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ahouseoflies · 4 years ago

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The Best Films of 2020

I can’t tell you anything novel or insightful about this year that has been stolen from our lives. I watched zero of these films in a theater, and I watched most of them half-asleep in moments that I stole from my children. Don’t worry, there are some jokes below.

GARBAGE

93. Capone (Josh Trank)- What is the point of this dinner theater trash? It takes place in the last year of Capone's life, when he was released from prison due to failing health and suffered a stroke in his Florida home. So it covers...none of the things that make Al Capone interesting? It's not historically accurate, which I have no problem with, but if you steer away from accuracy, then do something daring and exciting. Don't give me endless scenes of "Phonse"--as if the movie is running from the very person it's about--drawing bags of money that promise intrigue, then deliver nothing in return.

That being said, best "titular character shits himself" scene since The Judge.

92. Ammonite (Francis Lee)- I would say that this is the Antz to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's A Bug's Life, but it's actually more like the Cars 3 to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Toy Story 1.

91. Ava (Tate Taylor)- Despite the mystery and inscrutability that usually surround assassins, what if we made a hitman movie but cared a lot about her personal life? Except neither the assassin stuff nor the family stuff is interesting?

90. Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins)- What a miscalculation of what audiences loved about the first and wanted from the sequel. WW84 is silly and weightless in all of the ways that the first was elegant and confident. If the return of Pine is just a sort of phantom representation of Diana's desires, then why can he fly a real plane? If he is taking over another man's soul, then, uh, what ends up happening to that guy? For that matter, why is it not 1984 enough for Ronald Reagan to be president, but it is 1984 enough for the president to have so many Ronald Reagan signifiers that it's confusing? Why not just make a decision?

On paper, the me-first values of the '80s lend themselves to the monkey's paw wish logic of this plot. You could actually do something with the Star Wars program or the oil crisis. But not if the setting is played for only laughs and the screenplay explains only what it feels like.

89. Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy)- In this type of movie, there has to be a period of the Ben Mendelsohn character looking around befuddled about the new arrangement and going, "What's this now--he's going to be...living with us? The guy who tried to steal our medication? This is crazy!" But that's usually ten minutes, and in this movie it's an hour. I was so worn out by the end.

88. You Should Have Left (David Koepp)- David Koepp wrote Jurassic Park, so he's never going to hell, but how dare he start caring about his own mystery at the hour mark. There's a forty-five minute version of this movie that could get an extra star from me, and there's a three-hour version of Amanda Seyfried walking around in athleisure that would get four stars from me. What we actually get? No thanks.

87. Black Is King (Beyonce, et al.)- End your association with The Lion King, Bey. It has resulted in zero bops.

ADMIRABLE FAILURES

86. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan)- There's nothing too dysfunctional in the storytelling or performances, but Birds of Prey also doesn't do a single thing well. I would prefer something alive and wild, even if it were flawed, to whatever tame belt-level formula this is.

85. The Turning (Floria Sigismondi)- This update of The Turn of the Screw pumps the age of Miles up to high school, which creates some horny creepiness that I liked. But the age of the character also prevents the ending of the novel from happening in favor of a truly terrible shrug. I began to think that all of the patience that the film showed earlier was just hesitance for its own awful ending.

I watched The Turning as a Mackenzie Davis Movie Star heat check, and while I'm not sure she has the magnetism I was looking for, she does have a great teacher voice, chastening but maternal.

84. Bloodshot (David Wilson)- A whole lot of Vin Diesel saying he's going to get revenge and kill a bunch of dudes; not a whole lot of Vin Diesel actually getting revenge and killing a bunch of dudes.

83. Downhill (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash)- I was an English major in college, which means I ended up locking myself into literary theories that, halfway through the writing of an essay, I realized were flawed. But rather than throw out the work that I had already proposed, I would just keep going and see if I could will the idea to success.

So let's say you have a theory that you can take Force Majeure by Ruben Ostlund, one of the best films of its year, and remake it so that its statement about familial anxiety could apply to Americans of the same age and class too...if it hadn't already. And maybe in the first paragraph you mess up by casting Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, people we are conditioned to laugh at, when maybe this isn't that kind of comedy at all. Well, don't throw it away. You can quote more--fill up the pages that way--take an exact shot or scene from the original. Does that help? Maybe you can make the writing more vigorous and distinctive by adding a character. Is that going to make this baby stand out? Maybe you could make it more personal by adding a conclusion that is slightly more clever than the rest of the paper?

Or perhaps this is one you're just not going to get an A on.

82. Hillbilly Elegy (Ron Howard)- I watched this melodrama at my mother's encouragement, and, though I have been trying to pin down her taste for decades, I think her idea of a successful film just boils down to "a lot of stuff happens." So in that way, Ron Howard's loss is my gain, I guess.

There is no such thing as a "neutral Terminator."

81. Relic (Natalie Erika James)- The star of the film is Vanessa Cerne's set decoration, but the inert music and slow pace cancel out a house that seems neglected slowly over decades.

80. Buffaloed (Tanya Wexler)- Despite a breathless pace, Buffaloed can't quite congeal. In trying to split the difference between local color hijinks and Moneyballed treatise on debt collection, it doesn't commit enough to either one.

Especially since Zoey Deutch produced this one in addition to starring, I'm getting kind of worried about boo's taste. Lot of Two If by Seas; not enough While You Were Sleepings.

79. Like a Boss (Miguel Arteta)- I chuckled a few times at a game supporting cast that is doing heavy lifting. But Like a Boss is contrived from the premise itself--Yeah, what if people in their thirties fell out of friendship? Do y'all need a creative consultant?--to the escalation of most scenes--Why did they have to hide on the roof? Why do they have to jump into the pool?

The movie is lean, but that brevity hurts just as much as it helps. The screenplay knows which scenes are crucial to the development of the friendship, but all of those feel perfunctory, in a different gear from the setpieces.

To pile on a bit: Studio comedies are so bare bones now that they look like Lifetime movies. Arteta brought Chuck & Buck to Sundance twenty years ago, and, shot on Mini-DV for $250,000, it was seen as a DIY call-to-bootstraps. I guarantee that has more setups and locations and shooting days than this.

78. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (David Dobkin)- Add Dan Stevens to the list of supporting players who have bodied Will Ferrell in his own movie--one that he cared enough to write himself.

Like Downhill, Ferrell's other 2020 release, this isn't exactly bad. It's just workmanlike and, aside from the joke about Demi Lovato's "uninformed" ghost, frustratingly conventional.

77. The Traitor (Marco Bellochio)- Played with weary commitment by Pierfrancesco Favino, Tomasso Buscetta is "credited" as the first informant of La Cosa Nostra. And that sounds like an interesting subject for a "based on a true story" crime epic, right? Especially when you find out that Buscetta became a rat out of principle: He believed that the mafia to which he had pledged his life had lost its code to the point that it was a different organization altogether.

At no point does Buscetta waver or even seem to struggle with his decision though, so what we get is less conflicted than that description might suggest. None of these Italian mob movies glorify the lifestyle, so I wasn't expecting that. But if the crime doesn't seem enticing, and snitching on the crime seems like forlorn duty, and everything is pitched with such underhanded matter-of-factness that you can't even be sure when Buscetta has flipped, then what are we left with? It was interesting seeing how Italian courts work, I guess?

76. Kajillionaire (Miranda July)- This is another movie so intent on building atmosphere and lore that it takes too long to declare what it is. When the protagonist hits a breaking point and has to act, she has only a third of a film to grow. So whispery too.

Gina Rodriguez is the one to inject life into it. As soon as her motormouth winds up, the film slips into a different gear. The atmosphere and lore that I mentioned reeks of artifice, but her character is believably specific. Beneath a basic exterior is someone who is authentically caring but still morally compromised, beholden to the world that the other characters are suspicious of.

75. Scoob! (Tony Cervone)- The first half is sometimes clever, but it hammers home the importance of friendship while separating the friends.

The second half has some positive messaging, but your kids' movie might have a problem with scale if it involves Alexander the Great unlocking the gates of the Underworld.

My daughter loved it.

74. The Lovebirds (Michael Showalter)- If I start talking too much about this perfectly fine movie, I end up in that unfair stance of reviewing the movie I wanted, not what is actually there.* As a fan of hang-out comedies, I kind of resent that any comedy being made now has to be rolled into something more "exciting," whether it's a wrongfully accused or mistaken identity thriller or some other genre. Such is the post-Game Night world. There's a purposefully anti-climactic note that I wish The Lovebirds had ended on, but of course we have another stretch of hiding behind boats and shooting guns. Nanjiani and Rae are really charming leads though.

*- As a New Orleanian, I was totally distracted by the fake aspects of the setting too. "Oh, they walked to Jefferson from downtown? Really?" You probably won't be bothered by the locations.

73. Sonic the Hedgehog (Jeff Fowler)- In some ways the storytelling is ambitious. (I'm speaking for only myself, but I'm fine with "He's a hedgehog, and he's really fast" instead of the owl mother, teleportation backstory. Not everything has to be Tolkien.) But that ambition doesn't match the lack of ambition in the comedy, which depends upon really hackneyed setups and structures. Guiding Jim Carrey to full alrighty-then mode was the best choice anyone made.

72. Malcolm & Marie (Sam Levinson)- The stars move through these long scenes with agility and charisma, but the degree of difficulty is just too high for this movie to reach what it's going for.

Levinson is trying to capture an epic fight between a couple, and he can harness the theatrical intensity of such a thing, but he sacrifices almost all of the nuance. In real life, these knock-down-drag-outs can be circular and indirect and sad in a way that this couple's manipulation rarely is. If that emotional truth is all this movie is trying to achieve, I feel okay about being harsh in my judgment of how well it does that.

71. Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov)- Elusive in how it refuses to declare itself, forthright in how punishing it is. The whole thing might be worth it for a late dinner scene, but I'm getting a bit old to put myself through this kind of misery.

70. The Burnt Orange Heresy (Giuseppe Capotondi)- Silly in good ways until it's silly in bad ways. Elizabeth Debicki remains 6'3".

69. Everybody’s Everything (Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan)- As a person who listened to Lil Peep's music, I can confidently say that this documentary is overstating his greatness. His death was a significant loss, as the interview subjects will all acknowledge, but the documentary is more useful as a portrait of a certain unfocused, rapacious segment of a generation that is high and online at all times.

68. The Witches (Robert Zemeckis)- Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo Del Toro are the credited screenwriters, and in a fascinating way, you can see the imprint of each figure on the final product. Adapting a very European story to the old wives' tales of the American South is an interesting choice. Like the Nicolas Roeg try at this material, Zemeckis is not afraid to veer into the terrifying, and Octavia Spencer's pseudo witch doctor character only sells the supernatural. From a storytelling standpoint though, it seems as if the obstacles are overcome too easily, as if there's a whole leg of the film that has been excised. The framing device and the careful myth-making of the flashback make promises that the hotel half of the film, including the abrupt ending, can't live up to.

If nothing else, Anne Hathaway is a real contender for Most On-One Performance of the year.

67. Irresistible (Jon Stewart)- Despite a sort of imaginative ending, Jon Stewart's screenplay feels more like the declarative screenplay that would get you hired for a good movie, not a good screenplay itself. It's provocative enough, but it's clumsy in some basic ways and never evades the easy joke.

For example, the Topher Grace character is introduced as a sort of assistant, then is re-introduced an hour later as a polling expert, then is shown coaching the candidate on presentation a few scenes later. At some point, Stewart combined characters into one role, but nothing got smoothed out.

ENDEARING CURIOSITIES WITH BIG FLAWS

66. Yes, God, Yes (Karen Maine)- Most people who are Catholic, including me, are conflicted about it. Most people who make movies about being Catholic hate it and have an axe to grind. This film is capable of such knowing wit and nuance when it comes to the lived-in details of attending a high school retreat, but it's more concerned with taking aim at hypocrisy in the broad way that we've seen a million times. By the end, the film is surprisingly all-or-nothing when Christian teenagers actually contain multitudes.

Part of the problem is that Karen Maine's screenplay doesn't know how naive to make the Alice character. Sometimes she's reasonably naive for a high school senior in 2001; sometimes she's comically naive so that the plot can work; and sometimes she's stupid, which isn't the same as naive.

65. Bad Boys for Life (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah)- This might be the first buddy cop movie in which the vets make peace with the tech-comm youngs who use new techniques. If that's the only novelty on display here--and it is--then maybe that's enough. I laughed maybe once. Not that the mistaken identity subplot of Bad Boys 1 is genius or anything, but this entry felt like it needed just one more layer to keep it from feeling as basic as it does. Speaking of layers though, it's almost impossible to watch any Will Smith movie now without viewing it through the meta-narrative of "What is Will Smith actually saying about his own status at this point in his career?" He's serving it up to us.

I derived an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing the old school Simpson/Bruckheimer logo.

64. The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie)- Look, I'm not going to be too negative on a movie whose crime slang is so byzantine that it has to be explained with subtitles. That's just me. I'm a simple man. But I can tell you that I tuned out pretty hard after seven or eight double-crosses.

The bloom is off the rose a bit for Ritchie, but he can still nail a music cue. I've been waiting for someone to hit "That's Entertainment" the way he does on the end credits.

63. Bad Hair (Justin Simien)- In Bad Hair, an African-American woman is told by her boss at a music video channel in 1989 that straightening her hair is the way to get ahead; however, her weave ends up having a murderous mind of its own. Compared to that charged, witty logline, the execution of the plot itself feels like a laborious, foregone conclusion. I'm glad that Simien, a genuinely talented writer, is making movies again though. Drop the skin-care routine, Van Der Beek!

