#also like yes it’s acting so if Noah was given a role where the character smoked he would be capable of it

[chirpsythismorning]

With the smoker-Will discourse in the tag, I thought I would share this article that talks about how ST and the huge role of smoking in the first few seasons and a study related to it, has literally lead Netflix to vow to cut down on smoking in their content.

This is also part of the reason why we saw little to no smoking in s4 and also why we’re likely to see little to none in s5.

They’re lucky they have the excuse that it’s the end of the world so chain smoking would be a pretty shitty habit to find yourself in.

Anyways, sorry to the smoker-Will enthusiasts, but it’s looking like a pipe dream…

[therummonster]

My brain won't let me sleep so heres a 2 am ramble about kinda similar characters/parallels between characters in Rockymedia and Ybamedia/Horrormashfriends

Luke(Mc heroes) and Henry(Panik & Henry) are somewhat similar. Luke has a Alien inside of his head that gives him wish magic powers, and Henry seems to have magic seeped into his body some way (he also can understand and talk to a wand). Henry is a magic based character, Luke is a magic based superhero. Both have concepts where they could likely be taken over by their magic (Henrys due to the fact that it's very unstable, and Luke due to the fact that he could snap). Henry has a best friend he cares about, so does Luke, however Henrys best friend is insane and is more of an anti-hero, while Lukes is sane and is a hero. Henry has been the cause of something bad happening, and (technically) Luke was also the cause of something bad happening (peter being injured.). The two would likely get along in a calm setting.

Now Panik(Panik & Henry) and Dr Ostrich(mc heroes) are very similar. Both have a main kind of gun (Atomizer & TFG 10k) and have one/multiple henchmen of sorts (Dr ostriches ostriches and stink and stench, n panikbot and the demodog). The two could be classified as clinically insane. Panik relies on science a lot and thinks magic is dumb, Dr ostrich does the same but kinda leans into the 'magic is cool but should be tested' area in my mind. Panik actually has a friend he cares about, meanwhile Dr Ostrich has some yeetable henchmen, though I guess that may be equivalent since Panik does throw Henry places often. These two would probably be nerdy as shit together when sciencing, but otherwise would probably try to one up eachother.

Sabre (daycare) and Dark (13 st/Wither hill/Etc) act similar in some ways. Both say stupid shit at times, and it makes the others laugh or look at them weird. Both have very specific food preferences/a main food thing about them, Dark doesn't eat pork(irl and he doesn't eat it in Mc either [not sure if for religious reasons or what]) and Sabre likes cheese a lot! Both try to one up a character but also follow the lead of another (For Sabre is Unicorn mann and Ryan, and for Dark it's either Hooper or Action and Rickutto). Both get called nicknames (Dark=Dark Kelly & Sabre=Chicken face/Chicken man/Chicken gizzard/etc). The two would probably get along nicely with eachother in good circumstances.

Ryan(daycare/daycare academy) and Rage(Block city/Pixel town/Haunted neighborhood/Cursed town of tor/etc) are somewhat alike, not very but heres some of the ways that they are. Both take a leading role in their series (Daycare/Daycare Academy/etc & Block city). Both have a friend group and a live interest (Tina & Ashley. Sabre, Ucm, Shark, Goldy & Panik, Henry, Noah, Natasha, Frosty). Both experience a lot each episode/day in their respective places, some could be life threatening some could be just plain weird. Both consistently get confused or forget things. Both have had a mentor at some point. They'd probably get along with some tea and coffee, given to each respectively.

I consistently think about "what if henry/luke/ucm's magic corrupted them" and i love thay concept, cause it opens room for like so many things. Anyways yeah that's my little parallel thing- hope you liked reading it :D Ima sleep now 👍

ooooooo~

yes, this was a very nice read. 10/10, would read again.

[bi-bard]

Chick Flick Moments - Sam Winchester Imagine (Supernatural)

Title: Chick Flick Moments

Pairing: Sam Winchester X Reader

Requested: by an anonymous reader

Word Count: 2,363 words

Warning(s): violence, cussing, Sam embarrassing himself, spoilers for any movie/show listed in the author's note

Summary: (Season 11) Gabriel takes a break from hiding to teach (Y/n) and Sam to forgive each other.

Author's Note: I had so much fun putting this request together! Also, if I remember correctly, this reader wanted to remain anonymous.

Here are links to all the scenes that inspired parts of this imagine:

1 (Princess Bride), 2 (8x12 Criminal Minds; can't find just the scene to link), 3 (Moulin Rouge), 4 (The Notebook), 5 (The 10 Things I Hate About You), 6 (Gilmore Girls), 7 (La La Land)

Hey! I did a rewrite of the ending of Supernatural. It took a really long time to complete, so it would mean a lot to me if you check it out. Here’s a link! (it’s on my personal account)

-----------------------------------

I rolled my eyes as I walked through the bunker.

Sam was still ranting about the most recent hunt. I was just tired of listening to it. Dean had long since given up trying to control his brother, who had shown no sign of listening to anyone.

"You can't just throw yourself into every single enemy," Sam yelled. "Fun fact, you're not Superman!"

"Oh my god," I finally, turning around. I had been halfway through the library at this point. Dean continued through the bunker, ignoring us. "I ran up to one extra vamp because you were about to get your throat ripped out! Yes, I put myself in danger but it was to save you!"

"Why are you so desperate to be a hero," he asked.

"Why are you so pissy that I saved you," I shouted back.

I let out a yell before turning and leaving.

"Where are you going?"

"To bed," I shouted from down the hall. "Maybe you'll be nicer in the morning! You're welcome for saving your ass!"

I stormed into my room and slammed the door shut. I changed quickly, throwing my old clothes into the corner before curling up on my bed. My emotions got the better of me. I started crying into my pillow.

Imagine saving the man you secretly loved... and then he got mad at you about it.

I fell asleep crying that night.

--time skip--

I shot awake, cringing at how bright it was.

I looked around, letting my eyes adjust to the light.

I was on a hill. I was on a hill, lying in the grass with the sun shining on my face. This is not good.

I stood up and did a circle to look around the long stretches of grass. Nothing looked even slightly familiar.

"For fuck's sake," I muttered.

I decided that the best option would be to try to climb down and find a person... somewhere.

I was just about to start making my way down the hill when I felt a hand grab me.

Out of pure fear, I grabbed the person and pulled them from behind me. The person went flying down the hill.

"(Y/n)," I heard Sam's voice yell as he rolled down the hill.

I put my hand over my mouth. He soon stopped rolling and then he stood up, scrambling to pull the black mask off of his face. I sighed, dropping my hand when I saw he was alright.

"Sam," I called.

"Your instinct is to throw some down a hill," Sam asked.

"When a masked man tries to grab me, definitely," I replied. "Fun fact, Sam, I can actually defend myself."

He gave me a sarcastic smile. I shot it right back to him.

Sam looked down at his outfit before sighing and shrugging at me. He had just started to move back up the hill when my visions went dark.

I opened my eyes a few moments later.

What had been an open field was now a dark warehouse or factory. I saw Sam across from me, but also a group of people behind him. I recognized them. They were characters from Criminal Minds, a guilty pleasure I watched when we weren't hunting.

I tried to figure out what was happening.

Then, I became all too aware of the barrel of a gun pressing into my neck.

"No," Sam yelled.

It clicked.

Sam was supposed to be Spencer. I was Maeve. This was Zugzwang.

My heart dropped.

"Wait, please, don't," Sam yelled as the gun pressed harder on my neck.

"Sam, shut up," I snapped.

"Me for (Y/n)," he shouted.

"You would do that," Diane- the unsub of that episode- asked.

"Yes," Sam replied.

"No," I yelled. "Sam, shut up."

"You shut up," Diane growled at me.

"One difference between me and her...," I growled back.

I grabbed the gun, pushing it forward, away from my neck. The bullet she tried to fire hit the brick wall. I turned, bringing an elbow down on her arm. Her hand dropped the gun into my grasp. I pointed it toward her.

"...I'm not scared of a simple gun."

The others walked over and arrested her. I looked at Sam.

"If you continued, she would've killed herself, which would've killed me," I explained. He furrowed his eyebrows. "I watch this show when we aren't hunting."

He walks over, going to hug me before the scene changes again.

"Holy...," I trailed off as I looked around.

Around us, we could see the tops of roofs and a beautiful night sky. It was almost a dreamy setting.

"Where are we now," Sam asked.

"Only the great Moulin Rouge," Sam and I both twirled around to face... Gabriel. "I know, I know... I'm not dead, anyway!"

I rolled my eyes.

"You two need to learn a lesson," he pointed at us.

"It's like back in 2010," I mumbled. "Play our roles to get out. Probably why we were pulled out of the last two."

"You'll fall into them naturally, I promise," Gabriel smirked. "And yes. Stop ignoring the plotline."

"Alright... sure, I was gonna get shot for your crappy game," I snapped sarcastically.

Then, he was gone. I rolled my eyes.

"So, what are the roles," Sam asked as I walked around the top of the elephant.

"Well, Christian and Satine," I pointed between us. "Maeve and Spencer. The Princess Bride and Westley. It's all romance."

"Why," Sam scrunched his face up.

"Because Gabe wants to get his rocks off," I said sarcastically, "I don't know, Sam!"

I walked down the stairs of the elephant. It was gorgeous here. It was just as vibrant as the movie made it look.

"Wow," I look back at Sam. "This is awesome."

I chuckled and nodded.

"What seen is it?"

"The Elephant Love Medley," I said. "Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman sing this mash-up of famous love songs as his character tries to convince her that there is nothing more important than love."

"I'm not gonna sing," Sam shook his head.

"I was not gonna ask you too," I chuckled. "I've heard you sing."

"Rude."

I just shrugged.

I looked around at the room, trying to figure out how to play these roles without the singing.

"Wait," I said. "Come on."

I grabbed his hand and pulled him back to the stairs.

"What is it," Sam asked as we made it to the top.

"At the end of the medley, Christian and Satine are dancing and they walk out onto this field of clouds and are held up in the sky."

"What-"

"This whole movie feels like a fever dream the first time you watch it."

"Come on," Sam held a hand out to me.

"Can you dance?"

"Not well," he chuckled. "The role didn't say I needed to be good."

He grabbed my hand and pulled me closer to him.

I tried to lead his steps and laughed as he stumbled into a pattern.

"Come on," I moved back so I could grab only one hand.

I led him a few steps forward and onto- what seemed to be- steps in the clouds. I let out an excited laugh when it worked. Sam looked at me and grinned at my excitement.

As soon as got to the top of the steps... it was gone.

We were in the middle of the street now.

"Aw, that was just mean," I mumbled. I glared at Sam when I heard him laughed.

He held his hands up jokingly before extending one toward me. I furrowed my eyebrows at him.

"I know what movie this is," he shrugged. I motioned for him to continue explaining. He walked over, hand still held out to me, "The Notebook. Noah and Allie dance in the street. So... will you dance with me? Even without the sequence where we dance in the clouds."

I bit my lip as I smiled.

I took his hand and let him pull me into the street. I laughed as I stumbled into his chest.

We fell into the scene naturally.

Sam held one of my hands in his and held my waist with the other. I placed my free hand on his shoulder. I looked up at him. It felt strange that we so casually fell into the scene but I was happy.

Sam jokingly twirled me around before pulling me back to his chest. I closed my eyes and chuckled.

"What," he asked.

"Nothing," I shook my head. "I just never saw you as such a romantic."

"Well, don't tell anyone, you'll ruin my reputation," he said sarcastically.

I rolled my eyes.

Sam spun the two of us in a circle before going to dip me. I didn't think I'd ever get to experience something like this. It always just felt like something I should forget about as a hunter. I was starting to forget why I was so angry with Sam in the first place.

I barely noticed that Sam was leaning in before the scene around me changed.

I was on a football field.

I looked around.

There was no sign of Sam.

"Crap," I mumbled, trying to figure out where to look first.

Then, there was a voice going over the field's speakers.

"You're just too good to be true... can't take my eyes off of you..."

I looked around toward the stands to see Sam walking with a mic. Can't sing, my ass.

"You'd be like heaven to touch... I wanna hold you so much"

"Oh my god," I muttered.

"At long last love has arrived... And I thank God I'm alive... You're just too good to be true... Can't take my eyes off of you."

I tried to bite back my laugh. He shrugged at me with an embarrassed smile and stepped into the actual stands.

We both jumped when the marching band started playing. I looked to see Gabriel smirking and leading their march.

Sam and I shrugged at each other. He continued on with the act.

Now, Sam Winchester pretending to be Patrick in "10 Things I Hate About You" was a treat... and was exactly what you imagined it would be.

He was almost stumbling down the steps as he continued on with the act. I was laughing hysterically by the time I saw the security guards starting to run in.

"Sam," I yelled, pointing behind him.

"Crap," I heard through the mic (which made me almost double-over in laughter) as he tried to take off running.

As soon as he was grabbed, the scene changed.

We both took a deep breath when we realized we were sitting together in a car.

"Thank god," Sam mumbled.

"That was a great performance, by the way," I said, still chuckling.

"Shut up," he muttered, laughing along with me. We fell silent after a minute. "So... what scene is this?"

"I have no idea," I replied.

"It's Gilmore Girls, dumbasses," we heard Gabriel's voice but saw no sign of him. "Season 1, Episode 16... absolute idiots."

"Didn't peg him for a Gilmore Girls fan," I said. Sam laughed.

"Me neither."

We fell silent again.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, looking over at me. "You were right. You can defend yourself and you were just trying to help me. I'm sorry for being such a dick about it."

I grinned, "Thanks... I forgive you. I know you were just worried about me."

Sam smiled back.

"I... umm...," Sam looked down for a moment, clearing his throat and collecting his thoughts. "I just... I love you."

My heart leaped up into my throat. I blinked at him a few times and forced a chuckle out. Which was the wrong response but I panicked. Hunters... we could face the devil but emotions were a no-no.

"(Y/n)," Sam's smile dropped slowly when he realized I wasn't responding.

I was just about to respond when the scene changed again.

Sam was gone again and I was on a city street.

"Dammit," I muttered.

I ran down the street, turning the corner. I looked at the wall of the building I was by. Was this a jazz club?

I walked through the door and was guided to a table so I could sit down and watch the performance.

"La La Land," I said.

Sam and I watched this together. Dean had gone to bed. We weren't tired and just turned this movie on because it looked like it was mostly happy.

Big dance numbers, beautiful effects... and the epilogue that made me hide tears from Sam.

I looked at the stage. Sam was sitting there, wearing a suit, looking at the audience nervously. He hesitantly reached toward the piano. It was like it was a prerecorded track. It sounded just like the movie.

I smiled.

I just wanted to talk to him.

Soon the performance ended.

I stood up and started walking over, seeing Sam starting to walk out.

I grinned at him, "Sam-"

He cut me off by cupping the sides of my face and kissing me softly. I touched his sides lightly, smiling against his lips. It was... magic. Absolute magic.

Then, I shot awake, back in my bed in the bunker.

The game was over. Thank God.

"(Y/n)," I heard yell through the bunker hall.

I ran into the hall and ran toward his room.

We stopped as soon as we saw each other.

"Please tell me that wasn't a dream," I said. He shook his head, smiling widely at me.

I ran over, pulling him down to kiss him again. It was softer than our last kiss and I loved it. His arms wrapped around me and pulled me closer. I buried my hands through his hair.

