#again. 25. TWENTY FIVE YEARS OF AGE. @boss come back I have so many questions

[notbecauseofvictories]

not quite sure how to cope with the fact that I told my boss I'll be turning 32 in a couple weeks, and having her respond, "oh, I thought you were 25"

[iliketowrite1996]

Love and Other Valuable Things 5/6

I deleted a  lot of things form my story, so there will be only one more chapter to go here. Thank you to everyone who support, read, commented, etc. And thanks for putting up with all of the plot twists! I got one more for you, but it’s setting up to something bigger.

TRIGGER WARNINGS AND THEMES- Cheating, insecurity, age gap relationship, manipulation, mentions of death, scandal, worrying T'Challa chose someone because they are younger, player!T'Challa mentioned, one night stands, emotional distress, mentions of counseling

It’s been three weeks since you’ve talked to T’Challa. Ever since he introduced you to Jayde, you've been avoiding hm. You’ve busied yourself with getting accustomed to a new work environment, shopping and setting up for your apartment, and spending time with your parents and Shuri.

    So far, your tactic of ignoring T’Challa’s messages and calls have worked. He hasn’t even sent a member of the Dora Milaje to check up on you, so you know he’s not pressed about seeing you anytime soon.

    That is, until he is.   

T’Challa shows up at your work, somehow convincing your boss to let him slip into your corner office while you are working.

    ‘’Lilly,’’ you sigh, thinking it’s your college age assistant, ‘’I thought I told you I’d be working and that I need privacy.’’

    T’Challa clears his throat, ‘’I am not Lilly, but I am sorry to disturb you.’’

    You look up to T’Challa, the man who is part of the reason that you are four and a half months pregnant,the man that broke your heart again.

    After you finally reconnected.

    ‘’Your highness,’’ you being curtly, ‘’What are you doing here?’’

    ‘’I came to see you.’’

    ‘’I am very busy, your majesty. Wakanda’s Social Section is not going to write itself,’’ you stand up,ready to move past him and go see how the heck he even got past, but he blocks you, ‘’Please let me go, King T’Challa.’’

    ‘’Stop it with that nonsense. You know me. The rest of your office is out to lunch. So, please, talk to me. Why have you been avoiding me.’’

    ‘’T’Challa’’ you drop the charade of respect, ‘’I mean… you tell me you want to be with me. That you hope when I come to Wakanda, we can make this work. Oh, I’m sorry, what we had. You said that we could make it work. Now you’re prancing around with that young thing. Tell me, T’Challa, how old is she?’’

    He sighs, knowing that this conversation will continue until he gives you answers, ‘’She’s 25.’’

    ‘’Wow, about a whole seven years younger than me. Is that why you like her better? Because you can run your game on her and not on me,’’you laugh humorlessly, ‘’Because you can treat her as badly as you did every other woman? Use her and ditch her?’’

    ‘’You have no idea what you’re talking about,’’ T’Challa pinches the bridge of his nose, ‘’I am not using her. In fact-’’

    ‘’Is she pregnant?,’’ you continue, ‘’Is our baby going to have a little brother or sister? Someone from the Udaku family who will accept them other than Shuri?’’

    ‘’Listen to me!,’’ T’Challa begs, pleading with you to let him tells his side of the story as he grabs your shoulders, ‘’I am not seriously dating her. This whole thing was set up by my mother and Adisa, who is in charge of PR.’’

    You’re reeling from this news, trying to understand what this means,’’So… wait, Jayde is your fake girlfriend?’’

    ‘’As fake as those rumors about the Black Panther being a real cat,’’ he rolls his eyes, ‘’I did all of this to protect you. I promise you that I did. I would rather not be with you, thank you be with me and hurt you.’’

    ‘’So, to avoid hurting me, you pretended you were involved with someone else… which hurt me,’’ you clarify, to which he shrugs.

    ‘’It was a flawed plan, but I will admit that I was under a lot of pressure when I decided it. I would do anything to make you and this baby happy, and to keep you safe. I mean it when I say that I still love you.’’

    For so many years, you considered T’Challa the one that got away. And while you believed that you’d find someone eventually, one day. You knew that the one could never compete with the one that got away.

    So now you’re standing here, after this soap-opera-esque chain of events with a man who’s claiming he loves you.

    But does he?

    ‘’If you love me,’’ you begin, ‘’Like I love you… then understand that we can make this work. We love each other, T’Challa. We waited ten years to be back together again. Why mess that up now?’’

    ‘’But if you get hurt-’’

    ‘’If I get hurt, or if the baby gets hurt, or if you get hurt… we have each other, baby,’’ you raise a hand, caressing his cheek, ‘’I love you, T’Challa. But I can’t live love this way. Hiding our love. If that’s what this is. I can’t do that anymore, T’Challa.’’

