#and where the earlier seasons were BUILT around george having questions

[fictionadventurer]

"Good children's television lets the child characters learn lessons for themselves. Adults can provide inspiration or help, but the children should take initiative for their own discoveries and come to conclusions based on their experiences.

Bad children's television has the adults tell the children all the lessons and information they should learn. The children are only there as stand-ins for an audience that the writer wants to preach this information to and passively absorb the lessons rather than taking an active role in their own story."

I find it quite ironic when a genre becomes exactly what they were trying to act as an alternative for.

Because the point of children's entertainment is that it educates in a more entertaining and engaging way than school, you know by letting the kids enjoy fun adventures. Kids don't like being lectured or talked down to, either in school or in their television. It's why they love kid heroes.

You can so very much tell when a children's show is written by someone who remembers what it's like to be a child and respects children as human beings, and when it's written by someone who thinks it's their duty to Educate The Youth so they become Knowledgeable Adults. A children's show has to understand that the audience is already smart before they can begin to teach them anything.

[soutterlytaron]

TWIO HEADCANONS

HEADCANONS, WE ALL HAVE THEM. NOW, WE CAN SHARE THEM WITH EACH OTHER, TOO!

You can either work on all the questions at once, or work on a few of them at a time and post them in blocks, until you’ve answered them all. We’ll use them to fill the biographies on main, which were posted, when you were accepted in town. Have fun! We’ll definitely enjoy discovering new things about your darlings! Don’t forget to @ us! @theworldisoursforthetaking

Where do you live in town? How did you find it? I left the UK in June 2016 to get away from all the hoopla about Brexit, and also to have a bit of a break after filming back-to-back projects. I travelled around the East Coast, and out of a whim, I ended up staying just outside of Boston... I stumbled across people I had met before - some of them work-wise, at least - and was easily persuaded to stay for a little while. Five years later, and I built a completely new life here, which I’m utterly happy with.

Which is your go-to karaoke song? It’s “Faith” by George Michael, it’s never let me down in all the years, and I love going back to it. It’s a great song!

Are you and introvert or extrovert? I’m probably more of an outgoing introvert, since it takes me a little bit to warm up to people and situations, especially, when I’m thrown into them unpreparedly. Once I do, however, I’m as open and outgoing as I can be.

Are you good at sports? Which? I’m all right-ish at sports - I run, I swim, I can play a little footie or rugby - but I don’t have a particular affinity for any sport. That being said, I actually love watching sports once in a while.

Do you have a favourite film? Put on anything Disney or Pixar-made, and I’ll be a happy Taron. I might have a slight preference towards those films I can sing along with, and it’s only become more prominent since our twins have discovered the wonders of animated films. 

What are 3 things in you fridge? The three things that have never missed in our fridge are cheese - probably brie or camembert -, wine, and yoghurt. 

What are 3 recently watched things on streaming apps? I’ve been going back, watching and catching up on things I had abandoned earlier. I finally finished the fifth season of Lucifer, and then I caught up with Line of Duty, too. And now, I’m watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and it’s so good?

Who is you ultimate celebrity crush? Charlize Theron.

Are you close to your family? I’m very close to my mother and step-dad, and my little sisters. We have forged a very tight bond over the years, and especially my mother is one of the first people I call, when I have news, or need advice. My relationship with my father had its ups and downs, but it’s improved a lot over the years. And then I have my own family, Phoebe, Julian and Sadie, who are everything to me. I couldn’t imagine my life without them in it.

What is the best thing in you life? My family, as you can see above. There’s nothing I love more than being home, waking up, because I can feel our twins clambering up on the bed to get comfortable between us, or coming home and being greeted with pattering feet and lots of hugs. 

Which is your greatest guilty pleasure? That would definitely be anything chocolate, but specifically eating Nutella straight out of the jar.

Which is one white lie you told? “Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, my phone died” - it totally didn’t, I simply forgot to call back. 

Which is your biggest flaw? I tend to stress-eat - some people lose their appetite, when stressed, but not me, I gain it - and while I usually can curb it, sometimes it’s simply not possible. But with regular exercise and workouts with a coach it’s manageable.

Which is your greatest accomplishment? It might be such a cliché, but definitely my children - Julian and Sadie are amazing, they’re kind and caring, they have loads of sass, and they learn so much in the blink of an eye. One moment they were crawling, the next they were talking in semi-full sentences and walking. Running, rather. 

What are your biggest fear(s)? There are quite a few, but I think one of my main fears is that I fail as a father. My own did walk away, and while I had a great step-dad, the feeling kinda stuck. It is on the top, with flunking out while acting coming in as a low second.

What would your Hogwarts House be and why? I’d probably be a total muggle with no magic powers whatsoever, but if I had to choose? Hufflepuff. 

Did you graduate school? If so, did you attend college or did you start working right away? I graduated from  the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 2012 with a BA in Acting, and then slowly built my profile. But I started “working” in theatre productions, when I was 15.

How was your first kiss? When was it? It was a drunken one, very messy - I probably had no clue what I was doing, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have remembered, because we were flat-out drunk.

Have you ever broken someone’s heart? Has someone broken yours? I hope I haven’t, but I’m sure I must have some time. And yes, someone has. It’s all I’ll say about that.

Have you ever been married? Are you married? I’m married to the lovely @phoebejtonkinegerton​. We have been married since July 2017, and we celebrated by building a playground for a school in Haiti, and having our friends and families join in. I’ll never forget seeing Phoebe walk down that sandy aisle for the first time... she looked absolutely ethereal. 

Do you have children? If not, do you want children? Phoebe and I have twins, Sadie and Julian, born in April 2018, who are incredible. I love them dearly, and I can’t imagine my life without them. And yes, we still consider adding some children to our pack... 

What is your favourite animal? Generally? A sloth. I met one the first time I went to Australia with Phoebe, and I was so fascinated with these gentle creatures, who are so slow, you can probably watch them think. Amazing, really. 

What is your favourite season? Why? Anything warm is probably my thing - although I don’t mind the cold, my wife does, so I’m far happier, when it’s warm outside. Out of the other seasons, Spring is probably my favourite, everything is decked out in flowers and lush greens. What’s not to like?

Do you have any allergies? No, not that I know of. 

What is your favourite clothing item? I have a soft grey cashmere sweater I really like to wear, especially, when I want to get comfortable or into a comfy mindset.

Do you have tattoos or piercings? If so, where? No, I don’t. 

Do you have any distinctive features or marks on your body? I have a small mole on the right side of my Adam’s apple. It’s been there since birth, so I don’t even notice it. I also have a small gap between my upper premolar and molar on the left side. 

Do you enjoy coffee or tea? Hot or iced? I’m a coffee person all the way - hot, a splash of milk. Tea is for those times I want to get comfortable, just like the sweater, or when I’m sick, and have to keep warm and up with the fluids. 

Are you a morning person or a night person? I’m a bit of both, but more of a morning person, something my wife definitely isn’t. Luckily for us, our twins inherited that trait from her.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? There is no superpower without a downside, right? Hmm. I think I’d like to be like Domino from the second Deadpool and add a bit of luck to my life. 

Who is your “ride or die” friend? I have several childhood friends - Bleddyn, Jack, Blyn, to name a few - who really know me inside out, and I know they’d have my back no matter what. Then there’s my wife, of course. And as a close third come @itsrichmadden​ and @moonlightriana​ who are such wonderful people. ​​

What is your go-to flirt approach/routine? Can I be honest with you? I probably never had a proper approach. I’m a bit mouthy, I’m loud and joking around, especially, when there are a few drinks involved.

Have you ever written a love letter? Who was the last recipient? Do little notes on post-its count as love letters? Because I do write those regularly and slide them between the pages of the scripts Phoebe is reading. 

Who is your childhood hero? Do you have a hero in adulthood, too? One of my biggest childhood heroes is David Bowie. He had it all, he did it all, his music was perfect. He influenced many people’s lives, and he remained this humble, lovely fella. Nowadays? I’ve definitely added Sir Elton John to that list. He’s simply incredible. 

Lastly, what is your favourite gif of them?

[amateurteacher]

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A QUEER IN...?

First, a confession: It’s 22:49 in my country and I feel like my body is doing everything it can to separate itself from whatever's inside me. My skin doesn't feel like a skin and it seems like the air is solid under my fingers as I type these words. In the middle of this anxiety attack I remember that tomorrow I have to get up early for my class. I am 21 years old and the youngest professor at the university where I work. That means I still don't know how to handle the fact that my students of tomorrow think that one of the bloodiest massacres in Colombia's history is the fault of the victims because "they should have foreseen it". The college where I work is the most expensive college in the city, which means that many of its students are children of the privilege. Every time they express these violent expressions I can't avoid to see rocks in their hands and feel that if they could know I was a lesbian they would not hesitate to throw them at me, because, in most contexts, the privilege is misogynistic and markedly homophobic. My parents and my sister are sleeping. This silence is not very different from the silence that I usually feel when I am around them and I cannot show myself totally. More than anyone, I'd like to talk to something, and I feel like this blue page is the closest scenario I have to that conversation.

I graduated from literature at my university and I would like to share with you (the something invisible but real, the something timelessly present, the something unknown that takes time to read to another unknown, the something that is something because you cannot be someone when you are all at the same time) how some of the knowledge I learned during that period influenced my reflections on three of my favorite shows: Carmilla, Wynona Earp and Orphan Black. I would love to show you the thre ready-made reflections, but for now I will write my thoughts around Carmilla for as long as I need to take up my usual breathing and be able to sleep more peacefully.

I probably write this for myself but I still hope to find an echo in others "desvelados", which is a rare construction in Spanish that means “the one who lost sleep or can't fall asleep”, or in any fan, who like me, has found company in the stories of these series.

A METHOD OF ANALYSIS

Summarizing the whole theory, my method of literary approach is based on the works of Georg Lukács, Jacques Ranciere and studies on polyphony of Mikhail Bakhtin, from which a conception of literature is derived: literature is NEVER a reflection of reality, but a refraction of voices (many voices) of society (more a painting than a photo). Literature (and perhaps it would be good to already speak in terms of narratives) works in terms of representation. Therefore, I would not agree to use a book as a historical document, but certainly a book would reinterpret the voices of a historical moment in order to, according to the ideological positions of the author, create a version of it. The characteristic of this position is that it does not consider that the key to reading a text is in aesthetics as an artifice, as a manifestation of a style, but that all aesthetics are charged with an ethic (the author writes in a way because only in that way can he express his political bets).

All of the above is reduced to three levels of analysis. In my words:

-"Outside the book", which implies that to understand a book you must know everything about the author's writing context (why could this book only have been written at the time it was written?), the historical context in which the narration takes place, and the current literary situation in terms of literary movements and debates.

-"Inside the book", and I hope you don't misunderstand me, this is very important because we do literature, not sociology. This is the moment to put into practice all the critical tools related to time, characters, repeated thematic points: the architecture with which the story was constructed. The style of the book.

-A new one outside the book? Let's say "Above the book": this is the most interesting moment of the reflection where we try to construct the universe of values that allows the union of the two previous levels. Basically, what was the resulting image of reality, once we put together the pieces of the puzzle that the book proposes

You're probably bored. I think the only way I can explain myself is to "teach a lesson", but this is actually just as exciting for me as a last-minute goal, and I'm starting to feel better. All right, let's see how it goes when I analyze Carmilla.

CARMILLA AND THE UNIVERSAL LOVE

To give a quick example of what the first two levels of analysis would be like, because I want to focus on the last one, the "outside of Carmilla" could refer to a context of the need for good queer representation in the media and, to give a very specific example, a knowledge of how universities work in terms of fraternities (an element that, by the way, is not common in Latin America) The “inside of Carmilla” (and only referring to the digital series and not to the beautiful film) has an obvious aesthetic element that is marked by the presentation of the story from a "webcam" ,that is to say the story in a constant confession mode (usually from Laura- I take the moment to say that Elise Bauman  and Natasha Negovanlis are such a gift) and in a single setting (the room-the living room-the library).

So let's move on to "above Carmilla". I won't lie. When I approach a new series I usually do it for its queer representation. It still surprises me, moves me, makes me nervous, all at the same time, to see two women kissing on television. It is a constant reminder of validity.  I don't think there's anything wrong with this. But what makes me love a series is that, along with the fangirl that I can develop through a relationship, there is a space for deep reflection on who we are as people.

In Carmilla there are many reflections on this subject. In the first season the questions could be presented as: Is it worth fighting for what we think is right even when all the odds are against us? Should we resign ourselves to the fact that there is a natural world order that is stronger and more powerful than our vain attempts? In the second season the questions revolve around power: can we sacrifice everything around us in order to defend what we believe? Who determines that my cause is the noblest cause? Can I judge the actions of others based on my own scale of values? In the third season this exercise that I have been doing (to separate the reflections linked to love from the other reflections) is more difficult, because if one of the reflections of the second season around love, which I have not intentionally mentioned is should I change what I am for love?, in this last season the question is relativized and expressed as what is it that love causes in people, and when it comes to the issue of loss (Laura in the other dimension, death) how do I survive a lack of love, or why do I have to overcome my fears first to love? (I don't think it's a coincidence that this is the season for the beautiful Hollstein statement, interrupted by the Dean's applause)

Let's move away from all these reflections and focus only on the love between Laura and Carmilla. How do you unite the inside and the outside?

There are two consequences that I find in the presentation from the webcam: first, the world is reduced to the micro-world of, once again, Laura's room, the dean's former apartment and the library. This implies that an implicit pact is created with the characters. We must believe the story they tell us. The world is their world. It is a series without tricks in that sense, and very transparent. Everything that happens outside is only important because of its consequences inside. That is, the work is already "simplified" and what we can see is how what happens outside (the action) changes the characters (the reflection). That is, first conclusion, reality is only important for the kind of person it makes us be.

The second consequence is that as we can only see the immediate context of the characters, there are few characters. However, and to ensure the coherence of the story (that is, to convince us that a true story is being told) these characters were as varied as the outside world can be, and in that sense, and as I explained earlier that these characters are our only contact with the outside world, each of them would be an archetype. Laura is not just Laura, she is the archetype of people who have hope in changing their reality; Carmilla is not just Carmilla, she is the archetype of people excluded from history (because Carmilla's great debate is always in relation to history: should I let it all happen because in the end what happens won't have consequences for my immortal self? Can I overcome my past or will I remember it for all eternity) And… as the only romantic love story (couple love if you want to see it that way) we see in the series is the relationship between Laura and Carmilla, that relationship then comes to be built on an archetype of love. Wait, you mean the relationship between a young girl and a vampire is an archetype of love?!, but how can love between two specific personalities be a model of love?! Well, let's analyze how the series naturalizes love between them as love and period, and not as an expression of love between two women or love between a human and a mythological figure.

The explanation is very simple: the series does not problematize the fact that, for example, Laura is a lesbian, nor that Carmilla is a vampire (the two elements that could characterize this relationship as an "atypical" relationship). In the first case, and this was one of the elements that attracted the fandom from the beginning, we do not have a "coming out" in the series, and in fact, Laura's or Carmilla's sexuality is never a topic, it is not an element that the plot focuses on. It's just like that. It exists. It happens.

Likewise, the characters quickly get used to the existence of the supernatural in the story (except for Perry, and perhaps on another long night we could talk about his case. I mean, is the most reluctant of the situation possessed by a vampire goddess? That should be an important detail) This circumstance, which sometimes surpasses the absurd, does not create an “unreal-fake world”. Why? Because when Laura questioned the reasons why the world "was like this", and when all the characters questioned the same thing, they did not question why the world has vampires, or giant fishes or many dimensions. They questioned why evil or power or corruption exists. That's the world they want to change. It’s that "the weird", "the perverse", the "abnormal” about their lives.

I consider then that the purpose of the series is to analyze love through love between two women. That we forget and that we remember at the same time that they are two women. The love between Laura and Carmilla is a universal love, as an archetype, because it is presented as an expression of the standard and regular love that can be felt. And this, the basic claim to which all non-heterosexual people aspire, is achieved in the series thanks to all these strategies that I hope I have explained.

It's 12:47 pm. It's officially June, the month of pride. I think I should get some rest soon, because I really should get up early. I'm not anxious anymore, but I feel numb. I just want to make one last comment: is the love between Laura and Carmilla an example of perfect love because it is the official representation of love in the series? NO. Not at all. And this is the beauty of it all. We can learn from love through them: their difficulties, their celebrations, their lessons. What makes really transgressor the love between them to my eyes is not the fact of being a queer love but the fact that they decide, in the end, that their love will make them better, and that they will not destroy all if one of them dies. This is the Hollstein revolution. To break all the violent ideas associated with romantic heterosexual love, as an archetype in itself: possessive love, love that cannot be forgotten, love of “if you are not for me you are not for anyone”, “if I failed in love, we must all fail”. I'm not saying that all heterosexual love is like that. I'm talking about the patriarchy's versions of love (another night of explanations). Wow, my conclusion seems to be that Hollstein is, above all, a feminist love. I think I will end this conclusion like this. Nothing could be better than this.

Well, this is my literary reading of Carmilla. I am not an expert on this subject, nor do I want to present my version as the only one, much less the best. I was just looking for an outlet to unite my passions: literature + being a lesbian.  I don't know if anyone will read this or if anyone will find it interesting enough to continue the conversation. I just want to thank my Tumblr companies, with whom I have rarely spoken but who are with me now and always in this “struggle for being” in the day to day. This is my way of thanking you for your selfies, your gifs, your jokes, your criticisms of violence. I'm just getting started. I hope to publish my thoughts on Wayhaught and Cophine soon. I hope to sleep.

Feliz junio, my darlings.

PD:

-Sorry if I have grammatical or spelling mistakes. English is not my native language.

- As you can see I am using queer as a spectrum and not as a specific identity. I hope this isn't vague or offensive.

 Karla.

@natvanlis

[tomeandflickcorner]

Star Wars: Episode 4- A New Hope

Ah, the movie that started it all.  I wonder if anyone who worked on this movie knew how much of a cultural phenomenon this movie would become.  How do you think they’d react if somebody told them that they would still be making Star Wars movies 40 years later?  Also, a friendly reminder I’m reviewing the Special Editoon version of the original trilogy.  Because it’s apparently next to impossible to view the Original Version outside of the VHS tapes, and I no longer have access to a working VCR.

The movie opens with Tantive IV being pursued by a Star Destroyer, right after the events of Rouge One.  (Kinda interesting how the Star Destroyer caught up with the Tantive IV, which we saw jump to lightspeed when leaving Scarif.)  As the text crawl informs us, the Tantive IV is carrying the stolen Death Star plans.  Though the text crawl states that Princess Leia is taking the Death Star plans back to Alderaan.  Which is rather odd, because isn’t she supposed to be on the way to Tatooine to locate Obi-Wan?  It would be one thing if they would have passed Alderaan on the way from Scarif to Tatooine, but they don’t.  She’d have to go WAAAYYY out of her way to reach Alderaan.  (I even confirmed this by looking up a Star Wars galaxy map.)  But I guess I should cut this movie a bit of slack, as George Lucas probably hadn’t really ironed out the details of Rouge One back then.

Speaking of Leia, why exactly is she called a Princess in this movie?  I thought Bail Organa was a senator.  Was he also the ruler of Alderaan?  Or do they just call her Princess because she’s a pretty young woman in a dress?  And before anyone can say that it’s because her mother was the Queen of Naboo?  Padmé wasn’t actually royalty.  And she hadn’t been queen for quite a few years by the time she gave birth to Leia.  Even if she had still been a queen at the time, nobody is supposed to know that Leia was Padmé’s daughter.

Anyway, it turns out C-3PO and R2-D2 are also on the Tantive IV.  And they waste no time in showing us how much of a whiny doom-and-gloom wimp 3PO is.  Though they don’t really contribute much to the story right away.  The focus just kinda centers on them as the Star Destroyer manages to catch up to the Tantive IV and a battalion of Storm Troopers board the spacecraft, quickly begging a shoot-out with the ship’s crew.  Though there is one moment when we see 3PO and R2 just walking across a corridor in the middle of the shoot-out and don’t even get hit.  Yes, I know about the whole ongoing joke about the Stormtroopers, but the Rebels were also shooting, too.  Eventually, the Rebels start to fall back with the Stormtoopers continuing to pursue them.  This is when Darth Vader boards the ship, deciding to personally oversee the retrieval of the stolen Death Star plans.

We then get a bit of a head scratching moment.  Even though 3PO and R2 were literally just seen together a few seconds earlier, R2 somehow managed to give 3PO the slip long enough to meet up with Leia. Showing herself to be a natural leader, Leia has taken into account that the Empire has caught them and has instantly come up with an alternative plan.  This plan involves transferring the disk containing the Death Star plans into R2 and sending him the rest of the way to Tatooine, along with a holographic message of her explaining the predicament she’s in, in the hopes that R2 can deliver it to Obi-Wan.  Upon receiving his mission, R2 proceeds to make his way down to the escape pods, in order to reach Tatooine.  Which is a bit puzzling.  Did R2 specifically program the escape pod to head to Tatooine?  I’m just saying, what if the escape pod landed on Ryloth instead? That would be a pretty big setback.

For some reason, 3PO ends up tagging along with R2.  Granted, he clearly felt it was a better alternative to getting shot at, but why would R2 seemingly want him to come?  Also, he apparently insults 3PO by calling him a mindless philosopher.  I don’t get what motivated him to call 3PO that. 3PO was just being a worrywart and telling R2 not to go into the escape pod.

In any event, the two Droids get launched out in the escape pod, with the Imperials deciding not to blow it up when they detect no life signs within the craft. Meanwhile, Vader and his forces have searched the Tantive IV for the Death Star plans to no avail.  Vader ends up interrogating Captain Antilles about the matter, only for Antilles to insist that they never received any transmission containing the plans, and that they’re on a diplomatic mission.  Vadar, however, does not buy this and ends up strangling Antilles to death before ordering that the ship be searched even more, with all passengers brought to him for questioning.  And that’s how the Stormtroopers locate Leia, hiding in the bowels of the ship.  Strangely enough, Leia only shoots at one Stormtrooper before she tries to run away by stepping out into the open.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense for her to try and shoot more of them while utilizing her surroundings as improvised shields?  Maybe her gun only had enough juice for one shot?  Either way, she’s quickly hit by a stungun and apprehended. When she’s brought before Vader, Leia also tries to claim ignorance in regards to the Death Star plans, backing up Captain Antilles’ cover story that their ship is on a diplomatic mission. Which is quite ballsy, as she must know Vader had witnessed their ship leaving Scarif a short time ago.  Though it probably wasn’t a good idea of her to insist they were heading to Alderaan, considering Tatooine and Alderaan are in two different directions.  Regardless, Vader doesn’t fall for it, and decides to capture Leia on the grounds of her being part of the Rebel Alliance, disregarding his aide’s warning that keeping her prisoner might lead to Senate gaining sympathy for the Rebel Alliance.   To try and cover it up, Vader decides to make the Senate believe everyone aboard the Tantive IV was killed. He then proceeds to order his followers to track down the escape pod 3PO and R2 were on upon being informed that an escape pod with no life forms was launched during the attack, speculating that Leia hid the plans on the escape pod.

