#and now this show gets released on streaming service like five days earlier?

[alicepao13]

Gah, I almost posted spoilers about the Hudson and Rex episode that hasn’t aired yet. This is so confusing. Zero out of ten would recommend this release schedule.

[emily84]

my sister used to volunteer at a very big italian fan-ran subtitles forum, and by the time GoT became huge, they used to wait for the very first video release + english subs immediately after it aired in the US, which meant they'd get up at 4-5am... the english subs file would be split amongst five subtitlers so each had roughly 10 minutes of "screen time" to sub, which takes generally about an hour of work; then they had a "subs supervisor" which would help collate the bits into a unified file, check for continuity errors, and then upload it by 7am at the latest. by the time most fan-crazed italians got up to go to work, the file was up for download. A WHOLE DAY EARLIER than any streaming services, and with much better quality. their quality was so far above what netflix or prime or disney+ offer even now, they went and got 'em forcefully shut down by authorities

ps. why it generally takes about an hour to translate 5-10mins of screen time if you're a professional: upon joining the website, my sister had to undergo a voluntary training where they taught her the main laws of subtitling (punctuation & grammar in subtitling, use of signifiers for music, etc.; never go over 45 characters for each line, so if it's a long sentence you have to reshape it so it fits; never start a new line splitting grammatical units like "of the" or "at the", so, always keep complements together as a unit, etc. etc.). for fantasy shows with no books to look to, they had to basically invent turns of phrases that made sense in that magical world; for irl dramas or comedies they had to fit english slang into coherent italian, always within those 45 characters per line. for fantasy adaptations, most subtitlers were hardcore fans, so they already knew how certain expressions or words or names were translated in book canon, and had this huge pool of knowledge of the lore they often were revelatory in a scene.

it's a very careful process, and the reason why big streaming companies have such terrible subtitles and CC is that they underpay (or not pay at all) interns to do the job in a quarter of the time AND IT SHOWS, even when all they have to do is transcribe the original subtitles, never mind the abysmal translations!!

as a subtitler im incredibly biased as i say this but. shoutout to forms of fan labor other than fanart and fanfiction. fanart and fanfiction are awesome, don't take this as a dig at those, but i have a big appreciation for fans who provide closed captioning/subtitles/translations of works out of love n passion; fans who recap and explain aspects of the original work; fucking SPEEDRUNNERS, holy shit, shoutout to speedrunners and challenge runners in video game communities. lots of things that fall outside the scope of what comes to mind when people think of fanart/fan labor are integral parts of a healthy fan ecosystem

[msclaritea]

From UPS to Hollywood, summer of strikes from pandemic convenience | Fortune

"Six straight days of 12-hour driving. Single digit paychecks. The complaints come from workers in vastly different industries: UPS delivery drivers and Hollywood actors and writers.

But they point to an underlying factor driving a surge of labor unrest: The cost to workers whose jobs have changed drastically as companies scramble to meet customer expectations for speed and convenience in industries transformed by technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated those changes, pushing retailers to shift online and intensifying the streaming competition among entertainment companies. Now, from the picket lines, workers are trying to give consumers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to produce a show that can be binged any time or get dog food delivered to their doorstep with a phone swipe.

Overworked and underpaid employees is an enduring complaint across industries — from delivery drivers to Starbucks baristas and airline pilots — where surges in consumer demand have collided with persistent labor shortages. Workers are pushing back against forced overtime, punishing schedules or company reliance on lower-paid, part-time or contract forces.

At issue for Hollywood screenwriters and actors staging their first simultaneous strikes in 40 years is the way streaming has upended entertainment economics, slashing pay and forcing showrunners to produce content faster with smaller teams.

“This seems to happen to many places when the tech companies come in. Who are we crushing? It doesn’t matter,” said Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, a screenwriter and showrunner on the negotiating team for the Writers Guild of America, whose members have been on strike since May. Earlier this month, the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists joined the writers’ union on the picket line.

Actors and writers have long relied on residuals, or long-term payments, for reruns and other airings of films and televisions shows. But reruns aren’t a thing on streaming services, where series and films simply land and stay with no easy way, such as box office returns or ratings, to determine their popularity.

Consequently, whatever residuals streaming companies do pay often amount to a pittance, and screenwriters have been sharing tales of receiving single digit checks.

Adam Shapiro, an actor known for the Netflix hit “Never Have I Ever,” said many actors were initially content to accept lower pay for the plethora of roles that streaming suddenly offered. But the need for a more sustainable compensation model gained urgency when it became clear streaming is not a sideshow, but rather the future of the business, he said.

“Over the past 10 years, we realized: ‘Oh, that’s now how Hollywood works. Everything is streaming,’” Shapiro said during a recent union event.

Shapiro, who has been acting for 25 years, said he agreed to a contract offering 20% of his normal rate for “Never Have I Ever” because it seemed like “a great opportunity, and it’s going to be all over the world. And it was. It really was. Unfortunately, we’re all starting to realize that if we keep doing this we’re not going to be able to pay our bills.”

Then there’s the rising use of “mini rooms,” in which a handful of writers are hired to work only during pre-production, sometimes for a series that may take a year to be greenlit, or never get picked up at all.

Sanchez-Witzel, co-creator of the recently released Netflix series “Survival of the Thickest,” said television shows traditionally hire robust writing teams for the duration of production. But Netflix refused to allow her to keep her team of five writers past pre-production, forcing round-the-clock work on rewrites with just one other writer.

“It’s not sustainable and I’ll never do that again,” she said.

Sanchez-Witzel said she was struck by the similarities between her experience and those of UPS drivers, some of whom joined the WGA for protests as they threatened their own potentially crippling strike. UPS and the Teamsters last week reached a tentative contract staving off the strike.

Jeffrey Palmerino, a full-time UPS driver near Albany, New York, said forced overtime emerged as a top issue during the pandemic as drivers coped with a crush of orders on par with the holiday season. Drivers never knew what time they would get home or if they could count on two days off each week, while 14-hour days in trucks without air conditioning became the norm.

“It was basically like Christmas on steroids for two straight years. A lot of us were forced to work six days a week, and that is not any way to live your life,” said Palmerino, a Teamsters shop steward.

Along with pay raises and air conditioning, the Teamsters won concessions that Palmerino hopes will ease overwork. UPS agreed to end forced overtime on days off and eliminate a lower-paid category of drivers who work shifts that include weekends, converting them to full-time drivers. Union members have yet to ratify the deal.

The Teamsters and labor activists hailed the tentative deal as a game-changer that would pressure other companies facing labor unrest to raise their standards. But similar outcomes are far from certain in industries lacking the sheer economic indispensability of UPS or the clout of its 340,000-member union.

Efforts to organize at Starbucks and Amazon stalled as both companies aggressively fought against unionization.

Still, labor protests will likely gain momentum following the UPS contract, said Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, which released a report this year that found the number of labor strikes rose 52% in 2022.

“The whole idea that consumer convenience is above everything broke down during the pandemic. We started to think, ‘I’m at home ordering, but there is actually a worker who has to go the grocery store, who has to cook this for me so that I can be comfortable,’” Campos-Medina said..."

___

Associated Press video journalist Leslie Ambriz contributed from Los Angeles.

[fa-headhoncho]

Untitled TFATWS Fic: Part 3

Bucky Barnes x Reader

Prompt/Background: After turning yourself in to the government following the events of CA:TWS, they lock you up for the crimes you committed during your time at Hydra. Spending years there until Captain America got you on parole during the blip to help fight Thanos. Now, after doing community service acts and helping the broken society, when they give the new Captain America the shield, you’re thrown back into a life you didn’t want.

Word Count: 2058

Reader: Female

Warning: parole officers? canon level violence, john walker

Author’s Note: im being lazy and not writing rn but i have a stock pile of fics so get ready for shitty posts :p

Masterlist

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4

=====

Once you get onto the plane, you don’t hold back your emotions. The fight was enough but how Walker talked to Sam and Bucky on the car ride over sent you over the edge. You had to admit, the kid had good intentions but there was something about him that was off.

You don’t even wait for his private jet to lift off before turning to him and pinning him against the nearest wall. Your forearm was laying across his chest while the other was hovering over the knife clipped onto your hip. His managers and friend stand up, rushing to try to pry you off of him but he raises a hand to stop them. “Who the hell do you think you fucking are, huh?”

“Captain America.” He simply responds, looking at down you with a cocky smile. You let out a scoff, the audacity of this man. “Look, I didn’t know that you knew them.”

“Yes, you did.” You exclaim while your forearm digs into his chest, “You read my parole reports, it shows where I spend my time and who I talk to, Bucky and Sam being the main two who I interact with. They’re my friends and you’re using me as a pawn. Steve wouldn’t have done that, Captain America wouldn’t have done that.”

“You talk about looking up to him but you’re nothing like him. You throw around ‘brother’ like it means nothing, you have no idea what those two have gone through with Steve. You hold the shield like it’s a toy and using it to get what you want.” Your voice is menacing low and you knew if you still had your parole officer that he would be scolding you for it.

“Captain America stood up for the little guys but you’re just using it as a title, abusing it to act like the hero you tried to be before. You’re a fucking joke.” You release him and walk away. The air in the room felt tense as you plop down on the chair closest to the exit, furthest away from his management team who didn’t know what just happened.

“If you think I’m going to stand by your side after how you just treated my friends, you’re dead fucking wrong.” You shake your head and lean forward in your seat.

He lets out a chuckle, taking a step towards you with his hands fisted by his side. “You’re going to help me if I say you are. I say the words and you’re locked back in the goddamn cell where you belong. Remember who brought you here in the first place.”

“Hey, John, calm down.” Hoskins finally buds in. Walker scoffs and shakes his head, following him to join the rest of their team.

You shift your eyes to the floor, knowing he’s right. The power the government is giving their new Captain is a desperate attempt to give hope to those after the Blip. It’s going straight to his head and you knew it was going to get worse in the long run.

The rest of the flight is awkward. The tension never settling even if Walker acts like nothing just happened. Hoskins was keeping a close eye on you like you were going to bounce back to your Hydra days and take out everyone on the plane. To be fair, you wanted to but you weren’t stupid and you didn’t want to give him another reason to send you back.

Once the plane touches down, you’re out the door. The group was barely out of the seats before they could see you disappear into the airport. Haling a cab and taking it back to the apartment they were renting for you, changing out of your gear and plopping down onto the bed.

The events of the day finally collapse down onto you. This situation was going to be a lot harder than you originally thought. Walker explained it as just one mission to see where the Flag Smashers were taking the stolen vaccines and you would be on your way. “Free at last” to use his words but now you were roped in for the long haul.

You couldn’t stop thinking about the look of betrayal on Bucky’s face either. He had confided in you about how he felt about the new Captain and how lost he felt. If Steve wasn’t right about Sam then what the hell was wrong with Bucky?

Before you realize it, tears were streaming down your cheeks. You knew it was too early to try to reach out to them so you decide to give them time. They were still processing their interactions with the new Captain and the new information about the Flag Smashers being super-soldiers.

If you were going to have to work with Walker, you were going to have to figure out a plan. Racking your brain for ideas, one comes to mind that would be risky. It would be worth it, though. Staring up at the ceiling, you start strategizing a way you could pull this off. You were one of Hydra’s best agents so hopefully, this would be easy. After going against your original thought and shooting Sam a quick text, you slowly drift off asleep.

=====

Your leg bounces under the table as you stare at the clock above the door. It was half-past seven and the breakfast rush was winding down. The diner was slowly emptying, leaving a hand full of tables with families and friends enjoying their meal. The waitress comes up to your booth, standing there until you notice her.

“Ready to order yet, hun’?” The nice older lady questions, breaking your gaze from the entrance to her. You shake your head no before turning back to the door. She gives you a sad smile before looking down at her watch, “It’s been almost twenty minutes, sweetie, are you sure your friends are still coming?”

You nod quickly, no matter what kind of circumstances the two soldiers would never stand you up. Their hearts were too kind for that. “I was just a bit early, I’m kind of nervous.” You shyly admit, sending her a smile.

“Well, I’m bringing you something to eat at least,” She commands, you open your mouth to reject but she cuts you off, “on the house.” She gives you a firm look before walking off to the back.

Right as she disappears into the kitchen, the bell of the diner dings. Your head snaps to it and you can’t help the large smile that appears on your face at the sight of the duo walking in. The two immediately see you since you placed yourself right near the door.

Sam sends you back a smile while Bucky just eyes you down. You were wearing a simple sweater and pants while they were in their usual civilian gear, a ballcap and jacket. You couldn’t help but ogle at how good Bucky looked in the blue Hently you two bought when he first came to Brooklyn.

They slip into the booth, their broad figures barely fitting on the small seat. Sam elbows Bucky as he tries to get comfortable but he doesn’t acknowledge it.

“Morning.” You try to make conversation. “How was the rest of your day yesterday?”

“He got arrested.” Sam bluntly says making your jaw drop. “He missed his check-in with the shrink.”

“I told you not to tell her.” Bucky makes out through clenched teeth, he just shrugs in response. You go to scold him but he holds a steady hand out, “You can yell at me all you want later, what do you want? We don’t have much time.” Your heart drops with how aggressive he’s being towards you.

“I want to help you.” You announce, ignoring Bucky’s eye roll as he remembers who you’re working with. He goes to tell you off just like he told Walker but you start rambling before he could utter a word, “I know it’s not the ideal situation but Walker wants me on his team. If I could earn his trust and figure out what their plans are, I can report back to you two.”

“And how do we not know this is a setup?” Sam points out, leaning forward on the table as Bucky looks around the diner for any sign of said Captain America, “They could be listening right now, they still have you under lock and key.”

You gleam at the mention of that, realizing that you haven’t told them the good news. “Not anymore.” You extend your leg out from under the table for Bucky to see your naked ankle. “Walker pulled some strings to get me off my parole earlier.”

A look of realization comes across Sam’s face once he pieces everything together. He knew how mad you were about the new Captain America, how you helped him and Bucky against the Smashers instead of the other two, and how you didn’t know anything about Bucky getting arrested made sense.

“So, you made a deal with the devil.” Bucky snarkily questions, a look of disappointment on his face.

You let out a scoff at his words, “I did what I had to do, James. Not all of us were lucky enough to get pardoned.” You spit back, tired of how he was acting. “He tricked me, told me it was just one simple favor to repay him. Now, he wants me to be a part of his team to take down the Flag Smashers. Told me if I didn’t help that he would send me back to jail and it would reset everything I had accomplished in the last five years.”

Bucky’s eyes soften at your confession, hanging his head in embarrassment at his assumptions. The waitress comes up and sets the small plate of food down in front of you, giving an awkward smile to the boys before walking off.

You let out a sigh, feeling bad for yelling at him. He was being a dick but that didn’t mean you had to be one back to him. He was going through a lot and this was the last thing he needed.

Grabbing the fork, you stare down at the pancakes. “You don’t have to forgive me or anything but just understand where I’m coming from, please.”

They share a look as they silently communicate. Bucky narrows his eyes and Sam tilts his head at him. You look between them as you try to figure out what’s going on.