    ‘’You won’t have to. I’d rather shout my love for you from the rooftops,’’ he admits, ‘’And we will deal with whatever comes our way. So, if you don't already have plans, tell your baby and mother that we will have dinner at the palace tonight. And we will let them know about this… the start of a relationship? Amd that the baby is mine. In a few months, when you’re showing more. We’ll reveal to the public.’’

    It all seems rushed. And, to an outsider, it would. But you and T’Challa both know that this moment has been building up for over twenty years now. And despite the rough patch you two hit, you wouldn’t want to be going through this with anyone else.

    ‘’I don’t know if this is love, but I feel it is,’’ you tell him when he moves so your head can rest on his chest.

    ‘’I feel the same. Because even if it is not romantic love, I know that I love you as a friend.’’

    ‘’But, T’Challa?’’

    ‘’Yes, entle?’’

    ‘’Can you go? I’ve got to get my work done before my shift is over, and I think that the office would be shocked to see me snuggled up to the king.’’

    He chuckles then, placing a kiss on your head before promising to see you later and exiting.

    And with that,you sit at your desk and get back to work, excited for tonight.

        That night,you dress to impress. You wear a floral dress that shows off your ever growing baby bump, and the wedges that Shuri bought you as a gift when she was in London last week.

    ‘’I am so happy that you are here!,’’ she loops her arm through yours, ‘’I need someone to look at these memes with until Peter gets here next week,’’

    ‘’Your brother never has understood young people’s humor,’’ you muse.

    ‘’Ay, are you calling me old,’’ he questions, entering with Dora and Ayo flanking him.

    ‘’I call it like I see it, dear,’’ you smirk,letting him hug you.

    Pleasantries are exchanged between him and your parents as Rmaonda  and Adisa join you,and pretty soon all of you are sitting down to a nice meal.

    ‘’May I have everyone’s attention,’’ T’Challa taps his glass with his fork before clearing his throat, ‘’I have an announcement.’’

    ‘’Oh,’’ Ramonda raises an eyebrow.

    ‘’Yes. Jadye and I broke up.’’

    Adisa’s eyes widen, and she begins choking on her water, sputtering as Shuri gently patted her back.

    ‘’My king! Why did you not tell me,’’ she questions through clenched teeth.

    ‘’Because I did not think it mattered,’’ he says pointedly, ‘’I can live my own life. I make my own decisions, and I need to take responsibility for them.’’   

‘’T’Challa, Don’t.’’

    You don’t miss the way that Ramonda glares daggers at you as Adisa warns T’Challa.

    ‘’I am going to be a dad, in about five months.’’

    ‘’King T’Challa, do not!’’

    ‘’And the mother of my child is none other than this smart, amazing, patient, beautiful woman right here, ‘’T’Challa beams at you, ‘’Right here.’’

    You grin at him as he takes your hand, helping you stand before pressing a kiss to the back of your hand.

    ‘’Wait, wait, wait… you’re pregnant by the king,’’ your dad’s eyes widen hilariously, ‘’Are you sure.’’

    ‘’I’m sure, dad. There’s no way that this could be anyone else’s baby.’’

    ‘’I do not need to hear details,’’ your mother sings, clasping her hands together, ‘’Why did you keep it a secret so long?’’   

‘’Because he is king. Him having a child with someone that h is not married to will ring a scandal. He just became king. Give him time to adjust before bringing this shame,’’ Adisa begins, using words that Ramonda would have used.

    ‘’How very dare you,’’ your mother hisses, ‘’My daughter brings shame to no one, The king should be honored that she is having this baby with him.’’

    ‘’And I am. Adisa, quite frankly, I do not care for your attitude in this moment. I will have to ask you to leave, your job be terminated immediately.’’

    Adisa’s eyes go wide in fear, as she looks to Ramonda for help.

    And, suddenly. You’re putting all the little pieces together.

    ‘’T’Challa, no. This is not Adisa’s doing, it’s your mother’s.’’

    ‘’Entle,’’ he looks on in confusion, ‘’What do you mean?’’

    ‘’You don’t want him to be with me, do you,’’ you stand, moving so you’re now around the table to be face-to-face with Ramonda, ‘’You’re the one that’s ashamed of me and of this baby.’’

    ‘’Do not speak to her that way,’’ T’Challa says gently, pausing when Queen Mother raises a hand.

    ‘’I am nashed of you. If my son had to get anyone pregnant, I am glad that it was you. YOu have a nice head on your shoulders. And though I do think you two rushed, I see that he loves you, and that this was not a night orn out of his lust, insecurity, or impulsiveness. Pleasedo not think that I am ashamed of the child that you are growing in your stomach,either. I love my grandchild already. But yes, I'm to blame for this.’’