"Woah, what did I miss," we pulled away when we heard Dean.

I could basically feel Sam chuckle against my lips before he moved to look at his brother. I turned around in Sam's arm.

"A chick flick moment," Sam answered.

"Alright," Dean gave us a weird look before leaving without another word.

I looked back at Sam with a smile, "I love you."

"I love you too," he grinned and leaned in to kiss me softly again.

-----------------------------------

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[incomingalbatross]

So, my thoughts about Wrath of Chaos, as promised:

This finale is something of an odd one out among the series finales, as I mention in some detail here (with spoilers for season 4), as series 1, 2 , & 4 end with something about identity, with the Librarians reaffirming their choice to be Librarians and their role. Wrath of Chaos instead ends with them forcing a human identity on Apep. So, it's definitely something I want to look into more but haven't been able to pin down a theory about it.

And just how much of the Jenkins trap was Eve's idea? How far did she play along with DOSA? I mean, she's smart, she knows they're smart, so yes, she may have made some suggestions, but did they trust that she'd really turned?

And I think it was this series that the producers described in commentaries as 'the cost of being a superhero' in terms of a personal/love life, but maybe it was season four and this one was 'the cost of magic.' I don't even remember which episode they mentioned it in.

And part of the Doylist reason Flynn is always going off and doing his own thing is that Noah Wyle was under contract for Falling Skies (at least till 2015) and wasn't allowed to be a main character in The Librarians at the same time. Then it just stayed part of his character.

Chaos vs evil, too, there's something simmering under the surface there as well, given that mundane librarians are all about order and classification.

These are good thoughts, thank you for sharing them with me!

Oh, that is an interesting point... I am definitely avoiding S4 spoilers for now, but you're right, S1 finale was about the narrative/multiverse affirming that they are all Librarians and Eve is the Guardian, while the S2 finale needed everyone to personally affirm their Library identities just to get started on saving the day. S3 finale... did not do that, which is fair given where the characters are at, but it's true that them forcibly altering Apep's nature/identity is a contrast you should be able to do Something Thematic with.

My impression really is that DOSA knew very little about the Library and its people, and that Eve had to supply the whole plan (although whether or not they fully trusted her is another matter—obviously it would have been smarter not to ;P). Remember, her objective was to be alone in the Library with just her and Flynn and Apep, so Jenkins did have to be gotten out of the way somehow if you accept the premise she and Flynn couldn't have just told him what they were doing.

(Also, tangent related to "what did DOSA know": I don't believe what the General said about having engineered Flynn and Eve's first meeting. I think she just made that up as a mindgame to make Eve feel like she had less agency. Because, looking at the facts? A) we know Eve was the Guardian in at least three other timelines and it's often implied that this was her Destiny—the Library didn't need military intervention to find her. B) Flynn had not had a Guardian for almost ten years. It was not a position crying out to be filled, as far as anyone but the Library knew! There's no reason to believe getting Eve in the same room as the Librarian would lead to her being hired, because there wasn't a vacancy. And C) the Library hires the Guardian, the Librarian doesn't—again, throwing Eve at the Librarian and hoping that gets her hired would be a dumb plan, which at best suggests they don't understand enough about the Library to know who holds hiring power.

TL;DR whether or not DOSA knew Flynn was in Munich, the Library wasn't influenced by their plans. The Library chose Eve because Eve IS the Guardian.)

Anyway. :P Theme stuff is always interesting! Maybe when I'm done with the show I'll look up the writers' comments on this.

And oh yeah, that makes total sense—I figured he had some kind of real-life obstacle to being on the show more, given his clear investment in it, and another acting commitment is a very reasonable one. Just a slightly unfortunate case of Real Life Writes The Script, as it seems like it steered Flynn into some character patterns that might have been avoided otherwise. (I was happy to see his increased screentime in this season, though! It's nice that Noah Wyle was able to increase his presence as the show progressed.)

And YES, excellent point that librarians are natural defenders of order, and that that's a fun dichotomy to play with. (I also really liked the "chaos vs harmony" dichotomy being used, and would have liked to see more of that.)

Thanks again! I'm still a little frustrated by this finale, just because I would have liked to see some of these concepts executed differently, but I like having your perspective on it. Seeing a thing's merits through someone else's eyes is always a pleasure. :)

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Fantasies, dreams and desires, ideas of normalcy and fears of difference. A slightly queer reading of 15x14

Mrs Butters is a delightful character who is built to parallel so many things in the show. She occupies perfectly the semantic sphere that the narrative has crafted around Dean’s desires; also, you know, cake.

We could talk for days about the significance of food and drink in Supernatural. One of the biggest themes that run through the entire show is hunger (or thirst) and food is very often a symbol for an emotional need of sorts. Supernatural draws a lot folklore, and human stories have always used symbologies that put together food, desire, love, sex, family, goodness and darkness and all those human experiences.

We have discussed the shit out of every instance of food in the show, analyzed parallels to other stories and fairytales, scrutinized queer-codings and subtexts, got called nasty names by impolite people accusing us of saying that a slice of baked good means Dean likes sitting on dicks. So, yeah, I’m not gonna start explaining everything from the beginning. Let’s jump to the parallels.

- The comfort food. Motherhood, hugs, and the past that can never return: the ideal of childhood and the 50s fantasy

We’ve already talked about how Mrs Butters functions as a parallel to Mary and a symbol of the ideal motherhood that both Mary and Dean struggled with. In Dark Side Of The Moon, we see a memory from Dean’s childhood, where we learn that Mary would cut off the crusts off his sandwiches. Mrs Butters also says that she cut the crusts off, establishing a direct parallel to Dean’s ideal of childhood and child-parent relationship. Or, we should say, as both Mary’s and Dean’s ideals of a child-parent relationship, because we know that Mary set up her life with John and the kids as an elaborate “scene” according to her idea-slash-fantasy of the perfect safe life.

She strugged with that, because her ideal life could never match with reality - she had loose ends from hunting to deal with, she at some level liked having those loose ends to deal with because as much as she hated the hunting life and craved for safety and “normalcy” that was still something she was in her element doing, probably more than the perfect housewife role. Of course when she came back she attempted to recreate the scene but quickly discovered that it was impossible and dropped all attempts to do so, embracing the opposite, or at least what she perceived as the opposite (having a pretty dualistic view of hunting life-domestic life where they cannot be reconciled).

Dean, on the other hand, started out with a similar dualistic view, figuring that he’d always belong to the hunting world and could never have the domestic, “normal” thing at all, embracing his “freakness” as opposed to the concept of normalcy represented by civilians, by the middle class, by the suburbs, by the apple pie, white fence life (insert heavy queer subtext here). And yet there was always an ambiguity with him (again, he’s never one-or-the-other, he’s always both), because, while on the surface he embraces this rebellious, devil-may-care persona, that’s not quite what he is as a full individual. He grew up essentially a housewife from a very early age, has a very caregiving personality, and thrives in taking care of others.

Dean is both Mrs Butters and Mary, where the difference between him and Mary is that Mary couldn’t (didn’t have the time, support, resources?) reconcile parts of her that Dean instead was able to (and in fact recently helped her with: before dying, she’d reached a pretty healthy balance of living her own life as a hunter and having a warm relationship with her sons, at least as healthy as it can get in that kind of circumstances).

Another important parallel to Dark Side Of The Moon, borrowed by Scoobynatural, is the nightgown that feels like being wrapped in hugs: we are reminded of Dean’s “I wuv hugz” from when he was a kid, a symbol for his early life of affection and safety that he lost with his mother. Childhood hugs, comfort food, loving gestures like cutting off the crusts are all symbols of a past that cannot return.

On a level, from a “coming-of-age story” perspective, childhood, with its innocence and perception that adults will always keep us safe, is obviously something that everyone needs to accept as something that belongs to the past and cannot return, to embrace instead the responsibilities and risks of adulthood in a healthy way. In a sense, Dean needs to go through all these steps - acknowledging that his mother was a flawed person, that in fact both of his parents were flawed people who made mistakes but he can forgive them for his own sake in order to be able to let go of trauma and carry on... - to become a healthy adult able to be a good parent to his own child.

(There’s also the cholesterol thing - Mrs Butters chastizes Dean for his diet, but we know that there’s a depth to Dean’s diet, not only his extreme appreciation of food due to experiencing food scarcity and insecurity as a child, but also the memory of his mother’s comfort food, such as the “Winchester surprise”, a monstrosity of meat and cheese. While the “meat man” persona would appear on the surface as a sterotypical masculinity thing, it has layers, in a typical Dean fashion... not coincidentally, in the latest episode he calls himself the meat man while wearing an apron that we’re told he’s very fond of, painting him, again, in a mixture of different meanings, masculinity and femininity, fatherhood and motherhood, devil-may-care attitude and caregiver attitude.)

On another level, a more political level, there’s the 50s fantasy element. We all know the significance of the idealization of the post-war period as the “good ol’ times” in American culture, and it’s an ideal that Mary definitely drew from when she built her perfect life with her family. Mrs Butters represents this in a very literal way, being literally from 1958 when she “froze” herself, and acts as a very stereotyped governess for a bunch of men that feel like they are above housework, what is considered women’s work. Dean initially comments “how progressive”, knowing exactly how bullshit these conversative ideals are, but then appreciates the comforts of the perfect caretaker.

In fact, Dean’s “giving in” to the comforts of a governess makes me think of that famous feminist manifesto “I want a wife” by Judy Syfers... because housework is very much Dean’s work in the bunker. It’s interesting that Mrs Butters immediately comments negatively on the cleanness of the bunker and their clothes: we know that Dean cleans and washes, and, while it’s likely that he cannot keep everything super perfect like a governess would because he’s busy doing many other things, it’s a way Mrs Butters uses to establish roles that she knows and is comfortable with. She is used to being the one who does “feminine” work while the Men of Letters have absolutely zero skills in that regard, and doesn’t really even stop to question if that’s the case with the men in front of her.

Anyway, let’s go back to the 50s fantasy. The show has repeatedly made commentaries on the vacuity of it. Peace Of Mind is the most obvious instance, but there’s plenty of subtext in the show that deals with that typically American aspect. Just like the childhood aspect, the narrative tells us that the “good ol’ times” are also an idealized thing that cannot return (if it ever existed, because Dean’s childhood was built on a fantasy, and the “good ol’ times” are also a fantasy, because the real 50s were horrible for anyone who didn’t swim in privilege). Mrs Butters cannot stay, the 50s fantasy-slash-childhood fantasy cannot last, and Dean embraces his role as an adult-slash-modern housemaker. Blah blah gender, blah blah cake. (Yeah, sorry, but you can fill in the blanks.)

- The contaminated drink. Poison and weakness from the forbidden sexual desire to the forbidden family domesticity

Aaaand now the second branch of parallels that Mrs Butters pinged on my radar, which sends us in an even more queer-subtext-heavy territory. We’re going to talk about the smoothies and the tomato juice. Yes, I know, the smoothies are given to Jack, not Dean, but symbolically Dean and Jack share the same semantic area; both are given a magically conjured drink, and both end up locked away waiting to be killed. For this analysis, they basically overlap.

Let’s start with the tomato juice. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Dean is given something that visually reminds of the blood the vampires drink. The tomato juice is a stand-in for blood, and blood in relation to vampirism has a long history of subtext in the show that connects to sexuality, sex, sexual fears and contamination. While vampires are not necessarily always invested of those meanings every single time they appear in the three-hundred-whatever episodes of the show, their main symbology is connected to sex and sexual fears, as vampires do in modern western literature, after all.

You’re probably going to think, wait, what? What has Mrs Butters got to do with sexual fears? Yeah, I know, it sounds weird, but hear me out.

The tomato juice - a stand-in for blood, with a vampire reference - parallels Mrs Butters (who represents trauma, remember) to 6x05 Live Free Or TwiHard. Sexual assault, blood, contamination via the poisoning liquid.

Next to the tomato juice there’s the smoothie. It’s a poison in disguise, a contaminated drink that makes Jack weak. We have, in fact, a pattern of Dean being given contaminated drinks that place him under another’s power. Not just the vampire’s blood, but also Jeremy from 3x10 Dream A Little Dream Of Me, who offers Dean a beer through which he connects him to his dreams. There’s Nick the siren from 4x14 Sex And Violence, who contaminates Dean through the flask. The venom in the siren’s saliva parallels straight to the gorgon Noah in 14x14 Ouroboros, and I don’t have to start explaining what all those things represent, right? (I have written posts about these things, it would be nice if tumblr didn’t suck and showed them to me when I go look for them.)

(Oh, there’s also Crowley’s human blood addiction, which is not, as one might expect, a parallel to Sam’s demon blood addition, but Dean’s First Blade/Mark Of Cain issue, and the First Blade/Mark Of Cain arc is all imbued by the queer subtext of the Dean-Crowley-Castiel triangle.)

Basically, Mrs Butters is inserted in a history of queer subtext, although it appears as obvious that Mrs Butters hardly represents homosexual desire, unless we go a pretty stretchy route of her occupying Cas’ space in the Dean-Sam-Cas-Jack family (I mean, that’s true, but it’s not simply that). It is also true that Mrs Butters represents Cuthbert Sinclair, and here the radar pings, because Cuthbert Sinclair is totally inside the pattern! He wanted to make Dean part of his collection just like the vampire in 6x05 wanted to make Dean part of his pack, with supernatural means of exorting control over Dean and heavy heavy rapey tones. (I know we don’t like to talk about this, but the show does play with incest subtext, John mirrors are often rapey.)

So, we have all this semantic area of poison, weakness and submission to external control painted in overtones of sexual assault and sexual fears especially in relation to homosexual desire. (I am NOT linking homosexual desire to sexual assult, nor the show is, it’s a wide and volatile semantic area where the common denominator is fear, fear of being hurt FOR being different sexually, it’s about vulnerability because of being different. It’s a horror narrative, guys, remember, queer fear is a recurrent theme in the genre. Dracula was about the horror of what happened to Oscar Wilde, we’re running in circles.)

Now, what kind of fear is explored in 15x14? Well, the episode is about the fear of losing family. The plot is about Dean’s feelings towards Jack after he killed Mary. Dean doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to lose Cas soon also because of Jack. Mary and Cas are both very noisy absences in the episode, and we know that Dean is going to suffer something horrific again that will shatter his family again. This goes past the fears regarding forbidden sexual desire: we’re in the territory of forbidden familial desire, so to speak, Dean’s craving for a domestic peace with his family.

Jack is both the culmination of Dean’s process of family-building, as the son figure of the family, and the element of destruction of that family-building. Not a coincidence Jack’s birthday was referenced, as Jack’s birth coincided with Cas’ death and Mary’s supposed death or at least separation. Now Jack has supposedly killed Mary (or is it a inter-universe separation again? @drsilverfish​’s theory always pops up, and we keep getting reminded of other universes - the telescope is broken...) and we know that Cas’ ultimate death hangs above us.

We’re always running in a spiral, Dean’s relationship with Mary, Dean’s relationship with Cas, Dean’s relationship with motherhood and gender roles, Dean’s relationship with sexuality. There’s a big picture of mirrors in the semantic area of fantasies, idealizations, desires and dreams. I hope I managed to make this post make sense, but I’m always open to requests of clarification or elaboration. Thanks for reading!

