#Prizzi

[a-state-of-bliss]

Anjelica Huston in 'Prizzi's Honour' (1985)

[tygerland]

[80smovies]

[jerichopalms]

#75: Prizzi's Honor (1985, dir. by John Huston)

[theoscarsproject]

Prizzi's Honor (1985). Charley Partanna is a hitman who works for the Prizzis, one of the richest crime families in the US. When he sees Irene Walker, it’s love at first sight. But he soon finds that she, too, is a killer for hire. Charley can overlook his suspicions, but he can’t turn off his heart. And the couple must remember that even if they love each other, the Prizzis love only money.

I'm not entirely sure where to start with this one. John Huston has directed some films I've really loved, but man, this is Not It. A tonal disaster that not even the film's terrific cast can save. It's been a few days since I watched it now, and I'm still not entirely sure what it was trying to be. Just a mess. Anjelica Huston looked amazing though at least. 3/10.

[thatgeekwiththeclipons]

Remembering Academy Award Winning writer and filmmaker John Huston! ^__^

[prizzy-art]

6.28.2023🎤

Lilli for my new pfp✨

[whywhatwherewhen]

Chapter 1: Internship

Why: First post

What: New work experience not New York

When:3 October

Where? Internship

I began a new internship at USJ’s services of career management and entrepreneurship. 

They help on 2 levels: SIP = Service de l’insertion professionnelle and EC2: centre d’entreprenariat et de competences. For both services they have a website alumniusj.org where you can check out job offers, Instagram/ facebook and twitter account. They also do special events to put in relation students and companies such as the Job fair, Hackathon… and they provide one on one coaching on how to prepare your Cv and cover letter and how to ace your job interview. It’s a continuous path in which they accompany and help students.

I personally didn’t even know they had these services. It’s an occasion for students to showcase themselves and to learn how to prepare for their future career.

Discovering the real world can be hard for 18-year olds students but I believe in getting prepared for it rather than faking that everything is perfect.

Ec2 service is still kind of new but is made to promote entrepreneurship; they help students who have an idea in mind they would like to turn into a business. The spirit is to show that its possible; if you have a crazy idea/dream/passion or hobbies you can do what you love. 

Entrepreneurship is something you can work on; proof is famous CEOs and on smaller scale success stories of students.

They have hired me to help on the events communication.

The problem I identified right away is that they have difficulties to reach students; the participation rate is low although they send emails every week. They have infiltered classes with "spies" = ambassadors who try to reach more students. Ambassadors are volunteers who speak about the services and send the links to all the classes.

Students I exchanged with were not searching for jobs, not searching to improve their soft skills or Cv, cover letters. Although, job interviews takes lots of preparation; it's not about finding a job only but it's more than that; it's related to the personal circle and the PR.When you get to know someone you apply the same rules. Stay true stay natural and spontaneous. But not too spontaneous also! It's all about balancing the seriousness and the fun.

Sometimes students don’t know about the services or think they don’t need to prepare for job offers or sometimes they are too SHY even to ask.

This may explain why the participation rate is low.

This is one of the factors I’ve came across a lot: shyness of students. And I always ask myself:

Why>

They have hired me to help on the events communication and to put my creativity to the test.

In order to familiarize myself with the work and the environment I have conducted a research about what they do, about the competitors on the market and about what they need. I have come to the conclusion that most of the young students are not yet searching for a job, they sometimes have a CV but it’s not finalized nor ready to be sent to recruiters and that they never did a job interview. So it’s a bit early for the students who are still majoring.

We only live once so 2 scenarios present themselves to us; act over-shy and get lost or scenario number 2 ;just understand that time will pass very quickly but and now is the moment to prove yourself.

Everyone did a first interview, everyone fucked up already once; flaws are flawless. If I drop my pen by error in a meeting I''ll just laugh about it with the recruiter by saying: I am a specialist in making pens fall; cringe, I know but I believe in irony and sarcasm.

