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usagirotten · 8 months ago

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Movie Review: Late Night with the Devil is simple, honest, disturbing, terrifying and sinisterly entertaining

Streaming platforms have had a great boom since what happened with SARS-CoV-2, the options to hire have been many and varied, and each one has specialized in the material they present, with Netflix being the most popular. There are other more specialized and simpler platforms, their original productions may or may not be liked by locals and strangers, many of these are a pleasant surprise for their stories and how they have been presented, in this case, Shudder is an OTT video service on demand by American subscription that offers, among other things, series and films of horror, suspense and supernatural fiction, owned and operated by AMC Networks, they are the ones that have best known how to take advantage of the resource that this genre provides. Its programming sponsors work from different countries, including the United States (Christmas Presence -2019), Germany (Party Hard, Die Young -2019), Mexico (Belzebuth (2019), Argentina (Terrified -2019), Indonesia (Impetigore - 2020), France (The Room -2020), Australia (The Marshes -2020), Canada (Bleed with Me -2021) and South Korea (The Wrath -2019) among others. In 2024 they surprise us again with a production between Australia and the United States, Late Night with the Devil by directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes is much more than what may seem at first glance, a background that becomes increasingly more sinister.

What is the movie about?

Night Owls with Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is a late-night talk and variety show that is about to have one of its most disturbing broadcasts, the events that occurred on Halloween night in 1977. Its popular host attempts to increase ratings by inviting a girl supposedly possessed by a demon, the revelations and events during this event will be sinister and terrifying for its audience. The premiere of this film is not intended to pay tribute or show the dirt behind this type of variety program, what it intends to do is tell a series of events that happened due to doing unknown things that turn out to be very dangerous, a mockery of the broadcasts of this type today where it is more important to have a high rating that shows content that we might think is rehearsed and done on purpose to keep its audience captive for a couple of hours. The film is set in 1977 and invents a program on a commercial television network in Chicago, something that aims to compete with others such as the one hosted by Johnny Carson, the program has been on the air for six seasons and its audience ratings have never been the best, consider that their content is boring and that they need to have something very spectacular to surpass the others and steal the attention of the public, a strategy will give them that opportunity and the consequences of this will be fatal and the much promised night of terror that they have promised will become something more than that.

The film's prologue opens as a documentary that investigates and presents an inexplicable event that occurred on Halloween night in 1977, during the live broadcast of an episode of the sixth season of the late-night variety show “Night Owls with Jack Delroy” to increase the show's ratings, decides that its strategy will be to make a special episode with an occult and paranormal theme on Halloween, special guests include self-proclaimed psychic and medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), skeptic and former magician Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), parapsychologist author June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) and Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli). During the broadcast and the back and forth about the subject and the integrity of this During Christou has a premonition about someone called "Minnie", Jack surprised by this reveals that it was his affectionate way of calling his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) who died due to cancer, after this vision, Christou suddenly falls ill and vomits a black liquid and is immediately rushed to the hospital during the commercial break, for Jack, things are going better than he expected in the segment following the cut, June tells them presents Lilly as the only survivor of a mass suicide committed by a satanic church that worshiped the demon Abraxas, despite June's warnings about the possible consequences of interviewing her. Jack convinces her to conjure the demon whom the girl calls Mr. Wriggles, during another commercial break the team informs Jack that Christou died from a hemorrhage in the ambulance taking him to the Hospital. It is to be expected that things will not go well at all and during June's spell, Lilly is possessed by Mr. Wriggles levitating in her chair and making his presence manifest with glitches in the light of the study while this happens Carmichael challenges June subjecting Gus McConnell, Jack's partner, to a demonstration of hypnotism, which causes everyone in the studio to see worms coming out of his body to the surprise of everyone present, the production team rewinds the recorded footage and demonstrates that this act has It has been an elaborate hallucination experienced by everyone in the studio, but the paranormal phenomena that occur during June's spell appear unchanged and they deduce that there is no trick and that everything is real. Jack is completely horrified when he sees his dead wife behind him on tape, Carmichael accuses Jack of presenting what happens as an elaborate hoax, Lilly becomes possessed again, a beam of light comes from the ceiling and connects to her left hand, another beam comes out of a television monitor and connects to his right hand, his head opens from which a bright light emerges, using telekinesis he throws Jack against a wall and then mercilessly kills Gus, June and Carmichael. At this point things are already out of control, the audience and the ratings are through the roof, and the executives think that all this has been an elaborate plot that is working extremely well and better than they thought, in the studio Jack is inexplicably transported to an alternate version of the show, to his worst nightmare reliving moments from the past before it is revealed to us that he has a connection with the demon that possesses Lilly and remembering that he already knew him during a ceremony at The Grove, then they reveal to us that has also been responsible for cancer that killed his wife in exchange for the sudden success and rise of his career and his show, a terrifying version of Madeline confronts Jack, blaming him for her death and asks him to end everything once and for all. that he has unleashed, this is how, using the ritual dagger of the ancient cult that has been used to make the spell, he stabs Madeleine to death, moments later he finds himself in an empty study where he sees with horror that he has stabbed Lilly to death on sight. from everyone and in a live broadcast. Disturbed and standing next to the lifeless bodies of his guests, he hears the police sirens arriving at the scene.

We are faced with a film that knows perfectly well what it wants to offer, that respects its own rules and those of the genre it occupies, and that, without being a marvel, manages to have a good development in its narrative, thereby generating the interest of the viewers until its end. , the proposal itself is honest and clean when presenting explicitly violent scenes The story is simple and does not need to rely on subplots that go nowhere, what we are told here is clear and concise, and in addition to the graphic horror it has the exact dose of tension that is needed to recreate something like this, the script was written by Colin and Cameron Cairne, it has sudden twists and disturbing revelations towards its end and justifies each of the actions that the characters have, and if that were not enough it also presents us with what is behind these presenters and how the entertainment industry is managed in this type of variety and interview programs, revealing that not everything is as we think, that not all that glamor we see is entirely true. This work is not completely perfect but it is very close to being so, the setting of the 70s is almost exact, the filmmakers took care of even the smallest detail to convince us as an audience that what we see is authentic, the cinematography and The filters they use make everything look old and even decadent in an era in which changes aimed to risk-taking things to a much larger medium and to another level when it comes to prime time. The camera work, lighting, and photography stand out and perfectly accompany the plot, which, being modest, are spectacular in some shots. The directors know perfectly well how to coordinate their ideas so that everything looks more real and convincing, as does their makeup. costumes and the very few traditional special effects with a mix of AI for some shots, leaving aside the CGI to make all this something simple but with a very particular style that is what cinema needs today. It could be perfect if the film didn't trip over itself again and again insisting that what we see is something they found in footage that is gradually being built, although there is no room for a trite and boring moral message. what he wants when he wants without following a parameter established by American talk shows and variety shows in the 70s, it seems that at times they cannot agree between still shots and those with a camera in hand so the editing is fluid and more in line with the type of cinematography you need. It is clear and direct in what it means, showing how far human ambition can go when wanting more than what you have, crossing the limits of everything established, and playing to know that you can handle any situation, no matter how unknown, transgressing with unknown topics. and dangerous can have fatal consequences, paranormal themes are what have had the most acceptance in this genre today, and fear of the unknown and easy scares are what they shamelessly make fun of here doing extremely well, each act has a consequence whether or not within a fantastic world or in the reality in which we live.

What is the cast of this movie?

The cast is made up of David Dastmalchian, Laura Gordon, Ian Bliss, Fayssal Bazzi, Ingrid Torelli, Rhys Auteri, Georgina Haig, and Josh Quong Tart, who are more than correct in their interpretations of each of their characters and understand perfectly well what we can expect from each of them in a film of this type.

Who composed the music?

The music composed by Glenn Richards and Roscoe James Irwin also stands out with its nostalgic and bombastic notes of this era, mixing them with something more current that grates in some scenes and can almost make our hair stand on end, a very worthy work that perfectly complements everything. the audiovisual that it presents to us. It is worth mentioning that its propaganda and visual aesthetics advocate a lot for nostalgia, its poster and even the trailer remind us of those seventies horror films that had impeccable art, and images that invited us and made us have a genuine and authentic interest in what they We wanted to see something simple but attractive that leaves us with that mystery and wondering what this or that film will be about, something that recreates the decade very well, that stimulates without pretending to be something that it is not, in this we can say that it pays a well-deserved tribute to all those involved in the design of this art and concept. In summary, Late Night with the Devil is not a film that boasts of being a great blockbuster or that has one of the most impressive casts in recent years, it stands out, especially in its simplicity and what it does, it does well and fulfills very well. well, the task of entertaining and earning a lot with very little, which is no small feat for an audience that has become more demanding over the years, a film that does not go unnoticed and that, from its title and propaganda, draws attention either by morbidity or the desire to want to see something new that has nothing to do with a remake or a reboot of something that was already successful, one more demonstration that ingenuity counts more when telling things than millions of dollars invested in a product that it necessarily has to work. Very good for Shudder, which takes the risk of having different content and allows filmmakers and directors to present projects that could hardly reach movie theaters in other countries or that are discarded from a highly competitive industry that only seeks It's staying current with any shit by pretending it's the best thing we as an audience have ever seen. Late Night with the Devil is now available on the Shudder platform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKYfneOH3o Read the full article

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absolutepx · 4 years ago

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So I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Wait, that's not what this post is about. Well, it kind of is. Hang on. What is Death Stranding about?

A: Norman Reedus getting bare ass naked B. Sneaking around ghosts with the help of your sidekick, an actual baby C: Carrying 50 Amazon packages up a hill while trying to not topple over D: Waking up in the morning and drinking 5 Monster Energy™ for breakfast

For those following along at home, the answer is actually none of the above. Despite the set dressing being bizarre to the point of near absurdity, what the game is actually about, like thematically, is actually really simple.

See, the development of Death Stranding was actually quite a trip. Hideo Kojima is the video game world's equivalent of an auteur director. He has a very recognizable personal style. It's thoroughly horny – he caught a bunch of shit for the design of Quiet in MGSV, but like, a lot of Kojima characters are just -like that-, including the dudes. Also, this is going to possibly be important later.

Anyway, so Kojima was going to do a rebootmakequel of Silent Hill, and the demo actually made it to the PS store and I could actually write a whole side essay about why P.T. (it was called P.T. for some reason btw) was brilliant game design for how it used the same hallway over and over and it was somehow beneficial to the overall feeling of horror. So Konami it turns out kinda sucks nowadays and they like, fired Kojima (they were huge dicks about it behind closed doors, too) and scrapped the project and kicked him out on the street and kept the Metal Gear series which was his baby (literally the baby in the sink in P.T., he snuck a bunch of messaging about the Konami situation into the demo like a breakup album) and Kojima would go on to form his own studio and poach some of the people who worked with him to boot. So the thing about Kojima is this: he's got a reputation for already putting some wild shit in his games, like a ladder that takes like 10 real time minutes to climb in MGS3 for dramatic effect, and a boss in MGS3 that summons the ghosts of all the people you were too lazy to stealth past and killed, or a sniper battle with a really old guy that he wanted to have last two weeks or some shit until he died of old age but he was "told that "this was impossible and not recommended." That is a real quote I just looked up. So he's coming off the heels of making this hugely successful game with MGSV and the hype of the P.T. Demo and he fucking, he like took all the people that were going to be working on P.T. Along like Guillermo Del Toro was going to co-write it and Norman Reedus was going to star in it, and he's like, I'm going to make this game called Death Stranding. And the first trailer comes out for it and it's completely nuts. Norman Reedus wakes up naked on a beach crying with a baby and there are floating people in the sky? So we're all like hooooooly shit, there's no one to tell him "this is impossible and not recommended" anymore. What's he going to make now!?

So the whole time the game is in development I keep seeing these tweets where it'll be like, Kojima and one of his homies smiling with some saccharine message about being spiritual warriors and changing the world. And not just Del Toro and Reedus, there was Mads Mikkelsen (another guy Kojima puts in the game just because he apparently loves him), and the band Chvches, and also like, Keanu Reeves at one point? You know how everyone has just kind of accepted that Keanu is a being of light? Here he was endorsing Kojima. The hype was pretty confused and frantic.

The game eventually comes out. A lot of game journos hate it because I think there was this expectation it was going to be, you know, less weird and have more of the conventional structure of a video game. That's not to say the average gamer wasn't also dismissive of it, but I think on the ground level there was more of an understanding that like, yeah, Kojima just be like that sometimes.

Because the game was a timed console exclusive and your homie don't play like that, I spent the first year or so cautiously viewing Death Stranding from a distance. I wasn't sure I was going to like it – except for being really impressed with P.T., I wasn't actually a big fan of Kojima's games as games – but I -was- sure that I was going to buy it, because of the way Konami fucked him over, just out of support. And the shit I was hearing was really out there. The primary mode of gameplay is just delivery packages. You collect Norman Reedus' bathwater and pee and use it as grenades. You get a motorcycle that looks like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus, and when you sit on it, his character in the game says "Wow, this thing is like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus!"