“I can’t read your mind, cyborg. Use your words.” Sam finally spits out then elbows him one more time, “Will you please scoot over? I’m suffocating over here!”

Bucky sighs and rolls his eyes at his friend. He gets up out of the booth and slips in next to you, using his larger form to push you closer to the window. Your eyes widen in surprise as he slings his arm to rest behind your head. He then takes the extra fork and stabs it into your hashbrowns.

Sam lets out an awe as he watches the two of you eat from your plate, “Don’t you two look so cute.”

“Shut up, Sam.” You both demand at the same time. He raises his hands up in defense, leaning back in the booth with a smug smile on his face. The two of you easily fall into conversation, catching up on things and giggling at the little jokes he was making. Suddenly, after a few moments of silence as the two of you enjoy the meal, you remember what Sam mentioned earlier.

Bucky lets out a little yelp when you send a swift smack to the back of his head, making the hashbrowns he was about to eat fall off his fork. “What the hell was that for?”

“For getting arrested, are you kidding me, James? Do you know what could’ve happened to you? I swear to God, James Buchanan Barnes, you will be the death of me—“ You continue to scold while Sam lets out a booming laugh. Mad at him for being so careless, you poke and prod at his chest but stop when you notice the expression on his face. Your heart can’t handle the way he pulls out his puppy dog eyes and his pouted lip. “Oh, don’t pull that shit with me.”

_____

untitled tfawts fic: @crowleysqueenofhell @mischiefmanaged71 @thewinterrbucky @lizajane3 @ahahafudge @spookycereal-s @a-girl-who-loves-disney @kittengirl998 @ sebby-staan

[literallythebiggestfuckingsimp]

Our Little Secret

description: you and rudy have been sneaking around for a while now, what happens when you get caught in front of thousands of fans?😳😳

warnings: making out?? ooo and swearing oops (as a british person i can’t just NOT swear)

            Rudy’s lips smashed against yours, moving hungrily as his arms snaked around your waist. You gasped, arms moving to hook around his neck as he slipped his tongue in your mouth. You had to be on set in five, and you were just passing the time with your good friend Rudy in his trailer.

Between the two of you, neither of you were quite sure what you were. So far, all you guys had done was purely physical. Of course, there had been lingering touches, longing stares, stolen smiles. But you hadn’t talked about it. 

It had started with flirty jokes, and then, boom! It just kinda happened, if you were being honest.

Not breaking the kiss, the two of you stumbled backwards until you bumped into the table. You jumped up and he took his pace between your legs, detaching his lips from yours and turning his attention to the skin on your neck. You moaned, heading rolling back to give him more access.

“Hey, Rudy? You in there?” Your eyes widen at the voice outside the trailer door, freezing both yours and Rudy’s movements.

“Uh, yeah?” Rudy says, clearing his throat.

“Why’s the door locked, toot?” You could practically see the suggestive smirk on Chase’s face.

“Cause I’m about to take a shit and I didn’t want anyone to come in here and smell that,” Rudy replies, looking at you with a grin on his face. You rest your head in the crook of his neck, pressing your face up to it to suppress your laughter.

Chase laughs. “Alright, then, but have you seen Y/N? I’ve been looking for her everywhere.”

“Nah, sorry bro,” Rudy calls out when you shake your head at him. “I’ve gotta take this shit or I’ll explode. See you in a sec.”

“It’s good, bro,” Chase replies. “She’s gotta be on set now, though. I’ll find her, don’t worry about it. Probably went off to craft services or something.”

You glare at the door where Chase is stood on the other end, but your eyes widen wen you realise you’re gonna be late to set.

“Cya, man,” Rudy says, helping you down from the counter as you pat down your hair. Chase mumbles a “bye”.

You two wait until it’s clear, giving Rudy a quick peck as you subtlety sneak out the trailer door once you’re sure Chase is gone.

As you walk - more like jog - away, you look back. Through the window you salute to Rudy, and he salutes back with a maniacal grin on his perfect face.

♡

You’ve just finished shooting for the day, and straight away, you headed over to see Rudy. He’d slid you a note earlier in the day to meet him at his trailer once you were done.

Arriving, you were immediately pulled into a kiss by by the blond headed bimbo who’d stolen your heart. You smiled against his lips, happily thinking about the fact that you could finally call him yours.

Around two weeks ago now you two had finally sorted through your shit and admitted your feelings for each other. However, you’d both decided it would be better if you kept your newfound relationship to yourselves. You didn’t want to make things awkward if it didn’t work out, and, besides, sneaking around was fun. “Think of it as our little secret,” you had said.

You pulled away from the kiss and he pouted. Laughing, you pecked him on the cheek and watched as a smile took over on his lips. Rudy’s arms situated themselves around your waist as he laid the two of you down on the makeshift sofa in his trailer.

Rudy was lying on your lap as you played with his hair, occasionally kissing him as some stupid ass movie played on the TV. It was a nice breather from all the crazy scenes you’d been filming and you couldn’t feel more relaxed.

Well, that was until there was a knock at the door. You wasted no time in rushing into the bathroom, hiding as Rudy went to answer the door.

“Yo, dude,” you hear JD greet and you mentally cuss him out.

“Uh, hey, JD, Maddie,” Rudy says. “What’s up?”

“Why’re you being so weird?” Maddie questions, confused as to why Rudy seemed hesitant about letting them in.

“Me?” Rudy asks, shaking his head. “Nah, I’m not being weird.”

“Whatever,” Madison huffs. You hear her and JD walk in and mutter profanities under your breath. Thank god you had picked up your phone from the sofa or you would be toast. “We wanted to watch a movie and you have the comfiest couch.”

“What’re we watchin?” Rudy asks, bouncing on his heels. Madison shares a look with JD, confused as to what the hell was up with him.

“I dunno,” JD shrugs. “I gotta take a tinker in your bathroom, though. I’ll be right back.” He says, and your eyes widen.

“No!” Rudy calls out, and you search frantically for an escape route. There’s a window, but it’s kinda small, you’re not sure if you’d fit. Fuck it, you think as you hear JD and Mads confront Rudy about being weird.

“I just mean ... it’s kinda rank in there,” Rudy says, scratching the back of his neck.

“Disgusting,” Madison mutters.

“I’ll just block out the smell,” JD shrugs. “I’m desperate, bro.”

Rudy silently prays to himself as you fumble about the bathroom, climbing on top of the seat. You put one leg through the window as the footsteps land right outside the door, and  try to slyly maneuver yourself out with your phone in one hand. Your plan fails miserable and you tumble to the ground, landing in a bush.

“Fuck,” you mutter, sitting up and pulling leaves out your hair.

The door to the bathroom swings open and you run as fast as you can back to your own trailer. You ignore the confused looks of the crew members, and Drew calling your name as he sees you run past with twigs in your hair.

As soon as you get back to your trailer, you shoot Rudy a quick text.

I jumped out the window ;)

Jesus, Y/N. You good?

Yeah, just thank god for my super rad spy skills.

Sure, baby. Sure.

♡

You giggle as Rudy pushes you down on your bed, peppering your skin with kisses, making you laugh more.

Filming had ended and you were currently quarantined with the cast, stuck in yours and Madelyn’s apartment. After the release of the show, you had gained quite a big fan base and your time had been occupied with online interviews and live streams. You’ve barely had the chance to sneak around with Rudy, not wanting to raise any suspicions since fans had already started shipping the two of you, pointing out the way he looks and interacts with you, and vice versa.

You didn’t want to let your friends catch on. Not yet.

Swiftly, you flip you and Rudy over, straddling him as you pull him in for a passionate kiss. You must not have heard the footsteps creeping up to your room, or the door swing open as you kissed your boyfriend.

A quick shriek alerted you of someone’s presence. You scrambled away from Rudy, cheeks red and eyes wide. It was Madelyn, stood frozen in the doorway, eyes wide. Clumsily, she dropped her phone, the object clattering to the floor

“Fuck,” Rudy mutters, pulling on his shirt as you put your hands over your face in attempt to hide you embarrassment.

Madelyn stands dead still, frozen to the spot. “Oh my god, guys, I am so so so sorry! I didn’t know you two were-”

By now, you had alerted the attention of Chase and Drew, who came running over at the sound of a scream. It didn’t take them long to connect the dots, between your rosy cheeks and swollen lips and Rudy’s messy hair and flustered appearance.

“Oh, shit,” Drew swore, eyes wide.

“Uh, guys ...” Madelyn spoke up, chuckling nervously. “I was on live and they saw ...” she motions between the two of you with her hands, “that.”

Honestly, you think you could’ve died, right then and there. You scramble to grab Maddie’s phone from the floor, seeing the comments screaming about what they had just accidentally witnessed and quickly end the live.

“I’m so sorry!” Maddie squeals, cheeks tinging red. “I was planning on scaring Y/N and I didn’t think Rudy would be in here, let alone that you two would be-”

You quickly cut her off, scratching the back of your neck and biting your lip. “It’s fine, Maddie. Seriously, don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah,” Rudy clears his throat. “You couldn't have known.”

“Uh, well,” Drew chuckles. “This is awkward.”

“Honestly, I’m gonna need a good few shots to erase the embarrassment of this moment from my memory,” you state, walking through the door and towards the kitchen where a bottle of vodka awaits you.

“I second that,” Rudy says, following you and lazily placing an arm around your waist.

Chase grins, watching the two off you. “So ... “ he trails off, gesturing between the two of you with his hand. “Are you two, yanno, together?” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.

You nod and Rudy smiles. “Yeah, we have been for a while now.”

“God, it’s about time!” Chase exclaims.

“You guys were pretty bad at hiding it,” Drew states, a grin of his own on his lips.

You mock fake offence, gasping as you poor the vodka into your shot glass. “We’ve been dating for four months, so, obviously not.” 

Madelyn’s mouth hangs open. “Four months?!” she yells. “And you didn’t tell us?”

Rudy shrugs, kissing your cheek fondly. “Eh, it was pretty fun sneaking around.”

“Agreed,” you say, smiling up at him. He meets your gaze, pecking you on the lips.

“Ew, you guys,” Chase groans. “Just because you’re together now doesn’t mean you can be all openly affectionate.”

Madelyn whacks his arm, rolling her eyes. “Shut up, they’re cute.”

“Nah, they’re gross,” Drew jokes, laughing. “Anyway, I made Mama Starkey’s casserole. Who wants some?”

“Me!” you exclaim, grinning excitedly. If there was one thing you loved it was Mama Starkey’s chicken casserole. Also, eating and drinking would be a good way to get your mind off the fact that practically the entire world saw you on top of a shirtless Rudy, making out with him.

A/N: AHAHAH THE WAY I DIDNT KNOW HOW TO END THIS SHDJSHJDH also pls excuse the crappy writing this was made at 4am last night😳

[letterboxd]

Halfway—2021.

Two Filipino indies lead the Letterboxd Top 25 at the 2021 halfway point, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to shake—and reshape—the film industry. Jack Moulton and Gemma Gracewood take stock.

Cleaners, Glenn Barit’s photocopied, hand-colored, stop-motion feature about high schoolers in the northern Philippines city of Tuguegarao, is the highest-rated 2021 film on Letterboxd at the halfway point of the year, with a weighted average of 4.3 out of 5 stars. Ode to Nothing, by Barit’s fellow countrywoman Dwein Baltazar, is in second place, and Shaka King’s two-time Oscar-winner Judas and the Black Messiah rounds out the top three.

Last year was a transition year in many ways: for the world, a pandemic-led move away from cinema screenings to at-home virtual theaters and streaming-first releases; for Letterboxd, a move away from US-led release dates in our annual calculations. This has opened the way for notable films from around the world to be included on our lists far sooner than their oft-delayed American releases (which had resulted in, for example, Brazil’s Bacurau not making the 2019 Letterboxd Year in Review).

Both of these factors help to explain why we have two Filipino independent features leading our midway Top 25. “Cleaners and Ode to Nothing are exactly the kind of small Filipino films that would have struggled to get national distribution in theaters in the before times, despite the buzz that they garnered,” writes Manila-based film critic Philbert Dy in his companion essay to the Top 25, in which he explains how the Philippines’ particularly long and harsh Covid lockdown has “led to smaller, quirkier films being made accessible to more Filipinos, whose consumption of cinema were once beholden to the whims of conglomerate cinema owners”.

‘Cleaners’, written and directed by Glenn Barit.

When we shared the good news with him, a delighted Cleaners director Glenn Barit specifically shouted out his nation’s film lovers: “It is a testament to a vibrant Filipino film community still actively watching and supporting films of our own. Especially with a film like ours set in a small city far from the capital, it is amazing to read in reviews that it resonates with a lot of people (sometimes even outside our country).”

From this year forward, our mid-year rankings include films that have been released in any country, with at least a limited theatrical, streaming or video-on-demand run, and a minimum of 1,000 views on Letterboxd. These new rules allow us to celebrate the love for Katie Found’s lesbian romance My First Summer—released in Australia in March—without having to wait for the US to catch up. It joins indie highlight Shiva Baby, Michael Rianda’s animated hit The Mitchells vs The Machines and Heidi Ewing’s swooning romance, I Carry You With Me, on the Top 25 in putting young, queer characters on the screen.

‘My First Summer’, written and directed by Katie Found.

As expected, many films on the list have suffered pandemic delays. We use premiere dates to mark the year of record for each film, so A Quiet Place Part II will always be attached to its March 2020 red-carpet screening, despite the fourteen-month hibernation that followed. This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection by Mosotho director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese screened at 2019’s Venice Film Festival and had a very long festival run until Mubi picked it up for streaming in the UK this year. The film’s lead, Mary Twala, passed away a year ago, July 4, 2020 (see her also in Beyoncé’s Black is King). Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Our Friend—one of the eight women-directed films on the list—went to TIFF, London, and AFI before being released this January without screening once in 2020.

More than half of our Top 25 films are directed by BIPOC directors, nearly a dozen of whom are of Asian descent, illuminating a key benefit of the new eligibility system. Challenging the US for the most represented country is India with five films in the list, taking advantage of Amazon’s distribution deal and creating greater accessibility for Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam-language films at home and abroad.

‘Red Post Post on Escher Street’, written and directed by Sion Sono.

Also among the Asian directors making the list are legends Tsai Ming-liang and Sion Sono. Tsai’s Days recently received a limited run in Spain (it will be brought to the US by Grasshopper Films this August), while Sono’s Red Post Post on Escher Street had a quick VOD run in February courtesy of Japan Society Film.

Produced in the US and directed by Japanese-Brazilian Edson Oda, Nine Days qualifies due to an exclusive run at the Singapore arthouse theater The Projector in May—it’ll be released in the US later this month. Finally, Asian American director Jon M. Chu makes the list with his adaptation of Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. We are also happy to see a couple of Letterboxd members in the halfway 25: Cleaners’ Barit and Chad Hartigan (Little Fish). If you’d like to discover more 2021 releases by our member-filmmakers, we have a list for that.