Compared to stressing about such a small detail and fail my interview. Bloopers happen; anything can happen so let's laugh about it and move on.

I learned to be confident in all situations; if Im stressing, getting lost in my words/speech I will just acknowledge it maybe make it a joke about it and continue. Something between your teeth? a word you cannot prononciate? CHILL and listen to Relax by Mika. (always works out for me :)

Once I had spilled coffee all over my white chemise; I did as if it was on purpose designed on the chemise; I stayed confident and did not try to hide it. Being confident in our worst and best behavior is the true emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence begins with yourself and the interaction with others.

[citizenscreen]

John Huston’s PRIZZI’S HONOR hit theaters across the U.S. today in 1985.

The film was nominated for 7 Oscars and had one historic win, Best Supporting Actress Anjelica Huston, which made John Huston the only director to direct 2 members of his family to Oscars. Previously he directed his father Walter to a Best Supporting Actor win in THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE 1948.

[femmes-et-art]

Victor Gadino, La Famille Prizzi, 1986.

[ms-m-astrologer]

Transiting Venus enters Libra

Wednesday, November 8 - Monday, December 4

The good news is, Venus rules Libra, and she’s very happy to be home for a while. The bad news is, she’ll have a lot of challenges. Style over substance, “going along to get along” and refusing to take a stand when it’s necessary, being manipulative - things like that. And the hopeful news is that, if we can remember and adhere to Libra’s higher ground, we can spend this time making real progress.

How this could manifest in Venus’ various areas:

Art - as any music lover will tell you, “popular” doesn’t necessarily equate to “good.” If it did? As an example, Bruce Springsteen has never had a #1 hit song in the US - granted, he was competing against Prince in 1984, but what about the rest of the years?

Beauty - I remember reading a review of “Prizzi’s Honor” which described it as a conflict between “pretty” (Kathleen Turner) and “beautiful” (Angelica Huston). If we tend toward pretty, we’re missing out on depth of character.

Love - seeking personal validation through having a particular spouse (like wanting to date the most popular kid in high school), rather than a true partner. And then doing whatever it takes to acquire that “validating” spouse.

Money - blowing it all on makeup and disposable fashion. Or, we buy something because it’s impressive and not because it has any particular meaning for us.

These are the non-lunar aspects Venus will make. Give them a day or so on either side.

Wednesday, November 8 - Venus/Libra inconjunct Saturn/Pisces, 0°31’. Right off the bat, we have a difficult adjustment to make. Remember that Saturn is exalted in Libra - we’re being asked about our standards of justice and fairness.

Monday, November 13 - Venus/Libra (6°03’) sesquiquad Uranus Rx/Taurus (21°03’). Frustrations; “all that glisters is not gold” springs to mind.

Tuesday, November 14 - Venus/Libra square Vesta Rx/Cancer, 7°00’. We may turn ourselves off, sexually, if we think it will get us something we want.

Wednesday, November 15 - Venus/Libra inconjunct Jupiter Rx/Taurus, 8°45’. More “all that glisters;” with perhaps a little of “your eyes were bigger than your stomach.” Taking on toi much, or realizing it’s a much bigger and more difficult task than we anticipated.

Friday, November 17 - Venus/Libra (10°06’) semi-square Mars/Scorpio (25°06’). People in sexual relationships may feel this especially acutely. One partner may (as with the Vesta square) “turn off” or, conversely, be more demanding.

A “two-fer” with minor aspects from Lady Asteroids, on Sunday, November 19:

Venus/Libra semi-sextile Juno/Virgo, 12°11’

Venus/Libra (12°40’) semi-square Ceres/Scorpio (27°40’)

We’re trying to coordinate between demands of our partners (Juno) and our families (Ceres).