[hexalt]

Schitt’s Creek and the Transformative Power of Love

I first watched the pilot for Schitt’s Creek in the early part of 2019 and found it...eccentric. Not really funny, the characters weren’t speaking to me (except for Stevie (Emily Hampshire), whom I felt a kinship with), and the story seemed odd. I decided this show just wasn’t for me, and I had given it my best shot. Many months later, one of my best friends was posting about it frequently. Since we have the same taste, I thought maybe it was just the pilot. Maybe I should give it another shot. Maybe this time I’ll actually like it. So I started it from the pilot again, and I kept watching even if I wasn’t thoroughly entertained. I soon grew to love the two black sheep and having characters you understand always makes things easier.

What I didn’t realize when I started the show was that the characters were each more than they seem, they weren’t meant to be shallow jokes of themselves and their personas. The way they acted was often a façade hiding their insecurities of not being good enough in a variety of ways. The only other show that I’ve seen with a somewhat similar premise is Arrested Development, but there the characters are supposed to be absolutely ignorant, privileged assholes with no redeeming qualities.

I didn’t realize each season is better than the last, an astounding and rare feat in television. The quality of each season improves as the show quickly finds its footing by discarding early storylines that didn’t really work and letting the characters slowly becoming more grounded and open. This family that was once so distant that the parents didn’t even know their daughter’s middle name eventually develop genuine relationships for the first time with each other and other people.

Schitt’s Creek, co-created by father and son, Eugene (American Pie, Best in Show) and Dan Levy, wanted us to ultimately empathize with these characters, even if the remnants of their wealth can make them profoundly delusional and hilarious a lot of the time. Before writing the show, they created timelines going back to their characters’ elementary school years, detailing everything from where they worked to what they wore.

The fashion on the show is distinct and the best dressed I’ve seen in any show (and most films). Dan is huge into fashion and personally selects a lot of pieces worn in the show (some of David’s clothes are even from his own wardrobe). Instead of constantly telling the audience that this family used to be rich, we are reminded of it through Moira’s wall of wigs and couture black and white ensembles, David’s patterned black sweaters and low crotch pants, Alexis’s bohemian dresses and headbands, and Johnny’s array of business suits. When they enter any room in town, they are clearly fish out of water.

Schitt’s Creek centers on the Roses, a once-disgustingly wealthy family who lose their fortune and are forced to move to the only asset they have left: a small town named Schitt’s Creek that Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) bought as a joke for his son, David (Dan Levy). So dilapidated is Schitt's Creek and so destitute are the Roses, they don't even have a house of their own; instead they are forced to live in a motel with two connecting rooms, forgoing all the luxury they had become accustomed to and, more terrifyingly, are now physically closer than ever.

While at first the family is horrified at the prospect of living in such a small town with townies, they eventually embrace the weirdness of the town, and it makes them grow in unexpected ways. Johnny was once the owner of the second-largest video rental store in the country and retains his businessman-like self through and through, but he also began the show more uppity. While he is often the most reasonable of the Roses, he often sees himself as above others in town and gets into awkward situations because of it. Over the course of the show he ends up developing a friendship with the town mayor to whom he initially had yelled “get the fuck out!” While he’s always devoted to his wife, he wasn’t so keen on his children, but being forced to live together makes him take a larger interest in their lives and become a better father.

Alexis (Annie Murphy) is the quintessential “dumb blonde” socialite who’s had a Schitt-ton of relationships with powerful men, making stories of her past highly entertaining, often illegal, and frequently frightening. She clearly grew up way too fast, never having had proper adult supervision. She’s reliant on men, and all she can think about in season one is trying to date cute guys. In the following seasons, she realizes it’s time to start growing up and gets her high school and Associate’s Degree to start her own PR business. She becomes a more enlightened version of herself, still deeply kind but also willing to put the happiness of others above her own. The Alexis who previously couldn’t see beyond her own nose becomes independent and more selfless.

David’s had hundreds of flings with people of all genders, but they seem to be replete with abuse, manipulation, and a lack of care for his being. This is unsurprising when we see how he hides his insecurity behind sarcasm and sometimes downplays things he doesn’t like to fit in. He fears showing kindness to anyone because others haven’t always been so kind to him. Early on, he has a panic attack and comes to the realization that he’s “really lonely here,” but he’s been lonely for a lot longer than that. What he doesn’t expect is to make his first best friend or find his soon-to-be husband in this backwater town. In the process, he learns to shed some of his armor.

Moira (Catherine O’Hara) was once on a soap opera, Sunrise Bay, and retains the melodrama in her day-to-day life and demeanor. She is constantly trying to become what she believes is a star: someone who acts in film, someone who everyone mourns when they die, someone who people will just pay one sliver of attention to. She’s desperately trying to cling to the spotlight, but in “Life is a Cabaret,” she finds what I believe will be her place come this final season. Rather than trying to constantly soak up attention, she gives Stevie the starring role in the town’s production of Cabaret (which Moira comes to direct) because getting that role was a “gift that once jolted [her] out of [her] little podunk routine.” From the wings of the stage, as Stevie slowly builds into “Maybe This Time” with such breathtaking passion and joy after starting off unsure and quiet, Moira is shocked at what she was able to bring out of Stevie. She’s finally realizing that her place isn’t center stage but in bringing out the best in others and helping them find their place in the world.

Stevie Budd begins as the desk clerk of the Schitt’s Creek motel until her great-aunt passes away, and she inherits the motel. From there she has to decide whether she’s ready to grow up and take over the family business, and she’s terrified. Johnny soon teams up with her in the business, renovating the motel and renaming it after both of them, so she sees the Roses aren’t going to abandon her. She is part of the Rose’s found family. Her and David are similar in their bluntness and sarcasm, but Stevie is insecure about never making it out of the town, never being more than a motel desk clerk, never having a long-term romantic relationship. She worries while everyone moves on with their lives, she’s “watching it all happen from behind the desk.”

Dan describes creating Schitt’s Creek as “writing a world that examines the transformational effects of love when the threat of hate and intolerance has been removed from the equation.” While homophobia is often front and center in any media depicting LGBT characters, Schitt’s Creek doesn’t give it as much thought. Where small towns are usually seen as ripe for homophobia, transphobia, and other discrimination, Schitt’s Creek doesn’t fall prey to this trope. Instead, this small town is bursting with love.

Dan purposely made David pansexual (it’s also the only show I’ve seen use the word) to challenge the viewer’s biases and push the boundaries of what it means to be masculine and feminine. David’s parents and others in the town never discuss it as anything strange or bad, it’s something he simply is and as common as the sky being blue. When David tells Stevie about his sexuality (“I like the wine, not the label”), she’s a bit surprised at first because she thought he was gay, but ultimately she doesn’t care.

This doesn’t mean the show never discusses what homophobia can be like, but it comes at it from a different lens.

For example, in “Meet the Parents,” David decides to throw a surprise birthday party for his boyfriend, Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid). What David doesn’t realize is Patrick hasn’t come out to his parents yet, they think David is solely his business partner. He tells David, “I know my parents are good people, I just...can’t shake this fear that there is a small chance that this could change everything.” David himself is prepared for homophobia from Patrick’s parents, but when they tell him they don’t care about that, just that he was hiding such an important part of himself from them, David who’s been trying to stay strong through it all wipes a tear.

“When I found myself in a position to tell stories on a global scale, I seized the opportunity to make a television show that might, in its own way, offer some support, encouragement and love to those who might not have it in their homes or in their schools or in their day to day lives. It’s a place where acceptance incubates joy and creates a clarity that allows people to see themselves and each other more deeply. It’s fiction, yes. But I’ve always been told to lead by example and this felt like a good place to start.”

— Dan Levy

I would be remiss to not touch on the comedic style of the show. This is a comedy that relies heavily on the physicality of its actors. Their facial expressions, accents and tonality, their limp wrists, each create uniquely funny characters with mannerisms unlike any I’ve seen. The cast brought nuance to the characters, when they could have easily fallen into vapid stereotypes.

As season 6 premiered on January 7, Schitt’s Creek is not done yet, and I can’t wait to see how its final season concludes. The characters are all happier now that they are achieving dreams they may not have known they had, they have fulfilling relationships with family and friends, and they all have grown into better people. Schitt’s Creek truly was their saving grace.

*

I’m in a TV group where we wrote essays on our favorite shows of the 2010s, so here is mine on Schitt’s Creek.

[chibimyumi]

Dear @lunitamoon​​,

First of all, I am sorry it took so long to get to you, but thank you very much for your sweet compliments! The day you sent the ask was great, and so is today. I hope your life is good to you too.

But now without further ado, your question.

Uchikawa Reo

I think Reo is a very good actor. My first opinion of him when I saw him in Noah’s Ark Circus 2016 was that he has a lot of talent. Some of these talents were not polished yet, (his singing being one example, but given his young age I couldn’t possibly blame him), while other talents were already polished to a sparkling gem. When people talk about Reo, it is usually “cuteee, so tiny!!!” or compliments of the like. His looks make people shove his remarkableness as an actor under these irrelevant external qualities. That is a shame, so please allow me to highlight a few things that are remarkable about this boy.

Character interpretation and understanding

I think Reo understood the character of O!Ciel very well and he was able to deliver many of the nuances even his first time in the role. When hastily interpreted, O!Ciel’s character runs the risk of being taken for nothing but cranky, sulky and haughty. Reo however, even at the age of 12 managed to see that these three obvious traits have a much deeper root: ‘doneness’. O!Ciel is done with his butler’s sauciness, done with people around him imposing their opinions on him, done with the world. Uchikawa Reo managed to capture this fatigue quite well.

In the scene where Soma is altogether a bit too clingy, I think many would think O!Ciel would push the prince away or slap him away. Reo however, did not. He was trying to pull away Soma’s hands, but he never showed antagonism. Just doneness. Regardless of whether O!Ciel does or doesn’t see Soma as his ‘big brother figure’ and ‘friend’, he does care about him. Even when Reo-bocchan said: “I’m exhausted because of you,” there was no callousness in his voice; just irritation.

Reo managed to find a beautiful middle ground between ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ for O!Ciel, and that is exactly what I believe our Trash Baby Lord is. That is a lot more nuance in character study than I could possibly expect from most actors, let alone a 12 year old one.

Another example of Reo’s great understanding of his role is in the scene where he questions his butler whether he would be able to bring them to Baron Kelvin’s manor within an hour. Here he raised an eyebrow as he spoke. This raised eyebrow is very significant.

In the post ‘That Butler, Punchable‘, I discussed in detail how Sebastyun is constantly being very snarky at his master, presumably so because he did not consider the boy worthy of his full respect. In the scene of this example however, O!Ciel has earned the demon’s full respect, and he knows it.

Raising an eyebrow, O!Ciel shows that he has reestablished dominance as master, and that intellectually he is on the same playing field as the demon. He knows what he is doing, and unsurprisingly, the question asked was thusly phrased as a rhetorical one. Hence I did not translate this line as: “can you?” but instead as “you can, right?” Through this nuance, Reo-bocchan shows a great level of confidence and his grasp over the case.

Something else remarkable about 12-year-old Reo is his body-language. In the showdown between him and Baron Kelvin, Reo knew very well how to deliver his actions and the tension of the scene to even the people in the furthest back of the theatre. He takes his time to carry out every movement with meaningful decisiveness. One powerful kick. Re-assume stance. Walk behind his victim. Trap him under his foot. Point the gun at him. Had Reo just kicked Kelvin and stood on him in one consecutive movement, then the impact would have been broken.

I am not sure whether this was intentional, but before Reo pointed the gun at Kelvin, the hand that held the weapon was relaxed, which meant it would not attract attention away from his footwork. Only when the footwork was finished did Reo reveal his gun again from underneath his cape, effectively re-shifting attention back to the weapon when that should be the central focus again.  In theatre where audiences don’t view the production through edited and selected footage, it is vital that actors know where they should draw attention to, and reversely, where not to. Reo did well.

Reo’s natural flair for comedy is also noteworthy. O!Ciel’s character’s funniness is mostly his insane cuteness and inability to can at times; not because he has funny remarks to make. Trying too hard to be funny is a big theatre/movie sin, but Reo is luckily no sinner

As demonstrated above, Reo has an excellent understanding of his role and is careful in maintaining it even when the musical calls for comedy. Reo employed a very advanced technique of achieving comedy; namely discrepant solemness. He does not loosen up or start monkeying around; instead he maintains his usual up-tightness while tricking Aberline into saying his own name wrong. The brilliancy in this scene was not just Reo’s ability to employ this advanced comedy technique, but also that the nature of this skit was perfectly in character for this insidious, manipulative brat.

In Tango on the Campania Reo filled most of the ‘space for growth’ he still had in the previous musical. Even though Reo’s body language on stage was already great in Noah’s Ark Circus, he did have the tendency to stand idle when the scene’s focus was not on him. In the latest musical however, Reo would not forget to also act when he was in the background.

His singing also largely improved, and was able to prolong his notes as well as transitioning between the notes. He still had trouble hitting the highest of notes, but his voice would no longer die off mid-way in its ascending.

Fukuzaki Nayuta

I think Nayuta is a great actor too, and personally a seemingly very underrated gem. In the first run of the Lycoris that Blazes the Earth (2014) Nayuta was admittedly not the best actor ever seen in theatre history. However, he did up the game for Ciel actors even at the time. Acting style is more preference-bound, but undeniably Nayuta’s singing was more solid than any past Ciel performer before him. Despite him having outclassed past Ciels’ singing, Nayuta received a lot of hate from fans, most amounting to: “I can’t watch this, he is too ugly.” (Yes, very constructive, very legit. Ughum. The Kurofandom never fails to remind me how so many are here just for the pretttiiiiiiessss >_>)

In 2015, Nayuta’s voice was actively dropping, sending him in a constant swing between up-and-down. I don’t have experience with a dropping voice, but I heard from everyone who did that it is incredibly hard to control your voice in speaking, let alone singing. And yet, though his voice was rough at all times, Nayuta did manage to hit all the tones. I find that very impressive. I think technique-wise, Nayuta is the strongest singer among all Ciel stage-actors so far. I haven’t heard his singing after his voice-change was complete, but I can imagine him having become a very good singer now. His capacity for control over his voice is superb, after all.

Nayuta’s acting is very subtle but convincing. When Nayuta-bocchan was in his cage, he even added some little movements of the hand that would not be in people’s usual expectations given the situation. To me, this little quirk seemed to convey how despite already having hit rock bottom, the last straw had only fallen just now. This boy is not just scared and desperate, he is murderously angry and resolute.

Nayuta’s subtle and yet convincing body-language can be seen throughout the musical. To demonstrate what I mean by ‘convincing’, I wish to point at Tango on the Campania. Compare Nayuta’s shaking to the headbanging of the stand-in for O!Ciel... Nope. (This actress is not a child, so I can be harsher.)

Again, Nayuta’s acting is subtle, but it does mean it is easily missed, especially in a live theatre. (’Overacting’ is obviously a thing (see demonstration 1 above ⇈), but to the people who initially criticised Furukawa for “moving around too much”, that’s the theatre medium for you. Theatre was not made to be recorded and viewed in close proximity. Moving any less will basically be invisible in a theatre (see my analysis of Tamaki’s performance as Snake).)

Enough side-tracked, back to Nayuta. In the scene where Nayuta-bocchan just woke up, he performed the panic dying down slowly expertly. We can tell that the shaking and heavy breathing really got the better of him, but that the boy was actively trying not to show his butler.  This was probably not visible live, but we have footage of it, so let us savour the panic-dying-down for what it is.

