjoy gory thrillers or gritty detective dramas, it’s a must-watch.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Original Series, English Sub

You can probably imagine my surprise as I discovered this year that the Japanese version of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime is not only much better than the 4Kids version we got in the States, but it’s actually a decent show. The plot makes much more sense, it’s more interesting, the stakes are higher, the voices are better, and overall it’s just more enjoyable to watch. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it long enough to finish it this time, but this is definitely the way I’d do it and would recommend to others.

Fargo Season 4

It’s a miracle we even got another season of Fargo this year, let alone on time and of the same high quality as the first two seasons. It has a great setting, cast, and conflict. I love Chris Rock, and it was so cool to see him act so well in such a serious role. There’s a Wizard of Oz homage episode that is nearly flawless. And the post-credits scene at the end of the season is just the cherry on top. If you haven’t checked out Fargo by now, you are really missing out on some of the most interesting stuff happening in TV. I can’t wait to see what Noah Hawley does with the Alien franchise.

Movies

Cats

I had to include this one because it was the last full movie I saw in theaters before the pandemic hit. I technically went to Sonic too, but my friends and I walked out after about 30 minutes. The less said about that movie, the better. Cats, though, is a strange and curious beast (pun intended), adapting an already unruly animal (pun intended) to the big screen and yowling to be recognized (pun intended). But for every awkward or embarrassing scene, there’s one of pure joy and magic, like the extended ballet sequence or Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat. The film knows exactly what it is and leans into it hard, like a familiar yet slightly insane feline begging to be stroked, which I imagine is exactly what fans of the musical wanted.

Children of Men

There’s not much I can say about this film that probably hasn’t been said better elsewhere. I was intrigued to watch it when I learned it was one of my friend’s favorite movies. And I have to say, it’s really profound in a prescient way. Clive Owen gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. You should watch it, but only when you feel like taking a severe hit to the feels.

Basic Instinct

Vertigo is probably still my favorite film, so when I learned this year that Paul Verhoeven made a bloody, sex romp homage film to it in the 90s with Michael Douglas starring, I simply had to watch it. And you know, it’s not bad. It’s nowhere near as good as Vertigo, and you can see the ending coming a mile away. But what it does have is the immaculate Sharon Stone, who you cannot take your eyes off for the entire movie. And the movie knows it, making her look as alluring and suggestive as her character is to the detective investigating her. You could do worse than to watch it, just don’t expect any of Hitchcock’s subtlety or looming dread to seep into the final product.

Books

Dune

I finally finished Dune this year, and I can genuinely say it lives up to the hype. It’s not the easiest book to get through, but it’s by no means one of the most difficult either. I’m still bummed that the new film was delayed, but it might give me time to read the rest of the original book series.

The Fifth Season

Another fantastic piece of fiction, I cannot recommend this book enough. N.K. Jemisin is one of the best living authors of our time. If you want an original setting with a brilliant magic system and complex, compelling characters, look no further.

Video Content

Northernlion

I’ve been a fan of NL for years, though I’ve never been that into The Binding of Isaac. He just has a charismatic intelligence to him that sets him apart from most “Let’s Play” YouTubers to me, and he’s very funny to boot. I guess I’d say he seems a lot like me or the person I could picture myself being if I were a professional video content creator. So I was really excited for NL’s series of Spelunky 2 videos, and I still watch them every day, months later. And now he’s teaching me how to get better at chess, being a good 600 ELO higher than myself at the moment. His sarcastic and improv-laden banter have withstood the test of years and gave me some much-needed comfort and laughter in 2020. Somehow, the man even found a way to keep up his prolific output this year while raising his firstborn child. There are those who said it couldn’t be done...

The Command Zone - Game Knights

Josh Lee Kwai and the rest of the crew at The Command Zone continue to put out some of the most well-produced tabletop gameplay videos on the internet. It’s perhaps no surprise, seeing as how Lee Kwai created trailers for such blockbuster films as Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Jimmy Wong had a supporting role in the live action remake of Disney’s Mulan. But the crew around the two hosts are just as important and talented, and it’s clear that they all share the same singular vision for the channel’s future. They’ve carefully crafted a team of expert editors, animators, cosplayers, and voice actors to deliver one delightful video after the next at a consistently high level. If you’re into Magic: the Gathering at all, you simply need to watch Game Knights.

Cimoooooooo

I found Alex Cimo’s channel shortly after the algorithm learned I was interested in Yu-Gi-Oh! again, and at first, I was less than impressed with him. But it’s clear to me now that he not only loves what he does, he’s an expert Yu-Gi-Oh! player and analyst. Plus, he’s very good at explaining some of the more complex concepts in the game in a way that newcomers can understand. I’ve watched every new episode of The Progression Series and The History of Yu-Gi-Oh! so far, and they’re the best way I’ve found to learn how the game developed and changed over the last 20 years.

Team APS

This is another great Yu-Gi-Oh! channel, focusing more on skits, gimmick videos, and casual games rather than analytical or theoretical content. Mostly, they seem like a really great group of friends that just have a blast playing Yu-Gi-Oh! together, and their love for the game makes me want to play more too.

Tolarian Community College

Somehow, a community college English professor’s channel went from a quirky little deckbox review platform to the most popular Magic: the Gathering channel on YouTube in only a few years. But it’s easy to see why when Brian clearly loves what he’s doing more than most people ever will. He’s not only a fantastic reviewer and MtG scholar, he’s one of the most outspoken voices for positive change in the community and the game. Is he too hard on the Magic team at Wizards of the Coast? Perhaps, but without his measured and well-reasoned takes on all things Magic, I think we’d be much worse off.

IRL

Cooking

Even I get tired of eating the same things every day, so I’ve taken it upon myself to learn how to make more dishes, mostly out of sheer boredom. And I know I’m not alone in that, but I have to say it’s been a rewarding and fun adventure. It’s really surprising what you can throw together with a decent recipe and a little creativity in a modest kitchen when you decide to break away from the microwave for once.