    ‘’Mother,’’ Shuri whispers, hand covering her mouth.

    ‘’Mother… how could you do this? Why?,’’ T’Challa moves, but she looks to him with tears in her eyes, ‘’Mother?’’

    ‘’If we are going to do this, we are going to sit down and discuss it as a family. All seven of us. And we will deal with whatever comes up  tonight.’’

    That’s how the seven of you find yourself in what would be the living room0 the family's area where they got to sit and be together.

    ‘’What is going on, mother? Talk to me?’’

    ‘’Years ago, a woman came and claimed that she was pregnant with a child. This was right after your abab and I had started seeing each other. As you know, we’d only dated for a year before getting married. This woman claimed that she was pregnant with T’Chaka’s child. This caused widespread scandal. People were saying negative things about him, old fashioned elders wanted him to step down and for N’Jobu to step up, and it generally just made life unpleasant. I saw what your baba went through, T’Challa. I saw him struggle to maintain composure in an environment where people felt like he was not fit to lead. I did not want that to happen to you.’’

    ‘’Mother… that would not have happened to me. We have an understanding. This is my baby. I love her,and she loves me, if only as friends. You can not protect me from everything mother,’’ T’Challa sighs as you, your parents, Shuri and Adisa watch on.

    ‘’I realize that now. And I hope that, in time, you will forgive me.’’

    ‘’I do, mother,’’ T’Challa records immediately, ‘’I forgive you. But I can not say the same for the mother of my child. That is a decision that must be left up to her.’’

    T’Challa has placed the ball in your court, and it's heavy on you to either shoot the basket and forgive her or leave it there.

    While the whole thing was genuinely messed up, you can see why T’Challa’s mother wet thought so much trouble to protect her son. Especially after everything that happens with T’Chaka this year.

    So you decide to forgive her, only on one condition.

    ‘’We all need to go to therapy. Grudges can't’ be held and we have to work together for the good of this baby,’’ you place a hand on your stomach as you speak, ‘’I’m willing to try if you are. Are you all ready”?’’

    You sit and wait for their responses, smiling to yourself when  they all nod.

    And, just like that, you, your parents, Adisa, and the Udaku family are all on your way to healing your bond.

And you’ve learned one more valuable quality that makes up a family- patience.

Because something tells you, you’re gonna need a lot of it.

DISCLAIMER- I own no Marvel Characters or their fictional worlds, countries, planets, galaxies, countries, cities, towns, etc.

@ashanti-notthesinger @destinio1 @afraiddreamingandloving @starsshines-blog @airis-paris14 @syreanne @chaneajoyyy @90sinspiredgirl @shemiahsmelanin @zillmonger @skysynclair19 

 @constantlycravingtheunknown @imaginewhoever @wakanda-inspired @pocmarvelworks @theunsweetenedtruth @dreampovx @adrioola21 @supremethunda @thisiskayesworld @mcusocialimagines @priya212  @kumkaniudaku  @airis-paris14 @alexundefined @fonville-designs   @mellowjellow6 @omg-itsnadi @maddiestudentwritergaines @dadinhas-heat @jozigrrl @kaykay0829 @nerd-lovely @babygotl01292003 @oceanscorazon @yoyolovesbucky 

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 6/4/2021 - THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT, SPIRIT UNTAMED, CHANGING THE GAME, ALL LIGHT EVERYWHERE, GULLY and More

So yeah, I can happily say that the Weekend Warrior is back to where it began and where I like it to be, which is primarily a weekend preview about box office. I’ll still do a number of reviews each week, but that was never the plan when I started this column… are you sitting down? Nearly twenty years ago, this coming October, in fact.

Anyway, this past weekend, the extended Memorial Day one, ended up being quite a boon for the box office, which had been struggling ever since theaters slowly reopened last Fall, joined by New York City and Los Angeles this past March.There had been a couple strong weekends, but it took the might of the sequel, A Quiet Place II, and Disney’s prequel, Cruella, to really kick things into overdrive and mark the start of a real summer movie season where we finally had a box office where the top 10 grossed more than $100 million for the first time since March 2020.

With that in mind, we come into June with two new wide releases, both of them franchises, but one of them a much bigger and more lasting one. THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT (New Line) is the third movie following the case files of supernatural investigators Ed and Larraine Warren, as played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The first two movies were directed by James Wan before the series branched off into a number of spin-offs, including three movies about the haunted doll, Annabelle. This is the first movie with “The Conjuring” in the title in five years after The Conjuring 2 also opened with over $40 million and grossed $100 million total domestic.