Speaking of the Droids, 3PO and R2 have managed to make it to R2’s intended destination of Tatooine.  And 3PO wastes no time in being a pathetic wimp as he immediately starts to complain about how he needs to rest before his joints freeze in place.  Even though we can see the escape pod lying a short distance away, meaning they probably haven’t even walked a mile yet.  3PO proceeds to moan and complain to R2, refusing to continue on in the direction they’ve been heading in.  Instead, he insists on heading off into the opposite direction.  Of course, he ends up getting lost.  And proceeds to blame his predicament on R2, accusing the Astromech Droid of tricking him into going the wrong way.  Guys, I’m starting to realize how fitting it was that the prequels told us C-3PO was built by Anakin.  They’re both whiny, unlikable brats!  Anyway, that’s when 3PO notices a Sandcrawler in the distance.  Hoping that the people driving it are friendly, he proceeds to try and wave them down.  Of course, it turns out that this Sandcrawler belongs to a troop of Jawas who are in the business of picking up stray Droids and selling them for a profit.

Elsewhere, R2 is making his way through a rocky area of Tatooine when he is also discovered and picked up by Jawas.  When they bring R2 to their Sandcrawler, it’s revealed that they’re the same Jawas that picked up 3PO.  What are the odds of that happening?  3PO and R2 had been traveling in opposite directions for probably hours.  The Jawas must have really covered a lot of ground that day.  (Also, wasn’t R2 capable of flying about 19 years ago?)

The following day, the Jawas arrive at the moisture farm owned by Owen Lars.  And it’s at this point in the movie where we start having to judge between convenient coincidence and fate.  Anyway, the Jawas bring out a collection of the Droids they’ve gathered up, including 3PO and R2 and present them to Owen and Luke. They’re looking to purchase some Droids that could help them out with their harvests, as well as a Droid that can understand binary language of the moisture vaporators and can speak Bocce, which is an interplanetary trade language.  Not sure why the Lars family would need to worry about communicating with beings traveling to and from the planet, due to them being simple moisture farmers, but who am I to question.  This is a world where a little boy thinks a Protocol Droid can be of use to his slave mother.

Eventually, Owen ends up purchasing 3PO and a red Astromech Droid.  An R5 model, from what I can tell.   And 3PO once again shows himself to be a bit of a jerk when he shows no concern about R2 getting left behind.  Until R5 suddenly explodes for no apparent reason, though Luke chalks it up to the Droid having a bad motivator.  It’s only then that 3PO suggests that they take R2 instead.  And he proceeds to act as if R2 should be grateful to him.  Grateful my eye!  3PO would have left him behind without a thought if R5 hadn’t malfunctioned.

Once the two Droids are purchased, Owen tasks Luke with the job of cleaning them up a bit. This discourages Luke, as he’d been hoping to take a trip down to the Tosche Station.  While he states the purpose of his outing would be to pick up power converters, Owen thinks that is just an excuse Luke came up with and that he’d really just wanted to visit with his friends, who apparently hang out there on a regular basis.

Luke’s main problem is that he really wants apply to the flight academy and hopefully join in the fight against the Empire, especially since his two best friends have already left for the academy.  But Owen never allows it, always insisting that he needs Luke’s help around the farm for just one more season, only for him to say the same thing the following year, too.  So Luke is growing restless, which is quite understandable.  While I can see where people are coming from when they say Luke is a bit of a whiner in this movie, I find myself sympathizing with him.  He wants to live his own life, but his uncle keeps making put off applying to the flight academy by making Luke feel obligated to stay and help out on the farm.  While I can see how it could be argued that Owen is trying to keep Luke safe, considering he probably knows about the situation with Luke’s parentage, this could also be interpreted as a mild form of mental abuse.  We’re talking full-on Cinderella Syndrome here.  Not that Luke is getting locked in the attic room where he’s forced to make friends with womp rats.  But the fact that Luke is pretty much constantly manipulated into thinking he has to stay and continue working on his uncle’s farm instead of leaving home like he wants to is quite similar as to how the Evil Stepmother made the protagonist of the Cinderella fairy tale story feel as if she had to stay and be treated like a slave in her own house.

Anyway, Luke vents about his frustrations to 3PO and R2 when he beings cleaning them up. When he finds out that the two Droids were involved with the Rebel Alliance, his interest in instantly awakened and he instantly starts showering them with questions.  But his questions are put on hold when he inadvertently ends up triggering the holographic message Leia had recorded into R2’s memory banks.  But because of the interference I’m assuming is connected to the restraining bolt the Jawas forced on R2 upon picking him up, only a small segment of the message is played on a loop.  Luke is immediately intrigued upon seeing the snippet of the message and tries to get R2 to play the rest of it.  But R2 refuses, stating that the message was a private one and he had orders to deliver the message to Obi-Wan.

Now, I wonder if R2 had any idea that Luke was the long-lost son of Anakin and Padmé. Considering that, unlike 3PO, he has maintained his memories of everything that happened during the prequel trilogy.  Then again, I can’t be sure.  After all, R2 wasn’t present when Yoda, Bail and Obi-Wan decided to send Baby Luke to live with Owen and Beru.  And it’s possible Luke is a common name in this universe.

Anyway, because of the restraining bolt, R2 cannot stop playing the message on a loop. He suggests that he might be able to play the whole message if Luke removes the bolt.  But this ends up being a trick, because once Luke removes the bolt, R2 is able to regain full control of his functions and he immediately turns off the message and feigns ignorance, acting as if he doesn’t remember anything about a message.  This frustrates Luke and annoys 3PO, who proceeds to try and bully R2 into dropping the attitude and simply show Luke the message.

This is another reason why I don’t particularly like 3PO.  He claims he doesn’t recognize Leia, but thinks she was a passenger on the Tantive IV’s last voyage.  But wasn’t Captain Antilles, the man who essentially owned 3PO and R2 since the rise of the Empire, a part of Bail Organa’s staff?  So it stands to reason that they probably interacted with the Organa family on a regular basis.  You’re telling me that 3PO doesn’t recognize her?  Is his memory banks being affected by his own restraining bolt?  What’s his deal?

Either way, Luke gets called to dinner at that point.  When he joins Owen and Beru, he mentions how R2 is carrying a recording and stating that R2 is claiming that it’s meant for an Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Though Luke fails to notice the pointed look his aunt and uncle share at that point.  When Luke starts to speculate if there’s a possible connection to a local hermit that goes by Ben Kenobi, Owen instructs him to forget about it and states he should simply have R2’s memory erased the following morning.  Initially, this concerns Luke, as he wonders what would happen if Obi-Wan came looking for the Droids, but Owen insists that won’t happen, stating that Obi-Wan died around the time of Luke’s father.  That slip of the tongue gets Luke’s attention, as he’s apparently desperate for any information he can get about his father, but Owen makes it clear the subject is closed.  (Dude, you’re the one who brought up the subject of Luke’s father.)

So Luke changes the subject, reminding Owen about an agreement they’d made in which Luke had agreed to stay and help on the farm for another season.  He suggests that, if their new Droids work out, he’d like to submit his application to the academy that year.  However, Owen shuts down that request, stating that he can apply next year. That’s not good enough for Luke, however, as he’s apparently heard this song and dance before.   So he heads off to stew a bit.  Once he leaves, Beru tries to reason with her husband, telling him that Luke won’t be happy living on the farm and they can’t keep preventing him from pursuing a path that he clearly wants so much.  Though she mentions that Luke has too much of his father in him to be happy living out his life on Tatooine.  Not sure how she can say that with such conviction.  Didn’t she only meet Anakin once?

After we get a money shot of Luke looking out on the setting twin suns, he returns to the room where he’d left 3PO and R2.  When he can’t find them, he tries to utilize their restraining bolts, which apparently causes a Droid to feel an electrical shock, judging by the way 3PO just jumps up out of hiding.  Dang, L3 was right!  Those restraining bolts ARE barbaric!  If you’re not seeing what I’m seeing here, just replace the Droids with Black people. That you can affix what amounts to shock collars on to ensure they won’t run off or anything.  This is kinda terrifying.  Yeah, I’m on L3’s side here.  They need to start introducing Droid rights into this universe.

When Luke sees that 3PO was hiding, 3PO instantly starts to apologies.  It turns out that R2 went off on his own when Luke was at dinner, insisting that he had to complete the mission to find Obi-Wan and deliver the message to him.  Upon hearing this, Luke hurries out of the compound, only to find that R2 is nowhere in sight.  Which is bad, as night is falling.  This is apparently the time of day when the Tusken Raiders are most active, so it’s dangerous to wander around after dark.  So they have to wait until morning to search for the wayward Droid.  This is particularly frustrating to Luke, as he’s most likely going to get an earful from Owen over R2 running off, since Luke was the one who removed the restraining bolt.  Though I guess Luke was able to keep R2’s disappearance a secret, because when morning comes, Owen and Beru seem completely ignorant to it. Luke simply told Beru that he had some things to do before he started his daily chores, so he was heading out early.

Eventually, Luke and 3PO manage to catch up to R2 by utilizing Luke’s landspeeder.  Once again, 3PO reprimands R2 for his actions, insisting that they should just accept the fact that they belong to Luke and his family.  (I’m guessing the restraining bolt 3PO is still wearing is making him act this way?)   But before more could be said, R2’s sensors pick up the presence of the Tusken Raiders.  They’d apparently saw Luke pass by on his landspeeder and proceed to follow in order to loot it.  Upon being notified of this, Luke grabs a sniper gun from the landspeeder and goes to investigate.  He and 3PO take up a perch atop a rocky outcrop where Luke scans the area for any sign of the danger.  But the Tusken Raiders end up getting the jump on him, instead, with one appearing before him without much warning.  As a result, Luke gets knocked out and 3PO, I guess, faints from surprise and tumbles down the mountainside, as we later see him on the ground with his arm torn off. As for R2, he seeks refuge in a conveniently placed cave that allows him to watch as the Tusken Raiders leave Luke’s unmoving figure lying on the ground and proceed to tear apart the landspeeder.

But then, the Tusken Raiders get spooked by a loud, screaming cry, which seems to have come from a hooded figure approaching them.  Personally, I’m not a fan of the cry that’s featured on the blu-ray.  I ended up looking up a YouTube video that compared the blu-ray version to the original and according to what I found out, the cry that scared off the Tusken Raiders was supposed to resemble to roar of a Krayt Dragon, a gigantic beast that supposedly travel the deserts of Tatooine. Just knowing that makes me dislike the blu-ray version even more, as it just sounds like some person making weird sounds.  At least the other versions of the screaming cry sounded like something other-worldy.

In any event, the Tusken Raiders are scared off, allowing the hooded figure to approach Luke and check him for injuries.  This mysterious figure is soon revealed to be the man Luke knows as Ben Kenobi the Hermit. When Luke regains consciousness, Ben starts to question him on what led him to travel out to such a dangerous area of Tatooine.  So Luke explains about R2, and how the Droid is insisting on locating his former master, an Obi-Wan Kenobi.  (Even though Obi-Wan never held any ownership over R2, so…..)

The moment he hears the name Obi-Wan, the old man grows quiet and reflective.  After a few moments, he reveals that he is Obi-Wan.  But he ended up answering to Ben around the point when he went into hiding on Tatooine.

Okay, far be it from me to question the wisdom of Obi-Wan, but….wasn’t the whole point of him and Baby Luke settling on Tatooine to prevent the Empire from finding them? So why in the world would Obi-Wan only change his first name while maintaining his true surname of Kenobi? Same thing with Luke, who we later find out was allowed to call himself a Skywalker.  You’d think that would have been a pretty big giveaway, wouldn’t you? I doubt Skywalker and Kenobi were common surnames.

Also, I guess it’s safe to say that R2 is able to instantly recognize Obi-Wan as Anakin’s former teacher and friend the moment he identifies himself.  But did Obi-Wan recognize R2 right away?  Because there are apparently a lot of Astromech Droids. And Owen clearly didn’t recognize 3PO, even though the Droid resided with them for quite a while, as was shown in Attack of the Clones.

Knowing that the Tusken Raiders would probably return before too long, Obi-Wan suggests they head back to his place so they can talk more.  After they pick up 3PO, of course, who decides to act like a drama queen again.  Once they’re indoors, Luke starts to learn that Uncle Owen is a big fat liar.  See, Luke had spent most of his life believing that his father was a navigator on a spice freighter.  It’s not until Obi-Wan starts explaining things that Luke learns about the Jedi Knights, and how Anakin and Obi-Wan once fought together during the Clone Wars.  For crying out loud, Luke didn’t even seem to have heard of the Force, even though practically everyone else in the universe is at least somewhat familiar with the Force’s existence.  Was Owen purposely keeping Luke in the dark?  If that was the case, I wonder how he would have responded if he found out Obi-Wan had spilled all the beans.  Though I wonder why Obi-Wan didn’t tell Luke all of this earlier.  It’s clear they crossed paths before, since Luke is able to recognize him on sight.  Maybe he was just waiting until the time was right and decided that, once he heard Luke mention his true name, he decided the cat was finally out of the bag and that it was time to come clean?

Obi-Wan even manages to present Luke with Anakin’s old lightsaber, which he’d been holding onto since the battle on Mustifar.  He explains to Luke that Anakin would have wanted Luke to have it when he was old enough, even though Anakin never mentioned what his intentions with his children would have been, especially since Anakin wasn’t even there to see them being born and probably thought they died along with Padmé.  Then again, I guess plot holes are bound to happen when you don’t come out with the prequels until over ten years have gone by. After examining the old lightsaber for a bit, Luke asks Obi-Wan about how his father died.  Either because Owen never bothered to tell him or because Luke has decided that, since his uncle had lied about everything else, whatever story he’d told Luke about the subject was probably made-up, too.  So Obi-Wan proceeds to tell Luke a version of the true story, stating that a Jedi called Darth Vader ended up turning to the Dark Side of the Force, joining forces with the Empire to betray, hunt down and murder all the Jedi Knights, and that Luke’s father was among the Jedi who were killed that day.

As Luke processes that information, Obi-Wan turns his attention to R2, and the message he’s carrying from Leia.  This time, since R2 knows he’s reached the person he’d been tasked to locate, he plays the full message without fuss.  In the holographic message, Leia explains her predicament, about how her mission to bring Obi-Wan to Alderaan to meet with Bail Organa cannot be completed due to her ship falling under attack.  She beseeches him to help bring R2 to Alderaan in her place, stating that the Droid contains information vital to the survival of the Rebel Alliance, and that’s imperative that it reaches Bail Organa.

Once the recorded message ends, Obi-Wan states that Luke should accompany him to Alderaan, no doubt deciding that the time has come to start Luke’s Jedi training. Especially since Obi-Wan’s not as young as he once was and could use the assistance.  It’s doubtful that Obi-Wan’s body is agile enough to execute those backflips and other acrobatics anymore.  But Luke immediately comes up with excuses as to why he can’t leave the planet, as his uncle has clearly maintained a psychological grip on him for far too long.  Instead, Luke offers to take Obi-Wan to Anchorhead, stating that the old Jedi is sure to find someone better equipped to help him there.  Obi-Wan is visibly disappointed, but he doesn’t go on about it, as he knows he can’t force Luke to go with him.  Have to wonder, however, why Obi-Wan didn’t tell Luke who Leia was at that point.  I know they were supposed to be separated for their safety, but considering the fact that Obi-Wan had just gotten through with telling Luke about his true birthright, you’d think he would have gone for broke and decided the cat was out of the bag in regards to everything else.  But then again, I guess it’s wise to not keep all your eggs in one basket.

On the way to Anchorhead, however, they stumble across a broken-down Sandcrawler, with a lot of slaughtered Jawas lying nearby.  In curiously, Luke stops to check it out and surmises the attack was the Tusken Raiders. However, Obi-Wan directs Luke’s attention to the fact that the tracks and the appearance of the blast points in the side of the Sandcrawler are giveaways to the fact that whoever attacked the Sandcrawelr had only tried to make it look like the Tusken Raiders were involved. He is able to determine the true culprits are Imperial Stormtroopers.  It turns out some of them had managed to track down the Tantive IV’s escape pod to Tatooine and realized that a pair of Droids had stowed away on the escape pod when thy discovered a metal ring that had apparently fallen off 3PO’s body.  Upon realizing that the Stormtroopers were behind the attack, Luke realizes that they had been looking for 3PO and R2.  And the moment he figures that out, he realizes that the Stormtroopers might have figured out who exactly bought the two Droids, which means his aunt and uncle are in serious danger.  Impulsively, he runs back to his landspeeder to get back home right away, ignoring Obi-Wan’s warnings that it’s too dangerous.  As to why Obi-Wan hadn’t volunteered to go with Luke in order to help out with his powers is anyone’s guess.

Unfortunately, Luke arrives home too late, as the Stormtroopers had already came and went. As such, Luke is greeted by the sight of smoke billowing out from his home, along with the heavily charred remains of two people we can only conclude were Owen and Beru.  With a heavy heart, Luke returns to the spot where he’d left Obi-Wan and the two Droids.  Upon seeing him return, Obi-Wan comforts Luke, clearly already knowing what he’d found upon arriving at the Lars’ homestead.  He assures Luke that he shouldn’t feel guilty for not being there when the attack had happened, as he just would have died, too.  (I wonder if Obi-Wan was thinking about Anakin at that moment, and how he’d responded when Shmi had been killed.  If so, I like the idea of Obi-Wan possibly trying to offer Luke the words of comfort he hadn’t been able to give Anakin in his time of need.) However, the death of his family leads to one good thing.  Luke ultimately decides that there’s nothing keeping him on Tatooine anymore, so he’s ready to go with Obi-Wan to Alderaan, in the hopes that Obi-Wan can train him as a Jedi along the way.  Although, I wonder if Luke was also following this path because he hoped he’d get the chance to avenge his aunt and uncle.  

At this point, there’s a brief pause in the action so we can see a bunch of Imperial bigwigs discussing the threat of the Rebel Alliance.   During this scene, Tarkin and Vader enter the scene to announce that Emperor Palpatine has managed to completely put an end to the Senate. How he managed to do that, I can’t be sure.  But they’re apparently hoping that the fear generated by the Death Star will be enough to keep the planetary systems in line.  All things considered, however, this scene is rather pointless, as all they really do is show that Vader has mastered the Force Choke Hold, which he directs at this one guy who gets a bit too mouthy about how insignificant the ways of the Force are, especially now that they have the Death Star.  Though they seem to be placing credit for the Death Star’s creation with this guy.  Granted George Lucas hadn’t created Galen or Krennic at this point, but even so.

Back on Tatooine, Luke, Obi-Wan, 3PO and R2 have reached Mos Eisley spaceport, in the hopes of locating a pilot that could bring them to Alderaan.  Though Obi-Wan advises Luke to proceed with caution, as the place has a reputation of attracting low-lives and criminals.  After a brief run in with some Storrmtroopers that are still looking for the two Droids that were on the Tantive IV’s escape pod, whom Obi-Wan are able to misdirect with the use of a Jedi Mind Trick, they head to a cantina that discriminates against Droids, where Luke somehow gets on the bad side of two criminals by…just sitting there.  Luke was just ordering a drink and looking around the place when these two thugs come over and start harassing him for no discernable reason.  Incidentally, these are the same two criminals who were on Jedah right before the Holy City got destroyed.  So I’m guessing they were already on their way off the planet when they briefly crossed paths with Cassian and Jyn.  Obi-Wan attempts to step in to prevent the dispute from escalating, but when the two thugs continue to act belligerently, Obi-Wan is forced to activate his lightsaber, quickly incapacitating the pair before they could do much harm.

Once that distraction is out of the way, Obi-Wan informs Luke he managed to cross paths with Chewbacca.  Some might be wondering if Chewbacca questioned Obi-Wan about Yoda, since the two had been friends during the events of Revenge of the Sith.  But at the same time, Chewbacca might have thought Yoda had died by this point. Even if he hadn’t I don’t think Obi-Wan informed him that he was one of the last remaining Jedi Knights.  Just that they had to reach Alderaan.  So he might not have made the connection.

Chewbacca manages to arrange a meeting between Luke & Obi-Wan and Han, who has grown to be a bit cocky since the events of Solo. He agrees to transport them and the two Droids to Alderaan, but states that the fact that they’d prefer to avoid any Imperial attention will cost them a bit extra.  He demands to be paid 10,000 credits upfront.  That price agitates Luke, as he feels that they could simply buy their own ship with that much.  Obi-Wan, on the other hand, is much calmer and proceeds to bargain with Han, stating that they’ll give him 2,000 credits to start out and then pay him an additional 15,000 once they reach their destination.  This offer is good enough for Han and he accepts it, instructing them to meet him at Docking Bay 94 when they’re ready to go.  Of course, Luke and Obi-Wan have to slip out of the establishment rather quickly at that point, since some Stormtroopers had entered the cantina to investigate reports of the earlier confrontation between Luke and the two thugs.

The reason why Han demanded such a high price then becomes clear when it’s revealed he’s in a bit of trouble with the notorious gangster, Jabba.  It turns out that Han was doing a smuggling job for Jabba, but ended up abandoning his shipment when he was in danger of being discovered by Imperials.  But with the 17,000 he’s been offered, Han is hoping to pay off his debt to Jabba.  All of this made clear when Han runs into Greedo, who had apparently been hired to find Han.  Greedo quickly corners Han as he’s exiting the cantina and proceeds to threaten him.  After a brief exchange, Greedo is shot dead by the blaster Han had been hiding beneath the table.  