Chinchillin’

Like many people, I felt that I needed a pet to survive this year, and I’ve always wanted a chinchilla. So I took a risk and bought one from a seller on KSL a few months ago, and my life has definitely changed for the better. No longer simply alone with my thoughts all day, I have a furry little companion to commune and bond with. And it’s more difficult to find time to feel sorry for myself when a basically helpless tiny creature depends on me for almost everything. Not to say it’s been a perfect experience however, people don’t say chins are difficult to care for for nothing. And I have learned more about them than perhaps I ever cared to know before, but that’s only made them more interesting to me as a result. Overall, I would recommend them as pets, just be prepared to give them a lot more time and attention than you would to say, a fish or a hamster. I’ve seen the commitment compared to that of a large dog, and I think that’s fair, though chins seem far more difficult to train and are far less cuddly. Basically, imagine a fluffy, super fast squirrel that can jump half your height, shed its fur at will if grabbed too tightly, that sleeps all day and bathes in dust, and that cannot get wet or too hot or eat 99% of human foods without serious complications. And they get lonely, and they all have their own surprisingly distinct personalities, some shy and mischievous, others bright and social, and everything in between. But I’m glad to be part of my little buddy’s life and hope to make it a long and enjoyable one for him. Part of why I wanted a chinchilla so badly is they typically live between 10-20 years, much longer than the average rodent or even many cats and dogs. And they’re sadly endangered in the wild, poached for their incredibly soft fur, which is why I believe it’s critical that we care for and learn more about them now. And above all, I adore my chinchilla’s antics, even when he continually tries to dig up and eat the paper bedding below his cage when I’ve provided perfectly edible hay and pellets for him in much easier to reach locations.

And that’s all, folks...

If you’ve read this far, know that I really appreciate it and hope you learned something new about yourself, art, or the world. And please do let me know what’s kept you going the most this year too, as I suspect I’ll still be searching for new distractions next year, even after I’m able to get a Covid vaccine injection. As Red Green would say, we’re all in this together, and I’m pullin’ for ya. <3

#2020 #hobbies #art #youtube #reviews #entertainment #games #books #film #tv #netflix

6 notes · View notes

blazehedgehog · 5 years ago

Note

Who is THE video essay YouTuber for you? Who makes you drop everything without fail as soon as you see new content of theirs in your sub box? And while we’re on the topic of YouTubers, who are some of your favorites in general?

I dunno if it counts as making “video essays” because they’re way closer to documentaries, but The Gaming Historian is usually a “drop everything and watch it” guy for me.

The same goes for Ahoy. Come to think of it, he’s been quiet for a while now. I wonder when the next video is? Last year he did a fantastic Polybius video for Halloween.

I do this thing where when I’m inspired, sometimes it feels like I’m writing in someone else’s voice. Like, I can hear them reading my text out loud in my head as I write. There have been a couple videos now (ones that aren’t out yet) where I’ve written them hearing both The Gaming Historian and Ahoy reading them back to me as I write.

As for favorite Youtubers (which I will take as Youtube channels), I do have the Recommendation section, but I haven’t updated that in like three or four years now. A more recent list of shoutouts:

I’ve mentioned Accursed Farms before, because Ross Scott does extremely good work talking about online game preservation and now increasingly messed up it is that more and more games are becoming totally unplayable due to today’s business practices. Ross also just does good, weird video reviews of games I’ve usually never heard of, on top of the fantastic Freeman’s Mind series, which tells the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 from Gordon Freeman’s inner-monologue.

My friend Chess is one of the few people that streams where I find myself compelled to be present at almost every single one of their streams. Maybe I’m just bias because I think Chess is super cool, but she’s very funny and often streams weird games. If I can’t make it to one of her streams live, I usually watch archives.

Corridor Digital and Corridor Crew is probably the closest thing to “stereotypical youtubers” that I subscribe to. They are VFX artists that make short films for Youtube. I’m a little skeptical of them sometimes, because they can be kind of clickbaity (especially on the behind-the-scenes crew channel) and they have a podcast where they’ve, like, interviewed guys like Logan Paul from that Joe Rogan perspective of “I’m engaging with toxic people because I’m just asking questions, bro 😏" but generally I think they’re entertaining and informative.

I usually recommend BlameSociety with an asterisk at the end. These are the guys who, a decade ago, did Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager. It’s what they’re famous for. Since then they’ve kept the lights on doing more usual Youtuber stuff. I used to really like Beer & Board Games but it ended up getting kind of stale, so really, I mainly watch their channel now for Welcome To The Basement, their show where one person suggests a movie the other hasn’t seen and they talk about it. Usually they’re kind of obscure, but not always. I don’t watch enough movies, but these guys make me feel like I’m still absorbing something about them.

I would be remiss not to mention LGR. I watch everything he puts out because he usually focuses on an era of gaming and technology I couldn’t really afford. Up until 1998 or so all we had was a monochrome Hyundai computer. Didn’t have a HDD or anything. LGR’s videos show me what I was missing. And lately he’s also just been getting in to weird tech oddities, and his thrift store shopping series is jazz for my soul.

Obviously if I’m going to mention Ahoy and The Gaming Historian, I feel like I have to shout out Game Maker’s Toolkit. These are usually very thoughtful, very meticulous breakdowns of how and why certain game concepts work. There have been one or two times where I haven’t 100% agreed with what he said, but 99.8% of the time he’s usually saying some very smart things. Pick just about any video and it’s am academic treat.

I could keep going for a long time, but the last one I’ll rep is Brickroad. He was the first Let’s Play channel I ever subscribed to, and while he’s not as energetic as, say, The Game Grumps, and he can sometimes have weird, old-man opinions about games, I find something soothing about his videos. I guess it’s that thing people sometimes bring up – the “parasocial relationship,” where sometimes people watch videos like Let’s Plays because they give off the sense of hanging out with a friend. I guess that’s the kind of vibe I get from Brickroad. His videos are never super popular, but he’s been doing them for something like a decade and they’re always entertaining enough for me.