The third movie in the initial franchise branch follows another case of Ed and Larraine Warren, this one involving a young man in Brookfield, CT named Arne Johnson (Ruairi O'Connor) who becomes possessed by a demonic presence while helping the Warrens with an exorcism on the 8-year-old brother of his girlfriend. When he brutally murders a friend, he’s sentenced to the death penalty, and the Warrens need to find out how he got possessed and prove this to the court to spare his life.

This one is directed by Michael Chaves, who also directed The Curse of La Llorona (which was sort of tangentially connected to the series), and I’ll write more about the movie in my review below, but if you like exorcism movies and the Conjuring movies, then this is a good one.

There are a couple things in play with the latest “Conjuring” movie, the first one being the fact that it’s opening on the second weekend of the super-strong A Quiet Place Part II. While John Krasinski’s horror sequel should continue to do strong business with probably $25 million or more, the question is whether strong word-of-mouth might take away from potential business for the new “Conjuring” movie. At this time, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t enough theaters and screens to handle two big horror sequels, although people who finally got out of their house to see A Quiet Place Part II might feel more comfortable about returning to theaters, and a “Conjuring” sequel is a good follow-up.

On the other hand, the “Conjuring” is a franchise that has started to peter out with only 2018’s The Nun, which tied directly into the events from The Conjuring 2, actually opening even better than the original two movies with $53.8 million. It was followed by the less-connected The Curse of Llarona and Annabelle Comes Home, both which grossed less than $100 million domestic. And those were both in the “before times.” Although A Quiet Place Part II should still be going strong, it’s likely to drop from the people rushing out to see it last weekend. Another problem this Conjuring faces is that it is available to watch on HBO Max, which to many, could be the way to see it, essentially cutting into its opening weekend potential.

I think The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It should be able to capitalize on the return of theaters and the popularity of other movies about demonic possession in general to make just a little over $26 million this weekend, although it’s likely to be a very close race for the top spot at the box office against A Quiet Place’s second weekend, depending on how far it falls.

Mini-Review: I have to admit something before getting into this review. I actually lived not too far from where the original true story on which this movie was based took place when I was 16. Being quite an impressionable teen at the time, I was fairly familiar with the actual case. Because of that, this Conjuring probably connected with me in more ways than the others, but also, I think that having had experience directing the first two movies allowed James Wan to step back and just act as producer (and co-plotter) in order for Chaves to really shine as a director.

The movie starts with the Warrens in the midst of an exorcism for 8-year-old David Glatzel (Jullian Hillard), who has been possessed and is violently tearing up the house before Ed and Larraine do their thing. David’s older sister Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook) is dating Arne, who bravely calls for the demon to take him instead. In the midst of being attacked by the possessed David, Ed has a heart attack that puts him in a coma, so he’s the only one who realizes that Arne has been possessed. Days later, Arne repeatedly stabs and kills a friend of his.

I don’t want to go too much further into where the movie goes from there, other than it’s almost like a procedural mystery movie where the Warrens end up investigating another case of a missing girl that might tie into what’s happening with Arne. The film cuts between Arne in prison and the Warrens trying to solve that other mystery.

Wilson and Farmiga are great as always but they really up the game of everyone around them including 8-year-old Hilliard, who is already a genre superstar, but really creates a lot of the terror in the opening sequence, which ties closer into the overall story than other prologues in the previous movies. I especially liked how the Warrens are clearly older now and much more vulnerable to the demons they’re trying to beat. Farmiga even gives Larraine an older woman’s hairstyle, more akin to a woman of her age in the ‘80s.

But the real selling point for this new “Conjuring” movie is that it once again uses everything possible to create some insanely great scares, and not just the hokey jump scares we see in far too many horror films. As with Wan on the first two movies, director Chaves and his team brilliantly use sound and lighting to create the eeriest situations for the Warrens to enter, and boy, is it effective at making you wonder when the next scare is coming.

As much as I enjoyed the first two “Conjuring” movies and appreciated them for the amazing work Wan and his team did in creating scares, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It offers new layers and levels to what Ed and Larraine do, including a particularly apropos nemesis that makes me that there might be a lot more cases to be explored in such a manner.

Rating: 8.5/10

The animated SPIRIT UNTAMED (DreamWorks/Universal) is more of an anomaly, because it’s a new movie in a series that began with the early DreamWorks Animation movie, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron from way back in 2002 (back in my first year doing this column!). It opened over Memorial Day weekend against the second weekend of Star Wars Episode II and the fourth weekend of Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man, and yeah, it got demolished. The movie opened with $17 million, which isn’t really bad for 2002, but it also went on to gross $73 million domestic, which is great. In 2017, DreamWorks Animation brought the animated horse back for the Netflix animated series, Spirit Riding Free, and obviously, that did well enough that they wanted to return Spirit to theaters.