62. Greyhound (Aaron Schneider)- "If this is the type of role that Tom Hanks writes for himself, then he understands his status as America's dad--'wise as the serpent, harmless as the dove'--even better than I thought." "America's Dad! Aye aye, sir!" "At least half of the dialogue is there for texture and authenticity, not there to be understood by the audience." "Fifty percent, Captain!" "The environment looks as fake as possible, but I eventually came around to the idea that the movie is completely devoid of subtext." "No subtext to be found, sir!"

61. Mank (David Fincher)- About ten years ago, the Creative Screenwriting podcast spent an hour or so with James Vanderbilt, the writer of Zodiac and nothing else that comes close, as he relayed the creative paces that David Fincher pushed him through. Hundreds of drafts and years of collaborative work eventuated in the blueprint for Fincher's most exacting, personal film, which he didn't get a writing credit on only because he didn't seek one.

Something tells me that Fincher didn't ask for rewrites from his dead father. No matter what visuals and performances the director can coax from the script--and, to be clear, these are the worst visuals and performances of his career--they are limited by the muddy lightweight pages. There are plenty of pleasures, like the slippery election night montage or the shakily platonic relationship between Mank and Marion. But Fincher hadn't made a film in six years, and he came back serving someone else's master.

60. Tesla (Michael Almereyda)- "You live inside your head." "Doesn't everybody?"

As usual, Almereyda's deconstructions are invigorating. (No other moment can match the first time Eve Hewson's Anne fact-checks something with her anachronistic laptop.) But they don't add up to anything satisfying because Tesla himself is such an opaque figure. Driven by the whims of his curiosity without a clear finish line, the character gives Hawke something enigmatic to play as he reaches deep into a baritone. But he's too inward to lend himself to drama. Tesla feels of a piece with Almereyda's The Experimenter, and that's the one I would recommend.

59. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)- I can't oversell how delicately beautiful this film is visually. There's a scene in which Vitalina lugs a lantern into a church, but we get several seconds of total darkness before that one light source carves through it and takes over part of the frame. Each composition is as intricate as it is overpowering, achieving a balance between stark and mannered.

That being said, most of the film is people entering or exiting doors. I felt very little of the haunting loss that I think I was supposed to.

58. The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano)- Call it the Timothy Hutton in The General's Daughter Corollary: If a name-actor isn't in the movie much but gets third billing, then, despite whom he sends the protagonist to kill, he is the Actual Bad Guy.

Even if the movie serves up a lot of cliche, the action and sound design are visceral. I would like to see more from Morano.

57. Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen)- Well-made and heartfelt even if it goes step-for-step where you think it will.

Here's what I want to know though: In the academy training sequence, the police cadets have to subdue a "berserker"; that is, a wildman who swings at their riot gear with a sledgehammer. Then they get him under control, and he shakes their hands, like, "Good angle you took on me there, mate." Who is that guy and where is his movie? Is this full-time work? Is he a police officer or an independent contractor? What would happen if this exercise didn't go exactly as planned?

56. Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart)- The visuals have an unfinished quality that reminded me of The Tale of Princess Kaguya--the center of a flame is undrawn white, and fog is just negative space. There's an underlying symmetry to the film, and its color palette changes with mood.

Narratively, it's pro forma and drawn-out. Was Riley in Inside Out the last animated protagonist to get two parents? My daughter stuck with it, but she needed a lot of context for the religious atmosphere of 17th century Ireland.

55. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (Rob Garver)- The film does little more than one might expect; it's limited in the way that any visual medium is when trying to sum up a woman of letters. But as far as education for Kael's partnership with Warren Beatty or the idea of The New Yorker paying her for only six months out of the year, it was useful for me.

Although Garver isn't afraid to point to the work that made Kael divisive, it would have been nice to have one or two interview subjects who questioned her greatness, rather than the crew of Paulettes who, even when they do say something like, "Sometimes I radically disagreed with her," do it without being able to point to any specifics.

54. Beastie Boys Story (Spike Jonze)- As far as this Spike Jonze completist is concerned, this is more of a Powerpoint presentation than a movie, Beastie Boys Story still warmed my heart, making me want to fire up Paul's Boutique again and take more pictures of my buddies.

53. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)- Cool and cold, tantalizing and frustrating, loud and indistinct, Tenet comes close to Nolan self-parody, right down to the brutalist architecture and multiple characters styled like him. The setpieces grabbed me, I'll admit.

Nolan's previous film, which is maybe his best, was "about" a lot and just happened to play with time; Tenet is only about playing with time.

PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

52. Shithouse (Cooper Raiff)- "Death is ass."

There's such a thing as too naturalistic. If I wanted to hear how college freshmen really talked, I would hang out with college freshmen. But you have to take the good verisimilitude with the bad, and good verisimilitude is the mother's Pod Save America t-shirt.

There are some poignant moments (and a gonzo performance from Logan Miller) in this auspicious debut from Cooper Raiff, the writer/director/editor/star. But the second party sequence kills some of the momentum, and at a crucial point, the characters spell out some motivation that should have stayed implied.

51. Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, Suzanne Hillinger)- As dense and informative as any other Gibney documentary with the added flex of making it during the pandemic it is investigating.

But yeah, why am I watching this right now? I don't need more reasons to be angry with Trump, whom this film calmly eviscerates. The directors analyze Trump's narcissism first through his contradictions of medical expertise in order to protect the economy that could win him re-election. Then it takes aim at his hiring based on loyalty instead of experience. But you already knew that, which is the problem with the film, at least for now.

50. Happiest Season (Clea Duvall)- I was in the perfect mood to watch something this frothy and bouncy. Every secondary character receives a moment in the sun, and Daniel Levy gets a speech that kind of saves the film at a tipping point.

I must say though: I wanted to punch Harper in her stupid face. She is a terrible romantic partner, abandoning or betraying Abby throughout the film and dissembling her entire identity to everyone else in a way that seems absurd for a grown woman in 2020. Run away, Kristen. Perhaps with Aubrey Plaza, whom you have more chemistry with. But there I go shipping and aligning myself with characters, which only proves that this is an effective romantic comedy.

49. The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor)- Patient but misshapen, The Way Back does just enough to overcome the cliches that are sort of unavoidable considering the genre. (I can't get enough of the parent character who, for no good reason, doesn't take his son's success seriously. "Scholarship? What he's gotta do is put his nose in them books! That's why I don't go to his games. [continues moving boxes while not looking at the other character] Now if you'll excuse me while I wait four scenes before showing up at a game to prove that I'm proud of him after all...")

What the movie gets really right or really wrong in the details about coaching and addiction is a total crap-shoot. But maybe I've said too much already.

48. The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)- Porumboiu is a real artist who seems to be interpreting how much surveillance we're willing to acknowledge and accept, but I won't pretend to have understood much of the plot, the chapters or which are told out of order. Sometimes the structure works--the beguiling, contextless "high-class hooker" sequence--but I often wondered if the film was impenetrable in the way that Porumboiu wanted it to be or impenetrable in the way he didn't.

To tell you the truth, the experience kind of depressed me because I know that, in my younger days, this film is the type of thing that I would re-watch, possibly with the chronology righted, knowing that it is worth understanding fully. But I have two small children, and I'm exhausted all the time, and I kind of thought I should get some credit for still trying to catch up with Romanian crime movies in the first place.

47. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner)- I laughed too much to get overly critical, but the film is so episodic and contrived that it's kind of exhausting by the end--even though it's achieving most of its goals. Maybe Borat hasn't changed, but the way our citizens own their ugliness has.

46. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)- Despite how little happens in the first forty minutes, First Cow is a thoughtful capitalism parable. Even though it takes about forty minutes to get going, the friendship between Cookie and King-Lu is natural and incisive. Like Reichardt's other work, the film's modest premise unfolds quite gracefully, except for in the first forty minutes, which are uneventful.

45. Les Miserables (Ladj Ly)- I loved parts of the film--the disorienting, claustrophobic opening or the quick look at the police officers' home lives, for example. But I'm not sure that it does anything very well. The needle the film tries to thread between realism and theater didn't gel for me. The ending, which is ambiguous in all of the wrong ways, chooses the theatrical. (If I'm being honest, my expectations were built up by Les Miserables' Jury Prize at Cannes, and it's a bit superficial to be in that company.)

If nothing else, it's always helpful to see how another country's worst case scenario in law enforcement would look pretty good over here.

44. Bad Education (Cory Finley)- The film feels too locked-down and small at the beginning, so intent on developing the protagonist neutrally that even the audience isn't aware of his secrets. So when he faces consequences for those secrets, there's a disconnect. Part of tragedy is seeing the doom coming, right?

When it opens up, however, it's empathetic and subtle, full of a dry irony that Finley is already specializing in after only one other feature. Geraldine Viswanathan and Allison Janney get across a lot of interiority that is not on the page.

43. The Trip to Greece (Michael Winterbottom)- By the fourth installment, you know whether you're on board with the franchise. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" to Coogan and Brydon's bickering and impressions as they're served exotic food in picturesque settings, then this one won't sway you. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" about life, like they are, then I don't need to convince you.

I will say that The Trip to Spain seemed like an enervated inflection point, at which the squad could have packed it in. The Trip to Greece proves that they probably need to keep doing this until one of them dies, which has been the subtext all along.

42. Feels Good Man (Arthur Jones)- This documentary centers on innocent artist Matt Furie's helplessness as his Pepe the Frog character gets hijacked by the alt-right. It gets the hard things right. It's able to, quite comprehensively, trace a connection from 4Chan's use of Pepe the Frog to Donald Trump's near-assuming of Pepe's ironic deniability. Director Arthur Jones seems to understand the machinations of the alt-right, and he articulates them chillingly.

The easy thing, making us connect to Furie, is less successful. The film spends way too much time setting up his story, and it makes him look naive as it pits him against Alex Jones in the final third. Still, the film is a quick ninety-two minutes, and the highs are pretty high.

41. The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood)- Some of the world-building and backstory are handled quite elegantly. The relationships actually do feel centuries old through specific details, and the immortal conceit comes together for an innovative final action sequence.

Visually and musically though, the film feels flat in a way that Prince-Bythewood's other films do not. I blame Netflix specs. KiKi Layne, who tanked If Beale Street Could Talk for me, nearly ruins this too with the child-actory way that she stresses one word per line. Especially in relief with one of our more effortless actresses, Layne is distracting.

40. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)- Whenever Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman opens his mouth, the other defendants brace themselves for his dismissive vulgarity. Even when it's going to hurt him, he can't help but shoot off at the mouth. Of course, he reveals his passionate and intelligent depths as the trial goes on. The character is the one that Sorkin's screenplay seems the most endeared to: In the same way that Hoffman can't help but be Hoffman, Sorkin can't help but be Sorkin. Maybe we don't need a speech there; maybe we don't have to stretch past two hours; maybe a bon mot diffuses the tension. But we know exactly what to expect by now. The film is relevant, astute, witty, benevolent, and, of course, in love with itself. There are a handful of scenes here that are perfect, so I feel bad for qualifying so much.

A smaller point: Daniel Pemberton has done great work in the past (Motherless Brooklyn, King Arthur, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), but the first sequence is especially marred by his sterile soft-rock approach.

GOOD MOVIES

39. Time (Garrett Bradley)- The key to Time is that it provides very little context. Why the patriarch of this family is serving sixty years in prison is sort of besides the point philosophically. His wife and sons have to move on without him, and the tragedy baked into that fact eclipses any notion of what he "deserved." Feeling the weight of time as we switch back and forth between a kid talking about his first day of kindergarten and that same kid graduating from dentistry school is all the context we need. Time's presentation can be quite sumptuous: The drone shot of Angola makes its buildings look like crosses. Or is it X's?

At the same time, I need some context. When director Garrett Bradley withholds the reason Robert's in prison, and when she really withholds that Fox took a plea and served twelve years, you start to see the strings a bit. You could argue that knowing so little about why, all of a sudden, Robert can be on parole puts you into the same confused shoes as the family, but it feels manipulative to me. The film is preaching to the choir as far as criminal justice goes, which is fine, but I want it to have the confidence to tell its story above board.

38. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV)- I have a barfly friend whom I see maybe once a year. When we first set up a time to meet, I kind of dread it and wonder what we'll have to talk about. Once we do get together, we trip on each other's words a bit, fumbling around with the rhythm of conversation that we mastered decades ago. He makes some kind of joke that could have been appropriate then but isn't now.

By the end of the day, hours later, we're hugging and maybe crying as we promise each other that we won't wait as long next time.

That's the exact same journey that I went on with this film.

37. Underwater (William Eubank)- Underwater is a story that you've seen before, but it's told with great confidence and economy. I looked up at twelve minutes and couldn't believe the whole table had been set. Kristen plays Ripley and projects a smart, benevolent poise.

36. The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)- I prefer the grounded, manicured first half to the more fantastic second half. The craziness of the latter is only possible through the hard work of the former though. As with Fiala and Franz's previous feature, the visual rhymes and motifs get incorporated into the soup so carefully that you don't realize it until they overwhelm you in their bleak glory.

Small note: Alicia Silverstone, the male lead's first wife, and Riley Keough, his new partner, look sort of similar. I always think that's a nice note: "I could see how he would go for her."

35. Miss Americana (Lana Wilson)- I liked it when I saw it as a portrait of a person whose life is largely decided for her but is trying to carve out personal spaces within that hamster wheel. I loved it when I realized that describes most successful people in their twenties.

34. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)- Riz Ahmed is showing up on all of the best performances of the year lists, but Sound of Metal isn't in anyone's top ten films of the year. That's about right. Ahmed's is a quiet, stubborn performance that I wish was in service of more than the straight line that we've seen before.