The Top 25 is, of course, solely made up of narrative feature-length films. On the documentary front, Flee is currently the highest-rated non-fiction feature of 2021. Neon is expected to release the film in the US for an awards run later this year, but it’s eligible now due to a release earlier this month in director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s homeland of Denmark.

‘Flee’, directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen.

Fellow Sundance Film Festival winner Summer of Soul (or… When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is currently the year’s highest-rated documentary in general, but was 48 hours shy of eligibility for the halfway list, releasing in theaters and on Hulu on July 2. The runners-up are: Sir Alex Ferguson: Never Give In, directed by the notorious football manager’s son; David Attenborough’s The Year Earth Changed, directed by Tom Beard; and rock-docs TINA and (in his doc-directing debut) Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers.

In other categories, It’s a Sin is the highest-rated narrative miniseries at the midway point, Can’t Get You Out of Our Head by Adam Curtis is the highest-rated documentary miniseries, Bo Burnham: Inside is the highest-rated comedy special, Blackpink: The Show is the highest-rated music film, Save Ralph is the highest-rated animated short film, and Four Roads, by Alice Rohrwacher, is the highest-rated live-action short film.

With Cannes underway and more festivals to come, it is still a long road to the 2021 Year in Review for these films—but given the journey most of them have already travelled, it is pleasing to celebrate the filmmakers’ success. Ang galing ninyong lahat!

On top of its meticulously bonkers production process, our highest-ranked film, Cleaners, had a long journey to its first theatrical distribution, and it’s far from over. The film premiered at the QCinema International Film Festival in October 2019, to raves from Filipino Letterboxd members, and it still holds a firm grasp on its high rating nearly two years later. Ultimately, the first non-fest release for Cleaners occurred when Singapore’s Asian Film Archive screened it for a week in April, thus qualifying the film for our 2021 lists.

‘Ode to Nothing’, written, directed and edited by Dwein Baltazar.

Ode to Nothing has been on an even longer journey. The film also debuted at the QCinema Festival, but in 2018, and finally arrived on local streaming services iWantTFC and KTX.PH earlier this year.

Being celebrated by their countryfolk on Letterboxd is one thing, but how can those of us outside the Philippines see these top two films? Perhaps we need to give our local distributors a nudge. As Cleaners director Barit explains: “We are a team of three first-time filmmakers and producers. We are still learning the ropes of film distribution and marketing—and it’s been very hard. I just want to shamelessly say that our doors are wide open for distribution and acquisition; we are not yet available on any streaming platforms locally or internationally [winks nervously].”

See the Halfway 2021 list on Letterboxd and watch the Top 10 countdown on YouTube

Follow Jack and Gemma on Letterboxd

[cozycryptidcorner]

Potamoi (Greek River God) x Reader (sfw)

A commission for the wonderful and kind @atalantaroars! She wanted a meet-cute with the monster match I wrote for her awhile ago. Hope you all enjoy the hunky water boi as much as I did creating him!

There are two options for you today: hike a trail, or go one more week in the stifling silence of your house and go absolutely insane. It doesn’t take much mental convincing to pack up a little backpack with snacks and water, waking up while the sun is barely more than a hint in the sky. This might not be your usual mode of operation, to drop everything and spend time out in nature despite whatever responsibilities you still have at home, but you’ve been pushed to the fucking brink lately and need to spice things up.

There’s an unmistakable scent of growth the moment you step out of your car, one that calls your body forward as if you say welcome home. You take in a few long, deep breaths, trying to let the cold morning air medicate your soul in the only way nature can, a deep sense of relaxation overcoming your mind and body as you try to clear your worries away. Only when you feel mentally ready to take on the hike, do you approach the entrance of the nature reserve.

A large, wooden board is painted with the many different trails you can take, all winding around the mountain range, labeled with various symbols that indicate difficulty levels. While you don’t think you could manage one of the more difficult ones, you also think you might not find much fulfillment in one of the easier paths, so you settle for one a bit in the middle. This trail should wrap around one of the valleys, following the main river that brings life to a neighboring town, one fed by the melting snow from the tips of the higher peaks.

Everything is quiet, peaceful, you don’t see anyone else as you begin to walk the trail, basking in the sunlight before it’s drowned out by the towering trees. Birds chirp as you continue on, sticking close to the side of the matted dirt, right where vegetation dares to attempt growing. Wildflowers dot the side of the hill as the earth swells upward, white, light blue, and yellow smattering color amidst the green. The air is almost shockingly different from what you’re used to, your body is trying to compensate for the freshness, but it doesn’t quite know how yet.

When you take a break, the sun is already high in the sky, sweat now beading down your forehead. The water you carelessly packed tastes divine, you have to be careful not to drink too much or too fast, saving most of it for later. You even eat your lunch when you get to a pile of rocks that work as a table and seat, the flat, elevated surface perfect for tossing your food onto without worrying about it falling off.

Once you are satisfied that you’ve explored the trail as long as you desire, you decide that it’s about time to head back. Even though your path into the forest seemed straightforward and easy to remember, there are suddenly several branching paths that you didn’t even realize you passed just moments before… which isn’t good, to say the least. Biting your bottom lip hard enough to taste blood, you try to logic yourself into taking the one that seems like it blends seamlessly into the trail you’re walking.

Or maybe it would be best to keep going in the direction you were already heading, after all, the trails are supposed to loop around and head back to the parking lot, the keyword here being eventually. Some of them are supposed to take a seasoned hiker a full day, and you don’t remember how long this certain one is going to take because you had decided previously that you would turn back anyways.

Letting out a breath, you decide that it might be a better option to take the more straightforward path instead of risk getting lost, so you tighten the straps of your backpack and keep walking. As you go, you think about how best to ration what’s left of your water, in case you’re in for a much longer hike than you initially anticipated because you’re not sure if you can realistically make it.

You take another well-needed rest after a long while, trying to close your eyes and chill out, trying to find the same solace in nature that you felt earlier in the morning. Instead of that same, peaceful aura that settled around your body in a soft, gentle wave, you only feel more tense and anxious as you did before. The sounds of the forest are no longer warm and inviting, the screech of cicada is now like a hard, ugly accusation, the occasional snapping of twigs don’t fill your heart up with the thought of life, and the sky’s tone seems to turn almost a hateful gray as the sun makes an almost hasty descent.

Up ahead, there’s a river, and if you remember correctly, civilization is often downstream. Letting out a breath, crossing your arms over your chest, you look down at the water, internally fighting over what you should do. After a long moment of contemplation, you decide to stick to the trail, but just as you take a step on the crunching gravel, you spot someone over by the water. To say you almost tripped over yourself to get to them wouldn’t be an understatement; you almost bite the dust before you were able to catch your balance.

After regaining your stability and taking a second look, you realize with no small amount of shock that the man appears to not only be petting a deer but also… talking to it? You can hear the voice he uses on it, soft, soothing tones, clearly offering comfort of some kind. Whatever he is doing must be working, because the deer slowly stops thrashing about, it’s squeaking cries slowly dissipating as it seems to melt back into a state of calm.

Even though his back is towards you, he seems to sense your presence, because there’s an underlying tenseness in his body posture. Once the deer doesn’t seem too anxious anymore, he says, without so much as turning around, “I know you’re out there, at least do me the service of showing your face.”

“Um,” you say, after a moment unsure of what else to do, but introduce yourself, “hi. I’m very lost right now.”

When he doesn’t immediately respond, you wonder if he maybe was referencing some other person that is also hiding in the woods?

“I suspected,” he pets at a deer you hadn’t noticed prior, glancing up at you only after he manages to calm the creature down from its initial panic, “we don’t get a lot of your kind out this deep in the forest.”

“Er,” you look over at the deer, who seems to be regarding you with the utmost suspicion, “yeah, I wasn’t really planning on coming this deep into the forest, either. But, like, if you could point me in the direction of the parking lot, or literally any major highway, that would be absolutely fantastic.”

It takes you a moment to realize that he’s a massive, as in, you knew he was large for a man when you approached him, but you’re just now processing it all. He very well could be some kind of action movie star, his muscles, face shape, and stature all suggest that he’s very, very important, and you should pay attention to everything he says. As you watch him, he seems to look upwards at the sky, brow furrowed as though doing many mental calculations, then sighs.

“You won’t be able to leave this pocket of the forest until morning,” he says, releasing his steady hand on the deer’s flank.

“Um, what?” You aren’t sure if you heard him correctly, but you’re pretty certain he did not tell you that you can’t leave. “How is that even supposed to work? I came in through the main trail, surely there’s a way back.”

“Not once the sun is no longer in the sky.” He picks up a stick from the nearby banks, and now you realize that while his lower half is in the water, it’s not… it’s not human colors, more like… a kaleidoscope of some kind? Like he’s wearing those fancy mermaid tails, the kind you can buy off the internet, except what reason could he possibly have to wear one in the middle of a forest? “You will have to wait for night to run its course before you can return.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s not how basic geography works,” you say, tensing at the thought of spending however many hours the sun is gone out in the wilderness.

“It has nothing to do with basic geography, and you will do well to heed my words,” the man almost snaps, only marginally restraining himself from sounding rude. “This part of the forest encloses once the sun sinks below the horizon, and opens when it returns. It is this way to protect what little of Gaia’s children are left from your kind.”

You swallow nervously, not believing him in the slightest, so you think over your options in the meantime. There isn’t a lot for you to work with, your phone has no signal, and using your flashlight will eat up the battery fast than you might be able to find your way back to the main trail. Still, you’d rather be apart from him, even though he hasn’t given you any weird vibes beyond the obvious, you don’t want to be stuck here with him overnight.

So you do what you think is best, turning around and heading back for the trail, except there isn’t any trail. And by that, even though you were just walking on a gravel pathway barely more than five minutes ago, and you know it was in this direction, it’s nowhere to be found. Sucking in your breath, you close your eyes and count to ten, then whirl around and march back to where the man still lounges, halfway in the stream.

Trying to keep your voice from wobbling, you ask, “can you please point me to the regular trail? I think I… um, misplaced it.”

He pokes the water with the stick without looking at you, “you won’t find it until sunrise.”

Swallowing thickly, you try to say without trembling, “I don’t understand.”

With a sigh, he turns to the sandy banks, using the stick to draw a rudimentary chart, and in the dying light of dusk, you can manage to make out what he’s trying to convey. “This is the land of Gaia,” he draws out a circle, “which is the world you are familiar with. It is the physical plane at its most fundamental levels, meat and bone and blood grow and churn within the earth mother and her offspring. This land- this forest, is not a part of Gaia’s form,” here, her draws another bubble, halfway in the larger circle, halfway out, “halfway physical, but able to separate as it needs to. Do you understand?”

“Not really,” you say, trying to be truthful, and still just as anxious and frightened as ever.

He lets out a frustrated breath and tries to reiterate, “this separate pocket of world that can be hidden away or entirely separated on its own, and closes itself off once the sun sets. You must have stumbled over the boundaries while you were wandering, did you end up seeming to go around in circles on paths that don’t make any sense?”

Oh, god. “I- yes.”

“Exactly what I thought.” There’s a shimmering glimmer in your periphery, and you realize that his lower half is, in fact, a tail. “I’m sorry to inform you that you’re just going to be stuck here overnight.”

You feel absolutely defeated, miserable, broken, because how the hell are you supposed to be handling this now? Apparently, you’re trapped in some sort of fucking pocket dimension, and you can’t do anything about it, and the only other person here to help you is some sort of merman who seems less than pleased to be in your presence.

“So I just… wait here?” You’re doing your best to not cry, goddamnit. No fucking tears. In the meantime, you’re digging around your backpack for your can of bear spray, of which should completely wreck the man should he try to make the wrong move.

“I suppose,” he softens, just a bit, “you can stay here with me, because there are things roaming these woods that wouldn’t dare approach you so long as I am here.”

Oh, wonderful. “That would be nice,” you mumble, plopping yourself onto a rock, folding your legs up and making yourself seem small.

The woods are never really silent, so even though the two of you share no conversation, there is a background filled to the brim with dozens of different noises. Nocturnal creatures begin to creep out of their homes, an owl hooting just close enough for you to make out its specific call, crickets still chirping despite the descent of the sun, and the crunching of stray twigs and leaves upon the ground suggests a silent stalker. You’re suddenly thrilled to have accepted this odd man’s offer to stay by his side for the night.

The stars blink down, twinkling in the sky, almost like each individual eyes staring down at you from above. You remember that Ancient Greeks believe that each cluster used to be a living thing- Caster and Pollux, Cassiopea, Orion, and so on, people who died and then ascended into the sky to watch the earth below. You wonder if they are like guardians, keeping the inhabitants of the ground safe from anything that lurks in the depths of the void above, or if they are merely passing observers to whatever happens around them, trapped in time.

“So,” you swallow almost painfully, trying to make some conversation, “how do you know so much about the way this, um, pocket dimension thing works?”

“I told you that Gaia herself is protecting her children,” he says, not impatiently, nor unkindly. “The last effort to keep Prometheus’ biggest mistake at bay.”

“Right, of course,” you say, not believing him in the very slightest. “And you live here, then? With the blessings of Gaia?”

“Of course,” he says it like there’s no other possibility, “she looks after her children.”

“And I’m just a spawn of Prometheus?” You say it with some amount of humor, poking at his weird explanations, but he takes it seriously.

“Even if there are those here who would have you killed, just to chew your bones between their teeth and taste your blood. I will not allow that to happen.”

“Oh,” you say, trying not to sound awkward about it, “thank you.”

Silence follows, and you hear some crunching of leaves accompanying the water trickling through its creek. Still, you’d rather not spend the night in awkward silence, so you chew your bottom lip and try to quickly come up with something else to talk about. Anything. You wonder if he might know about modern devices, or if he would even care, but you need to reassure yourself now that it’s too dark to see that he’s still there.

As though reading your thoughts, he speaks first. “Tell me about your home.”

Relief fills your veins, so you do. You spill your guts like you’re at a confessional and it’s your death day, opening up every single crevice of your life back in reality and letting it pour out of your mouth like a broken dam. Where you were born, where you lived, where you moved, school, the people who went to school, friends, families, enemies. Not necessarily in that order, the night goes so shockingly fast that you barely keep track of what you’ve already said. You tell him about cities, about corporations, about countries, about charities. Humanity at both its best and its worst, and even what happens in between.

He’s a good listener, too, offering questions here and there, following your train of thought even though sometimes it doesn’t even make sense to you. He seems to be able to pick up on any gaps of logic you’ve forgotten to say, asking for clarification on some things, wishing for more detail on others, even requesting information about kingdoms you know haven’t existed for hundreds of years. And… better yet, he seems to enjoy talking to you.

“So,” you say, putting on your jacket to fight the biting night chill, “does this part of the forest happen every single night?”

“Yes,” he says, and you may be imagining it, but you think there might be some kind of tone of relief in his voice. “Yes, the forests merge every day, only to part during the night.”

“Theoretically, then,” you fan your fingers out, folding them together, “I could come back. To… like, visit, or something.”

“If you wanted to, then yes, you most certainly could.”

You close your eyes tight, shutting out the stars and the moon. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to impose or anything, but like, if you’d want to know more about the modern human world, I could come back prepared. With like, an iPad and a PowerPoint ready.”