I’m not going to review Spirit Untamed, because honestly, it’s not really my kind of movie, but I did enjoy it, and I think a lot of younger girls who dream of having their own ponies will love it as well. It’s just a very well crafted film, directed by Elaine Bogan that goes into a lot of nice places while staying away from some of the typical animated movie tropes -- i.e pratfalls and body humor for the youngest of kids. It’s just a sweet and exciting young person’s adventure that I would recommend to parents for sure.

This is an extremely hard movie to gauge in terms of the interest that might bring families out to theaters. Presumably, the Netflix series is popular enough, but people are learning that movies like this will eventually be on VOD and streaming. In fact, DreamWorks Animation’s NEXT movie, a sequel to the hit The Boss Baby will be both in theaters AND on Comcast streamer Peacock at the same time. Spirit Untamed will probably be available on VOD in 18 days as is the case with most Universal films post-pandemic.

I’m not sure how many theaters this will get (maybe 2,000?), so I think Spirit Untamed might still be able to pull in $4 million this weekend, but maybe it’ll surprise me and do better. Even though little girls still love horses, I’m not sure it’s enough for their parents to buy tickets rather than wait until this is on streaming.

Oh, you know what? It’s a new month, and that means that I might as well bring back a section that has lapsed in the past year …

REPERTORY!

Yes, a lot more movie theaters in New York and L.A. have now reopened, so I’ll see if I can fit in some repertory offerings in the column each week.

Exciting news at my own local theater, the Metrograph, as they’ve just announced a Metrograph TV APP, available on Fire TV, Apple TV and others. This means that you can now become a Digital member ($5/month; $50/year) and you can digitally stream Metrograph programming directly to your TV set. (Me, I’ve been using mirroring from my computer for the past year.) If you’re a member you can watch Lisa Rovner’s fantastic doc, Sisters with Transistors, which I wrote about before. If you get on board now, you’ll be able to watch the Metrograph’s upcoming “Whole Lotta Herzog” series, which features two months of the German filmmaker’s work including some quite obscure little-seen offerings as well as a number of true classics like Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Nosferatu The Vampyr . If you’ve missed some of Herzog’s great work, now’s a great time to be a Metrograph member. Oh, yeah, and the theater will be reopening its theaters to in-person audiences in September!

Uptown at Film at Lincoln Center, they’re finishing off “Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2021” and showing JIa Zhangke’s latest film, Swimming Out Til The Sea Turns Blue, in its theater. Okay, fine, neither is repertory but we’re glad to have FilmLinc back!

Back downtown, Film Forum is showing Jacque Deray’s 1969 thriller La Piscine, starring Alain Delon & Romy Schneider, and Fellini’s 8 ½ only in its theaters, and similarly cool stuff streaming, so yeah, nice to have them back as well. Also, a new 4k restoration of The Ladykillers, starring Alec Guinness will open at Film Forum this Friday.

A few blocks away, the IFC Center continues to show George Romero’s long-lost 1973 film, The Amusement Park, which is also available this week on Shudder.

Okay, I think that’s enough repertory. Let’s get back to the new movies.

This week’s “Chosen One” is Michael Barnett’s documentary CHANGING THE GAME, which is now playing on Hulu, a full two years after it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019. This is an amazing and quite timely film about a trio of teen student athletes. First up is Mack Beggs, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Dallas, who by Texas rules or law has to compete in the girls’ wrestling division, because he was born female. Part of his transition involves taking steroids, so he quickly becomes the state champion, beating all the teen girls he takes on, although he’d much rather be wrestling boys, because he is a boy. Living in Connecticut, transgender runner Andraya Yearwood is allowed to compete against other girls, but even that is deemed unfair (mostly by the parents of other girls) since Andraya is much bigger and stronger than her competition. Lastly, there’s transgender skier Sarah Rose Huckman whose state of New Hampshire requires student athletes to get gender confirmation surgery in order to compete in the class of her choosing. The catch is that one has to be 18 to get said surgery.

These are three really interesting entries into the ongoing debate about whether transgender youth should be allowed to play sports. Beggs is a particularly interesting case because he WANTS to wrestle against boys but isn’t allowed to. Sarah Huckman doesn’t have quite the challenge of Andraya, because she is diminutive and better at passing as female. She’s also pretty amazing as an activist, fighting against the discriminatory laws of her state, in such a way that she really creates some inspirational moments even if Beggs gets a lot of the attention in Barnett’s film.