And yes, in the Special Edition, an effect is added to show that Greedo’s gun fired off its own shot.  This is something that evidently led to this whole ‘Han Shot First’ debate.  Honestly, I just have one thing to say about this: Who cares?  It doesn’t matter!  The uber Star Wars nerds are really making a mountain out of a molehill here.  Trust me, there are bigger things to get upset about in these movie.

Also, in the Special Edition, we get a small scene of Han meeting directly with Jabba himself.  While I gather this scene was something George Lucas probably had always intended to include but hadn’t been able to with the technology at the time, it’s rather pointless.  They don’t reveal or establish anything we hadn’t already learned through the Greedo scene.  Not to mention how Jabba looks considerably smaller than he will in Return of the Jedi.  And there’s a pointless Bobba Fett cameo thrown in, despite the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be introduced yet.

Later on, Luke and Obi-Wan make it to the designated hanger bay with 3PO and R2, along with the money they’d gotten from selling Luke’s landspeeder.  But it turns out that they’d been followed.  Some Alien guy had been spying on them the whole time and reported them to some Stormtroopers, who appear on the scene a few seconds after they board the Millennium Falcon.  As such, Han and Chewbacca have to take off rather quickly. When they exit Tatooine’s atmosphere, they’re met by two Imperial Star Destroyers, which further complicates their escape.  But Han eventually manages to elude them by jumping to lightspeed, after a bit of technical explanation thrown in for the viewing audience.  Which makes sense because this movie was, for a lot of people, their first introduction into the Star Wars mythos.

Meanwhile, Leia is being kept prisoner aboard the Death Star, where Darth Vader has been trying to torture her into revealing the location of the Rebel base.  But Leia proves to be stronger willed than anyone anticipated.  Not even their attempt to probe her mind seems to work.  My guess was that this was the result of Leia’s Force Sensitivity, though it’s a puzzlement that Vader didn’t sense that about her then.  But Tarkin gets an idea, speculating that Leia might respond better to a different kind of persuasion.  As such, he instructs the crew of the Death Star to set a course for Alderaan.   When they arrive, he has Leia brought up to the bridge and informs her that, if she does not give in and reveal the location of the Rebel base, then they will unleash a full-powered attack from the Death Star directly on Alderaan.  And because it will be a full-powered blast, the attack would destroy the entire planet.  When Leia is informed of Tarkin’s intentions, she is horrified. Not only is Alderaan a peaceful planet with no weapons, it’s also her home planet, and the place where her adopted parents are currently located.  But Tarkin isn’t swayed by her pleas, simply instructing her to reveal the location of the Rebel Base.  As such, Leia gives in, announcing that the base is located on the planet Dantooine.

Unfortunately, Tarkin decides to proceed with the destruction of Alderaan, since Dantooine is far too remote a planet to make much of an impression on the rest of the Galaxy.  And the whole point of this demonstration was to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who might even think to challenge the Empire.  As such, Leia is forced to watch helplessly as the Death Star destroys Alderaan, thereby killing everyone on the planet.  Including Bail and Breha Organa. (Say, weren’t they supposed to try and keep the existence of the Death Star a secret?  That’s why they covered up the destruction of Jedha’s Holy City by blaming it on a mining accident.  So why did they change their minds and decide to openly reveal the Death Star’s existence now?)  

On the Millennium Falcon, Obi-Wan is overseeing Luke’s first lightsaber training exercise when he seemingly becomes lightheaded.  Noticing this right away, Luke asks him what’s wrong.  It turns out that the destruction of Alderaan caused a significant disturbance in the Force and Obi-Wan was able to sense it, in much the same way that Yoda could sense the Jedi extermination in Revenge of the Sith.  (I wonder if he also sensed the destruction on Jedha and Scarif).  However, Obi-Wan urges Luke to continue with his exercises as he tries to regain his composure.

While Luke continues his lightsaber training, Han steps in to chat with them.  After advising R2 to be careful in how he goes about in the hologram chess game he’s playing with Chewbacca, as Wookiees have a tendency to be sore losers (and does Chewbacca fall for the same trap he fell into when he was playing that game with Tobias?,) he goes on to state he doesn’t believe in the Force and dismisses the whole thing as a hokey religion.

Although, I do notice that Obi-Wan seems to smile a bit when Han claims that no mystical power is controlling his destiny.  Does Obi-Wan know something we don’t?  I wonder if it’s possible that Han might be Force Sensitive himself but never knew it.  After all, we do see him get out of some pretty bad scrapes throughout the original trilogy.  He’ll even manage to navigate his way through an asteroid field in Episode 5.  But because he’d simply chalk it all up to simply being lucky, he wouldn’t even consider all of that an indication of his Force Sensitivity.  Of course, if he is Force Sensitive, it’s most likely not as strong as it is with Luke and Leia.

Regardless, despite Han’s skepticism, Obi-Wan encourages Luke to proceed with his exercises, eventually blindfolding him in order to teach him how to reach out with his feelings instead of trusting his eyes alone.  Luke, being a prodigy on account of his father’s blood, is able to pass his first test with the lightsaber by correctly anticipating the trajectory of the little lasers the remote fires off, effortlessly blocking the with the lightsaber blade.

At that point, the Millennium Falcon’s computer notifies them that they’re approaching the location of Alderaan.  But when they emerge from hyperspace, they’re met with nothing but space rubble, as Alderaan had just been destroyed by the Death Star.  Right away, Obi-Wan is able to guess what had happened- that the Empire had blown up the planet.

Before they can fully process this revelation, a TIE Fighter flies past them.  This confuses them, as TIE Fighters are supposed to be a short-range fighter, and there’s no way it could have gotten this far out into space on its own.  But Han takes up a whole ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ attitude and decides to go after the craft and shoot it down, before the pilot could inform anyone of their presence.  This ultimately leads to the Millennium Falcon on a direct course for the Death Star. Which of course leads to the iconic line of “that's no moon.  It's a space station.”  

Unfortunately, just when Han is trying to turn the ship around, they get caught in the Death Star’s tractor beam, which pulls the ship into the Death Star’s hanger bay. In order to avoid being discovered, the six of them hide within these compartments hidden away in the floor, which Han usually used for smuggling purposes.  But while they’ve managed to avoid detection for now, they know they’re still trapped on the Death Star, as that tractor beam would prevent them from escaping.  Obi-Wan announces their best bet is to find the controls and disable them.  In order to achieve that goal, Luke and Han manage to knock out two of the Stormtroopers standing guard over the ship and don their armor, which enables them to make it up to the control room.  Though I’m not sure exactly how they managed to sneak Chewbacca, Obi-Wan, R2 and 3PO along without detection.  Especially since Vader had ordered the ship be carefully searched and guarded, no doubt because he sensed Obi-Wan’s presence. Regardless, once they get up there, Han and Chewbacca are able to get rid of the Imperials manning the control room. With the Imperials taken care of, R2 is able to hack into the computer and locate the location of the tractor beam terminal.  Obi-Wan then volunteers to go off and disable the tractor beam by himself.  Luke voices his desire to accompany his mentor, but Obi-Wan gently turns him down, informing Luke that he should stay behind and make sure R2 and 3PO remain safe, because if they’re discovered, other planets might meet the same fate as Alderaan.

Mere moments after Obi-Wan leaves, however, R2, who is still scanning through the Death Star’s computer, discovers that Leia is on board.  And, because the Imperial forces had already gone to Dantooine and determined that she’d lied about the location of the Rebel Base, she has been sentenced for execution.   This information horrifies Luke, and he immediately turns to Han for his assistance in rescuing Leia.  At first, Han isn’t interested in saving Leia, because he’s not interested in risking his life for some random person.  But Luke manages to convince him by pointing out that he’ll probably be rewarded handsomely for helping rescue her.  And so a rescue attempt is hatched.  Once again impersonating Stormtroopers, Han and Luke make their way down to the detention area, pretending to be escorting Chewbacca as their prisoner.  R2 and 3PO, however, remain behind in the control room and try to keep from being discovered.

When they make their way down to the detention area, they manage to take out the guards by utilizing this whole ruse in which Chewbacca pretends to break free from his restraints, and Han and Luke pretend to try and corral him when they’re actually aiming at the prison guards.   For good measure, Chewbacca even takes out the security cameras.  Once the final prison guard is gunned down, Luke proceeds to try and locate Leia’s cell while Han deals with the fact that one of the prison guards had attempted to contact someone during the attack.  This leads to that classic scene of Han trying to prevent anyone from coming down to check up on them, but to no avail.  So now time is of the essence.

Luke soon locates Leia’s cell.  At first, Leia is skeptical of him due to his Stormtrooper disguise.  But she immediately decides to trust him when Luke reveals he’s there with Obi-Wan.  Except he refers to him as Ben Kenobi.  Which leads to the slight issue of how Leia seemed to know that Obi-Wan went by Ben. Regardless, their escape route is quickly blocked off by Imperials.  And when Luke tries to contact 3PO with a comlink, they discover the whole Death Star is on high alert now, as their presence has been detected.

And this is when Leia shows the steel beneath the velvet.  Upon realizing these two boneheads haven’t come up with a proper escape plan, she takes matters into her own hands and creates an alternative escape route through the garbage chute.  One-by-one, Chewbacca, Luke and Han all follow her down there.  

Unfortunately, they’re now trapped, as the only door out of the trash chamber is magnetically sealed, so they can’t shoot their way out.  Han learns this the hard way, as his blaster bolt bounces right off and reverberates around the room for a bit.  Before they can think of a way out of their situation, some aquatic creature called a Dianoga attacks Luke by dragging him underwater.  To be honest, I’m not entirely certain what the point of the Dianoga was.  But my pal, @revanmeetra87, informed me that this creature has an elaborate backstory. According to her, the Dianoga is apparently Force Sensitive and was able to sense Luke was, too.  Apparently, the Dianoga wasn’t trying to drown Luke, but was initiating some kind of baptismal ritual designed by her kind for Force Sensitive individuals.  While this would present the question as to why she didn’t extend the same treatment towards Leia, perhaps the Dianoga would have gotten to her, next.  If the sounds of the trash compactor engines hadn’t scared her off, first.

Yeah, it turns out that our heroes landed right in the middle of a trash compactor, which starts up at that very moment.  In a desperate attempt at saving their lives, Han, Leia and Chewbacca start trying to stop the walls from closing in while Luke frantically tries to contact 3PO and R2 through the comlink.  Although, the movie decides to add some tension into the moment, because 3PO had ended up turning the comlink off because Imperials had been lurking outside the control room.  

This leads to a scene when I really start to think some of the Imperials are incompetent morons.  They end up discovering the presence of 3PO and R2 in the control room, but then they just let them leave when 3PO claims to be taking R2 down to the maintenance room to treat his overrun circuits.  Granted these Imperials might not have been informed that two Droids had possession of the stolen Death Star plans, but even so.  Anyway, it’s not until they make it down to maintenance that R2 reminds 3PO that he turned off the comlink.  And in the nick of time, because R2 now has barely enough time to shut down the trash compactor.  Of course, he manages to do so in time, so our heroes’ lives are spared.

Upon getting out of the garbage pit, we get a scene with Han and Leia essentially butting heads, on account of them both being headstrong people, and they’re both too accustomed to being the one giving the orders.  However, they can both agree on one thing- that it’s in their best interest to get back to the Millennium Falcon in one piece.  Of course, nothing is ever easy, and they end up running into some Stormtroopers along the way.   This results in them getting temporally separated, with Han and Chewbacca charging off in one direction while Luke and Leia head off in another.  Eventually, however, both groups manage to evade their pursuers and make it back to the hanger where the Millennium Falcon is waiting.  The problem is, their path is once again blocked by a group of Stormtroopers.  So how are they going to get past them?

The answer ends up coming in the form of Obi-Wan.  While Han, Luke and Chewbacca were off rescuing Leia, Obi-Wan had managed to navigate his way down to the tractor beam’s terminal and deactivated it. But when he was making his way back to rejoin the others, he finds himself face to face with Vader.  The two soon engage in a lightsaber duel.  Though it’s not nearly as impressive as their battle on Mustifar.  Though I suppose it’s understandable, as Obi-Wan is now considerably older, and it’s doubtful Vader’s life support/armor provides him with much mobility.  

Anyway, this lightsaber battle ends up catching the attention of the Stormtroopers standing guard, and they proceed to leave their posts for a better look.  With their way clear, Luke, Han, Leia and Chewbacca can proceed to hurry over to the ship.  And so can 3PO and R2, who just happened to be nearby.  But on his way to the ship, Luke stops in his tracks when he notices Obi-Wan and Vader’s duel.

And this is when Obi-Wan is a total boss.  He notices Luke watching and, seemingly knowing that Luke wouldn’t leave otherwise, he decides to simply allow Vader to kill him.  Which he does.  Of course, the moment Vader cuts him down, Obi-Wan’s body instantly vanishes, signifying the old Jedi has quite literally become one with the Force.

Of course, Luke is horrified at the sight of Obi-Wan’s death, but his cry of vehemence alerts the Stormtroopers to their presence.  This results in a brief shoot-out.  In the end, however, Luke is urged to get onto the ship and make his escape by Obi-Wan’s disembodied voice.  (And for some reason, Luke doesn’t seen that shocked at hearing Obi-Wan’s voice.)

Because Obi-Wan had managed to deactivate the Tractor Beam, Han is able to fly the Millennium Falcon away from the Death Star.  But they’re not out of the woods, yet, as a few TIE Fighters proceed to chase after them.  So before they can fully escape, Luke and Han team up to man the Millennium Falcon’s canons. They eventually manage to shoot all of them down and get away.

On a side note, I have to comment on the short scene when Leia is comforting Luke over Obi-Wan’s death.  I’m probably alone, but when I watched this scene again, it struck me how strange and surreal it was.  For starters, Luke seems more broken up over Obi-Wan’s death than he did about the deaths of the aunt and uncle who raised him.  I mean, did Luke have a long-standing relationship with Obi-Wan when he still thought he was simply Ben the Hermit?   Also, props to Leia for acting compassionate to Luke.  She could have very easily been all ‘oh, boo hoo, the old man you started mentoring from yesterday died.  It’s not as if you had to watch your home planet blow up, along with everyone you knew and loved.’  Leia really deserves more credit than she usually gets.

Regardless, once they’ve gotten away from the Death Star, we get another scene of Leia and Han butting heads.  Han comes in being all cocky, confident that they’ve just pulled off a pretty epic jailbreak.  But Leia isn’t as confident, as she is able to (correctly) conclude that Vader and the other Imperials allowed them to escape and are now tracking the Millennium Falcon.  Although Han believes it’s impossible for his ship to be tracked.  (Even though he should remember that Enfrys Nest managed to track the Millennium Falcon years ago.)  In a related story, if Leia is so sure the Empire planted a tracking devise on the Millennium Falcon, why would she then knowingly have Han fly right to the Rebel Base on Yaven 4?

Anyway, the scene continues with Han insisting that he doesn’t care about Leia and the rebellion, and he was only assisting in her rescue for the reward money.  The scene also kinda sets up a potential love triangle involving our three main heroes.  Which is pretty ewey for the viewers who already know about Luke and Leia’s connection.

Finally, they reach Yaven 4, where Leia is welcomed with open arms by the leaders of the Rebel Alliance.  They also offer her their condolences about Alderaan, which is probably the only time the movies acknowledge how much Leia lost.  But Leia is wearing her metaphorical business-first suit and proceeds to inform the Rebellion about the Death Star pans implanted within R2.

As such, we enter into the movie’s final act.  The Rebels are able to plan an attack on the deadly space station by utilizing the information about the Death Star’s weakness.  The plan involves deploying a fleet of X-Wings to attack the Death Star. One of the fighters has to aim a direct hit into a 2 meter wide thermal exhaust port that leads right to the main reactor.  A direct hit to this spot will set off a chain reaction that will result in the Death Star’s destruction.  Of course, time is of the essence, as the Death Star is on its way, having tracked them to Yaven 4.  And they plan to direct a full-powered blast at the Rebel-occupied moon the moment their trajectory is clear.  So, the X-Wing pilots have a time limit, because if they don’t destroy the Death Star in time, it will destroy the Rebel Base, and the majority of the Rebel Alliance along with it.

Luke ends up joining the pilots who will participate in the Battle of the Death Star, stating he’s had plenty of practice in hitting 2 meter targets when he shot at womp rats back on Tatooine.  As he’s preparing to be deployed, he encounters Han, who is in the process of loading up the reward money he’d gotten for Leia’s safe return into the Millennium Falcon.  Luke is crushed that Han is bailing with the money and tries to convince him to stay and help them fight, as they could really benefit from a pilot of his caliber. But Han is not swayed, stating he needs the money to pay off some debts, and that he views attacking the Death Star to be an act of suicide and not bravery.  Deciding that Han is not going to change his mind, Luke bids him goodbye, but he makes his disappointment in him clear.

Also, within the Special Edition, Luke also ends up crossing paths with Biggs, his closest childhood friend from Tatooine.  Though it’s hard to be too invested in this friendship, as we hadn’t seen Biggs at all before this point, and Luke only mentioned him twice in the beginning.  At least there’s an old deleted scene in which we see more of Luke and Biggs’ interactions.  Too bad that was cut from the final film.

Without further ado, the movie’s big space battle begins.  It’s a pretty standard Star Wars space battle, with X-Wings dodging the Death Star’s defensive cannons, as well as a trio of TIE Fighters, including one manned by Vader himself.  During the battle, Luke continues to hear Obi-Wan’s voice, offering him guidance along the way.  To make a long story short, a lot of Rebel pilots get killed during the battle. (And I do feel particularly bad for this one pilot.  It was a bit mean spirited of them to give the overweight pilot the name ‘Porkins.’)  In what was undoubtedly supposed to be an upsetting moment, Luke’s friend, Biggs ends up being among the pilots who are killed.  But the emotional impact is sorely lacking due to the fact that we know absolutely nothing about this guy.   All we know is that he was Luke’s oldest friend. In the end, only Luke and a Rebel pilot called Wedge are left.  But Wedge has to retreat, as his ship is damaged by enemy gunfire and can no longer be of much assistance.

In the end, it’s all down to Luke.  At first, he attempts to use his targeting computer to aim his ship’s missiles at the exhaust port.  But Obi-Wan’s voice urges Luke once again to trust the Force, instead.  Luke decides to listen to Obi-Wan’s voice and relies on his feelings while aiming his shot.  

However, without the rest of the Rebel pilots backing him up, Luke is vulnerable against the TIE Fighters that Vader and two other Imperial pilots are manning.   Interestingly, Vader is able to sense that the Force is strong with Luke.  Though it’s doubtful he even suspects that the pilot he’s targeting is his long-lost son. Which makes me wonder when he started to figure it out.

But just when Vader tries to shoot Luke down, he’s startled when one of the other TIE Fighters get hit from behind.  It turns out that Han had a change of heart after all and came back to assist in the battle at the last minute.  Thanks to Han, the TIE Fighters are either blown away, with Vader’s ship tail-spinning away in a random direction.  Now that Luke is in the clear, he is able to make the shot.  And because he trusted in the Force to guide his shot, it lands directly into the designated exhaust port.  As a result, the Death Star is destroyed in an instant.  And in the nick of time, as the Death Star had been seconds away from firing its deadly laser blast at Yaven 4.

At the Rebel base, Luke returns in triumph.  Everyone greets him with expressions of gratitude for his part in putting an end to the threat of the Death Star, with Leia leading the charge.  They also express their appreciation to Han for coming back.  However, it’s revealed that R2 was badly damaged during the fight, much to 3PO’s anguish.  Because in spite of his bad attitude at the start, I guess we’re supposed to realize the two Droids really were close friends.  But Luke is confident that they’ll be able to repair the little Droid, and he proceeds to walk off with Han and Leia to celebrate their victory against the Empire.

An undetermined amount of time later, an award ceremony is held, in which Leia presents metals of honor to Han and Luke for their actions during the Battle of the Death Star.  And, despite the movie’s attempt to draw out the tension by not revealing him right away, it’s ultimately shown that R2 is indeed alright.  The movie ends with the Rebel forces applauding Han and Luke, commending them.  Though I feel it’s a bit unfair that Chewbacca didn’t get awarded a metal as well. After all, he helped in the fight, too.  So where’s Chewbacca’s metal?  Also, I wonder where Luke got the suit he wore for the award ceremony.  Remember, he left Tatooine with only the clothes on his back.  So where’d he get that suit?  Do you think it actually belonged to Han, and he loaned it to Luke out of friendship?

So, does this movie hold up today?  For the most part, I say it does.  Even though there are a few plot holes.  And some of the scene transitions are a bit jarring, but I guess that should just be chalked up to the fact that this movie was made in the 70s.  Although, I do wonder what would have happened if the story had completely ended with this movie, with no other sequels being made. Because if this movie hadn’t received the kind of reception it did, they might not have made another Star Wars movie. Personally, I’m glad it didn’t work out that way.  Because while the movie does end on a triumphant note, it’s still rather open-ended. After all, Darth Vader is still out there, so there would have been no resolution to that plot point if the movie hadn’t taken off the way it died.  Not to mention the fact that the Empire probably still exists.

However, with every cultural phenomenon, there are bound to be some low points.  And that will be the focus of next week’s review.

(Click here to go back to the directory)

[papermoonloveslucy]

NEW TV SHOW

August 14, 1962

HOLLYWOOD (UPI) - There is something ludicrous in the sight of a man trying to do a woman's work. A man looks about as silly wielding a dust mop as a woman does trying to throw a baseball overhand.  

But even funnier, I think is a woman trying to do a man's work. I don't mean in the professions or trades — I mean around the house. Certain household functions like climbing ladders and fixing light switches have a built in logic that is completely foreign to the feminine mind.  (1)

I think this has a universally comedic element in it. It had better have —  because that’s the premise of the new television show I’ll be doing on the CBS Television Network this fall under the title “The Lucille Ball Show.” 

Maybe it should be named “The Lucy Show" (2) — because that's the character I’ll be playing: The same improbable kook I had so much practice at playing on “I Love Lucy." She's a widow with two children trying to be both the lady of the house and the man of the house. As you might suspect, if you knew Lucy, she approaches her problems in a kind of inside-out way. (3)

Like Most Women 

Actually, Lucy is like most women, only more so. 

After 11 years of playing Lucy it may be that I’ve acquired some of her characteristics, or maybe she has acquired some of mine. This question, if it must he answered, will have to be answered by someone else. But whatever the answer, I’d like to say that I love Lucy, too — and whatever changes in her situation, I'm going to do my best to day her the way she’s always been. 