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But I didn't really want to know that much about it. Something has that much fucking crazy person energy, you want to go in mostly blind, right? So maybe people just weren't talking about this, or maybe I wasn't seeing it, but then I watched Girlfriend Reviews' video about it and they came right out and said it (link provided if you want to hear Shelby say it more articulately than me):

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Death Stranding is basically about the exact opposite of Twitter. It's about remembering how to be kind to each other, how to reconnect in a world where people are so often hostile to each other by default. Prophetically, it's about a world where people are afraid to go outside or touch other people and how damaging that is. It's not a game about carrying packages, it's a game about helping people by being brave enough to walk through a wasteland carrying their burdens because they can't. It's about rebuilding the lost connections between people, about restoring roads and giving people hope. I bet, for Kojima and the people close to him, it's about how to answer hostility with compassion. You can't kill people in Death Stranding. You can and are absolutely encouraged to fucking throw hands with people sometimes, but all the tools and weapons are nonlethal. So I think Kojima took all the Twitter heat he got over the Quiet nontroversy, and all the feelings of isolation he had from Konami separating him from his team during the end of the development of MGSV, and all the support and encouragement he got from his bros Del Toro and Mads and the rest, and decided to channel that into making a game that was a statement about all of it. And sure, it's a little heavy handed, and sure, it's a little saccharine, and sure, the gameplay sometimes borders on miserable in service of creating emotional payoffs. For me, especially in 2020, this message is a huge success. Social media should be an opportunity for all of us to feel more connected to each other, yet primarily it feels like one of the main forces driving people apart. Why is that? Why is the internet of today such a hostile place? I'm old enough to remember web 1.0: I can haz cheezburger memes; YTMND; the early wild west days of Youtube... What happened to us? I've thrown the blame at Twitter in the past, and I think the architecture of the user experience on Twitter is absolutely a big piece of the puzzle, because it fosters negative interactions. But in terms of the behavior, people have observed that 2018 Twitter was actually almost exactly like 2014 Tumblr. (For the record, Tumblr is now one of the chillest places left on the internet, because so few fucks are left to give.)

I think part of it is the anonymity. The dehumanizing disconnection of the separation of screens and miles. Louis CK, before he was cancelled, had a great point about cyberbullying, and why it's so much more savage than kids are IRL. When you pick on someone in person and you are confronted with seeing the pain you caused them, for most sane people it causes negative feedback and you become disgusted with your actions and eventually learn to stop being a shithead. Online, at best you can "break the wrist, walk away".

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At worst, you can become addicted to "clout chasing" and the psychological thrill of being cheered on by your social ingroup. It's even worse if you feel like it's not bullying and your actions are justified because whoever you've targeted is a bad person so you don't have to feel bad about what you do to them. This is where reductive, unhelpful catchphrases like "punch a nazi" come in. For every argument, one or both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is subhuman because their beliefs are so disgusting. And sometimes it's even true! A lot of times, especially these days, people really are acting like animals or worse online. Entire disinformation engines are roaring day and night, churning out garbage and cluttering the social consciousness. (Kojima talked about this bit, too, way back in MGS2. As if I wasn't already in danger of losing my thread through this.)

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The human brain was not built to live like this. You can't wake up every morning, roll over and open your phone, and be immediately faced with a tidal wave of anger and indignity. It wasn't built to be aware of fully how horrible the world is at any moment ALL AT ONCE, ALL THE TIME. And you will be. Because of another way that our brain works – the way we are more likely to share negative opinions. And because of the cottage industry built on farming outrage clicks, and because of constant performative activism.

It's not that I don't agree that being informed is important.

It's not that I don't agree that the causes people get riled up about are important.

They are. They absolutely are.

But we can't keep living like this. The constant, unending flood of tragedy, arguments, and hot takes. How much of the negativity we associate with online culture is the product of this feedback loop? What if the rise of doomer culture has been, if not entirely created by, has been nourished and exacerbated by our hostile attitudes toward each other? Incels and TERFs, white supremacists, radfems, tankies and Trumpers – it seems like on every side of every issue, there are people simultaneously getting it wrong in multiple directions at once and there are more being radicalized every day. They are the toxic waste left behind by the state of discourse. And any hill is a hill worth dying on.

So what am I actually advocating? I don't know. There are a lot of fights going on right now that are important and we can't just climb into bunkers and ignore our problems hoping that Norman Reedus and his fine ass are going to leave the shit we need on our doorsteps. We need to find the strength to carry those hypothetical packages for ourselves sometimes - and hopefully, for others as well. Humans are social creatures. We need interaction and enrichment.

We need love.

So just try to remember the connections between humanity. Try to put more good stuff into the world when you can. Share more shitposts and memes. Tell your friends and family that you love them. Share good news when you hear it. Go on a weird fucking tangent about Death Stranding. Find a way to "be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes."

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#death stranding #hideo kojima #video games #cancel culture #essay #oc

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my-mt-heart · 4 years ago

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Don't you think it would benefit the show if they dropped some well placed spoilers directed at certain fanbases? I'm at a complete loss for the secrecy and apparent lack of concern for the audience sticking around or coming back. I'm no marketing expert, but I'm smart enough to know that going silent for the most part will NEVER get anyone excited or bring that audience number up. I personally find it insulting. As well meaning as those 6 bonus episodes were meant to be, they were for the most part, boring and moved barely a storyline. Add in a pandemic and everything that came along with surviving it, the idea that they aren't going balls to the wall with promotion is insanely stupid. Fans have been waiting a LONG time for something. Anything. Reward your fans. Reward your actors and crew. Make a big deal about a show that's been on for 11 years ending. AMC lines their pockets. They will pay to promote the holy hell out of their biggest shows final season. Anyway, my job is so damn slow, my favorite show is giving me nada and I'm irritated af.

I'm not well-versed in the marketing side of things either even though I get to see a little bit of the process in my own job. Personally, the only thing I really want from the show is a good story, so I'm not going to make a big fuss about promotions or lack thereof. You do make some really great points though about emphasizing the fact that it's the last season and trying to tailor everything to the specific fanbase that has stuck around when everyone else seems to have dropped off. I have to believe the trailer will give us some juicy tidbits when it comes out. It's not all going to be stuff that has us up in arms. One thing to also keep in mind is that they might not be seeing this summer as their final shot to promote the show. If the plan is to air 11C next summer, that gives them the opportunity for another major Comic Con trailer.

#caryl #twd #twd speculation #twd season 11

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thedeaditeslayer · 4 years ago

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Greg Nicotero Talks ‘Creepshow’ Season Two, His ‘Evil Dead’ Love Letter And Exploring More Iconic Horror IPs.

This interview with Greg Nictorero covers the season premiere episode that is a homage to Evil Dead. Recommended reading below!

The first season of Creepshow was a monster hit for AMC’s horror streamer, Shudder.

Becoming the most-watched program in the platform’s history, it smashed several records in terms of viewership, total minutes streamed, and new subscriber sign-ups. The show’s second season is about to drop, and a third has already been confirmed.

I caught up with horror legend and Creepshow’s showrunner, Greg Nicotero, to discuss the show’s killer formula for success, paying tribute to iconic multimillion-dollar franchises and what stands in the way of a new Creepshow movie.

Simon Thompson: How does making season two compare to your experience on the first season?

Greg Nicotero: Well, we got the green light to do Creepshow while I was shooting The Walking Dead, so we had to develop the stories, get the scripts written, prep in six weeks, so the entirety of season one was done between January and April. It was fast and furious. I’ve been in The Walking Dead world for ten years, so I was like, ‘How hard can it be? You build a bunch of sets, get some cameras, you get a bunch of great actors and a good script, and you shoot it.’ Man, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. You’re creating an entirely new universe, all new sets, all new cast and crew every three and a half days. I felt like it was grabbing the horns of a bucking bull and just holding on for dear life. We made it through by sheer will. I had to deliver something that stayed true to the spirit of George A. Romero and Creepshow. If I screwed it up, I wasn’t going to get another chance. So, I don’t know if I had any fun on season one.

Thompson: Season one of Creepshow was a massive success for Shudder in so many ways, from viewership to subscriptions as well as critically. Did you soak that in?

Nicotero: I didn’t read many reviews because I didn’t want my heart to be broken. I’m a sensitive guy. I would probably find the one sh***y one and just be devastated. However, one thing that people saw across the board was that I had a passion for the material and put my heart into it. That gave me a lot of confidence to go into season two, stand up straight, grab those horns and control the show and fight for the stories I wanted to tell. I also wanted to have fun with it. I feel like season two has got that heart and passion, but it’s fun and pays tribute to everything important to me and my upbringing, from building monster models and watching TV horror hosts to the loving nod to Sam Raimi. These stories all meant something to me. I feel like I’ve matured 100 years between season one and season two.

Thompson: That’s the Public Television of the Dead story in the first episode of season two. It blew my mind a little bit.

Nicotero: That makes me so happy to hear that. I worked so closely with Sam on Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness. When I read the script, I loved that it was a nod, but it became something else when we got into making it. There’s a bit where Ted Raimi starts to float on the Appraisers Road Trip set; I put that in, and the camera work with the evil force going down the hallway; they weren’t in the script. I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m going to go all the f***ing way.’ I even adjusted some of the dialogue, like when Ted Raimi talks about the book being in his family for years and gathering dust in the fruit cellar. Any opportunity I had to buy into the fact that maybe the Necronomicon is a real thing and that Sam and his brothers went off and made this movie with his book, I took it. Sam was shooting the Dr. Strange movie, but I reached out to him right before shooting it. Without a doubt, it’s probably the most respectful send-up of the Evil Dead universe. Every one of the actors was like, ‘F**k, man, I love Evil Dead II. This is so much fun.’ It was always intended to be a love letter to Sam and Evil Dead. Creepshow is all about paying tribute, little love letters, to the likes of EC Comics, Stephen King, George A. Romero, and so many other things. We got to change the Necronomicon just a little bit. We still wanted it to feel like the original, but we also don’t want anyone to feel like we’d infringed copyright. Even the appraiser’s name, Goodman Tapert, is a tribute. David M. Goodman was the transportation coordinator on Evil Dead, and Rob Tapert was the producer. If only I could have got Bruce Campbell down there, steal him out of retirement, to do something on Creepshow, that would have been awesome.

Thompson: You got a great cast together for the first season, and you have raised the bar.

Nicotero: I feel fortunate that we were able to get the caliber of talent we did. Kevin Dillon, Justin Long, D’Arcy Carden, C. Thomas Howell, Ali Larter, the list of great people who jumped on board for season two goes on. Every one of them did a great job. They all showed up, were prepared, and knew their lines, and they were excited to be back to work. It’s always funny when you bring actors into your world. They show up, work for three days, and leave. And I remember in season one, I went through my phone, and I convinced Adrienne Barbeau and Giancarlo Esposito to do it because they all knew me, and I had worked with them on different projects. When they walked onto the set, they saw how fast we were moving and how immersive it was, and they had a really good time. Many actors find a tremendous amount of freedom in immersing themselves in a role that will take up their life for just three or four days.

Thompson: Going back to you paying homage to Evil Dead in an episode this season, would you like to do that with more iconic horror IPs or pick up on previous Creepshow stories?

Nicotero: The freedom is the greatest part about it. We talked about potentially revisiting stories from the first Creepshow movie, but that is convoluted in terms of the rights. You can’t clear it. There are stories that I guarantee you, especially after you see season two and season three, that we would love to revisit and pay tribute to those genres that we love. If I had a way to intertwine a Jason Voorhees story, a Michael Myers story, or a Freddy Krueger story without having the people that own the rights to those franchises jumping up and down and screaming, I would do it in a minute. For me, it’s really fun to be able to take a story and look at it from a different vantage point like we did with Evil Dead. So often now, the world is about taking material you think you know everything about and giving it to you from a different perspective. I think Wicked was probably the first piece of material that did that. It took The Wizard of Oz, a story that everybody knows and loves, and looked at it from the witch’s perspective. I read the screenplay before there was a show because I think the writers wanted it to be a movie first. I remember reading it and thinking, ‘Oh my God, it changes how we do look at everything related to The Wizard of Oz.’ The idea that we can take the horror genre and tell it from a perspective that gives us a completely new take is exciting and allows people to pay tribute to the original material and put a new spin on it. It gives fans something exciting that they can’t get from the original material.

Thompson: It was great to hear that there will be a third season but what’s the latest on a potential new Creepshow feature film?

Nicotero: I would love that. We’ve talked about it. When you do a show like this, you do it for the amount of money that we do it for, it becomes successful, and people want more, to get someone to turn around and give you more money to do a movie, they’re like, ‘Why would we do that when we’ve got a great show right here?’ I would love to do a Creepshow movie and expand the world with bigger stories and a little bit more money. I’m sure that down the road, that will become a reality, but right now, part of the beauty of Creepshow is that it gives you these bite-sized meals, these little appetizers. With today’s short attention span, you can watch 20 minutes and then go back later and watch another 20 minutes. I think that is very much in tune with how today’s society devours content. The beauty of Creepshow is that every story is so different, and every theme is so different that you’re getting an entirely new experience with each story.

The second season of Creepshow lands on Shudder on Thursday, April 1, 2021.