But the way Barnett tells these three stories is what makes it such an important one about a very complex issue, including interviews with the three kids’ parents and immediate families, all of whom are quite supportive even as their kids garner ridiculous amounts of hate from other parents.

This is the thing. Transgender boys and girls should have equal rights with their peers, and that includes playing sports. They’re already forced to go through a lot due to their gender dysphoria, so to have to, on top of that, deal with scorn and derision from jealous over-competitive parents whose own kids aren’t able to achieve the same level of competition, I mean it’s just bullshit. This movie really hit me hard in the gut, because I have close friends who have transitioned who are constantly dealing with hatred and scorn and to have politicians in states like Texas and Florida and other places making their situation worse, it just kills me. THESE ARE KIDS, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

I’m quite shocked that it took so long for someone to release Barnett’s film, but this also couldn’t be better timing to add to a conversation where there’s just too many people in this country who do not or will not try to understand what trans kids are contending with on a daily basis. Changing the Game is the perfect conversation starter, and a great way for people unable (or unwilling) to understand the trans struggle to see it from a fresh, new perspective.

One of the fairly high profile docs out of this year's Sundance Film Festival was Theo Anthony’s ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE (Super, LTD), a really intriguing movie that seems like science fiction at first but actually is an in-depth look into surveillance cameras, taking a particularly detailed look at the Axon body camera system used by many police, cameras triggered by the use of officer’s weapons.

It takes a little time to understand what Anthony is trying to achieve with what is essentially a thesis paper done via cinema verité-style documentary (not my favorite), but it pulls you in with its look at the history of surveillance and footage that might seem disparate at first but comes together as the movie comes along.

I found this to be a particularly compelling film, especially with the music, which is a bit of a musical cacophony, though it seems to work with the robotic female voice-over that tells us what we’re watching. (Something that tends to lack in most cinema verité films.) As you can tell from the image above, the film is fairly avant garde with a lot of gorgeous images that might not necessarily fit in with the subject, but it does add to the overall narrative about surveillance and vision. I thought it was funny that my first reaction to this was similar to my reaction to last year's Oscar-nominated Time, because I went into both movies not realizing they were documentaries.

Ultimately, the film does become kind of scary because we have heard so much about the importance of body cams on police, but Anthony’s film shows how unreliable that footage is as evidence in a case. While All Light, Everywhere is a very different movie from what I was expecting, it shines a focused light (sorry for the pun) on a piece of technology that we’ve become so reliant on to achieve justice but is still clearly quite flawed.

A couple other docs that I wasn’t able to find the time to watch, both involving sports, are Graham Shelby’s CITY OF ALI (Abramorama) and Chase Ogden’s SUPER FRENCHIE (Greenwich). The first one is pretty obviously about boxing great Muhammad Ali, but it deals specifically with the week after his death when the people of his Kentucky hometown and the rest of the world came together to celebrate the greatest boxer of all time. Super Frenchie is about professional skier and base jumper Matthias Giraud, who takes on bigger challengers and more dangerous stunts just as he is about to start a family. These both sound great, and I’ll do my best to watch and write about them once I do.

Actually, I watched Super Frenchie just as I was finishing up this column, and it’s pretty great if you love amazing footage of fantastic skiing stunts. I’ve seen quite a few great docs in this vein -- Free Solo comes to mind -- and I generally liked this one, too, especially since it covers quite a long span in Giraud's life and gets into him becoming a father. I actually would have loved to see this in a movie theater, but you can, since it’s opening in theaters Friday as well as Virtual Cinema and TVOD, so lots of opportunities to watch it.

Next up is Nabil Elderkin’s GULLY (Paramount Home Entertainment), which hits theaters on Friday but then will be on Digital and VOD on Tuesday, June 8. This one also premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, oddly enough, and it ALSO follows a trio of teenagers, but this is a narrative film, not a doc, but it very well could be a doc with the honesty it handles its subjecet.

It follows three young L.A. friends -- Kelvin Harrison’s mute Jesse, Jacob Latimore’s Calvin and Charlie Plummer’s Nicky -- kids who are constantly getting into serious trouble and in danger of ending up in the system. As we watch them committing crime and complete chaos, it’s counterbalanced by Jonathan Majors’ Greg, a longtime friend of the boys’ families, who himself is being released from jail and trying to stay out of the life that put him there. There’s also Terrence Howard as an enigmatic street poet, who doesn’t seem to serve much purpose until the end, while Amber Heard plays Nicky’s mother, who seems to be a stripper or prostitute of some kind, I couldn’t really figure it out.

