#Kerri Russell

[thierry1970]

[digitalcheesecake]

2024.03.26

🌸Very Kerri...

[elliehopaunt]

It's happening...I am getting pulled into The Diplomat.

[wildchildblog]

[mandoreviews]

📽️ The Magic of Ordinary Days (2005)

TikTok made me watch this movie, and I did not regret it. I’ve actually watched several movies because of clips shown on TikTok, and I don’t think I’ve regretted any of them. This was a very sweet, predictable, entertaining movie. Yes, I could see the ending from a mile away, but all the stuff before then was what made the movie so sweet and enjoyable. I have to say that this was one of the best tv movies I’ve ever seen. I highly recommend it.

Sex/nudity: 1/10 (some kissing, a woman is pregnant and unmarried but there’s no mention of sex at all)

Language: 1/10 (if there was any it was very mild; giving it a 1 because I honestly don’t remember if there was any or not)

Violence: 0/10

Overall rating: 8/10

[person-1-one]

Y’all know that thing about a twist shouldn’t be “I never would have seen that coming,” it’s supposed to be “I should have seen that coming.” Well, I just watch the season one finale of The Diplomat, and holy shit I should have seen that coming

[stastrodome]

Fun Facts. 100% verified.

At any Pizza Hut in Iowa, you can replace traditional tomato sauce with creamed corn.

Jennifer Lawrence's Kentucky accent was once so thick her first movie was voice-dubbed by Keri Russell.

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald had a falling out due to an argument about what makes "authentic paella".

Live Wire, Kelly Ripa's autobiography, was originally released under the title Lettin' it Ripa.

Sigmund Freud joked that his "American Dream" was to move to New York to open a wig store.

[angelofverdum]

The diplomat

I try to avoid these types of shows like the plague. American politics, foreign affairs, and Middle Eastern conflict are definitely not my thing. But Keri Russell tho.

I don't like political shows because I can't understand half of what they saying but this show is somehow exciting.

It feels fresh. The chemistry between the actors is great, especially Kate and her husband specifically when they are at each other's throats.

I started the show because of Keri Russell, I finished The Americans not too long ago and I needed more. This show got incredibly good reviews so I said "Let me try"

Kerry Rusell is so good at what she does. I like this character more than her character in "The Americans"

After I finished the show I confirmed my favorite genres are shows written by women. There is a delicate balance between drama and comedy that I love so much, and women do it so well.

I love a female character that is flawed and feels real. But I'm also going to admit the fact that her hair looks like that annoys me so much, it's crazy. I can understand a ponytail because she doesn't have time to get her hair done but that mess she has on her head is something else.

I get it she is supposed to look dirty, like she hasn't taken a shower in days so her hair looks greasy but it's killing me.

I'm happy I started the show. I'm excited for season 2.

Complaints

- No queer women

- No Latino characters, but at least they have Asian and black characters.

[notsosilentsister]

The Diplomat

I kinda get why one might keep the awful husband around - he's a loose cannon who gets results, an asset as much as a liability. And while Kate often disagrees with him about the means, they do seem to be on the same page regarding the ends, which does matter, after all. You do get the sense that they share certain core values. So keeping him around is a high risk, high reward strategy.

It also seems like Kate's living a bit vicariously through him - she's so very restrained (as signified for instance by the eating disorder), and in a way he's a permission mechanism, sabotaging the restraint, and at the same time a cautionary tale, justifying the restraint. Maybe he's her Jungian shadow, doing what she doesn't allow herself to do. I also kinda get how you might love someone while not at all trusting them, and that always makes for an interesting dynamic. He still has to go - I'm on episode four - at least for a while, because I ship Kate with the State secretary. Competence porn, for sure, but I'm so jaded about politics at this point that it's starting to break my suspension of disbelief. People are all so professional, focussed on the task at hand. Sure, there may be some personal vanity involved on occasion, but the show does a good job showing how seemingly frivolous things can be valid concerns when you're in the business of reputation management. (Kate acknowledges that the presidend is right to worry about looking old and weak - there's an undeniable cost to it, it's just that the cost of a show of strength would be higher in this particular case). And sure, people fuck up, but so far all the fuck ups are the sort you easily might make when you have to make quick decisions based on insufficient information, and it's often easy to see how every alternative option could have led to something disastrous just as well. It want to see some unforced errors! But unforced errors are made at one's leisure, which no one has in this show and that brings me to my main issue: pacing and stakes. Which are too fast, and too high, respectively, for my taste. I tend to prefer the sort of character study, where characters get some room to breathe (and rope to hang themselves with; for that, you gotta cut them some slack). That's what I really loved about the Americans, where the pace could ramp up to nail-biting degrees at the drop of a hat, but also linger, allow for a slow, downright torturous build-up of tension, for treacherous lulls in the action, a temptation to succumb to the lure of mundanity, the American dream in suburbia, a false sense of security. You might easily lose track of something, that would later come back to bite you in the ass, which added to the suspense, and made the sudden eruptions of violence, always simmering below the surface, seem more shocking and at the same time more inevitable, less contrived. I always kinda had to steel myself to watch the Americans and would be left reeling for a while after a lot of episodes. Well, this is more of a comedy, but the pace for me is is too constant, I guess. I'm also not sure that I buy into the central thesis as formulated by the awful husband, that the person most suited for power is the one being thrust into it by circumstances instead of actively seeking it out. It's a very popular sentiment (why your average hero first has to refuse the call), but a bit too romantic for my taste. 