#Greg Nicotero #Evil Dead #Ted Raimi #Creepshow

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bunnylouisegrimes · 4 years ago

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Episode 9 Review (The Future: What Does It Hold?)

Tagging @coldsoba per request

This episode was a headache for me. I was anticipating it, and although it wasn’t entirely bad and it wasn’t the worst, I think this episode highlights all the bad aspects of this season and brings them together. It brings some of the good that this season brought out together as well, but it’s evident to me now that we’re reaching the end so far that the bad is outweighing the good. This episode has me worried about the future of the series, and angry overall. I’m concerned that if this series does continue and has a season 3, it won’t be good, and it will turn into a shit show like The Walking Dead did (they want a season 3, although, based on the low ratings and low viewership, AMC might cancel, no one truly knows yet, especially if BBC and all that other stuff helps boost it).

Before I start this review, I’d like to say right here and now: this is a pretty critical analysis, and possibly has a bunch of unpopular opinions, but I’m saying it anyways. I’m mad, I’m annoyed, and I’m ticked. Last week’s episode ticked me off, this... Oh, man... just know I’m cool if you disagree with me, but I’m hoping by the end you all understand why I feel this way.

Now, don’t get me wrong: like most episodes of this show from this season, despite entire scenes and plot points being bad, it has great moments to enjoy. Did this episode contain lots of action and intensity? Hell yes, and I liked that. Did it stay true to the book ending so far? In a few ways, yes. Pretty much all the ways it didn’t due to the changes they made that were already questionable were the things I didn’t like, which leads me to this: Do I like the direction the story is going, based on what we know and have so far? Hell no. Of course, we don’t know 100% the direction it’s going until next week’s episode, but right now, I’m very on the fence.

Because there is a lot of bad I’m going to discuss, let’s get the good out of the way.

Lou and Vic in the beginning, as per usual, are sweet and I love them. Tabitha and Lou’s interaction was sweet as well. Seeing Charlie frightened and shook was oddly cute, but also funny. And Wayne and Charlie’s interaction... I’m sorry, it was just adorable. I like the idea of Maggie and Vic going to Christmasland together, that was a good choice (although now... I’m uncertain).

To begin the negativity, we’ll start with Charlie and the house scene. I like Charlie confronting his own fears, it’s a very interesting concept. I find it kinda stupid and confusing Charlie wouldn’t know this house exists in his own mind, I mean, it is a part of his own mind, even if it was in the back of it. Why would he not know? Despite that, we’re gonna move onto the meat and potatoes. Now, Cassie’s POV, based on how she was presented in the show (which I still hate, btw, and I am greatly annoyed with how she is not the abuser she was in the book, but I’ve discussed this already a million times), makes sense. We get why she’s pissed, she should be, although I don’t think she understands that her ex-husband had all of this shit happen to him as far as creating Christmasland and becoming a vampire and all that by having a mental snap. It all happened due to his mental pressure. He didn’t have full control (if any control!) over that entire situation. It happened, his life depended on souls and energy from that moment on, and he had to make do with the shitty end of the stick being presented to him. Christmasland is both good and bad, and vampirism is both good and bad, and Charlie has to try to make do with what he can to give himself and his daughter happiness, and focus on the positives. Cassie could’ve maybe given him at least that credit, but she makes it out like, “You’ve brought her happiness in presents and candy, not making her a woman.” Uh... Cassie? Charlie and Millie became vampires out of his control. All this shit happened, how the hell could he reverse all of it? Is there anyway he could? It’s not even explained if he can, but the writers ignore this fact and make it out to be like, “Look, he’s so evil!” Writers, is there anyway he could change these things, even if he wanted to? “Well, no, not exactly, but look, he’s still evil!” So... you’re not even allowing him to have an opportunity to change, and then when he’s stuck in the situation and making the best out of it, even if it isn’t 100% the best way... he’s still super heinous and evil? “Yes!” Okay... whatever... see this is another reason why it annoys me how they’re writing Charlie as “the worst person in the world,” when really, he isn’t. He’s not an angel, but he is not as evil as this show wants to present. Pretty much all of Cassie’s criticisms are valid, but she could’ve at least given Charlie some credit. Nope! But the thing that really bothered me in the back of my mind was how much better this scene would’ve been had they actually written his backstory properly. I kept thinking how much better it would’ve been if an abusive Cassie comes back to haunt Charlie and taunt him, degrading him, and mocking him, how much more sense it would’ve made. And if Millie pointed these things out to him, it might’ve changed his mind some (he would think, “oh, even my daughter kinda agrees with the abuser”). It works here with the way they portrayed her, despite the point I mentioned about Charlie making the best of shit falling flat on Cassie’s end, but it would’ve been 1000% better if they made her an abuser and she scared Charlie, then Millie brings up similar points and Charlie’s POV starts to change a bit.

(Plus, I’d like to add that by doing that, you’re setting potential up for a Charlie redemption arch, and he wouldn’t have to die, Vic and Maggie wouldn’t have to die, and season 3 has interesting potential, and you still have your main characters that we enjoy).

On the topic of this scene, here is a take a friend of mine gathered from it that I definitely can see as well: The point they were trying to make in this scene is that Charlie is a coward. This is their interpretation of Cassie being ‘abusive,’ they didn't leave it out (her being angry at him) like we thought they would. They wanted to give her a concrete reason to hate him so much and call him out for his bad deeds. Also, this house, which was hidden away at the back of his mind, is a mesh of Charlie's fears and his guilt. Based on his facial expressions and his mannerisms, and how he forcefully held Millie, this was all out of fear and guilt for what he did to them that first time and how The Wraith pretty much consumes you. She's literally trying to tell his stupid ass that they can never leave, otherwise, they'll turn to static, which they will. Millie can't go anywhere because she's stuck there and Charlie knows because he was selfish, he robbed her of her future without intending to. Charlie is highkey a yandere, even for his own kid, but it makes sense because he's never really had anything, Also, as to why he’s sort of controlling in a sense: he's driven by fear and also anger if you think about it. Christmasland is how he projects and saving other children because he had a rough and traumatic childhood, he has some serious mental health issues. This I see 100% presented here too, which is a good aspect coming out of this scene. This season does show us a really vulnerable Charlie as they explore his past and give him a breaking point, which we like! But we both definitely agreed that they wanted to make Charlie more of a dick than needed throughout this whole season. Maybe these writers really wanted more drama, especially Manx family drama, through Charlie acting worse? Not so sure. Either way, it gets on my nerves, and it’s almost inconsistent with the narrative they want to spin. They keep going back and forth with “Charlie’s so sad” (which, I would agree, he is, but they even mess that up and somehow still make him look worse) and “Omg he is the worst person ever.” I hope I’ve explained myself well enough in this area, it’s a very complicated and convoluted topic that has me conflicted and annoyed myself.

I think most importantly, the thing that annoys me about all of this Manx family drama the most is: How tf are they gonna “live normal lives” and “escape?” Millie grabbing onto the ornament prevents her from disappearing, which really doesn’t make sense. I’m sure they’ll clarify it next episode, but how is she gonna become a woman and live a normal life? For Christ’s sake, Charlie can barely understand the modern world as an adult man! You think a kid like her is gonna truly enjoy it or understand it? I have my doubts on this and how they’ll write all of that. Plus, she’s a vampire! If she returns human and all the other kids do when their ornaments break, and this is something that confuses me even in the book... where will they go? Oh yeah, they’ll somehow find normal lives! Honestly, it would make more sense to have them move onto the afterlife. Are they gonna keep them human and alive to make them the stars of the show? That possible concept of, “Oh, the kids are gonna be the stars of the show now!” No, writers... just no. Nobody is gonna care about that. Again, it’s a possibility, and it’s a possibility I’m not thrilled by personally. I don’t want them to be the stars. They can be awesome supporting characters, but not the main focus. Idk man, I’m just saying right now, I’m not so sure how this whole concept is gonna work and I fear how they’re going to write it.

Next up: Wayne’s shitty behavior. Wayne is acting like a really big asshole, and it’s getting on my nerves. “He’s now a vampire!” I hear someone say. “Of course he’s acting this way!” Yes, but the reason why it’s especially annoying is because Vic keeps trying and trying to get the point across to him, and it’s all for nothing. We know Vic’s opinions and her heartfelt feelings for her son, and she ends up having to repeat herself when she might as well be taking to the wall. What’s the point? Filler? We already know Vic’s determination is strong. In the book, how Wayne was acting was better. He held onto himself, but he also didn’t, but Vic’s words managed to get across to him quite a few times throughout his journey. This would’ve been much better on screen, but the writer’s were like, “HA HA NOPE!” The scene that really angered me: what was the point of Vic making her speech (which was really nice btw) only for Wayne to not listen... you’d think that’d be the scene where he changes, but the writers decided to turn it into a shock value filler moment (similar to Chris’s death, which, btw, all this nonsense is making his death for near nothing). And, let’s not forget my question from last week.. where is Craig in all of this? Hmmm... guess he decided to take a vacation from helping his biological son, because he’s just gone! Why?! What was the point?! He better at least appear next week, but even then... too late now, buster! Probably should’ve been here earlier! I mean, for real, what was the point of Craig’s character at this point? What a waste of potential...

The worst part imo from this entire episode: Okay, so the writers make Charlie an even worse villain, even giving him those subtle sadistic undertones even as Vic is trying to talk to Wayne (alright, I get it, there’s that element to “saving” Wayne that’s vengeful when it comes to Charlie, but it’s honestly just too much darkness; it’s almost out of character, especially when it’s in a scene like this. I get it, he likes the idea of getting revenge on Vic, but does he have to be THIS dark? That laugh he gave was funny, yes, and I couldn’t help myself but laugh just because of how stupid it sounded, but looking at the reason why he laughed... if anything, he would’ve stood there with a smug smile and say something like, “I told you he loves me more.” They make him way too dark and it really takes away from the fact he is a villain with moral code, but these writers have seemingly forgotten that with the exception of the one scene in episode 7 where he condemns Bing’s rape. Of course, the rapist might be getting a redemption arch anyways, not Charlie, but uh... moving on from all that past shit!). Yeah, as I was saying, they make Charlie darker. Okay, let’s forget my opinions on that for a moment: the characters have the opportunity to make him, this super evil and irredeemable villain, weak to the point he couldn’t get up at all... But Maggie stops him from being in this state? WHAT?! That shit is very out of character for her, and it’s very out of character for Vic to just stop! Vic would’ve persisted, and if the roles were reversed, Charlie would’ve persisted. That’s the thing about them both: they are persistent and protective about their kids. Why did Vic need to stop? “We need to find your son!” MAGGIE! You’ve both tried multiple times already! Focus on Charlie when you have the chance! How stupid are you two?! And better yet: Why would Vic drop the weapon?! She would’ve grabbed it!!!! What the hell is this shit?! I can’t even express how stupid this is... I get you can’t exactly kill him, but you could make absolute certain he would be subdued and unable to even have the chance to get up and grab his weapon. But nope! They need to attempt for the thousandth time to save Wayne in the exact same way, when it has shown not to work. You’d think they’d at least attempt to think of something else, even if their options are limited, but nah, we’re gonna do something very out of character instead... why?

Things aren’t looking too good for Maggie, so I have to ask: is Maggie gonna die? And if so, that is beyond fucking stupid. They set up the potential for a plot with Tabs and Mags for the third season. I didn’t pick up that they officially broke up, rather just separated for now, and... for what?! If she’s seriously gonna die, I’m gonna be extremely pissed. That wasted potential and insult to her character would be so fucking stupid. Yes, she dies in the book (in a different fashion, and it’s probably not that great how she goes there either), but look at all they’ve done for her character, especially giving her a girlfriend, a character that’s become even more important. Her death would be questionably more insulting here for sure!

Overall, while there were things I liked about this episode, I am majorly disappointed and concerned for the future of the series. I’m afraid it will take directions that are not good, and if it does continue, I am afraid it will be a living dead show of sorts. I think the only true way this show can carry on and be good is if all our main most important characters (Vic, Maggie, Charlie, Lou, Wayne, and Tabs) are all alive. Now, Vic and Charlie might be the only exception to this, just because they both do die in the book, and although even that is rough and not the best, it is expectant and I think this show can still be good with Maggie, Lou, Tabitha, and Linda taking care of Wayne (I’m not gonna go into the potential with Millie in this scenario because that’s a rocky topic lol). But if this show follows the path of TWD, where we have a whole new cast of characters you’re not really gonna care about and all the old cast you got to know and love is just gone... that’ll be the cherry on top of this shit sundae. I am excited for the concept of exploring the world of other Strong Creatives, as many rumors speculate the next season will contain, but if the show that explored the world of zombies failed by getting rid of pretty much their whole old cast... what about this show? They’ve already messed up quite a few things I don’t like this season I’ve discussed before, and if they go the route of doing anything that can get worse... I can’t describe how disappointing it would be. Not saying things have to be perfect or my way all the way, but it has to be generally good and enjoyable for everyone. Growing attached to a cast of characters only to erase many of them and focus on a new one is not a way that is good and enjoyable for everyone. AMC: This happened with TWD; for the love of God, don’t let it happen with NOS4A2.