“Would you?” He sounds a bit mystified, and you realize you probably didn’t cover those two things during your talks. As he mulls it over, the first element of daytime bashfully pokes out from the trees, the sky lighting just enough to swallow up the stars.

“If you wanted my company.”

“Yes,” he says very firmly, “you’re…. Fascinating, a very fascinating specimen of your species. I do not sense any bloodlust that I’ve heard is so very common in your kind.”

That’s the nicest thing he’s said about you, and you find your chest thundering in response. “Tha-thank you, I guess.”

“And I would also like to see this iPad and PowerPoint.”

You feel your cheeks redden slightly. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

[lovemesomesurveys]

1 - What's your favourite TV show that was released before you were born? What is it that got you into that show in the first place? I have a few, such as I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Golden Girls, and Roseanne. Most I got into with my grandmothers, but I’m honestly not sure how I started watching Roseanne.

2 - What is your preferred brand and flavour of ice-cream? Strawberry, mint chocolate chip, cookies and cream, and birthday cake.

3 - When's the last time you got something in your eye? Earlier I had an eyelash stuck in there.

4 - When was the last time someone got you flowers and what was the occasion? For my birthday a few yeas ago.

5 - What are your plans for tomorrow? Are these normal for that particular day of the week or are you doing something out of the ordinary? Same stuff as always, which yes is normal for that day and everyday.

6 - What will you be eating for your next meal? I’m not sure yet.

7 - Who was the last person to pay you a compliment? How did you come to know that person? It was my aunt.

8 - When is the last time the weather changed your plans? What were your plans and what did you end up doing instead? I don’t recall to be honest.

9 - What's your favourite kind of liquor? Do you prefer it "plain", flavoured or in a mixer? I don’t drink.

10 - Who was the last person you spoke to via video call? Did you speak to this person via video before the pandemic hit? My doctor for my appointment last month. No, that was the first time we did a Zoom appointment.

11 - Are you someone who prefers routine or spontaneity? My days are very routine.

12 - What streaming services (if any) are you subscribed to? Do you think they're good value for money? Several. We have Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+, HBO Max, Paramount+, and Amazon Prime.

13 - When was the last time you struggled to get to sleep? What did you do to help things? Every night for over a year now. I have my nightly routine I do until I eventually fall asleep.

14 - How often do you get your five a day? What was the last fruit or veggie that you ate? I never do. I may get some spinach, green onions, or potatoes in now and then, but it’s not a regular thing and certainly not the recommended amount. I haven’t had fruit in years... :X

15 - How do you take your coffee? With flavored creamer or cream (half and half) and sugar.

16 - Is there anything that you're currently putting off? When do you think you'll finally get round to doing it? I’ve put off a lot of things for years and it’s not good. I don’t know when or if I’ll get to them. :/

17 - When was the last time you watched a Disney film? Which one was it and is it one of your favourites? I think it was Soul. It was good, but I wouldn’t call it a favorite.

18 - What was the last household chore you completed? Is this something you do regularly? Put the silverware and some of the stuff that goes in places I can reach away from the dishwasher. I do it somewhat regularly. Usually, someone else just does it.

19 - Who were you with the last time you went out for a meal? My mom and brother back before the pandemic hit.

20 - Have you had your COVID vaccine yet? If not, are you going to accept it when you're offered? No. I haven’t decided what I will do yet.

21 - Do you have any pets and how many? If not, would you like to have one someday? Yeah, I have a doggo. 

22 - What's the most unusual meat you've ever eaten? Did you like it? I haven’t had anything unusual. I’m super picky and particular and not adventurous at all when it comes to my food (or anything).

23 - Do you prefer still or sparkling water and why? Still. I don’t like the taste of sparkling water.

24 - Do you own a car? If so, could you live your current lifestyle without one? If you don't have one, would having one change your life in any way? No, cause I don’t drive so I don’t have a need for a car.

25 - Who was the last person you made plans with and what are you going to do? I haven’t made plans in a long time.

26 - What's the worst kind of physical pain you've ever experienced? Is this a one-off or is it something you experience regularly? The pain after all my surgeries, for sure. The recovery for them was rough. 

27 - What's your favourite length for a survey to be? Do you get put off if surveys are longer or shorter than you like? I like them to be at least 20 questions, but preferably more. Like this length is good. I could go for longer, though. If it’s less than 20 than I very rarely bother. 

28 - What colours are you wearing at the moment? Are any of those colours your favourite? Black, red, and gray. I like ‘em all.

29 - Once you've found a TV show you like, do you tend to watch it over and over again? What was the last TV programme you watched for the second for third time? Not necessarily, but there are several shows I do that with. The last one I did that with was Wandavision. But there’s also shows I watch that come on TV everyday at certain times such as The Golden Girls, Roseanne, King of Queens, and Reba  that I kinda just have on in the background or depending on the time are on as I’m falling asleep. Like right now it’s 5:45AM and The Golden Girls are on in the background as I’m doing this and listening to an ASMR video with headphones.

30 - When was the last time you cried and what was the reason for it? Do you feel better now? Last night because I was in a shit mood and meh. 

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift Bent the Music Industry to Her Will

By: Lindsay Zoladz for Vulture Date: December 30th 2019

In the 2010s, she became its savviest power player.

n late November 2019, Taylor Swift gave a career-spanning performance at the American Music Awards before accepting the statue for Artist of the Decade. (Swift was perhaps the perfect cross between the award’s two previous recipients, Britney Spears and Garth Brooks.) Clad in a cascading rose-colored cape and holding court among the younger female artists in attendance - 17-year-old Billie Eilish, 22-year-old Camila Cabello, 25-year-old Halsey - Swift had the queenly air of an elder stateswoman. After picking up five additional awards, including Artist of the Year, she became the show’s most decorated artist in history. “This is such a great year in music. The new artists are insane,” she declared in her acceptance speech, with big-sister gravitas. That night, she finally outgrew that “Who, me?” face of perpetual awards-show surprise; she accepted the honors she won like an artist who believed she had worked hard enough to deserve them.

Swift cut an imposing adult figure up there, because somewhere along the line she’d become one. The 2010s have coincided almost exactly with Swift’s 20s, with the subtle image changes and maturations across her last five album cycles coming to look like an Animorphs cover of a savvy and talented young woman gradually growing into her power. And so to reflect on the Decade in Taylor Swift is to assess not just her sonic evolutions but her many industry chess moves: She took Spotify to task in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and got Apple to reverse its policy of not paying artists royalties during a three-month free trial of its music-streaming service. She sued a former radio DJ for allegedly groping her during a photo op and demanded just a symbolic victory of $1, as if to say the money wasn’t the point. Critics wondered whether she was leaning too heavily on her co-writers, so she wrote her entire 2010 album, Speak Now, herself, without any collaborators. In 2018, she severed ties with her longtime label, Big Machine Records, and negotiated a new contract with Universal Music Group that gave her ownership of her masters and assurance that she (and any other artist on the label) would be paid out if UMG ever sold its Spotify shares. Yes, she stoked the flames of her celebrity feuds with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, and Katy Perry plenty over the past ten years, but she’s also focused some of her combative energy on tackling systemic problems and fashioning herself into something like the music industry’s most high-profile vigilante. Few artists have made royalty payments and the minutiae of entertainment-law front-page news as often as Swift has.

Within the industry, Swift has always had the reputation of being something of a songwriting savant (in 2007, when “Our Song” was released, then-17-year-old Swift became the youngest person ever to write and perform a No. 1 song on the Billboard Country chart), but she has long desired to be considered an industry power player, too. A 2011 New Yorker profile of Swift circa her blockbuster Speak Now World Tour noted that she initially intended to follow her parents’ footsteps and pursue a career in business, quoting her saying, “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was 8, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.” In an even earlier interview, she fondly recalled the times in elementary school when she stayed up late with her mother, practicing for school presentations. “I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds - because male artists are allowed to,” she said this year in an unusually candid Rolling Stone interview. “And I’m so sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business.” Of course, she still spent plenty of time sitting at her piano or strumming her guitar, but in that conversation she painted herself as someone who is also “sit[ting] in a conference room several times a week,” coming up with ideas about how best to market her music and her career.

And so over the past decade, Swift’s face has appeared not just on magazine covers and television screens, but on UPS trucks and Amazon packages. Her songs have been featured in Target commercials and NFL spots, to name just two of her many lucrative partnerships. That New Yorker profile also found her to be uncommonly enthused about the fact that her CDs were being sold in Starbucks: “I was so stoked about it, because it’s been one of my goals - I always go into Starbucks, and I wished that they would sell my album.”

“Taylor Swift is something like the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music,” Hazel Cills wrote recently in Jezebel. “She has propelled her career from tiny country artist into pop machine over the past few years with little shame when it comes to corporate collaborators.” Such brazen femme-capitalism will always be a turnoff to some people (“the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music” is even less of a compliment in 2019 than it was when Lean In was first published), but it’s undeniable that it has helped Swift maintain and leverage her status as a commercial juggernaut more consistently than any other pop star over the past ten years.

In the 2010s, with the clockwork certainty of a midterm election, there was a Taylor Swift album every other autumn. (Yes, there was a three-year gap between 1989 and Reputation, but she all but made up for it with the quick timing of August’s Lover.) The kinds of pop superstars considered her peers did not stick to such rigid schedules: Adele released two studio albums this decade, Beyoncé released three, and even Rihanna - who for the first three years of the decade was averaging an album a year - eventually slowed her roll and will have released just four when the 2010s are all said and done. The only A-plus-list musician who saturated the market as steadily as Swift did this decade was Drake.

Still, Drake’s commercial dominance was more of a newfangled phenomenon, capitalizing on the industry’s sudden reliance on streaming and his massive popularity on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Drake might be the artist who rode the streaming wave most successfully this decade, but - with her strategic withholding of her albums from certain platforms until they better compensated artists - Swift was often the one bending it to her will. And she could do that because she didn’t need to rely on it solely: Somehow, against all odds, Taylor Swift still sold records. Like, gazillions of them. When Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation (some critics thought it was a critical misstep, but it certainly wasn’t a commercial one), moved 1.216 million units in its first seven days, Swift became the only artist in history to achieve four different million-selling weeks. And, of course, all four of these weeks came during a decade when traditional album sales were on a precipitous decline. At least for those mere mortals who were not an all-powerful being named Taylor Alison Swift.

“Female empowerment” has been such an ambient, unquestioned virtue of the pop culture of this decade that we have too often failed to take a step back and ask ourselves what sort of power is being advocated for, and if its attainment should always be a cause for celebration. Is “female empowerment” any different from the hollow, materialistic promises of the late ’90s “girl power”? Is “female power” inherently different or more benevolent than its default male counterpart? Maybe this feels like such a distinctly American hang-up because we have not yet experienced that mythic, oft-imagined figure of the First Female President, and have thus not had to contend with the cold reality that, whoever she is, she will, like all of us, be inevitably flawed, imperfect, and at least occasionally disappointing.

As she’s grown into her own brand of 21st-century American pop feminism - sometimes elegantly, sometimes gawkily - Swift seems to have come to a firm conviction that female power is essentially more virtuous than the male variety. This was a side of herself she celebrated in her AMA performance. Swift opened her medley with a few fiery bars of “The Man,” her own personalized daydream of what gender equality would look like: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” she sings, “wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” She wore an oversize white button-down onto which the titles of her old albums were stamped in a correctional-facility font: SPEAK NOW, RED, 1989, REPUTATION. Plenty of the millions of people who scrutinize Swift’s every move interpreted her choice of outfit and song as not-so-subtle jabs at Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta and the manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun, with whom Swift is still in a messy, uncommonly public battle over the fate of her master recordings. (The only album title missing from her outfit was “LOVER,” which happens to be the only one of which she has full ownership.) She has framed the terms of her battle with Borchetta and Braun in strikingly gendered language: “These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work,” she told Rolling Stone. “And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of Scotch to themselves.” Though she is herself a very rich, very powerful woman, she reads their message to be unquestionably condescending: Be a good little girl and shut up.

It is true that many record contracts are designed to take advantage of young artists, and that young women and people of color are probably perceived by music executives to be the marks most vulnerable to exploitation. But it is also true that Swift signed a legally binding contract, the kind that a businesswoman like herself would have to respect if it were signed by somebody else. Braun, who has been asking to have these negotiations in private rather than on Twitter, claims to have received death threats from her fans.

Even as she’s grown into one of the most dominant pop-culture figures in the world, Swift sometimes still seems to be clinging to her old underdog identity, to the extent that she can fail to grasp the magnitude of her own power or account for the blind spots of her privilege. “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” she sang on Speak Now’s Grammy-winning 2010 single “Mean,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that, compared to 99.99 percent of the population, she already was. The mid-decade backlash to Swift’s thin-white-celebrity-and-model-studded “girl squad” - none of which was more incisive than Lara Marie Schoenhals’s hilarious parody video - took her by surprise. “I never would have imagined that people would have thought, This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it... I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to.”

“Female power” is not automatically faultless, and can of course be tainted by all other sorts of biases and assumptions about class, race, and sexual orientation, to name just a few more common pitfalls. Swift’s face-palm-inducing 2015 misunderstanding with Nicki Minaj revealed this, of course, and plenty of people felt that her sudden embrace of the LGBTQ community in the “You Need to Calm Down” was a clumsy overcorrection for her past silence. Maybe she would have gotten where she was quicker if she were a man. But it would take a more complicated, and perhaps less catchy, song to acknowledge she might not have gotten there at all had she not also enjoyed other privileges.

Art has its own kind of power - sneakier and harder to measure than the economic kind. The reason Taylor Swift has been worth talking about incessantly for an entire decade is that she continues to wield this kind, too. “I don’t think her commercial responsibilities detract from her genuine passion for her craft,” a then-17-year-old Tavi Gevinson wrote in a memorable 2013 essay for The Believer. “Have you ever watched her in interviews when she gets asked about her actual songwriting? She becomes that kid who’s really into the science fair.”

After so much industry drama, much of the lived-in, self-reflective Lover is a simple reminder that Swift was and still is a singular songwriter. Yes, this was the decade of such loud, flashy missteps as “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Welcome to New York,” and “Me!,” but it was also a decade of so many quieter triumphs: the pulsing synesthesia of “Red,” the nervous heart flutter of “Delicate,” the sleek sophistication of “Style,” the concise lyricism of “Mean,” the cathartic fun of “22,” the slow-dance swoon of “Lover.” But like so many of her fans, and even Swift herself, I still find the most enduringly powerful song she’s ever written to be “All Too Well,” the smoldering breakup scrapbook released on her great 2012 album Red. “Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well,” she sings, an innocent enough lyric that, by the end of the song, comes to glint like a switchblade. In a decade of DGAF, ghosting, and performative chill, remembering it all too well might be Swift’s stealthiest superpower. She felt it deeply, can still access that feeling whenever she needs to, and that means she can size you up in a line as concisely cutting as “so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Forget Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer. That’s the sort of observation that would bring Goliath to his knees.