In two big scenes, there's this trick that Ahmed does, a piecing together of consequences with his eyes, as if he's moving through a flow chart in real time. In both cases, the character seems locked out and a little slower than he should be, which is, of course, why he's facing the consequences in the first place. To be charitable to a film that was a bit of a grind, it did make me notice a thing a guy did with his eyes.

33. Pieces of a Woman (Kornel Mundruczo)- Usually when I leave acting showcases like this, I imagine the film without the Oscar-baiting speeches, but this is a movie that specializes in speeches. Pieces of a Woman is being judged, deservedly so, by the harrowing twenty-minute take that opens the film, which is as indulgent as it is necessary. But if the unbroken take provides the "what," then the speeches provide the "why."

This is a film about reclaiming one's body when it rebels against you and when other people seek ownership of it. Without the Ellen Burstyn "lift your head" speech or the Vanessa Kirby show-stopper in the courtroom, I'm not sure any of that comes across.

I do think the film lets us off the hook a bit with the LaBoeuf character, in the sense that it gives us reasons to dislike him when it would be more compelling if he had done nothing wrong. Does his half-remembering of the White Stripes count as a speech?

32. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe)- This is such a play, not only in the locked-down location but also through nearly every storytelling convention: "Where are the two most interesting characters? Oh, running late? They'll enter separately in animated fashion?" But, to use the type of phrase that the characters might, "Don't hate the player; hate the game."

Perhaps the most theatrical note in this treatise on the commodification of expression is the way that, two or three times, the proceedings stop in their tracks for the piece to declare loudly what it's about. In one of those clear-outs, Boseman, who looks distractingly sick, delivers an unforgettable monologue that transports the audience into his character's fragile, haunted mind. He and Viola Davis are so good that the film sort of buckles under their weight, unsure of how to transition out of those spotlight moments and pretend that the story can start back up. Whatever they're doing is more interesting than what's being achieved overall.

31. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)- It's definitely the film that Vinterberg wanted to make, but despite what I think is a quietly shattering performance from Mikkelsen, Another Round moves in a bit too much of a straight line to grab me fully. The joyous final minutes hint at where it could have gone, as do pockets of Vinterberg's filmography, which seems newly tethered to realism in a way that I don't like. The best sequences are the wildest ones, like the uproarious trip to the grocery store for fresh cod, so I don't know why so much of it takes place in tiny hallways at magic hour. I give the inevitable American remake* permission to use these notes.

*- Just spitballing here. Martin: Will Ferrell, Nikolaj (Nick): Ben Stiller, Tommy: Owen Wilson, Peter: Craig Robinson

30. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)- Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed.

I think a less conclusive finale would have been better, but what a model of high-concept escalation. This is the movie people convinced me Whannell's Upgrade was.

29. On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)- Slight until the Mexican sojourn, which expands the scope and makes the film even more psychosexual than before. At times it feels as if Coppola is actively simplifying, rather than diving into the race and privilege questions that the Murray character all but demands.

As for Murray, is the film 50% worse without him? 70%? I don't know if you can run in supporting categories if you're the whole reason the film exists.

28. Mangrove (Steve McQueen)- The first part of the film seemed repetitive and broad to me. But once it settled in as a courtroom drama, the characterization became more shaded, and the filmmaking itself seemed more fluid. I ended up being quite outraged and inspired.

27. Shirley (Josephine Decker)- Josephine Decker emerges as a real stylist here, changing her foggy, impressionistic approach not one bit with a little more budget. Period piece and established actors be damned--this is still as much of a reeling fever dream as Madeline's Madeline. Both pieces are a bit too repetitive and nasty for my taste, but I respect the technique.

Here's my mandatory "Elisabeth Moss is the best" paragraph. While watching her performance as Shirley Jackson, I thought about her most famous role as Peggy on Mad Men, whose inertia and need to prove herself tied her into confidence knots. Shirley is almost the opposite: paralyzed by her worldview, certain of her talent, rejecting any empathy. If Moss can inhabit both characters so convincingly, she can do anything.

26. An American Pickle (Brandon Trost)- An American Pickle is the rare comedy that could actually use five or ten extra minutes, but it's a surprisingly heartfelt and wholesome stretch for Rogen, who is earnest in the lead roles.

25. The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow)- At two hours and fifteen minutes, The King of Staten Island is probably the first Judd Apatow film that feels like the exact right length. For example, the baggy date scene between a gracious Bill Burr and a faux-dowdy Marisa Tomei is essential, the sort of widening of perspective that something like Trainwreck was missing.

It's Pete Davidson's movie, however, and though he has never been my cup of tea, I think he's actually quite powerful in his quiet moments. The movie probes some rare territory--a mentally ill man's suspicion that he is unlovable, a family's strategic myth-making out of respect for the dead. And when Davidson shows up at the firehouse an hour and fifteen minutes in, it feels as if we've built to a last resort.

24. Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)- The tricky part of this film is communicating Hunter's despair, letting her isolation mount, but still keeping her opaque. It takes a lot of visual discipline to do that, and Claudio Mirabella-Davis is up to the task. This ends up being a much more sympathetic, expressive movie than the plot description might suggest.

(In the tie dispute, Hunter and Richie are both wrong. That type of silk--I couldn't tell how pebbled it was, but it's probably a barathea weave-- shouldn't be ironed directly, but it doesn't have to be steamed. On a low setting, you could iron the back of the tie and be fine.)

23. The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson)- I wanted a bit more "there" there; The film goes exactly where I thought it would, and there isn't enough humor for my taste. (The predictability might be a feature, not a bug, since the film is positioned as an episode of a well-worn Twilight Zone-esque show.)

But from a directorial standpoint, this is quite a promising debut. Patterson knows when to lock down or use silence--he even cuts to black to force us to listen more closely to a monologue. But he also knows when to fill the silence. There's a minute or so when Everett is spooling tape, and he and Fay make small talk about their hopes for the future, developing the characters' personalities in what could have been just mechanics. It's also a refreshingly earnest film. No one is winking at the '50s setting.

I'm tempted to write, "If Andrew Patterson can make this with $1 million, just imagine what he can do with $30 million." But maybe people like Shane Carruth have taught us that Patterson is better off pinching pennies in Texas and following his own muse.

22. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)- At first this film, adapted from a picaresque novel by Jack London, seemed as if it was hitting the marks of the genre. "He's going from job to job and meeting dudes who are shaping his worldview now." But the film, shot in lustrous Super 16, won me over as it owned the trappings of this type of story, forming a character who is a product of his environment even as he transcends it. By the end, I really felt the weight of time.

You want to talk about something that works better in novels than films though? When a passionate, independent protagonist insists that a woman is the love of his life, despite the fact that she's whatever Italians call a wet blanket. She's rich, but Martin doesn't care about her money. He hates her family and friends, and she refuses to accept him or his life pursuits. She's pretty but not even as pretty as the waitress they discuss. Tell me what I'm missing here. There's archetype, and there's incoherence.

21. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles)- Certain images from this adventurous film will stick with me, but I got worn out after the hard reset halfway through. As entranced as I was by the mystery of the first half, I think this blood-soaked ensemble is better at asking questions than it is at answering them.

20. Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh)- The initial appeal of this movie might be "Look at these wonderful actresses in their seventies getting a movie all to themselves." And the film is an interesting portrait of ladies taking stock of relationships that have spanned decades. But Soderbergh and Eisenberg handle the twentysomething Lucas Hedges character with the same openness and empathy. His early reasoning for going on the trip is that he wants to learn from older women, and Hedges nails the puppy-dog quality of a young man who would believe that. Especially in the scenes of aspirational romance, he's sweet and earnest as he brushes his hair out of his face.

Streep plays Alice Hughes, a serious author of literary fiction, and she crosses paths with Kelvin Kranz, a grinder of airport thrillers. In all of the right ways, Let Them All Talk toes the line between those two stances as an entertaining, jaunty experiment that also shoulders subtextual weight. If nothing else, it's easy to see why a cruise ship's counterfeit opulence, its straight lines at a lean, would be visually engaging to Soderbergh. You can't have a return to form if your form is constantly evolving.

19. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)- Understandably, I don't find the subject as interesting as his own daughter does, and large swaths of this film are unsure of what they're trying to say. But that's sort of the point, and the active wrestling that the film engages in with death ultimately pays off in a transcendent moment. The jaw-dropping ending is something that only non-fiction film can achieve, and Johnson's whole career is about the search for that sort of serendipity.

18. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)- Delroy Lindo is a live-wire, but his character is the only one of the principals who is examined with the psychological depth I was hoping for. The first half, with all of its present-tense flourishes, promises more than the gunfights of the second half can deliver. When the film is cooking though, it's chock full of surprises, provocations, and pride.

17. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittmann)- Very quickly, Eliza Hittmann has established herself as an astute, empathetic director with an eye for discovering new talent. I hope that she gets to make fifty more movies in which she objectively follows laconic young people. But I wanted to like this one more than I did. The approach is so neutral that it's almost flat to me, lacking the arc and catharsis of her previous film, Beach Rats. I still appreciate her restraint though.

GREAT MOVIES

16. Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)- I don't think the Dardennes have made a bad movie yet, and I'm glad they turned away from the slight genre dipping of The Unknown Girl, the closest to bad that they got. Young Ahmed is a lean, daring return to form.

Instead of following an average person, as they normally do, the Dardenne Brothers follow an extremist, and the objectivity that usually generates pathos now serves to present ambiguity. Ahmed says that he is changing, that he regrets his actions, but we never know how much of his stance is a put-on. I found myself wanting him to reform, more involved than I usually am in these slices of life. Part of it is that Idir Ben Addi looks like such a normal, young kid, and the Ahmed character has most of the qualities that we say we want in young people: principles, commitment, self-worth, reflection. So it's that much more destructive when those qualities are used against him and against his fellow man.

15. World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (Don Hertzfeldt)- My dad, a man whom I love but will never understand, has dismissed modern music before by claiming that there are only so many combinations of chords. To him, it's almost impossible to do something new. Of course, this is the type of thing that an uncreative person would say--a person not only incapable of hearing the chords that combine notes but also unwilling to hear the space between the notes. (And obviously, that's the take of a person who doesn't understand that, originality be damned, some people just have to create.)

Anyway, that attitude creeps into my own thinking more than I would like, but then I watch something as wholly original as World of Tomorrow Episode Three. The series has always been a way to pile sci-fi ideas on top of each other to prove the essential truths of being and loving. And this one, even though it achieves less of a sense of yearning than its predecessor, offers even more devices to chew on. Take, for example, the idea that Emily sends her message from the future, so David's primitive technology can barely handle it. In order to move forward with its sophistication, he has to delete any extraneous skills for the sake of computer memory. So out of trust for this person who loves him, he has to weigh whether his own breathing or walking can be uninstalled as a sacrifice for her. I thought that we might have been done describing love, but there it is, a new metaphor. Mixing futurism with stick figures to get at the most pure drive possible gave us something new. It's called art, Dad.

14. On the Record (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering)- We don't call subjects of documentaries "stars" for obvious reasons, but Drew Dixon kind of is one. Her honesty and wisdom tell a complete story of the #MeToo movement. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering take their time developing her background at first, not because we need to "gain sympathy" or "establish credibility" for a victim of sexual abuse, but because showing her talent and enthusiasm for hip-hop A&R makes it that much more tragic when her passion is extinguished. Hell, I just like the woman, so spending a half-hour on her rise was pleasurable in and of itself.

This is a gut-wrenching, fearless entry in what is becoming Dick and Ziering's raison d'etre, but its greatest quality is Dixon's composed reflection. She helped to establish a pattern of Russell Simmons's behavior, but she explains what happened to her in ways I had never heard before.

13. David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)- I'm often impressed by the achievements that puzzle me: How did they pull that off? But I know exactly how David Byrne pulled off the impish but direct precision of American Utopia: a lot of hard work.

I can't blame Spike Lee for stealing a page from Demme's Stop Making Sense: He denies us a close-up of any audience members until two-thirds of the way through, when we get someone in absolute rapture.

12. One Night in Miami... (Regina King)- We've all cringed when a person of color is put into the position of speaking on behalf of his or her entire race. But the characters in One Night in Miami... live in that condition all the time and are constantly negotiating it. As Black public figures in 1964, they know that the consequences of their actions are different, bigger, than everyone else's. The charged conversations between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke are not about whether they can live normal lives. They're way past that. The stakes are closer to Sam Cooke arguing that his life's purpose aligns with the protection and elevation of African-Americans while Malcolm X argues that those pursuits should be the same thing. Late in the movie, Cassius Clay leaves the other men, a private conversation, to talk to reporters, a public conversation. But the film argues that everything these men do is always already public. They're the most powerful African-Americans in the country, but their lives are not their own. Or not only their own.

It's true that the first act has the clunkiness and artifice of a TV movie, but once the film settles into the motel room location and lets the characters feed off one another, it's gripping. It's kind of unfair for a movie to get this many scenes of Leslie Odom Jr. singing, but I'll take it.

11. Saint Frances (Alex Thompson)- Rilke wrote, "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." The characters' behavior in Saint Frances--all of these fully formed characters' behavior--made me think of that quotation. When they lash out at one another, even at their nastiest, the viewer has a window into how they're expressing pain they can't verbalize. The film is uneven in its subtlety, but it's a real showcase for screenwriter and star Kelly O'Sullivan, who is unflinching and dynamic in one of the best performances of the year. Somebody give her some of the attention we gave to Zach Braff for God's sake.

10. Boys State (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine)- This documentary is kind of a miracle from a logistical standpoint. From casting interviews beforehand, lots of editing afterwards, or sly note-taking once the conference began, McBaine and Moss happened to select the four principals who mattered the most at the convention, then found them in rooms full of dudes wearing the same tucked-in t-shirt. By the way, all of the action took place over the course of one week, and by definition, the important events are carved in half.