#questions #youtube #suggestions #recommendations #youtuber #Anonymous

7 notes · View notes

purplesurveys · 5 years ago

Text

546

Are we alike?

You pretty much always have a cup of tea or a bottle of water with you. I do bring my Hydroflask with me to school everyday. I love my water, lol.

You think enjoying the moment is more important than catching it on camera. I mean, it kinda depends. There are some moments that I know are way too significant, so I’d take one or two photos just so I’d have some sort of souvenir that would, over time, be more reliable than my memory. Case in point, I definitely danced my heart away at my Paramore show, but I took 15-second videos for a couple of songs I really liked. You enjoy watching documentaries. I don’t have the time nowadays, but I love them. The last one I watched is Netflix’s docu about Fyre Festival. You spend most of your time alone and have no close relationships. As shy as I am, I like being around people. You joined Pottermore and were sorted into Gryffindor.

You have a dry and sarcastic sense of humour. I can. Long, dark winter nights drain you. Summer is by far your favourite season and lifts your mood a lot. If I’m not otherwise spending a day at the beach, I HATE summer. A lot of the time you have to laugh at your own bad luck. I always catch the red light. I’m ALWAYS the first car in line that’s caught behind a red light. Gabie knows this for fact that whenever it happens we just laugh it off. Your mood plummets if you don't follow a health and fitness routine. Your favourite ever music video is Lana Del Rey's Ride. I don’t care for Lana Del Rey. You love lazy summers spent going for walks and lounging in the garden. Meh, not really. I don’t like being alone with my thoughts, which is what walking and lounging would do for me. I prefer going out with a friend or two. You love to spend your time lost in a good book. I like when books are able to catch my attention for long, but it’s not my favorite pastime. You watch American Horror Story and Asylum is your favourite season so far. You've overcome a lot over the last year but have slipped up recently. After N passed, my backlog grew bigger because I didn’t want to deal with work after losing someone so suddenly. You prefer sitting exams to completing coursework. I usually feel lazy to do fieldwork or labwork, and my strong suit is memorizing stuff and writing essays, so.

You love long car journeys spent listening to music. So long as it’s music I find pleasurable, or something I can sing along to. You find learning about how people lived in the past interesting. That’s why I’m taking an elective this semester called Social History of the Philippines. That class is literally about how Filipinos used to deal with hygiene, how they used to cook, the games kids played, how they dealt with sicknesses before modern medicine took over. It’s one of my favorite classes that I’ve ever taken.

Your parent's closed-minded attitudes frustrate you. I mean, anyone who is close-minded can be frustrating.

You've grown very used to loneliness. I had no friends for many years, so yeah. I mean most days I like being around people, but there are still some times I do want to shut the world out, delete all my social media (except Tumblr so I can keep taking surveys ha), turn on airplane mode on my phone so no one texts, and spend the whole day with my coloring books. You prefer getting up early and having productive mornings. I always hated getting up early, from all the way back in kindergarten. You try to enjoy dancing in public but you still feel very awkward. This, especially in parties. Even when I’m already drunk I still hate it, and I prefer being with my friends at the side of the dance floor. You can't even be bothered to hold grudges and find them pointless. Winona Ryder is one of your favourite actresses. She’s not my FAVORITE favorite but I have a soft spot for her. You don't find award shows very interesting. You have no patience for people who are glued to their phones. I once saw this Expectation/Reality comic on Facebook, with the Expectation side showing people all glued to their phones while riding the bus and how it’s ~ruining society. The Reality pane, in actuality, shows that all these people on their phones were actually talking to their loved ones – one was saying how she was on her way to the hospital and can’t wait to meet her newborn niece, another was congratulating her friend for passing an exam, another was complimenting her friend for her pretty plant. Ever since then when I see people on their phones, I don’t get as annoyed about it cos for all I know they can be having a very special conversation. You're a bit of a hypochondriac. You enjoy warm evenings spent doing yoga in the garden. Sunsets are one of your favourite things about the planet. You prefer to avoid medication but appreciate it's necessary sometimes. I avoid it because it’s expensive, and I know my parents won’t be willing to help me out with mine because there are more important things to pay for. I do realize that I may need it, though. You find talking to older people easier than talking to ones your own age. It’s very hard to find older people who are pleasant to talk to in this country, because almost every Boomer and X-er are close-minded and conservative. You're naturally quiet and content with being that way. I can sit with someone somewhere, not talk for hours, and it wouldn’t mean that I don’t like them. Your handwriting seems to change every time you pick up a pen. It’s been pretty consistent through the years. You dislike the thought of ever being dependent on anybody. Texting bores you and you'd rather just make a phone call. You like to hear about other people's music tastes. Talking about music bores me, lowkey. You prefer to keep your living space clean and tidy. It’s certainly more relaxing to look at. Anxiety controls you more than you'd like to admit. I’m very aware of just how much it controls me lmao. You can hardly even cope with being around people because of it. You can't decide whether you prefer cities or countryside. Cities. Always. You're pretty much incapable of ever relaxing. 7 classes for this semester, thesis year, and executive positions in both my org and our college’s graduation committee. Weekends like this where I can take more than one survey are ridiculously rare. You like discovering and being introduced to new music. Your favourite song by The Smiths is What Difference Does It Make. You procrastinate things you don't feel capable of doing perfectly. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA yeah these ones I keep to the very back of the line. You keep pretty much everything to yourself. I don’t think so. I tell my best friends everything. You have quite a temper but you're good at controlling it. I’ve done things while angry before and regretted them, so I’ve learned to control my temper. You much prefer skirts and dresses to jeans. Welp I hate skirts, but I like dresses. And I HATE jeans. You're not really a fan of alcohol anymore. Your parents let you down when you needed them the most. This only applies to my mom. You have a pretty awful relationship with your mum and it upsets you. It doesn’t upset me; I’ve grown used to it over the years. You dream of finding a sense of belonging somewhere. You're a fan of The Cure. You love doing toning exercises, especially stomach workouts. I hate exercising. Patience is definitely not a trait of yours. You don't expect anybody to take an interest in you or be there for you. Keyword being expect. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is one of your favourite albums. You're a university student. Yeah huh. And expected to end in a year, too. You waste too much time on Tumblr and the internet in general. Not so much on Tumblr, but we do need the internet to do nearly everything now, don’t we? You're an Arctic Monkeys fan. You've read and loved The Outsiders by S.E Hinton. Based on this, are we alike? I think I left more entries than I bolded, so it’s probably safe to say not really.