Though I might go as far as to say Nayuta might be better suited as a film-actor than theatre-actor, what was not missed on live audiences was this iconic scene below ⇊ when it finally dawned in O!Ciel that he had been chasing the wrong tail all along.

The atmosphere he created was incredibly tense, and we could practically hear the gears grinding and suddenly coming to a shocking halt. Bravo. It is ultimately for this scene that I think Nayuta would make a phenomenal stage-actor with just a BIT more stage-oriented instructions from the director.

Another scene that also conveyed the tension excellently was when O!Ciel was putting up with the Viscount. Nayuta knew better than put on an insulting high-pitched voice in parody of “a girl’s voice”, instead he minded the intonation of speaking and subtler mannerisms girls are socialised to perform.

When the Viscount really got way too close, Sasaki’s acting was incredibly flamboyant and loud, and yet it never threatened to overshadow Nayuta’s performance. Nayuta knows very well how to keep people’s attention on him even when he doesn’t have lines to say. When the Viscount turned Nayuta-bocchan around, the boy’s facial expression spoke voluuuumes.

Sakamoto, Nishii and Tanaka

I don’t have footage of them, and I am not going to get them legally or illegally, so I will include no visual examples of them in this post.

I don’t want to be harsh on children, they all did their best I believe, but do allow me to say that I am not very enthusiastic about their performances.

Sakamoto’s performance of Ciel was not very memorable, but I think it mostly has something to do with his part in the script just not being memorable at all. To sum up; Ciel in ‘Friendship’ received some guests from Japan, played chess, and stared wide shifty-eyed until the case solved itself. Sakamoto’s singing was decent, though. I wish they capitalised more on that.

Nishii... I think many people were initially especially enthusiastic about him because he did not “look like Vincent Phantomhive”. He did his best, I could tell he had fun in the performance, but whatever acting-talent he might have, the musical never gave him any chance to shine. That musical gave his character ZERO nuance. Nishii’s singing was very unpolished, and in the mere 3 weeks of audition time, there was also no time to get it polished. But then again, the same goes for the singing of most of that cast.

Tanaka... I could tell he did his best, but perhaps he was doing his best not to f*ck up a bit too hard. The songs in this musical were rather challenging, and Tanaka always seemed very tense as he was trying to chase the notes. It was like he was desperately clinging to his spot within a safety-zone, which ultimately meant he didn’t explore any potentials outside the range of monotony. When it comes to acting, it also seemed like cranky outbursts were the only emotion he dared touch upon.

So that was that! Thanks for reading!

[thisguyatthemovies]

A beautiful day indeed

Title: “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”

Release date: Nov. 22, 2019

Starring: Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys, Susan Kelechi Watson, Chris Cooper, Maryann Plunkett, Enrico Colantoni, Wendy Makkena, Tammy Blanchard, Noah Harpster, Carmen Cusack, Christine Lahti

Directed by: Marielle Heller

Run time: 1 hour, 48 minutes

Rated: PG

What it’s about: A jaded magazine writer is assigned a profile about children’s television personality Fred Rogers, and the two become friends as Rogers helps him see humanity in a more positive light.

How I saw it: How often these days do you sit quietly and ponder your life? How often do you think about the people who have shaped it? How often do you do that for a minute at a time, uninterrupted? How often do you even go 60 seconds without glancing at your phone?

The turning point and most powerful, poignant moment in director Marielle Heller’s serene, soulful look at the enduring influence of children’s television personality Fred Rogers, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” is one minute of silence. And it plays out in real time. Imagine that -- one minute of sitting there, with no one on the screen making a sound and no action taking place. One minute seems like a long time these days, especially in a movie. It could have been an unnerving test of patience. But here, in a movie already more peaceful than anything else you will see in a theater, it not only works, it leaves an impression. It helps transform a nice enough movie into something special.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is not just the story of TV’s Mister Rogers. It’s neither biopic nor documentary but a narrative film based on a true story that blends fact and fiction. Fred Rogers (played with perfect charm and energy by Tom Hanks) isn’t even on screen for parts of the film, and he is not the lead character. That would be Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel, a magazine writer and fictional character based on real-life journalist Tom Junod, whose 1998 Esquire article “Can You Say … Hero?” is the basis for the screenplay written by Micah Fizerman-Blue and Noah Harpster.

Just as Junod in real life, Rhys’ Lloyd Vogel is an award-winning journalist with a reputation of angering and alienating his subjects and sources. Vogel, a cynical middle-aged man who is coming to grips with being a new father and also dealing with an unhappy past, is given an assignment he thinks is beneath him – a puff piece, 400-word profile of Fred Rogers that will be part of a “heroes” series. Vogel is not happy about the assignment but accepts it and arranges to meet Rogers in-person at the TV studio in Pittsburgh where Rogers’ show is produced.

It doesn’t take long for Vogel to realize he is the interviewee more than the interviewer. Rogers recognizes a tortured soul when he sees one. In the days before meeting Rogers, Vogel is involved in an altercation with his hard-drinking father, Jerry (Chris Cooper), at his sister’s third wedding, and he still is sporting a black eye when he arrives in Pittsburgh. Rogers seems to recognize that Vogel’s story about the injury being the result of a softball incident is a lie. Vogel’s issues stem from his troubled relationship with his father, who left the family while Lloyd’s mother was dying.

Which brings us to the minute of silence. Vogel and Rogers are sitting in a booth at a busy diner. Vogel still is skeptical about Rogers; he thinks the whole “nice guy” thing might be an act. Rogers senses this, and he asks Vogel to sit in silence with him and think about those who “loved us into being.” So, Vogel does. And then everyone else in the diner does. The moment changes something deep in Vogel. The last 20 seconds or so of the scene is a close-up shot of Rogers just sitting there with a slight, warm smile.

From then on, Vogel gets it. He tries to be a better husband to his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson), and a better dad. He slowly builds a relationship with his father, who by this time is dying in a hospital bed in his living room. Lloyd Vogel and Rogers become great friends (and that happened in real life with Rogers and Junod). The sudden transformation of Vogel’s attitude because of Rogers’ decency might seem simplistic, and it is. But this is Mister Rogers we are talking about, and that’s just what he did.

Vogel’s journey from selfish and bitter to loving husband/father/son is the stuff of standard-issue redemption drama, and at times that is what “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” threatens to become. But it is lifted by the performance of Hanks, a nice-guy icon playing a nice-guy icon. He seems as comfortable as a zip-up red sweater in the role. Because of how well-known he is and Rogers was, a concern is not being able to lose sight of it being Hanks playing Rogers. But that lasts about five seconds. Only when we are reminded of the real-life Rogers in a clip during the credits do we remember, “Oh, yeah. That was Tom Hanks.” Hanks is perfect in a scene in which Vogel turns the table on him when the two talk about Rogers’ sons. The moment is a reminder that Rogers was human just like the rest of us.

“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” also benefits from moments of surrealness. Part of that is Rogers himself, and his show. The movie is patterned after Rogers’ PBS TV kids’ program, with toy cars, planes and cities indicating travel between scenes. And in the movie’s oddest moment, Vogel imagines himself on the set of the show, at first as his adult self but later as a puppet among show regulars Daniel Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII and Lady Aberlin (Maddie Corman).

Hard as this might be to fathom, some people did not like the real-life Rogers (just as some don’t like Hanks), and they likely won’t see this movie for the same reasons. To hardened souls, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” like Rogers, will seem too fantastical. Too cornball. Too soft. Too lightweight. Too out of touch. Too loving (Rogers and his show were criticized by those who prefer a tough-love approach for teaching children they are special and accepted unconditionally). Those are precisely the kind of people who need to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

But if they won’t see it, and if they choose to view the world through a cynic’s eyes, Rogers, were he alive today, would undoubtedly offer an understanding smile and say, “And that’s OK.”

My score: 94 out of 100

Should you see it? Yes, you owe it to yourself to be reminded what kindness and empathy are all about.

[thedeviljudges]

Honestly I agree that the acting in ST isn't thaaaat great with a few exceptions of course. Which actors did a good job, and which did you hate? Just curious :)

as i mentioned in a previous ask, i think sadie/max is the weakest/worst out of the whole ensemble. it’s hard to describe, but her movements and line deliveries are way too dramatic/over-the-top, and it doesn’t come off as natural even if a teen girl is supposed to technically act dramatic.

i realize that eleven is meant to slowly learn the world around her, but millie’s one-word delivers in st3 annoyed the fuckkkkk out of me. it was just so stilted.

i dislike the nancy/jonathan storyline together and independently, so that skews my view of their performance as a whole as i just don’t enjoy them at all. charlie isn’t a bad actor. i think he’s just given a terrible story to work with. i literally couldn’t care less for natalia.

finn is probably the strongest of the kids aside from noah. i’d say they’re on pare with finn ultimately ahead, but finn has a really great way of mixing comedy and seriousness into what he does. noah has done well with having a character who’s been traumatized, and st3 just made him cardboard flat, and that was truly awful to see because he was great in st1 and st2.

caleb is fine. really neutral about him. he kinda gets the short end of the stick in terms of range, so that ain’t his fault. and gaten is fantastic, but i feel like he’s better at comedy more so the serious side of things.

maya was fantastic esp as a newer character being randomly inserted into st3 for no reason, lmao. joe is really great as well, but i know that people feel he lacks range esp when it comes to other projects - i haven’t seen him in much outside of st. i did watch his eps on chicago fire, and i think he’s great. he just needs to be given more material to work with. (i mean, the breakup scene in the bathroom of st2 really showcases his ability to be vulnerable where you fuckin feel it, you know?)

dacre... his range depends on his role imo. he’s not bad. he’s not the best. did he work with billy really well? yes, absolutely. but then looking at something like power rangers, he certainly wasn’t the strongest there. also, his accent still needs work to this day, lmao. it’s also kinda difficult to gauge him bc of how few and far between his projects have been. i think the real testament is broken hearted gallery that’s supposed to come out this year and see how that goes.

it’s kinda odd to me tho that all the side characters have better performances than the actual main cast - sean astin, the guy who played alexei, the teacher dude, and the russian translator weirdo.

[omgbrainstorming]

The Librarians Periscope Live

Since I can’t watch UPtv because I live outside the US (not salty about that, not at all), I’ve watched the Live on Periscope that was supposed to be on Facebook, but Facebook was dead, so here’s what happened:

UPtv has given us a new home and said that if they get enough “love” they might do something for either a new movie or season 5

Dean had an ear piece to hear the questions and was playing FBI/CIA agent 

First “on screen” was John Kim to “talk behind the girls’ backs” (they were all behind the cameras)

Dean would have loved to explore the Mayan Mythology in season 5 (and again said it still might happen)

John was asked if he thought that Ezekiel would have changed had he picked up the Apple of Discord in season 4 since he didn’t change in season 1, and he said absolutely no and Dean added that there’s a freaking reason why the answer is a big fat no and it’s in the special that they did so, hey, those of you who can watch UPtv will find out! (n.d.a. Not salty at all, really). Also he said that Ezekiel is always both the best and the worst version of himself, so really, no.

John said his fave memory is his first day because he knew nothing, where Portland was (”it’s west of New Hampshire, right?”), what he was supposed to do etc., but everyone was really welcoming 

Dean said that the actors really helped shaped it all (the show) because they had lots of great ideas (like Lindy’s idea of having Cassandra smitten with Jenkins)

John was asked if Ezekiel kept any of the werewolf’s traits and he said that even though the “fetch the ball” scene with Christian at the end of the episode was hilarious, no, he’s just himself, “Ezekiel’s superpower is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing”

Here an alarm went off and, hilariously, it was the sound guy’s alarm 

Here came Lindy “on screen”

MY SHIPPER SISTER WAS MENTIONED: they asked a @jenksel ‘s question (I’m so proud??) where she asked if Casskins was going anywhere and Lindy was all “Listen here, I AM THIS SHIP’S CAPTAIN AND IMMA GO DOWN WITH IT!” so she certainly hopes so, she loves the idea that the thing keeping them (Cassandra and Jenkins) apart was their mortality/immortality and when Jenkins became mortal “it was... maybe maybe maybe!” and Dean and John echoed her “Maybe maybe maybe” and she concluded with: “I would be interested!”

Question: “We know Flynn has a special bond with Excalibur, what would your character choose?” (As something to bond with) And both Lindy and Dean had to suggest Stumpy to John, and Lindy said that Cassandra bonded with no objects, but with her power.

Lindy started making fun of Dean for his ear piece

Q: “In an hypothetical s5, would Cassandra and Jenkins remember the stuff from s4 that was erased when they went back and flipped it?” Because, Dean explains, we know that Flynn remembers and we think that Baird remembers. Lindy said that Cassandra and Jenkins’ relationship is so special that maybe it was imprinted on their hearts ”If I can be super romantic about the entire thing, and I think that kind of thing never goes away, and so maybe, if the details of it had gotten away, they still would have had a sense of that” (n.d.a. Lindy is our ship’s captain through and through, gotta love her)

Q: John and Lindy, what was you fave scene together? They both went “The Minotaur scene” when they are inside the Labyrinth (n.d.a. I’m not crying, go away), John said that it was beautiful because up until this point we see Ezekiel not caring for anyone but himself, and here and throughout all the seasons we see how he has a soft spot for Cassandra and he opens up to her before, and then to the rest of the team (n.d.a. my Casekiel babiiiies), he loved shooting with Lindy because they felt really at ease with each other; and then the final scene of the Morgan episode where Ezekiel gives her the trophy

Q: What was your (Lindy) fave costume? Lindy loved this question. She loved many of her outfits, creating them as well, but if she has to pick one, it’s the Cindy’s episode costume, where she is really colourful, yellow skirt, striped shirt underneath, a blue vest, an extremely short tie and a lovely big bee brooch on it. She doesn’t know why, but this outfit just makes her happy. 

Dean made fun of Christian before he came on screen “don’t know if you can hear it, but there was the sound of a motorbike and a horse running, so that tells me that Christian Kane is in the house”, Christian acted as if he was winded and didn’t know what was happening (he truly didn’t know it was a Periscope and not a Fb Live)

Q: What was your (Christian) fave myth? Was it in the show or not? Christian loved the Frankenstein thing, he was jealous of John Kim for this, he knows that Flynn has killed Dracula so that’s out of the table, but he would have loved more Frankenstein. 

Question for Christian: Which series required more stunts? Leverage or The Librarians? Leverage. And Dean is still salty about the fact that Christian makes him hire stunts for him and then goes and does the stunts himself.

Question for Christian: did you have to watch The Librarian movies or did you just wing it? He said he was lucky because the role was written with him in mind, so no, he knows what Flynn did in the past, but he didn’t

Q: What was your fave interactions with the fans of the show? Christian likes that both 5yo kids and 100yo watch the show together and can both be fan. For John it was at the DragonCon because two girls went up to them (Christian was with him) dressed as Eve and Cassandra and he was like “I know those outfits”, they (the girls) told them they were Eve and Cassandra (Prince Charming Cassandra and a jumpsuit for Eve) and John couldn’t believe he hadn’t recognised them. For Lindy all the girls who thanked her via Instagram or Twitter for representing them, the “weird ones”, who said that Cassandra really meant something for them and that helped them through a difficult time. Lindy herself said she “was always a weirdo” never fitting anywhere, so it was really special, “for all of you ladies out there, hiiiiii” and waved. 