Another two-fer on Wednesday, November 22:

Venus/Libra (15°48’) sesquiquad Saturn/Pisces (0°48’)

Venus/Libra oppose Chiron Rx/Aries, 15°58’

These are rather more serious than what we’ve experiences so far - as are the remaining aspects. Even if we’ve been as tactful and graceful as we can manage, it isn’t enough. It’s important to really listen to what other people have to say. They get to have free will, too.

Sunday, November 26 - Venus/Libra inconjunct Uranus Rx/Taurus, 20°32’. A difficult adjustment. If we overindulged, it’s coming back to bite us in the butt.

Tuesday, November 27 - Venus/Libra opposite North Node/Aries, conjunct South Node/Libra, 22°39’. An opportunity to examine (at least) those Libra ways we mess ourselves up.

Wednesday, November 28 - Venus/Libra opposite Eris Rx/Aries, 24°19’. What did I say? Other people get to have free will, too. And if the shoe is on the other foot, and we find we’ve been manipulated, this is the day we could fight back.

Thursday, November 29 - Venus/Libra inconjunct Neptune Rx/Pisces, 24°54’. Taking those rose-colored glasses off, or having them removed for us.

Sunday, December 3 - Venus/Libra square Pluto/Capricorn, 28°33’. We’re aware that we haven’t done Venus or Libra very well (not just this transit, but in our past). We’ve seen that our past machinations were unfair - that our cowardice and complacency haven’t served us well - so, either we resolve to fix it during Venus’ imminent trip through Scorpio; or in Steven Forrest’s words, “we fail to look at ourselves; we imagine the issue to have its sole origin in the other person’s intransigence.”

Painful, I know. The higher Libra traits include justice and fairness; valuing other people; tact and diplomacy. We just need to be more consistent about expressing them - and we need to use them to reach out for the higher Aries traits, as represented by the North Node.

[justforbooks]

In the late 1960s, Burt Young dashed off a letter to Lee Strasberg, who ran the Actors Studio in New York, hoping to be taken on as a student. “Seriously, Lee, I don’t know if acting has anything for me, or vice versa, but I’m treading water,” he wrote. “So see me.”

The letter was intended to curry favour with a woman whom Young was trying to impress, and whose dream it was to study with Strasberg. Both she and Young were invited to audition. She quit after drying up during her first acting class but Strasberg was impressed by the stubby, paunchy Young, telling him: “You have huge tension about you. I feel you’re an emotional library.”

Less than a decade later, Young, who has died aged 83, found fame playing Paulie Pennino, the gormless, rough-and-tumble butcher who is brother-in-law to the aspiring prizefighter Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) in the rags-to-riches hit Rocky (1976).

“I thought the script had the cleanest street prose I’d ever read,” said Young. Among the film’s 10 Oscar nominations was one for him as best supporting actor. It won three prizes, including best picture.

In Young’s hands, Paulie was roguishly endearing as well as exasperating. The actor described him as “all burly on the outside and all quicksand inside”. Paulie’s tenderness toward Rocky is forever being complicated by his jealousy at the boxer’s success. Any initial tension or piquancy in the drama, however, was diluted by a stream of sequels in which Stallone and Young reprised their roles. One low-point was Rocky IV (1985), which begins with Paulie receiving a robot butler as a gift from Rocky, whose success has made him profligate. Paulie modifies the robot to give it a female voice.

He is last seen in the sixth instalment, Rocky Balboa (2006), where he is once again the boxer’s corner-man. The character’s death is alluded to in the spin-off Creed (2015), in which Young does not appear.

Paulie was typical of many of the roles that came Young’s way: you could hear the hair growing in their ears, smell the stink on their singlets, feel their brain cells dying. In Back to School (1986), for instance, he played a tough-guy chauffeur described by the hero, played by the comic Rodney Dangerfield, as “an animal. In his family, he’s only the second generation to stand upright.”