As I said in my last review: let’s hope next week is better, and AMC, for the second time in a row, doesn’t deliver a disappointment of a show.

#nos4a2 #nos4a2 vic #nos4a2 charlie #nos4a2 maggie #maggie leigh #charlie manx #vic mcqueen

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aaronmaurer · 4 years ago

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TV I Liked in 2020

Every year I reflect on the pop culture I enjoyed and put it in some sort of order.

Was there ever a year more unpredictably tailor-made for peak TV than 2020? Lockdowns/quarantines/stay-at-home orders meant a lot more time at home and the occasion to check out new and old favorites. (I recognize that if you’re lucky enough to have kids or roommates or a S.O., your amount of actual downtime may have been wildly different). While the pandemic resulted in production delays and truncated seasons for many shows, the continued streaming-era trends of limited series and 8-13 episode seasons mean that a lot of great and satisfying storytelling still made its way to the screen. As always, I in no way lay any claims to “best-ness” or completeness – this is just a list of the shows that brought me the most joy and escapism in a tough year and therefore might be worth putting on your radar.

10 Favorites

10. The Right Stuff: Season 1 (Disney+)

As a space program enthusiast, even I had to wonder, does the world really need another retelling of NASA’s early days? Especially since Tom Wolfe’s book has already been adapted as the riveting and iconoclastic Philip Kaufman film of the same name? While some may disagree, I find that this Disney+ series does justify its existence by focusing more on the relationships of the astronauts and their personal lives than the technical science (which may be partially attributable to budget limitations?). The series is kind of like Mad Men but with NASA instead of advertising (and real people, of course), so if that sounds intriguing, I encourage you to give it a whirl.

9. Fargo: Season 4 (FX)

As a big fan of Noah Hawley’s Coen Brothers pastiche/crime anthology series, I was somewhat let down by this latest season. Drawing its influence primarily from the likes of gangster drama Miller’s Crossing – one of the Coens’ least comedic/idiosyncratic efforts – this season is more straightforward than its predecessors and includes a lot of characters and plot-threads that never quite cohere. That said, it is still amongst the year’s most ambitious television with another stacked cast, and the (more-or-less) standalone episode “East/West” is enough to make the season worthwhile.

8. The Last Dance (ESPN)

Ostensibly a 10-episode documentary about the 1990s Chicago Bulls’ sixth and final NBA Championship run, The Last Dance actually broadens that scope to survey the entire history of Michael Jordan and coach Phil Jackson’s careers with the team. Cleverly structured with twin narratives that chart that final season as well as an earlier timeframe, each episode also shifts the spotlight to a different person, which provides focus and variety throughout the series. And frankly, it’s also just an incredible ride to relive the Jordan era and bask in his immeasurable talent and charisma – while also getting a snapshot of his outsized ego and vices (though he had sign-off on everything, so it’s not exactly a warts-and-all telling).

7. The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)

This miniseries adaptation of the Walter Tevis coming-of-age novel about a chess prodigy and her various addictions is compulsively watchable and avoids the bloat of many other streaming series (both in running time and number of episodes). The 1960s production design is stunning and the performances, including Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead role, are convincing and compelling.

6. The Great: Season 1 (hulu)

Much like his screenplay for The Favourite, Tony McNamara’s series about Catherine the Great rewrites history with a thoroughly modern and irreverent sensibility (see also: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette). Elle Fanning brings a winning charm and strength to the title role and Nicholas Hoult is riotously entertaining as her absurdly clueless and ribald husband, Emperor Peter III. Its 10-episodes occasionally tilt into repetitiveness, but when the ride is this fun, why complain? Huzzah!

5. Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC)

A limited (but possibly anthology-to-be?) series from creator/writer/director/actor Jason Segal, Dispatches From Elsewhere is a beautiful and creative affirmation of life and celebration of humanity. The first 9 episodes form a fulfilling and complete arc, while the tenth branches into fourth wall-breaking meta territory, which may be a bridge too far for some (but is certainly ambitious if nothing else). Either way, it’s a movingly realized portrait of honesty, vulnerability and empathy, and I highly recommend visiting whenever it inevitably makes its way to Netflix, or elsewhere…

4. What We Do in the Shadows: Season 2 (FX)

The second season of WWDITS is more self-assured and expansive than the first, extending a premise I loved from its antecedent film – but was skeptical could be sustained – to new and reinvigorated (after)life. Each episode packs plenty of laughs, but for my money, there is no better encapsulation of the series’ potential and Matt Berry’s comic genius than “On The Run,” which guest-stars Mark Hamill and features Laszlo’s alter ego Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender.

3. Ted Lasso: Season 1 (AppleTV+)

Much more than your average fish-out-of-water comedy, Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso is a brilliant tribute to humaneness, decency, emotional intelligence and good coaching – not just on the field. The fact that its backdrop is English Premier League Soccer is just gravy (even if that’s not necessarily represented 100% proficiently). A true surprise and gem of the year.

2. Mrs. America (hulu)

This FX miniseries explores the women’s liberation movement and fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and its opposition by conservative women including Phyllis Schlafly. One of the most ingenious aspects of the series is centering each episode on a different character, which rotates the point of view and helps things from getting same-y. With a slate of directors including Ryan Bowden and Anna Fleck (Half-Nelson, Sugar, Captain Marvel) and an A-List cast including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, Sarah Paulson, Margo Martindale, Tracey Ulman and Elizabeth Banks, its quality is right up there with anything on the big screen. And its message remains (sadly) relevant as ever in our current era.

1. The Good Place: Season 4 (NBC)

It was tempting to omit The Good Place this year or shunt it to a side category since only the final 4 episodes aired in 2020, but that would have been disingenuous. This show is one of my all-time favorites and it ended perfectly. The series finale is a representative mix of absurdist humor and tear-jerking emotion, built on themes of morality, self-improvement, community and humanity. (And this last run of eps also includes a pretty fantastic Timothy Olyphant/Justified quasi-crossover.) Now that the entire series is available to stream on Netflix (or purchase in a nice Blu-ray set), it’s a perfect time to revisit the Good Place, or check it out for the first time if you’ve never had the pleasure.

5 of the Best Things I Caught Up With

Anne With An E (Netflix/CBC)

Another example of classic literature I had no prior knowledge of (see also Little Women and Emma), this Netflix/CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables was strongly recommended by several friends so I finally gave it a shot. While this is apparently slightly more grown-up than the source material, it’s not overly grimdark or self-serious but rather humane and heartfelt, expanding the story’s scope to include Black and First Nations peoples in early 1800s Canada, among other identities and themes. It has sadly been canceled, but the three seasons that exist are heart-warming and life-affirming storytelling. Fingers crossed that someday we’ll be gifted with a follow-up movie or two to tie up some of the dangling threads.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

I liked Breaking Bad, but I didn’t have much interest in an extended “Breaking Bad Universe,” as much as I appreciate star Bob Odenkirk’s multitalents. Multiple recommendations and lockdown finally provided me the opportunity to catch up on this prequel series and I’m glad I did. Just as expertly plotted and acted as its predecessor, the series follows Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman on his own journey to disrepute but really makes it hard not to root for his redemption (even as you know that’s not where this story ends).

Joe Pera Talks With You (Adult Swim)

It’s hard to really describe the deadpan and oddly soothing humor of comedian Joe Pera whose persona, in the series at least, combines something like the earnestness of Mr. Rogers with the calm enthusiasm of Bob Ross. Sharing his knowledge on the likes of how to get the best bite out of your breakfast combo, growing a bean arch and this amazing song “Baba O��Reilly” by the Who – have you heard it?!? – Pera provides arch comfort that remains solidly on the side of sincerity. The surprise special he released during lockdown, “Relaxing Old Footage with Joe Pera,” was a true gift in the middle of a strange and isolated year.

The Mandalorian (Disney+)

One of the few recent Star Wars properties that lives up to its potential, the adventures of Mando and Grogu is a real thrill-ride of a series with outstanding production values (you definitely want to check out the behind-the-scenes documentary series if you haven’t). I personally prefer the first season, appreciating its Western-influenced vibes and somewhat-more-siloed story. The back half of the second season veers a little too much into fan service and video game-y plotting IMHO but still has several excellent episodes on offer, especially the Timothy Olyphant-infused energy of premiere “The Marshall” and stunning cinematography of “The Jedi.” And, you know, Grogu.

The Tick (Amazon Prime)

I’ve been a fan of the Tick since the character’s Fox cartoon and indie comic book days and also loved the short-lived Patrick Warburton series from 2001. I was skeptical about this Amazon Prime reboot, especially upon seeing the pilot episode’s off-putting costumes. Finally gaining access to Prime this year, I decided to catch up and it gets quite good!, especially in Season 2. First, the costumes are upgraded; second, Peter Serafinowicz’s initially shaky characterization improves; and third, it begins to come into its own identity. The only real issue is yet another premature cancellation for the property, meaning Season 2’s tease of interdimensional alien Thrakkorzog will never be fulfilled. 😢

Bonus! 5 More Honorable Mentions:

City So Real (National Geographic)

The Good Lord Bird (Showtime)

How To with John Wilson: Season 1 (HBO)

Kidding: Season 2 (Showtime)

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs The Reverend (Netflix)

#tv #television

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popwasabi · 5 years ago

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“Little Monsters” Review: Wait, this movie isn’t about Lupita killing zombies??

Directed by Abe Foresythe

Starring: Alexander England, Lupita Nyong’o, Josh Gad

No one would blame you if you thought Hulu’s “Little Monsters” was going to be about Lupita Nyong’o

After all, the viral campaign featured her heavily on both the movie’s poster and trailer leading us all to believe we were going to get a heaping helping of the Oscar-winning actress getting her turn to kick zombie ass in Australia.

youtube

(Seriously!)

But what ends up happening in the end is a fairly run of the mill zombie comedy that, though entertaining, isn’t even about Nyong’o’s character, instead kicking the tires on some tired tropes within its comedic sub-genre with a far less captivating character.

Nyong’o does her very best though to lift “Little Monsters” average script and makes it worth the stream alone but feels ultimately like a missed opportunity to tell a more interesting story and an ultimately more fun zombie comedy.

(^A more fun zombie comedy)

“Little Monsters” follows Dave, a washed-up, loser musician who’s been kicked out of his house by his girlfriend for not understanding her feelings regarding child-rearing. He moves into his sister’s house and finds himself in the care of his nephew who’s picked on at school. When Dave discovers his nephew’s school teacher Ms. Caroline he immediately becomes infatuated with her and works up a plan to win her affection by volunteering to go on a class field trip to a petting zoo with the class. When they get there however it appears things have gone horribly wrong as a nearby American military base accidentally unleashes a zombie horde on the class and now Dave and Ms. Caroline must work to stay alive and keep the kids spirits high.

The modern zombie genre is now over 40 years old with dozens of movies and TV shows sprinkled between George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and AMC’s seemingly undying “The Walking Dead.” With a few notable exceptions here and there since 1968 such as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Train to Busan,” the genre has grown as stale as the shambling corpses its protagonist shoot, stab, smash and murder has grown more and more repetitive over the years. There’s been some attempts at really outlandish ideas such as making the zombies romantic interests in “Warm Bodies,” and making a Christmas musical out of them in “Anna and the Apocalypse” but even those films couldn’t escape many of the tropes we see over and over again in these movies.

(”Anna and the Apocalypse” does have some decent show-stopping tunes though.)

“Little Monsters,” in the trailers at least, appeared to be attempting something new. What if a school teacher had to play dumb in front of her kindergarten students while the apocalypse raged around her? How can the eternal optimism, patience and responsibility needed to control 20 plus ignorant, unattentive, needy, clingy children hold up against the ravenous undead?

There was potential for a very interesting take on a tired genre of film here but director Abe Forsythe bafflingly decides the lead of this film should instead be another mediocre white man who needs the help and charisma of a far more charming female character to learn the power of responsibility and fweelings.

Alexander England isn’t bad per se in his portrayal of Dave but his character is just the same irritating schmuck we all see in these types of movies and frankly not a good person. He’s Safeway brand Shaun of the Dead but without Simon Pegg’s impeccable charm or more importantly Edgar Wright’s directorial finesse and brilliance. He’s a loser but far from the lovable kind as the film seems to think comedy through this character should revolve all around dropping multiple F-bombs and lazy casual sexism at every moment.

Meanwhile, Lupita plays a far more entertaining protagonist who’s relegated to side character in the middle of this catastrophe. She sings, laughs, dances and is just perfect playing this character as she charms her students into believing their playing a “game” of tag with the voracious undead clawing at their windows. How any director could think this character played by an Oscar-winning actress should play out as simply a love interest for such a mediocre hero is just beyond comprehension.

What makes it so infuriating is there are glimpses of how much better this movie could’ve been written throughout the story had they focused on Lupita’s Ms. Caroline instead. Ms. Caroline is eternally optimistic for her students but she alludes to a more pained past at multiple points during the film. She talks about how she caught her ex fiance cheating on her and how she wears her engagement ring still as a defense mechanism to men who keep hitting on her. This all happening while England’s Dave continues to be an insufferable jackass.