In this, I’m happy to report, I'll have expert assistance. Vivian Vance will be with me for one thing. (4) Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Martin, Bob Weiskopf and Bob Schiller will be writing the new show (5) — and they are the ones who as writers of “I Love Lucy" made Lucy what she is as much as I did.  

Desi Is Producer 

And of course, Desi Arnaz will be the executive producer of the new series. (6)

A decade without a vacation can make you pretty tired and when we stopped filming “I Live Lucy” I was just that. But I didn’t take a vacation. I went into Broadway musical '“Wildcat," and by time I'd been in that show for a year (7), I was exhausted. So I took a year off — a sort of sabbatical — from work. It was a wonderful vacation and I finally had time to do a lot id things I'd never had time for before. I enjoyed it so much I didn't get excited about the new series until Vivian and I started getting down to specific discussions with the writers and Elliott Lewis, our producer. 

Then I suddenly realized how much I had missed Lucy.

I just hope everyone else has missed her as much.

#    #    #

FOOTNOTES FROM THE FUTURE

(1) This opening paragraph seems extremely sexist in the present day. Bear in mind that in 1961, America had not gone through the women’s liberation movement, and the culmination of the Equal Rights Amendment was still more than a decade away.  Lucy’s gender role thoughts reflect a very 1950s ideal. The very first image of Lucy and Ethel in 1951 (above) was of them washing dishes.  As the Lucy character ages, comedy based on these type of domestic stereotypes will wear thin. 

(2) The working title of the show was “The Lucille Ball Show” but it was eventually changed to “The Lucy Show” before the first broadcast in October 1962.  Lucille is not being entirely truthful with the public.  In reality, when “I Love Lucy” / “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour” ended in April 1960, they were without their iconic star and ratings dipped.  Similarly, Desilu was also facing financial trouble.  The creation of a new show for Lucille was the natural answer to these problems, and Ball agreed to do it for one - possibly two seasons - but no more.  As with “I Love Lucy”, however, syndication is where the real money was - and “The Lucy Show” would need more than two seasons to be successfully syndicated.  So at the end of 1964, Ball re-upped, although the series changed greatly from its original premise.  

(3) The premise of the show was borrowed from the book “Life Without George” by Irene Kampen, who got screen credit on every episode.  In the book, Viv’s character was also a widow, but for TV was changed to a divorcee. Vivian played the first divorced female leading character on a TV sitcom.    

(4) Vance agreed to return to Desilu, despite having moved East to live with her new husband. The rigorous schedule and great distance finally proved to much, and she left the series after season 3.  She made guest appearances on “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy.” 

(5) Writers Madelyn Martin (formerly Pugh), Bob Carroll Jr., Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf stayed with the series through the end of season two in spring 1964.  They still received screen credits for all 156 episodes as ‘creators’.  They left the show after being with Lucille since “My Favorite Husband” in 1948, claiming they were out of ideas! 

(6) Desi Arnaz stayed as Executive Producer for 13 episodes. He had sold his shares in Desilu to Lucille, and wanted to usher in the new series.  Once the show was on his feet, he resigned, but mutual agreement. 

(7) Lucille began doing “Wildcat” on October 29, 1960 (out of town tryouts), and had undergone several weeks rehearsal prior to that.  The show opened on Broadway on December 16, 1960.  Eight performances a week singing and dancing proved taxing for the nearly 50 year old star, and she had to withdraw from the show due to exhaustion at the end of May 1961.  Ball’s understudy assumed the role, and the show closed shortly afterwards.  There were plans to bring it back in the fall (with or without Ball, no one knows), but they never materialized. All tolled, Ball was in the show for seven months, a few months shorter than the year she claims here.  Preparations for such an endeavor, however, likely began months earlier than rehearsals, so it was likely close to a year all said and done.  

[romionesecretsanta]

Knowing

Merry Christmas, @like-a-whisper​ !! I hope you have a lovely holiday and enjoy your gift. :)

###

“When did you know?”

“Know what?” Ron asked his brother as he motioned to the bartender for another round.

George traced the rim of his empty glass. “When did you know you were going to marry Hermione?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Just making conversation.”

Ron shot him an incredulous look.

“What?”

“Really, George?”

“Can you just answer the question instead of making this a bigger to-do than it needs to be?” George snapped irritably as the barkeep slid new glasses toward them. “Cheers,” he added shortly.

“Well, I dunno how to answer,” Ron retorted.

“I’m not asking for the gory details,” George replied. “I’m just asking when.”

“Well, I don’t know when,” Ron said. “Long before I actually asked, I s’pose.”

“This isn’t helpful,” George sighed, running a hand through his hair.

“I assume you’re asking because of Ange?” Ron guessed, eyeing his brother warily. “‘Cause I think she’d be a great sister-in-law, obviously, but it’s your decision.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So what do you want me to say, then?”

George rested his elbow on the bar and used his hand to prop his head up, tilting toward Ron. “Dunno. I just…I want to know what’s going to happen if we do it, I reckon.”

“Well, you’ll get married,” Ron reasoned. “Which is nice, there’s a big party and all. You’ll have to see a few of our less pleasant relatives, but they do come bearing gifts.”

“Can you be serious for a second?”

“I am. I’m telling you that you’re seriously out of your mind, mate,” Ron said. “There’s no way to know what’s going to happen. And if that’s all that’s holding you back-”

“Then how do you know it’s not going to fall apart?” George retorted.

“Do you think it would with Angelina?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Just that I don’t know that it won’t.”

Ron softened a bit as he watched his brother’s shoulders slump. When he’d first asked the question, he’d assumed George was going to take the mickey out of him something fierce - but there was sincerity there he hadn’t expected, though perhaps he should have. They weren’t teenagers anymore; they trusted each other, and it had taken a long time to get to this point. It wouldn’t help matters if he got preemptively defensive every time George toed the line toward a sensitive subject. He hesitated a moment, choosing his next words more carefully.

“Marrying somebody isn’t saying you know what’s going to happen, though,” Ron reasoned. “It’s saying whatever happens, you’re in it together.”

“S’pose,” George allowed. “I’ve just been waiting for…a realization, I guess? A sign? I dunno. Merlin, this sounds ridiculous.”

“Doesn’t sound like you, honestly,” Ron agreed.

“Yeah, I know,” George admitted. “Maybe it’s just the time of year, you know? The holidays and all that, makes you look for that sort of thing.”

“Well, there wasn’t one big moment for me,” Ron told him honestly. “It was a lot of little moments.”

“Well, yeah, I’ve got loads of those,” George replied. “I could come up with three, just today.”

“Trust those.” Ron finished his drink with one long sip. “Those moments are when life happens. I mean, yeah, you’ll go through a lot of big stuff together, just look at me and Hermione. But those big moments weren’t when I fell in love with her. That happened along the way, every time she believed in me when I thought I was too useless to write an essay or take a test, every time she laughed at one of my jokes while we were playing chess. So I guess I knew, yeah, but I knew because we’d already built something worth fighting for, just being ourselves every day. So it wasn’t just something we felt; we chose each other.”

George whistled. “Right, then.”

“What?” Ron snapped, suddenly self-conscious again.

“No, I’m not criticizing, or whatever,” George said quickly. “Really, I’m not.”

“What then?”

“I…I do feel that way, about Ange,” George sighed. “It’s just not easy, the not knowing how things will play out. Hasn’t been, not since…”

“I know,” Ron said, his voice lower now. “But not knowing what’ll happen a decade from now shouldn’t keep you from taking the leap.”

“Yeah,” George agreed. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not like I have doubts, you know? Not about her, anyway.”

“I know what you mean,” Ron replied. “Just don’t stand in your own way, yeah?”

“Alright.” George finished his drink and slid his jacket on. “Not a word of this to the others, got it?”

Ron smirked. “Wouldn’t want them to know you’ve got feelings, would we?”

“Oh, shut it.”

“Not a word. Promise.”

###

The small bar where he had met his brother was only three blocks away from the flat he and Hermione shared, and Ron was happy to walk. The air wasn’t too cold, despite the thin layer of snow that covered the grass from a small storm that had blown through the previous evening. The trees on the other side had been adorned with strings of lights, and the whole world felt like Christmas.

He’d told George the truth - he couldn’t pinpoint exactly when he’d known he wanted to marry Hermione. He could hardly remember a time he hadn’t known, really. From the time they got together, honestly, even if he hadn’t exactly admitted to himself at first. It felt like a lifetime ago, though he supposed it had only been six years - time was funny that way. Some days he could close his eyes and be seventeen again, as though no time had passed at all; others, he could hardly believe it had only been a year and a half since their wedding day - it felt like they’d always been like this.

When he arrived at last to the door of their flat, Ron was greeted by the seasonal scent of gingerbread wafting from the kitchen. It was, if he was being totally honest, the only thing Hermione was very good at baking, but she wasn’t just good at it. Her gingerbread was excellent, and she took the time to painstakingly decorate each little figure as if they were a real person, with details on their clothing and a unique face. Sure enough, when he glanced at the table, he saw row upon row of neatly organized gingerbread men (and women) - but no Hermione.

“Hermione? I’m home!” he called out as he swiped the nearest treat - this one had blue sprinkles for hair and a purple frosted bow tie. He took a bite and instantly felt as though he had transcended several universes - perhaps it had been the first time he’d tasted her gingerbread that he’d decided to marry her, after all!

“I’m in bed,” he heard her voice call back.

“Already?”

“It’s past midnight,” came her response, but he heard no annoyance in her voice. “You’re not eating my gingerbread men, are you?”

“Course not.”

“Liar.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

“After you finish chewing, I expect.”

Ron couldn’t help but chuckle; she knew him too well. He scarfed down the rest in two bites, wiped the crumbs from his face and sauntered to their bedroom where he found his wife reading a newspaper by lamplight. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Hermione folded the paper and stretched out her arms. Ron quickly slipped out of his jeans, crawled into bed next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she laid her head on his chest and snuggled into him. He grinned as her soft curls tickled his chin. “What did George want?”

“Oh, just a bit of business with the shop,” he dismissed, keeping his promise to his brother. “I was thinking of something earlier, though.”

“What’s that?”

“When did you decide to marry me?”

“What do you mean?” Hermione asked. She was tracing circles on his chest.

“Was there a moment you just knew?”

“Hmm. I…I don’t suppose I’ve ever thought of it like that,” she said slowly. “It was a lot of moments, really.

Ron’s smile grew, and he squeezed her shoulders affectionately. “Me, too.”

“Now that I think of it, though, I suppose the first one was that summer after the war. Do you remember?”

“Love, there were about forty thousand moments for me that summer,” Ron said honestly.

“Well, yes, but do you remember the first time I told you that I loved you?”

“Course. I thought I was dreaming.”

“You did seem a bit dazed,” Hermione recalled warmly. “You said it back, though.”

“We were just about to go to Australia, weren’t we?”

“Well, I was about to go. Then you made it clear it would be actually be ‘we.’”

“Wasn’t going to let you go alone, was I?”

“I just remember feeling so unsure about everything,” Hermione said, tilting her head so her chin was resting on his chest and he could peer down into her eyes. “I felt like I was drowning. And then I came to talk to you about it, and it just felt…simple. Like everything was going to be okay, even though it wasn’t.”

“Well, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, either,” Ron admitted bashfully, feeling the tips of his ears burn. “I just knew we ought to face whatever was coming together.”

“But that’s all that mattered, in the end,” Hermione replied. “And that’s what I realized, too. That even if everything else felt like it was falling apart, I wanted you with me through all of it. I might not have been thinking about marriage, specifically, but…”

“Well, no, but that’s what it is, isn’t it?” Ron agreed. “It’s choosing each other, every day.”

“Absolutely.” Hermione raised herself up and kissed his lips gently. “Now, what brought this on?”

“Oh, just thinking about the whole idea of knowing you’ll end up with someone,” Ron replied. “I’ve never really gotten it, I suppose. I mean, yeah, I knew with you, but that’s because we built us, you know?”

“Well, I’ve never bought into the idea that any relationship is written in the stars,” Hermione said thoughtfully. “But I do think there’s a bit of that, with us.”

“You do?”

“Well, don’t you?” Hermione asked. “I’ve always felt like things played out the way they were supposed to, if there’s any such thing.”

“I don’t think I’d be the person I am if I hadn’t known you since I was eleven,” Ron offered.

“Same goes vice versa,” Hermione confirmed. “And I think there’s something to be said for that, for meeting the right person at the right time. I think there’s a lot of poetry in the way things happened with us. Whether that’s a happy accident or not, I don’t know, but I like to think it’s part of something bigger, I suppose.”

“Hermione Granger, the girl who walked out of third year Divination,” Ron remarked with a chuckle.

“Yes, well,” she said primly. “Love makes you believe all kinds of crazy things.”

Ron smiled again and drew her in to his chest with both arms, engulfing her in a bear hug and pressing a kiss to the top of her curls. The truth was that he didn’t care - destiny, fate, coincidence, what have you - so long as he got to fall asleep with her in his arms every night, kiss her every morning before he left for work, listen to laugh and feel like the sun was shining from her face. It didn’t matter when he knew or why it happened, so long as he got to love her for the rest of his life.

“Happy Christmas, Hermione,” he murmured into her hair, cherishing the feeling of her pressed against him - and smiling again when her sleepy, contented voice murmured a reply.

“Happy Christmas, Ron.”

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

June 7, 2020

My weekly review of things I have been thinking about and doing. Topics include crime and urbanism, the I5 bridge placement, NEPA, advances in automated reasoning, public health’s damaged reputation, and ongoing protests.

The Public Safety and Urbanism Nexus

I tend to think about cities in physical terms. My work revolves around concepts like energy consumption, land use, and traffic throughput. But cities are, first and foremost, engines for social activity, and the social aspects of how cities function needs to be prominent. In light of recent events, I have been thinking about how public safety, and the perception thereof, both shapes and is shaped by the urban form, and how urbanists should think about crime and policing.

Needless to say, public safety is a huge topic that cannot adequately be done justice in this manner. Maintenance of public order--and in a constitutional republic such as the United States, protection of the citizens’ Constitutional rights--is arguably the most basic function of the state in that all other state functions require that public safety be maintained.

Cities tend to operate under several scaling laws, in that city attributes grow nonlinearly with city size. The concept known as agglomeration economy tells us that as a city size increases, per capita commerce increases (a decent estimate is a 12% increase for doubling the city size). Unfortunately, this applies to crime, which is an undesired form of commerce. Several studies (e.g this, this, this, and this) find that per capita crime rates tend to increase with city size. Such studies are typically done by comparing crime statistics across cities in a given country at a point in time, and then fitting a curve.

I would expect to identify a certain equilibrium. A given population will distribute itself across cities based on consideration of tradeoffs between advantages (greater wealth, access to amenities, transportation efficiencies, environmental benefits, etc.) and disadvantages (crime, communicable disease--another timely topic--, stress, etc.) of large cities. An important element in the growth of cities is the mitigation of the drawbacks, such as through modern policing and public health. We know that there factors other than city size that are important in understanding crime rates, evidenced through the drop in crime in New York City and other large US cities since the 1990s, or the wide differences in crime rates between cities of comparable sizes in different countries. Therefore, a better understanding and practice of crime reduction is necessary in the urbanist project of building large cities that offer a high quality of life.

That is about where my understanding of the issue comes to an end. The next step will be to better understand how crime works, why it varies in the way that it does, and what practical solutions are best supported by the evidence.

The I5 Bridge Replacement

If crime is the oldest issue that cities grapple with, the I5 crossing over the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington is the second oldest. It wouldn’t surprise me if we have flying cars before we have a new bridge.

This week Oregon Metro took up the issue in a work session and showed this lovely diagram of the project development process.

I think it is fair to say that I am more engaged in these issues than most citizens, yet I find this diagram to be completely inscrutable. I don’t know when, how, or to whom I should take my comments on the project design, so I usually go to my elected representatives in different governmental bodies in the hope that they will route the comments to the right place.

But I think I am also catching on to why these complex committee and community engagement structures are designed as they are. With this system, the working and advisory groups can reach out to designated community groups, knowing generally what they are going to say, and tell the legislatures and federal government that they did their community engagement homework. There isn’t much risk that the process will generate much public comment that is out of bounds of what is expected. Perhaps it is telling that the elected portions of the state governments are mostly outside that green community engagement cartoon cloud of toxic gas.

Much has been written as well as to why infrastructure costs in the United States are so high and project timelines are so long. Highly bureaucratized planning processes are no doubt a piece of the puzzle.

Executive Action on NEPA

This week the Trump Administration issued an Executive Order streamlining NEPA reviews for federal infrastructure projects. This invokes an interpretation of NEPA that would allows normal environment review to be bypassed for emergency situations, taking the current economic situation as an emergency.

I am a supporter of streamlining NEPA, particularly of the (separate) two year review proposal the administration made earlier this year. However, the recent EO does not offer a permanent solution, based as it is in emergency conditions, and it is legally dubious. And while I very much believe that NEPA needs to be reformed, I won’t go so far as to call for getting rid of it, which the current EO would nearly do de facto.

I experienced Twitter at its best on this issue, where several people greatly improved my understanding of the issue.

On the Infrastructure of Artificial Intelligence

A couple weeks ago I commented on the infrastructure of AI, echoing (what I understand to be) Eric Drexler’s view that the development of artificial general intelligence, when it comes, will focus less on autonomous agents and more on stitching together AI’s for narrow tasks. This raises the question of infrastructure, or how the stitching will actually be done.

This week a very interesting paper appeared on the ArXiv on learning from knowledge graph embeddings. To summarize, the authors pulled some data from Twitter on Australian politics, built an ontology and knowledge graph from it, embedded it in a vector space, and used deep learning to extract new knowledge. Several models were tested; the accuracy of facts determined ranged from about 70-80%.

This number doesn’t sound too exciting in itself, but I find it remarkable that the method works at all. This paper also marks progress in automated reasoning and knowledge extraction, a subtopic of AI that has been resistant to progress for a long time. It may also serve as a rebuke to deep learning skeptics (of which I was one until recently). It should be kept in mind that the results are based on Twitter data, which isn’t high quality data to say the least.

The paper itself is quite readable. Aside from a few of the finer mathematical points, I didn’t have any trouble understanding what was going on. Implementing the full model as described would be a challenge, but there are many subcomponents to play around with.

I am optimistic that this decade is going see some major progress in automated reasoning. Such progress will, no doubt, bring us tangibly closer to AGI.

Whither Public Health Leadership?

The last few months have been a trying time in the United States and around the world. As with individuals, institutions that are strong and healthy are likely to come out of the pandemic all right; institutions that are weak and unhealthy are in trouble. And it looks like public health, broadly speaking, is in serious trouble.

The trouble began in January, with the FDA’s inexplicable failure to allow supplies of testing and PPE to ramp up, even as news out of China made it clear that we were facing a serious risk. Throughout February, as the virus started spreading to South Korea, Italy, Iran, and other countries, most leaders in the United States dithered on getting regulations ready. It was the NBA, of all institutions, that first took decisive action by canceling their season on March 11 and finally set off wider action.

In mid-March, the public was alarmed, overwhelmingly supporting strong restrictions on activity, and was ready for leadership. Unfortunately, leadership was not forthcoming. By April it was becoming apparent that states were still making halting progress at best on testing and contact tracing, while the White House was embarrassing itself with the daily briefings. While partisanship no doubt played a role, I think it was a justifiable loss of confidence in state leadership that triggered the round of anti-lockdown protests that picked up in April.

This week, 1288 public health experts nuked what remains of their profession’s credibility with an open letter supporting ongoing mass protests. Whatever the merits of the protests’ cause (more on that below), it is clear to all that the letter signatories put ideology ahead of evidence. The affair makes a mockery of those of us who faced business losses, disrupted travel plans, missed wedding and funerals, and otherwise accepted hardship in the interest of fighting a serious health threat and were just starting to see the United States turn the corner on the death toll.

I hope the optimists, who say that there has been enough mask wearing at the protests, and that the virus doesn’t transmit outdoors very well, are right. I think it is more likely that this week, we will start seeing clear evidence of the protests in statistics, with possibly tens of thousands of deaths that will ultimately be attributed to them. State and local governments will lack the credibility needed to impose, or even maintain, restrictions on public activity if we see a big case jump.

I distinguish between two types of disasters. A Katrina-class disaster is one that causes the public to lose faith in particular politicians or parties. After Hurricane Katrina, the administrations of George W. Bush and Kathleen Blanco, governor of Louisiana at the time, never recovered. A Chernobyl-class disaster is one that causes the public to lose faith in the system as a whole (or at least play a contributing role). For the United States, COVID-19 may well fall into the latter category.

Thoughts on Ongoing Protests

I don’t have a whole lot to say here that isn’t being repeated thousands of times over already, but I’ll say it anyway.

Police departments in the United States--not all, but enough to cause alarm--are deeply infected with corruption and unaccountability. Reform is needed. Justin Amash has introduced legislation that will remove qualified immunity from law enforcement, and I am pleased that my own representative, Suzanne Bonamici, is a cosponsor. There is a whole range of reforms needed: end civil asset forfeiture, stop providing military equipment to police departments, use alternatives to armed police in situations where that is more appropriate, and curb the power of corrupt police unions. It is too bad that it takes a crisis to catalyze change, but I am optimistic that we will see some reforms shortly. What we all saw happen to George Floyd should never be tolerated.

In a misguided attempt at wokeness, several prominent publications have attempted to justify or minimize the wave of rioting and looting that occurred last week. Violence and property destruction should not be tolerated, and indeed they are important reminders of why we need a strong police force.

It is easy to get discouraged at the state of race relations in the United States, but I think we should also appreciate the enormous progress we have made. We are undoubtedly in a far better place today than during the Jim Crow era. To say that we have made no progress, or that the country is irredeemably tainted by racism, is to denigrate the major achievements by past generations of civil rights activists. I have my suspicion that contemporary social justice ideology, which fosters an exaggerated culture of grievance without offering practical solutions, bears at least a portion of the blame for ongoing problems.

[junker-town]

The evolution of Kawhi Leonard as a defender

Kawhi Leonard is still the league’s scariest defender.

Kawhi Leonard’s vintage defense is the key to the Clippers’ championship hopes.

Five years ago, Kawhi Leonard’s defensive impact was explicit. As the first non-center to win consecutive Defensive Player of the Year awards since Sidney Moncrief in 1983 and 1984, Leonard was a human fog machine Gregg Popovich would unleash on whoever the San Antonio Spurs wanted to fluster.