For Young, it was never that simple. In Robert Aldrich’s vulgar cop comedy The Choirboys (1977), his turn as a cackling sergeant was singled out by the Washington Post as “human and appealing”. Cast as the flawed, the coarse or the criminal in films such as Sergio Leone’s gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984) or Alan Alda’s whimsical Betsy’s Wedding (1989), he allowed a rumpled warmth to shine through the cracks, his actorly intelligence informing every choice.

Esteemed co-stars respected his craft. Jack Nicholson shared a scene with Young at the start of Roman Polanski’s neo-noir thriller Chinatown (1974), and was said to have greatly admired the actor and to have used him as the model for the laconic hood he played in Prizzi’s Honour (1985).

James Caan, with whom Young first worked on the shore-leave love story Cinderella Liberty (1973), wangled parts for him in The Gambler (1974), inspired by (though not adapted from) the Dostoevsky novella of the same name, and The Killer Elite (1975). The latter was the first of two films that Young made for the director Sam Peckinpah, the other being the action-comedy Convoy (1978).

“Everybody was scared of [Peckinpah],” said Young. “The studios were scared of him. The other actors. And so they would go through me, because I had no fear of nobody.”

It was Aldrich who became Young’s friend and loyal collaborator, directing him in The Choirboys, the nuclear-age thriller Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) and …All the Marbles (1981), a salty comedy about female wrestling released outside the US as The California Dolls.

A 1978 Esquire magazine profile dwelt on the actor’s history of juvenile delinquency and general criminality, noting that his life was “lifted right out of the pages of Damon Runyon”.

He was born in Queens, New York. His birth name has been listed variously as Gerald De Louise and Richard Morea, with Burt Young the name he adopted once he became an actor. His mother, Josephine, and father, Michael, an ice-delivery man and sheet metal worker who later trained as a teacher, tried to improve his chances by sending him to Bryant high school, an establishment in a better neighbourhood, but he was soon expelled. He attended St Anne’s academy, from which he was also ejected.

At 16, he joined the Marines, served tours of duty in Japan and the Philippines, and developed an aptitude for boxing. After a dishonourable discharge, he returned to New York and boxed professionally, training under the renowned Cus D’Amato and Charley Goldman. Fighting under three different aliases, he claimed to have amassed a record of 17 wins to one loss.

He became a truck driver, managed a silk-screen printing business that went bankrupt, part-owned a bakery and a bar, and worked for his brother’s Manhattan carpet-cleaning firm, before starting an outlet of his own in Queens. He later opened his own restaurant, Burt Young’s Il Boschetto, in the Bronx.

His first acting jobs included parts in the daytime soap The Doctors (1969) and the crime comedy The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971). Over more than half a century, he accumulated around 160 movie and TV credits including The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke, a harrowing adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), the Hugh Grant comedy Mickey Blue Eyes (1999), which reunited him with Caan, and Transamerica (2005), in which he was the father of a trans woman played by Felicity Huffman.

He also wrote and starred in two films: the TV movie Daddy, I Don’t Like It Like This, about a boy whose father tries to toughen him up, and the sentimental Uncle Joe Shannon (both 1978), in which he played a bereaved trumpeter. In recent times, Young devoted much of his life to painting.

One of his most wrenching performances was in a 2001 episode of the HBO series The Sopranos. He played an ageing hoodlum, dying of cancer and grateful to be given one final hit to carry out. The assignment ends unforgettably in blood and bathos.

Crime was an area he felt he might have lapsed into were it not for the approval he received from Strasberg. “I come from that life,” he said. “To this day, two of my best friends are doing 100 years.”

But he was acting well into his dotage. “Rather than flying high, I’m wide,” he said in 2002. “I still have ambition, but I’m slow. I’ll never be Tom Cruise.”

Nor would anyone have wanted him to be: there was more character in one grin or grimace from Young than in a dozen vehicles featuring sleeker, shinier stars.

He is survived by Anne, his daughter, from his marriage to Gloria, who died in 1974.