I can definitely tell why critics might not like Elderkin’s work, because he comes from the world of music video and has a kinetic style of filmmaking that keeps things moving, which might not be the case in normal indie dramas, which might involve a lot of dialogue vs. just showing these three kids and their lives. These are all kids that have been damaged by familial relationships and society as a whole, who have pretty much been left to fend for themselves. The thing is, and this might be another issue that other critics had with the film, is that Calvin and Nicky are especially unlikable due to the violent crimes they get up to, and at one point, the movie reminded me a bit of a modern-day real world A Clockwork Orange. By the way, Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my top 5 favorite movies of all time.

What Elderkin has going for him is this amazing cat. This is earlier work by Harrison, an actor who is quickly becoming the dramatic actor to keep an eye on, and the same can be said for Jonathan Major. I’ve long been a fan of Plummer and this is a very different role from the nice guys he’s played in the past. Latimore also gives a really exciting performance, as well, and the only one who disappointed me a little was Heard, who at times gets a bit out of control with her performance.

Gully is a tough and challenging film, but it’s one with such a strong message delivered so well by Elderkin and his cast, that it bums me a little this might not be seen by a very big audience, competing with so much other content right now. Maybe it’s not quite as strong narratively as other films of its ilk -- Monsters and Men comes to mind as an improved version of this -- but it’s a compelling character study that ultimately delivers what’s intended.

Hitting Shudder on Thursday is Damien McCarthy’s Irish horror film CAVEAT (Shudder), starring Jonathan French as Isaac, a drifter who is hired to look after a psychologically troubled woman whose husband committed suicide in an abandoned house on an island. Once he gets there, he learns that he’s forced to wear a chain securely fastened to the basement floor to prevent him from going into certain rooms, but he soon finds out that there’s a lot more to that one simple “caveat.”

I’m always excited for a new weekly Shudder movie, and this one looks quite fantastic with a tone that makes it feel sort of period while in fact being quite modern. The way the premise is set-up is certainly quite compelling, and I wanted to see where things go, especially after the opening where we see a sullen woman walking through the house with a toy rabbit that bangs on its drum mysteriously. For some reason, I assumed that this movie would involve ghosts or spirits or something similarly scary, but no, it’s just a guy chained to the basement trying to solve some mystery of the house’s dead inhabitants. This ended up being quite disappointing even though it started from such a good premise, but it’s one that never goes quite far enough in terms of scares.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Dominic Cooper star in Michael Haussman’s EDGE OF THE WORLD (Samuel Goldwyn Films), a period drama set in 1839 with Rhys-Meyers playing Sir James Brooke, whose adventures in 19th century Borneo were the inspiration for films Lord Jim and The Man Who Would Be King. When Brooke’s ship is attacked by pirates, he teams with local princes to seize a rebel fort, agreeing to be crowned Rajah, as he joins his new allies.

I’m not going to review Haussman’s film at this time, because I wasn’t able to give it the full attention that it deserves, but it’s a pretty gripping film on par with James Gray’s The Lost City of Z and other films about explorers. It’s a beautiful film with some great action and an amazing score, and honestly, I wish I had more time to give it the attention it deserves, but that’s what happens when you’re trying to run a site full-time and continue to write reviews for this column. Some things just slip past me or don’t get the time they deserve.

It will be available on Digital and On Demand starting Friday, but honestly? This would be a great visual movie to see in theaters.

Other movies (and new series) out this week, include:

UNDER THE STADIUM LIGHTS (Saban Films/Paramount) FLASHBACK (EONE) BAD TALES (Strand Releasing) MONUMENT UPHEAVAL (Abramorama) SWEET TOOTH (Netflix)

That’s it for this week. Next week… In the Heights and Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway!

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/frightening-brilliance-behind-donald-trumps-media-attacks/

The frightening brilliance behind Donald Trump's media attacks

President Donald Trump created a media disavowal campaign back in 2015 during his campaign, but on Friday, it picked up a frightening speed with a simple tweet. This tweet was the beginning of something rather dark in our country which has resulted in many Republicans coming forward to disagree with the president. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 Diehard Trump supporters will stand behind this comment without realizing the full ramifications that come with it. This seemingly simple comment can slowly be applied to other things that Trump doesn't like. Say, immigrants or even those who disagree with him. You might think that sounds reactionary, but columnist Bret Stephens delivered a very eye-opening lecture this week at the University of California laid it out extremely well. Donald Trump's strategy is to slam those who criticize him (like The New York Times, Washington Post) in favor of those who idealize him (such as Breitbart News). Alex Jones Infowars is another favorite of Trump's, but even he is smart enough not to tout them publicly. Stephens lecture shows how we become inured to Trump's blatant falsehoods and his supporters continue saying that his words don't mean what he says. That alone makes no sense as Trump's words and actions are beginning to match up which is even more frightening. The full transcript (a true must read) of Stephens lecture is below. I’m profoundly honored to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal.