“It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority,” the historian Mary Beard writes in her manifesto Women & Power, “or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it.” At least in the realm of pop music, Swift has spent the better part of her decade chipping away at that double standard, and teaching people how to think about cultural power a little bit differently. She sprinkled artful emblems of teen-girl-speak through her smash hits (“Uhhh he calls me and he’s like, ‘I still love you,’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting, we are never getting back together, like, ever”) and did not abandon her effusive love of kittens and butterflies in order to be taken seriously. As an artist and a businesswoman, she made the power of teen girls - and the women who used to be them - that much more perilous to ignore. Because they’ve been there all along, and they remember all too well.

[lokiondisneyplus]

After more than 40 years as an actor, Sheri Mann Stewart had finally taken the plunge to launch her own production company. A week after she wrapped shooting her first film for Mann Woman Productions, Atlanta went on pandemic lockdown.

Mann Stewart was suddenly left with a film on hold, an audition on hold, and the careers of her husband and two sons — all performers — on hold. Instead of ushering her first film — prophetically inspired by John Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” — through editing and post-production, she spends several hours each day on the phone trying to iron out issues with unemployment benefits that she has yet to receive.

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” said Mann Stewart an Atlanta native who most recently appeared in Tyler Perry’s Netflix feature film “A Fall from Grace.” “I think, one way or another, our industry will be changed.”

COVID-19 left actress Sheri Mann Stewart with the first film from her production company on hold, an audition on hold, and the careers of her husband and two sons – all performers – also in flux. She has spent time working on other projects including a new YouTube series to support LGBTQIA youth who may not be in supportive environments.

Like many other industries, the film and TV business has been shut down since mid-March, with only a few exceptions such as late-night talk shows and virtual versions of “American Idol” and “The Voice.” With plenty of content currently in the pipeline, streaming services and television networks have managed so far, but if production doesn’t restart soon, viewers will face a major drought of new shows to watch this fall.

Pressure is building to get production started as soon as possible, but the natural intimacy of a typical set with makeup artists, camera operators, producers, actors and production assistants constantly crossing paths, makes creating proper protocols a serious challenge.

“People are anxious to get back to work,” said Mark Wofford, general manager at Atlanta-based Production Consultants & Equipment, which provides motion-picture rental equipment. “But this has to be weighed against the need to make sure everyone is safe. It’s going to be a real balancing act.”

Georgia has become a major player in Hollywood production, courtesy of generous tax credits to film and TV production companies passed in 2008. It’s now the third-largest state for such content after California and New York. As the only state with no cap on its credits, Georgia has drawn big-budget films such as “Black Panther” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.”

Despite Hollywood’s liberal leanings — some in the industry called for boycotts after Georgia’s 2016 religious liberty bill and 2019 heartbeat abortion bill — the Republican-led state legislature and three Republican governors have consistently embraced the tax credit system. At the recent Georgia Film Day on March 11, Gov. Brian Kemp spoke before 200 industry supporters in the state Capitol atrium, extolling the $2.9 billion in direct investment and 50,000-plus jobs the business brought into the state last fiscal year. Weeks later, Kemp would issue a statewide shelter-in-place order.

In May, the Georgia Film Office released a set of nonbinding best practices for film and television productions to consider during the pandemic. The guidelines included holding remote auditions and virtual location scouting as well as reducing the number of extras used on set and placing clear barriers between actors to be removed just before the director yells “Action!”

Local studios are preparing to reopen this summer as they await multiple unions to accept unified protocols. Earlier this month, a task force composed of the various unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, sent approved health and safety guidelines to governors in California and New York with plans for final protocols to follow soon. “This document is an initial set of principles and guidelines that we all agree form a relevant and realistic first step to protecting cast and crew in the reopening of the entertainment and media industry in its two largest markets,” said a joint statement from unions, including the Teamsters, the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA. Face masks for live audiences, staggered mealtimes with no buffet-style setups, and daily screenings for COVID-19 along with a designated COVID-19 compliance officer, were among the recommended guidelines.

Studios have already begun to make big investments in COVID-19 friendly infrastructure. Since March, two of the largest studios in the metro area — Pinewood Studios in Fayetteville and Blackhall Studios in Atlanta — have each invested more than $1 million to retrofit their studios. One of the biggest costs: improving the HVAC systems on their sound stages and offices so they are comparable to that of hospitals in order to reduce the chances of airborne transmission of viruses. Major film and television productions can easily have hundreds of staff members working in tight indoor quarters, creating the kind of environment that public health officials have noted can increase the spread of COVID-19.

“I’ve had to become an expert in viral containment,” said Ryan Millsap, owner of Blackhall Studios. “Until March, I hadn’t given it a second thought. This is a big moment in our generation where disease has come to the forefront.”

Atlanta-based makeup artist Tracy Ewell has seen a virus or cold spread like fire on almost every production on which she has worked. She started toting a personal air filter to set up in the trailers and tents where she and her team spend hours getting actors camera ready. ”I am paid to be hygienic,” Ewell said. “I take full responsibility for my actor’s condition, but masks don’t work in my world.”

Ewell, who has worked as a department head on productions for Marvel and the Netflix drama “Ozark,” is not afraid of returning to set, but she knows that is a decision everyone will have to make for themselves. The initial industry guidelines for makeup artists included providing more time to allow for safety measures to be followed, but additional protocols need to be established before that kind of work can continue. “I would be comfortable having fewer people on set in my department if I knew they were going to have the time,” Ewell said. But more time means more money, and studios now have to make big investments at a time when they’ve posted big losses.

Just before the pandemic shut down productions nationwide, HBO finished its upcoming J.J. Abrams drama, “Lovecraft Country,” and Paramount wrapped Chris Pratt military science fiction movie “The Tomorrow War” at Blackhall. Millsap was about to sign with two other major studios for new productions when COVID-19 put the kibosh on that.

Since then, Millsap has generated zero revenue, shedding more than $1 million a month while keeping his 12 full-time employees on payroll. He said he has had enough money in the bank to keep his studio afloat but would be challenged if shows didn’t begin shooting by the fourth quarter. If all goes well, two major studios will begin pre-production at Blackhall in July with potential full-blown production by August or September, he said.

Frank Patterson, the head of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, said they have had to study every aspect of their business, from more limited security access to more sequestered work pods, dividing the studio into zones. They also hired a medical testing company, BioIQ, to handle the anticipated flood of COVID-19 tests they plan to use on a daily basis. “Some days, we’ll have 6,000 people on the lot,” he said.

The past couple of months have been “overwhelmingly stressful because I’m working with people I’ve known for decades,” Patterson added. “These are people I grew up within the industry. We have to make certain nobody gets sick. At the same time, these are friends who haven’t worked for months and have families to feed. We need to get this done now.”

Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios was the first in the country to announce detailed plans to shoot two of his BET television series in July. Perry has some advantages most other studios do not. He owns 330 acres of a former Army base and has at least 80 residences on the property which will enable him to more easily isolate crew and actors. He writes and directs his own TV series in a way that will enable him to finish shooting an entire season in less than three weeks. He has developed protocols to test everybody multiple times with contingencies in case anybody gets COVID-19. He has scaled back on-site crew and extras and is using his largest sound stage as a cafeteria with proper social distancing.

“It’s an enormous undertaking and an enormous cost to the budget,” Perry told Variety last month.

Mann Stewart had just been called for an audition for a Perry television production before the studio closed. She is unsure if that opportunity still stands but has continued with other auditions, including a recent commercial audition that came through in late May. Still, it is never far from her mind how so many aspects of the industry must change.

While writing a script for a play, she found herself debating if she really needed the characters to have a physical interaction.

“I try not to let it impact me and say I can fix it later but…,” said Mann Stewart, her thought left trailing.

Some studios are already pondering creative solutions to those kinds of concerns. As soon as the pandemic hit, executives at Atlanta-based Crazy Legs Productions created an advisory council of five medical experts to help them draw up 25 pages of safety guidelines. Last month, they began compiling a database of local actors who are in relationships with other actors. “We can cast a husband and wife as a husband and wife,” said Scott Thigpen, chief operating officer. “It’s a way to mitigate risk.” They are also considering using family members as extras.

The company, which launched in 2006 and now has 34 salaried employees, produces docuseries for TLC such as “Family by the Ton” and crime shows for ID, like “Dead Silent. ” They also began shooting films for the first time this year.

Industry insiders are confident productions in Georgia will bounce back quickly and fill sound stages as a backlog of content gets filled.

After months spent keeping their skills sharp and in some cases, auditioning via Zoom, actors across metro Atlanta are ready to get back to work, said Clayton Landey, president of SAG-AFTRA Atlanta local. He hopes summer marks that return but said the proper precautions are needed. Landey, a 48-year industry veteran, recalled a scene years ago when his character was being hit with a bullet. Everyone else on the set was standing behind safety glass. “I feel a little like that now,” Landey said. “I am interested to see what is going to be the new normal in terms of safety on set.”

The pandemic ended a theater run for Landey and stalled a film, which no longer has a date to begin production, but he has spent the past three months staying connected to other actors through virtual chats and meetups. Landey worries about the actors who may be suffering mentally while isolated from the career that allows them to channel their emotions into their work. Though acting is a field that prepares you for career ups and downs, this is unlike anything they have seen before, he said.

“Nothing in our industry touches what we are going through now. Typically when there are times of stress or hard times in the general population, we are working like crazy because entertainment is what gets you through the day,” Landey said. “This time, it is slapping us all.”

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Upcoming Movies in September 2020: Theaters, Streaming, and VOD

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Movies are back! Granted they never really left either, with Netflix, Amazon, Disney+, and others keeping us satiated with content these past five months. Still, the streamers are about to be reinforced for those willing to return to movie theaters: Major Hollywood blockbuster releases are coming, and limited rollouts are slowly making their way back into cinemas around the world.

For that reason, we’ve assembled a list of potential moviegoing experiences in September, whether on the big screen (please consider the risks of attending a theatrical screening) or at home via video on demand. It’s time for the popcorn to get popping.

Bill & Ted Face the Music

Now playing in theaters and VOD in the US (September 23 in the UK)

One of the biggest movies yet to eschew its intended theatrical window for a premium video on demand (PVOD) release is this most excellent adventure. It’s been 29 years since we last saw Alex Winter’s far out Ted or Keanu Reeves’ perpetually astonished Bill, yet it’s good to have both back in their legendary stoner roles. 

The fact they’re middle-aged and still having adventures through time and space, and against the visage of Death—he’s still cheating!—is pretty sweet. As is Keanu coming back to this role one Speed, three Matrixes, and nearly five John Wick chapters later. But this time they’ve got daughters (played by Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine)… but rest assured, the children are as amused as their dads.

Tenet

Now playing in the UK (September 3 in the US)

Already playing in the UK, Tenet will be making its much vaunted North American debut in “select U.S. cities” in September. We’re still not entirely clear what that will look like, but hopefully it will be worth it for this mysterious and visually dazzling Christopher Nolan epic. 

Early reviews are in, and the majority promise Nolan’s most exciting use of IMAX spectacle to date, though even without spoilers, this one might be too big for its own good. Our own Rosie Fletcher describes it as Nolan’s long-whispered about James Bond movie meets Doctor Who…

The New Mutants

Now playing in the U.S. (September 4 UK)

Josh Boone’s journey into the X-Men universe has been pushed back so many times it almost feels like a mythical lost movie. So when it finally arrives in UK cinemas on Sept. 4 (it landed in the U.S. at the end of August) it might feel like a bizarre flashback to another era – namely that of 2017 when the main shoot took place. 

Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt, and Henry Zaga star as five young mutants held in a sinister facility against their will. It’s been positioned as an action horror which in theory sounds pretty cool, though what the final cut will look like is anyone’s guess.

Mulan

September 4 (Disney+ with premium)

One day after Tenet makes its U.S. debut, Disney, and more specifically Disney+, offers a starkly different vision for the future of cinema with Mulan. Whereas Tenet will attempt to jumpstart moviegoing, Disney has pushed one of their biggest 2020 blockbusters exclusively to streaming in all markets featuring Disney+, including the U.S. and UK. That means if you want to see Niki Caro’s anticipated reimagining of the 1998 animated Disney movie, you are going to have to pay $30 on top of your Disney+ subscription to get a load of this bad boy on a new PVOD model.

Read more

Movies

Mulan and Tenet Show Competing Visions for Future of Movies

By David Crow

Movies

UK Cinemas Slam Disney After Mulan Streaming Announcement

By Kirsten Howard

Even so, the film’s need to step away from the 1998 version’s iconography—Chinese moviegoers generally dislike musicals—appears to offer an opportunity to make a modern 2020 epic that can stand on its own two feet.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

September 4 (Netflix)

Charlie Kaufman does horror? Well, uh, maybe?! For his first Netflix original production, the idiosyncratic writer-director behind Synecdoche, New York, and the Being John Malkovich screenplay is adapting Iain Reid’s thriller novel, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But Kaufman is expected to come at it from his singularly off-center perspective.

With a somber setup about a young woman (played by Wild Rose’s talented Jessie Buckley) going to meet the parents of her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons), the movie is actually about an unhappy lover planning to terminate her relationship. Yet when she meets Mom and Dad (Toni Collette and David Thewlis), things are going to get weirder, if not necessarily better for the relationship…

The Roads Not Taken

September 11 (UK)

Sally Potter’s wistful drama was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival earlier in the year before the world went into lockdown. It follows Leo (Javier Bardem), a man with dementia, as he imagines different paths in life he might have taken, while his daughter Mollie tries to help him keep various appointments and struggles with decisions about her own future. A very personal study of mental illness, grief, and regret.

The Devil All the Time

September 16 (Netflix)

Southern fried noir might be the creepiest noir. With its rural and sunny backdrops, and a smiling Christian face, its pleasantries belie an evil heart. And Tom Holland of all people will be driving right to the dark center of it in The Devil All the Time, a new thriller by writer-director Antonio Campos. 

Ready to bow on Netflix this month, the all-star cast, which also includes Bill Skarsgård, Riley Keough, Sebastian Stan, and Robert Pattinson, as a fire and brimstone preacher no less, The Devil All the Time reimagines post-WWII Tennessee backwoods as a hotbed of corruption, hypocrisy, and murder. Sounds about right.

Antebellum

September 18 (U.S. Only)

Co-writers and directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz appear to have cracked the code in making one of fiction’s favorite fantasies terrifying. You know the type: From Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Midnight in Paris, some congenial fellow travels back to a point in history he loves and has an all-around splendid time. Now imagine that same scenario except the protagonist is a Black woman. And she’s sent to the Antebellum South on the eve of the Civil War. Scared yet?

It’s a disturbing premise that aims to put Antebellum in the same wheelhouse as recent horror movies that have tackled American racism head on, including Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us. The movie stars the ever compelling Janelle Monáe as a 21st century author trapped inside a 19th century nightmare, and it’s one of the most intriguing setups of the year. It also will be available on VOD and in select theaters.