🔔 Burt Young (Gerald De Louise), actor, born 30 April 1940; died 8 October 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[starbage]

side characters

their names are Halcyon Swirl, Prismatic "Prizzy" Debris, and my personal favorite, Synthesizer Turquoise.

[sunpoweredog]

My journey of self-discovery as a therian was quite a fun ride. I've described it several times to my friends but I guess it would be nice to document everything into one long post.

My very first ?sona? (not as a fursona, but as an image of myself??) was a dark blue dragon with yellow wings and belly scales. I don't have many pictures of this form left, and don't feel connected to it anymore. It was some kind of a night+stars+water dragon, I guess.

I will add a picture here once I find my childhood drawings of this dragon form

Next one was a cat, but it felt forced and emerged more as a result of my Warrior Cats obsession in middle school. It was a diluted tortoiseshell longhair cat. I was clinging to this form for a long time, though, but it was nothing more than roleplaying.

At the same time I was obsessed with wolves, howling and growling at my peers, googling "How To Become A Werewolf Real Working Spell", etc. But a wolf identity never felt quite fitting either. Some interactions with wolf therians and their experiences made me realise That's Not Me. So I started searching.

Some other animals that I have considered to be connected to were:

otters (legs waaay too short and I'm not That Much of a water person)

smilodons (i do sometimes get mild shifts of being a Big Beast though, but my claws are DEFINITELY not retractable)

cheetahs (their body is quite similar to what I feel but the vocalisations feel WRONG)

I was searching for both physical and behavioural characteristics that I felt, such as:

Height. I feel that my point of view shouldn't be much higher than 1m off the ground

Limbs should be LONG and lanky

Claws are non-retractable, I feel them clicking on the ground as I walk

Ears aren't big and pointy, they are either rounded or floppy/drooping

I have a mane??? Weird?? Maybe not a mane but some kind of long and/or thick fur on my neck

No small spots or stripes on my pelt, colors blend in quite smoothly

No real preference for a certain terrain. I like forests, plains, rivers, hills, swamps, steppes and even deserts, but not the seashore, not the mountains, and not the tundra.

Definitely not a solitary but neither a big pack animal, lives in a small family group?? Also tolerates humans and human environment well.

I bark.

It was a bit frustrating for me to realise that I wasn't some Cool Beast like a sabretooth cat, or a reindeer, or a dragon, but... Just some dog.

But what kind of dog?

My first choice was a Caucasian Shepherd Dog. The mane, the colors, the size felt quite right, but not the bulkiness and the thick fur. My human body isn't very strong and sturdy, and I considered it wishful thinking to think of myself as of such a beast.

Next pick was a sighthound, a borzoi or a saluki. But I've never seen a borzoi that has the right pelt color, and they are way too tall and social for me. And salukis don't have the mane, though the overall body shape was similar to what I felt myself, and the "grizzle" color feels almost right.

So for a while, I presented as a weird mutt, a pariah mixed breed dog looking somewhat like this:

Being a mutt felt like a permission to go wild and add whatever features felt right, so I experimented a lot. And then I stumbled upon a photo of a silken windhound. That was like a revelation. The colors were off, but the shape felt So Correct that I felt euphoric just by looking at pictures of this breed.

So this is the form I'm content with, and feel comfortable enough. The only weird features are that I feel still a bit bulkier than average windhound, and have an additional toe on hind paws!

(The dog on my profile picture is named Tangaloor Prizzi's Honor, by the way!)

[classicfilmfan64]

Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, Anjelica Huston, and John Huston in 'Prizzi's Honor' (1985). Jack and Anjelica dated, for many years and John directed the film. Jack and John were also both in 'Chinatown'.

[thatgeekwiththeclipons]

Happy 86th Birthday to 3x Academy Award Winning, 6x Golden Globe Winning, 3x BAFTA Winner, SAG Award Winning, Grammy Winning actor Jack Nicholson! ^__^