Question for Christian: how did the character of Jacob help you evolve as an actor? He said that he was really lucky to work with amazing people (said all the cast’s names, but paused before John Kim’s name lol), and he said that Jacob was smarter than him, so he kinda had to get smarter.

Q: how was it to work with Rachel Nichols? They all said she was really nice.

Q: what was the funniest behind the scenes moment? They couldn’t really pick one, they loved playing UNO together, but turns out they gave a nickname to John Kim at 2 a.m. because John Kim is a really common name for korean actors and... they brainstormed. Lindy, laughing, said “and then he said he wanted a traditional Australian name!” and... they came up with Koala Newton John. They all agreed it would have been a hit

Q: would you (Dean) have liked to have an episode with all the villains together? Yes, Dean would have loved it, mainly because they all like the actors who played them, Christian was like “yeah, man, we can take ‘em, bring ‘em in!” and Dean “We got Baird, we can win anybody”

Rebecca arrived on screen

Question for Rebecca: what was your fave action and fave emotional scene? She loved the bar fight with Christian in the very first episode because they had played brother and sister in a previous show and had a fight together, so she liked that as the action scene. As the emotional scene she said Jenkins’ deathbed was tough, everyone chimed in saying it was so very emotional, but she added the scene in s4 where she is trying to make them remember The Library and she forgets it herself (in the alternate reality).

Q: we want to know everything that happened with those bunk beds from the summer camp episode. They said that there weren’t many funny outtakes, but that Ezekiel was bunking with Jacob and that Cassandra was under Eve’s bed. They had funny pj’s (”sleeping bonnet” for Lindy, alien pj’s for Ezekiel). But, on Rebecca’s Instagram there are pictures of them in bunk beds, it’s from the time loop episode. They said that maybe they liked bunk beds so much that they (the characters) sleep in bunk beds in The Library. 

Dean said that the location for the time loop episode is an actual prison, never used before, but still a prison.  John then said that, talking about emotional scenes, the one where Eve tells Ezekiel the WW2 story was really emotional, he didn’t want to know the story ‘till their close up and it worked well because he was genuinely tearing up when Rebecca/Eve told him for the first time during the shoot.

Question for Rebecca: fave memory from working on the show? Probably The Silver Screen episode because she likes that it’s not, as usual, Flynn explaining things to Eve, it’s Eve who knows this world and explains it to him. And then the fact that they (Rebecca and Noah) were really beautifully dressed as noir movies want and they (Lindy, Christian and John) showed up dressed up as anything but. They started laughing, John’s fond memories of Jab Jab, Christian was really embarassed because of his cowboy outfit so out of context with their beautiful world. Then everyone laughed because Dean brought up Christian’s yodeling in that episode. 

Q: what was something you wanted to see your character doing/going that we didn’t get to do in s5?  John likes that he (Ezekiel) was almost at the point of being responsible and he would have liked to shoot that.  Lindy would have liked to know more about her past, her parents etc. She has so many ideas because we only got a glimpse of her goth phase in high school, she would have loved to have a particular actress as her mother (n.d.a. sorry guys, I didn’t catch her name, did you?) because she thinks she could portay the same energy Cassandra has, and Christian said he actually often visualise the same actress as his mother and thinks she’d be perfect.  Rebecca would have loved to see an immortal Eve. Christian said that Jacob has found his family in s3, so he thinks he just wants to be like Eve, not in any romantic way, but he wants her to have to focus only on protecting Cassandra and Ezekiel, he wants to be able to fight at the same level, he wants to be great in a fight. 

Dean reveals (to them as well) that he knew what the opening scene of s5 would have been: right back in the middle of the Tethering Ceremony with Nicole barging in and yelling “Stop! If you tether the world ends!” and end of teaser. He knows nothing after that, but he wanted to “screw everything up”

Q: if you had to do a body swapping episode, who would you like your character to body swap with?  John, without a second of hesitation: “Baird.” And then “Aaaaaah, to kiss Noah Wyle” and everyone started laughing. Because he likes the idea of changing the Librarian-Guardian thing. Rebecca agrees that watching her as Ezekiel would have been fun. Lindy to Christian “Does that leave you and me?”  Christian would be ecstatic to play Cassandra, he thinks he’d be great with his hands (for the visions), “I think I’d be fabolous!” and Lindy said she’s be impressive as Jacob because no one expects her to be able to fight, but she actually, in real life, is, Christian knows this and was “yes, she can throw a punch, I believe she knocked me back 3 feet”

Q: in tribute to John Larroquette who’s not here, your fave scene with John Larroquette. Lindy made a whining pained sound (she can’t choose one, “All of them!”). Dean: I think as a group, you all agree on his death scene.  Everyone: yes. Dean: that was a rip-your-heart-out scene. But what about your one on one scene? Christian: the episode where Jenkins and Jacob had the talk after the stuff with Jake’s father. Christian went up to John (Larroquette) and told him, before they even knew about that episode, “<You have to understand something, man, you’re going to be my dad in this>, and I told John that, and you (Dean) before that episode with my dad, <I’m looking at you because I have nothing, you know what I mean? I don’t trust this guys (points at the others), so you- you’re the guy>” and it went exactly as he imagined it, and said that just getting to have a cup of coffe in the morning with John is amazing. Lindy: it was the entire episode she directed (Some Dude Named Jeff) because she says that what he gave her during that episode is so incredible. Her fave scene between him and Cassandra is “the vampire episode”. Christian: “At the very end?” Lindy: “No, no, at the beginning! Where she confesses her undying love to Jenkins! And asks him out on a date! And I just remember John (Larroquette) being so awkard about this and was like (tries to deepen her voice to speak like John) <Ooooh, nooo, I don’t think you would ever ask me out on a date!> and I was like, <Listen John, don’t tell me what I wouldn’t do>” and everyone laughs. She said that she likes their fight over mortality and immortality (same episode) and “he’s just a dream to work with” and stares dreamily into the void.  John Kim says it’s when Ezekiel confronts Jenkins when he’s going away in the Apple of Discord. Dean said that his fave scene between John Larroquette and Rebecca was in the second episode, under the bridge, when he gives her the pep talk.  Rebecca agrees, but also like the scene just before his death, when Eve has brought them all back and “he was there and gave me the biggest hug in the world”

Christian: “If I can speak for the panel, none of our tears (in the death scene) were acting, I was crying”. Everyone: yes. He (John Larroquette) was powerful.

Question: which episode was the funniest to film? Or which moment?  Rebecca can’t pick, but said that the episode when they know they can work together, the four of them, without Flynn, the fairytale episode, they had lots of fun then, especially at Eve being mad for being a princess. Christian remembers going up to Rebecca: “as someone <that claims to know about stunts> I said <you’re in high heels, be careful with them> and she looked at me and she goes <Christian, there’s nothing I can’t do in high heels>” and everyone started laughing. Christian “and you know what? She’s absolutely right”

Question for John: can you actually pick a lock and have you ever stolen something? Yes, he can actually pick a lock, he learned, he can do it in under a minute. Christian “what did you steal that’s worth the most money?” Lindy at John “Nooooo! Do not admit to that!” Chaos ensued and Dean calmed them: “I’ll answer the question for him” then looks in the camera “A million hearts”. 

Q: if there could only be one Librarian, who would make the best Librarian? Dean is sure this will start a fight. John: Ezekiel Jones. No questions, no hesitation. Everyone laughs. Lindy raises her hand and goes: “Guys, like, who else’s ever read a book? Who else could it be?!”  Christian “I’ll be honest with you: it wouldn’t be Jacob Stone” and “sure as hell wouldn’t be Ezekiel” and “It would have been Cassandra. Because she thinks about things before jumping in and because she has the power of magic” 

Dean thinks Captain Marvel stole the idea from them: the fact that Cassandra has powers, then gets rid of the brain grape and her powers go boom.

Lindy: “I actually think that not one of them can be The Librarian, even Flynn admitted it, after muuuuch discussion, that they are all better together.” Dean: 100% agrees with Lindy

Q: would any of you consider being a librarian as an alternative career?  Rebecca volounteers at her kids’ library Lindy spends lots of time with children literacy causes, she wouldn’t be a librarian, “but the library is my happy place” Christian “I don’t wanna have to do with any card catalogue whatsoever!” (he’d only be a Librarian, capital L).   John: nope, his fondest memory of a library is him behind other children scaring them.

Dean: can any of you actually use the card catalogue? John: NO. Rebecca and Lindy: yes, no problem. Christian: it’s the easiest thing in the world. Then to John “of course you can’t” And Christian Kane is an actual honorary librarian, because he made some publicity for the show and the NY Library gave him an honorary position.

Q: What do you think The Librarians have been doing since the last episode? Christian wants everybody to know that Jacob Stone has perfected and probably marketed his own line of beef jerky - everyone explodes in laughs - which is called Chupacabra. Lindy (n.d.a. who totally wanted to say “Jenkins”) says that Cassandra is probably re-organizing everything in The Library. John thinks Ezekiel is being lazy, sleeping in, getting bald.

Lindy directed an episode, John asked what she did for it and she said she normally just reads the script and thinks what would Cassandra wants, here she had to do it with all of them, mostly Jenkins.  Christian said she was amazing, especially because it was her idea the opening scene (when they come into The Library, it’s shot all in one, no room for error, they are shouting news of the escaped animals at each other)

Dean asked: Did directing changed the way she acts? (Lindy) Not really, just made her want to be better.

Q: if you could use the Magic Door to take you anywhere in the world, where would you go?  Lindy: can we travel in time? Rebecca: No, it’s not a time machine.  Lindy: I kno- Rebecca: Do you even remember the show we were in? The thing escalated when they asked Dean if they could swap the magic doors for a time machine.  Christian: magic door, same day, same time. Go. Lindy: Ok. Becca? Rebecca: ahm.......................... Christian: John Kim? They laugh.  Rebecca: Come back to me! Dean: I’ll tell you where I would go!  Rebecca: ok Dean: I would take all of you and we’d go through the Magic Door and we’d arrive at The Library. Everyone: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwww!

And that’s it. 

Now it’s almost 6 a.m. here and I want the extended episodes of The Librarians. No, I don’t need sleep, someone gives those episodes to me, please

[bbclesmis]

‘Valjean is like Spider-Man’

DOMINIC WEST FIGURES he's played his share of awful people. The serial killer Fred West in Appropriate Adult? Jimmy McNulty, the Baltimore cop in The Wire? A lovable rogue, but a rogue nonetheless. Noah Solloway, the lead in The Affair? "He's deeply silly," West contends. "Just a silly man!" In the film Colette (out this Friday), he plays a sadistic husband who locks his gifted wife (Keira Knightley) away and makes her write books for which he claims credit.

"As an actor, you do live with these people and experience what they're feeling," sighs the actor, 49. "If they're a******s, it's exhausting and ultimately degrading. So it was such a relief to play someone who's great." And he smiles that irascible smile, the one that makes you root for West even when he's playing murderers and pretentious, adulterous novelists.

Jean Valjean, West's character in the BBC's adaptation of Les Miserables, is not only "great" in the actor's eyes. He is nothing less than the "greatest hero in all literature": a superhero ex-convict who has spent 19 years in prison being tortured by Inspector Javert (David Oyelowo) for stealing a loaf of bread, but who determines on his release to be the best possible man he can be... with heartbreaking results.

West considers Victor Hugo's French revolutionary epic to be the "greatest novel ever written", too - "much better than War and Peace!" - and certainly much better than the famous musical (he's not a fan).

"Valjean is not just a good guy, he's an amazing guy. Like Spider-Man!" he beams. "He climbs up the sides of buildings to rescue kids. And he has the legitimacy of intense suffering; he's done 19 years of hard labour. That knocks Iron Man into a cocked hat! Then you get into the humanity of Valjean, his demons, his desperate need to redeem himself... He's trying not to be the brute that the prison has turned him into. You become a better person by spending time with someone like that."

He has asked me to his home, a converted brewery in Wiltshire that he shares with his wife, Catherine FitzGerald, and four children - Dora, 11, Senan, ten, Francis, nine, and Christabel, five - "I'm trying to cut down," he jokes. (He has another daughter, Martha, from his first marriage, who is studying English at Oxford and wants to act.) "I think all households should have a five-year-old girl running round," he says. "I just think it's better for children. Stops them from becoming little princesses. It's much harder to be a spoilt brat as one of four."

HE OPENS THE door unshaven and unkempt with a general air of bohemian bonhomie. He puts on a succession of silly voices as he leads me through to his kitchen. "Teas? Light refreshments? Do we want hot milk in our coffees? Yes?" He's such a chameleon as an actor that even his own accent sounds as if it's put on. He was educated at Eton, but his family isn't proper posh. His Irish father owned a plastics factory in Sheffield, his mother was an actor and he's the sixth of seven children.

The Wests have been doing up the house for about three years, but only moved in last summer - there are paintings waiting to be hung, pieces of Lego, mugs, antiques scattered around... The house used to be a "very manageable cottage next to a derelict brewery, but having decided to connect them all together they're only now getting used to the layout. "There are about five different doors to choose from. I didn't realise how spread out it would be. It's enormous!" They moved from west London to give the kids more space to range around when they're teenagers: "I want my kids to be around trees and animals more."

We take refuge in his office, up in the rafters of the old brewery, where he sinks into an armchair and resumes recounting his love affair with Les Miserables.

THE BBC VERSION is written by Andrew Davies and picks up more or less where his adaptation of War and Peace left off. It opens on the field of Waterloo in 1815 in the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat. Back in Paris, the royalists are resurgent - but can't quell the forces unleashed by the Revolution.

In the first episode, we follow Valjean's ill-starred attempts at redemption after his nemesis, Javert, releases him; meanwhile, the grisette Fantine (Lily Collins) falls for a cad (Johnny Flynn) and becomes pregnant with little Cosette - whose path will cross with Valjean's in the future. Six episodes, much heartache and many improbable coincidences will take us all the way up to the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris.

West hadn't read the epic novel, but now that he has, he's a convert. He even loves Hugo's digressions into the design of the Paris sewers. "Actually, I'd have loved it if we could have made six seasons out of it," he says. 'There's more than enough material and it's all important and relevant. As with any great classic, it's big enough to handle any amount of interpretations."

Javert's antipathy to Valjean is one of the engines of the plot - but it's also something of a mystery. Why does Javert hate him so much? "I always like to trace motivations to sex," West says. "I said to David, 'Javert obviously fancies him!' But he thought that was crass."

Did the rivalry extend off-set? "You're never quite sure where the character ends and the actor starts," he laughs. "But the key to David is that he's actually royal. He's a prince in Nigeria. And he doesn't drink. He's very religious. He's been married to his wife since he was 19 and they have four beautiful children. I hadn't realised people like that existed in the acting world! He's a very inspiring guy."

The co-stars decided it was the shared trauma of being institutionalised that set their characters against one another. "Valjean doesn't think he deserves anything other than brutality. Javert is constantly reminding him he's just a common criminal who breaks rocks and murders people."

Oyelowo is one of a number of non-white actors in the cast, marking a departure from traditional costume-drama casting. West jokes that he really wanted to do it all with 'A1lo'Allo accents, but: "Like any classic, it's not a museum piece. It has relevance to modern life. Eponine and the girls all talk like modern London girls. And therefore it looks like modern Britain, too."