I mean, obviously you'd want someone in power who sees power only as a means to an end - to protect, to promote - and not as an end in itself. But that seems less about "wanting power" vs "not wanting power" and more about what precisely one might want the power for. And personally, I do actually feel more comfortable with someone in power who does care enough about power to study it, to find out how it works and how it doesn't work in any given situation, and who can hold onto it long enough to actually implement a proper reform. Being naive about power has never helped any cause. For what it's worth, I do think that both Hal and Kate actually care very much about power in this way. But right now, they both would rather be the power behind the throne, and that's not gonna work, because someone also has to sit on it. I mean, Kate would argueably still be a power behind the throne as a VP, but one suspects that Hal's idea is more about Kate pulling the president's strings, and Hal pulling Kate's. It's a good conflict! Anyways, I would have always watched this for Kerri Russel no matter what, and would certainly watch another season as well.

[victusinveritas]

[51316120825]

Austenland (2013) dir. Jerusha Hess

[moorheadthanyoucanhandle]

DOES A BEAR SNORT IN THE WOODS?

Now playing in the multiplexes:

Cocaine Bear--This shocker has at least as much right to claim "true story" status for itself as Fargo or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There really was a Cocaine Bear: back in 1985, an American black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia, just south of the Tennessee line. The poor creature had OD'd, having ingested more than 30 kilos of cocaine, valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The stuff had been dropped from an airplane by a smuggler who then died himself in a parachuting mishap. The unfortunate ursine, dubbed "Pablo Eskobear," was stuffed by a taxidermist and ended up on display in a shopping mall in Kentucky, where it reportedly still stands.

The movie, directed by Elizabeth Banks from a script by Jimmy Warden, is set in 1985 and uses some real place names and at least one real person's name (the smuggler's). But it's still a load of gleeful b.s., a highly entertaining sick joke. Unlike the real animal, the movie's bear--arguably the newest addition to the stable of Universal Monsters--turns into a drug-crazed spree killer, mauling and dismembering hikers and park personnel, as well as the drug traffickers that enter the forest in search of the lost product.

Cocaine Bear is as violent and gory as any big-studio movie you're likely to see. But it isn't scary, and isn't meant to be; the splatter is played entirely for gruesomely slapstick laughs. Indeed, the exuberance with which the blood and brains and guts fly is the central recurring and escalating gag.

Except for a single mom (Keri Russell), searching the woods for her daughter and the daughter's friend, most of the major characters are scoundrels or cretins or both, though not necessarily unlikable scoundrels and cretins. All of them are broadly played caricatures, so Banks invites us to leave our empathy at the door, take a cathartic break from compassion and hoot at the horrors which befall them. I indulged, and so did the audience with which I saw the film.

The title character, generated through some reasonably seamless combination of virtual and practical effects, has a guileless personality that contrasts with the bloody mayhem. Indeed, you're more likely to feel for the blameless beast than for most of the humans.

The cast is nonetheless excellent, even if most of them are not employing ten percent of their talent. I've long thought that Russell is one of the more underrated and underutilized lead actresses now in movies. I also don't understand why Alden Ehrenreich hasn't become a bigger deal; he's comically muddled yet sympathetic as an elaborately bereaved drug operative. So is O'Shea Jackson as his weary partner, Aaron Holliday as a dimwit would-be mugger they encounter, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as a cranky detective.

The film was one of the last in which the late Ray Liotta appeared. He's in his usual strong form as Ehrenreich's father, the heartless local boss of the drug dealers. It's not a rich enough role to be a worthy swansong, but it's a good performance, and the film is dedicated to him. The great Margo Martindale nails every line and facial expression as a hard-up park ranger trying to get the attention of a naturalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Maybe the best of all are Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery as the two kids, who get across a genuine affection behind their mild, familiar ragging and posing and their dares of each other. They, along with Russell, offer us somebody to unambiguously root for.

Banks has a lot of fun evoking '80s-movie atmosphere, not only with the costumes and cars and posters and overheard pop songs but with her direction. From the full opening credit sequence to the leisurely camera movement to the driving synthesizer score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the film is as much a throwback to the decade in which it's set as last year's Top Gun: Maverick, and the response to both of those films suggests that maybe today's audiences wouldn't object to a return to that style.

[madalore1994]

Jane and Henry || love of a man

[puttingideasinherhead]

[wandamercer7]

Universal Pictures in this week

Released Super Mario Bros trailer, David Harbour as Santa in Violent night for this week and a bear who accidentally eat the cocaine with The Americans casts & Gus aka Sweet tooth saying F-bomb which based on the true story