Leonard didn’t just “guard” the best basketball players in the world. He quarantined them. He tattooed his name on the back of their eyelids. He invaded their worst nightmares by condemning them to pockets of loneliness. Leonard isolated opponents with a perfect blend of grace and menace. He hovered and pounced and refused to negotiate.

Few in the history of the sport were more disruptive. It didn’t matter if you were 6’11, JJ Redick, or the best player alive, smack dab in the middle of your physical prime.

In the years that followed, Leonard’s offensive ascension combined with a mercurial quadricep condition to ever-so-slightly suppress what he once was able to do on both ends of the court over the course of an entire season. He didn’t decline on defense so much as see his responsibilities shift; eventually he stopped bodying the opposing team’s best player for 30 minutes every night and began to pick his spots.

But this season there have been extended periods where Leonard’s defensive effort, focus, and impact better resemble his 24-year-old self than what he was last season — a heartening and relevant revelation for a Los Angeles Clippers team that’s all-in trying to win its very first NBA championship.

During All-Star Weekend, I posed questions about the state of Leonard’s defense to as many players and coaches as I could, including the man himself.

“I never even think of stuff like that,” Leonard said when asked if he could describe his own evolution as a defender over the past half decade. Then he thought about it for a moment. “[It’s] being smarter, knowing the offense a lot better, you know, just trying to be a better overall team player, team defensive player.”

When I followed up by asking if he was at the same defensive level now as he used to be, Leonard was blunt. “I mean, no. That was my job back then. I wasn’t getting the ball as often and my hat had to hang on being the best defensive player. Can’t do that now. It’s too much energy on the floor.”

“I don’t know what much more there is to say other than he’s as good as it is on the other end, when he starts playing.” — Nick Nurse

All that is true in the sense that Leonard is the one who said it; barring a pinch of self-modesty, he would know the answer better than anyone else. Leonard led the Spurs in scoring during the 2015-16 season but his usage rate was eight percent lower than it is right now. The Clippers have built their offense around his gravity and precision. Not including Luka Doncic, no forward finishes more possessions as a pick-and-roll ball-handler. The highest assist rate of his career entering this season was 18.9. Today it’s 28.4.

But sometimes two statements that appear to contradict one another can both be correct. Leonard isn’t who he was five years ago. Sure. But his current apex still rivals the best of the best. He’s a roving scourge who uses countless possessions’ worth of backlogged information and incomparable physical dimensions to seep into the offense’s blood stream. Those massive hands that can squeeze 10 grapefruits at the same time are not smaller than when he wore a Spurs jersey. His wingspan did not shrivel, either.

Last season, Leonard had his fair share of brilliant moments with the Toronto Raptors. He picked pockets, single-handedly made open lanes feel congested, and in certain high-profile games embraced the most challenging matchup on the floor.

Leonard cracked an All-Defensive team, though not the first team — Marcus Smart, Paul George, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Eric Bledsoe all made it over him — and he tied Draymond Green for sixth on the Defensive Player of the Year ballot. But so much of the year was about establishing preservation and balance.

Kawhi finished 249th in defensive real plus-minus and the Raptors had the best defense in the league when he was not on the floor, a trend that carried over into the playoffs when they were never better on that end — by a pretty wide margin — when their best player didn’t play. Leonard’s health and offensive authority took precedent over the gas that’s required to be a true lock-down defender.

On-off numbers aren’t the be-all, end-all, especially in a 223-minute sample size. Most defensive units are only as strong as their weakest link; the Raptors had several all-galaxy defenders on that championship team and haven’t skipped a beat this season. And Leonard was still invaluable for a team that always needed him to reach their goal, most notably when Nick Nurse threw him on Antetokounmpo in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals. The regular-season MVP and his Milwaukee Bucks struggled to generate quality looks through the 99.8 partial possessions Leonard guarded him.

Leonard, with plenty of help, was superb in those final four games, noticeable limp and all. This season, several numbers combine with conventional wisdom to suggest that he has been more impressive on that end than he ever was while with the Raptors.

“As players get older they naturally get better,” Frank Vogel said. “But he’s always had great defensive instincts and great physical tools.”

Leonard is currently sixth in defensive real plus-minus — the metric’s algorithm has changed since 2015, but Leonard finished sixth and ninth, respectively, during the two seasons he won Defensive Player of the Year — and sixth in defensive RAPTOR (among players who’ve logged at least 1,200 minutes). His defensive box plus-minus was a personal-worst 0.7 in Toronto, but right now it’s at 2.4, his career average.

He’s deflecting 3.6 passes (only five players rank higher) in 32.5 minutes per game. Last year he deflected 3.2 passes in 34 minutes. His steals are the same (1.8) despite the slight drop in playing time. In 20 possessions as an isolation defender, he’s holding opponents to 0.65 points per possession, which ranks in the 89th percentile. (Last year he defended 22 possessions and allowed 0.55 points per possession.)

Those isolation numbers are indicative of how much a deterrent Leonard is, and who he regularly guards (i.e. players who aren’t about to take Leonard one-on-one). “If he [switched on me],” Memphis Grizzlies rookie Brandon Clarke laughed. “I’d probably pass it quickly.”

Even more important than the shots that are abolished by his presence and reputation are the ones he actually has to contest. Leonard is holding forwards to 39.6 percent shooting and guards to 36.4 percent. Last season forwards shot 45.6 percent with Leonard on them while guards were at 43.9 percent. He’s as immovable as ever.

Among all active players, Leonard owns the NBA’s second-lowest defensive rating. This year he ranks 11th in that category, and the Clippers allow 103.7 points per 100 possessions when Leonard is on the floor without George. When George is on the floor without Leonard that number shoots up to 108 points per 100 possessions, which is the difference between the second-best defense and 10th-best defense in the league. (A quick contrast: Last year the Raptors allowed 5.4 more points per 100 possessions when Leonard was on the floor without Pascal Siakam.)

“He knows where the ball’s gonna be.” — Ben Simmons

Over the weekend, I asked Nurse if he believed Leonard’s defense was at the Defensive Player of the Year standard he set during his early 20s.

“I think he is. I don’t know, we’ve played them twice earlier in the year. I haven’t seen him play all that much lately. I did watch a bit of the game the other night [against the Boston Celtics]. Listen, he’s as good as there is defensively. He can guard size, he can guard the perimeter, he’s got an incredible knack for getting a key steal or just taking it from somebody, going up and ripping it away and heading the other way. Great rebounder that can go in and grab the big rebound then head the other way as well. So, I don’t know what much more there is to say other than he’s as good as it is on the other end, when he starts playing.”

When you watch the Clippers, those sustained stretches where Leonard “starts playing” are hard to miss. He completely takes over the game by terrorizing everyone who’s wearing a different colored jersey. Take these recent sequences against his former team as an example.

A couple minutes later, he picked DeMar DeRozan up 90 feet from the basket, then late switched onto LaMarcus Aldridge to deny a pass back on the pick-and-pop. This is art.

The NBA is not what it was five years ago, pre-Steph Curry’s tide-changing three pointers. The average three-point rate during the 2014-15 season was 26.8. Right now it’s 38.0. Possessions have shorter lifespans, too, with teams opting to race up and down instead of hunkering down to wage war in the halfcourt. Translation: there’s more ground to cover and less time to do it. Defense is more complex and exhausting than ever before.

It’s unreasonable to expect any human being to sustain the type of activity he showed on this crunch-time excerpt against the Warriors, but 99.9 percent of all the players who pass through the NBA will never rattle an entire team like Leonard does here:

While most defenders chase the ball, Leonard communicates with it directly. The two have a bond that transcends film study or the memorization of an opponent’s tendencies. He doesn’t think through the action or even react to what’s happening. Instead, Leonard makes the play’s result feel like fate by staying one step ahead of everybody else. “He knows where the ball’s gonna be,” Ben Simmons said.

Watch this clip against the Dallas Mavericks. How many players can reach in for a steal at the elbow, then race out to block a shot in the corner in essentially the same motion? As he covers a surreal space in no time at all, not a single watt of energy is wasted.

While in Chicago, I spoke to several players about what it’s like to have Leonard on them, compared to any other defender in the league. The consensus, particularly from those who just entered the league, is filled with wonder.

Aaron Gordon: “He’s got very strong hands.”

Josh Okogie: “When he’s guarding you, you’ve gotta know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, he’s definitely gonna take the ball from you.”

Nickeil Alexander-Walker: “I’ve seen him pickpocket people and I’m like, I don’t even know how he was able to come up with that.”

Eric Paschall: “I don’t know how he does it.”

Jaren Jackson Jr.: “He’s not gonna change his defense for your offense. He’ll play you the way he wants. He’ll have his hand right in the passing lane or in your dribbling area the whole time.”

Leonard will not win his third Defensive Player of the Year award in 2020 for a variety of reasons, the most important being his disdain for the regular season. His effort is up, but he still refuses to pummel each play with the same desperate intensity Antetokounmpo inflicts night after night. Also, the Clippers do not treat Leonard as their defensive spine, like the Los Angeles Lakers or Utah Jazz do with Anthony Davis and Rudy Gobert. It’s still incredibly difficult to impact the game as a perimeter defender, even one who can switch onto bigs and hold his own.

With the regular season’s home stretch bearing down and Moe Harkless — the wing LA regularly stuck on opposing first options earlier this season — traded to New York, Leonard’s defensive impact is set to become an increasingly important variable.

The stakes are clear. If the 28-year-old can simultaneously channel the defender he once was — handcuffing himself to the opponent’s best player until they consider sawing off their own hand, making set plays flow through bumper-to-bumper traffic, etc. — and the offensive force he’s become, through multiple playoff series, the Clippers will boast the best player alive, at the absolute peak of his powers. And with that, they just might be unbeatable, too.

[yashuved]

How To Make Your Dragon

First thing’s first: Dear United States of America, how the hell are you still tolerating Nazis in your country? The world defeated Nazism over 70 years ago, and you played a big part in that. The birthplace of Nazism is more intolerant to it than you. Everyone in the world knows it, condemns it and vehemently opposes it. Everyone but you, it seems. 

The World hopes that for your own sake, you use your sense, just the common one in this case will be good for a start. 

On to happier things…

Last weekend I watched one of the greatest comedians in the world perform live. Jerry Seinfeld graced our shores with a one night only stand-up act and me and the wife were lucky enough to be a part of it.  

He has been doing stand-up shows for 40 years now and he is still the best. He doesn’t do sex. He doesn’t do race. He doesn’t do accents. He doesn’t do impressions. He doesn’t do politics (he didn’t mention Donald Trump at all!). 

90 minutes of non-stop gut wrenching laughter was all about observational humour. Much like his sitcom Seinfeld, which aired 20 years ago, the stand-up act is much about nothing. It just looks at people’s lives, as it goes by each day. The writing is so tight, the performance is so nuanced that you can almost see how much work must’ve gone behind it. He knows how to time the punch lines, he knows exactly when to pause, when to raise and lower his pitch. He knows how to draw the audience in and then take them on a journey.

There is so much class about everything that goes on about the show. Right from the moment you enter the arena. You walk in and there’s Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York blasting on the sound system. You hear that and you know, you’re in for something special. The set decor is simple, yet elegant. Everyone, from the announcer, to the opening act, to Seinfeld himself are dressed in very stylish suits - jacket, tie et al. 

Best of all, there is no fanfare before Jerry’s entrance. No DJ spinning some gangsta shit or some band announcing his entrance. Hell, even the announcer doesn’t do anything at that moment. The lights go out and Jerry just walks on to the stage. 

It was a dream, I never thought would come true. If I could, I would do it all over again. And if you ever get a chance, Do. Not. Miss. It!

Now, on to this week’s GOT. There are spoilers from S7, E6. If you haven’t watched it, you know what to do…

The penultimate episode came with big expectations. This series has been so huge - so many characters, places, houses, lineages, story lines, relations, alliances, enmities and deaths. So many deaths, and bringing-back-from-the-deads.

Now it is nearing towards an end. We know it, the writers know it and they need to do bring it all together in pure GOT style, in GRRM style. 

But I am not sure what is their approach for this though. Are they bringing it as the fans want it? or as they want it, as George RR Martin would want it? GRRM is involved in it, no doubt. But the plot seems to distance itself from GRRM’s style. 

My gripe is not with the writing per se. It is with the plotting of the episode, the narrative style and structure. GOT has taken TV to a new level and in doing so, continuously built and delivered on new expectations. And this is working against them a little bit at this point.

Here are some of my observations/questions/WTFs…My 2 Cents

- Tyrion started off well on his attempt to get Dany to cool down on the people burning part. He was starting to get through to Dany when out of the blue, he started talking about succession! WTF man? She’s right - first get me on the throne and then we can talk about who will succeed me! Plus, what about my ships that Euron Grejoy stole/burnt? What about my important allies that are captured/dead/presumed dead? It was an awkward dialogue between the two with no logical conclusion in sight. The only thing it showed was that tensions between Tyrion and Dany increased further, which was evident when Dany left for North against Tyrion’s advice.

- Speaking of North, what’s up with Arya and Sansa? Haven’t they lost enough to be fighting now? Sure, sister jealousy and whatnot but they cannot make it this easy for Littlefinger. Arya, for all her new wisdom should’ve sensed that. They argue about the moment when Ned was beheaded. Both were there. For her to insinuate that Sansa was there, and not affected by it all is a bad jab at the viewers! Yes, a lot of this is setup for the finale and the next season but come on guys, please set it up a bit better. They teased the audience with the unsheathed Valyrian dagger and then did nothing with it! And where was Three Eyed Raven 2.0? Ya, we know he doesn’t care about any of this now but he can clear the air out. He can now see what happened. So see, clear the air.

- Moving further up North, North of the Wall, the first 10 min or so felt like The Fellowship of The Rings. Unknown companions on a quest to save the world from evil. But it was weird to see that at this stage of the series they were trying to build rapport between the characters. 

- There was a nice tongue-in-cheek moment between Jon and Beric (Dondarrion). Beric tells Jon he doesn’t look like his father at all. Kinda true for the show. However, in the books, Jon Snow was more Stark looking than any of his half-siblings. However, we the viewers know that Jon is Rhaegar and Lyanna’s son so from that POV, yes, he doesn’t look like his father at all!! Would Beric know something or was that an unintentional coincidence?

- How convenient was it for a small party of un-dead to be wandering separate from the main group? Just what they wanted, right. And how easy was it for them to capture an un-dead. But we all knew it was not going to end there. That confrontation between the living and the dead was so very one sided. There was no way out of it. But we have Gendry, the character who returned after four seasons to get a quick exit yet again! We also have a frozen lake. It’s not that frozen - BTW; we can buy you some time until the message reaches Dany. You just hold tight and don’t do anything stupid. Enter, The Hound, throwing rocks in a lake like a bored kid on a family picnic. The rest was an unconvincing fight sequence. But then what to do until the dragons show up? How silly would it look that the dragons show up and the two groups are just sitting quietly :D

- Why did Dany take all three of them up North? Drogon has already shown his power. Plus, it was not an attack. It was a rescue mission. Yes, I know it was necessary for a major, probably the biggest plot twist of the series. But that too came too easily. Are we to believe that the Night King has a spear more powerful than the scorpion and an arm more powerful than the scorpion? Lets say the former has magic involved. But the force with which the spear pierces Viserion was unreal. This means in battle, the dragons are essentially useless against the Night King! 

- Waddup, Uncle Benjen! Where did you come up from, yo? That was the most convenient placement for a Jon getaway. He just came there, out of nowhere to get Jon to escape and then he just gets himself killed! I guess the actor was just bored and the writers didn’t know what more to do with him.

 - There is an undead Dragon now. How strong is the Night King’s army now? Think about it - GRRM’s original title - A Song of Ice and Fire seems to refer more and more to a final showdown between dragons - two (until now) spitting fire and the one spitting snow! Obviously, the Night King will ride it into the battle. Does this mean they now have the weapon to bring the Wall down? Hell, as such they don’t need to bring it down anymore, they can just fly over!

Look, I am still excited and committed to the show. I even got a HBO subscription. The fans are very invested with the characters and want to know how it all ends. Jon and Dany obviously have a thing for each other. Even though I noticed that she withdrew her hand three times when Jon held it, I also saw the look on her face when Jon asked them to leave him in the North. 

We have picked our sides and we have spirited debates around the lunch room, with the Non-GOTs looking at us with blank looks! But as per my last post, we want entertainment. Game of Thrones delivers entertainment at a certain standard. While it is known for its violence and sex, it is admired for its characters, the plots and the politics. We want to see a final showdown. But we want to see it done with finesse and with justified motivations for actions as per the characters. They have kept Tyrion, Varys and Littlefinger in the background for most of this season. Remember when they ruled the plot-lines in the earlier seasons. It was so much fun to watch!

Since S4, E2 - The Lion and the Rose, GRRM has not written a single episode. He is currently busy writing the books (apparently), which are already way behind schedule. But that would mean an even more reduced input from him in the writing process of the episodes. 

Maybe there is a need for bit of an impetus from the man himself - a bit of course correction, if you will. 

Maybe he needs to…

[reactingtosomething]

Reacting to Grey’s Anatomy (Part 1 of ?)

“Why Do We _____, Dr. ____?”

The Setup: Kris’s writing teacher doesn’t watch more than one season of most TV shows in real-time, so that she can keep up with the big picture of the industry, but she does stay current on Grey’s Anatomy. She was annoyed with the structure of the season 13 finale, so it was homework for Kris’s class. Marchae and Miri have wanted Kris to react to Grey’s for a long time -- this was actually, indirectly, part of the origin story for Reacting to Something -- and Kris didn’t want to jump in TOTALLY blind so he figured he could just watch a handful of earlier episodes to ease in. Silly boy.

KRIS: So I have now seen the nine episodes of season 1, plus episodes 1-5 and the “code black” two-parter of season 2

And the most recent season finale, because [Writing Teacher] told us to watch it

MARCHAE: You nailed the rewatch! 

KRIS: And in freshman year of college I saw a few scattered episodes of whatever season fall 2005 was

or maybe sophomore year?

MARCHAE: And to be transparent I am two-ish seasons behind 

KRIS: Did you watch the last finale?

MARCHAE: No but I knew most of the players in this episode 

Of the recent season I watched more episode from where I was in season 12

But am committed to finishing and being caught up after this season 

KRIS: OK I guess we shouldn’t talk about that one then

But I do have some Opinions about the earlier stuff I’ve watched

MARCHAE: Oh I will watch as we text!! 

So I do want to know what you think of the show in general 

I've wanted your opinion for a long time now

KRIS: It’s hard for me not to compare it to early ER, which was one of my first major TV obsessions (I watched those seasons in syndication when I was in high school)

I low-key refused to watch House or Grey’s when I first learned about them after moving back to the US after high school in Europe, because I was like “why do these need to exist if ER is still on the air?”

(And if anyone does want to seek out those early ER seasons I think they probably hold up surprisingly well)

It has Young George Clooney!

And when I did eventually watch House I loved the first 3 - 5ish seasons

MIRI: Moment to remind us all that Lin-Manuel Miranda had a significant arc on a late season of House. I have nothing substantial to say about it right now, but I think we all collectively forget about that fact most of the time and we should be reminded.

MARCHAE: Yeah I think she talks about ER in one the master class episodes

She=Shonda Rhimes, whose online Master Class Marchae is taking

And house is awesome 

KRIS: But all that said, I do like what I’ve seen and will probably very slowly make my way through 12 more years worth of it

MIRI: VICTORY!!!!

MARCHAE: Yessss

KRIS: VERY slowly

Like that’s a lot of TV

MARCHAE: Ohhhhhh come onnnn

It's only taken me four years to get where I am you can do it!!!

KRIS: I feel like it might be a little hard for me to binge because there are some stylistic things that annoy me

MARCHAE: Tell me!!!!

KRIS: Four needle drops an episode

is a lot

I’m also not sure the voiceover is really doing enough to justify itself?

MARCHAE: That's often my critique is how are these people doctors 

KRIS: I feel like you can have all those needle drops OR you can have heavy-handed VO but both is too much

Do we need to define needle drop for our readers, you think?

MARCHAE: Perhaps I was looking for a good link

That explains to put here but can't find one 

KRIS: So a needle drop is when a show plays non-diegetic (usually) pop music that they have to license, as opposed to an instrumental score composed for the show

And diegetic means sound that comes from the action that’s happening onscreen, or off-screen but still in the world of the scene/story--dialogue, sounds from the environment, anything that the characters are hearing too.

And it’s not an unusual thing at all

But I feel like Grey’s does SO MANY songs

And I’m vaguely aware that a fair number of singer-songwriter type artists were first “discovered” by a lot of fans through Grey’s, like maybe Ingrid Michaelson

MARCHAE: They do and they even have an album, I think there have even been interviews with Shonda Rhimes (SR) 

She says she wanted music to be just as much a character as the people 

Which I find interesting thematically 

KRIS: I get that theoretically, but it’s one of those things that’s the hard opposite of Show, Don’t Tell

when it’s lyrics

And especially for a show with bookend voiceover to tell you exactly What An Episode Is About, it’s just... it’s a lot

MIRI: I CANNOT WAIT for Kris to get to the musical episode, which is both amazing and so on the nose it hurts at multiple points.

MARCHAE: That's so interesting considering your like of shows like CEG which is quite musical 

KRIS: I actually do like voiceover when it’s used well throughout a thing (thinking Burn Notice, or Dead Like Me)

MARCHAE: Did you watch sex and the city 

KRIS: But in Crazy Ex the music is dialogue, it’s written by the writers and it’s spoken by the characters, it’s not a third party thing

I’ve seen a little

I guess I’m also just curious about the choice only to use voiceover at the beginning and end

although I think maybe it was there throughout the pilot episode

MARCHAE: Yeah I was about to say there may have been a few where it's through out

KRIS: In the pilot there was this conceit that at least some of the VO was addressed to Meredith’s mom

But other times (most times?) Meredith is clearly addressing the viewer

MARCHAE: I think it's to keep reminding us that this is Merediths world 

KRIS: Meredith is interesting

Which I realize is super vague

MARCHAE: That's my theory or has been at least since the beginning 

KRIS: But I’m having trouble landing on really clear descriptors for her

I like her

I think Ellen Pompeo is good

MARCHAE: I have a few but I'll wait 

KRIS: But she’s harder for me to pin down than Izzy or Cristina or George

MARCHAE: Ellen Pompeo is AMAZING

KRIS: And I think maybe this is deliberate?