THE PRODUCTION LOOKS likely to make Collins, as Fantine, a star. "She's incredible," says West. "It's an exhausting part. So harrowing. Any actress who goes for it deserves all the accolades she gets..." The first scene they shot together was Fantine's death, filmed in a freezing manor house outside Brussels at 5am. "She really went for it. I was like, 'Oh my God! How did you do those spasm things?' She said, 'I just made it up'." I imagine it's reassuring to have West on set: he is very experienced, but doesn't take himself too seriously. Do the younger actors come to him for advice? "Pfah! No. I'm jaded and lazy."

The Wire was the show that brought him fame, as well as a credibility not usually open to Old Etonians. But originally he didn't want to be in it. "And it turns out to have been the one thing that everyone knows me for and it was one of the best shows ever made! I think [creator] David Simon is almost the Victor Hugo of our time... certainly the Charles Dickens."

The Affair offers more escapist pleasure, its marital rows interspersed with good-looking people having sex (even if he doesn't think much of Noah). The Wests are about to decamp to LA for the filming of the final season, but it will be without Ruth Wilson this time. Last February, she disclosed in a Radio Times interview that she was "sure" she earned less than West. "I don't want more money, I just want equal money," she added. Not long after that her character Alison Bailey was killed off. What was all that about? "Oh, not related!" West yelps.

He remains good friends with Wilson. The main point of contention on set was whose behind would be visible in the sex scenes. "We used to fight about it. 'You're on top this time', 'No! I was on top the last three times!'"

He'd never given much thought to who was paid what, he says. "I never asked what the money is on a show. It was more a question of if I wanted to do it. So it woke me up to the issue. I never realised the disparity and the injustice."

It's one of a number of changes he has noticed since the #MeToo movement gained ground. "One thing that's happened is a positive discrimination in favour of female directors. But the main thing is that unacceptable behaviour from male directors or actors is now either not possible, or you can call them out on it. There was one guy in particular whose behaviour was disgusting. Particularly to young females in minor roles. I tried to counter it on several occasions. But now it wouldn't be so hard to get rid of them."

'Treatment of women has taken a big step back in television'

He twists his face in derision at those who feel the feminists have gone "too far". "Treatment of women has taken a big step back in the past 20 years," he says, his voice rising. "Particularly in television, which has become more pornographic and the burden of that falls squarely on young women. Things like Game of Thrones, where you get a pair of bare breasts every five minutes... I mustn't say this, but..." Say it!

"I'm fairly sure that 20 years ago young actresses would not have had pressure put on them to take their clothes off. The parts young actresses get, particularly pretty ones, involve violent rape. When I think about my daughter going into the profession... I'm just really glad that #MeToo has started to counteract what has happened in the past 20 years."

He puts it down to internet porn - "It's made boys feel that women are sex objects who are easily available" - as well as social media. "If you can swipe someone's face because you don't think they're pretty and it costs you that little... I haven't done it myself, but it cheapens it."

HE's CONCERNED AT the turn the world is taking: he mentions Trump, climate change, teenage boys becoming addicted to the online game Fortnite. A wariness of modernity seems to have inspired the move to the countryside; he and his wife are "luddites", he confesses. "I'm not one of those people who say, 'How can you bring children into this world?' But I do want to spend a lot more time hanging out with my kids and running around in forests."

Once he has finished filming the last season of The Affair, he plans to hire an enormous camper van, bundle the entire family into it and spend a few months driving around the States.

"It's the last chance we have," he explains. "They're nearly teenagers, so they're not going to want to spend that much time with their old man for much longer. I've spent a long time away from them. So we're taking six months, four months of it travelling. I've taken them out of school - there are no big exams. We'll home school them. They'll read. No screens. You're not going to get a better education than that. If you travel with as little as possible, you get much more interesting experiences."

Radio Times 5-11 January 2019

[noahcdaily]

Noah Centineo, Shameless Heartthrob

My date with the best thirst architect the internet’s ever seen.

Now, I put my hand here,” Noah Centineo instructs as he slides his hand in the back pocket of my jeans. “And then we walk a little, like this.” He leads me around the Coney Island Aquarium like that: hip to hip, smiling at each other, his hand, to reiterate, in the back pocket of my jeans. I’ve just shamelessly asked him to re-create his signature move from Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, an adaptation of Jenny Han’s YA novel, in which he plays Peter Kavinsky, the high-school jock at the center of the film’s romantic plotline. I watched the movie and mentally flagged this scene — where he’s trying to convince a cafeteria full of students he’s dating the protagonist, Lara Jean Covey (Lana Condor) — as the one that made me wonder, Who is that guy? It’s a moment that belongs in a clip reel of classic, chemistry-laden movie moments, and I, a journalist, wondered if it could inspire the same feelings when executed in real life.

Centineo tells me how he totally improvised the move during filming. It was a thing he used to do with his ex-girlfriend. They’d be walking around, like we are now, and he’d realized he could sort of dance her around by the pocket and turn her, “just like this,” and boom, propelled by just a tug on my pocket, I’m suddenly facing him. We’re pelvis to pelvis. He’s smiling, comfortably, and I’m confronted with his hazel eyes, the scent of clean laundry, and pure pheromones. I sort of squeal, I think? Who can say, because I definitely black out for a second.

If I seem thirsty, well, isn’t that the point? At 22, Centineo is the most effective, addictive sort of heartthrob: the kind who absolutely loves being one, the kind who does everything in his power to make us thirst harder than we’ve ever thirsted before — and, yeah, it works. When the movie came out in August, Noah Centineo was immediately, breathlessly given the title of Internet’s Boyfriend. Now, with his second Netflix rom-com, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, in which he plays yet another lovable, evolved jock, Centineo has graduated to full-on cultural obsession.

In less than a month his Instagram followers went from just under 800,000 to 9.5 million. In the movie, his character drives crosstown to buy his love interest her favorite Korean yogurt drinks — and no joke — Yakult stock has been going up. This man’s floppy hair is actually driving the market. He’s been stalked by fans and now employs an omnipresent security guard named Dave. He’s been the subject of a leaked nude scandal (“I understand why you have to ask that question,” he demurred when I asked him about a certain video that’s been making the rounds. “I just hope you understand why I’m not gonna answer it.”). His Twitter mentions are an anthology of fantasies — some chaste and some really not — written by women of all ages. “Tell them all to hit my line,” he says with a laugh.

We decide to tour the aquarium, where I’m idly waiting for him in the lobby when he walks in shirtless. Shirtless. Without a shirt. Holding his black T-shirt in his hand, instead of wearing it on his torso, which I can see right now. With my eyes. He has a real reason. He’s just been outside, taking pictures on a boardwalk in nearly 100-degree weather. But even with a rational explanation as to why he has no shirt on, the entrance is so on the nose it’s almost ridiculous: a smoking-hot leading man, walking into a room sweaty and half-naked. It’s like there should be a slowed-down frame rate, a treacly indie-pop song playing, a zoom-in of my pupils turning into those hunga hunga hearts. He hands his ticket to the woman at the front desk and apologizes, for some reason, for his bare chest. She makes him put his shirt back on, and greets me with a smile so huge, I can assure you he has zero cavities.

Even offscreen, Centineo, I observe immediately, has that whole thing. It wasn’t just good directing or the right song cued at the right moment that created the effect. He has all the qualities deemed necessary by early-in-life fans of Teen Bop and Devon Sawa at the end of Casper: white sneakers (Vans, of course), an easy charm, and a tendency to play it fast and loose with knowing, meaningful eye contact that says “I see you.” He knows the right way to lean against a wall, how to twirl a specific clump of hair so it slouches over one eye. He’s even got an imperfection you can moon over: this tiny scar on his chin from where his dog tried to rip his face off when he was a kid. When he greets me with a hug, it’s the kind of genuine, intentional, full-body contact that makes me feel like he’d write me a letter every day and build me a house.

“I’ve always played the love interest,” Centineo says. “I’ve trained for it for a while. These roles are just molds I can pour myself into.” He grew up in Miami, with a few years’ interlude in Park City, which he hated because he never felt like he fit in. He started acting as a preteen when he attended a general casting call sort of on a lark, but he enjoyed it so much he eventually dropped out of his Boca Raton high school sophomore year and moved to Los Angeles with his mom to pursue it full-time. Since then Centineo’s been playing graduating levels of “crush”: first on a tween-friendly Disney show Austin & Ally, then on a teen-friendly Freeform show, The Fosters, and now for admiring audiences of all ages on Netflix rom-coms (To All the Boys, Sierra Burgess, and one deep cut for the algorithm-determined real fans, SPF 18.)

“I like this rowboat. Do you want to sit in this rowboat,” he asks, upon discovering a fake rowboat stuck in the corner of an exhibition about ponds. (Fake rowboat, a move.) Ever the leading man, he gets in first to steady the fake boat, and helps me in. Then, he directs yet another adorable moment for us, and starts rocking the boat back and forth, like we’re on a real pond, laughing this huge, full-throated laugh like the only thing he’s ever wanted to do was crouch in a plastic rowboat with me. And even though we both know the answer to the question, I ask, “Why do you think everyone is going nuts over you right now?”

“People love love,” he says, and begins to explain how both of his recent movies “empower” people. “I think these are just great examples of feel-good films, how could you not like something that makes you feel good?”

He stops talking and looks at me, a little concerned. “If you’re still warm, we should move,” he suggests, perhaps noticing the sweat pouring from my forehead and rolling down to my chin. It’s such a hot day, even the AC inside has given up. “I just want you to feel comfortable,” he says thoughtfully, adding, “Don’t worry, I also sweat like a motherfucker.”

It’s now his mission to find the coolest spot in the aquarium. He leads me down some stairs, back up the same stairs once he realizes they lead to a bathroom. We go around all the exhibits, while he looks up at the ceiling, in the corners, searching for an air vent, determined to find the perfect spot to get the full blast. We finally do. “Can you feel it?” he asks, one last time, before he seems satisfied, parked in front of a manmade reef. It’s a specific sort of gallantry I recognize from his roles, the ones he describes as manly and masculine, but also “sensitive, emotionally intelligent, loving, nurturing, and protective.”

“That’s just what a great man is in life and in general,” he shrugs. In his two most well-known parts (both of which occurred in the past month) he plays an updated version of a familiar type of crush. In To All the Boys, a lacrosse player who loves Fight Club but drinks kombucha and falls for the film’s Korean-American protagonist. In the other, Sierra Burgess, a quarterback who thinks the cheerleader is way hot, but instead falls for the brainy girl who catfishes him. In both, he displays a preference for the unexpected love interest. In both, he drives a Jeep Wrangler, the preeminent car of teen crushes. He’s not the mysterious, brooding type à la Robert Pattinson in Twilight, he doesn’t have the cold, intellectual appeal of Timothée Chalamet’s character in Lady Bird. He’s not pure Zac Efron dumb-hot-frat boy or even the misunderstood, sexually experienced bad boy like the ones Adam Driver plays. What Centineo does well — and what nobody has really done with such conviction since Freddie Prinze Jr. — is play a simple, suburban-mall kind of crush with Stanislavski dedication. That’s it. He’s just fully nice and hot at a time that feels like “nice and hot” is a rare resource. He’s a throwback to a more classic sort of wish fulfillment.

In fact, Centineo can see a whole career based around this: being good at love. He imagines all the potential types of roles he can explore: romantic dramas, other types of rom-coms, action romantic comedies, edgier, more toxic and dangerous types of love. “There’s so many degrees to love. I think I have a lot more to offer the space,” he says. He’s got a few projects lined up already, most notably a movie coming out in 2019 called The Stand-In. He plays a post-grad who launches a start-up, which requires him to loan himself out as a fake boyfriend.

“Whoa whoa! That motherfucker just came through so quick! He ran up on us with his boy.”

Centineo jumps back and marvels at some large fish that just came swimming right at his head. He makes a kissy-fish face back at the fish. What a lovely time we’re having. Looking at fish! Then he points to a placard and carefully reads out the description for Slippery Dick, a type of fish native to this particular tank, and chuckles. Then I read one about the French Grunt. I have no idea what’s going on. I point to a particularly fascinating fish, and he leans in to see, angling his head so his hair brushes my hand. Our arms accidentally touch.

“How’d you get so good at flirting,” I’m compelled to ask.

“Am I flirting?” he laughs and leans and looks down at the floor. “I don’t know — I’m fucking so romantic. Like, such a romantic — it’s not even funny. I can’t help it. I swear to God, like, every day, the majority of my day is sentimental. You know, I’m thinking about past relationships I’ve been in, how I miss them so much or what I would do different, or why I wanna be with them again, or just moments I’d like to go back to or I know why I shouldn’t go back, and then you know, it’s just constantly love, love, love.”

He’s a Taurus, ruled by Venus, he offers by way of explanation. “That means a couple things: one, like I need a lot of nurturing, and two, Venus is love, I’m ruled by love.” His favorite movie is Gaspar Noe’s Love, his favorite feeling is being in love (which he has been, twice). I bet if you could cook Love and serve it over pasta, it would be his favorite meal. He lives, breathes, and expels love. His Instagram is a steady stream of soul-baring, puppy-dog-eyed selfies — “I’m pretty vain,” he jokes. His Twitter alternates between sort of yoga studio platitudes and vague flirtations like “Fuck…you’re so cute,” or, more in line with my personal interests, “THE BLACKER THE BERRY.”The messages are to nobody specific, he says — he’s single right now — they could be to somebody he just met, or he met before, or he saw across the room, or just to everybody.

Dating is going to be hard for him from now on, he suspects, even though he really doesn’t want to change how he pursues someone he likes (open-heartedly, passionately, purely) but he’s started worrying about the reasons people want to date him. Is it just because he’s more famous now? Do they just want to date Peter Kavinksy? But are Kavinsky and Centineo really so different?  “I’m definitely not as innocent—” he says, with a gaze, because why say anything if you aren’t going to commit.

Centineo continues to list the differences, both philosophical and material: He’s more apt to jump out of a plane or just sit in nature than his characters. He doesn’t live in the suburbs, he lives in Los Angeles with his older sister and her boyfriend. He likes yoga and martial arts. He parties with friends. He starts every day at 6 a.m. with oatmeal, the recipe for which he begins detail, slowly: “I do Irish steel-cut oats, I do almond butter, coconut butter uh, coconut oil, honey, uh, chopped bananas, and, and, uh, like, hemp granola,” and I’m struck with this familiar feeling of being completely entranced by a man saying absolutely nothing interesting to me, which, oh right, yes, is infatuation.