To call Boys State a microcosm of American politics is incorrect. These guys are forming platforms and voting in elections. What they're doing is American politics, so when they make the same compromises and mistakes that active politicians do, it produces dread and disappointment. So many of the boys are mimicking the political theater that they see on TV, and that sweaty sort of performance is going to make a Billy Mitchell out of this kid Ben Feinstein, and we'll be forced to reckon with how much we allow him to evolve as a person. This film is so precise, but what it proves is undeniably messy. Luckily, some of these seventeen-year-olds usher in hope for us all.

If nothing else, the film reveals the level to which we're all speaking in code.

9. The Nest (Sean Durkin)- In the first ten minutes or so of The Nest, the only real happy minutes, father and son are playing soccer in their quaint backyard, and the father cheats to score on a children's net before sliding on the grass to rub in his victory. An hour later, the son kicks the ball around by himself near a regulation goal on the family's massive property. The contrast is stark and obvious, as is the symbolism of the dead horse, but that doesn't mean it's not visually powerful or resonant.

Like Sean Durkin's earlier film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, the whole of The Nest is told with detail of novelistic scope and an elevation of the moment. A snippet of radio that mentions Ronald Reagan sets the time period, rather than a dateline. One kid saying "Thanks, Dad" and another kid saying, "Thanks, Rory" establishes a stepchild more elegantly than any other exposition might.

But this is also a movie that does not hide what it means. Characters usually say exactly what is on their minds, and motivations are always clear. For example, Allison smokes like a chimney, so her daughter's way of acting out is leaving butts on the window sill for her mother to find. (And mother and daughter both definitely "act out" their feelings.) On the other hand, Ben, Rory's biological son, is the character least like him, so these relationships aren't too directly parallel. Regardless, Durkin uses these trajectories to cast a pall of familial doom.

8. Sorry We Missed You (Sean Durkin)- Another precisely calibrated empathy machine from Ken Loach. The overwhelmed matriarch, Abby, is a caretaker, and she has to break up a Saturday dinner to rescue one of her clients, who wet herself because no one came to help her to the bathroom. The lady is embarrassed, and Abby calms her down by saying, "You mean more to me than you know." We know enough about Abby's circumstances to realize that it's sort of a lie, but it's a beautiful lie, told by a person who cares deeply but is not cared for.

Loach's central point is that the health of a family, something we think of as immutable and timeless, is directly dependent upon the modern industry that we use to destroy ourselves. He doesn't have to be "proven" relevant, and he didn't plan for Covid-19 to point to the fragility of the gig economy, but when you're right, you're right.

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)- swear to you I thought: "This is an impeccable depiction of a great house party. The only thing it's missing is the volatile dude who scares away all the girls." And then the volatile dude who scares away all the girls shows up.

In a year short on magic, there are two or three transcendent moments, but none of them can equal the whole crowd singing along to "Silly Games" way after the song has ended. Nothing else crystallizes the film's note of celebration: of music, of community, of safe spaces, of Black skin. I remember moments like that at house parties, and like all celebrations, they eventually make me sad.

6. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht)- I held off on this movie because I thought that I knew what it was. The setup was what I expected: A summer camp for the disabled in the late '60s takes on the spirit of the time and becomes a haven for people who have not felt agency, self-worth, or community anywhere else. But that's the right-place-right-time start of a story that takes these figures into the '80s as they fight for their rights.

If you're anything like my dumb ass, you know about 504 accommodations from the line on a college syllabus that promises equal treatment. If 2020 has taught us anything though, it's that rights are seized, not given, and this is the inspiring story of people who unified to demand what they deserved. Judy Heumann is a civil rights giant, but I'm ashamed to say I didn't know who she was before this film. If it were just a history lesson that wasn't taught in school, Crip Camp would still be valuable, but it's way more than that.

5. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)- When explaining what is happening to them, Andy Samberg's Nyles twirls his hand at Cristin Milioti's Sara and says, "It's one of those infinite time-loop scenarios." Yeah, one of those. Armed with only a handful of fictional examples, she and the audience know exactly what he means, and the continually inventive screenplay by Andy Siara doesn't have to do any more explaining. In record time, the film accelerates into its premise, involves her, and sets up the conflict while avoiding the claustrophobia of even Groundhog Day. That economy is the strength that allows it to be as funny as it is. By being thrifty with the setup, the savings can go to, say, the couple crashing a plane into a fiery heap with no consequences.

In some accidental ways, this is, of course, a quarantine romance as well. Nyles and Sara frustratingly navigate the tedious wedding as if they are play-acting--which they sort of are--then they push through that sameness to grow for each other, realizing that dependency is not weakness. The best relationships are doing the same thing right now.

Although pointedly superficial--part of the point of why the couple is such a match--and secular--I think the notion of an afterlife would come up at least once--Palm Springs earns the sincerity that it gets around to. And for a movie ironic enough to have a character beg to be impaled so that he doesn't have to sit in traffic, that's no small feat.

4. The Assistant (Kitty Green)- A wonder of Bressonian objectivity and rich observation, The Assistant is the rare film that deals exclusively with emotional depth while not once explaining any emotions. One at a time, the scrape of the Kleenex box might not be so grating, the long hallway trek to the delivery guy might not be so tiring, but this movie gets at the details of how a job can destroy you in ways that add up until you can't even explain them.

3. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)- In her most incendiary and modern role, Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, which is short for Cassandra, that figure doomed to tell truths that no one else believes. The web-belted boogeyman who ruined her life is Al, short for Alexander, another Greek who is known for his conquests. The revenge story being told here--funny in its darkest moments, dark in its funniest moments--is tight on its surface levels, but it feels as if it's telling a story more archetypal and expansive than that too.

An exciting feature debut for its writer-director Emerald Fennell, the film goes wherever it dares. Its hero has a clear purpose, and it's not surprising that the script is willing to extinguish her anger halfway through. What is surprising is the way it renews and muddies her purpose as she comes into contact with half-a-dozen brilliant one- or two-scene performances. (Do you think Alfred Molina can pull off a lawyer who hates himself so much that he can't sleep? You would be right.)

Promising Young Woman delivers as an interrogation of double standards and rape culture, but in quiet ways it's also about our outsized trust in professionals and the notion that some trauma cannot be overcome.

INSTANT CLASSICS

2. Soul (Pete Docter)- When Pete Docter's Up came out, it represented a sort of coronation for Pixar: This was the one that adults could like unabashedly. The one with wordless sequences and dead children and Ed Asner in the lead. But watching it again this week with my daughter, I was surprised by how high-concept and cloying it could be. We choose not to remember the middle part with the goofy dog stuff.

Soul is what Up was supposed to be: honest, mature, stirring. And I don't mean to imply that a family film shouldn't make any concessions to children. But Soul, down to the title, never compromises its own ambition. Besides Coco, it's probably the most credible character study that Pixar has ever made, with all of Joe's growth earned the hard way. Besides Inside Out, it's probably the wittiest comedy that Pixar has ever made, bursting with unforced energy.

There's a twitter fascination going around about Dez, the pigeon-figured barber character whose scene has people gushing, "Crush my windpipe, king" or whatever. Maybe that's what twitter does now, but no one fantasized about any characters in Up. And I count that as progress.

1. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman)- After hearing that our name-shifting protagonist moonlights as an artist, a no-nonsense David Thewlis offers, "I hope you're not an abstract artist." He prefers "paintings that look like photographs" over non-representational mumbo-jumbo. And as Jessie Buckley squirms to try to think of a polite way to talk back, you can tell that Charlie Kaufman has been in the crosshairs of this same conversation. This morose, scary, inscrutable, expressionist rumination is not what the Netflix description says it is at all, and it's going to bother nice people looking for a fun night in. Thank God.

The story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, when constructing Raiders of the Lost Ark, sought to craft a movie that was "only the good parts" with little of the clunky setup that distracted from action. What we have here is a Charlie Kaufman movie with only the Charlie Kaufman moments, less interested than ever before at holding one's hand. The biting humor is here, sometimes aimed at philistines like the David Thewlis character above, sometimes at the niceties that we insist upon. The lonely horror of everyday life is here, in the form of missed calls from oneself or the interruption of an inner monologue. Of course, communicating the overwhelming crush of time, both unknowable and familiar, is the raison d'etre.

A new pet motif seems to be the way that we don't even own our own knowledge. The Young Woman recites "Bonedog" by Eva H.D., which she claims/thinks she wrote, only to find Jake's book open to that page, next to a Pauline Kael book that contains a Woman Under the Influence review that she seems to have internalized later. When Jake muses about Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems," it starts as a way to pass the time, then it becomes a way to lord his education over her, then it becomes a compliment because the subject resembles her, then it becomes a way to let her know that, in the grand scheme of things, she isn't that special at all. This film jerks the viewer through a similar wintry cycle and leaves him with his own thoughts. It's not a pretty picture, but it doesn't look like anything else.

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englishmemoirthing-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Memoir Project

Preface

I am not a parent. I will be one of these days to my own children, but at this point in time, I am not a parent. I am a sister. I am a first-year college student, studying nursing with the goal to become one of the best and most experienced nurse practitioners out there. I like to draw and I’m a pretty amateur singer. I am an 18-year-old who still drinks juice boxes and eats microwave chicken nuggets for lunch. I am not one to take on something that is too big, mostly because I know from experience. I am not what you would define as your typical parent. I’ve never even had children of my own. And yet, I was handed a cranky 4-year-old at the prime age of 10 years old, and I call her my kid. She is my child, even to this day. I am not a parent, but when it comes to my sister, my one and only source of happiness, I am one.

The Initiation

I’m sitting in between my sister’s bed and my own on the floor, playing with my dinosaurs when I hear the loud banging on the front door. I immediately look up from my imaginary Jurassic world, knowing that in my 10 years of living in that house that no one ever knocks on our old, broken down front door. I sprint up around to the back door of my mom’s room leading to the living room to see who our loud, new guest could be, but by the time I get there, my grandmother is being pushed aside by the police barging into our house. I could see their police cars blocking our driveway and in the road by in front of our house through our front door, now left wide open. I watch them as they head out of my sight, towards the hallway to the kitchen, which I promptly circle around using the back entrance.

I jumped up onto my grandparents’ old armchairs, through a large window looking into the kitchen. I remember slipping a little bit, making me giggle a little while I got back up. However, the sight that I saw once I got up wiped my tiny, innocent smile off my face. I watched as the police took hold of my father, handcuffed him, and started to recite his Miranda rights. My heart sunk to my stomach, and all the noise in the room started to fade around me. I then looked to my right to realize that my 3-year-old sister, who had climbed up onto the chair next to mine, was trying to see over the window, just as I had been doing. I calmly and quietly climbed down from my perch on the chair, pulled my sister away from the window, and quietly led her back to the room we shared. I shut the doors so she couldn’t escape, then sprinted back to the front of the house. I had just missed the cops putting my dad into the police car in our driveway when my mom came up to me with a look of utter disbelief on her face. “Can you please go get your father some clean pants to take with him before he leaves”? I stared at her as if I was waiting for her to laugh and tell me that she was joking. When that moment never came, I slowly turned around and ran to my dad’s closet for the pants. When I got back to my mom, she yanked the pants from me, almost knocking me over, and walked out the door. I wanted to follow her, but something was holding me back (in due time, I found out that my grandfather had held me until everyone left the driveway). My mom didn’t come home until about 2 in the morning. I had to figure out how to feed my baby sister without my mom or dad helping me. And sure enough, this continued on for the next 5 years after my dad got arrested. This was my first day of becoming a co-parent to my sister.

Every mother can attest to the hardships of motherhood, from birthing the child to watching them leave for college, nothing is easy for parents these days. However, being the child having to take care of one or more of your siblings makes it 10x harder, especially if your parents are still around, but are too caught up with everything else to worry too much about taking care of the kids. And this isn’t me trying to bash my parents or the thousands of parents relying on the older siblings to help with the younger ones, they do the best they can with the circumstances they are given. I wanted to share my story considering that there are thousands of others out who could possibly relate to my experience. Each situation is unique and some definently had it worse than me, but speaking on behalf of myself and all the other older siblings out there that had it somewhat like me, raising a kid when you’re still a kid can either the worst thing or the best thing for your childhood.

There are a plethora of things that I have learned from becoming a co-parent (which is technically between two divorced parents, but my parents agreed that we could call all three of us to be co-parenting), but the most important thing I could’ve learned is the art of patience. From the start of my parenting journey (awful word to use but I’ll work on it) to now, my patience threshold had risen to levels that still make me wonder how I was ever impatient with anybody. If I had a dime for the amount of times I held my tongue when my sister would back talk me or throw a tantrum, I could go into early retirement (and I’m only 18).

The Struggle

Ever since my father decided to make the mistakes he made that ruined our family dynamic, I’ve been left to be my sister’s primary caretaker. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve had to help her with homework, and the amount of recipes in my head that I have from having to scramble to make for dinner is more than I’ll ever need. From getting her to 7:00 am theatre practices to following her and her friends around the mall for hours on end, I’ve made sure that she still gets the childhood that was taken from me. And in doing these things and having to be there for her, it triggered this unexplainable love for my sister that I have never (and probably will never) experienced in my entire life. She is the most important person in my life and my absolute favorite person on this planet. I would do anything for my younger sister, and at times I have had to make sacrifices so she could be happy, but I was more than willing to do them for her. My school schedule is solely based off of when I need to be home to get her from school or make sure she’s not at home alone for too long. In about two months, I’ll be getting her first and middle name tattooed behind my ear. She has become my whole life, the one person I could not live without. And yet, she is also the person that gets to me the most. She’s the only one who knows exactly what button to push to make me a certain kind of angry. She knows every single thing to say or do to get her way with me. She bends every rule in my rule book and uses that against my parents now that they take care of her more with me. She learns from everything my parents and I do so she can use it for the future. She’s the smartest, yet most annoying and manipulative child I’ve ever met. And I bet many parents (or siblings with the same case as me) could say something like that about their kid as well.