My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump. I suspect this is a theme that would have resonated with Danny.

When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust — the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual.

Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and exclusively factual. And therefore trustworthy.

This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a story.

In the 15 years since Danny’s death, the list of murdered journalists has grown long.

Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia.

Zahra Kazemi and Sattar Behesti in Iran.

Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff in Syria.

Five journalists in Turkey. Twenty-six in Mexico. More than 100 in Iraq.

When we honor Danny, we honor them, too.

We do more than that.

We honor the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with.

So that’s the business we’re in: the business of journalism. Or, as the 45th president of the United States likes to call us, the “disgusting and corrupt media.”

Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.

This isn’t unprecedented in U.S. history, though you might have to go back to the Administration of John Adams to see something quite like it. And so far the rhetorical salvos haven’t been matched by legal or regulatory action. Maybe they never will be.

But the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.

His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.

But again, that’s not all the president is doing.

Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:

Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.

To which the president replies:

Many people have come out and said I’m right.

Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. ��Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.

We are not a nation of logicians.

I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant — if not in intention than certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.

He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.

If some of you in this room are students of political philosophy, you know where this argument originates. This is a version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”

Substitute the words “truth” and “falsehood” for “justice” and “injustice,” and there you have the Trumpian view of the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.

If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then—it’s 90% occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your inauguration crowds were the biggest—well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?

Now, we could have some interesting conversations about why this is happening—and why it seems to be happening all of a sudden.

Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.

When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.

But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a severe example of a common type.

The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.

Nearly 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great scholar and Democratic Senator from New York, coined the phrase, “defining deviancy down.” His topic at the time was crime, and how American society had come to accept ever-increasing rates of violent crime as normal.

“We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.

You can point to all sorts of ways in which this redefinition of deviancy has also been the story of our politics over the past 30 years, a story with a fully bipartisan set of villains.

I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.

But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.

If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million is a statistic.

One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.

Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur about John McCain’s record as a POW? Or his lie about New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his attacks on Megyn Kelly, on a disabled New York Times reporter, on a Mexican-American judge? Would it be him tweeting quotations from Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to David Duke and the alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Vladimir Putin? Would it be his refusal to release his tax returns, or the sham that seems to been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his Trump U courses? Would it be the tape of him with Billy Bush?

None of this made the slightest difference. On the contrary, it helped him. Some people became desensitized by the never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.

Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core supporters liked it.

Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.

Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.

Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.

Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.

Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise sources and methods.

But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?

At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.

To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”—which is to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.

So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.

The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.

The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters—the ones that tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way—we have been given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.

And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in Peoria.

Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.

One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little more than a word jumble.

But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.

If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.

A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign policy to the New York Times’s David Sanger, the reporter asked him whether it didn’t amount to a kind of “America First policy”—a reference to the isolationist and anti-Semitic America First Committee that tried to prevent U.S. entry into World War II. Trump clearly had never heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and made it his own. And that’s how we got the return of America First.

More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative Washington Times: “How Trump’s ‘disarray’ may be merely a strategy,” by Wesley Pruden, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. In his view, the president’s first disastrous month in office is, in fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of Washington and Lincoln’s cabinet of rivals. Sure.

Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.

Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers—precisely because I haven’t changed my opinions about anything.

By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right—again, because I’ve stuck to my views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.

In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main reason for the conversion.

They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.

I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.

And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.

The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues.

There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.

This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.

So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump.

When Judea wrote me last summer to ask if I’d be this year’s speaker, I got my copy of Danny’s collected writings, “At Home in the World,” and began to read him all over again. It brought back to me the fact that, the reason we honor Danny’s memory isn’t that he’s a martyred journalist. It’s that he was a great journalist.

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s something Danny wrote in February 2001, almost exactly a year before his death, from the site of an earthquake disaster in the Indian town of Anjar.

What is India’s earthquake zone really like? It smells. It reeks. You can’t imagine the odor of several hundred bodies decaying for five days as search teams pick away at slabs of crumbled buildings in this town. Even if you’ve never smelled it before, the brain knows what it is, and orders you to get away. After a day, the nose gets stuffed up in self-defense. But the brain has registered the scent, and picks it up in innocent places: lip balm, sweet candy, stale breath, an airplane seat.

What stands out for me in this passage is that it shows that Danny was a writer who observed with all his senses. He saw. He listened. He smelled. He bore down. He reflected. He understood that what the reader had to know about Anjar wasn’t a collection of statistics; it was the visceral reality of a massive human tragedy. And he was able to express all this in language that was compact, unadorned, compelling and deeply true.

George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Danny saw what was in front of his nose.

We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.

Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.

The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.

Thank you.

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