The King’s Man

September 18 (September 16 in the UK)

Kingsman: The Secret Service was one of the nicer surprises of 2015. A better Bond movie than that year’s Bond film, this Matthew Vaughn directed and Jane Goldman co-written spy adventure was both a satire and loving homage to 007 movies of the 1960s and ‘70s, with excessive swagger and style to boot. Unfortunately, Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) didn’t live up to its predecessor. It did, however, make enough money to spawn a prequel. Which brings us to The King’s Man.

As Disney/20th Century Studios’ latest release, this movie sees Vaughn return to the director’s chair as he travels back in time to World War I and the origins of the Kingsman secret service. With the same daffy style but now in period garb (it worked for Vaughn in X-Men: First Class), the prequel hopes to recapture the charm of the original. It certainly has a winning cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Daniel Bruhl, Djimon Hounsou, and Gemma Arterton.

Kajillionaire

September 18 (October 9 in the UK)

One of the happy discoveries out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Focus Features’ Kajillionaire is a movie we’ve had our eye on for a while. The picture is writer-director Miranda July’s pleasant vision of criminality and heists being the stuff of family team-building. Take Evan Rachel Wood as Old Dolio. She’s an adult daughter whose depression has forced her to live at home with her small time crook parents. But Mom and Pop (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins) have a plan; they’ll incorporate their daughter in the next heist and bring her out of her funk. It’s a charming premise that won over almost every critic who saw it back in January.

The Nest

September 18 (U.S. Only)

Another apparent highlight out of Sundance this year, Sean Durkin’s The Nest presents itself as a foreboding drama. As the follow-up feature from the director of Martha Marcy May Marlene, the film intends to be an unsettling account of a wealthy marriage descending into Gaslight levels of manipulation. With Jude Law as the rich patriarch and Carrie Coon as his quietly suffering wife, a sudden move to the country reveals dark dimensions to their relationship and the brittleness of domesticity. If the buzz is to be believed, the wound up WASPy tension in this could strangle an elephant.

Enola Holmes

September 23 (Netflix)

Did you know Sherlock Holmes had a little sister? You’re about to thanks to some strong synergetic mojo going on at Netflix with Enola Holmes, a new mystery/adventure that stars The Witcher’s Henry Cavill as Sherlock, The Crown’s Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Holmes, and Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown as the eponymous Enola. That’s right, Eleven’s going to use her own English accent and play Sherlock’s kid sister. 

Often kept in her famous brother’s shadow, it is up to Enola to do him one better when she sets off to find their mysteriously vanished mother. In the process, she proves she’s a super-sleuth in her own right and brings to light a deadly conspiracy. The game’s afoot!

Misbehaviour

September 25 (Open in the UK)

A crowd-pleaser that debuted earlier in the year in the UK, Misbehaviour has all the markers of a charming dramedy with real world ramifications. In fact, it’s set during the events of the Miss World competition in 1970, a televised beauty pageant in London that was then the most-watched event on the planet. In this context, the Women’s Liberation Movement reached international acclaim by disrupting the proceedings, and a Woman of Color from Grenada became a contender for the Miss World title.

Director Philippa Lowthorpe (The Crown) reportedly explores these events to winning results with an ensemble of players that Keira Knightley and Jessie Buckley as lead activists, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Jennifer Hosten (aka Miss Grenada), and Greg Kinnear at his greasiest as an aging Bob Hope.

Greenland

September 25 (U.S. Only)

Imagine this: A comet that is supposed to gently pass Earth by was misjudged by the science community, and instead a cataclysmic extinction level event occurs with comet fragments destroying parts of the world one action scene at a time! Yeah, in 2020 that sounds about right. It’s also the plot of Greenland, a new high-concept survivalist action movie starring Gerard Butler as a family man who, realizing Florida is gone and his home state is next, tries to save his wife (Morena Baccarin) and child by getting his family to the last place that may be spared: military bunkers in Greenland!

And you thought U.S. leadership was being ridiculous when it tried to buy the country a few years ago…

The post Upcoming Movies in September 2020: Theaters, Streaming, and VOD appeared first on Den of Geek.

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Taylor Swift Bent the Music Industry to Her Will

In the 2010s, she became its savviest power player.

In late November 2019, Taylor Swift gave a career-spanning performance at the American Music Awards before accepting the statue for Artist of the Decade. (Swift was perhaps the perfect cross between the award’s two previous recipients, Britney Spears and Garth Brooks.) Clad in a cascading rose-colored cape and holding court among the younger female artists in attendance — 17-year-old Billie Eilish, 22-year-old Camila Cabello, 25-year-old Halsey — Swift had the queenly air of an elder stateswoman. After picking up five additional awards, including Artist of the Year, she became the show’s most decorated artist in history. “This is such a great year in music. The new artists are insane,” she declared in her acceptance speech, with big-sister gravitas. That night, she finally outgrew that “Who, me?” face of perpetual awards-show surprise; she accepted the honors she won like an artist who believed she had worked hard enough to deserve them.

Swift cut an imposing adult figure up there, because somewhere along the line she’d become one. The 2010s have coincided almost exactly with Swift’s 20s, with the subtle image changes and maturations across her last five album cycles coming to look like an Animorphs cover of a savvy and talented young woman gradually growing into her power. And so to reflect on the Decade in Taylor Swift is to assess not just her sonic evolutions but her many industry chess moves: She took Spotify to task in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and got Apple to reverse its policy of not paying artists royalties during a three-month free trial of its music-streaming service. She sued a former radio DJ for allegedly groping her during a photo op and demanded just a symbolic victory of $1, as if to say the money wasn’t the point. Critics wondered whether she was leaning too heavily on her co-writers, so she wrote her entire 2010 album, Speak Now, herself, without any collaborators. In 2018, she severed ties with her longtime label, Big Machine Records, and negotiated a new contract with Universal Music Group that gave her ownership of her masters and assurance that she (and any other artist on the label) would be paid out if UMG ever sold its Spotify shares. Yes, she stoked the flames of her celebrity feuds with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, and Katy Perry plenty over the past ten years, but she’s also focused some of her combative energy on tackling systemic problems and fashioning herself into something like the music industry’s most high-profile vigilante. Few artists have made royalty payments and the minutiae of entertainment-law front-page news as often as Swift has.

Within the industry, Swift has always had the reputation of being something of a songwriting savant (in 2007, when “Our Song” was released, then-17-year-old Swift became the youngest person ever to write and perform a No. 1 song on the Billboard Country chart), but she has long desired to be considered an industry power player, too. A 2011 New Yorker profile of Swift circa her blockbuster Speak Now World Tour noted that she initially intended to follow her parents’ footsteps and pursue a career in business, quoting her saying, “I didn’t know what a stockbroker was when I was 8, but I would just tell everybody that’s what I was going to be.” In an even earlier interview, she fondly recalled the times in elementary school when she stayed up late with her mother, practicing for school presentations. “I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to,” she said this year in an unusually candid Rolling Stone interview. “And I’m so sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business.” Of course, she still spent plenty of time sitting at her piano or strumming her guitar, but in that conversation she painted herself as someone who is also “sit[ting] in a conference room several times a week,” coming up with ideas about how best to market her music and her career.

And so over the past decade, Swift’s face has appeared not just on magazine covers and television screens, but on UPS trucks and Amazon packages. Her songs have been featured in Target commercials and NFL spots, to name just two of her many lucrative partnerships. That New Yorker profile also found her to be uncommonly enthused about the fact that her CDs were being sold in Starbucks: “I was so stoked about it, because it’s been one of my goals — I always go into Starbucks, and I wished that they would sell my album.”

“Taylor Swift is something like the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music,” Hazel Cills wrote recently in Jezebel. “She has propelled her career from tiny country artist into pop machine over the past few years with little shame when it comes to corporate collaborators.” Such brazen femme-capitalism will always be a turnoff to some people (“the Sheryl Sandberg of pop music” is even less of a compliment in 2019 than it was when Lean In was first published), but it’s undeniable that it has helped Swift maintain and leverage her status as a commercial juggernaut more consistently than any other pop star over the past ten years.

In the 2010s, with the clockwork certainty of a midterm election, there was a Taylor Swift album every other autumn. (Yes, there was a three-year gap between 1989 and Reputation, but she all but made up for it with the quick timing of August’s Lover.) The kinds of pop superstars considered her peers did not stick to such rigid schedules: Adele released two studio albums this decade, Beyoncé released three, and even Rihanna — who for the first three years of the decade was averaging an album a year — eventually slowed her roll and will have released just four when the 2010s are all said and done. The only A-plus-list musician who saturated the market as steadily as Swift did this decade was Drake.

Still, Drake’s commercial dominance was more of a newfangled phenomenon, capitalizing on the industry’s sudden reliance on streaming and his massive popularity on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Drake might be the artist who rode the streaming wave most successfully this decade, but — with her strategic withholding of her albums from certain platforms until they better compensated artists — Swift was often the one bending it to her will. And she could do that because she didn’t need to rely on it solely: Somehow, against all odds, Taylor Swift still sold records. Like, gazillions of them. When Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation (some critics thought it was a critical misstep, but it certainly wasn’t a commercial one), moved 1.216 million units in its first seven days, Swift became the only artist in history to achieve four different million-selling weeks. And, of course, all four of these weeks came during a decade when traditional album sales were on a precipitous decline. At least for those mere mortals who were not an all-powerful being named Taylor Alison Swift.

“Female empowerment” has been such an ambient, unquestioned virtue of the pop culture of this decade that we have too often failed to take a step back and ask ourselves what sort of power is being advocated for, and if its attainment should always be a cause for celebration. Is “female empowerment” any different from the hollow, materialistic promises of the late ’90s “girl power”? Is “female power” inherently different or more benevolent than its default male counterpart? Maybe this feels like such a distinctly American hang-up because we have not yet experienced that mythic, oft-imagined figure of the First Female President, and have thus not had to contend with the cold reality that, whoever she is, she will, like all of us, be inevitably flawed, imperfect, and at least occasionally disappointing.

As she’s grown into her own brand of 21st-century American pop feminism — sometimes elegantly, sometimes gawkily — Swift seems to have come to a firm conviction that female power is essentially more virtuous than the male variety. This was a side of herself she celebrated in her AMA performance. Swift opened her medley with a few fiery bars of “The Man,” her own personalized daydream of what gender equality would look like: “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can,” she sings, “wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” She wore an oversize white button-down onto which the titles of her old albums were stamped in a correctional-facility font: SPEAK NOW, RED, 1989, REPUTATION. Plenty of the millions of people who scrutinize Swift’s every move interpreted her choice of outfit and song as not-so-subtle jabs at Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta and the manager-to-the-stars Scooter Braun, with whom Swift is still in a messy, uncommonly public battle over the fate of her master recordings. (The only album title missing from her outfit was “LOVER,” which happens to be the only one of which she has full ownership.) She has framed the terms of her battle with Borchetta and Braun in strikingly gendered language: “These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work,” she told Rolling Stone. “And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of Scotch to themselves.” Though she is herself a very rich, very powerful woman, she reads their message to be unquestionably condescending: Be a good little girl and shut up.

It is true that many record contracts are designed to take advantage of young artists, and that young women and people of color are probably perceived by music executives to be the marks most vulnerable to exploitation. But it is also true that Swift signed a legally binding contract, the kind that a businesswoman like herself would have to respect if it were signed by somebody else. Braun, who has been asking to have these negotiations in private rather than on Twitter, claims to have received death threats from her fans.

Even as she’s grown into one of the most dominant pop-culture figures in the world, Swift sometimes still seems to be clinging to her old underdog identity, to the extent that she can fail to grasp the magnitude of her own power or account for the blind spots of her privilege. “Someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” she sang on Speak Now’s Grammy-winning 2010 single “Mean,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that, compared to 99.99 percent of the population, she already was. The mid-decade backlash to Swift’s thin-white-celebrity-and-model-studded “girl squad” — none of which was more incisive than Lara Marie Schoenhals’s hilarious parody video — took her by surprise. “I never would have imagined that people would have thought, This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it … I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to.”

“Female power” is not automatically faultless, and can of course be tainted by all other sorts of biases and assumptions about class, race, and sexual orientation, to name just a few more common pitfalls. Swift’s face-palm-inducing 2015 misunderstanding with Nicki Minaj revealed this, of course, and plenty of people felt that her sudden embrace of the LGBTQ community in the “You Need to Calm Down” was a clumsy overcorrection for her past silence. Maybe she would have gotten where she was quicker if she were a man. But it would take a more complicated, and perhaps less catchy, song to acknowledge she might not have gotten there at all had she not also enjoyed other privileges.

Art has its own kind of power — sneakier and harder to measure than the economic kind. The reason Taylor Swift has been worth talking about incessantly for an entire decade is that she continues to wield this kind, too. “I don’t think her commercial responsibilities detract from her genuine passion for her craft,” a then-17-year-old Tavi Gevinson wrote in a memorable 2013 essay for The Believer. “Have you ever watched her in interviews when she gets asked about her actual songwriting? She becomes that kid who’s really into the science fair.”

After so much industry drama, much of the lived-in, self-reflective Lover is a simple reminder that Swift was and still is a singular songwriter. Yes, this was the decade of such loud, flashy missteps as “Look What You Made Me Do,” “Welcome to New York,” and “Me!,” but it was also a decade of so many quieter triumphs: the pulsing synesthesia of “Red,” the nervous heart flutter of “Delicate,” the sleek sophistication of “Style,” the concise lyricism of “Mean,” the cathartic fun of “22,” the slow-dance swoon of “Lover.” But like so many of her fans, and even Swift herself, I still find the most enduringly powerful song she’s ever written to be “All Too Well,” the smoldering breakup scrapbook released on her great 2012 album Red. “Wind in my hair, I was there, I remember it all too well,” she sings, an innocent enough lyric that, by the end of the song, comes to glint like a switchblade. In a decade of DGAF, ghosting, and performative chill, remembering it all too well might be Swift’s stealthiest superpower. She felt it deeply, can still access that feeling whenever she needs to, and that means she can size you up in a line as concisely cutting as “so casually cruel in the name of being honest.” Forget Jake Gyllenhaal or John Mayer. That’s the sort of observation that would bring Goliath to his knees.

“It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they do not hear a voice that connotes authority,” the historian Mary Beard writes in her manifesto Women & Power, “or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it.” At least in the realm of pop music, Swift has spent the better part of her decade chipping away at that double standard, and teaching people how to think about cultural power a little bit differently. She sprinkled artful emblems of teen-girl-speak through her smash hits (“Uhhh he calls me and he’s like, ‘I still love you,’ and I’m like, ‘This is exhausting, we are never getting back together, like, ever”) and did not abandon her effusive love of kittens and butterflies in order to be taken seriously. As an artist and a businesswoman, she made the power of teen girls — and the women who used to be them — that much more perilous to ignore. Because they’ve been there all along, and they remember all too well.

[onestowatch]

Ant Clemons Is Just Getting Started [Q&A]

Photo By: Dominique Ross

Ant Clemons is ready for the spotlight. The LA-based singer/songwriter has been a budding songwriter in the LA scene for a few years now. He’s secured placements with Luke James, Kali Uchis, and Noah Cyrus to name a few. His biggest break was when he appeared on “All Mine,” track three on Kanye West’s 2018 project, Ye. Since then, Clemons has been nominated for multiple Grammys, collaborated with Pharrell and The Neptunes, performed with Kanye West at Coachella, and much more. But where did his story start?