#survey #surveys

2 notes · View notes

amostexcellentblog · 5 years ago

Photo

Judy Garland: Reflections on an Icon, Gay or Otherwise

Today, June 22, 2019, marks the 50th anniversary of the day we lost one of the world’s greatest entertainers, Judy Garland. In just a few days time we will observe an even more momentous 50th anniversary, that of the Stonewall Uprising which birthed the modern LGBTQ equality movement. If you’re familiar with your queer folk history, you’ll know there are those who claim this close timing is not a coincidence. But we’ll get to that later.

I first encountered Garland the way most people do--my parents showed me The Wizard of Oz when I was little. I don’t remember much of the experience aside from wanting to be a flying monkey for Halloween, and that “Over the Rainbow” made me cry, which was the first time any piece of media had made such an impact on me. It never really occurred to me that the woman who sang that song could have had a career beyond Oz until 12 years ago when I was just finishing Middle School and becoming interested in the Old Hollywood era. She was the first star I formed an emotional connection to, and as I happily made my way through her filmography and read up on her life I first encountered the phrase “gay icon.”

I knew what gay meant, obviously. I was vaguely aware of the LGBTQ and marriage equality movements, but at the time I mostly knew “gay” as the insult hurled at me seemingly everyday of Middle School for a series of things I never gave a second thought to but were apparently tell-tale signs that I was that way, and thus a figure deserving of torment--how I carried my books, how I sat, how I looked. My basic opinion of being gay at that point was that it’s fine for other people, but dear god don’t let this be my future!

So, when I realized that the star I was idolizing was famous for being idolized by gay men, I did what I’d become very adept at doing, I ignored the implications. Denial allowed me to spend high school working my way through her films, youtube videos, documentaries, and a biography without really examining why this woman resonated so much with me. So now, as we approached these two anniversaries, it seemed like a good time to finally try to sort through what she meant to me. What I ended up with instead is an essay that’s part personal reflection and part mediation on the meaning of the term “Gay Icon” in the era of Marriage Equality and Corporate-Sponsored Pride.

The term “Gay Icon” has been used to mean several similar, but different types of people. To clarify, when I talk about Gay Icons in this post, I’m talking specifically about a subset of gay icons related to the so-called “Diva Worship” culture among gay men. Nobody really seems to know why exactly gay men are so drawn to larger-than-life women, I’ve heard too many reasons to go into them all now, but even if not all of us go for the cliches (Cher, Gaga, etc.) pretty much every gay man has a female figure--real or fictional--they connect with in a way their straight male peers don’t.

Looking back, it’s obvious why Garland resonated with me. She was chronically insecure, especially about her looks--as was I. She spent her life wanting desperately to for someone to love her unconditionally and to be able to love them back, only to be denied this simple happiness time after time--well, of course that would resonate with a gay audience, especially in her lifetime. And she was a survivor, repeatedly cast aside by the press and the industry as washed up, she continually had the last laugh. She had a strength to her that I wanted. It was a different kind of strength than the physical/masculine kind offered by the pro-athletes and superheroes my male peers emulated, but which I found unrelatable and unappealing. Hers was a strength that came dressed in sequins and high heels, and I just thought it was fabulous.

Garland though, is more than just a gay icon, in a lot of ways she seems to be the gay icon. The popular code phrase “friend of Dorothy” is generally assumed to be a reference to her character in Oz. She maintained close friendships with gay men throughout her life, with whom she would frequent illegal gay bars on both coasts. Her father was a closeted homosexual, and biographers have speculated this is why so many of the men she was attracted to, both as friends and romantically, turned out to be gay or bi. She was one of the first celebrities to have their gay following acknowledged in the mainstream press. There’s even footage on youtube of her being asked directly about why she attracts so many “homosexuals,” and she is visibly thrown by it.

To understand why Garland would be so flustered over that question, it’s important to understand how being popular with the gay community was perceived in her lifetime. William Goldman’s The Season, his influential book about the 1967–68 season on and off Broadway, includes an account from an unnamed screenwriter friend describing a mid-1960s cocktail party that offers a fascinating glimpse at just that:

I can’t explain her appeal, but I saw it work once in this crazy way. I was at a party in Malibu... There were a lot of actors there, the word on them was that they were queer, but this was a boy-girl party, everyone was paired off, and these beautiful men and gorgeous broads were talking together and drinking together. Anyway, everything’s going along and it’s sunny, I’m getting a little buzzed... when I realized, Garland was in the room.

The guy she’s with, her husband, supports her as she plops down in this chaise, and says what she wants to drink and he goes off to get it. And she’s sitting all alone and for a minute there was nothing, and then this crazy thing started to happen. Every homosexual in the place, every guy you’d heard whispered about, they left the girls they were with and started to mass move towards Garland. She didn’t ask for it, she was just sitting there, while all these beautiful men circled her. They crowded around her and pretty soon she’s disappeared behind this expansive male fence. It may not sound like all that much, but I’m telling you, she magnetized them.