[bylertruther]

he did sob, yes, but is that pertinent? don't we sometimes sob because we're overwhelmed, stressed, scared, or even happy? how do we know that was because of self-hatred? i think sobbing is a rather appropriate response when one decides to repackage their feelings for their best friend and the painting they've spent so much time on and care so much about as being wholly their sister's. i think it's also an appropriate response when someone you love happens to see you for who you really are despite all of your tireless hiding and tells you they love you unconditionally.

the duffers said that will wants to make himself understood, he wants to get this off his chest to those that he cares about. jonathan sees it and responds to it when they're alone, but mike doesn't because he doesn't understand. there is no one way to be or experience anything, but this is a character in a story and i personally just don't feel like those desires and his actions line up with someone who is experiencing shame. will is already a reserved character and we've seen him be ashamed or embarrassed of things before, like the mind flayer for instance, but he doesn't exhibit those behaviors now with this. he behaves more like someone that doesn't think his "crush" could ever return his feelings, which is in part why he pushes mike towards eleven. he doesn't tell mike, because he thinks he has no chance whatsoever. noah even says that himself, too, that his role this season was to essentially play someone in love with their best friend. if will is already such a sensitive and reserved character, would it really be like him to want to and unpromptedly divulge that which brings him shame or that which he hates?

i'm not saying that will is an out and proud lgbt icon strutting around in rainbow everything, not even in the safety of his mind. i also don't think that's realistic or accurate lol. i do, however, believe there's a difference between navigating a dangerous society and actually internalizing their hatred and turning it on yourself. given his actions throughout the show, i just don't feel like he holds that hate for himself or his sexuality. if he did, i struggle to understand then why he would lean into that part of himself more openly in an environment where he doesn't have to be the local fairy that got hate-crimed. i struggle to understand why he would want to tell mike, per the creators of this story, if that was something he was ashamed of. will has hidden things before. if he wanted to hide this, why hasn't he?

i guess i just feel like will being covert, aka being sensible and not suicidal, isn't a result of hatred that he's internalized in the I Hate Myself For Being Gay</3 way that this post was about. it's just survival instinct and wanting to live, no? that doesn't mean that he's ashamed of himself; it just means he has to play by society's rules if he wants to participate in it, just as everyone else does even if their rules are different. at the end of the day, he wants to love and be loved for who he is. he has never tried to tame that or snuff it out like some other characters (looking at you, mike) have. he lives as true to himself as he can in a society that can and would kill him for it if they had proof, seeing as how the people of hawkins thought his death/disappearance was a hatecrime. if he did actually hate that part of himself, then why would he honor it as much as he has even with all the pain it has and continues to cause him?

maybe we're just having a philosophical disagreement or i've misunderstood you, but i just have A Lot of feelings about how people mischaracterize (in my opinion) his bravery and strength as shame. the fact that he continues to be as he is without apology for it is an act of bravery that he commits every single day. just because he isn't throwing people around with his mind or shooting a gun doesn't mean that he isn't as brave and strong as some other characters. he fights every single day; it just looks different than everyone else's fight. and while shame is undoubtedly a social construct that obviously does not exist or arise in a vacuum, it feels unfair to say that people doing what they have to do to be safe and survive is a result of shame or hate turned inward In The Way That This Post Was Referencing. society needs shame, shame enforces the rules, and we need to abide by the rules if we want to live, but that doesn't mean that we have to believe in or accept that shame. people not endangering themselves and remaining covert isn't always due to shame, the same way that not everyone that's "in the closet" is in there because they're scared or not proud of their sexuality. everyone has their reasons and i just don't believe that will's are due to that. it isn't safe for him to be out as some people are today. that doesn't mean that he hates himself all the time for being gay. will's struggle has always been with how other people treat him: in season one he's bullied, in season two he's babied, in season three he's ignored, and in season four... well... he feels like his love is unrequited and reiterates that he's different as he has in past seasons, but at least he has his best friend that doesn't make him feel like a mistake at all and gives him the courage to fight on as well as his brother, so not all is lost. shame is a social construct, but i don't think he's the character to look to for internalized homophobia.

people who think will byers hates himself for being gay when will byers is one of the very few characters on the show that has refused to change himself to fit anyone else's idea of what he should be despite the fact that people, including his own father, have been harassing, bullying, and abusing him for it literally his entire fucking life are just...... so weird.

will's entire POINT is that he will survive and brave whatever you throw his way against all odds and come out on the other side of it still clutching on to his sense of self and hope that tomorrow will be a better day. the entire point of his character is that he loves what he loves without apology or shame.

he sings "that weird song he loves" in the middle of hell because it reminds him of his brother and offers him comfort in a place where there is none. he creates art because he loves it and doesn't care if it isn't something boys do, then he gifts it to his friends because he loves them and wants them to know it, too. he loves dnd and writes campaigns and dresses up for them because they bring him joy and he just wants to spend time with his friends even if they think they're "too cool" for it now.

he knows that sometimes it's harder than it should be to be gay in a homophobic society and has been harassed for that literally his entire fucking life it's LITERALLY how they introduce him to us not even twenty minutes into this fucking show and YET !!!!!!! he doesn't back away from that. ever.

he gets picked on for his clothes, but he doesn't change them. he gets called names, but he doesn't make any attempt to conform. his best friend, the boy that he's in love with and his very first friend ever, tells him it isn't his fault that he doesn't like girls and shamefully asks him if he really thought they were going to play games together in his basement for the rest of their lives and never get girlfriends, and what does will do?

he says yeah. i guess i did. i really did.

will faces all of that and goes to a new place where he has the golden opportunity of a clean slate, and what does he do? when assigned to do a presentation on his hero... he picks alan turing of all people. and when his brother later on tells him that he loves him no matter what, essentially giving him the It's Okay To Be Gay I Love You So Much And Always Will talk, still there is no denial on will's part here either.

will has NEVER, EVER denied being gay. he has NEVER tried to change that part of himself. he has ALWAYS stood tall and braved another day even when it was scary and hard. he has ALWAYS remained true to himself even though that has only ever made his life that much harder.

he said that sometimes he feels like a mistake for being so different from other people, but that being loved and accepted makes him feel like he isn't one at all and like he's better for being different and that gives him the courage to fight on.

literally what the fuck are you guys on about when you talk about will being self-hating for being gay. where is the canonical evidence for that? and more than that, why are you so keen on throwing away all of his acts of bravery and the sheer fucking strength of character that he's had since the very beginning? it would've been so much easier for him to conform, to be the "man" that everyone has always pushed him to be, but he doesn't ever do that. he stays true to himself no matter what. so, again, where the hell are these self-hating receipts?!

[poipoi1912]

Carisi-centric thoughts on Ep 19x11

Wait, was Sonny even in this episode?

Still, I do have some thoughts about him (I do not, however, have overall thoughts because this episode kind of put me to sleep). But first:

Dodds Thoughts

I LOVE HIM. I support him. I will not stand for him turning into some villain because the writers need to add some tension and they can’t figure out a more creative way of doing it.

I will, however, say that Liv works best when she has an adversary, and if the writers have realized that, and they’ve chosen to use Dodds for that purpose, I guess I’ll take it. I’ve said this before, but Liv is more sympathetic as an underdog. And she has more fire when she’s fighting against someone stronger. She is a woman in a position of authority, and it’s great to see the others respect and acknowledge her position and her skill (i.e. her being the ONE AND ONLY person who could EVER do this job that COUNTLESS people have done before her etc etc), but dramatically speaking that can get preachy or sycophantic or just plain boring. Giving Liv an enemy just might be a positive step. BUT WHY’D IT HAVE TO BE DODDS?

Also, Peter Gallagher is a wonderful actor and he continues to bring the best out of Mariska and it’s beautiful to watch. So, again, maybe it’s a good thing that he’s possibly shady. EXCEPT IT’S NOT. BECAUSE HE’S GREAT. BEST GUY EVER. BEST HAIR. BEST EYEBROWS. BES-ok I’ll stop.

Barba Thoughts

He is a feminist icon.

He is hungry for a nice thicc

steak.

Legal Thoughts

Nope lol. Grand larceny? OK then.

Sonny Thoughts

So, Liv comes back after 3 weeks, and Sonny literally turns his back the minute she walks in, and then he walks away and never even says a word? Never welcomes her back? The hell?

Allow me to say something as objectively as I can, considering Sonny is my fave.

I think Sonny has been relegated to last man on the totem pole, which is what he was originally brought in for. What he actually was, when he first appeared on the show, back in S16, when Amaro was still the main guy. For about a year after that (during S17) he was given a larger role, and more storylines, partially because Danny Pino had left and Kelli took time off to have a baby, and that changed things for him. Sonny started having more nuanced interactions with all the other characters (Liv, Barba, Amanda, even Dodds and Fin). In S18 he was the stereotypical Angry Male Lead, so he was getting a lot of screentime and bigger scenes, and working the cases more extensively. In S19, he’s been getting less screentime, and he only ever interacts with his partner, Rollins. No scenes with Liv, no scenes with Barba. And I actually lament the former more, because we’ve had one or two funny Barisi moments this season, bit the Benisi dynamic has been paid dust.

Liv has gone through a lot, as we’ve heard, and Sonny has always idolized her, and she always seemed to have a soft spot for him (certainly over Amanda lol). So it’s weird not to see his concern for her. I realize that the new showrunner sees Amanda as Liv’s new confidant, and the Rollivia scenes are true highlights so I most certainly am not about to complain about that, especially since I love seeing two women bond without the bullshit antagonism that used to plague their relationship, but I wish Sonny’s relationship with Liv wasn’t sacrificed in the process.

Also, is this season ultra light on Sonny, or is it me? Hasn’t his screentime been decimated since the start of the season? There were several (suspiciously so) deleted Sonny scenes in the first handful of episodes, and ever since he’s literally had nothing to do. Just the random one-off comment here and there. No real contribution. When was the last time he cracked a case? More importantly, when was the last time he connected with a victim? Or a suspect? He used to do that even in S16, when he was still the butt of all the jokes.

I mean, I can’t complain, because in previous seasons Peter was getting what was perhaps a disproportionate amount of screentime, and I certainly (and selfishly) enjoyed that, and I’m glad Kelli has been finally getting the increased role she’s always deserved (and barely had in S15), but still. Maybe they were overusing Sonny before, but they’re definitely underusing him now. As a Sonny fan, I guess I’m just saying that I want to see more of him because that’s the only way I can justify the fact I’m still watching SVU. Cause it sure ain’t about the cases.

Stray Thoughts

Kressler! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Old school!

“The guy doesn’t have so much as a parking ticket” =  “he’s guilty”

Peter’s side-eye when that flight attendant said “I turned 30! I’m so old!” rivaled my own.

Also, I only caught it after I saw the gifset, but Sonny spilled his coffee as he was taking a sip? I love it when Peter is bored as an actor, he always makes his own fun in the background.

Martin Donovan is so good. I wish the writers had given him more to do.

Dodds: This is a case for the FBI.

Liv: lol no

I liked that Liv wasn’t acting like being separated from Noah would be this traumatic “WHERE IS MY BOY???” thing. I liked seeing a working mom be like “omg I’ve had enough of my kid after 3 weeks, let him go to school to play with other kids so I can go do my job!” That’s refreshing. And necessary.

Is Barba a masochist? Why did he look so happy when Liv turned him down for the eleventh time in the last 3 episodes? And why couldn’t Liv come up with an actual excuse? It’s possible she has run out of excuses, to be fair, but still. “I’d love to but [dot dot dot]”? What’s that, if not a gentle brush-off? And what does she have to do that’s better than dinner with Barba? I don’t know what these moments are supposed to convey, other than “Liv doesn’t like Barba Like That” and “Barba has no other friends”. Maybe that’s it? His loneliness? As yet another reason he might eventually leave? A slow burn of a reason? He wants to fully embrace a nice thick life and the job won’t let him? Is that the point? yes I’m overthinking this shhh

Fin, like, did some stuff. Good for him! He even has a sort-of feud with Dodds, for some reason. I’ll take it! Peter Gallagher also brings out the best in Ice-T, and they’re so fun together! There’s some macho posturing that’s very amusing because both of them have a very specific and incompatible way of, just, being, and I love every minute of it.

Dodds: How’d you get this memo?

Fin: I got a memo guy.

[radedneko]

Top Graphic Novels of 2020

I read a ton of graphic novels this year, and they were almost all wonderful.  Middle grade graphic novels are hitting it out of the park and I spent well over an hour narrowing this list down to just 11 series/titles.  When possible, I chose series, and all but one are new reads to me this year.  There’s no number one title/series here; everything’s just in alphabetical order.  

The Avant-Guards by Carly Usdin and Noah Hayes: This series absolutely hasn’t gotten the recognition it deserves.  No, it’s not earth-shattering literature, but it’s well-done and I look forward to reading each new volume.  I don’t even like basketball and I would happily read about 30 games play-by-play to see more of these characters.  It reminds me a lot of Giant Days and Questionable Content in ways I can’t quite explain. 

Azumanga Daioh/Yotsuba&! By Kiyohiko Azuma: Yes, these are both old and are not even a single series, but Azuma’s work kept me going during the quarantine and I couldn’t in good conscious leave it off this list. Do yourself a favor and re-read these.  She also wrote Sailor Moon doujinshi, which...is exactly what you would expect it to be given the humor in her official works.  

Class Act by Jerry Craft:  Did you somehow miss Craft’s Newberry-winning New Kid last year?  Go read it.  Now you’re ready for the sequel, which does not disappoint. I’m predicting this one also racks up the awards; it deserves it.  I’m not even going to bother summarizing it; just read it.   

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang: No really, I don’t like basketball.  But this made me care about the (real) people involved in this school’s hunt for athletic glory.  I would probably automatically put anything by Yang on my best-of lists, since every book he writes is gold, but to make me learn basketball terms and care about whether some kids throw a ball into a hoop? Yang is a genius.  If this doesn’t win some major awards, I’m going to be pissed.  Go read a real review of this, then pick up the graphic novel. 

I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemesia Gentileschi by Gina Sicilano: This was the very first book I read in 2020, and it’s still stuck in my head.  It shouldn’t be surprising that an artist’s biography has beautiful artwork, but I could look at any panel in this book for hours.  I had no idea who Artemesia was before reading this (you probably don’t either) and spent way too long looking at her pieces during and after reading this.  As a biography, this would have been an impressive read, but as a graphic novel biography, it was a visceral experience.  Read this even if you dislike graphic novels or art history; you won’t regret it.

Komi Can’t Communicate by Tomohito Oda: I am also jumping on the Komi bandwagon.  It’s fun, humorous, gives you the feels, and plays with manga tropes.  It’s also notable for having a character whose expression of gender isn’t played for laughs; everything else about their personality is, but Najimi is one of the most popular students at the school despite refusing to adhere to any form of gender binary.

Our Dreams at Dusk by Yuhki Kamatani: Even if this series wasn’t great all-over, I would have still included it in my list for this simple fact that this is the first manga I’ve ever seen with an explicitly ace character.  But is a great series in all aspects.  The art style is unique, the characters are all explored in as much depth as you can expect for a four-book series, and it ends on a good note, even if everything isn’t tied up into neat, little bows.    

Satoko and Nada by Yupechika and Marie Nishimori: This short series is slice-of-life but with the twist of exploring religious and cultural differences between two study-abroad students who end up roommates in America.  It’s never heavy-handed despite the fact that it was absolutely created to teach Japanese people about Islam and I’m honestly sad it only has four volumes.  Take the afternoon and binge-read them all.

The Way of the Househusband by Kousuke Oono: There is a reason why this series has been on pretty so much every best-of list.  It’s laugh-out-loud funny, heartfelt, and weirdly, has taught me laundry tips.  I can also say that it’s my mom’s favorite graphic novel series. 

The Witch Boy books by Molly Knox Ostertag: When I said middle grade is hitting it out of the park, this is one of the series I meant. Class, gender roles, race, friendship, and more done well for a middle grade audience in a series masquerading as a magic adventure?  I didn’t have this kind of quality when I was growing up and I am slightly jealous that today’s kids do.  I also can’t wait to see where this series goes.    

Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama:  This won an Eisner, with reason.  This series may be the most inventive fantasy I’ve seen in years, and the artwork is just beautiful.  I’m completely hooked on the storyline, with hints of lore handed out between lovely character development and critters I’d love to see in real life (brush-buddy?  I want 20).  If you haven’t given it a go, do so immediately. 