The script could’ve worked with that immensely; make it about how Lupita is hiding her pain by pretending, much like how she’s doing with the children in front of the zombies. Talk about how she see’s the need for positivity no matter what, beyond just being there for her kids even in these horrible circumstances because its the only way she can function without falling apart. The movie could’ve really worked with this through the lens of the zombie genre to great comedic affect but again, bafflingly decides the movie is best viewed through the eyes of a frankly shitty white dude.

This all said the movie is fun enough and plenty cute given the children’s often innocent reactions to the carnage around them and Josh Gadd’s puts in a fun short performance as a children’s TV show host who just can’t take it anymore. If you have Hulu there are worst things you can do for an hour a half of your time. As mentioned, Lupita is infuriatingly relegated to a side character in this film but she nonetheless delivers and makes the whole film worth it in the end.

“Little Monsters” is still a missed opportunity in the decaying landscape of the zombie genre and its unfortunate that not even a talented actress such as Lupita could win out the starting protagonist job on such a small movie.

(Seriously, again, how dare you?)

But that’s how it is unfortunately. Despite some major strides in story-telling in Hollywood the last few years, plenty of director’s still think the audience will only enjoy it if its told through the lens of an uninteresting white man in place instead of the far more interesting supporting character, who do tend to be women and people of color.

Hopefully this trope dies along with the tired clichés of the zombie genre in the coming years, lest we have to suffer its shambling corpse again.

Not Holding my breath though…

VERDICT:

3 out of 5

You said it, Rick...

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defendtranswomen · 6 years ago

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I am too sick to write this article. The act of writing about my injuries is like performing an interpretative dance after breaking nearly every bone in my body. When I sit down to edit this doc, my head starts aching like a capsule full of some corrosive fluid has dissolved and is leaking its contents. The mental haze builds until it becomes difficult to see the text, to form a thesis, to connect parts. They drop onto the page in fragments. This is the difficulty of writing about brain damage.

The last time I was in the New Inquiry, several years ago, I was being interviewed. I was visibly sick. I was in an abusive “community” that had destroyed my health with regular, sustained emotional abuse and neglect. Sleep-deprived, unable to take care of myself, my body was tearing itself apart. I was suicidal from the abuse, and I had an infected jaw that needed treatment.

Years later, I’m talking to my therapist. I told her, when you have PTSD, everything you make is about PTSD. After a few minutes I slid down and curled up on the couch like the shed husk of a cicada. I go to therapy specifically because of the harassment and ostracism from within my field.

This is about disposability from a trans feminine perspective, through the lens of an artistic career. It’s about being human trash.

This is in defense of the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death, those who came looking for safety and found something worse than anything they’d experienced before.

For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone.

I was one of these people.

They controlled my housing and access to nearly every resource. I was sexually harassed, had my bathroom use monitored, my crumbling health ignored or used as a tool of control, was constantly yelled at, and was pressured to hurt other trans people and punished severely when I refused.

The cycle of trans kids being used up and then smeared is a systemic, institutionalized practice. It happens in the shelters, in the radical organizations, in the artistic scenes—everywhere they might have a chance of gaining a foothold. It’s like an abusive foster household that constantly kicks kids out then uses their tears and anger at being raped and abused to justify why they had to be kicked out—look at these problem kids. Look at these problematic kids.

Trans fems are especially vulnerable to abuse for the following reasons:

— A lot of us encounter concepts for the first time and have no idea what is “normal” or not.

— We have nowhere else to go. Abuse thrives on scarcity.

— No one cares what happens to us.

This foster cycle relies on amnesia. A lot of people who enter spaces for the first time don’t know those spaces’ history. They may not know that leaders regularly exploit and make sexual advances on new members, or that those members who resisted are no longer around. Spaces self-select for people who will play the game, until the empathic people have been drained out and the only ones who remain are those who have perfectly identified with the agendas and survival of the Space—the pyramid scheme of believers who bring capital and victims to those on top.

My first puberty was a nightmare—faced with the opportunity to make my second one a healthy, healing experience, I was instead abused and broken. The community practiced compulsory BDSM sexuality, which was deeply inappropriate considering it was one of the only visible spaces for trans people interested in making games. I didn’t need that coercion in my life; I needed safety and mentorship.

I spent those years of my early twenties not making connections or gaining valuable socialization that I had missed in my youth, but being exploited and brainwashed in nightmarish isolation. I was scared away from the “inclusive” coding spaces, the “inclusive” conferences and their orbiting alt events, and everything else that people like to pretend is available for trans fems.

Things escalated at the Allied Media Conference of 2013. Unfortunately I was traveling alone. People from the abusive community overheard me asking about safe-space resources in Oakland and became angry that I was seeking to escape their community. I was intimidated in person by someone who had a great deal of social power over me. I had a panic attack and went to the bathroom to dry heave and cry. Shortly afterward, threatening messages began bombarding my Twitter and my phone, and the community began to develop a coordinated political response to my desire to leave. People suddenly stopped talking to me, and I felt the icy net of isolation drawing tight.

This was the only time a conference responded appropriately. AMC apologized, notified their security team to check up on me, and encouraged me to submit a talk next year. I came back and ran a workshop (with two friends for security) and a small amount of healing was possible.

This reintegration was not made anywhere else. I was excluded from the vast majority of game spaces because of what happened to me. Of course, the multimedia nature of AMC meant it had the least stake in preserving the reputation of games and other things that matter more than people.

When I got back home, I was kicked out of my housing. I later learned that the community had been contacting my landlord for months prior to the actual eviction, as well as spreading rumors throughout my field. These seed rumors are a common tactic in those spaces, cultivating a brittle structure around people that can be shattered when necessary.

Living was my sole attempt at innocence.

ATTACK

One of my abusers was sent a list of the nominees for the upcoming games festival Indiecade. Unfortunately, I was on the list. I ended up winning an award, ostensibly to recognize my feminine labor in the areas of marginalized game design—years of creating access for other people, publicizing their games, giving technical support, not to mention the games I had designed myself. Instead of solidarity from other marginalized people in my field, I was attacked.

Anyone else getting that award would have been able to just … get that award. But people like me aren’t allowed to just have careers. Feminist culture saw fit to give a pass to every man and every cis woman who got that award, but when a trans fem from a disadvantaged background stepped up, she somehow happened to be the worst. The culture was fine with me as long as I was window-dressing, but daring to excel got me kneecapped.

They spread rumors that I was sending harassing messages to people, even as the messages streamed one-way toward me. They said I controlled a misogynistic mob and was using it to attack people. (I had never been more alone.) I was called a pedophile, a rapist, an abuser (the typical dog whistles used in feminist spaces to evoke the dangerous tranny stereotype invading ur bathrooms.) Even when the rumors were debunked, even with a history of co-habitating respectfully with partners and a history of being a respectful tenant, the damage was never repaired. The purpose was to keep firing until I was gone, until every possible bad thing had been said about me.

The reputation game was used to paint a vulnerable, isolated trans girl, too scared to leave her room most days, as having power which she did not have—power which my abusers, veterans of queer and artistic scenes with decades of institutional privilege, did have.

It happened without warning or recourse, without a single attempt at conciliation. Multiple times I had noticed tension building and had asked explicitly for mediation. Each time this was refused. When you’re exiling someone for petty political reasons, it works best when they can’t tell their own story. By privately vocalizing concerns that I was being abused, I became a public target—presenting a false chronology to observers.

Previously their ostracism had been silent, made simple by the fact that no one cared about what happened to trans fems who made games. The fact that my games had inadvertently made me visible meant that the attack had to be devastatingly public, my fake crimes commensurate to the amount of disgust required to repel me. This is the danger of the token system—it elevated me to a level of violent politics I was unprepared for.

Very few people want to defend a target of disposability. I was told by one person that she couldn’t risk losing her job, another that she didn’t want to become a target too.

I was threatened into not defending myself, gaslit into silence, told that people knew “things” about me that were never explained. When I asked how I could do accountability, when I said I would do whatever they wanted, they said that I was “incapable” of accountability, that my crime was unknown and my sentence was permanent. That is the point where the body starts to die.

My attackers were expert pathological liars who had been getting away with it for years—entire fictional realities playing out on their social-media accounts like soap opera. Escaping from abuse is the most certain way to become painted as an abuser, and being an abuser is the most sure way to be believed. You know how movies are realer than reality? How the sound effects and physics become so normalized to us that reality seems flat and fake? Talking about abuse is kind of like that. Abusers know what sounds “real.” They are like expert movie-effects artists. Victims are stuck with boring fake reality.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH

Social media is significant to my story because for a long time it was my only outlet as a disabled individual barred from many physical spaces, and a way to express myself artistically when traditional outlets were closed to me. However, it came with its own set of problems.

When I told another trans person that I had been abused, I was told in response that my follower count on Twitter was higher than hers.

I tried talking to people about my poor health, how I needed to withdraw and have space. After unfollowing most people related to games, a subject which was quickly becoming a trigger, I was told that I was “manipulative” for unfollowing, and my following list on Twitter was scrutinized and brought up as evidence that I still followed certain games people and that I was doing this to hurt people.

I was pressured not to post about certain things I cared about (“crystals,” ”slime”) and not to use my favorite emoticons. I was pressured to join in social-media smearings of other trans people (which I frequently rebelled against, to my detriment) and to RT things I didn’t want to RT.

My twitter was incompatible with the rest of the network because I mainly posted poetry-style tweets that had no connection to anything else. I would be accused of subtweeting or encoding hidden messages into my tweets. People would associate random words in my tweets with some random thing going on in their life that I surely must be commenting on.

Social media became a scientific metric for my abusers, a set of numbers and behaviors to obsess over and divine hidden messages. The games network constantly abraded against my nonparticipation—my desire for a safe, therapeutic online space, not a competitive one.

Feminist practice of declaring privilege and marginalization became a way to collect information about victims: Look at someone’s profile bar for their elemental weaknesses. Being frank about my health problems was never an advantage for me in feminist spaces, only something to be used against me. I was an object, an invalid on a bed that could be infinitely manipulated and extruded through social media to fit the agendas of a thousand bored strangers.

The ethereal potential of the net had become rigidly hierarchized and numbered to the point where I could be managed and controlled as efficiently as if I were in 3-D space.

MOBBING

CALL-OUT CULTURE AS RITUAL DISPOSABILITY

Feminist/queer spaces are more willing to criticize people than abusive systems because they want to reserve the right to use those systems for their own purposes. At least attacking people can be politically viable, especially in a token system where you benefit directly by their absence, or where your status as a good feminist is dependent on constantly rooting out evil.

When the bounty system calls for the ears of evil people, well, most people have a fucking ear.

When I used to curate games, I was approached by people in that abusive community who pressured me not to cover a game by a trans woman. Their reasoning was blatant jealousy, disguised under the thin, nauseating film of pretext that covers nearly everything people say about trans people.

When I rejected their reasoning and covered the game, the targeting reticule of disposability turned toward me. What can we learn from this? Besides “lofty processes in queer/feminist spaces are nearly always about some embarrassingly petty shit,” it’s about the ritual nature of disposability, which has nothing to do with “deserving” it. Disposability has to happen on a regular basis, like forest fires keeping nature in balance.

So when people write all those apologist articles about call-out culture and other instruments of violence in feminism, I don’t think they understand that the people who most deserve those things can usually shrug off the effects, and the normalization of that violence inevitably trickles down and affects the weak. It is predictable as water. Criminal justice applies punishment under the conceit of blind justice, but we see the results: Prisons are flooded with the most vulnerable, and the rich can buy their way out of any problem. In activist communities, these processes follow a similar pragmatism.

Punishment is not something that happens to bad people. It happens to those who cannot stop it from happening. It is laundered pain, not a balancing of scales.

If a man does something fucked up, all he has to do is apologize, if that, for feminists to re-embrace him. If a trans fem talks about something fucked up that happened to her, she is told to leave and never come back.

MOBBING

A common punishment for infanticide in the Middle Ages was living burial. This was a feminine-coded punishment, often reserved for women, one that allowed execution without having to actually be there at the moment of death. This line of thought pervades feminine punishment to this day.

One of the most common tools of exclusion is through mobbing, which is rarely talked about because unlike rape, murder, etc, it’s not easy to pin it on a single person (or scapegoat). Mobbing is emotional abuse practiced by a group of people, usually peers, over a period of time, through methods such as gaslighting, rumor-mongering, and ostracism. It’s most documented in workplace or academic environments (i.e. key points of capitalist tension) but is thoroughly institutionalized into feminist, queer, and radical spaces as well. Here is why it is horrible:

1) It has an unusually strong power to damage the victim’s relationship to society, because it can’t be written off as an outlier, as some singular monster. It reveals a fundamental truth about people that makes it difficult to trust ever again. People become like aliens, like a pack of animals that can turn on you as soon as some mysterious pheromone shift marks you for death.

2) The insidious nature of emotional abuse: How do you fight ostracism and rumors? They leave no bruises, they just starve you.

3) Mobbing typically occurs in places where the victim is trapped by some need or obligation: work, school, circles of friends. This can prolong exposure to damaging extremes.