But again the VO would make that a strange choice

MARCHAE: I Honestly think she's supposed to be

KRIS: But I do sort of like the idea that she keeps a lot to herself

I think she’s a pretty good example of a lead who has to ground the more eccentric performances of the rest of the ensemble

MARCHAE: She does-ish it's weird I love and hate her simultaneously and that's what I love about her 

KRIS: At least in these earlier seasons

MARCHAE: I think she does also as the show progresses you're right on 

KRIS: Then again I did just watch the Pick Me Choose Me Love Me speech

Which is as demonstrative as anything the others do

But still there’s a restraint in how she generally presents herself to the rest of the world that I identify with

I guess what I’m having trouble figuring out with her is what her fundamental drive is

MIRI: I would argue that this is because Meredith’s fundamental drive is a quest to understand and accept herself, which is a tough main character to pull off and it works better in some stretches than others. But overall I am really pleased with Grey’s willingness to let her flounder and be wrong sometimes.

Also I would not have called Kris identifying with Mer but it makes SO MUCH SENSE.

MARCHAE: That is really eloquently stated 

She has a tremendous amount to prove 

And she has a tremendous amount of hurt and she is guarded because of those things - I think as the show progresses (I'm trying not to spoil too much for you) 

But we learn it's a lot more than mom and dad 

It's Webber and her own crap too 

Meredith's drive is summed up in that choose me, pick me statement 

And it gets the best of her often 

KRIS: (Of the few original characters still around in season 13 I’m most surprised Webber is still there)

MARCHAE: (Really!!!!! I'm surprised by Alex)

KRIS: I guess just because it seems like he would’ve retired

MARCHAE: Ha! 

I suppose that makes sense 

KRIS: Do you think Meredith is a little bit of a cipher at first because she’s supposed to be sort of an audience surrogate? Or is it just that she’s stuffing a lot down where no one can get to it yet?

I guess I could look at the bible to figure this out

MIRI: The show bible, not the Christian one. A show bible is a big ass document explaining the world of the show--a deep dive on who the characters are, the setting, the vibe, etc. It also usually contains some episode and season plots.

MARCHAE: I can send it to you (maybe I already did) 

KRIS: You did

MARCHAE: I think it could be a by of both to answer your question 

Bit*

I think we learn the most about her as the show progresses that justifies somemof the things I find most annoying about her 

However, she is kind of our guide into this world 

I read the Bible and it's a bit different than what's on screen not much 

I'm most impressed by how developed she is and and that SRs intention is that her characters (when she writes) have no end they are infinite in terms of story because they have to be (except in the case of scandal which had an end from the beginning)

KRIS: Sure, and that also makes sense for a setting that has continuing education built into the characters’ lives

MARCHAE: Which is kind of brilliant on her part 

KRIS: It was part of why I liked ER

MARCHAE: I know you said you liked Bailey but I was curious about why and also your thoughts on Christina Yang 

KRIS: Which was specifically at a teaching hospital

MARCHAE: (Did you ever watch St. Elsewere)

KRIS: no

Part of why I like Bailey is that in these earlier episodes when I haven’t really found my way into all of the central intern characters yet is just that she thoroughly has her shit together

MARCHAE: (Such an amazing show- set in the 80s) 

YESssss

KRIS: As someone who has never disagreed with a character yelling at George, I just appreciate that there’s a blunt authority figure with a really dry sense of humor

MARCHAE: (Oh Kris promise you'll keep watching!!!!!!!)

KRIS: And that she also has basically that same comportment toward the attendings

MARCHAE: Ummm excuse me!!!! George is awesome and it infuriates me he gets yelled at!

KRIS: I will, I think it’s one of those things that’ll be easy to return to between other shorter things

Oh man

I mean I don’t dislike George

If I’m being honest there’s more of George in me than I’d like

Which is on some level probably a reason I like when people take him to task

MIRI: Wait guys this is actually enormous progress for Kris to “not dislike” a character he thinks he partially embodies.

MARCHAE: He just so freaking kind that I feel like they poo on him because they can

MIRI: Just because he’s kind doesn’t mean he’s without flaws. Also he is not always kind! Which is good because no one is, but let’s not pretend he’s a saint.

KRIS: I have trouble with Designated Kind Characters though

MARCHAE: And that bothered me a tremendous amount as a person who rarely yells at people even when I'm mad 

Kris what is happening 

KRIS: Because those characters are also often very squishy

And I’m impatient

MARCHAE: So you weren't an Izz fan either?

Squishy 

?

KRIS: And I think you can have Very Kind characters who aren’t pushovers

Hmm

I like Izzie fine

K: I didn’t want to do much annotation here, but on this point I want to be clearer. Obviously George has stories and an arc about becoming a stronger, more assertive person. What bothers me not necessarily about George specifically, but about how Nice characters are often written, is a conflation of kindness with weakness or timidity, and this seems to me how we’re supposed to read George’s default setting, or at least his starting point. Not that kind characters should never be weak or timid! To address Marchae’s question a little further, I think there’s an interesting distinction between how Izzie’s kindness or “softness” makes her seem less of a doctor (to someone like Cristina) and how George’s seems to be more a reflection of his overall character.

MARCHAE: *insert Marchae DYING GIF*

MIRI: Marchae has what has been described as an “unhealthy attachment to Katherine Heigl”

KRIS: So okay, yes, if I had to pick an intern I most identify with it’s Cristina

There are just a lot of feelings flying all over the place

MARCHAE: I KNEW IT!!!!

KRIS: And Cristina has no time for that

And Cristina doesn’t like babies

MARCHAE: She is my favorite!!! 

(She does....ish)

These people are incredibly emotional which sometimes makes me uncomfortable so she is often the voice of reaso 

Reason*

KRIS: Right, me too

And I realize there’s some masculinity/patriarchy baggage here too that I’m always in the process of dealing with myself

But yeah, I feel like a lot of the characters are not just emotional but very NEEDY

Which brings me to Shepherd

MARCHAE: I will also give you that 

They are needy 

KRIS: That man is super needy, specifically in how he wants to be liked

MARCHAE: I often feel like they don't listen very well to one another 

KRIS: Oh for sure

Which is also often used effectively for laughs

Like in the episode I just watched, Izzie has just gotten home from her first date with Alex and Meredith has just dumped Derek

and they go into George’s room and are just having their own “Seriously?” monologues

MIRI: This kind of moment on Grey’s is usually done SO well and I really want to go watch some season 2 Grey’s right now and avoid all of my responsibilities, ok? Ok.

What did you think of Derek’s initial courtship of Meredith?

MARCHAE: I don't love it to be honest 

KRIS: Even setting aside the professional inappropriateness, which I think we can just grant a TV drama

I don’t either

MARCHAE: I couldn't understand why she was smitten with him to begin with to be honest

MIRI: It does work better for me once they’re established and have a weight of history to cite re: their mutual obsession and problems. I think that’s the dynamic SR was always interested in for them.

It reminded me of a more 

Or I guess less childish Carrie and Big relationship 

KRIS: I didn’t find the Can’t Take No for an Answer thing charming, and I feel like the show really wants us to find him Needy-BUT-Charming

MARCHAE: I don't find him likable in later seasons 

KRIS: I’ll grant that the performance is less grating than the equivalent character in a lot of rom-coms

Patrick Dempsey does Quiet Charm and Quiet Intensity really well

oh interesting

MARCHAE: He forgets Merediths needs often 

KRIS: I’ll keep that in mind

In the code black/bomb squad two-parter, that runner where he keeps nagging Burke about why they can’t use first names for each other eventually pays off, but in the first couple scenes of it I was like “Ugh, classic Derek”

MARCHAE: LOL

KRIS: I actually really like Burke, most of the time

MIRI: Ugh, you would

MARCHAE: Derek, I will say this, has a long stretch where I don't mind him 

Burke I forget about him sometimes 

I like him as he relates to Christina 

KRIS: Isaiah Washington was written out for unpleasant interpersonal reasons, right?

MARCHAE: Yes he was! 

He and yang have an interesting dynamic and she owes her success (in small- very small-part) to him 

But he also softens her a bit but not in an icky way

MIRI: Um I would say some of it is very icky, when he is steam rolling over what she actually wants because he’s too busy seeing the version of her he wants. I’m glad for her to have the chance to grow personally, but not for her to be forced to do so in any particular direction.

In a way I think that gives her a bit more depth 

KRIS: I really liked the B-story where they tried to go on a date and it was just super awkward until someone else at the restaurant collapsed

MARCHAE: Because it's them LOL

KRIS: What I like about Burke is that his vibe is what I guess we would stereotypically call “Zen”

I always like the Zen guy

And one of the things I generally really like about the show is how it portrays teaching and mentorship

MARCHAE: I never thought about that really until you just said it 

Hmmmm 

It is kind of interesting 

I always appreciate the friendship aspect- I think that's what I note 

Like how much these people love each other so so much

And would do anything

MIRI: Any time they dance it out is an amazing time

But that teacher /mentor relationship is also a really neat dynamic 

Thanks 

KRIS: I mean the teaching is often couched in very technical things (“Why do we _____, Dr. ____?”), partly for audience benefit, but they also use those moments to show how that bonding happens

MARCHAE: Yes!! 

KRIS: And I think Burke’s personality lends itself particularly well to those beats, but I like it with everyone

It’s when they show that they can put aside all their relationship stuff and be professionals, and I think that’s really important for a show like this

MARCHAE: YES! Again while you don't love the music I don't love how unprofessional they are sometimes 

KRIS: Like in front of patients, or just how they fight a lot?

MARCHAE: The patients, each other, all of it 

Discussing other patients with patients 

I'm like REALLY GET IT TOGETHER -FICTIONAL LIVES ARE COUNTING ON YOU 

it's my biggest critique

MIRI: Marchae really does not approve of her fictional hero people being people--see our Captain America: Civil War reactions.

Though I guess I would be watching some other show if it was all about being professional and not the bonus stuff 

KRIS: Yeah, I guess I just assume a certain amount of Hot Mess in almost any TV, but especially network

(I guess NCIS is a show with less of that, I don’t really know it)

MARCHAE: Criminal minds too 

Any cbs show really

MIRI: Hard disagree--those people are all Hot Messes. Gibbs does nothing but Emote Grumpily and have discolored flashbacks of his dead wife and daughter, and the whole Criminal Minds team is full of emotions and PTSD.

KRIS: I guess most crime procedurals will tend to be more [self-]serious

But ER definitely had lots of friendship and romance stuff

Oh, there is one little thing where I compare Grey’s unfavorably to ER

And it’s that even though there are nurses we see fairly often, no one ever addresses nurses by name

And look, I STILL remember the names of some of those early ER nurses

Haleh

Chuny

Malik

Lydia

MARCHAE: Now that is impressive 

Derek dates one nurse 

KRIS: Olivia got to be a person for a bit because of the syphillis thing

But just like, give them names

MIRI: Bokhee and Daniel Sunjata have names. I’m not sure about anyone else, and Daniel Sunjata isn’t for a few seasons.

MARCHAE: Yeah 

Ha! 

You could start a campaign 

Lolol

KRIS: I feel like it’s also a thing that could be used to show character

Cristina and Burke might not bother to learn names

But Meredith would

MARCHAE: So would Izzie and George 

KRIS: George and Izzie definitely would

MARCHAE: Alex not so much 

KRIS: Derek would

Yeah not Alex, unless he was trying to hook up with them

MARCHAE: Derek might I think unless he's flustered 

KRIS: Webber would have at least absorbed everyone’s names through osmosis at this point

MARCHAE: HAHAHAHAHAHHAAH

LOL

KRIS: Okay I can end this rant

MARCHAE: That is hilarious 

So were you completely lost with the finale you watched 

KRIS: Not as much as I was worried I’d be

But for sure the character turnover was like, oh, maybe I should’ve just jumped right into this season

MARCHAE: Yeah she kills or lets go of lots of people (it's usually where I have to take a break out of frustration with the show) 

KRIS: I mean I totally get it, it’s a long time to be on the air

MARCHAE: I don't they should do this for the rest of their lives 

Long live #teamgeoizzie

MIRI: ANY PORTMANTEAU THAT INCLUDES “JIZZ” IS NOT OK, MARCHAE. WE’VE HAD THIS CONVERSATION

KRIS: Marchae

MARCHAE: *sorry*

MIRI: SHE’S NOT SORRY. SHE’S LYING, READERS.

KRIS: You know Miri will have to annotate that

MARCHAE: I know but I feel like since we're here and it came up-she'll be fine 

KRIS: Do you know if those four leads who are still around have done much other high profile stuff while it’s been on the air?

Even Noah Wyle was in and out of ER for the last few seasons

MARCHAE: Ummmm hmmm I know that Owen was involved in an indie film 

But he's the only one I know of 

KRIS: But like Meredith, Alex, Bailey, and Webber

MARCHAE: I forget he came later my bad 

KRIS: Oh wow, looking at Ellen Pompeo’s IMDB page, not a lot at all besides Grey’s post-2005

MARCHAE: No I just check Chandra Wilson because I thought she'd done broadway 

But nope

KRIS: Pompeo’s in a Taylor Swift video and she did a little bit of voice work for a cartoon

and that’s it

I wonder what that’s like

MARCHAE: Oh yeah she was in bad blood for six seconds 

KRIS: You become an actor to be different people and then you end up just being this one other person

MARCHAE: You know Sandra Oh said she went to therapy when she decided to leave 

KRIS: I believe it

MARCHAE: I have thought about that too 

It becomes legitimately a different part of you I'd suspect 

Because it's been forever for some of these people

KRIS: Yeah. I wonder if it’s just too exhausting to like go do a feature or something in between seasons when you’re the lead on a 22-24 episode show

MARCHAE: That does seem like a lot 

KRIS: Although I would also believe if Ellen Pompeo has trouble getting cast just being a woman over 40

MARCHAE: Which is mind boggling - because she's dynamic 

KRIS: She is great, but again it’s not a very showy part

Most of the time

(I mean I don’t want to speculate, I obviously don’t know her life)

MARCHAE: Yeah 

So you mentioned that your instructor had some things about the finale 

KRIS: Yes

MARCHAE: I'm curious what they were 

(By things I mean opinions) 

KRIS: She said that the thing the episode is supposed to be about doesn’t really get the act breaks

And that the story that does get the act breaks isn’t really substantial enough to justify it

The most obvious candidate for what the episode is About is Meredith’s VO thing about your world “exploding”

But Stephanie also has a little speech about clenching your fist through necessary pain that seems like it could be a thematic statement

I agree with her that most of the act breaks are not very strong

There’s not much real suspense in whether Stephanie and Erin are going to get through the fire or whatever

And most of those beats just come back right where we left off, and the beat gets resolved without any twist or new information

MARCHAE: I could see that 

KRIS: Just, yep, Stephanie made it into the stairwell

Yep, Stephanie got her keycard

MARCHAE: I think my notes even say this isn't their strongest finale 

KRIS: Not knowing most of these new characters, it seems like it would have been stronger for Nathan and Owen to get the act breaks?

MARCHAE: I thought there was tension because she's notorious for killing people in the end - so I didn't know if she was going to die 

KRIS: But I’m not sure what those would have been either, because they’re mostly just reacting to information they can’t do much with

I thought it was possible Erin would die on the roof

But not before

MARCHAE: But she couldn't die At all because she was keeping Stephanie alive 

And Stephanie had to have a reason to live thus leave 

So ultimately I can agree with your teacher on all accounts my note says the episode seems weird 

I think you may have articulated what I couldn't put my finger on 

KRIS: Yeah, and I do think that from what I’ve seen Grey’s is usually really good about tying its storylines together with the theme of the episode

MARCHAE: (I also thought the dialogue was odd - stating something we'd already seen) 

KRIS: Heavy-handed but effective

And here there was no real emotional link between the fire story and the Megan story

K: Now that my class has met I do want to clarify what Writing Teacher meant. Writing Teacher is usually a big proponent of Grey’s; along with The West Wing and Friends it’s one of her most frequent touchstones for story structure and theme, and how those things work best when they’re in concert. She talks about having a “tree” when you write anything, the thematic and emotional core that can and must stay intact no matter what else you change in the course of writing and rewriting. And the tree here was, or should have been, that story about Megan and how her homecoming affects the relationships of Meredith, Owen, et al. To her guess, the problems of poor/no suspense were not the real problem, but symptoms of “draft drift” as the writers lost sight of the Megan tree and tried to manufacture artificial drama out of a Finale! gimmick that was doomed to fail precisely because they didn’t relate it to the theme they started with. (Except literally, I guess, in terms of your world exploding.) 

MARCHAE: I may have to watch the episode before to see what was happening 

KRIS: And whatever was going on with Jackson trying to be a hero

MARCHAE: I thought it was a call back to an episode before he saved a kid from a bus and scared Kepp to death 

(Also the perpetual beeping almost made me shut the episode off)

(Complete aside) 

KRIS: This isn’t totally related but it’s a great piece about writing suspense/action that everyone should read

By one of my favorite showrunners

The gist of it is that you need to have multiple live possibilities for how an action scene should end if it’s not going to just be taking up time

“Don't write action sequences. Write suspense sequences that require action to resolve. ... every action sequence has its own internal three act structure. Objective, complication, resolution. And not only that, but the complication needs to be something which forces a choice on the character, not just a complication in physical circumstances.”

And this was generally not the case in those Stephanie scenes

MARCHAE: Ahhhhh 

So my argument for her is that we just needed an event/thing to get her off 

KRIS: You could sort of see how it could’ve been, with the stuff you said about Erin keeping her alive

MARCHAE: The show and make her realize she needs to be away from the hospital 

KRIS: But it didn’t feel like the emphasis

What’s her story?

MARCHAE: Stephanie? She comes as an intern in season 9

Her group loses several interns by way of death 

KRIS: Geez

MARCHAE: She and Avery were kind of a thing 

I never thought it was as serious as she did 

KRIS: HA

MARCHAE: But he breaks up with her after at Kepps wedding 

When He decides hey I want Kepp 

Embarrassing her and making her feel like an idiot 

She's not, in my opinion, liked much by all of her peers at first but they end up getting to be better friends 

I stopped there because I'm in the middle of that season 

(And yang leaves and I'm not ready for that nonsense) 

I like her but from 9-11 I don't feel like she's terribly well developed and the relationship with Avery isn't either 

KRIS: It seems like the cast also just got a lot bigger

It didn’t seem like all the regulars were even in this

MARCHAE: They revolve really we lose interns and doctors go 

KRIS: But also it felt like there were characters currently there and in the credits who weren’t part of the story. I think Alex is only in that one scene where Meredith tells him to help look for Erin?

MARCHAE: I think in this episode you saw most everyone except a few

Yeah jo also wasn't there 

She's in Stephanie's class

KRIS: And Jo is one of the few people whose (actor) names I recognized so I was weirdly disappointed

MARCHAE: I need to watch the episode before the finale I bet they were in that one

KRIS: I do like Kevin McKidd; Rome on HBO was great

I don’t think I have any other season 1-2 notes, but I can take questions

Man we didn’t even cover Ellis, but I feel like there’s more stuff Meredith is about to learn in season 2

MARCHAE: So much 

And Merediths half sister and her other half sister

KRIS: Right, Miri wants to do one of these after I meet Lexie

MARCHAE: YES!!!!

MIRI: For the first few episodes of Supergirl I called Alex ALexie because I couldn’t let go of my Chyler Leigh associations, despite how different the roles are. And I’m excited for Kris to see those differences!  But also come on--both are the sister of the blonde lead/title character, both named some variant on Alexandra/ria. It’s a lot.

KRIS: Oh I do like Joe the bartender and Joe’s the bar

MARCHAE: Oh kris 

KRIS: But I feel like they probably should’ve introduced Joe before the episode where he was a patient

MARCHAE: You get to know him I think 

KRIS: You know, before watching for this reaction I’d probably seen at least as much of Private Practice as I had of Grey’s

Which is to say five or six episodes

Private Practice had more actors I already recognized

MARCHAE: Oh that's another good one I didn't finish it though

MIRI: I did finish it, because my loyalty to Addison Montgomery runs DEEP

KRIS: Like, almost everyone, really

Tim Daly voiced Superman in the 90s animated series

MARCHAE: I LOVE HIMMMMM 

he's on madam secretary 

It's good 

KRIS: Amy Brenneman, obviously

MARCHAE: I agree watch more and I want another reaction!!! Stat<---see what I did there 

Yeah taye diggs I think is also in that show 

KRIS: Yeah, I knew him from something

Oh I guess that’s it actually

Okay so like half the cast

OK I’ll keep watching Grey’s

And I’ll pick up Private Practice when Addison gets spun off

MARCHAE: YES

YESsssss

I wanna react to that with you also! 

KRIS: I do like Kate Walsh

I feel like that’s actually not a super popular opinion but I’m not sure

MARCHAE: She just had an article out a couple of days ago about watching herself on tv

I like her a lot 

KRIS: I don’t have much interest in 13 Reasons Why but I know she’s in that

MIRI: She is???

I thought the pilot of Bad Judge was fun but didn’t see more of it

MIRI: I loved it SO much

MARCHAE: I haven't seen 13 reason the book was traumatic but I'm confident she's stunning in it 

So let's say we check back in on august for reaction part two!!!! 

KRIS: We’ll see

Maybe if I’ve gotten to season 4 we bring the others into this

MARCHAE: I was just throwing it out there

🤓🤓

KRIS: But if we do a Grey’s check-in we also need to do either a Crazy Ex check-in with you or an Orphan Black check-in with Lemon

And OBVIOUSLY our Sweet/Vicious check-in

MARCHAE: That's very fair! 

I also started the Tina Fey show 

KRIS: I’m not even going to identify it here, that deserves an annotation

MIRI: Does she mean 30 Rock??

K: She 1000 percent means 30 Rock

I feel like we have a lot that’s sort of vaguely on the docket but not a lot of For Sure We’re Going to Talk About This Next

Lemon mentioned something yesterday or the day before

Oh, Hello--2 man Broadway show now on Netflix

Miss Sloane, The Leftovers, possibly Cable Girls

...

Spider-Man

MIRI: YES!!!