[gretagerwigarchive]

Greta Gerwig, Accidental Movie Star

by Mark Asch, 03/28/2012

source: http://www.thelmagazine.com/2012/03/greta-gerwig-accidental-movie-star/

Like you, Greta Gerwig is still figuring out how she ended up in the job that’s working out surprisingly well for her. Since she arrived at the SXSW Film Festival in 2006, on spring break from her senior year at Barnard, in conjunction with her first film role in Joe Swanberg’s LOL, her onscreen roles and career trajectory have traced an arc familiar to many from her generational cohort. Initially playing stumbling postcollegiate strivers in films from the loosely associated DIY movement everybody kept claiming to hate referring to as “mumblecore,” Gerwig these last few years has graduated to Hollywood comedies like No Strings Attached and Arthur, and has become something of a muse to the literate, neurotic writer-directors to have emerged from previous indie epochs. She was the secret heart of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg; she stars in the first film in over a decade by writer-director Whit Stillman, Damsels in Distress, a daffy comedy about campus mores which comes out April 6; the big kahuna, Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love, comes out in June. We met for lunch earlier this month, before she headed uptown to see the new production of Death of a Salesman; our conversation follows, give or take some grumbling about New York’s gentrification and what the internet is doing to our brains.

Is there any kind of trade-off as far as having been in films, at least initially, where you had some claim to authorship over them, versus now? How comfortable are you with the trade-off? The trade-off is strange as far as—I love it some ways. In some ways it’s wonderful to have a strong author to a film, a writer-director like Whit, but. It’s frustrating when you both don’t have a voice and then there isn’t someone else with a strong vision. That’s really hard, because then it feels like I don’t know what language I’m speaking, or what world I’m in, no one really setting the tone. It’s a pleasure to be in someone else’s world and vernacular, but it is hard in terms of… I don’t know, acting in some ways is so selfless, it’s strange because actors do get a lot of visible glory, but at the same time, there are ways in which you’re really a vessel for someone else, and always in someone else’s world, and I don’t know that I’m always adequately selfless—I’m always deeply impressed by actors that give only to the character and it’s not about themselves at all, and I always struggle with that, I always feel like I’m battling between what Greta thinks—

Is it a kind of self-consciousness? It’s more like, I mean on a very base level, it will be like: I’ll be reading a script and have an opinion about it and say, “I could’ve written this better!” But it’s… that’s not good. But I think on another level—this sounds pretentious, not pretentious, but I think it’s an actress I admire very much said it, but it’s a little elevated, but someone said, Actors are written in water. A performance disappears as soon as it appears, and even if it’s caught on film it’s gone.

I think that was Keats’s epitaph, actually. Really? Well, an actress said this, at a moment of passion. Anyway, there is a way in which it’s fated as soon as it’s begun, so if you have any sort of author instinct, you have to kind of squish it down.

I had a question for you about writing. You wrote, initially. Do you still? What are you working on? I shot a movie that I wrote.

Oh, you did? I hadn’t heard about that, can you tell me about it? It’s a secret. It should be at festivals this fall or next winter, but it’s done, it’s shot, so… Still writing! It’s sort of deliberately been under the radar because it’s hard to surprise people and everyone has expectations about it.

You were doing dramatic writing in college, right? I was doing playwriting in college. And I love the theater, so I did a lot that when I was in college, and I kept doing it after college but I got pulled into this world. I think in some ways—I mean I do love film, but I think if I had been pulled into the world of theatre, that had as many opportunities, I would have hung on—

Writing or acting, or both? Both. It was more of a response to when you’re just out of college, it’s like a desert. It’s like, you’ve gone from—there’s a rich culture, so many opportunities, people are responding to everything you do and interested and willing to enter you and give you small amounts of funding to work on stuff, giving you awards every two seconds. And out of college, there’s nothing, you have no structure—and I’m so grateful to Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski and the Duplasses that that they were making all this work and that I could just dive into what they were doing. So much of the battle was about forward momentum, and all you want to do is be given a canvas. I love films and I love what we did but I also think in some ways it was happenstance.

This makes another good segue, because the film that we’re promoting, you and I, Damsels in Distress, which I love, and which we’ll get to— Yay! I love it so much.

Well, let’s talk about that. We’ll go back to college. It’s just so virtuous and credulous and you’re playing somebody’s who’s discovering all these belief systems and internal logics for the first time. I think it’s just such an openhearted movie about… I guess, generousness of spirit. She’s the most sincere liar, too. She’s a terrible liar, but she completely means it the whole time. It’s such an odd character, such an odd group of characters—and movie. Watching it, the first time I watched it was in Venice at the film festival, and the strangeness was heightened by the fact that it was mostly an Italian audience, the jokes don’t totally work for them or they would work a little later because of the subtitles, but when I was making it I really believed in Whit’s world. It all started sounding really rational. When I originally read the script, it seemed that it was heightened and satire and I started making it—

He means everything, I think. He means everything. It’s totally sincere on his part. He’s not making fun of these people and he’s not making fun of their ideas, or what they’re going through, and, I don’t know, there’s this quality he has in his filmmaking that it’s hard to put my finger on that I really really like. It happens in Last Days of Disco and in Metropolitan I think the most. But there’s something that happens towards the end of the movie in his movies, people are often just sort of… forgiven.

He has a remarkably inclusive worldview, I think. I like that he writes about these very circumscribed social microcosms where you don’t really have the option of not socializing with somebody because of personal animosity or romantic rivalry and then by the end everybody is sort of reconciled to each other. I think he likes all his characters, I don’t think he writes bad people. Even the people who are difficult, like Violet, or the Kate Beckinsale character in The Last Days of Disco, he likes them. He’s generous with all of them.

Is it interesting, because he’s I guess 60 years old now— He is? Oh my goodness, I didn’t know.

Well, I was interested because it’s a much different perspective on this age bracket than many of the films you’ve made with people who are much closer to you in age. I know. It’s a much more interesting perspective.

It’s what youth looks like I suppose to somebody else, for once. I don’t think—you know it’s funny, but I never really thought about it as a movie about young people. I think in his world adults behave the same way. I tend not to look at like, this is about young people—I mean, most things are about young people, so it’s hard to…

Yes, but I mean there’s things specifically— College—

Well not even college, but the way that somebody like your character repeats things and the way your character tests out everyone else’s formulations. It seems at least sort of formative or tentative. Not to get sidetracked into arguing… No, I just thought it was interesting that I never really thought of it like that. I mean it just seemed so out of time, in a way. I guess it didn’t have that “this is how young people live today” feeling, which, some of the other movies I’ve done feels like that. It felt like it was about young people in a world that never existed.

How was it working with a group of younger and, at this point, lesser-known actresses for the most? I guess that’s fairly a fairly recent development for your career right, at least in terms of larger films. It is. They were great. I mean, it was sort of like, actually most of us were around like 27 or 26 when we made it. Annaleigh Tipton’s younger, but everyone else was sort of—me and Aubrey Plaza and Megalyn and Caitlin were all sort of… it was actually kind of nice in that way, acting like you’re in college after you’re out of college, only Analeigh was actually college age, but the idea of being the known element is utterly absurd still to me. But I would say more than being sort of a whatever-that-means known element, it’s the first time I’ve ever been number one on the call sheet. It’s different the way that you feel in a movie. Because even if you’re a big part but you’re not the biggest part you still come in and do your work, but you’re not setting the tone for everyone. And actually doing that was a challenge, I loved doing it but it’s terrifying because—it must be, this is an unfair comparison, but it must be sort of what it feels like to have a child, where you realize, “Well, my parents never knew what they were doing. You just… can have a baby.” You always feel like, when you’re lower down on the call sheet, the person who’s number one seems that they must have some secret knowledge that you don’t have. But for the most part they don’t, everyone’s just acting every day.

It’s. I suppose, analogous to pretty much anything that people in our age bracket are experiencing in whatever field they’re in, by now. Or it’s creepy when you realize that people I went to college with are now out of medical school, or out of law school. And it’s like, “She’s my fucking doctor? I did E with her at four in the morning on a roof!” But now they’re becoming the people… There’s this Joseph Conrad novella called The Shadow Line, it’s about being 27, when you cross this “shadow line,” from boyhood into manhood, It’s about this guy who takes over a ship when the captain dies, and stuff happens, and he’s all of a sudden given, he’s become the captain of the ship, and it’s happened in a second, and he realizes he’s crossed the shadow line, and now he can’t go back. It’s great, it’s not that long, but it’s so good, it’s so good, and it ends with him talking to all these old sailors—or it’s framed so he’s telling the story of when he was 27, and he’s old now. And old in Joseph Conrad stories is, like, 50. It’s so sad, it’s so sad, and he’s talking about being young and he sort of says, like, none of us knew that was going to be the happiest we ever were.

I went back and reread an interview you did with Lena Dunham where you talked about wanting to work with Woody Allen, about how he “had an erotic renaissance with Scarlet Johannsson and he can have a neurotic renaissance with” you. I guess I did say that.

And I was wondering, now, how it came about? And how the experience was, in comparison to what you expected. I think if you had a moment that you’ve been anticipating and can’t believe that it’s happening and you’ve been building up your whole life, you almost can’t experience it while it’s happening, so it was amazing, but it also had a very dreamlike quality and I also feel like I want to do it again. I want to go back and do it again, I want him to make another movie… I had a great part, but it was also very much an ensemble and I wanted to spend 24 hours a day with him. I think it’s always a struggle to be present in your own life while it’s happening, especially while good things are happening—but yeah I watched the documentary about him a couple of months later and I didn’t feel like I had had that experience, it still felt removed to me. Maybe if I see the movie, it’ll feel like that.

As a director, is he particularly—not demanding, but specific? Yeah, he’s specific. It’s funny, people always say he doesn’t direct, but he really does direct, in my experience. He gives you freedom with the words—oh my gosh, doesn’t that dessert look really good? I might get it—he says, “Oh, say whatever you want to say,” but he’s looking for a sound, I think he’s looking for something that sounds naturalistic to him. He’ll push it until he hears what he wants, which is, you know, that’s what good directors do.

That’s interesting because you see a lot of sort of open-ended takes where there’s enormous of variety in terms of style or vocal mannerism. It seems like an interesting contrast between him having very specific standards and the results on screen often looking very relaxed. It’s pretty amazing to me that still makes a film a year. It’s odd that—I think that there’s two different kinds of actors, I think there are actors who fell in love with acting, and I think there are actors who feel in love with writing. And I think I’m an actress who fell in love with writing more than even acting, and with Woody Allen and other people… I love participating in them, as writers. But the same time, part of me, I think that’s why I write too. Part of me is like, “Was I responding to wanting to be them, or be part of them? Did I want to have my own experience of doing that do I want to be part of their experience of doing it?”

Do you have a sense when you’re working with other performers—do you feel that most of the performers you’ve worked sort of give in to the script. Do you feel like you’re in the minority or the majority? I think it depends. I think a lot of my favorite actors are ones who are in love with acting, and maybe I’m just self-loathing. But I think a lot of my favorite actors, I think they’re the ones who can take mediocre material and elevate it. Because they’re so in love with acting that they can do that. I don’t know. I’m not quite sure I think that there’s a good number of actors that I love who know struggle with it too. Gene Hackman is one of my favorites, he has nothing good to say about acting, pretty much.

That’s his persona, too. That’s the thing, yeah, I’m such a sucker, too, I believe personas, I believe interviews, sometimes I’ll read things, like, “That’s the truth” and my agent’s always like, “Greta, you of all people should know this is not always true.” I can’t like separate it, if I read a profile of someone… I actually think some of the best, for me, whenever I feel like uninspired, especially as an actor, I love listening to Terry Gross’s interviews with actors, she always asks great questions and she gets them talking about something they love, and listening to really smart, interesting actors talk about why they love acting makes you want to do it. I just heard Viola Davis talk about it and I was like, “Oh my god,” I was crying, she’s talking about her grandmother and what it means to be an actor and it’s really I think that’s always a good thing. I don’t know, I think listening to other actors talk about acting is the best way to learn about it.

One thing I remember vividly from Hannah Takes the Stairs was the sense that the struggle for the character that you played was about expressing herself, verbally and whatever else that implies, and the film that I thought of at the time was actually Kicking and Screaming, because it was a completely opposite tack, people talking around and around and around the same problems. And I was wondering, as you’ve started to work with directors who are known as writers of great dialogue, about the difference between performing inarticulacy and performing articulacy. Well, I love scripts, I love lines, I love working with good ones… With Whit, the character of Violet is the most articulate character I’ve ever played. I don’t have the sense of Hannah, or other films that I made—we got a lot of shit for the way we used language, or for people struggling with what they were going to say, but I don’t know that struggling to find the right word is necessarily a sign of inarticulacy. It’s odd because I think sometimes it shows someone who cares a lot about language, because they’re struggling and can’t find the words. Mike Nichols said something about—I actually, as a person who both acts in things and writes things, I’m not that interested in improvisation. I don’t like it that much. I don’t think it’s that useful. Most often it yields something that might be interesting, but feels like a rehearsal. And then you need somebody like Mike to go away and shape it and make it amazing and come back and execute. Mike Nichols said something, he came from an improvisational background, that there’s this quality to improv where someone says something, they’re not really thinking about their motivation or anything else, they’re just so proud to have thought of something to say. And there’s this kind of, “I just thought of this and now I’m gonna say it,” and he said that ideally all lines should feel that way too. And the biggest thing for me, with really great dialogue, is finding the words spontaneously appear for you, in your body, and they come out in the same—I think that’s what’s exciting. I think that’s what the whole struggle with acting is. In Greenberg, I had very precise things to say, but they weren’t very erudite… Often, she struggled to find the right thing to say. So sort of artificially creating that struggle…

Is that different from going through it— Yeah. Because it has a predetermined meaning, as opposed to inventing the meaning while you’re doing the scene. I haven’t done straight improv like that in a long time. It’s an odd skill. It’s cool, but the well runs dry at some point.

Let’s talk about New York stuff. Where do you live? I live in Chinatown. Off of East Broadway, so real deep. I love it. It feels like After Hours. It shuts down really early and the streets are deserted and it feels crazy.

Where were you before Chinatown? I’ve lived a lot of places. Before Chinatown, I was in Chelsea, before that, I was in East Williamsburg, and before that I lived in Park Slope—we called it “Park Slide,” it was the not quite as nice part of Park Slope, by the water.

I suppose I should ask you about living in Brooklyn, and which bars you went to, and whether it’s completely ruined now—when were you in East Williamsburg? Like two years ago, two or three years ago. Right off of Grand.

By the high school? Yeah, they used to show the Met Opera there, which was convenient. I love Brooklyn, when I leave Chinatown I might go back, the only thing that could be hard about it is if the train’s not running, you’re screwed. Especially in Park Slope, my experience of being there was not having enough money to go anywhere, so it was a lot of getting just really cheap like Georgi vodka, we used to buy Georgi vodka and juice concentrate. It was disgusting. And we wouldn’t even unfreeze the juice concentrate to make juice, we just let it get a little soft, we’d mix it in and maybe add a little water, but it was like fully disgusting. Most of Brooklyn was just marked by being—it was a lot of drinking at home. My friend Gabby made up this phrase, we used to bring Naughty Nalgenes everywhere.