For these reasons, PTSD is an almost inevitable outcome of any protracted mobbing case.

In ideological spaces, this damage is exacerbated by the fact that the victims are often earnest people who take the ideals to heart and can’t understand why the culture is going contrary to its own messages. They appease, self-incriminate, blame themselves—anything to be a Good Person. They don’t want to fight. Fighting sickens them.

From a report by the Australian House of Representatives Education and Employment Committee: “90 percent of people being bullied make the comment: ‘I just want it to stop.’ They don’t want to go down a formal path, but just want the behaviour to stop.”

Those who participate, even unwittingly, feel compelled to invest in the narrative of victims as monsters in order to protect their self-conception as a good person—group violence creates group culpability. For their ego they trade the career, health, community (and sometimes life) of the victim.

MOBBING AS WITCH HUNTS

One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici

The term witch hunt is thrown around a lot, but let’s look at what it really means. Witch hunts, as discussed by Silvia Federici, were responses to shifts in capital accumulation, as is slavery. To jury-rig the perpetually self-destructing machine of capitalism, huge amounts of violence are required to obtain captive labor (fem and non-white). The effect is to devalue our labor as much as possible, and to destroy the bonds between marginalized people.

You see this in games and tech spaces where the intense amounts of competition and capital accumulation, both physical and social, are a breeding ground for mobbing. But the popular two-sided discussion of mobbing as carried out in numerous clickbait articles ignores the fact that mobbing goes all the way down—even as white cis women struggle for safety, they participate in the exclusion of others, creating a hierarchy of labor and competition. Because mobbing is a form of capitalist violence, the popular discussion (conducted by those who are intricately entwined with the flow of capital) must omit the nuances of mobbing in favor of a narrative that is about replacing uncool regressive masculine consumerism with liberal feminist consumerism.

When the people who are scapegoated happen to be from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, the culture calls it coincidence, clutching our respectable counterparts to their chest like pearls, a talisman of tokens to ward away reality.

SEXUAL MENACE

I saw a queer black woman, struggling to survive by her art, falsely accused of rape by a white queer. The call-out post was extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice. Immediately, hundreds of other white queers jumped on the bandwagon. Many of them likely didn’t know either of the people involved.

Accusations of sexual menace are a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act—the threat of black skin on innocent white, of trans bone structures on ethereal cis skeletons. It’s as common for many of us as cat-calling or any other form of ubiquitous harassment that cis feminists talk about, except no one wants to talk about it. It’s a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy.

Mobbing uses these rumors to trade a vague suspicion for the actual reality of violence. It’s like turning the corner and watching someone on the street having their teeth kicked in by a mob who assures you that just before you appeared, this person had committed some mysterious act which justifies limitless brutality.

DAMAGE

PTSD AS DISPOSABILITY ALCHEMY

I was, in effect, beaten until I had brain damage, over a long period of time. Unlike some other survivors of trauma, I was unable to heal because I was never separated from the source of the danger. I was never given the chance to vent, to express myself, to tell my side of the story—but I had to keep working, harder than ever, while being constantly exposed to violence.

The pressure on me was not merely to survive but to display no signs of the incredible amounts of damage pouring into me daily. To never display the slightest hint of anger, to never cry, to not argue with people telling me horrible things. Every hint of damage was an excuse to further isolate and demonize me.

The cost of resisting disposability was PTSD. It was catching a lethal amount of negative energy with my body and becoming a poison-processing factory.

My job is wired to give me electric shocks. What do you do when your alternative is homelessness?

“The allostatic load is ‘the wear and tear on the body’ which grows over time when the individual is exposed to repeated or chronic stress.”

“Stress hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol in combination with other stress-mediating physiological agents such as increased myocardial workload, decreased smooth muscle tone in the gastrointestinal tract, and increased coagulation effects have protective and adaptive benefits in the short term, yet can accelerate pathophysiology when they are overproduced or mismanaged; this kind of stress can cause hypertension and lead to heart disease. Constant or even irregular exposure to these hormones can eventually induce illnesses and weaken the body’s immune system.”

To cover up the abuse and protect the “reputation” of the games industry, it was deemed worthwhile to lower my lifespan, weaken my immune system, and permanently damage my body.

Even if I drink multiple cups of water before bed I wake up with severe dehydration. An interesting side effect of being a trans fem on hormones is that spironolactone (an antiandrogen) is a diuretic, so the dehydrating effects of stress are added to the dehydration of my gender, tipping it over to agonizing extremes, the unspoken tax of pursuing both gender and a career. The amount of water in my body is political.

I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches.

By the end of the day my neck and left arm are aching from nervous tics.

I forget things rapidly. Triggers leave me exhausted or panicking at inconvenient times, sometimes for days or weeks.

My hair fell out in handfuls. I still have a nervous tic of running my hands through my hair to pull out loose strands.

Having PTSD is like breaking a limb and never being able to rely on it as strongly. The sudden weakness of standing on it wrong, suddenly being unable to hold something, a fatigue and spasm of nerves.

It became difficult to diagnose other medical problems because of the all-consuming nature of the symptoms. It became difficult to talk about what happened to my body in general. When my hairdresser asked, the only way to explain the damage was by saying I had been in a car accident.

Attacks on marginalized artists go beyond merely denying them access to networks; they also damage a person’s faculties of expression.

For a long time, PTSD deprived me of the privilege of being a multitemporal being. The space of time I was able to safely think about shrunk to about a minute. Larger projects, the kind most tied to commercial value and to the media coverage apparatus, were difficult for me due to the traumatic potential of expanding my aperture of time.

The diversity-centric system expects more jobs to fix the problem, ignoring how long we’ve been damaged and made unfit for their jobs. They encourage the Strong Woman stereotype because it means taking the damage onto ourselves. We need more than jobs; we need social reintegration.

COMMUNICATION

INABILITY TO SHARE STIGMA

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon feeling a connection to others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma de-humanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

The worst thing is not having other survivors to commiserate with. I can think of people who went through similar situations and were defended, re-integrated. Their stories are paraded through feminist spaces, saturated through social media, and every time I’m exposed to them, I feel less safe, not more. This enhances my feelings of dehumanization: “Why was I not worth protecting in the exact same situation? I must not be human like them”.

I often have the overwhelming physical sensation of having a dead person in my life, someone as close as an identical twin. The sensation is of me being the only one still alive after a terrible accident, lingering like an unshriven thing. The inability to share stigma is even worse than the original act of violation. The greater part of a wound is its inability to heal.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #1

The typical narrative of abuse on social media doesn’t include the problems of the most vulnerable, like how public verbal harassment may only be an ultimately minor part of a trans fem’s exile.

The most skilled abusers know that a good exile is done with pure silence, through the whisper network, by having the person wake up one day and have every second or third person she knows or who practices her profession block her and/or stop talking to her. No one tells her why. She has to painstakingly talk to every friend, every contact, every person she would normally have a cheerful conversation with. The electric shocks of knowing that every simple human interaction you have with a friend or stranger could turn into a nightmare of victim blaming or worse, a cold iciness where they pretend nothing is wrong. Imagine repeating that experience hundreds and hundreds of times, with no way to end it. After the noise, the long years of silence are what kill us.

The backchannels that should be used to protect people from abusers and rapists are instead used to protect abusers and rapists. Any usefulness these channels have is reserved for Real Women. No one warned me about any of the comically large number of predators in my professions. I was considered unrapeable, unabuseable, not worthy of protection. A trans fem can try to talk about her experiences of abuse for years and have no one listen, but the instant one of her abusers smears her, everyone is alert and awake.

One reason it took me so long to talk about my experiences was that I associated being able to speak against abuse with being an abuser. Because every abuser throughout my life was so good at being believed, I thought that being believed was the exclusive domain of abusers.

This is why my first months in therapy were spent convincing me that I wasn’t a sociopath, crazy, abusive, or any of the other terms I had been brainwashed with. Abusers don’t spend years disabled by those thoughts because they don’t care if they hurt other people.

INADMISSIBLE NARRATIVES OF ABUSE #2

And when verbal harassment does occur, it’s often cloaked in feminist language, making it impossible to fight.

If they call a woman a bitch, people comprehend that as misogyny. But they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place?

When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist.

TRASH ART

When it was really bad, I wrote: “Build the shittiest thing possible. Build out of trash because all i have is trash. Trash materials, trash bodies, trash brain syndrome. Build in the gaps between storms of chronic pain. Build inside the storms. Move a single inch and call it a victory. Mold my sexuality toward immobility. Lie here leaking water from my eyes like a statue covered in melting frost. Zero affect. Build like moss grows. Build like crystals harden. Give up. Make your art the merest displacement of molecules at your slightest quiver. Don’t build in spite of the body and fail on their terms, build with the body. Immaculate is boring and impossible. Health based aesthetic.”

Twine, trashzines made of wadded up torn paper because we don’t have the energy to do binding, street recordings done from our bed where we lie immobilized.

Laziness is not laziness, it is many things: avoiding encountering one’s own body, avoiding triggers, avoiding thinking about the future because it’s proven to be unbearable. Slashing the Gordian Knot isn’t a sign of strength; it’s a sign of exhaustion.

Although I’ve fashioned this reflection in a manner that some may find legible, it is not a fair representation of my sickness. Writing these paragraphs has taken constant doses of medicine, fevered breaks, a few existential timeouts, and a complete neglect of my other responsibilities. When I tried in true form to write – in my realest moments of sickness – all that emerged were endless ellipses and countless semi-coherent revelations.

—Alli Yates

With the trashzine, I tore up the pages because I didn’t have the time or energy to bind them. I put them in ziploc bags—trash binding. In this new form they were resistant to the elements and could go interesting places. I hid one in Oakland under a bridge, and posted coordinates online. Someone found it.

When read, they come out of the bag like my thoughts—fragmented, random, nonlinear. If dropped they become part of the trash.

SOCIAL DYNAMICS

COMMUNITY IS DISPOSABILITY

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence. If its members move away every couple years because the next place seems cooler, it is not a community. If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying. Let’s not kid ourselves: we don’t have communities.

—The Broken Teapot, Anonymous

People crave community so badly that it constitutes a kind of linguistic virus. Everything in this world apparently has a community attached to it, no matter how fragmented or varied the reality is. This feels like both wishful thinking in an extremely lonely world (trans fems often have a community-shaped wound a mile wide) and also the necessary lens to convert everything to profit. Queerness is a marketplace. Alt is a marketplace. Buy my feminist butt plugs.

The dream of an imaginary community that allows total identification with one’s role within it to an extent that rules out interiority or doubt, the fixity and clearness of an external image or cliche as opposed to ephemera of lived experience, a life as it looks from the outside.

—Stephen Murphy

These idealized communities require disposability to maintain the illusion—violence and ostracism against the black/brown/trans/trash bodies that serve as safety valves for the inevitable anxiety and disillusionment of those who wish “total identification”.

Feminism/queerness takes a vague disposability and makes it a specific one. The vague ambient hate that I felt my whole life became intensely focused—the difference between being soaked in noxious, irritating gasoline and having someone throw a match at you. Normal hate means someone and their friends being shitty toward you; radical hate places a moral dimension onto hate, requiring your exclusion from every possible space—a true social death.

CURATING QUEERNESS

An entire industry of curation has sprung up to rigidly and sometimes violently police the hierarchy of who is allowed to express themselves as a trans or queer person. The LGBT and queer spheres find it upon themselves to create compilations of the “best” art by trans people, to define what a trans story is and to omit the rest. Endless projects to curate, list, own, publish, control, but so few to offer support and mentorship.

The stories that reflect poorly on alt culture are buried in favor of utopianism that everyone aspires toward but where few live. People feed desperately on this aspiration, creating the ever more elaborate hollow structures of brittle chitin that comprise feminist/queer culture.

To find the things I wanted in queerness, I had to find those who had been exiled from it, those who the name had been torn from.

COMPLAINT AND PURITY

there is nothing “wrong” with a politics of complaint but there are several risks like developing a dependent relationship with “the enemy” politically neutralizing oneself by dumping all of one’s subversive energies into meaningless channels or reifying one’s powerlessness by identifying with it because it makes one virtuous complaint becomes a form of subcultural capital a way to morally purify oneself —Jackie Wang, the tumblrization of everyday life

Popular feminism encodes pain into its regular complaint/click cycle, keeping everyone on the rim of emotional survival. Constant attack, constant strength, constant purity.

Lacking true community, the energy spent is not restored. Those with more stability in their life can keep up the cycle of complaint, and those with lower amounts of energy are filtered out, creating culture that glorifies a “strength” not everyone can access.

There is immense pressure on trans people to engage in this form of complaint if they want access to spaces—but we, with our higher rates of homelessness, joblessness, lifelessness, lovelessness, are the most fragile. We are the glass fems of an already delicate genderscape.

Purification is meaningless because anyone can perform these rituals—an effigy burnt in digital. And their inflexibility provides a place where abuse can thrive—a set of rules which abusers can hold over their victims.

Deleuze wrote, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.”

ENDING

People talk about feminism and queerness the way you’d apologize for an abusive relationship.