MARCHAE: I can't react to spider man so I'll leave you and Miri for that 

And atomic blonde

MIRI: YES!!!!! Y’all, the first trailer for Atomic Blonde is still my favorite movie of the year. I’ve watched it 16 times. One of those times was right now, because I had to pull it up to do the link and then obviously I couldn’t not watch it. I would do a whole reaction on just that first trailer.

KRIS: YES

Okay dear readers

I’m personally a big fan of The AV Club and Vulture and Vox Culture

but if those aren’t your thing

we hope you’ll Pick Us, Choose Us, Love Us for your pop culture reaction needs

(too much?)

(I’ll show myself out)

MARCHAE: YESssssss

MIRI: Amazing

Not enough Kris, not enough!

[frazzledsoul]

A few thoughts on fandoms, series finales, BIG ASS VOLCANO EXPLOSIONS, and expecting too much of showrunners

(Disclaimer: yes, there is some Gilmore Girls/shipper talk at the end. If you don’t care about genre shows or want to look at all of these gorgeous faces, please proceed past the hot Iraqi guy reminding you of your imminent demise. Thank you).

Recently the Lost showrunners revealed the series finale was supposed to feature a colossal, epic volcano explosion instead of a sweet, let’s-die-happily-ever-after-and-party-in-purgatory denouement.

My thoughts on this run somewhere between HELL TO THE YEAH!!!!!! and “what would have happened to Sawyer’s pretty, pretty face? Or Jack’s pretty, pretty face? Or Desmond’s . . .”

You get the idea. Never before or since have so many gorgeous men been packed into one television show.

Okay, the women weren’t too bad, either.

The thing is that Lost is one of the few TV fandoms where it became obvious very early on where the fan reaction quickly eclipsed the intent of the showrunners. I knew as early as the second season that this show was never, ever going to be able to answer most of the questions they posed in their own mythology, never mind the insane theories the fandom quickly jumped on. It’s my opinion that in other recent cases where a sci-fi/fantasy show collects a massive, unwieldly following that most of the blame gets shifted to the interpretation of the source material. However, in this case there was no one else to blame or to deify and it quickly became its own monster.

Lost was a mess much of the time. It had grand, majestic, awe-inducing moments and characters that made you want to weep because you loved them so much. It had a tendency to get bogged down in sci-fi mumbo jumbo and to kill off characters long before they got anything close to what they earned or deserved. It had episodes like “Walkabout” and “The Constant” that nothing on TV will ever get close to matching. It was a high-concept show that got drowned in its ambitions over and over again, that bitterly disappointed its fans and yet climbed out of the much to make us scream in glee over and over again.

It was a gleefully upsetting and awe-inducing experiment and I miss it very much.

The thing is that knowing it was going to disappoint so many people ahead of time made me enjoy it more in its last moments. The “sideways” world was a way to redeem the show for the awful fates to which it subjected so many of its characters. For me, it worked, and perhaps it’s a reflection of absorbing the ethos of the Bible Belt for so many years, but I felt that the show was redeemed by this. They were never going to answer any of those questions, but I feel they did make me feel that in the end all of it had been worth it. The key was not expecting more of the show’s creators than they had to give.

(One small caveat: Sun should have sacrificed herself and sent Jin home to take care of their child. It would be an exact reflection of the sacrifices he had made for them both earlier, and it would make their tragic end a tinier less tragic. Other than that, I am zen with how it went down).

With that in mind, I’m reminded of the two current genre obsessions currently ongoing: The Walking Dead and Game Of Thrones. 

Whenever either show runs into problems (and The Waking Dead runs into problems a lot), the blame is directed at the creators for not being slavish enough to the source material. The Walking Dead uses its source material as more of a guide than anything else (and I’m grateful for that, because if they didn’t, there would be no Richonne or Daryl and we’d still be stuck with Andrea) but its problems are its own. It’s an enormously crowd-pleasing show when it’s on top, but it will never be a great one, and I’m okay with that. I know not to expect more of its creators than they can give.

With Game Of Thrones, it’s a little different. The book purists make the Lost acolytes from a decade ago seem like amateurs, and most of them are still stubbornly naive about George R.R. Martin delivering their “real” ending. (I seriously doubt he is ever going to publish another book in the series, much less finish it). I think the difference between the two shows is that we don’t know what kind of show Game Of Thrones will end up being, and we only have a little bit of time left to find out. I find I love almost everyone in Game Of Thrones almost as much as I loved almost everyone in Lost, and the ensuing slaughter in the next batch of episodes is probably going to hurt just as much.

And this all brings me back to where I learned to be zen about showrunners: the excruciating, otherwordly experience otherwise known as dealing with Amy Sherman Palladino through Gilmore Girls.

I stopped watching OG Gilmore Girls when the rumors about April came out early in season 6. I knew it wasn’t going to end well, and if you kept up with the press from the showrunners around that time, it became obvious that ASP was dying to do #TeamChristopher. I knew this would end badly.

Man, did it ever end badly. I watched the second half of the season six finale and resolved never to touch the show again. It wasn’t until I forced myself to watch season 6 recently that I realized just how terrible it got. I think it’s because of that experience that I got hooked on genre shows. Yes, I remain fond of characters in my shows, and love them intensely, but there’s a certain amount of distance to be had when you know they can die at any time.

I won’t ever get emotionally attached to anything the Palladinos do again. They’re unstable, irrational, and bitterly cling to their own ideas in the midst of all sanity and rationality. I think Shonda Rhimes is like this, too, but at least she makes the trains run on time. I full expect meltdowns from all corners by the time the Palladinos finish up their Amazon show, if they don’t get displaced before then.

Despite all this, I think my latent cynicism towards these showrunners made me be at peace at the way in which they righted my ship. I think a lot of shippers built up this alternate world where Luke and Lorelai quickly got their crap together, married, and had kids right away, and never faced any significant obstacles ever again. I was one of them, and that’s part of why I never wanted this show to come back. I don’t think it was ever plausible to expect that from these showrunners.

It could have worked out that way. Or they both could have figured out that they had atrocious track records and decided to find a life that was right for them. The Lorelai that was so singularly marriage-focused during season 6 was almost as much of an out-of-character creation as was the Luke who becomes so focused on his new fatherhood that he stops listening to her. It is entirely plausible that after a failed engagement and a failed marriage in eight months (to two different men) that she might want to slow down and reevaluate what she wanted. 

It doesn’t mean that she didn’t get her “middle”, because she did. She chose a life, and was fairly happy with that life until she decided she did want something more traditional. It doesn’t mean that the years before didn’t count or that it wasn’t a real life until she got married. I know it’s not what a lot of fans envisioned or wanted, but I don’t think it was a false or unhappy existence, either. I think it’s much more true of the title character than the Lorelai Gilmore who is so obsessed with getting married that she will literally take anyone who asks.

Maybe I’m too easy on ASP in this respect, but I don’t think so. But you have to take what you can from your showrunners and not expect more of them than what’s possible.

All I ask for is a happy ending for the last ship I really cared about and for Daryl Dixon and Jon Snow to remain alive. May the TV gods smile on me on the last two.

[mastcomm]

Rodgers finds Graham to set up Packers’ second score.

Rodgers finds Graham to set up Packers’ second score.

The Packers may have found a rhythm, even if it’s getting late.

Green Bay scored seconds into the fourth quarter to cut San Francisco’s lead to 34-13.

Aaron Jones ran in the 1-yard score. Green Bay missed the 2-point conversion when receiver Davante Adams could not handle a pass from Aaron Rodgers on an out route.

Read more Rodgers finds Graham to set up Packers’ second score.

The Jones touchdown came after Rodgers hit tight end Jimmy Graham with a 42-yard pass, the quarterback’s longest completion of the game. The play was initially ruled a touchdown, but on review, the officials determined Graham was down before he crossed the goal line.

Either way, down by three possessions, the Packers still have an uphill climb.

Mostert’s fourth score makes it look easy.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

Did we say running back Raheem Mostert is having the game of his life?

Mostert scored his fourth touchdown of the game on a 22-yard run around left end to put the 49ers ahead, 34-7.

It was an emphatic response to the Packers’ lone score on the opening drive of the second half.

Read more Mostert’s fourth score makes it look easy.

The 49ers philosophy seems to be, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. The 7-play scoring drive started with Mostert notching big gains.

The back-breaker came on second-and-8, when the 49ers ran a reverse to receiver Deebo Samuel, who scampered 32 yards to the Green Bay 22-yard line.

Two plays later, Mostert evaded several blockers to rumble into the end zone.

The 49ers have run the ball so well that quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo has only thrown the ball six times, completing four of those passes for 48 yards.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

After a disastrous first half, the Green Bay Packers started the second with a strong 75-yard drive to chip into the 49ers’ 27-point lead.

Aaron Rodgers had time to throw, hitting receivers Davante Adams and Geronimo Allison for big gains. On the final play of the drive, Rodgers found running back Aaron Jones with 9-yard touchdown pass. Rodgers completed nine of 10 passes en route to the end zone.

The 11-play drive, though, consumed more than six minutes of game clock. Still behind by three possessions, the Packers will have to get the ball back quickly if they hope to keep making up ground.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

San Francisco 49ers running back Raheem Mostert is having the game of his professional life. In the first half alone, he scored all three 49ers touchdowns and ran the ball 14 times for 160 yards.

The 49ers went into the locker room leading the Packers, 27-0.

Mostert, a fifth-year player from Purdue, is the leading rusher in the 49ers backfield by committee. He gained 772 yards on 137 carries during the regular season with eight running touchdowns. He averaged a healthy 5.6 yards per carry.

Read more First half: All Niners.

Green Bay did not help themselves in the first half. Tyler Ervin bobbled a kickoff return. Aaron Rodgers muffed a snap, lost another fumble and threw an interception.

The 49ers have made the Packers pay for those turnovers, ending five of six total possessions with a touchdown or field goal.

Aaron Rodgers throws an interception.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

Cornerback Emmanuel Moseley picked off Aaron Rodgers on second-and-15 to add onto Green Bay’s woes. The Packers’ drive began with a muffed kick return by Tyler Ervin, which buried the team at their own 8-yard line to start. Four plays later, the 49ers have the ball yet again.

Packers mistakes dig a deeper hole.

Things are going from bad to worse for the Packers, and they have themselves to blame.

After finally gaining some momentum, quarterback Aaron Rodgers muffed a snap on second-and-4 deep in the San Francisco end of the field. San Francisco defensive lineman DeForest Buckner recovered the ball on the 49ers’ 25-yard line to give his team another chance to score.

The 49ers didn’t waste it. Raheem Mostert broke free for a 34-yard gain, cutting left and right through the Packers backfield. San Francisco fullback Kyle Juszczyk made a key block to pave the way for Mostert.

Read more Packers mistakes dig a deeper hole.

San Francisco’s drive ended on the Packers’ 7-yard line and the 49ers settled for a field goal to go up, 20-0, with just under 2 minutes left in the first half.

Tevin Coleman carted off.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

The 49ers have built a commanding 17-0 lead, but it has come at a cost.

On their last drive, Tevin Coleman injured his shoulder and left the game.

The injury happened in the red zone. Coleman ran for five yards and as he fell to the ground, he reached out with his arm to break his fall. After a lengthy examination by the team trainers, a cart was driven on to the field.

Read more Tevin Coleman carted off.

Coleman’s return is questionable.

Coleman was the 49ers third-leading rusher this season, after Raheem Mostert and Matt Breida.

Niners go up 17-0 as Mostert runs for another score.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

More pressure on Green Bay leads to more points for the 49ers.

On the Packers’ first drive of the second quarter, 49ers cornerback K’Waun Williams stripped quarterback Aaron Rodgers of the ball on third down. Green Bay recovered the fumble, but the play led to a 15-yard loss. Then Green Bay punter J.K. Scott shanked the punt just 23 yards down the field.

The 49ers took over on the Packers 37-yard line, eager to pounce. Running back Raheem Mostert ran for 13 yards and 9 yards to open the drive. Garoppolo extended it with a quarterback sneak.

Read more Niners go up 17-0 as Mostert runs for another score.

Then Mostert punched in his second touchdown run, this one for nine yards.

San Francisco now leads 17-0 midway through the second quarter.

Though both teams have had the ball for about the same amount of time, the game is starting to feel like another blowout by San Francisco.

Aided by a penalty, 49ers finish field-goal drive.

San Francisco kicker Robbie Gould hit a 54-yard field goal on the first play of the second quarter to put the 49ers up by 10 points. The 49ers caught a break on the 15-yard drive after the Packers were penalized 15 yards for roughing the passer.

The drive began with excellent field position for the 49ers after Richie James Jr. returned the Green Bay punt 26 yards to the San Francisco 49-yard line.

The first quarter zipped by, in part because the 49ers scored so quickly on their second drive to head into the break up, 7-0.

Read more Aided by a penalty, 49ers finish field-goal drive.

Both defenses have made outstanding plays. Nick Bosa has hounded quarterback Aaron Rodgers, while the Packers sacked 49ers quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo for an 8-yard loss to end the quarter.

Nick Bosa torments the Packers.

Credit…Ben Margot/Associated Press

San Francisco had the second best defense this year, and their front line showed why on the Packers’ second drive.

Rookie defensive end Nick Bosa sacked Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers for a 13-yard loss on third-and-7 to end Green Bay’s second drive. The play before, Bosa gobbled up running back Aaron Jones at the Packers 42-yard line for no gain.

Read more Nick Bosa torments the Packers.

Bosa tormented Rodgers when the teams met in November, recovering a Rodgers fumble and nearly returning it for a touchdown.

As my colleague Ben Shpigel wrote, Bosa totaled 80 sacks, hurries and hits for the 49ers during the regular season, “tormenting offenses with a blend of power, speed and technical expertise amplified by a sophistication uncommon for his age, particularly at that position.”

San Francisco strikes first.

Credit…AJ Mast for The New York Times

The San Francisco 49ers strike first. Running back Raheem Mostert broke free for a 36-yard run, speeding past several defenders to score the game’s first touchdown.

After their opening drive stalled on three plays at their own 34-yard line, the 49ers came out firing. Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo hit receiver Deebo Samuel for two catches and 46 yards, including a 30-yard catch on second-and-5 that could have been a score had Samuel not been tripped up.

Read more San Francisco strikes first.

Mostert, a track and field star, did the rest, running for 5, 6 and 36 yards on the 6-play, 89-yard drive.

The 49ers had the second-best running game in the N.F.L. this season. They deploy tight end George Kittle as a blocker often, as they did early today.

The 49ers aren’t counting on a repeat.

Credit…Ben Margot/Associated Press

If the past is prologue, the San Francisco 49ers should wallop the Green Bay Packers in the N.F.C. championship game on Sunday. After all, the 49ers beat the Packers, 37-8 in November, as the 49ers bottled up Green Bay’s run game and constantly pressured quarterback Aaron Rogers.

But the Packers have had time to review what went wrong and prepare, which is why the 49ers are not complacent. “I promise they’re looking at some clips on tape where they know that they could have hit us on,” said Robert Saleh, the 49ers’ defensive coordinator. During the regular season, the Arizona Cardinals and the Los Angeles Rams were unable to avenge earlier losses to the 49ers, who swept the season series from both teams.

Neither the Packers nor the 49ers were in the postseason last year.

Matt LaFleur and Aaron Rodgers have Green Bay’s offense clicking.

The Green Bay Packers fired Mike McCarthy, their longtime coach, after Week 12 last season in part because quarterback Aaron Rodgers was reportedly unhappy with his boss. Despite a lot of wins together, the Packers had faltered in the last two years.

Enter Matt LaFleur, Green Bay’s 40-year old coach who has a reputation as an offensive savant. A quarterbacks coach with the Redskins and the Falcons, and offensive coordinator with the Rams and Titans, he appears to have Rodgers clicking again.

After two losing seasons, the Packers went 13-3 in the regular season. Rodgers topped 4,000 yards passing for the eighth time in his career. He threw 26 touchdown passes and was intercepted just four times.

Read more Matt LaFleur and Aaron Rodgers have Green Bay’s offense clicking.

The playoffs come to Santa Clara. Finally.

Credit…Tony Avelar/Associated Press

Levi’s Stadium opened to great fanfare in 2014, but the building has largely been a house of horrors for its primary tenant, the San Francisco 49ers. This year, the team has finally arrived, going 13-3 in the regular season and winning its first playoff game in Santa Clara last weekend.

The mood on the field before the N.F.C. championship game against the Green Bay Packers was as jubilant as it has been all season. The sidelines were packed six- and seven-deep with credentialed fans, including Steve Young, Jerry Rice, and Barry Bonds. Quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo got the loudest cheers as he stopped to sign autographs before heading into the locker room.

There was a sprinkling of Packers fans, who were easy to spot with their bright yellow foam cheeseheads. Home field advantage isn’t what it used to be, but if the 49ers need any encouragement, they’re likely to get it from a highly partisan crowd.

How will Richard Sherman fare against Davante Adams?

Richard Sherman returns an interception against the Minnesota Vikings in the divisional round.Credit…Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

One potential matchup worth watching: 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman and Packers wide receiver Davante Adams. Sherman usually plays on the left side of the field, but he may be asked to shadow Adams, who caught eight passes for 160 yards and two touchdowns in Green Bay’s victory over the Seattle Seahawks in the divisional round.

Sherman, one of the best cornerbacks in the game, intercepted Vikings quarterback Kirk Cousins when San Francisco beat Minnesota last week.

Because of Sherman’s skills, offenses often avoid throwing to his side of the field. But the 49ers could place him strategically on the right side, as well.

Read more How will Richard Sherman fare against Davante Adams?

On Thursday, Sherman talked down the notion that he gets more pumped up to cover an opponent’s top receiver, in this case, Adams. “At the end of the day it’s about winning football games. He’s a great player. He’s somebody that we’ve obviously got to account where he is on the field at all times. But in terms of individual matchups, it means nothing to me.”

Aaron Rodgers is looking for revenge against the 49ers.

Credit…Stacy Revere/Getty Images

Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’s grudge against San Francisco is among the most talked about story lines in Sunday’s N.F.C. title game. Rodgers, 36, grew up a 49ers fan in Chico, Calif., and played college football at California. The 49ers had a chance to draft Rodgers in 2005, but opted instead to take quarterback Alex Smith with the first overall pick.

Smith, who quarterbacked the 49ers from 2005 to 2012, has had a fine career, but not the caliber of Rodgers, who has won a Super Bowl and appears destined to enter the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In that draft, Rodgers slipped to the 24th pick, where the Packers selected him. Rodgers has a 4-5 career record against San Francisco, including two losses in the playoffs.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/sport/rodgers-finds-graham-to-set-up-packers-second-score/

[wikitopx]

On the Drac and Isère Rivers, Grenoble is a high-tech city of science ringed by mountains in France’s Northern Alps.

To the north is the powerful Bastille at the start of Chartreuse mountain range, and threatening the city from the west are the monumental rocks of the Vercors Massif. If you want the great outdoors you’ve got them in Grenoble, with a catalog of walks leading you to the region’s lakes, forests and mountain pastures. In winter ski resorts are less than an hour away. Back in the city, there are countless amazing free museums inviting you to explore the rich history of Grenoble, dating back to Roman times. Discover the best things to do in Grenoble.

[toc]

1. Musée de Grenoble

There is no question that this splendid modern building is the place to start your journey to Grenoble. It is one of France’s premier art museums, with 57 rooms and a collection that totals 1,500 pieces.

It’s no exaggeration that you can get a good summary of the history of European culture, from the 1200s to the present day right here in these galleries. There are paintings in French, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish and Italian masters from the 17th century.

But the museum really became it's own in parts of the 20th century, where all the major movements from Fauvism to Pop Art were shown. Chagall, Picasso, Magritte, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Joan Miró are just a few of the names you may know.

2. Cable Car

Directly on the left bank of the River Isère is a cable car station that will take you 263 meters up to the Bastille, the name of both the fortress and the rocky hill that dominates the city from the north.

The cable car has been operating since 1935 and underwent a style update in the 70s when its current space-age bubble was introduced. Each bubble can fit six people, and if you’re not a big fan of enclosed spaces don’t worry, because they whisk you up the hill in a maximum of four minutes.

It’s only €8 for an adult round trip and the views as you glide up from the river are sensational.

3. Bastille

The cable car is a way up, but many people choose the path and stairs starting from the cliffs in Jardin des Dauphins. When you climb, you can go around the abandoned walls and stairs of the old fortress.

Once you make it to the top you’ll be in a system of soaring walls built in the 19th century by General Haxo on the site of two earlier fortresses dating back to the 1500s. Grenoble stretches like a map below, and it's really satisfying to follow the vast Cours Jean Jaurès as it stretches, inevitably into the distance.

The threat will never come from Grenoble, but the Chartreuse mountain range to the north and that's where the fortress is facing.

4. Archaeological Museum

The best archaeology museums are those that put you right on top of a dig, and Grenoble’s is one, with galleries overlooking the structure of a Gallo-Roman church built in the 6th century.

These remnants are partly beneath a later Romanesque church that is still on the site (with its floor removed), while the portion outside this newer church is protected from the elements by a glass and steel canopy.

The main event is the mausoleum that dates to the year 521, and what’s fascinating is the way the many artifacts discovered in digs (coins, pottery, stone epitaphs, glassware, everyday items) have been placed back where they were found to add context for visitors.

5. Dauphinois Museum

Not far from the Archeological Museum, on the right bank of Isère, is a small attraction that shows the history and culture of the Dauphiné region. The site is also interesting, on the slopes of the Bastille in the 17th-century monastery of Visitation de Sainte-Marie-d’en-Haut.

Churches, gardens and baroque interiors, exemplified by lovely ceilings in chapels, all capture the imagination.

In the exhibition areas, there is a room on skiing history in the French Alps, as well as representatives of 18th-century mountain houses decorated with furniture from the period. there.

There is a large space for temporary exhibitions, updated regularly, so you can get another pleasant surprise when you visit.

6. Musée de l’Ancien Évêché

In the former Grenoble Episcopal Palace, this free museum handles the history of the surrounding Isère Department.

Like many of Grenoble's attractions, the building is a large component, as the basement contains the remains of the Gall Gallo-Roman city wall and the remains of an early Christian baptism. spear.

Both are crossed by raised walkways, and there are drawings to show you how they would have looked in their day.

Up from these vestiges, each new floor represents a step through history, so on the first floor have galleries about the Stone Age, through the Bronze Age and into the Gallo-Roman era, all embellished with artifacts.