I’ve come to learn very quickly that guardians are the most predictable human beings ever, knowing from myself and my parents equally. We use the same punishments and same phrases when talking to our children or telling them right and wrong. We say the same lectures when the kid runs with scissors or tries to touch the hot stove or telling them not to talk to strangers. Everything is the same with us, mostly because kids tend to have a hard time learning from certain things, but we tend to prepare what we want to say in certain situations in order for them to understand. We want to be ready for the worst of the worst, for the stuff that will stick with them in the long run. The first time they go out with friends by themselves, the first time they stay home alone, their first boyfriend or girlfriend. Looking into the future at that stuff is scary, so we prepare something that is going to get the point across, but still give them room to learn in a safe manner (whether we know it or not).

Another harsh truth of childcare is the no sleep thing, especially when they’re little. She always had a hard time sleeping in her bed, so I let her sleep in mine when I first started taking care of her. My only problem with it was that she tends to sleep like a starfish and kicks like a horse in the middle of the night if you get too close to her. I was constantly covered in bruises, and the bags under my eyes looked like they weighed 50 pounds. It went on for about a year before I found a good way to kick her out for good. One day she started crawling in with me, and at one point I started to apologize. “What are you saying sorry for?”, not knowing the horror she was about to endure.” Oh, not much, I just thought you should know that I farted in my bed a minute ago”. She never stepped foot in my bed after that.

The Aftermath

After being a tired, baggy-eyed witness to my parent’s divorce, and they finally stepped away from the problems they had with each other, they finally started to help with me with my sister. Of course, they had their struggles considering by the time they started pitching in, she was around 8. They didn’t have too much experience with the madness that is my sister. Frankly, they didn’t really know her personality all that well. So, in a very awkward and weird set of conversations with my parents, I began to teach them the ABC’s of how to raise a little girl who wants to become president or a lawyer some day at the age of 8. I taught them her little quirky things like not to question her when she names her stuffed whale Jefferey, or not to correct her when she says deodorant like de-do-dar-ant because she knows the correct way, she just wants you to correct her so she can laugh at how concerned you get when you correct her. However, the most important thing I taught them about her is that she is one of the most individualized people on the planet, and she will always try to do everything by herself first before asking. The last thing she wants to do is ask for help, but I taught her when to realize your capacity for doing something and that it’s ok to ask for help sometimes when you really can’t do something. And the last thing I wanted them to do was to undo everything I taught her because it didn’t fit with how they wanted her to be.

At times they wanted her to be something she wasn’t, like the time my mom wanted to put her in gymnastics even though all she wanted to do was play in the pit with all the foam blocks every time she went. My dad had an easier time accepting everything, maybe because he felt bad for missing out in the first place, or because he wants the same things I want for her. My mom never felt like she did anything wrong, so she came back into it as though she already knew her. However, after a while she realized that the 4 year old she used to know was not the same as the smarter, more independent child that was in front of her. Even to this day she says my sister scares her, because she never got used to the fact that there’s a good chunk missing from her memory of my sister in the time she was chasing my dad around everywhere and going to court all the time. She learns something new about my sister every day, even as an 11-year-old middle schooler who wants to join the volleyball team and is constantly mumbling internet memes to herself to make herself laugh.

Now, my parents and I both equally split the work of raising our tall, very strange 11-year-old girl. Sometimes I take her all the way into Katy for school in the mornings in exchange for one of them to go and get her or to babysit when I want to hang out with a friend or something. And in some ways, they pay me back for all the lost time. Both pay me whenever I go out with her to buy dinner, but my dad gives me more freedom when it comes to going out with friends or my boyfriend or someone. My mom still likes to think she was there all those years to cope, so the most she’ll do is not fight with us when we want to have fast food instead of meatloaf. They both, however, have grown into the whole parenting thing, and both love how my sister turned out in the end.

My time with her was long and hard, and sometimes I think I lost apart of myself as a kid that I know I won’t get back. But I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world, because I gained something so incredible and I gained so many good things I can use for my own children someday. I’d go back and do it all again if I had the chance. I’ve learned so much, and I’ve become someone my sister is going to look up to while she grows more into who she is. And I hope one day I can show her this, so she knows our past a little more and can understand why she is who she is. Because in a way, she lived out the part of my life that I lost, and for that I am eternally grateful.

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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HBO Max New Releases: June 2021

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TV had the run of the place for awhile there during the pandemic. But now that vaccinations are speeding up and the weather is warming, it’s film’s time to shine. At least that’s the conclusion that can be drawn from HBO Max’s list of new releases for June 2021.

There are no real original TV series of note coming this month, which is highly unusual for HBO and HBO Max. In their place, however, are some really impressive film offerings. Major Warner Bros. titles like The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (June 4) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights (June 11) both arrive this month. So too do some interesting documentaries like Revolutionary Rent on June 15 and LFG on June 24. The former deals with the staging of the musical Rent in Cuba and the latter follows the U.S. women’s soccer team’s fight for equal pay.

Movies

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It and the Perils of Taking on a Real Life Murder

By Rosie Fletcher

The Conjuring 3 Sheds Light on Arne Cheyenne Johnson Trial That Rocked Connecticut

By Tony Sokol

The library movie offerings this month may be even more noteworthy. All eight Harry Potter films come to HBO Max on June 1. If you want to have a marathon be quick about it since they all leave at months end. June 1 also sees the arrival of Doctor Sleep, The Green Mile, Eyes Wide Shut, and more.

Here is everything else to expect in June 2021.

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HBO Max New Releases – June 2021

June 1 A Shot In The Dark, 1964 (HBO) The American President, 1995 The Aviator, 2004 (HBO) Bangkok Dangerous, 2008 (HBO) Black Rain, 1989 (HBO) Bless The Child, 2000 (HBO) The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990 Camelot, 1967 Cold Case The Conjuring 2, 2016 Curse Of The Pink Panther, 1983 (HBO) Dirty Pretty Things, 2003 (HBO) Disaster Movie, 2008 (Extended Version) (HBO) Doctor Sleep, 2019 (Director’s Cut) (HBO) Dr. Strangelove, 1964 Drillbit Taylor, 2008 (HBO) Eight Men Out, 1988 (HBO) El Cantante, 2007 El Nombre Del Hijo (Aka The Name Of The Son), 2019 (HBO) El Remedio (Aka The Prescription), 2019 (HBO) Extract, 2009 (HBO) Eyes Wide Shut, 1999 Fast Company, 1979 (HBO) Feast Of Love, 2007 (HBO) The Green Mile, 1999 The Grifters, 1990 (HBO) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 2001 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2002 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2009 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, 2010 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, 2011 The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, 2005 (HBO) How To Be Single, 2016 (HBO) Humboldt County, 2008 (HBO) Iris, 2001 (HBO) It Takes Two, 1995 (HBO) Jerry Maguire, 1996 Just Married, 2003 (HBO) Kajillionaire, 2020 (HBO) Kung Fu Hustle, 2005 Leapfrog: Math Adventure to the Moon, 2010 Leapfrog: Numbers Ahoy, 2011 Leapfrog: The Letter Factory, 2003 The Manhattan Project, 1986 (HBO) Matchstick Men, 2003 (HBO) Mindhunters, 2005 (HBO) Miss Congeniality, 2000 National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, 1989 National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze 2: College @ Sea, 2013 (Extended Version) (HBO) National Lampoon’s Vacation, 1983 Orange County, 2002 (HBO) Other People’s Money, 1991 (HBO) Pale Rider, 1985 The Pink Panther, 1964 (HBO) The Pink Panther, 2006 (HBO) The Pink Panther 2, 2009 (HBO) The Pink Panther Strikes Again, 1976 (HBO) Presumed Innocent, 1990 (HBO) Rat Race, 2001 (HBO) Return Of The Pink Panther, 1975 (HBO) Revenge Of The Pink Panther, 1978 (HBO) Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991 Shazam!, 2019 Sherlock Holmes, 2009 Son Of The Pink Panther, 1993 (HBO) Stoker, 2013 (HBO) Take Me Home Tonight, 2011 (HBO) This Is 40, 2012 (Extended Version) (HBO) Three Days Of The Condor, 1975 (HBO) Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, 2005 Trail Of The Pink Panther, 1982 (HBO) True Romance, 1993 Victor/Victoria, 1982 Wedding Crashers, 2005 The Wedding Singer, 1998 Without a Trace

June 2 To Your Eternity (Dubbed) (Crunchyroll Collection)

June 3 The Fungies!, Max Original Season 2A Premiere Juan Luis Guerra 4.40: Entre Mar Y Palmeras (HBO)

June 4 Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, The, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021 El Ultimo Balsero (Aka The Last Rafter), 2020 (HBO)

June 5 Clueless, 1995 (HBO) Off the Air, Season 10

June 6 Rizzoli & Isles

June 8 Billy on the Street Killerman, 2019 (HBO)

June 9 Young Hearts, 2020

June 10 F9: The Fast Saga: HBO First Look, (HBO) Hacks, Max Original Season 1 Finale Lazor Wulf, Season 2 Legendary, Max Original Season 2 Finale

June 11 Betty, Season 2 Premiere (HBO) In the Heights, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021

June 12 The 40-Year-Old Virgin, 2005 (HBO)

June 15 Revolution Rent, Documentary Premiere (HBO)

June 17 Summer Camp Island, Max Original Season 4 Premiere The Little Things, 2021 (HBO)

June 18 Super Friends

June 19 Fatale, 2020 (HBO)

June 22 Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (HBO)

June 24 LFG, Max Original Documentary Premiere

June 25 Explota Explota (Aka My Heart Goes Boom!), 2020 (HBO) PAUSE with Sam Jay, Season 1 Finale (HBO)

June 29 The Legend of the Underground, Documentary Premiere (HBO)

TBA Full Bloom, Max Original Season 2 Premiere Genera+ion, Max Original Season 1, Part 2 Premiere In Treatment, Season 4 Finale (HBO) Starstruck, Max Original Series Premiere

Leaving HBO Max – June 2021

June 5 Sesame/CNN: Standing Up To Racism, 2020 ABC’s Of Covid-19: A Cnn/Sesame Street Town Hall For Kids And Parents Part 1, The, 2020

June 13 Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, 2019 (HBO) Those Who Wish Me Dead, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021

June 14 Coyote Lake, 2019 (HBO)

June 19 Contraband, 2012 (HBO)

June 29 Galveston, 2018 (HBO)

June 30 10 To Midnight, 1983 (HBO) 16 Blocks, 2006 All About The Benjamins, 2002 Alpha And Omega, 2010 (HBO) The Angriest Man In Brooklyn, 2014 (HBO) The Banger Sisters, 2002 (HBO) Best In Show, 2000 A Better Life, 2011 (HBO) Big Fish, 2003 The Bodyguard, 1992 Boogie Nights, 1997 Caddyshack, 1980 Caddyshack II, 1988 Class, 1983 (HBO) Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, 2003 (HBO) Constantine, 2005 Day Of The Dead, 1985 (HBO) Dennis The Menace Strikes Again!, 1998 Dennis The Menace, 1993 Desperately Seeking Susan, 1985 (HBO) Dirty Harry, 1971 Down And Out In Beverly Hills, 1986 (HBO) Dreamscape, 1984 (HBO) El Astronauta (Aka The Astronaut), 2018 (HBO) El Cantante, 2007 Fifty Shades Of Black, 2016 (HBO) Flags Of Our Fathers, 2006 (HBO) Flushed Away, 2006 (HBO) The General’s Daughter,1999 (HBO) The Getaway, 1972 The Girl With All The Gifts, 2016 (HBO) Hacksaw Ridge, 2016 (HBO) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, 2001 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2002 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, 2009 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, 2010 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, 2011 Hawaii, 1966 (HBO) He Said She Said, 1991 (HBO) Inside Daisy Clover, 1966 Josie And The Pussycats, 2001 (HBO) Joyful Noise, 2012 Killing Streets, 1991 (HBO) La Bamba, 1987 The Last Boy Scout, 1991 Legends Of The Fall, 1994 The Lost Boys, 1987 Lost In Space, 1998 Love Don’t Cost a Thing, 2003 Madeline, 1998 Malcolm X, 1992 Margaret, 2011 (Extended Version) (HBO) The Mask Of Zorro, 1998 Miss Julie, 2014 (HBO) Money Talks, 1997 Money Train, 1995 MXP: Most Xtreme Primate, 2004 (HBO) My Left Foot, 1989 (HBO) My Name Is Maria De Jesus, 2017 (HBO) The Natural, 1984 Nina Errante (Aka Wandering Girl), 2018 (HBO) No Country For Old Men, 2007 Pale Rider, 1985 Penelope, 1966 Reflections In A Golden Eye, 1967 Righteous Kill, 2008 Rock Of Ages, 2012 (Extended Version) (HBO) Rock Star, 2001 RV, 2006 Scanners, 1981 (HBO) Secretary, 2002 Sex And The City (Movie), 2008 Sex And The City 2, 2010 Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, 2018 (HBO) The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants, 2005 The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants 2, 2008 Soylent Green, 1973 Sudden Impact, 1983 Suicide Kings, 1998 (HBO) Summer Catch, 2001 Sunday In New York, 1964 Tejano, 2018 (HBO) Three Kings, 1999 The Three Stooges, 2012 (HBO) Thx 1138, 1971 Underclassman, 2005 (HBO) Underwater, 2020 (HBO) Unfaithful, 2002 (HBO) Van Wilder: Freshman Year, 2009 (Extended Version) (HBO) Victory, 1981 Wag The Dog, 1997 Walk Of Shame, 2014 (HBO) Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, 1971 Yo Soy Taino (Aka I Am Taino), 2019 (HBO) You Can Count On Me, 2000 (HBO)

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kalamanthana · 4 years ago

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It’s a curse being a woman.