I’ll never forget all those famous secret guys moving across this gorgeous patio without a sound, and her just sitting there, blinking. And then they were on her, and she was gone. (x)

Another passage describing one of her concerts in 1967, from Goldman himself, is even more blunt:

Another flutter of fags, half a dozen this time, and watching it all from a corner--two heterosexual married couples. “These fags” the first man says, “it’s like Auschwitz, some of them died along the way but a lot of them got here anyhow!” He turns to the other husband and shrugs, “Tonight, no one goes to the bathroom.” (x)

Both passages, laced with condescension, homophobia, and misogyny, are nevertheless useful windows into a pre-Stonewall way of looking at how far gay culture has come. Today Lady Gaga can sing “Don’t be a drag just be a queen” on a lead single and still reign as a queen of pop music, back then any association with homosexuality was enough to taint you. Garland’s popularity with gay men opens her up to condescending mockery, while gay men’s mere existence at a public event is enough to terrify the heterosexual attendees.

Still, the most revealing part of that last passage might not be the homophobia, but the opening reference to “another flutter of fags, half a dozen.” The fact that a decent amount of gay men evidently felt comfortable enough to express themselves at least somewhat openly at a mainstream public event is notable. In this pre-Stonewall era such openness was generally reserved for bars and other covert safe spaces.

Which brings us back to the first paragraph. If you know any queer folk history, then you’ve probably heard this one--Judy Garland’s funeral sparked the Stonewall Uprising. That fateful night in June the Stonewall Inn was packed with gay men still emotionally raw from losing their idol, so much so that when the police raided the joint they channeled that anger and loss, and fought back, and the modern LGBTQ movement was born! It’s a story that would solidify Garland’s status as the definitive gay icon, a martyr for the cause, (move over Harvey Milk!) Except, it’s not true. It’s been debunked multiple times. Most recently in this video from the NY Times.

I bring it up though, because even if she wasn’t the cause, she was still connected to that historic night, if only indirectly. Even as the NY Times video debunks the myth of her funeral causing it, two of the uprising’s participants interviewed do admit to being at Garland’s funeral, which really was held just hours before the violence started. Other accounts from people who patronized Stonewall have said that “Judy Garland” was a popular fake name to use on a sign-in book at the entrance. In other words, even if she didn’t cause them, she was still an important figure for some of the people who went on to build the modern equality movement.

As a final thought to wrap this all up, I’ve been thinking about Garland and her status as a gay icon. It’s no secret that as the years have passed by she’s been somewhat supplemented by younger icons for younger generations. There’s been some question over whether Garland even has a place in a gay culture that now has people like Lady Gaga and “Born This Way,” openly acknowledging their gay fans in ways Garland never could.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel the recent debate over Taylor Swift’s gay-themed music video demonstrates why Garland still deserves her Gay Icon status, even if most younger queer people today don’t have the same connection to her that older generations did. Swift’s video, chocked full of every out celebrity who would return her calls and saturated in a rainbow-hue, has faced criticism for being “performative activism.” That after being fairly silent on the issue for so long she’s now trying to cash-in on the movement by branding her single a new gay anthem for Pride Month. The fact that with one exception, which misuses the word “shade,” the lyrics to the song sound more like they’re referring to Swift’s online haters rather than anti-LGBTQ bigots, certainly helps the critics’ case. As does the fact that Swift never seemed to have much interest in building a large gay following before this.

Yet there’s also a sense that this was inevitable. Corporations already roll out rainbow colored logos for Pride, in retrospect it seems obvious that celebrities, and their PR firms, would start deliberately trying to market themselves as a gay icon without first taking the time to build a large following in the LGBTQ community. (Gaga’s established gay fanbase undoubtedly blunted similar criticisms of “Born This Way,” for example.) Garland in this case then serves as a symbol of a time when the Gay Icon title wasn’t anointed by marketing campaigns, but emerged organically from a genuine affection for an individual held by a large number of queer people. A reminder of how important that affection was to members of our community, (and still is to many of us) even if it could only go one-way. And perhaps even a warning, of what we might lose if we let this important part of gay subculture be transformed into just another marketing gimmick.

But I’ll leave all that for another time. For now, I’ll just say, thank you Judy Garland. Thank you for all the joy and comfort you’ve given to generations of gay men. And thank you especially for the companionship you gave me while I was still figuring some things out.

#judy garland

5 notes · View notes

ladyloveandjustice · 6 years ago

Text

My Go-to Youtubers

The $5 tier on my patreon allows people to nominate/vote on one post a month- about anything! This is one of those posts. Go to my patreon here to learn more.

I haven’t really gone DEEP into Youtube, but i do have a few channels I’m subscribed to or that I frequently visit I wouldn’t mind talking up. I’m a media analysis geek, as y’all can tell, so I love me some good video essays on pop culture, social issues and whatnot. Here’s some channels I visit and recommend if you share my tastes

Lindsay Ellis- She has a ton of thoughtful and funny examinations of media and pop culture trends. Her videos are well-researched, detailed and I learn a lot from them! Example: Her Hobbit documentary is especially of note, its worthy of being shown in theaters- I had no idea about the actors strike or any of that, but it’s fascinating. She also did a great piece on the Shape-of-Water-style “monster boyfriend” throughout the history of media and why marginalized communities in particular are drawn to that archetype.

Jenny Nicholson- She has a great dry sense of humor and really takes on the weirdness of the internet and is excellent at eviscerating bad or mediocre movies. Unlike a lot of Youtubers, she’s not pretentious or pedantic about it- she can often get you to think about why these stories exist and how they can be improved. Example: Recently she did a video of some of those silly “dark rituals” they post on the Internet, I cracked up through the whole thing. She also destroyed The Greatest Showman in a satisfying way that I appreciated after being forced to see it.

Sarah Z-She has some really thorough and thoughtful essays on the kind of media I’m interested in. She’s especially good at explaining some of the social criticisms and breaking down why the concerns of *deep voice* SOciAL JuSticE WaRriors can be worth listening to. I’m often nodding along, but occasionally I learn something new. Examples: She completely eviscerated Riverdale and the Heathers reboot in a satisfying way and recently did a good comparison of the Series of Unfortunate Events adaptations. She also has a good breakdown on what is and isn’t “queerbaiting”.