Ant Clemons grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey. Willingboro is a small town about thirty minutes outside of Philadelphia. The oldest of three children, Ant described his childhood as a creatively expressive environment. Besides singing in his church choir, and his budding career as a Michael Jackson impersonator, young Ant would perform with his sisters at family events. “We wanted to be the Jackson Five so bad, but my parents only had three kids.” The creative gene came from his parents. His father had a famous falsetto and his mother was a trained dancer. Music was always played in their household. “I equate my childhood to The Cosby Show. We had some great times. I remember having amazing times at Christmas. Music was always on in the house. Someone was always singing or trying to sing.”

Clemons’ seemingly perfect childhood definitely had its share of trials and tribulations. Around 2009, his parents got divorced and he ended up moving with his mom to a small town called Pennsauken, right outside of Philadelphia. In the wake of the divorce, Clemons began taking his singing and songwriting more seriously. Shortly after moving to Pennsauken, he met Frankie Hill, Julian Tabb, Michael Stargel, Ross Richards, and Theo Robinson. Like Clemons, they were also into making music. Shortly after, they formed a group called The Committee. “To this day, they’re some of my best friends. We were all working on music 24/7. So, it was a great way to transition into my new surroundings and distract me from some of the things I was going through.”

Being a part of The Committee helped Clemons sharpen his writing and singing skills. To make money, Clemons started waiting tables at a Red Lobster in his town. As his ambitions grew, he wanted to get closer to the music industry and make his career as a songwriter a reality. For a lot of people, the first step in that journey is tasking a trip to Los Angeles. Describing his first impression of LA, Clemons says “I only stayed for like a week and a half, but I knew from the time I walked out of LAX that this is where I needed to be. It’s nice all the time. Everybody was always smiling. This is the best place in the world. Like, I have to be here”

Lucky for him, his bosses at Red Lobster were extremely supportive of his dream. “They knew that music was my number one priority. So, when opportunities popped up in LA, they were more than supportive. They wiped tell me “go out there for as long as you need. Your job is here for you when you come back.” His family was also a major source of support for him. “Having supportive parents was everything. At the time, I was living with my mom. So, she was the main push, but both of them are just hella supportive of anything my sisters and I ever wanted to do. I know that not everybody grows up with that kind of support. But I had amazing parents that set an amazing foundation for me to just be whoever I wanted to be. None of my successes is possible without them.”

In 2017, Clemons made the full time move to LA. When he first got to LA, he was sleeping on couches and floors. Triangle Park, an LA-based music production crew, let him crash with them. But there was one caveat - He had to write one song per day. Reminiscing on that time, Clemons said “I just knew God wouldn't place me anywhere that I wouldn’t be able to succeed. I had a motivation get off the floor, so I was working really hard. Back when I lived near Philly, it was normal to make seven or eight songs a day. When I came out to LA, I saw that people were working at a different pace, so I put my head down and kept going. I learned that what I thought was normal was going to be the thing that set me apart from everybody else.

Things started moving for Clemons in Los Angeles when he met fellow Willingboro native, Ryan Toby. Ryan Toby was part of the early 2000s R&B/Hip-Hop group, City High. Bonding over music and their hometown connection, they started making music together. This relationship led to Clemons working with Luke James which is how he landed his first placement as a songwriter on “Drip.” Around this time, he was also introduced to the Producer Bongo By The Way. When they first got in the studio together, they made eleven songs and they were locked in ever since. Bongo would go on to introduce Clemons to Jeremih which was the catalyst for Clemons’ big break.

When Kanye West was recording Ye in Wyoming, he asked Jeremih to come to Wyoming and work on music for the album. One of the ideas he played for Kanye was an idea that he made with Ant Clemons. This idea turned into “All Mine.” It was at this point that Clemons’ life would change.

Being featured on a song with Kanye West can instantly change your life and bring you a massive amount of attention. Describing that time of transition, Clemons says, “Ye’s album dropped in June and by September, I was with him 24/7. We went from Chicago to SNL in New York, back to Chicago, and then to Uganda. It was all happening so fast. It was crazy.”

Entering the orbit of a revered musician like Kanye West could be very unnerving, but Clemons said being around West was quite the opposite. “The crazy part of working on music with Ye was that he was just a big fan of whatever I was doing. He would say ‘Bro, I want you to just be you. Keep being you. Do whatever makes you, you. Just keep doing you.’”

Fast forward to Coachella 2019. Kanye West has invited Clemons to perform a song, “Water”, made earlier that week, for an Easter edition of Sunday Service. Describing that moment, Clemons said, “For me, it was like when the Jackson 5 performed with Diana Ross for the first time on the Ed Sullivan Show. It was amazing. I'm performing at Coachella for the first time by praising the Lord with one of my favorite artists of all time. God is too good”

“Water” would go on to appear on West’s gospel album, Jesus Is King, later that year. In recent years, West has shifted his musical focus to Gospel with the release of Jesus Is King and the upcoming Jesus Is Born. Knowing that Clemons is a man of faith, I asked him how his faith has helped him navigate the treacherous nature of the music industry. He said, “God’s timing is always immaculate, and I learned not to question what happens. If you have a strong relationship with God, he will lead you through any situation”

A lot of artists would be happy living in the light of Kanye West. But Clemons has way more to do. Speaking on his transition from songwriter to a solo act, Clemons said, “I wanted my first official release to be something undeniable. I wanted something that showcased my songwriting abilities but was also relatable. I think “Four Letter Word” is such an amazing song. I want my music to be played now and ten years from now. Not only is it an ode to a relationship I was in but it’s about my relationship with God. I was happy to talk about it in a cooler way with up-tempo and contemporary sounds and being able to work with Timbaland on the song was a dream come true. My goal for the project was to tell my story and approach it like the artists I was inspired by.”

His debut EP, HAPPY 2 BE HERE has something for everybody. “I wanted to tell my story. I wanted to take the listener on a journey with cool concepts. I wanted to talk about love. I wanted to have something people could dance to. I wanted to tell stories. Most importantly, I just wanted to create songs people could listen to every day.”

I would say Clemons has achieved his goal. Look out for more music and collaborations from Clemons. Stream HAPPY 2 BE HERE below.

[frozenmiwa]

Review: Rise of the Turtles part 1 (TMNT 2012)

I know, I know I promised to post this during summer but instead I ended up editing my TMNT 2012 fanfiction. I ended up having some technical difficulties with this post. I did watch the episode but somehow all the screen shots I took just vanished. My guess is some form of Windows update happened and poof, all screen shots were gone.

I actually just got the first season on DVD yesterday – I finally ordered it online three or so weeks ago, I’ve been looking for Finnish release of the show ever since 2014 when it started to air in Finland but we got nothing. Not that I minded, the dub was decent but definitely lot worser than the dub 2003 series got from the group called Dubberman. So I’m more than happy to have the UK release of the first season.

Firstly I’d like to address one thing: I was hesitant to watch this show because I don’t like CGI that much anymore since it’s everywhere these days, but I was interested in it after scrolling some Turtlepedia especially after I saw one of my absolute favorite character from the 2003 show, April. When I read about Donnie’s crush on her, I recalled their relationship in the 2003 series – seeing Donatello and April interact was one of my favorite things about the show so naturally I was interested to see how well 2012 series pulled that off. Then I had this boring weekend and I decided to give it a try. I did and absolutely loved the show, I loved the turtles, I loved what they did with Splinter, I even loved this one character I thought I wouldn’t, what I didn’t love however was April – instead Karai became my favorite character.

But we get to that when we get to that. Let’s start this thing!

Like with the previous post I’m not going to do full plot summary here, instead I’m doing this brief summary. If you are interested in full summary please go to sites like Turtlepedia for that!

Now this episode starts similarly to the 2003 series. We are introduced to our main characters as they are in training session. It turns out the turtles are celebrating their fifteenth birthday today and wish to go top side for the first time even though Splinter is hesitant to let them go. Eventually he does and the turtles get to see the what the world looks like outside sewers. It seems to be full of wonder… and dangers. Turtles witness a family of two, father and daughter getting kidnapped by a group of identical men, but are unable to rescue them due to their inability to work as a team. And Mikey finds out those men weren’t exactly human… but no one believes him. The group returns to the lair and they get scolded by Splinter for letting the kidnappers getting away because they couldn’t work as a team – then again, he does admit it’s partially his fault as he never trained them to fight as a team. While Splinter suggest they have another year to wait until their next visit to the top side, Donnie isn’t having it as he wants to save the poor kidnapped girl, he fell in love with at the first sight. After some convincing Splinter agrees to let them go and save her. Before they go however Splinter makes Leonardo their leader – the group does need a leader in order to function correctly after all, but as to why he chose Leo, isn’t clear. So, to the back side we go, after some time they manage to find one of the kidnappers and chase him until his car falls over. When Raph opens up the back door to the car a mysterious cannister filled with green ooze rolls over – looking a lot like the one broken cannister the turtles have in their lair, the one that had something to do with their current forms. And with that the first episode ends.

What I liked about the episode

+ Turtles actually acting like teenagers. I don’t think we have seen that in any other incarnation despite the show being called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”.

+ What they did with Leo’s personality. I was so used to Leo being this perfect serious leader who’d win any training session against Raph, seeing Leo actually losing against Raph not to mention having this kind of geeky awkward side to his character was refreshing to see.

+ Master Splinter. I liked how he looked nothing like his former counterparts, I loved how they brought up his personality and most of all now he actually felt like a caring father to the turtles instead of being just their teacher. Not to mention how cool his design looks in this show!

+ The plot in general. For a pilot episode it did good job at presenting our four main characters, showing they, each have different personalities without spending too much on that. It had this sense of wonder when we see the turtles discovering the world for the first time. And there was action included as well but not in a way that our heroes just swoop in and save the day, I liked the fact they messed it up on their first try. I also liked how the episode didn’t end with turtles saving the day but rather with a cliff hanger because that would get viewers to want to catch the next episode – unlike 2003 series where it just ended, personally I wouldn’t have waited to see the next episode, unlike with this 2012 show.

+ Interaction and comedy between the turtles was well done, I definitely did have some laughs here and there.

+ The way flashbacks and ending stills are done in this version. What can I say? I just love the comic book style they went with!

What I didn’t like about this episode

- Well in general I liked this episode fine; it really didn’t have much to complain about, characters were solid, their backstory was solid, story was solid and the action was solid. Over all I’d say it’s a good episode. But if I had to pick one thing I did not like; it would be the way April was presented. Unlike the turtles she didn’t seem like a character, just a pretty girl shown to our faces who needed to be saved. I know that’s how it was intended but if I’d have to pick one thing I didn’t like about the episode, this would be it.

And now let’s say few words about the dub my country eventually got...

When this series finally started to air in Finland you better believe I got up every Sunday to watch this show, not because I hadn’t seen it, it was January 2014, I had already seen the episodes couple of times in English but I wanted to check out the dubbed version especially after seeing the voice cast. Just by looking at the voices seemed like this dub would go either way. It could be good or really bad. Like with seasons 3-4 and 6-7 of TMNT 2003 a group called Dubberman. And I wasn’t completely trusting for the fact they would do the show justice. I mean they did skip over the season 5 in 2003 series – and later season 3 in 2012 series so…

The dub was decent, not great, not the worst we could have gotten but decent. There were some errors like they called Raphael “Rafaello” or “Rafa” for short like in the dubbed VHS/DVD release of 1980 series – luckily, they stopped doing that after few episodes because it bothered me a lot. Another thing was how those Japanese phases were pronounced – in this episode by Leo. They didn’t sound right at least when you compare to the original version.

The voice cast was okay. It consisted of some familiar and great voice actors like Jon-Jon Geitel as Leo who has also voiced characters like Jack Frost from the Rise of the guardians or Jake Long from American Dragon: Jake Long – I think this is where I first heard his voice acting. More recently he voiced Aladdin in the live action version from 2019. Another familiar voices we had were Aksu Palmén as Donatello who had voiced characters like Hiccup in How to train your dragon, and Markus Bäckman as Master Splinter – It’s better I won’t go in too much details on his voicing career because he has done a lot of good voice acting in TV and Disney movies. These two were probably the most suited for their roles. Especially Markus Bäckman as Splinter. He sounded just right for the part. Then there was Henri Piispanen who I hadn’t heard much voice acting from before TMNT. I think he was solid pick for Raph – not as good as Sean Astin but they could have gone for worse. Then there were couple unknown actors Miro Loopperi who voiced Mikey and Ella Jaakkola who voiced April.

Miro Looperi did fine job as Mikey but he didn’t really sound like him. This reminds me of 2003 series as Mikey had a voice actor in the Finnish dub that I liked, but one that didn’t sound like him when compared his original voice. This has the same feeling to it. And now Ella Jaakkola, she had this high-pitched kind of bitchy voice I found annoying but at the same time I thought it kind of worked for April’s character because I knew what would become of her character in season 2. I remember thinking: “I can’t wait to hear this voice in Mutation Situation!” – Too bad they changed her voice for season 2.

Now, don’t expect me to do this thing for all the episodes where I talk a little bit about the Finnish dub as I’ve only seen the first season dubbed – I don’t even know when season 2 aired. And I don’t have many notes about the dub. Nor do I remember much of it. I have notes for I think five or so episodes and very good memory for Karai’s debut episode but that’s about it. As I said earlier so far now DVD releases have been made in Finland so I would only have access through streaming services to seasons 4 and 5 – which I haven’t even watched completely yet. I can only hope Netflix or Viaplay would upload the dubbed versions of TMNT to their servers but as we lack DVD releases or reruns of seasons 1 and 2 and season 3 in general that’s very unlikely.

And now some screenshots!

Would you look at that? Leo actually lost to Raph.

Is that supposed to be Splinter? He looks kind of cool - were my first thoughts when he appeared on the screen.

Happy Mutation day! I just love their expressions here.

And it’s flashback time! I really love the way they did and animated the flashbacks in this version.

Splinter holding the broken mutagen canister.

...And Mikey giving it a hug.

They are finally able to go to the top side. Look at how happy they are - I mean even Raph is smiling.

Well I just like this shot of Splinter.

Leo and Space Heroes. I love how proud he looks here.

“Hai, sensei!” - This is probably one of my favorite scenes in this episode. It shows that over protective side of Splinter which is one of the many things I love about the show.

Turtles entering the top side for the first time.

Donnie geeking out at computer stuff while Raph is not interested. Personally being a geek myself, I see lot of myself in Donatello during this moment.

Turtles are about to find out what pizza is.

Oh, look at that it’s a love interest... I mean it’s my least favorite character... I mean it’s April.

And Donnie is in love with her. Just like that.

I know April is supposed to be scared here but I find her expression hilarious. It cracks me every time.

Fighting is not going too well here.

Or here.

Saving April.

I really like this shot of Donnie smiling. He looks kind of adorable. I mean who would scream after seeing that adorable face?