“I shouldn’t have let you go and got educated so high if you were going to be like this.”

That was a remark toward my friend, Miranda (not real name) from her mother.

The encounter happened before my eyes, and being Miranda’s long-time friend, I knew she was hurt.

Miranda and her mom were having an argument.

You know, those things that parents say to their children about what you should/should not do.

And Miranda, being Miranda, would not let go without her own argument. She would always have a say back.

The exchange went dirty and the mother grew tired of her daughter talking back, and it just slipped out of her mouth; it must be because she got educated so high that she would have the nerve to talk back to her parents.

The mother could not possibly mean what she said; there was no doubt she felt so proud of seeing her daughter being able to pursue higher education, not to mention in a foreign country.

Nonetheless, the remark has been said, and Miranda felt hurt. She couldn’t believe her mother had just said that.

Later, Miranda told me what hurt her the most; in her own defence, by saying so her mom would prefer if she’d gone by the old-centuries rule of being a decent woman: finish your school, find a steady job, marry the perfect man, bear a child; tend to the household and that’s it.

That, letting her fantasy go beyond the possible circumstances, she thinks her mother would prefer her to go by one rhetoric that women are often being cautiously warned, ”Men don’t like women who are higher educated than them.”

“What’s the catch of getting an education so high, if in the end you will end up in the house?”

THE PREDICAMENT

As the world embraces modernity, women are now with omni-roles.

Women are CEOs, activists, advocates, politicians, prime ministers―you name them; they hold positions that have been always predominantly occupied by men.

However, instead of killing the traditional perception of what a “good woman” should be—stay in the house, prepare breakfast and dinner for the husband and children, take care of the household—the narrative has evolved into one thing: why not do all?

A woman can prepare breakfast for the husband and children, take the children to school, go to the office, attend a yoga class in between, and still be home to prepare dinner for the whole family.

As confidently said by New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to Stephen Colbert, “I’m a woman, I multi-task.”

So, I would say it is progressing.

However, as it always has been with progress; 1 step forward taken, 1,000 setbacks come.

The Millennium era, in which mostly defined by technologies that further forces our world to be borderless, has emphasised our empathy as human beings. Stories that occurred in the most remote places in the world can strike movements in big cities around the world in an instant.

That is how we’ve all got to be made aware of the systemic, primordial practices―most of the time are “permitted” in the name of culture―that still deny the basic rights of women, rights that are inherent to every human being. Technology opens my eyes to the discrepancy of the conditions women are living all around the world; in one country, a woman has become a prime minister with approval rate that has never been achieved by her male predecessors. But in one small village on the other hemisphere, a 19-year old girl was just murdered by her father and uncle, just because she escaped a child marriage, one act that was deemed as hurting the honour of her whole family.

Father and uncle, the men who were supposed to protect her.

My own experience of being a woman surely could not be compared ever to those strong and brave women who have escaped horrors of their life. I am fortunate enough to be born and raised in a society where such things, i.e. honour killings, FGM, are never practiced.

However, I am 100% sure that across countries, race, culture, the majority of us would agree: being a woman is not easy.

Growing up, I don’t enjoy the same flexibilities that my brother has been bestowed upon by my parents.

Of course it’s okay for my brother to take the car and go home late, he’s a guy so he can take care of himself. But for me, I need to be home at 9, because I’m a girl and the world is a scary place.

It’s okay for my brother’s female friends to hang out at his flat, but it’s a big hell-no for me to bring my guy friends to mine.

“It’s okay for your brother to take his time to marry, but Amira, if a woman isn’t married by when she reaches 30, there must be something wrong with her.”

When I hang out with friends and get a call from my mom, she often asks, “Who are you with?” to which I reply, “just my college friends,” “are there any guys around?” and when I answer yes, she then furthers her interrogation about my guy friends, with an additional cautious tone.

I have never, even once, heard my mom asked my brother when he hangs out, “Are there any girls around?”

Not until I hit the age of twenties, that I found this thing amusing.

When I was still in the primary-education age, I was told to focus on my studies, to get in to the best university, thus I won’t have time for boys.

When I hit the university era, the interrogative phone-calls didn’t stop; I figured it was because I studied in a different city that my parents needed to check on me from time to time.

However to my surprise, now in my late-twenties, already graduated college and far into my years of work life (or what me and my girls like to say, the “legit adult life”), every time my mother is informed that I’m hanging out with guys, she immediately stages that interrogative tone, which automatically lets some sense of discomfort come in, and it sends a signal to me that my mom would prefer me to hang out “girls-only” way.

Then, comes the most amusing predicament—my personal favourite.

In the society where I live in, when a woman hits the age of twenties, not married yet, career already on hand, she is suddenly obligated to the questions, ”So, marriage? Anytime soon?” “Who is your boyfriend? Do you have one?”

Even more confusing to me, my mother is not exempted from asking those questions.

How would I be able to meet the right guy to marry when all my life you have been telling me—implicitly and explicitly—that having guys around is not a good thing?

I have come to realise that girls have been raised to worry so much about optics.

So much, that sometimes it hinders the girl’s aspiration to achieve more. That sometimes it dwarfs a young girl’s desire to express herself. You are continuously being told: you need to be a good girl.

How do you define a “good girl”?

When you smoke, you’re a bad girl.

When you go home late, you are perceived as a wild girl.

When you show some skin with your clothes, you are hurting “modesty”.

And so on, and on, and on.

When a woman got raped, somehow she needed to bear the burden of perpetrating as well.

“You should not have walked alone in the night”

“You should not have worn skirt”

“You should not have worn provocative clothes”

“You should have had men by your side”

To the point that, it suggests that the safest way for a woman to live is to remain in her bubble.

What’s the need of defying the natural categorisation of the role of men and women?

As once expressed by the boyfriend of my friend, “Men go out and work their asses off to earn living, and women don’t have to. You have it all good.”

Any effort that tries to defy and re-shape the status quo will incite discomfort, that sometimes it is perceived as an act of rebellion.

And rebellion is seen as a problem in the society.

But then again, the existence of women itself is provoking.

It incites politisations.

Politics, that somehow don’t involve women themselves. The very beings that never experience how it is to live as a woman get to politicise what women should be/do. And it’s just not normal.

At one point, I have come to think that being a woman is a curse.

THE NARRATIVE OF STRONG WOMEN

The “earth” is a mother. You never once hear of a “father earth”.

In international settings, a country is often referred to as “she”.

And yet, still not many women have a seat on the table.

The history of the modern world is unevenly shaped by masculinity.

Women stay inside the house, where the men go out, debate and shape policies.

But as times go by, it changes as well.

Bit by bit, the enduring stereotypes of the role of women have been cracked down, or at least questioned.

It is best for women to not wear revealing clothes.

But, why? How do you define “revealing”?

When a leadership position is assumed by a man, seeing him telling others what to do seems normal.

But if it were a woman leader, most of the time she would be called bossy.

Why? How is it different? Is it in the way that usually women’s voices are more high-pitched than men, that you wouldn’t find them music to your ears?

When you’ve passed the age of 30 and you’re not married yet, you are kind of into the late-bloomer category.

But, seriously why?

Where does the time-limit justification come from?

Personally, I get it if the age range is preferable because there are biological reasons to it. But why is it rarely talked about? If it is talked about, then it would spark a conversation—even one that would make women understand more about themselves—not encouraging self-blame or self-pity.

Sometimes, we forget to ask why?

And that is what’s missing between me and my parents’generation.

That’s what allowed the situation that Miranda was in to take place.

The “why” question itself poses a threat to any establishment.

It poses a threat to the status quo.

A status quo that demands change.

And change comes from discomfort.

When I was a kid, I thought presidents would have to be men.

It was not in the Constitution, but can really a woman lead a country?

Because, I never saw any woman becomes one.

Then, a woman president was elected.

Then, an Islamic country had its first female prime minister.

A woman has won Best Director at the Academy Awards.

A 15-year old girl was shot in the head just because she championed education for girls.

A woman who smokes and has a giant tattoo on the leg—one full package of what the society deems as “not decent”—was elected a Minister, and boy, do we young generations love her for being such a badass in doing her job. Because it sends a positive signal to the young generation: your capability comes first, not how the society perceives you.

An analysis came around journaling about the three countries that have been seen successful in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. What do these countries have in common?

Female prime ministers.

A new narrative has been set for girls and women; yes, you can be anything you aspire to be.

Your gender is valid to achieve your dream.

WHAT IS MY VERDICT?

That being said, as I grew up, I have begun to understand that all of those freedom-restricting measures my parents apply upon me come from a place called love.

They are rooted in a natural worry, concern of parents that will always want the kids to be safe, out of harm’s way.

Especially, seeing how the world would be harsher towards women, how we are prone to optics. Parents just don’t want us to get hurt.

There’s no “Parenting 101”, they just do what they need to do, what they know best.

Since I have never been a parent thus far, I am not one to speak on behalf of them. They don’t need a constant validation that they also want what’s best for me.

But, from the children’s perspective, I had wished that they’d also given up some space in them for conversations, for an arena where both the parent and daughter could speak and contemplate together, can compromise.

Where I could say what I wanted to say, and vice versa. Where we could respect one another and, as the child, I could try to understand the reason why they did what they did. I had wished.

Now in my late twenties, I am fortunate enough to be surrounded by female friends who have begun to question everything.

We ponder around the root ideas of why women need to be/do certain things.

We shall not be satisfied by the mere answers, “Because it has always been like that,” “it’s our culture,” “because you’re a girl”, so what?

Though, sometimes the act of questioning is the furthest we can do so far.

Women are subject to politisations, and that is hardly to change.

But just the act of questioning itself, women are ready to challenge old-centuries practices when they think they’re a hindrance to what they want to achieve. And it should set the first step of a something.

Something that we may not see in our lifetime, but surely the future generation of women would benefit from.

I, for sure have taken for granted years of fight from my women predecessors.

Had women before me not fought for the right to education, the right to pursue a career, the right to choose our own partner, I would not have been able to enjoy my own self-determination right now.

I find joy, self-fulfilment, and an immense self-enriching moment when I meet up with my girls.

When we forge sisterhood around daily problems, support, and just share and listen to one another. Nothing is more empowering than that.

Is it a curse, then, being a woman?

I can’t remember where I heard it from, but a while ago one said “Don’t be disheartened at the pace in which things move.” What you’re doing right now, is something that the future generation can benefit from.

I am in for the long run to achieve something I know what is right, and what my future daughter, and hers would benefit from as well.

I can’t say I’d prefer to be born not as a woman.

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helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog · 6 years ago

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Chrissy Teigen, Anne Hathaway & More Sound Off on Immigrant Children Being Separated From Parents at US Border

Celebrities are continuing to speak out on President Donald Trump's controversial, "zero tolerance" immigration policy that has resulted in about 2,000 children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during a six-week period in April and May.

Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, who recently donated $288,000 to the ACLU, were two of the first Hollywood stars to express their outrage, penning a letter they shared via Instagram on the president's birthday last week.

"John and I are outraged to see and hear the horror stories of immigrant families seeking asylum and refuge in American being ripped apart due to the inhumane policies of the Trump administration," the mother of two wrote. "These actions are cruel, anti-family and go against everything we believe this country should represent."

happy birthday

A post shared by chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) on Jun 14, 2018 at 10:36am PDT

Teigen also posted a heartbreaking image via Twitter of a 2-year-old girl crying as she was taken from her mother by U.S. border agents, which was recently published on the cover of The Daily News. "This little girl is the same age as my daughter," she shared. "Luna is the happiest thing. the funniest girl. and she is absolutely terrified to look around and realize she is too far away from us, even for seconds. the fear she would feel here fills me with rage and sadness."

this little girl is the same age as my daughter. luna is the happiest thing. the funniest girl. and she is absolutely terrified to look around and realize she is too far away from us, even for seconds. the fear she would feel here fills me with rage and sadness. pic.twitter.com/riSV8ADRFe

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) June 16, 2018

Sara Bareilles also was "appalled," tweeting her thoughts on the "beyond inhumane" policy.

"I am so sad and feel so helpless about the families being separated," she said. "I am grateful for those sharing how to engage and help, thank God for you. The idea that there is anyone who believes this is justice is simply heartbreaking."

I am so sad and feel so helpless about the families being separated. This is beyond inhumane...I am just appalled. I am grateful for those sharing how to engage and help, thank God for you. The idea that there is anyone who believes this is justice is simply heartbreaking.

— Sara Bareilles (@SaraBareilles) June 14, 2018

On Father's Day, Anne Hathaway dedicated an Instagram post to her dad, whom she says grew up in poverty and taught her to "use [her] brain" and make the world a better place. "My Dad and I -- not to mention my entire family -- are disgusted and rocked to our core by the current administration’s shocking decision to separate asylum seeking immigrant families, the consequence of which is creating orphans with living parents."

"In appreciation of my father, and in honor of all the fathers torn from their children because of this brutal policy, I am making a donation to @americansforimmigrantjustice in my father’s name," she added. "I invite you to join me and make a donation of any size in your father’s name."