This isn’t for the people who are benefiting from these spaces and have no reason to change. This is for the people who were exiled, the people essays aren’t supposed to be written for. This is to say, you didn’t deserve that. That even tens or hundreds or thousands of people can be wrong, and they often are, no matter how much our socially constructed brains take that as a message to lie down and die. That nothing is too bad, too ridiculous, too bizarre to be real when it comes to making marginalized people disappear.

Ideology is a sick fetish.

RESISTING DISPOSABILITY

— Let marginalized people be flawed. Let them fuck up like the Real Humans who get to fuck up all the time.

— Fight criminal-justice thinking. Disposability runs on the innocence/guilt binary, another category that applies dynamically to certain bodies and not others. The mob trials used to run trans people out of communities are inherently abusive, favor predators, and must be rejected as a process unequivocally. There is no kind of justice that resembles hundreds of people ganging up on one person, or tangible lifelong damage being inflicted on someone for failing the rituals of purification that have no connection to real life.

— Pay attention when people disappear. Like drowning, it’s frequently silent. They might be blackmailed, threatened, and/or in shock.

— Even if the victim doesn’t want to fight (which is deeply understandable—often moving on is the only response), private support is huge. This is the time to make sure the wound doesn’t become infected, that the PTSD they acquire is as minimized as possible. This is the difference between a broken leg healing to the point where they can run again, or walking with a limp for the rest of their life. They’ve just been victim-blamed by a huge number of people, and as a social organism, their body is telling them to die. They need social reintegration, messages of support, and space to heal.

— Be extremely critical about what people say about trans people, especially things said in vagueness. The rumor mill that keeps trans people out of spaces isn’t even so much about people believing what is said, it’s about people choosing the safest option—a staining that plays on the average person’s risk aversion.

— Ask yourself if the same thing would be happening if they were white/cis/able-bodied.

— “Radical inclusivity recognizes harm done in the name of God.” —Yvette Flunder

Marginalized spaces can’t form healthy community purely from rejection of the mainstream. There has to be an acknowledgment of how people have been hurt by feminist spaces and their models.

— A common enemy isn’t the same as loving each other.

— Don’t be part of spaces that place an ideal or “community leader” above people.

DREAM

On January 18, 2015, I woke up from a dream. It was early morning, still dark. I felt very sad that the dream wasn’t real. I wrote it down, like I’ve written down all my dreams for the last eight years.

“She was my abuser. She came to my house on the island. I begged her to stop what she had done, to clear my name. She would not. It had been two years of being abused like a child because of her. I turned to walk deeper into the house. I looked back. She had a knife. She stabbed me. It was the happiest dream of my life. Because finally an abuser had done something to me that people would pay attention to. When I woke up my entire spirit was crushed because I had not been stabbed. I felt the weight of all these years of abuse. I wished so badly I had been stabbed.

I pulled the knife out. I wrestled the knife away. I called my friend to come over and help me.

I walked along the beach of the island and saw for the first time how PTSD had numbed and corroded every perception I’d had since that August, this debilitating disease. I finally felt the brightness of the air in my lungs, the color of the sand and the waves. It was so beautiful. I just wanted to experience all the things that had been stolen from me.”

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thepastisaroadmap · 2 years ago

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[Image description: 10 gifs of Jacob Anderson talking about Louis in AMC’s Interview with the Vampire. He says: When the pilot came into my inbox I had a passing familiarity because of the film. I felt almost sort of confronted by it like, oh this feels like it’s tapping into something familiar and I had to put it down.

I’m feeling something in my chest and I’m not sure what that is yet. I need to take a second and then go back to it and I did. It’s the best script I’ve ever read. That pilot episode is incredible.

I read the first two books. I think Anne Rice’s way of talking about these vampires is so human and very deeply felt. The sensations of being a human that struggles with themselves, asking questions about their footprint on the world. I found it very striking and the language is so beautiful as well. It’s also incredibly dark!

Reading the pilot I was like oh, this is a departure from Brad Pitt. I can’t imagine Brad Pitt playing this guy!

It’s really refreshing to read something that is colour conscious rather than it be colourblind casting. There’s a place particularly in fantasy that is visually representative of the world we live in now. If you don’t want to you don’t have to explore racism or a greater context of what it means to be a person of colour. But when you do it’s really special and rare, it’s like a gem.

There’s something very true to me about those feelings of like helplessness and powerlessness what that can drive you to. Particularly as it like pertains to his power as a vampire doesn’t buy him out of the perception other people have of him as a black man.

I want him to have therapy! Or to engage in some therapeutic thinking. I would love for Louis to not put all of his stock in his romantic relationships as important as they are. I want him to really connect to who he is.

So much of his torment is about the fact he never was given or gave himself the opportunity to sort of reconcile with the truth about himself. He was always trying to be somebody else always having to perform, code switch between these different parts of society everyday.

I would love for him to find what makes him happy. What he can do for himself that’s what I really want. That might not make for dramatic storytelling and maybe nobody else wants to see that but for me as somebody that loves him I do!

He finds a version of that in the books he goes back to New Orleans. He has this house and he sits in his garden and does gardening at night and he reads his books. I think Louis would be a great vampire therapist eventually he could train and become a therapist for other vampires and wade through their trauma.

End image description]

#iwtv #sil captions things

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peggy-faces · 6 years ago

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Mad Men rewatch: Season 1, Episode 1: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

I finally got around to doing this months after I said I was going to start. Don’t say I never keep my promises.

I’m still trying to work out a good format for these recaps/reviews. Having watched this episode so many times before I’m not really sure how to approach this with fresh eyes but I’ll give it a shot. Bear with me, this is a learning process.

This episode is essentially just “24 hours in the life of Don Draper(with some Pete/Peggy hijinks thrown in)”. I genuinely love this and it is the perfect way to be introduced to these characters.

I won’t focus much on Don right now because there’ll be plenty more opportunities down the line, but the thing that struck me in this specific episode was the emphasis on Don’s age compared to Pete and the “younger guys”. 34 is basically a baby by today’s standards. Pete is only 8 years younger than him! Perhaps(?) the role was intended for a man in his 40s but they cast Jon Hamm instead?

A weird thing that’s always bugged me about the pilot. The show seems to set Pete up as someone who wants to take Don’s job. But Pete’s an accounts guy who never really shows that much interest in being in the creative department in the rest of the show.

Also, I’m still not totally sure what was up with Don’s “It’s Toasted” speech. That slogan has existed since the 1910s. Either Mad Men was attempting to retcon history or Don was using it as an example of a good slogan? The commentary tracks seem to suggest it was the former.

Meanwhile, a certain mousy working class girl from Brooklyn is starting her first day of work at Sterling Cooper. Peggy is my favourite fictional character in anything ever and I unironically adore her despite her faults so I’ll definitely have more to say about her in the future especially about her relationships with Don and Joan. But now I’d like to focus on her relationship with Pete.

In the closing moments of this episode, Pete shows up at Peggy’s apartment and she allows him inside, presumably so they can have sex. First of all, how the hell did Pete get her address in the first place. Secondly, Why? Why did Pete go to Peggy of all people? Why did Peggy fuck him? Let’s take a look at their previous interactions in this episode.

1. Pete insults Peggy’s appearance and insinuates that she’s sleeping with Don.

2. Pete lies to get into Don’s office and gets Peggy into trouble with Don on her first day of work.

I like this episode and I do like the Pete/Peggy arc throughout the show and they normally have amazing chemistry together. But this scene feels so inorganic that there was a lot of speculation that Pete and Peggy knew each other beforehand because that would at least make more sense than what we got.

Fun fact: according to the shooting script for this episode(easily Googlable if you want to read it), Pete arrives at Peggy’s apartment at 9:45. Which means Pete’s bachelor party must have ended at 9 at the very earliest in order for him to get to Brooklyn in time. What bachelor party ends that early in the night? And Pete must have spent chunk of time finding Peggy’s address WHICH, AGAIN, WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW HE EVEN FOUND. I like imagining Pete wandering around Brooklyn drunkenly asking random people where “Peggy” lives.

We’re also introduced to Ken, Dick, and Harry. Yes, Paul Kinsey’s name in the pilot was originally Dick but it was changed when it got picked up by AMC. Ken is the weird sleazebag and Harry is the married guy who does seem somewhat decent compared to Kinsey and Ken. Weird how things change, isn’t it? Paul’s the pretentious guy. At least that never changed.

And then, of course, there’s Sal. Hey, did you know that Sal was gay? If you didn't, you probably missed the numerous “subtle clues" that were dropped throughout this episode. And by subtle, I mean so blatant that the only way they could have been more unsubtle is if you could hear Matthew Weiner screaming "heeeeeeeeeeeeee's gayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" in the background of every shot Sal is in. The most notorious example of this is when Sal randomly drops the line “we’re supposed to believe people are living one way and secretly thinking the exact opposite? That’s ridiculous.” It doesn’t feel organic to the conversation at hand, it just sounds weird. But if you look closely into the reflection in Sal’s eyes you can see Matthew Weiner patting himself on the back and congratulating himself on being such a genius.

But the most cringeworthy line of dialogue in the entire episode goes to: “It’s not like there’s some magic machine that makes identical copies of things.” Which is the sort of line you’d expect in an SNL parody of Mad Men, not the actual show.

The final plot twist of this episode is that we find out that Don is *gasp* married. Yes, this was actually supposed to be a plot twist. But I guess finding out that the dude who just claimed love was invented by capitalism has wife and kids would be pretty shocking if you don’t know what’s coming?

This is getting kinda long so I’ll touch more on Betty, Joan, and Roger in later instalments as they don’t get much to do here, as well as Rachel and Midge.

Random Observations

I really like the very brief interaction between Roger and Joan. I don’t know if there were was already plans for a secret relationship between the two, but it fits in well.

Elisabeth Moss seems to be affecting some sort of mild Brooklyn accent in this episode that doesn’t exist in the rest of the show. Kinda weird but it does make sense that Peggy would try to hide her working class background later on.

Is this guy in the opening scene Pete? Because he looked like Pete when I was watching it on Netflix but when I put in the DVD to listen to the commentary, he didn’t look like Pete anymore. Pete’s evil twin? Pete’s non-evil twin?

Commentary tracks

There are two commentary tracks for this episode. The first has Matthew Weiner and the second has director Alan Taylor. There wasn’t really anything particularly juicy so I just wrote down the BTS stuff that sounded interesting.

The pilot script existed for five years and Matthew Weiner used it as his writing sample when he applied for jobs.

Weiner was planning to play the role of the judgmental gynaecologist himself. Make of that what you will.

This is the only episode of Mad Men actually filmed in New York. The bar in the very first scene is a real bar in Harlem called the Lennox Lounge.

It took them a long time to cast Jon Hamm, partly because Taylor didn’t believe a man that handsome could be interesting.

Taylor calls Midge the most modern person in the show. Her apartment is a real artist’s studio on 57th street. They were warned it would be impossible to shoot there because it was on the seventeenth floor and only had a tiny elevator and no space for equipment. They built a set based on this apartment when they started filming the show in California.

The traffic sounds you hear in the scene where Don wakes up after sleeping with Midge are real New York traffic sounds.

The actors for Kinsey, Ken, and Harry felt they had to bond so they went out to drink together every night. At least that’s the excuse they used.

If you look carefully at the end of the elevator scene with Peggy and the guys you’ll see Rich Sommer(Harry Crane) walk off to the right because he had mistakenly thought they’d already cut. Classic Harry.

Taylor says the scene with Lucky Strike was very reminiscent of Bewitched and I agree, which is why I initially described Mad Men as “Bewitched with less magic and more adultery” when I was first started watching.

Something weird I noticed: Alan Taylor only refers to Matthew Weiner as “the writer”. Bad blood? Can’t remember his name? Guess we’ll find out in the inevitable Mad Men BTS tell-all someone writes in ten years.

The strip club was a real retro-style strip club in New York.

They’d almost completely run out of money by the time they shot the scene of Don on the train so it’s basically just a piece of plexiglass with water dripping down it.

Taylor says he dislikes the use of the song Caravan but I actually really like it.

Overall, great episode, albeit one with some glaring flaws. I give it 7 Scowling Petes of 10.

#tupf mad men rewatch

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storiesofwildfire · 6 years ago

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I don't know where they presented her to be the 'strongest' - that scene towards the end was more of a show of how her humanity is connected to her powers, similar to how Wanda shows great power faced with great loss. The 'Carol is deus ex machina' narrative comes from fanboy trolls who so desperately want to hate on her.

Oh, I’m not talking about the film painting her to be super powerful. I’m not talking about the final scenes of the film, ‘Nonnie, I’m talking about the straight up advertisement.

MCU has advertised Captain Marvel as being the most powerful character in the MCU.

I don’t know if everyone has this or where Noovie is actually aired. I go to see movies in AMC theaters and Regal Cinemas in the United States and both places air Noovie. It’s like a pre-show, pre-previews thing for people who get to the theater super earlier and they talk about upcoming films and television shows and other such things in the field of entertainment.