ProZD: I post his stuff a lot on here, so it shouldn’t surprise you. Very funny skits about important subjects like anime, video games and cats. A lot of geekery to be found here, and I enjoy how he handled Q and A’s too.

Press Buttons ‘n Talk- My fave Lets Play channel. ProZd and Manky are both incredible voice actors and have bought me to tears of laughter on several occasions. Anne Marie’s always a blast too. Example: an entire, voice acted lets play of the first two Ace Attorney games, I’ve introduced people to the series via these, they’ve been invaluable. I also recommend the Hamtaro playthrough.

Gibi- My go-to ASMR person. She has a very soothing voice and does a lot of fun role-play skits based in various fandoms (a lot of anime) and its a good way for me to calm down. Her Team Rocket skits are genuinely funny, she clearly adores the characters.

Honorary mentions:

I also like the essays of The Pop Culture Detective and Big Joel has some good vids! I’ve also started watching Contrapoints recently- I’ve only seen a couple videos, but they’re very interesting and informative so far.

I sort of got into anime via Abridged Series, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention I still follow YGOTAS and DBZ Abridged.(warning for lots of questionable humor).

Also I’ve talked about watching the Persona Lets Plays while working out on here, so I should mention my source for those is JohneAwesome- he’s a pleasant guy and clearly loves the series a ton, so he’s good to listen to. He’s also extremely thorough. For 1 and 2, I’ve relied on TheAgentShades for a lot of it (others as well for P1 though).

Another lets player I like is Cryaotic!

That was way more than 300 words but there you go. My YouTube faves. If you have any suggestions for other YouTubers you think I’d like based on my tastes, feel free to tell me!

#youtube #prozd #press buttons n talk #lindsay ellis #jenny nicholson #sarah z #gibi asmr #youtubers #monthly patreon posts

64 notes · View notes

orbemnews · 4 years ago

Link

When Some Critics Reject the Movie That’s About Your Life Matthew Teague is a journalist who’s traveled to distant corners of the world for tales. He lined C.I.A. operatives in Pakistan, famine in Somalia, double brokers in Northern Eire. However his best work could also be the essay he wrote in 2015 for Esquire journal, titled “The Good friend.” Teague devoted some 6,000 phrases to the arduous two years he spent caring for his spouse, Nicole, who realized she had terminal most cancers at age 34. The essay informed the story of her deterioration and dying by the prism of their friendship with Dane Faucheux, a rudderless soul who came around the Teague household for Thanksgiving and ended up staying for 2 years to look after the couple and their two younger daughters. Apart from successful a Nationwide Journal Award, the essay related Teague to readers in methods his dramatic reporting from Afghanistan or Sri Lanka by no means did. They shared their very own painful tales with such overwhelming power he was typically “struck dumb” by the response. To this present day, he receives impassioned, heartbreaking letters. Hollywood, too, rapidly got here calling. And Teague, now 44, knew the drill. Two of his earlier items had been optioned by numerous producers, however no films had been ever made. He vowed issues can be totally different this time. What he didn’t account for was simply how merciless Hollywood could be when a film does come collectively, an expertise he’s nonetheless coming to phrases with. First he tried his hand at writing the screenplay himself. When that didn’t work (“I spotted I’m too near this,” he stated) he signed on as an government producer and labored carefully with the author Brad Ingelsby (“The Means Again”) to craft a movie that each depicted the realities of dying and celebrated the life that got here earlier than. Quickly a cadre of well-known actors (Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson, Jason Segel) descended on Fairhope, Ala., to painting the Teagues and Faucheux. Gabriela Cowperthwaite directed the actors in scenes shot within the hospital the place Nicole was handled and in a house simply three doorways down from the Teague residence. (The household nonetheless lives in the identical home. Teague has remarried and now additionally has a 3-month-old son named Wilder.) Toggling between previous and current, the script jumps headfirst into each the nastiness of most cancers and the banalities of married life, presenting a portrait of a household that’s each fully recognizable and terrifyingly distinctive. Younger girls are usually not presupposed to die of most cancers of their residence whereas their young children are within the subsequent room. However fueled each by the profound response to his essay and by his profession as a journalist, Teague was wedded to authenticity. “The gist of it’s I wished my spouse’s legacy and reminiscence to be one in all huge respect. I didn’t need to mishandle it,” he stated. “And I’ve a mission to inform the reality about that point and all the things that got here from it.” There are components of Teague’s unique essay that made it immediately onto the display: the physician’s phrases when he revealed Nicole’s prognosis (“It’s in all places. Like any person dipped a paintbrush in most cancers and flicked it round her stomach”), the friendship between Teague and Faucheux, and Nicole’s dying needs (leaping in a downtown fountain with all her household and mates, turning into the grand marshal in her city’s Mardi Gras parade). “What her life lacked in size, it made up for in top,” Teague wrote in Esquire. The extra visceral components that, partly, made the essay so memorable had been omitted: particularly Teague’s function within the grotesque artwork of wound-packing and the bodily horrors that accompanied it. “There are issues that I can write about in print, and folks can soak up and discover to be sincere,” he stated. “But, when you see it onscreen, individuals are going to throw up their popcorn and run from the theater.” But, regardless of his rigorously calibrated work, success in Hollywood isn’t a assure. The 2019 Toronto Movie Pageant accepted the movie and gave it a coveted opening-weekend slot. Seated contained in the Princess of Wales Theater, Teague was a flurry of nerves, held collectively solely by sheer will and the assistance of a good friend and fellow journalist, Tom Junod, who was additionally the topic of a Hollywood film, “A Lovely Day within the Neighborhood,” about his unlikely relationship with Fred Rogers. “It stunned me how emotional I felt watching it,” Teague recalled. “However what actually took me aback was how emotional the viewers was. There have been lots of people feeling plenty of issues. So I felt like I had accomplished proper by Nicole.” The actress Kristen Stewart was seated behind him, and listening to her sniffle was extra affirmation all the things was going to be OK. There have been audible sobs from the viewers, a standing ovation and a visit to the stage, the place the solid answered an earnest flurry of questions. “There was nothing however love from that viewers,” Teague stated. However when he returned to his lodge room later that night time, early critiques from the commerce publications landed like a intestine punch. The Hollywood Reporter known as it “out of contact with the very feelings it desperately tries to evoke.” Selection took situation with turning his “devastating essay” into an “inspirational group hug.” In that evaluate, the critic Peter Debruge counseled the actors’ performances however wrote, “A lot of the unpleasantness has been scrubbed from the image, till what stays is exactly the sort of dishonest, sanitized no-help-to-anyone TV-movie model of dying that impressed Teague to set the file straight within the first place.” Right this moment Teague nonetheless bristles at this criticism. Regardless of spending years in newsrooms and understanding the function of critics, this explicit critique rings as unfair. “I had simply come from a room full of people that had by no means learn the essay, didn’t know something concerning the essay and simply took the film by itself phrases and located it to be very transferring,” he stated. “So to have my very own story used to beat up my very own story was actually painful.” Cowperthwaite felt the wrath too, saying the early critiques “simply took the wind out of me.” However the director, who has made 4 movies together with the BAFTA-nominated documentary “Blackfish,” has had extra expertise dealing with criticism. “It’s simply one of many suck-it-up truths behind our trade,” she stated. “It by no means doesn’t damage, however I believe the longer you’re on this artistic world you be taught to metabolize the ache extra rapidly.” For Teague, the critiques felt unfair, however extra vital he was frightened concerning the impact they’d have on the destiny of the movie. Films like “The Good friend” enter festivals with the hopes of securing a hefty distribution deal, and the early commerce critiques carry outsize import when studios and streamers are figuring out what to purchase. Would the movie discover a residence with preliminary vital response so tepid? “I used to be in a panic as a result of I didn’t know what was going to occur to this factor that’s so valuable to me,” Teague stated. “Are we sunk? Are individuals going to get an opportunity to see it?” Evaluations did enhance. In Vainness Truthful, Katey Wealthy wrote that the movie “finds a extra considerate means by the kind of story that usually feels rote onscreen, no matter how devastating it may be in actual life.” Its Rotten Tomatoes rating is now hovering round 80 p.c contemporary. And the producer-financier Teddy Schwarzman stated the movie left the competition with 4 gives, although an official deal wasn’t introduced till January. Delayed due to the pandemic, the movie, now titled “Our Good friend,” will now debut Friday in theaters and on demand. Teague is utilizing the expertise as a development alternative in his profession as a journalist. “The glare of public criticism has helped me be extra conscious of how scary and helpless a narrative topic can really feel,” he stated in a follow-up e-mail. “It’s simple to neglect that, even for a author who prizes empathy. Generally even a quick story — or a rapidly written evaluate — can break somebody’s coronary heart for a protracted, very long time.” But, he hasn’t given up on Hollywood, both. The author lately returned to the screenwriting sport and tailored his 2003 GQ article concerning the over-the-top warfare video games in North Carolina right into a mini-series known as “Pineland” that’s now being shopped round. “It’s not a delicate trade,” he stated. “Nevertheless it has nothing on journalism — my old flame — for onerous knocks.” Supply hyperlink #Critics #Film #life #reject