My Dad grew up in poverty, got his first job when he was 10, and is now among the most respected lawyers in his field. When my brothers and I were growing up, our Dad commuted an hour and half to work every day and still coached our soccer teams and helped out the stage crew on every one of my shows (he put himself through college and law school as a stage hand- long live Buster). He has the hugest Leo heart and is thrillingly smart- also, he is a bad-ass who doesn’t take $&@! from anyone. He taught me how to use my brain, to try and make the world a better place, and told me that I should never lie so that way I would never need to remember anything (it’s true). Simply put, he is my hero. My Dad and I- not to mention my entire family- are disgusted and rocked to our core by the current administration’s shocking decision to separate asylum seeking immigrant families, the consequence of which is creating orphans with living parents. In appreciation of my father, and in honor of all the fathers torn from their children because of this brutal policy, I am making a donation to @americansforimmigrantjustice in my father’s name (link in my bio). I invite you to join me and make a donation of any size in your father’s name. Also, for those of you who are going to slam me for politicizing Father’s Day- I’m Jerry Hathaway’s daughter and I speak my mind: you are on the wrong side of history.

A post shared by Anne Hathaway (@annehathaway) on Jun 17, 2018 at 5:15pm PDT

Sophia Bush also encouraged her followers to take action, tweeting, "CALL YOUR SENATORS."

"Regardless of party or opinions, certain things need to be non-negotiable to all humans," she wrote. "A non-negotiable? We do NOT rip BABIES from their mothers' arms to put numbers on their chests like the Nazis did during the Holocaust, & then throw them in cages. NO."

CALL YOUR SENATORS Regardless of party or opinions, certain things need to be non-negotiable to all humans. A non-negotiable? We do NOT rip BABIES from their mothers’ arms to put numbers on their chests like the Nazis did during the Holocaust, & then throw them in cages. NO. https://t.co/Bu0bt5d2aZ

— Sophia Bush (@SophiaBush) June 18, 2018

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted three easy steps to help out. "1) Call your reps at (202) 224-3121- tell them to END the separation of families at the border (ask your Senators to pass the Keep Families Together Act and your House Rep to pass the HELP Separated Children Act). 2) Donate to https://supportkind.org to protect vulnerable children at our border. 3) Use this frame on Facebook with a photo of you and your kids to show that you will not stand for families being ripped apart."

"This Father's Day, I hope that our President and his minions remember that children should be with their parents, not in detention centers," he added in another tweet.

1) Call your reps at (202) 224-3121- tell them to END the separation of families at the border (ask your Senators to pass the Keep Families Together Act and your House Rep to pass the HELP Separated Children Act).

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) June 14, 2018

This Father's Day, I hope that our President and his minions remember that children should be with their parents, not in detention centers https://t.co/pIhcR9ygI1

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) June 17, 2018

Others, like Star Trek actor Walter Koenig, simply shared a link to the Save the Children Action Network website, encouraging people to "tell Congress that families belong together."

Tell Congress that Families Belong Together https://t.co/Dy3bhb6E6b

— Walter Koenig (@GineokwKoenig) June 17, 2018

"SIGN ON to tell President Trump, Secretary Nielsen and Attorney General Sessions to reverse their administrative policy of intentional family separation now and to stop human rights abuses," he continued. "#FamiliesBelongTogether."

SIGN ON to tell President Trump, Secretary Nielsen, and Attorney General Sessions to reverse their administrative policy of intentional family separation now and to stop human rights abuses #FamiliesBelongTogetherhttps://t.co/npUtnq4a3h

— Walter Koenig (@GineokwKoenig) June 18, 2018

Hamilton star Lin-Manuel Miranda shared a similar tweet, with a link to FamiliesBelong.org, a coalition led by @WomenBelong to put an end to "the cruel and unjustified separation."

👇🏽 https://t.co/8P5W1IhfQg

— 🇵🇷 Lin-Manuel Miranda 🏳️‍🌈 (@Lin_Manuel) June 14, 2018

See more responses from celebrities and public figures below:

This is abhorrent. This is NOT representative of what our county stands for. It’s all I can think about. It’s just unfathomable. Do you feel helpless too? What can we do to stop these atrocities, besides calling our Reps? #keepfamiliestogether

A post shared by Mandy Moore (@mandymooremm) on Jun 19, 2018 at 10:26am PDT

A post shared by Oprah (@oprah) on Jun 17, 2018 at 7:12pm PDT

I don’t care what your politics are, we can’t be a country that separates children from their parents. Do something about this, here. https://t.co/0ozLcxxmxC

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) June 18, 2018

Isn't it the just the best to snuggle your little one -- knowing exactly where they are, safe in your arms? It's the best. The BEST. Right, Ivanka? Right? https://t.co/X79r8aWInc

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 27, 2018

What’s happening to families at the border right now is a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 18, 2018

Are we really such monsters?! #ThisIsAmerica https://t.co/ft7PSE3UYe

— Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) May 26, 2018

The administration’s current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now.

— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) June 18, 2018

I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.https://t.co/he1uw1E96A

— Laura Bush (@laurawbush) June 18, 2018

Sometimes truth transcends party. https://t.co/TeFM7NmNzU

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 18, 2018

Well Said @laurawbush These images of parents and children being separated is horrifying. Cruel and immoral and deplorable. https://t.co/ePLUm310Ph

— Reese Witherspoon (@RWitherspoon) June 18, 2018

Attn ALL U.S.Senators & U. S. Representatives: Please support the Keep Families Together Act. This atrocity must end. Please Support S. 3036 https://t.co/LDJ1cZM1xb

— Reese Witherspoon (@RWitherspoon) June 18, 2018

“Give us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...and we will lock their children in cages with tin-foil blankets. And scar them for life! You know: The American Dream!” pic.twitter.com/32624NB7VO

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 7, 2018

"Until the end of the Civil War, it was common for slave owners to rip families apart by selling the children to other slave owners. In the late 1800s to the 1970s, indigenous children across the country were forcibly separated from their families and sent to 'Indian schools'" https://t.co/Q6xxQDcZZO

— COMMON (@common) June 18, 2018

MAKE THEM PUBLIC: Demand the @whitehouse make public each-and-every one of the 100 federal camps separating children and families. And let our elected officials inside. From NY to CA; From the Dakotas, to the border of Texas. The fight for humanity is on. This is not America.

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) June 18, 2018

Thrilled to announce we welcomed a brand new baby girl into the world Friday morning, just in time for #FathersDay 😍 These last few days, as I’ve enjoyed the privilege of making smoothies I know my older kids will like, making my wife red raspberry leaf tea to ease her uterine contractions, spending “boy time” with my son and getting my two year-old down for a nap in the way only I know how... I’ve been heart sick about something. As I write this, kids are being ripped from the arms of their parents. By our government. For the kid’s benefit? No - the opposite - as a purposeful display of cruelty to deter would-be illegal border crossers AND legal asylum seekers (it’s happening to both). And it wouldn’t be honest to wax poetic about my new-baby bliss without speaking up against this atrocity. If we allow our government to de-humanize fathers, and mothers, and children in the name of defending our borders... we’ve lost a huge part what makes those borders worth defending. And even if you don’t believe in karma, or in extending basic human decency to people who didn’t win the geographic birth lottery... even if you’re hard-liner enough to say, “Break the law, suffer the consequences,” shouldn’t the punishment at least fit the crime? And if you’re still cold enough to say, “Well, it’s effective,” consider this: This heinous practice was put into place by our own attorney general (who justified it with a cherry-picked Bible verse), and our president blamed rivals before tweeting his list of legislative demands to be met before he stops it. Regardless of how you feel about immigration, or a wall, or this president... if we say we’re okay with our government using human rights violations as a deterrent or as a bargaining chip... what happens when we find ourselves on the wrong side of the agenda? Either in this administration or the next? This should not be a political issue - it’s a human one. A crime against humanity is a crime against us all. More info in link in my bio. Oh, and @vanderkimberly - you’re a f*cking earth goddess rock star and I’m as in awe of you as I am in love with you. And our new baby’s name is Gwendolyn ❤️ #HappyFathersDay everybody.

A post shared by James Van Der Beek (@vanderjames) on Jun 17, 2018 at 12:49pm PDT

@glennondoyle says: “you have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land” HOME by Warsan Shire I do not understand how people refuse to understand. Why do we feel more worthy of safety because we were born on the right side of an imaginary line? We are people born on third base convinced we hit a triple- while folks outside the ball park starve. We ask them to stop trying to get their children inside for food and shelter. We tell them- we tell parents - to let their children die and stop bothering us about It. When they refuse: we take their children. America is an experiment and we are failing. We are repeating our history - we took babies from African mamas and we took them from Native American mamas and we took them from Japanese mamas. This is who we have been. And it’s going to take those of us who believe in Making America Great For Once- to keep showing up, to refuse to go numb- to refuse to look away until those babies are out of those cages and back in their parents’ arms. Love will win but only if we refuse to give up. There is No such thing as other people’s children. @together.rising Is still collecting for lawyers and social workers for detained children. Go to momastery.com to see our detailed transparent work- every penny we receive goes toward advocacy for and reunification of these families.

A post shared by kristen bell (@kristenanniebell) on Jun 18, 2018 at 11:24am PDT

#_uuid:92bf1577-727b-3ddd-95f4-d6a8098c6c0f #_revsp:new_provider_with_logo_342 #_lmsid:a0VK0000001yfWcMAI

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wordsarepretty · 7 years ago

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Ashley McBryde is a girl going somewhere

(Photo: Larry McCormack / The Tennessean)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Ashley McBryde’s knees hit the Ryman stage in Nashville, Tennessee, with a thunk.

She’d just made her debut at the historic venue during Marty Stuart’s annual Late Night Jam, and her autobiographical ballad “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” earned a standing ovation. Overwhelmed, her legs crumpled, and she was left kneeling like a supplicant before legendary country singer Connie Smith. “Connie patted me on the back of the head as if to say, ‘Bless this child with country music,’ ” McBryde remembered. “Or, ‘Get up; you’re an idiot.’ ”

In the nine months since that sweltering June night at the Mother Church, McBryde’s career has taken off in a way that influential NPR music critic Ann Powers described as “one of the most remarkable things I’ve witnessed since I moved (to Nashville) a couple years ago.”

McBryde has seen her single “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega” hit the charts, opened arena shows for Miranda Lambert and Luke Combs, played her first overseas shows and performed on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Ashley McBryde bows down before Country Music Hall of Famer, Connie Smith, during Marty Stuart’s annual Late Night Jam on June 7 at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee.

(Photo: Larry McCormack / The Tennessean)

She’s captured thousands of new fans with forthright songwriting on topics ranging from addiction (“Livin’ Next to Leroy”) to life on the road (“Home Sweet Highway”), and her voice, which contains hints of Reba McEntire and Susan Tedeschi.

Some of those fans have half-century careers under their belts. “It’s just so refreshing to hear her and watch her,” said the Grand Ole Opry’s grande dame, Jeannie Seely. “She’s just very real, and doesn’t have a polished persona where she looks, sounds and acts like everybody else. I think she’s something the industry needs right now: a dose of reality.”

On March 30, McBryde will release her major label debut album, the country-rock gem “Girl Going Nowhere,” on Warner Music Nashville. These days, she’s living an entirely different life than the one she walked away from 11 years ago.

‘I have to go to Nashville’

McBryde, 34, grew up in Saddle, Arkansas, a no-stoplight town in the Ozarks. Its main attraction was the canoe rental joint, with its “Come Paddle at Saddle” slogan. There wasn’t much to do. But there were musical instruments at home, and she learned how to make noise on all of them.

As a kid, she was drawn to the high lonesome harmonies and precise picking of bluegrass music. By 12, she’d written her first song, and her dream of being a singer-songwriter was born.

But it didn’t take long before her dream was deflated.

In high school, her algebra teacher asked what she wanted to do for a living. McBryde replied that she wanted to write songs in Nashville.

“She looked at me in front of the whole class and said, ‘That’s stupid. That won’t happen, and you better have a really good backup plan,’ ” McBryde remembered. “I carried that for a lot of years.”

Country singer Ashley McBryde wrote her first song at the age of 12.

McBryde studied French horn at Arkansas State University and planned to be a band director after graduation because “that’s what you do,” but before too long, she was regularly making the 70-mile drive into Memphis to play music at any place that would let her, fighting to be heard over clinking bottles and conversations. Her folk-tinged sound became grittier and louder as Memphis’ rich music history seeped into her bones.

During the commute between dive bars and classrooms, one thought kept returning: “If I want to find out if I’m any good at this or not, I have to go to Nashville.”

One day in 2007, her French horn instructor stopped mid-lesson and said, “I think you need to just drop out of school and go.”

“So I did,” McBryde said. “That day.”

Girl going somewhere

For a decade, McBryde lived the life of countless singer-songwriters who come to Music City with big dreams and empty pockets.

She crashed at a friend’s apartment, worked a series of jobs and spent nights driving from gig to gig with either her beagle, Banjo, riding shotgun, or her band Deadhorse — the name is a salute to all the cover songs they’ve beaten to death over the years.

Her career started picking up in early 2017 when she signed with Q Prime management. Last April, country star Eric Church, who has the same management, invited her to see a show in Chicago and then brought her onstage to sing her song “Bible and a .44.”

“I’d never sung in an arena, never had in-ear monitors in my ears before, and I didn’t even play my own guitar,” McBryde said. “It was a trial by fire and I loved it.”

When she started work on the album that would become “Girl Going Nowhere,” she went into the studio with Jay Joyce, who has produced Church’s albums as well as releases by Emmylou Harris, Brandy Clark and Little Big Town.

Recording the album, the first McBryde has made with Deadhorse, wasn’t that different from a typical night on the road, she said. “We rehearsed for three days. Then we went in on the fourth day … and basically played a bar show all night. We left at 4 a.m. The next day, we did it again.”

The album made its way to Cris Lacy, senior vice president of A&R at Warner Music Nashville, who remembered that McBryde first caught her eye about two years ago during a show at 3rd and Lindsley: “She was so captivating onstage. Her personality was just otherworldly. She was funny and self-deprecating and honest and ballsy. … She said all the things that women think but don’t necessarily get a platform to say.”