April of course!

I find Donnie’s reaction and posture here priceless, it’s like: “Oh my god, what did I just touch?”

April is being cornered by creepy men.

And Donnie’s offering to help her.

But that doesn’t really work out. Mikey looks adorable though!

I guess The Kraang didn’t fancy April’s screaming either.

And here’s Mikey, facing a suspicious man all by himself.

...That is not a man at all.

Okay what the hell is that thing?

You know what Mikey, I totally agree with you.

Turtles are having a conversation about the leader stuff. And they all can’t believe what they just heard.

Here is Leo facepalming. One of my favorite scenes in the episode.

“I thinking of something green. Green.” “Is it Raphael again?”

Cornering Snake.

Ending still.

Anyway, this was my review for the first episode of TMNT 2012. Next time I think I’m doing review for the second episode of 2003 series, so stay tuned for that. Or something.

[letterboxd]

Ghibli Goes Digital.

We celebrate the explosion in Studio Ghibli activity on Letterboxd with Michael Leader and Jake Cunningham from the Ghibliotheque podcast.

LISTEN NOW: David Jenkins (Little White Lies), Tasha Robinson (Polygon) and Adam Kempenaar (Filmspotting) nominate their most magical Studio Ghibli moments in this new episode of The Letterboxd Show.

For all the ways that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered the film industry, one coincidence that’s worked out extremely well for Studio Ghibli fans old and new is the roll-out of 21 of the famed studio’s films on streaming services.

It started in February for Netflix subscribers outside Japan and North America. Then in late May, HBO Max launched in the US with the Ghibli films as part of its offering. Finally, Canada got its turn with twenty titles available on Netflix right now, and The Wind Rises coming on August 1. For film lovers sheltering in place, the timing is as soothing as a nap on a Totoro’s belly; as wondrous as a Takahata sunset.

株式会社スタジオジブリ (Studio Ghibli) was founded in 1985 by directors Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, and producer Toshio Suzuki, upon the success of Miyazaki-san’s 1984 feature, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Huge acclaim, an Academy Award, and growing fandom followed, but the studio has long shied away from making its catalog available for digital consumption, preferring the films to occupy a larger canvas.

And then, all of a sudden, Suzuki-san announced the digital streaming plan—starting with the whole catalog being made available to own (via download) last December. “We’ve listened to our fans,” Suzuki-san said at the time. “In this day and age, there are various great ways a film can reach audiences.” This turn of events has been a very big deal—both for long-time fans and Ghibli newbies—and we’ve run the numbers to prove it:

The above chart shows the daily number of entries logged on Letterboxd for each of the Ghibli films, and clearly depicts the February, March, April and late May spikes as groups of titles were released to the two aforementioned streaming platforms (and mini spikes coinciding with weekend watches).

The Ghibli films included in the streaming deals stretch over four decades of the studio’s output, and include big-hitters like the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and the whole-family favorite My Neighbor Totoro. All of those films appear in the Official Letterboxd Top 250; Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service also made it onto a list of Letterboxd members’ top twenty favorite comfort films in a recent survey.

To get a sense of what this all means, we went to Letterboxd members Jake Cunningham and Michael Leader, hosts of Ghibliotheque, a podcast dedicated to the studio’s filmography, about the Netflix deal (“none of us could quite believe it when it happened”) and the clues Ghibli films offer us for how to have adventures inside our own homes.

Earlier in the pandemic, when we were all figuring out how to stay home, you hosted a joyous My Neighbor Totoro watch-along. What is it about the fuzzy, mythical creatures that feels so helpful right now? Michael Leader: In some ways, the world’s mum is in hospital right now. We’re all working from home. There’s the bit halfway through the film where the dad is trying to get on with his work in the study, and [his daughter] Mei is coming up and putting little flowers on his desk. That’s what everyone is doing right now, is trying to get on with their work whilst their kids are milling about, full of imagination and adventures.

With Totoro, I go back to a guest we had on the show, Helen McCarthy, who wrote the book about Miyazaki. And she described Totoro as something like “kindness and acceptance made furry”, and that’s really what it is. The idea of this creature being there for you, coming out of the surroundings that you live in, allowing you to not only come into a new space that you’re maybe scared of going into, but also dealing with tricky situations that you’re in.

You’re both deeply embedded in the London film scene, but the dynamic of your Ghibliotheque podcast is that Michael is the long-time Ghibliophile, while Jake is the novice. How did that come about? Jake Cunningham: Michael and I actually work together, and it came up that I hadn’t seen any of the films and then it happened to come up that Michael was one of the UK experts of these films and was having a go at me for never having watched any. This was the perfect opportunity to work on something with each other, and my ignorance has finally paid off, because all I need to do is watch the film and then I get this amazing history lesson.

Jake Cunningham with his ‘Only Yesterday’ poster, and with Michael Leader at the Ghibli Museum.

ML: It was really fun for me, because by that point—this is nearly two years ago now—I’d been writing about Ghibli on and off for almost a decade. There aren’t really many outlets to write about anime, Ghibli and animation in particular, in the monthly film magazines. Jake is the novice we can take through the library and invite people to join us on that journey. We have listeners who are so engaged, sending us comments every week. They had no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

That’s something that was personally for me quite important about the show. We want to show that this is one of the few studios that has ten five-star films. They had this amazing streak from the late 80s through the 2000s, just innovating on every film at the highest level, with multiple voices working in their own different worlds. We’ve really managed to show this whole world and invite people into it.

What did you make of the Netlix flex, and the subsequent explosion in Letterboxd activity around Ghibli films? JC: The graph is amazing! I was expecting a boost but not so big. They must be very happy with how well the deal has done for them. I think it’s a good place for Ghibli for sure. I want so many other people to be in the position that I was in two years ago. It is a whole world of pleasure to delve into for audiences.

I did think it was so funny that they spent fifteen years going “We’re never going to be streaming, this is never going to happen, stop asking us”, and then out of nowhere the announcement that they’re going to be online in two weeks! I think none of us could quite believe it when it happened, but what it’s meant is people are going back to the start of the podcast and listening along, because they can finally watch the films that they hadn’t seen before.

And it’s so exciting that people might watch Totoro, or Spirited Away, or Howl’s Moving Castle, these bigger tentpole releases, and that’s going to change their algorithm and they’re going to get presented with Isao Takahata’s My Neighbors the Yamadas or Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves. The under-appreciated Ghiblis are suddenly going to get dragged out again.

ML: I’m really excited about it. It’s an interesting thing: it shines a light on what I think is more of a fandom problem, where something becomes rarified or scarce or special to a certain subculture, and that becomes part of its appeal. Sort of ‘Oh, Miyazaki doesn’t believe in streaming, he will never sell out’, and going on about how Netflix somehow cheapens it—but really they are completely accessible films that should be available in a mass market.

Also, and this is something we wanted to tease out in the podcast, they are business savvy. They’re not crazy geniuses who live in wooden shacks in the middle of nowhere. They’re a real company that needs to keep the lights on. There are so many ways to speculate on what this deal means. I think on the one hand they were happy because in the Japanese market they sell enough merchandise, they have a real home entertainment churn going, that they never really needed to do an international release.

There’s a really good book just out by Steve Alpert, who was their first international division lead. He was hired in the 90s to sort out their penetration into western Europe and America. Before the 90s, there were a couple of home entertainment releases and small theatrical runs, but they suddenly saw the business benefits in going global. In some ways I’m very happy for it because it’s a business deal that makes these films more available. They’ll always be special because they’re great films.

JC: The films streaming is extremely exciting, but something that’s gone under the radar a bit is that all of the music is now on Spotify. There are some of Ghibli’s shorts that you can only watch in the museum in Japan, but the scores for those films are now on Spotify, and everything is there. After having the melodies of some of these stuck in my head for months and months, you can finally actually go and deal with the earworm once and for all.

Is it possible for you to sum up for us the thematic essence of Ghibli films, and make a case for why Letterboxd members should introduce their children to the catalog? For me, in the context of the pandemic, it’s the corn on the window-sill in My Neighbor Totoro: the idea of presence despite distance; connection through gesture; the significance of nature. JC: It’s a lot to do with leaving things in an ambiguous space. Having kids watch things where there’s not a binary answer to everything. The studio moved away from the earlier films where a villain is a villain. In Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, it’s less clear what a ‘bad person’ is and what a ‘good person’ is. I think it’s important that kids are gonna see that. Even with something like Kiki’s Delivery Service, on the surface it’s one of their simpler films. Kiki goes on an amazing journey and she meets amazing people, and at the end, she learns about who she is and what she can do. I think in a Western kids’ film that would be the end note. But there’s that note at the end of the film where she says that she still feels sad, and she still feels homesick, but that’s okay and that’s part of being alive.

ML: I think Miyazaki’s real magic touch across his films is that he’s able to really look at the world through children’s eyes. I’m not the first person to say that. It tends to be one of the first things that people say about him. The magical things about My Neighbor Totoro are when they’re just walking through the house, cleaning the house, cooking together. And for Kiki, when she gets her own [apartment], sweeps up and cooks herself pancakes. It is just as much about the magic of the everyday, about the world that you can see around you, within the four walls of the home.

JC: Now that you say that, I’m thinking about Ponyo, a key scene where the storm is hitting, and Sosuke and Ponyo and Sosuke’s mum just hunker down in their house and they have a generator going and they make instant ramen noodles, and the mum slips in little bits of ham. They also have some honey tea. Even though he’s a fantasy filmmaker, and he makes grand statements about geopolitical situations, these are the sequences now which will play most poignantly to people.

ML: Ghibli offers escapism, right now.

We got a glimpse of the next Ghibli film, Gorō Miyazaki’s fully-CG Aya and the Witch (see picture below), via the online version of the recent Annecy International Animated Film Festival. What are your thoughts? JC: Regarding the new images, I’m not as petrified as some fans have been. On the podcast I’ve mounted my defence for Gorō’s Tales From Earthsea, which is very much the black sheep of the family, and I don’t think I’d be doing him justice after that if I didn’t stand in his corner on this one as well. Until we see the style in motion, I think it’s unfair to judge, but it certainly is… different.

Jake, are you now a true Ghibliophile, or are you still just following along with what Michael’s got you into? JC: I would say I am now. I could definitely bore people in conversations with production stories! A lot of people will, I’m sure, have seen a lot of the films, but doing the podcast is the only thing that would have made me watch all of them.

Michael, how proud are you of this achievement? ML: Turning Jake into a new Ghibiliofile is really something. When we went to Japan in November last year—we managed to find change down the back of the sofa, and take the team out and visit the museum, visit Studio Ponoc, who are the spin-off studio founded by veterans from Ghibli—the thing that made me most proud was seeing how excited the rest of the team were. I think just out of shot of Jake’s webcam is a poster of Only Yesterday that he bought in Japan. It’s the only thing he wanted to find, was an original 1991 poster of that. There’s a picture of Jake just absolutely beaming with this poster.

Related content

Our Letterboxd Show Ghibli Magic Moments episode, with Tasha Robinson, David Jenkins and Adam Kempenaar.

Little White Lies editor David Jenkins’ Letterboxd review of My Neighbor Totoro.

The Official Letterboxd Top 250

Letterboxd members’ favorite comfort films.

[mdwatchestv]

Everything I’m Going to Watch in November: The End is Extremely Fucking Nigh

Hello friends,

Welcome. Settle In. We have much to discuss.

For long we have waded in the waters of peak tv, pushing forward against the rising tide of content, surging through the riptide of originals the gush from seemingly every corner of the internet and cable-sphere. We have kept our faces above the waterline, arm-in-arm with our fellows, attempting to absorb and share what is worthwhile, picking out pearls from the churning surf. 

But, despite our labors, we weary waders are helpless in the face of the growing Tsunami waves of the Pluses and the Maxes building on the horizon. The time has come, friends, to make hard desperate choices if we want to continue to watch and blog and survive. We must choose now what we want to watch, and how we will watch it, lest we are swept away, never to surface again.

IN CONCLUSION - I am not getting Apple Plus.  

It’s not personal! It is simply self-preservation. 

The reviews for the new AP shows range from “bad” to “fine”, and that is simply not enough to get me to add another streaming service. Maybe one day, but today is not that day. If i WAS going to watch an Apple+ show it would probably be For All Mankind aka the “fine” show.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk about some other stuff. 

LAST MONTH-

Watchmen took big swings, I am into it. Also love the look and the dedication to major American musicals of the 20th century. 

Catherine the Great -  Watched 20 minutes of this and found it to be so paint-by-numbers I turned it right back off! 

Silicon Valley - Forgot to watch it and was just reminded by own blog!

You know what I did start watching? Money Heist on Netflix. It is a GOOD time! And it has hot Spanish actors that are new to me! Pls praise me for starting a new scripted show  and not another season of Love Island! 

Phew all that and we haven’t even gotten to NOVEMBER.

Monday, November 4th 

His Dark Materials (9pm on HBO)

Based on the fantasy YA book series of the same name, and some of my favorite books ever. Like I love these books more than Harry Potter. Like I-named-my-boy-cat-Pan-and-DIDN’T-name-my-girl-cat-Lyra-because-I-am-saving-that-name-for-my-HUMAN-child love these books. Fans have been waiting a long time for a non-shit adaptation of this beautiful work and HOPEFULLY this is it!!! The cast is on point, the color-palette is rich, the CGI looks good- all the pieces are there! Also if you haven’t read these books I highly recommend you do so, there is so much for adults as well as youths.  Um but yeah, it’s a fantasy series set in a world very much like ours, except part of your soul exists outside your body as an animal! And there are witches! And warrior polar bears! And complicated issues of morality, maturation, and free will! Get into it!

***NOV 12 DISNEY PLUS LAUNCHES***

Tuesday, November 12th 

The Mandalorian (Disney +) 

Okay you got me, the reason I am subscribing to Disney+ is to see a live action Star Wars television show. I don’t know what to tell you, except that I am loyal to my IPs. No one really knows anything about this except it cost a truck load of money and it’s Star Wars, but isn’t that enough??

Friday, November 15th

Dollface (Hulu) 

Kat Dennings attempts to rebuild the female friendships she let stagnate during a long term relationship. Yeah, she’s that girl. This would be an otherwise unremarkable comedy, but per the trailer it looks like it’s attempting a quirky / meta vibe which might be fun. Hulu did such a good job with Shrill earlier this year,  perhaps they are capable of creating another non-terrible female driven comedy. Not a guarantee. 

Sunday, November 17th

The Crown (Netflix)

THEY’RE BACK BABY! It’s a new decade and new cast for The Crown, with Olivia-freakin-Colman taking over the title from reigning champ Claire Foy. This lush monarchy drama is one of my all times favs because there is nothing I love more than British actors giving pointed looks in period dress! This season also introduces a more adult Charles (and Camilla!) which means we are really getting to the Good Stuff. Only five-ish more seasons until Princess Duchess Meghan!!

Lots to be excited about this month as we slog slowly and inevitably towards the end of the year. I plan on coasting through to Christmas on the fumes of an Olivia Colman-fueled endorphin release. 

XO MD