0 notes

langblrwhy · 4 years ago

Text

New Year’s Goals

September

I DID IT BETTER :) I wanted to do 90% this month and I did! I had to make a small list on the last week to remember me the topics I was procrastinating and I finished everything on time :))))

1 Try 2 new foods every month (food, beverage, recipe) + no meat for 2 days)

I didn't ate meat for 2 days

1 rice without meat

2 radish

2 Be fluent in esperanto and active in the community

I've been doing stuff on BEJO, translating stuff, calling people to speak, etc.

3 Practice having conversations via audio and video

I practiced a couple times.

-Bonus: Write a 10k fiction in french and publish it on Wattpad

I wrote this on the beginning of the year, and I didn't wrote a single page since then. My problem is not the french part, but the creative part. I have an idea of a romantic sapphic love story, but that's it, also I tried to write this month and I wrote 209 words and that's it, I have no ideas.

And I also don't feel the need to write a third fiction at the same time, so after explaining myself, this topic will continue here, but as a bonus.

4 Try to study russian again and focus on the basic

I revised the alphabet and sing along with songs as a way to better learn the alphabet.

5 Watch a movie every week and put them on doesthedogdie/ (at least the less popular movies)

1. Gemini (Japan, 1999)

2 Scary Movie 4 (USA, 2006)

3 Upside Down 3 (Brazil, 2019)

4 Moving (Japan, 1993)

5 Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (USA, 2014)

6 Read 5 books (I want to finish a book in october)

I read many chapters of Crime and Punishment, I finally passed the middle.

I read half of a book in Esperanto called "Island, Men and Love", it's a short gay book.

And I finally started reading The Communist Manifesto from Marx and Engels (people lied to me, it's not extra easy as I expected lol, but maybe is easier than the others political and economical books, but this won't stop me)

7 Finalize 1 art every month (it doesn’t have to be good, just finished)

I started a lot, but didn't finish a lot, but I finished a couple, so yeah.

8 Doing some exercise every week

YEAH, I've been walking on my garden for like 40-100 minutes almost every day and I glad I started, I feel relieved, I love walking.

9 Try to make listening podcasts an habit

Yeah! It's not an habit, but I did it.

-Bonus: Learn toki pona

Nope.

10 Write a fiction in esperanto

I did and I finally have a clear idea of the plot.

11 Try 1 new thing per month

I painted some stuff on my walls.

12 Interact on virtual groups (telegram, tumblr, whatever)

I did.

13 Be more proactice and publish my stuff somewhere online (draw, fiction, whatever)

Sadly I just published stuff on instagram, but it's enough.

14 Sketch every week

I did :)

15 Study spanish, focusing on write, listen and speak

I watched the last 8 episodes (1 hour each) of La Usurpadora with spanish subtitles.