However, Lacy said, with a few exceptions, McBryde’s music didn’t quite match “how authentic her personality was.” It felt like she was trying too hard to write what she thought would be a hit. “So,” said Lacy, “we just watched for a while.

“Then she made this record with Jay Joyce. There was so much depth, so much heart and so much truth in the lyrics. … It all came together for me.”

In September, McBryde, wearing her holey “Girl Goin’ Nowhere” T-shirt, signed a contract with the record label.

“Girl Going Nowhere” is a refreshingly unfussy album. McBryde eschews frills offstage, too. The night of her Grand Ole Opry debut in June, she entered her dressing room to find a brightly colored bouquet of … Duluth Trading Co.’s utilitarian underwear, carefully rolled and placed on rose stems by her friends. “That’s the best bouquet,” McBryde enthuses. “They don’t die (and) you can use them over and over.”

Tattoos — her latest one, a pair of aviator sunglasses and a tube of lipstick inked on her forearm, is a nod to her song “American Scandal” — snake down her arms, and before a photo shoot, she gingerly pokes at her false eyelashes as if confronting a large spider.

She’s not quite sure what to do with her hands when they’re not holding her guitar, which she’s named Dinah, and she refuses to trade her lifelong uniform of T-shirts and battered boots for Music Row glam: “I’ve been in T-shirts and jeans since I was a kid. It worked then; it works now. I don’t have to show you a bunch of my skin for you to listen to my songs. You’ll listen, or you won’t.”

People are listening. “Girl Goin’ Nowhere,” the ballad inspired by her algebra teacher, has become an anthem. Every night, she sings, “The lights come up and I hear the band/ And where they said I’d never be is exactly where I am/ I hear the crowd, I look around and I can’t find one empty chair/ Not bad for a girl goin’ nowhere.” And the audience sings along.

“I feel like I should thank her,” said McBryde of her old teacher. “Because nothing lights a fire under you like somebody saying, ‘You’re not going to be able to do it.’ ”

5 things to know about Ashley McBryde

•The Arkansas native wrote her first song when she was 12 years old.

•In college, she studied classical music and played the French horn.

•McBryde has toured with Luke Combs and Miranda Lambert.

•Her major label debut, “Girl Going Nowhere,” will be released March 30.

•It is the first album McBryde has made with her road band, Deadhorse.

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njawaidofficial · 7 years ago

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'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Ryan Murphy ('Feud: Bette and Joan')

http://styleveryday.com/2017/08/14/awards-chatter-podcast-ryan-murphy-feud-bette-and-joan/

'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Ryan Murphy ('Feud: Bette and Joan')

“The only difference between me and the ten guys and women who were in my writing group when I first started out here in Hollywood is that I’m the only one of those people who just didn’t take no for an answer and didn’t become devastated over the rejection,” says Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, producer and showrunner best known for creating or co-creating The WB’s Popular, FX’s Nip/Tuck, Fox’s Glee, NBC’s The New Normal and Fox’s Scream Queens, as well as the ongoing FX anthology series American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Feud. As we sit down at the offices of Ryan Murphy Productions on the Fox lot to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s ‘Awards Chatter’ podcast, Murphy continues, “I think that’s because when I was growing up, I would get pushed down. And what are you gonna do? You gonna stay on the ground? No, you’re gonna get up and you’re gonna keep going. I’ve always had that philosophy: ‘Okay, well, that didn’t work out — and it hurt — so what’s the next thing that might?'”

(Click above to listen to this episode or here to access all of our 165 episodes via iTunes. Past guests include Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Amy Schumer, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Louis C.K., Emma Stone, Harvey Weinstein, Natalie Portman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jane Fonda, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicole Kidman, Aziz Ansari, Taraji P. Henson, J.J. Abrams, Helen Mirren, Justin Timberlake, Brie Larson, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Vikander, Warren Beatty, Jessica Chastain, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Winslet, Sting, Isabelle Huppert, Tyler Perry, Sally Field, Michael Moore, Lily Collins, Denzel Washington, Mandy Moore, Ricky Gervais, Kristen Stewart, James Corden, Sarah Silverman, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Beckinsale, Bill Maher, Lily Tomlin, Rami Malek, Allison Janney, Eddie Redmayne, Olivia Wilde, Trevor Noah and Elisabeth Moss.)

Murphy, 51, was born and raised in Indianapolis — partially by his grandmother, who helped to introduce him to film and TV — as part of “a very rigorous, conservative,” religious, middle-class family. He knew early on that he was gay, but remained in the closet until the age of 15, when his mother discovered love letters that he had exchanged with an older boy and sent him to a therapist. The therapist met with him several times and then told his parents that they could either love him or lose him, and they got on board — but even so, by the time he graduated from high school and college, he knew that he needed to get away. “I always wanted to come to Hollywood, even as a young kid, and I always knew I would end up here,” he says, “I just didn’t know how.”

After college, Murphy headed west “with nothing” but, nevertheless, “instantly loved it.” A journalism major in college, he started out as a freelance writer and eventually graduated to churning out celebrity profiles for Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, while doing his own writing on the side. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I knew the way in was to write,” he recalls, and indeed his first screenplay, Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?, was read by an agent and bought by Steven Spielberg. “From that, everyone wanted to meet me,” he recalls. Murphy spent the next two years selling movie pitches and writing scripts, but, he says, “I realized, at that point, that I didn’t really want to be a writer; what I really wanted to be was a director/producer.”

At the urging of Murphy’s agent at the time, he turned one of his film scripts into a TV pitch, and all four networks bid on it. It wound up at The WB in 1999 as Popular, and it helped to put him on the map. He loved much about working in television — “I loved the pace of it and the energy and I liked creating something and writing something and then you were shooting it a week later,” he explains — but his overall experience with that show was “really terrible”: “I had homophobic executives; I was constantly being told to change who I was and what I was writing; and I always felt like I was 15 years old, you know, back pre-shrink.” The show was canceled after two seasons.

At that point, Murphy says, “I just decided, ‘Okay, well, what do you want to do and what do you want to be? You’ve got a foot in the door and your next move has to be pretty good.” In 2003, inspired by Mike Nichols and his 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, as well as an article that he came across about plastic surgery, he created the series Nip/Tuck for FX, marking his first of many collaborations with that network; his first time doing a show that didn’t really fit into any pre-existing mold; and, with the exception of one episode of Popular, his first time directing. “That was sort of the birth of a different part of my life and career,” he says, and he was recognized for it with a best drama series Golden Globe Award in 2005.

With his stock soaring, Murphy poured his heart and soul into Pretty Handsome, a pilot about a small-town gynecologist who realizes he is a woman, but, to his devastation, FX passed on it. However, this proved to be the first of several times when a low moment paved the way for high ones soon after — in this case, Glee and American Horror Story. “Every great success that I’ve had in my life has come from a disappointment that I was devastated by,” he marvels. “From that Pretty Handsome melancholy came these two big hits in my career, and it only happened, I think, because I was forced to get quiet and say to myself, ‘Well what do you really want to talk about?'” (He notes that a similar thing happened years later when FX declined to pick up his pilot Open, soon after which he arrived at the idea for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.)

Glee was “an optimistic family musical” in which “the underdogs would always win,” Murphy says, noting, “There was a lot of my childhood in there.” Beyond being a musical series, the show — which ran on Fox from 2009 through 2015, arriving, like Modern Family, shortly after the election of America’s first black president — prominently featured LGBTQ and disabled characters, and became a full-fledged hit. “That was one of the biggest shocks of my life, that that show became what it became,” he confesses. Two years into its run, he launched a totally different sort of program — an anthology series in the mold of The Twilight Zone and others from TV’s Golden Age, only with a horror tint — and American Horror Story became an award-winning hit in its own right.

What’s with all the genre hopping, which most TV content creators never get to do because they either have more limited interests or get pigeon-holed into one sort of work? Murphy gets the chance, he says, because “Not everything [I do] does work, but I’ve had enough things that have that shouldn’t have” that he is given the benefit of the doubt. The desire, though, exists for deeper reasons. “I love all different genres and I just sort of bounce around between them because it keeps things fresh for me,” he explains. “And, I guess, maybe subconsciously, in the early days it was a way for me to not be stereotyped, when I have felt, as a minority, that I’m so stereotyped. He adds, “Now, I would say, it really is by design. I really love it.”

Another thing he loves: actors. He has built a veritable stock company over the years, led by his two queens from different generations, Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson, and also including Kathy Bates, Frances Conroy, Angela Bassett, Lily Rabe, Evan Peters, Emma Roberts, Matt Bomer and Denis O’Hare, plus many behind-the-scenes collaborators. “I think it comes from me having a sense of, ‘I wish that I had more of a close-knit family growing up and maybe felt a part of a community growing up,’ and I didn’t,” he reflects. As for the disproportionate number of women, and particularly older women, with whom he works, he says, “I like writing roles for women over 40 because it just resurfaces them, and they’re great.” This year, he started the Half Foundation, an initiative within his production company, to make 50 percent of his on-set hires women.

Murphy also has used his pedestal to highlight stories about gay people, not only on Glee, but in his short-lived semi-autobiographical NBC sitcom The New Normal (2012-2013) and his HBO TV movie The Normal Heart (2014), on which he partnered with Larry Kramer to bring Kramer’s landmark play to the screen after years of roadblocks. Productions like these would not have been possible less than two decades ago, when Murphy was starting out in the business. “I feel like I haven’t changed,” he says. “I feel what changed is the executives. The executives are now great — like, they want those characters. They know that launching a conversation about anything in visibility means a more diversified audience, which leads to success.”

Recently, Murphy has devoted a lot of his time to launching new FX anthology series in the mold of American Horror Story. He started last year with American Crime Story and its first installment, The People v. O.J. Simpson, which proved a towering success. And this year he did so again with Feud and its first installment, Bette and Joan, an eight-part study of the complicated relationship between the legendary movie stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two best actress Oscar winners, starring two other best actress Oscar winners, the aforementioned Lange, as Crawford, as well as Susan Sarandon, as Davis. For it, Murphy personally received three Emmy nominations in July — best limited series, best directing for a limited series, movie or dramatic special and best writing for a limited series, movie or dramatic special — bringing his career tally to 23, four of which have turned into wins: best directing for a comedy series for Glee in 2010; best TV movie for The Normal Heart in 2014; best limited series for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story in 2016; and best short form nonfiction or reality series for Inside Look: The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story in 2016.

Murphy, who grew up obsessed with Hollywood’s Golden Age and the Oscars, interviewed Davis when he first moved out to L.A., and created Feud using information from that conversation, tons of other research and a film script that he and Plan B bought years ago. He insists that the bickering of the two actresses featured on the show was not at all replicated by the two actresses who brought them back to life on his set. “It was a love-fest,” he says of Lange and Sarandon’s interactions. “They actually worked well together and supported each other and had great ideas for scenes for each other, so none of that happened. And hilariously, and thankfully, they were both nominated for best actress, as opposed to poor Joan Crawford, who wasn’t invited to the party [in 1963 for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, when the Academy nominated Davis but not Crawford for best actress]. Jessica and Susan are staunch feminists and believe in equality, and they’re not gonna do that bullshit. They’re just not those people. They’re not interested in petty gossiping. I’ve never met two women less interested in that.”

The one bit of drama that has been associated with Feud has come from the most unexpected of places: Olivia de Havilland, the sole legendary actress portrayed in the film who still is alive today. In June, on the eve of her 101st birthday, de Havilland sued Murphy for, allegedly, defaming her on the show (which she had not yet seen when I asked her about it in April). “I was saddened by it because I felt that I really had written and produced and directed a love letter to these women, and I was like, ‘Oh, no, really? I love her so much,'” Murphy says. “I’m sorry that she feels badly about it, but I don’t know why she feels badly.” In reference to Feud‘s depiction of de Havilland, he insists, “There is absolutely nothing but love — there is no malice, there is nothing said that’s not treating her like a lady.”

Murphy emphasizes, “The other thing that I think people should know about the docudramas that I do — be it Feud or American Crime Story with O.J. or [the subjects of an upcoming installment] Charles and Diana and on and on — you know, we don’t just write those and film them; we write them and lawyers read them and they say, ‘Where did you get this piece of information from? Where is this quote of Olivia de Havilland coming from?’ Obviously, the construct of doing a documentary wrap-around is a device of docudrama that’s been done since God was a boy. But everything that we have Olivia or Joan or Bette saying is, I would say, based completely on existing information, either research or interviews. And in the case of Olivia de Havilland, we have a very long document, as we did with Joan and Bette, where we say, ‘This is where we got this line from. She said this in an interview.’ Is it directly the exact line? No, some of it’s tweaked, but it’s all based on fact, it’s all based on research. And this had been vetted for months before we even shot any episode.”

He notes, “I feel like Olivia de Havilland is a historical figure, and I’m just sad she didn’t love it as much as everybody else seemed to. But I also have the support of Fox, and we have 15 lawyers who have reviewed every claim and think there absolutely is no claim.” But, he emphasizes, “I have nothing but love and admiration for her, and I do think it will all end up okay. Maybe I’ll get to meet her in court, but I hope it doesn’t go that far. The first thing I would do is say, ‘Can I have an autograph? I really love you! I really do!'”

Throughout our conversation, while discussing past traumas, personal and professional, and even lawsuits, Murphy exudes calm, but he says that doesn’t mean he isn’t upset about some of what’s going on around him. “I feel very angry about the state of the country,” he vents, “and I feel like the best thing that I can do is sit up straight and shut up and just write characters that are going through difficulties, so that people can see that and, as human beings, hopefully recognize that pain is pain is pain. That’s what I’m interested in doing as my sort of political activism.”

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