For months, I’ve seen a segment on Captain Marvel every single time I go to the theater where Brie Larson is talking about the responsibility of taking up the mantle of Captain Marvel. Other people who worked on the film are interviewed and one woman describes Captain Marvel as the strongest character in the cinematic universe and that whole segment is professionally shot and approved for theaters. That’s advertising for their film and no one can say claiming Captain Marvel is the strongest character in MCU isn’t something Marvel purposefully and openly put out there into the world to draw attention to the film, because they did it.

Here’s the clip: https://www.noovie.com/videos/47493

The link it gonna take you to a Captain Marvel trailer. For some reason, I can’t link directly to the specific video because all their Cap Marvel stuff is clustered under one link, but in the sidebar under “more videos” there’s a video titled Exclusive: Captain Marvel Leads the Way. It’s 1:32 minutes long. One of the people they interview literally says word for word, “It’s amazing to get the opportunity to introduce Captain Marvel because she is the most powerful character in the Marvel Universe.”

There are numerous other interviews where the same claim has been made, like this one for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbVfhUYhLQ

At 3:55, the interviewer points out that Captain Marvel is the most powerful character in the MCU and Brie Larson is very quick to agree and follows up by saying she’s very happy with that fact.

Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, has even confirmed that Captain Marvel is the most powerful person in the MCU: https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/kevin-feige-confirms-captain-marvel-is-the-mcus-most-powerful-character/

Here’s the quote taken directly from that linked article:

“In our comics mythology, Captain Marvel is a character who’s got one foot on Earth and one foot in the cosmic arena. Now that we’ve made a number of movies that take place on Earth, and a number of cosmic adventures with the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and Thor, we thought it was the right time to finally introduce Captain Marvel to the world. She’s one of the most powerful – and one of the most popular – characters in our comics, and will be the most powerful character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

This isn’t just fanboys making up false narratives about her. Marvel as a company has literally stated numerous times that she is the most powerful character in all of the cinematic universe. They’re advertising her that way on purpose.

I’ll be the first to admit, I see a lot of sexist shit about Carol Danvers, where their arguments for not liking her are purposefully focused around dragging her down and shitting all over her because she’s a female character. Trust me. I see it, I get it, it’s tiring and it’s old and disgusting. If you don’t like a character, that’s fine, you don’t have to like any character that doesn’t vibe with you. But you are absolutely right, I do see a lot of people cracking down on her for purely sexist reasons and that makes me sick.

I’m a woman. I want to see more powerful female leads in the media that I choose to ingest, that are important to me and millions of people around the world. It’s important to see that strength in diversity of gender, sexuality, and race, but that does not excuse legitimate follies in films when there are some.

All that changes nothing about Marvel’s own views, statements, and advertisements about Carol, and it does not take away their responsibility to justify their claims through their storytelling.

They’ve said it, multiple times, that Captain Marvel is the most powerful character in the cinematic universe, but in my humble opinion, they haven’t justified how or why she is actually the strongest. The story they told in the film doesn’t support that when you pair it up to literally every other Marvel movie and hero.

#outofmagic #mun answers #anonymous #Captain Marvel spoilers #spoilers #{ not really #but just in case!! }

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obsidianarchives · 6 years ago

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Ashley Romans

Ashley Romans started her formal acting training at Pace University School of Performing Arts. She moved to Los Angeles immediately after graduating in 2015. Los Angeles theater credits include: Celebration's Charm (Beta), Rotterdam (StageRaw and LADCC award recipients). Film/Television credits include: "I'm Dying Up Here" and "Shameless" (Showtime), "Are You Sleeping?" (Apple TV), "Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis" (Sunshine Moxie), "NOS4A2" (AMC new series).

Black Girls Create: What do you create?

I’m an actor. I create by acting. Collaborating with writers, directors, designers, and visionaries in whichever medium possible to hopefully create an honest reflection of a being’s life experience.

BGC: How do I create?

I suppose my entire creative process begins with healthy self trickery. Not quite deception but more healthy, playful, self manipulation. Naturally as creators we have a way of resisting and fearing whatever it is we most want to bring about into the world. Similar to a mother’s fear of giving birth or raising a child, we think “what if the world doesn’t receive my creation well? What if people are mean? What if it’s not healthy or ready?” I often find myself trying to bribe or trick my way out of this fear. I trick myself into going into my next audition as confidently as I can, or preparing for that day on set when I really don’t want to, or finding some connection with a character trait I find reprehensible.

I also think it is very important to stay relaxed and loose so one can reach a playful and spiritual place of creativity. So I try and keep myself healthy; mentally, spiritually, and physically by reading, eating healthy, journaling, praying, meditating, and exercising.

BGC: How did you get into acting?

I would say my professional pursuit officially began when I went to study theater at Pace University in New York City for my undergraduate degree, but for as long as I can remember I always had an interest in acting. I loved watching ‘90s action/drama movies with my father and “I Love Lucy” reruns with my mother as a child at all hours of the day. I became even more interested in theater and performance through high school choir, joining community summer camps, and doing the spring high school musical.

Even as an adolescent I felt it was best to keep my professional aspirations to myself in fear of naysayers. In retrospect, I understand now that high school is a time a lot of young people are dealing with self doubt and insecurity. Considering that I was far from the funniest, smartest, or most talented individual in the theater department, I, unconsciously, kept my performing ambitions quiet even from the people closest to me because I didn’t want to risk someone rubbing their self doubt on me. I worked up the courage to audition for a couple of acting schools but I told no one except my acting teacher Douglas Hooper and a few very close mates.

I still abide by this privacy philosophy even now and it hasn’t steered me wrong to this day. I still feel that speaking one’s dreams and aspirations among chaotic or unsupportive energy environment would most likely dissipate or poison their own source.

Eventually after graduating from Pace University through a couple months of tumbling I landed representation for acting with a management company and I moved out to Los Angeles. I’ve been able to land some great acting opportunities and gain a supportive team of people and I could not be more grateful.

BGC: What has been your favorite role so far?

I have so many favorites. The roles that stand out to me as my favorite are the ones that have most challenged me and allowed me to explore a different aspect of life, and explore and connect to the full range of the human experience. I’ve received some of my most valuable acting lessons in various roles in the theater. I played Inez, a red dressed-vixen-leading lady with a passionate, deep-seeded hatred for her ex-husband in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st. Two years ago I played Beta, a young teenage gang affiliated boy in Chicago with a secret in Phillip Dawkins’s play Charm at Celebration Theater. This coming March I will be part of the Kirk Douglas’s production Rotterdam by Jon Brittain. Set in the Netherlands, I will play Fiona/Adrian, one half of a modern London couple who decides to make a huge change in their life. My experience acting in these productions specifically has been positively nurturing. Throughout our rehearsal process, I learned what it means to be not just a more nuanced and skilled actor but also a more supportive and capable teammate in the creative process.

In terms of film/television world, my work as Hermione Granger in Sunshine Moxie’s Hermione Granger and the Quarter Life Crisis remains my greatest acting lesson in the film/television/on-camera discipline. Eliyannah Yisrael, Megan Grogan, Alice Pierce, other writers and producers leveled up my game up. I’ve never before been number one on the call sheet and I’m not sure if I ever will again, but having that responsibility was so enlightening. It was also an invaluable learning experience getting to work with those amazing creators and seeing those women just get shit done. It was truly an honor being chosen to play such an important and monumental literary character in this version. I remember reading the Harry Potter series as a little girl in London and thinking how much I wanted to be part of and live in that magical world. Playing Hermione in the HGQLC series was by far the best artistic adventure I’ve ever had. Exploring moments, scenes and how far we can bring characters all felt like adventures. Even our trip to Dublin, Ireland this past year felt like one big adventure. I’ll be forever grateful for that experience.

BGC: Why do you create?

I enjoy acting because I love being seen and getting to disappear. It’s a paradox but it’s my truth. I enjoy exploring the range of human experience. I love that I get to feel connected to people in the safe incubator that is pretend. I love that I get to feel and say all the things I’m afraid to feel and say in my real life. I still never get bored of going to the theater, movie or stage, sitting in a dark room with other people and watching performers simply tell us a story. I hope to serve God and the people around me through my creativity and acting. I always hope to truthfully represent a human experience no matter how high or low the stakes it might seem to us at first. Losing your phone and frantically trying to find it can be as exciting and dramatic a story as losing one’s job or finding out your spouse is unfaithful. It’s all in the storytelling and truthfulness of the moment and I love as an actor I get to explore that.

BGC: Who do you hope to reach through your work?

Honestly, the most important people I aim to ultimately reach and impress are my nieces and nephews. Yes the public, my agents, and producers are all important but I feel as though they are a means to an end. Right now my oldest niece is 10 years old and she loves the Hermione series and is always pretty excited to see me act on TV. At the moment she still thinks I’m pretty cool and I hope to keep it that way.

If this was a decade ago and you asked 16-year-old Ashley the same question I probably would have said something like “I want to be a voice for the voiceless and the underrepresented… blah blah blah.” Truthfully, I don’t think I ever really knew what that meant. I mean, I knew what it meant on a superficial-runner-up-in-Beauty-Pageant kind of level but now that answer doesn’t resonate with me as the gutter truth. Whenever I’m working on scripts, deciding on content to create or post etc, I ask myself “Is this something I would be proud to let my niece see? Is this the kind of work that can help make the world even the tiniest bit better for her?” Eventually, she’s going to grow up and have a voice in this world and I hope that her seeing me embrace mine will give her the courage to embrace hers. My nieces and nephews and all the children like them are who I hope to reach.

I really love seeing how the world is changing now. Representation in the media was so limited even 10 years ago but now it’s getting more and more beautiful by the day. With so many platforms, works such as Pose, Glow, Fresh Off the Boat, Chewing Gum, Masters of None, Eighth Grade, and more, so many beings who have been underrepresented for years are getting a chance to reach their audiences and tell their stories. And we all get to identify and see ourselves in each other. I don’t have to reach out and save the world because it kind of starts with myself and our own backyard.

BGC: Who or what inspires you to keep creating?

Oh geez, that’s a loaded question. My peers are my first and foremost inspiration and motivation. Again Eliyannah Yisrael, Megan Grogan, Alice Pearce, Jessica Jenks. It’s remarkable to watch those ladies do what they do. I love being in acting class and witnessing breakthroughs or being in a really great rehearsal with a cast mate. That’s always promising when you get to be part of the creation of something honest and true. Even if it is just a great moment in a scene. Actors who inspire me are endless. Octavia Spencer is a fantastic actress and creator who I adore. I had the blessing of working with her once and she’s an even better human. Lovely doesn’t do her justice. I love watching Regina King. There’s a great example of an honest to God creator and storyteller. She’s accomplished so much in acting, directing, writing, and producing. That’s also how I feel about Shonda Rhimes, Boots Riley, Jim Carrey, Maggie Gyllenhaal. There are many more. I’m sure as soon as you publish this interview I’m going to think of more.

BGC: Why is it important as a Black person to create?

As Black people, we have such a specific and loaded way we walk through the world. The Hermione Series has such a beautiful tag line. It says “HGQLC - Write Your Own Ending.” I’ve always loved that because it gives power to the subject. As Black people it is our responsibility to take control of our story the best way we can. We must feed our communities the best and most honest images of ourselves to ourselves because images and representation matters. In the area of cinema, for years non-Black people have told their version of the Black experience and it has left us misrepresented.

BGC: How do you balance creating with the rest of your life?

It’s always a struggle to keep a balanced life. I have a tendency to obsess and quickly lose perspective but when I want to regain balance I plan my day to make sure I get everything I need in. Luckily for me in my particular art form, acting is about living so I know I can’t be a good actor if I’m not allowing myself to experience life and fun.

BGC: Have you been able to build a support system around yourself? What does that look like?

I feel so grateful for my support system. I have amazing representation, an amazing day job with super awesome and motivating coworkers who are actively pursuing their life goals. I also have super supportive family and friends who tell me they’re proud of me just for being myself. My sister is also a great support system, someone I can speak and think out loud with no fear of judgment. I could not be any luckier.

BGC: Any advice for young creators/ones just starting?

It takes 10,000 hours to be a professional at anything. So just put in the hours, however that may look. Either do it, read about it, watch a YouTube video on it, whatever you have to do to learn about your craft and get better.

BGC: Any future projects?

I’m going to be doing a remounting of the stage production Rotterdam at the historic Kirk Douglas Theater in Culver City. It’s a short run, performances run from March 28 - April 7th, but it’s such a blessing to revisit this work with such a remarkable group of people. It’s a super funny and insightful play about gender and love.

In the television world I just finished wrapping a new AMC series starring Zachary Quinto and Ashleigh Cummings called NOS4A2. I don’t know the exact date it is to be released but it’s happening soon. The series is based of the hit novel by Joe Hill and it centers around a teenager (Cummings) who uses supernatural abilities to track down the seemingly immortal Charlie Manx (Quinto), who steals children and deposits them in “Christmasland.” I play a Detective Tabitha Hutter trying to suss out the truth. This series has supernatural fantasy, horror, action/adventure, procedural, and family drama. Everything you want to see.

#actress #Harry Potter #theater #actor #New York City #London #Los Angeles #Black Woman Creator #create

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