16 Study french, focusing on write and listen and speak

I want to rewrite the french and spanish topic too.

I just want to study french, read news from francophones countries, watch youtube videos etc, that's enough for me. I'm not talkative and I don't plan to travel to Europe in the near future, so I don't really need to focus on that.

Whatever, I didn't studied anyways lol :c I need to study, for real

17 Study whatever theories (such as astronomy, lingustics, ecology, whatever)

I studied marxism (besides the manifesto, I also listened 2 podcasts about it), primitivism (a couple texts my primitivis friend send me) and Cowspiracy is a documentary about veganism, climate change and ecology (it's on netflix).

18 Study for vestibular (mathematics, physics, geography, philosophy, sociology, biology, chemistry, history, english, portuguese, brazilian literature and essay). For october: math, write 2 essays and practice (observation and from imagination) drawing

Not enough, but yeah.

17/18 = 94%

I'm glad I did all of this and I want to this again in october, I want to do 80% now and do everything with more intensity, because I have no routine, so I procrastinate A LOT.

#new years goals #goals #glowup #glow up

7 notes · View notes

abbajane · 5 years ago

Text

I hope everyone had an informative and reflective Black History Month! This month for the Own Voices Global Reading Challenge we read for Black America (#ownvoices selections from Black American authors). Here’s what I read, listened to, and who I followed this month!

What I Read

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: My favorite of the month! This book has been on my TBR for ages, and I finally sat down to it and read it all in one sitting. Following the life of Janie from her idyllic but illusionary childhood, through her marriages, through her adventures and travels, Their Eyes radiates with beauty, love, and self-discovery. The story was so vibrant and moving, so complex and philosophical. I loved Janie and her story; she’s probably one of the most interesting and complex characters I’ve ever read. I was thinking about her and her story long after I closed the book.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones: Another that’s been on my TBR for ever. I was working at the library when this book exploded in popularity — it was almost never on the shelf. With Jones being a local author, I was excited to read her Atlanta and this book did not disappoint. Moving between the lives of a married couple, Roy Jr. and Celestial, the novel navigates the complicated terrain of love while the characters navigate the even more complicated terrain of a wrongful conviction and imprisonment. I was riveted to the last chapter, unsure how it was going to turn out well for anyone with only a few pages left. A moving portrait of love, loss, and the effects of the criminal justice system on Black lives, this novel is an instant classic.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine: I had the honor of meeting Claudia Rankine while I was in college. She was a guest at Agnes Scott College’s Annual Writers’ Festival in 2017 while I was interning with the program. I was amazed by her wisdom and quiet grace, and I thoroughly enjoyed her reading though I had never read her work. When I devised this challenge, she was immediately at the forefront of my list for this month. Citizen is a moving collection of experiences, reflections, and essays in which Rankine lays bare the Black experience. There was so much I learned not only about the physical and casual experiences that Black women face, but also about historical events of racism and violence that I had never heard about before.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange: I found this book from a bingo card for Black history month by @diverseclassics on Instagram (see below!). I had heard about this book here and there, but I didn’t really know what to expect from it. It was unlike anything that I’ve ever read. Written and performed on stage originally in the 1970s, For Colored Girls is a moving and flowing collection of Black women’s experiences. It can be hard to read. I will admit that the form of this book really inhibited the experience of it for me. I have no experience in theater, I don’t read plays, and I only read poetry when forced. I’d love to watch this book performed, as it was intended.

Just Mercy by Brian Stevenson: Another that’s been on my TBR for a while! This book came to my attention more seriously when the film was released, but I had watched it dance around on Bookstagram for a while. I found a copy at my library book sale recently, so I had it up farther on the list. I knew it would be good, but I had no idea how moving, how emotional, and how mindset changing it would be for me. The book follows the experience of the now-famed civil rights lawyer Brian Stevenson as he became involved with Death Row cases and began his organization the Equal Justice Initiative. The stories Stevenson told about the people he met on Death Row, the injustices they faced, the outright racism that warped their lives was truly harrowing. I cried a lot reading this book. It truly changed how I think about the world and the experiences of others in it.

What I Listened To

Ella Fitzgerald (with Louie Armstrong): a classic! I love nothing more than dancing around the kitchen cooking dinner while Ella and Louie sing their jazz.

H.E.R.: I’ve been a fan of H.E.R.’s award show performances for years. Her style and skill and attitude and persona on stage is electric and empowering. I’ve just gotten around to listening to her music more casually and I’ve really enjoyed the experience!

Bobby Hebb: I found the song “Sunny” on instagram’s music feature while I was looking for a happy song to put with a video of one of my cats rolling in the sun. The rain and cold and whisper of spring this month has me listening to this song literally once a day.

The Birth of Rhythm and Blues (Spotify playlist): I love this Spotify playlist! So much good music!

Women of Motown (Spotify playlist): Another classic. Gladys Knight and Diana Ross — need I say more?

Who I Followed

@booksbythecup: This Bookstagram is so dreamy! Creator La’Shell posts photos daily of Black-authored books with cups of tea. She’s been working through the alphabet this month, posting a photo each day with a theme.

@nedratawwab: Nedra Glover Tawwab is a therapist and writer who posts amazing graphics about mental health, healthy relationships, and living to your truth. This is a great entry way into therapy for someone considering it, and a great resource for those who can’t invest fully in therapy at the time.

@rachel.cargle: Rachel Elizabeth Cargle is a writer, academic, and lecturer. For the month of February, in honor of Black History Month, she posts prompts for folks to research Black History for themselves. I love this idea! It’s an amazing way to bring attention to topics in Black history that aren’t well known and to practice your researching skills.

@diverseclassics: A staple of Bookstagram! This account is dedicated to highlighting marginalized voices in the literary world as well as redefining what the “classic canon” is. I’ve discovered so many new authors and books through this account. They also shared this amazing bingo-card style list for Black classics which was very helpful in building my TBR!