The Second Floor then deals with the middle ages, the early modern age, and the Enlightenment.

7. Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation

Massif Vercors bordering on Grenoble was a hotspot of resistance during the war.

Not far from the city, in Méaudre, was where various resistance networks had their important meetings in January 1944. With the help of propaganda posters, leaflets, fake IDs and protective maps This museum excelled in giving detailed accounts of local characters involved in sabotage and ambush under the Vichy government.

In addition, there is an overview of life in the area during the occupation, including the practice and deportation of Jews, minorities and other political opponents.

8. Winter Sport

In 1968 Grenoble hosted the Winter Olympics and drove in comfort from a range of ski resorts. You’re close enough to base yourself in the city and make day trips up to the slopes.

One of the best is 7 Laux, 45 kilometers northeast of the city, with 120 kilometers of slopes. The resort has just been revamped so if you’re a snowboarder or freestyle skier you’ll want to show off on the updated HO5 snow park, which has a boarder-cross ice racing track.

About the same distance west of Grenoble is Autrans in the Vercors Massif. Autrans is all about cross country skiing, with more than 160 kilometers of trails for Nordic-style adventure. And if you’ve ever wanted to try dog-sledding this one is for you.

9. Alpine Lakes

In the summer, ski resorts can help you access more beautiful natural wonders without snow.

At almost 2,000 meters, the glacial Lac Achard freezes and has a layer of snow in the winter, but in summer the glorious cirque surrounding it is reflected in its tree-edged waters. You can walk on GR-549, and it walks quite simply but beautifully from Chamrousse.

On the same trail, you can also walk to Les Lacs Robert, in a rugged, rugged setting of peaks and needle-like grasslands. If this walk is too taxing you can also let the ski lift take the strain, dropping you right by the southeast shore.

10. Vercors Massif

Grenoble can be your HQ for a hiking holiday you’ll remember fondly, setting off each day for the Vercors Massif which looks a little threatening on the skyline to the west of the city.

The terrain is a sequence of high plateaux interrupted by epic rocky barriers, and just as this creates prime cross-country skiing country in winter, it’s a dreamland for hikers in the warmer seasons.

The trails meander through easy-to-walk landscapes covered with oak and pine forests, while natural wonders abound, in the form of a 300-meter cliff and Coffin Cave near Choranche.

More ideals for you: Top 10 things to do in Arles

From : https://wikitopx.com/travel/top-10-things-to-do-in-grenoble-706555.html

[lodelss]

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | Month 2018 | 10 minutes (2,519 words)

In May of 2017, Mayor de Blasio unveiled Jimmy Breslin Way, a street sign dedicating the stretch of 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue to the late reporter. It was a strange press conference — half eulogy, half lecture — a chance for the mayor to laud Breslin and scold members of today’s media by whom he often feels unfairly maligned. “Think about what Jimmy Breslin did. Think about how he saw the world,” said de Blasio. He left without taking questions. What was he talking about? Did he imagine he and Jimmy Breslin would get along? In 1969 Breslin wrote a cover story about Mayor Lindsay for New York Magazine, “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” was the title. Lindsay was an inch shorter than de Blasio.

In 2010, Heike Geissler took a temporary position at an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Geissler was a freelance writer and a translator but, more pressingly, she was the mother of two children and money was not coming in. Seasonal Associate, which was translated by Katy Derbyshire and released by Semiotext(e) this month, is the product of that job. (Read an excerpt on Longreads.) It’s an oppressive, unsettling book, mainly because the work is too familiar. The book is written almost entirely in the second person, a style that might’ve come off as an irritating affectation with a lesser writer or a different subject. Here, it’s terrifying — you feel yourself slipping along with Geissler, thoughts of your own unpaid bills and the cold at the back of your throat weaving their way through the narrative. It’s not just that this unnamed protagonist could be you, it’s the certainty that someday she will be you. “You’ll soon know something about life that you didn’t know before, and it won’t just have to do with work,” Geissler writes. “But also with the fact that you’re getting older, that two children cry after you every morning, that you don’t want to go to work, and that something about this job and many other kinds of jobs is essentially rotten.”

*

The question of who killed New York used to be up for debate. Was it John Lindsay, who couldn’t face reality, who covered the city’s debts with short-term, high interest loans he knew were impossible to repay? His successor, Abe Beame, who bent to the demands of the bankers and gutted the social safety net during the fiscal crisis of the 70’s? Ed Koch, who embraced Beame’s cuts wholeheartedly and mocked past mayors as men who wanted New York “to be the No. 1 welfare city in America”? Giuliani, who launched the deregulation of rent controlled apartments and the quality of life campaign that gave us Broken Windows and COMPSTAT? (I’m not mentioning David Dinkins, because I really don’t think David Dinkins brought us here.) Was it Hipsters and their attendant paraphernalia? Was it the McKibbin Lofts? Union Pool? Was it Shred Stuy?

Inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face?

All New York City mayors are venal, but some are more venal than others. A few months ago, I would have told you Bloomberg was to blame, our bloodless, billionaire mayor, who rezoned the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods and openly courted real estate investment from foreign billionaires. Rents rose at neat clip alongside the homeless population. To his credit, Bloomberg — a very short man — was always transparent about where his priorities lay. The city, he said, was a “luxury product” and it should behave that way.

De Blasio was supposed to be the antidote to the Bloomberg years, a progressive underdog who ran on universal pre-k and affordable housing. But that affordable housing has largely failed to materialize — where it’s been built, it’s often still pretty unaffordable — and his administration has been marked by disappointing half-measures and an ill-conceived plan for a ridiculous four billion dollar streetcar no one wants.

On Black Friday, Amazon workers staged mass walkouts across Europe. On Cyber Monday, led by community groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change (NYCC), protestors stormed Amazon’s Midtown bookstore to protest the planned headquarters in Long Island City and later gathered in front of the LIC Civil Courthouse chanting “I stand in the rain, I stand in the snow, Amazon has got to go!” City Council members Jimmy Van Bremer, Jumanne Williams, and Melissa Mark-Vitero were all in attendance — Williams and Mark-Vitero, it should be noted, are both running for Public Advocate. All of them decried the incentives offered to Amazon, which total about 3 billion. Williams claimed they were steamrolled by the Mayor and Governor Cuomo and that while Cuomo’s betrayal was no surprise, the de Blasio administration was “the biggest waste of progressive capital [Williams had] ever seen.”

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It might’ve been a good show of force, had not all of the aforementioned politicians signed the letter urging Amazon to build its headquarters in New York. What did they think was going to happen? A New York Times investigation released earlier this year showed that the city had lost 152,000 rent-regulated apartments since 1993. The subway system is crumbling, the state leads the nation in income inequality, and the homeless population is at an all time high. No reasonable human being could look around and conclude that the answer to all these problems is to give the most avaricious company in the world the keys to the city. Amazon swallows everything it touches, it isn’t interested in civic health. Only half of the jobs being brought in are in tech and many of the low level positions will likely be replaced by robots fairly soon, but for now, these are the jobs for which the Mayor sold the city. “At any rate,” Geissler writes, early on in Seasonal Associate, “it’s almost impossible not to be forced to your knees and into defiance by this job you’re about to have.”

*

Geissler was hired in the warehouse to handle the Christmas rush, hence the title, and the cold is so omnipresent it seems to be a feature of the company rather than simply the reality of winter. A gate that will not latch properly becomes a major antagonist and everyone is either ill or on the verge of falling ill, although they have been warned specifically against this. “Sick days hurt Amazon,” Geissler is told at her orientation. Precarity manifests as a constant, low-grade fever. You’re the protagonist but her voice leads you through the job, a tired Virgil navigating a new circle of hell. The work is inventory — entering items into the system so they can be purchased online and performing at least a cursory check to make sure they’re undamaged. “Everything exists, in case you were going to ask,” says Geissler. “Absolutely everything exists, and people can buy it all.” Despite the scale of the warehouse, inventory work provides Geissler with a granular view of consumerism. Stripped of the marketing and storefronts that make it palatable it quickly begins to look like a form of mental illness. Who is buying these mugs, stamped with George Clooney’s face? Who needs these pre-distressed Iron Maiden hats, already rags at point of purchase? Amazon customers, which is to say, all of us.

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out.

Geissler isn’t the typical warehouse employee and as a temporary contractor she’s something of a tourist at Amazon. She’s well-educated, she’s white, she lives with the father of her children, and she’s normally able to make a living — however precarious — as a writer. There’s significant privilege there. Many people spend their entire lives working shitty, unforgiving jobs with arbitrary, infantilizing rules and part of the reason Geissler is so attuned to the myriad indignities of Amazon is because she’s unused to them. She’s aware of this position though. “It has to be said right away,” she writes, “that no one is suited for unhappiness, yet this fact doesn’t get enough recognition.” Seasonal Associate is a book about slippage and a sudden fall into the working class, but it’s a document of anxiety and futility rather than stunt journalism. The central rallying point in the warehouse is a desk made out of a door — a replica of Jeff Bezos’ desk when he founded Amazon; an absurd symbol of frugality and the company’s dedication to customer satisfaction over employees’ personal comfort. As if every warehouse worker has the potential to become the richest man in the world, if only they would stop buying such expensive desks. The idea that if you work hard enough you will inevitably rise out of poverty has always been a sham and Amazon has taken it to it’s logical endpoint. You work hard and nothing happens. You will never be good enough at your job, because you’re a human being, not a machine. As long as you’re alive you’re a potential problem for the company.

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In order to maintain some sense of agency Geissler stages tiny acts of rebellion — refusing to hold a handrail despite the signs instructing her to hold the handrail, keeping her safety vest in her pocket until she absolutely has to put it on. The gestures are adolescent and effectively meaningless, but every time she’s snide it’s a relief — a sign of life. Much later, after her contract is finished, she recognizes a man in a parking lot who she described as Amazon’s “only hipster.” The last time she’d seen him he was docking people’s pay for what’s commonly known as time theft. They had lined up a few minutes early to leave work, rather than waiting, unpaid, to go through security. “Unable to think of anything better,” says Geissler. “Or because it seemed like the most appropriate idea, I called out the name of a book I’d just read, by Mark Greif and others. I yelled at him: What Was the Hipster! I called it twice and I thought then he might know he was over.”

Geissler tried to sell the book as straightforward journalism initially and was turned down by five publishers, likely because book is largely boring. It’s a propulsive, weaponized banality though — something unnatural is going on here and it’s hard to see a way out. “You’ve completely forgotten that you have a profession and are only here to alleviate momentary poverty,” Geissler writes, just after her interview at Amazon. “Something inside you is essentially unsettled and will never calm down again, even though you do get the job. From this point on, you are beside yourself with worry.”

My own mother raised two kids by herself as a high school English teacher and she took a number of side jobs to supplement her income. Tutoring, working at a bakery, working at a strange, luxury gardening store that sold copper birdhouses and rocks that said things like “LOVE” and “CREATE” for people who couldn’t. None of them were bad jobs, none as oppressive as warehouse work, but they did not pay very well. Her desk (worse than Jeff Bezos’) was just a slab of wood, perched atop two filing cabinets. She never made a big deal out of that though, because she is not an asshole. She’d wake up at four or five in the morning to grade the lousy papers of teenage Republicans and shovel the walkway, but she still tried to read to me and my brother before putting us to bed. Oftentimes she’d fall asleep mid-sentence and start mumbling about the electricity bill or replacing the boiler. Eventually, a doctor told her she had to relax — her blood pressure was dangerously high, her muscles so tense that when she breathed, her ribs barely moved.

If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong.

My mom was thrown into financial uncertainty (and my dad wasn’t even a deadbeat) by an early divorce and the responsibility for two small children, but at this point that choking feeling is basically just the lived experience of the average American. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2003 J.G. Ballard said that “the totalitarian systems of the future will be subservient and ingratiating, the false smile of the bored waiter rather than the jackboot.” This is it, the future is here now. It’s because Geissler doesn’t fit the typical profile of an Amazon warehouse worker that her book is such a well-timed warning shot. If you think you’re immune to this — if you went to college, if you believe you’re upwardly mobile, if you imagine you will comfortably survive the inevitable spike in rent once Amazon’s headquarters settles into Queens — unless you have vast familial wealth to draw on, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Without immediate collective action, this is coming for all of us.

*

“Too tall,” Breslin clarified, about Mayor Lindsay, “means too Manhattanish, too removed from the problems of the street corners.” He wrote “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” shortly after his own failed mayoral bid with Norman Mailer, a campaign that left him “nervous and depressed.”

“I saw a sprawling, disjointed place which did not understand itself and was decaying physically and spiritually, decaying with these terrible little fires of rage flickering in the decay…On top of the city was an almost unworkable form of government and a set of casually unknowing, unfeeling, uncaring men and institutions. The absence of communications in a city which is the communications center of the world is so bad that you are almost forced to believe the condition of the city is terminal.”

  If that doesn’t sound familiar, it will soon. On December 12, the New York City Council held the first of a series of hearings on the new Amazon headquarters. Protestors covered the balcony and unfurled a No HQ2 Banner. “It’s all smoke and mirrors!” a man yelled. “Don’t let them monopolize the city! Don’t let them near the subways, don’t let them near the schools — these guys are lying creeps!” He was escorted out.

Amazon has become so large that it can have the same pacifying effect as the threat of climate change, but despair isn’t helpful right now. As Hamilton Nolan and Dave Colon have already pointed out over at Splinter, Amazon’s New York headquarters represents the best chance at effectively unionizing the company and the resistance to HQ2 is broad and growing. Still, it was difficult to watch the City Council hearing without a paralyzing sense of dread. Amazon is a contractor with ICE, they have a horrific labor record, and they’re accountable to no one. That guy was right, these people are lying creeps, as are many of the people we’ve elected. There’s such a long and rich tradition of grift in this city that it’s rare to be able to definitively level blame, but here we are. De Blasio was too tall to be mayor and we didn’t see it. “Is this all a matter of life and death?” Geissler writes, at the very beginning of Seasonal Associate. “I’ll say no for the moment and come back to the question later. At that point, I’ll say: Not directly, but in a way yes. It’s a matter of how far death is allowed into our lives.”

* * *

Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/slice-director-and-cast-on-their-wild-and-weird-horror-comedy-interview/

'Slice' Director and Cast on Their Wild and Weird Horror Comedy [Interview]

One of the most talked about streaming releases of the week was dropped on the unsuspecting public on Monday like a new album by Beyonce, Radiohead or Kanye West, with nearly identical fanfare, due in large part to it being the big-screen acting debut of Chance the Rapper (or as he’s credited in the film, Chance Bennett). The film in question is a horror-comedy offering called Slice, the feature writing/directing effort from Austin Vesely, who has worked previously with Chance and some of his label mates on music videos over the last few years.

Slice opens with the murder of a pizza delivery driver (played by Vesely) in the part of town occupied by ghosts — and there’s nothing spooky about it. The film takes place in a version of reality where ghosts and other supernatural beings are just a part of day-to-day life. Chance plays a werewolf, who also used to deliver Chinese food; there are also witches about. The town’s only pizza place (owned by Paul Scheer) is built atop a gateway to hell, and it’s partly up to another delivery person named Astrid (the great Zazie Beetz) to find out who’s being what becomes a string of murders of her co-workers.

/Film spoke with several members of the Slice production, including Vesely, just hours before the film’s world premiere in Chicago, where it’s release plan was announced (the film is being distributed by A24, which has an impressive history with releasing unconventional horror films). Joining the filmmaker was Beetz, who most recently kicked serious tail as Domino in Deadpool 2, as well as appearing in the epic second season of FX’s Atlanta. She also has somewhere in the neighborhood of six films scheduled for release in 2019, including the latest from Steven Soderbergh, High Flying Bird.

The third member of this interview gathering was noted film buff Sheer, the co-host of two Earwolf podcasts, How Did This Get Made? (on which he talks about bad movies) and Unspooled (where he and co-host Amy Nicholson are working their way through the AFI’s top 100 movies list). Sheer also starred in such films as The Disaster Artist and Popstar, as well as series like The League. We get into the origins of Slice’s story, capturing the proper horror/comedy balance, and the challenges of shooting in Joliet, Illinois (home of the infamous prison from The Blues Brothers).

***

I heard you talking to someone earlier about tech checking your film earlier today and seeing you name on the big screen for the first time. What was that feeling like?

Austin: It’s bananas! It’s absolute crazy. It doesn’t quite make sense to me just yet. But even walking down the hallway to the theater and seeing the digital readout that said Slice outside the theater, it was heavy.

And you’re not going to get many chance to have that experience with this film, at least on the big screen.

Austin: And I’m glad that happened here in Chicago, where we made the movie.

Paul: What’s so crazy about this movie is that when it was just a spec script, there was a poster up on line for it.

This is a comedy-horror film, which can be fairly awful if done the wrong way, but it can be beautiful when done correctly. Tell me about the balance for you—how funny did you want to make it, how gross and bloody do you get on the horror side?

Austin: To me, it’s primarily a comedy. What I like about horror is that it’s got these very recognizable genre conventions, and what’s fun about that is that everyone recognizes them and you can subvert them easily. That just gives you a lot of room to play around and go into this genre that people know and love and play around with it. It’s more of a comedy masquerading as this horror film. But you’re right, it is a precarious tone. I think it was all in the casting when it came to figuring out who was going to be able to ride that line. But there’s a spectrum of performances too.

There’s a spectrum of performers just on this couch. Was your approach, when in doubt, go for the comedy?

Austin: I think so, but then when I saw that I feel like it’s not true. The auditions we did here in Chicago, we had all of these amazing theater actors come in, and one guy in particular, Tim Decker, who I think about a lot because he so is the tone of the movie. He came in and he’s not telegraphing the humor; he’s really committed to what the world is.

Zazie: But that’s what works so well about his performance—he’s not trying to be funny. He’s just committing to the world, and the world in itself is so ebullient that going straight there, it still works.

Paul: I’d also argue that one of the things that’s so defining about this movie is how good it looks. That’s the thing that’s often missing in these slapdash…like you said, when horror-comedy goes bad, because it’s like they don’t care. I feel like, “No, it’s got to function as a real thing.” This thing has a defined set of characteristics, and Austin’s fingerprints are all over this. It really does like a movie you made and not just a collage of different ideas.

You make it seem like this doesn’t take place in this world exactly. So where are we playing exactly?

Austin: Yeah, yeah. It’s like middle-America, but it’s middle-America where ghosts exist and people are like “These fucking ghosts.” They just annoyed by it and take it for granted that this is where the world is. “Oh, we had a werewolf problem.” Stuff like that. It’s definitely not the universe we’re living in, as far as I know.

Paul: Also, it doesn’t comment on it that much.

Zazie: It’s just assumed that ghosts and things are a part of the world around you.

What was the germ of this story?

Austin: It was about six years ago, I was thinking of ideas for movies, and it was just like “Pizza delivery, horror—that sounds like a good idea.” I ended up writing a version of it that was more grounded in the world that we live in, it still had it’s own tone, but it was more of an Edgar Wright tone. Eventually, I started to develop it, and there was this book that I really loved called CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders, and there was a little thing in this novella where he places ghosts in the universe and deals with them like they’re a pain in the ass. “The ghosts are out there booing and wooing in the parking lot all the time when I get off work,” and I thought that was so funny and I’d never seen it quite done in a movie. So that was how it became something else and it started to be about putting in these other horror genre conventions. Let’s put in ghosts and werewolves into this pizza/middle-America story and see how that goes.

Are there certain horror tropes that you subverted as well?

Paul: I think this movie keeps you on your toes because you don’t quite ever know what kind of movie you’re seeing. At the beginning, you’re like “It’s this,” and then it switches to something else.

Zazie: It’s almost a bit of a genre shift by the end as well.

Paul: Yeah, and I’d even say at certain points, the lead of the film even shifts. It passes off a bit. People do things, then they go away, then they come back again. It’s a very fluid, different thing. I think one of the things that’s so interesting about it is that in this world of indie film, there’s often a very similar type of script that you see—dramas, dramedies, and then there’s horror. And this is unlike all of those. For that simple reason, it’s exciting. When I was growing up, when I saw indie films, it was everybody doing their own thing and each one felt very unique, and not just “We’re in a family and things are troubled.”

Tell me about your characters.

Paul: You should go first, because I can speak in context to your character.

Zazie: I’m one of the only characters who survived from the short film [script].

Austin: Actuallym you both did.

Zazie: My character’s name is Astrid. It’s difficult to talk about without revealing too much. Somebody close to me gets killed, and I go out for revenge.

Paul: She used to work for me, and you come back to the pizza place to figure out what the deal is.

Zazie: Yeah, I get the team together to help figure out what’s going on. There are killings happening in the town, and we’re trying to figure it out. I’m emotionally spearheading it.

Paul: And I’m upset because all of this is diluting my final money totals [laughs]. This is a work-stoppage situation. I’m looking at it from a commerce perspective.

You’ve worked with Chance a lot in the past, but making a film is a huge jump in many ways. When I saw that he was in, I wasn’t in anyway concerned with his performance because he was so good on SNL. Talk about the discussions you two had, and how involved was he in creating this with you? It sound like most of this came out of your head.

Austin: It is, and that’s what was great about it. He was so willing to get on board with what I was trying to do, even when it was extremely strange. I think that comes from us having a comfortable working relationship form the past several years. We were working together but we were supplementing his art. So in this case, it was the opposite.

Paul: When this movie was being shot, it was right at the point where Chance went supernova.

Zazie: His album was released that year.

Paul: Right. I think right before I started shooting, he was on Ellen, and I think of Ellen as being the marker of grand success. He was on tour when we were shooting, but at that moment, he was exploding into the cultural mainstream.

How was he to direct?

Austin: Luckily, part of writing this werewolf character, I was writing it with him in mind. I was thinking of his voice. We all know that Michael Jackson werewolf in “Thriller,” so I was thinking “What is Chance the Rapper as a werewolf?” [laughs] He’s kind of a rascal, just wily dude. It was a lot of fun to play around with him on that.

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When you bring in these really fun people to be in your movie, do you give them a chance to customize their characters, play with them a little bit before you start shooting?

Austin: I felt that way.

Paul: I don’t know if it was as much changing as it was having a real collaborative experience. One of the interesting things about Austin is that he’s a first-time feature director who was so open to making the best product. We work with a lot of people who, the first time out, want to hold onto every idea, every instinct. And allowing us to go in different directions, whether of not you used them or not, I think it speaks to someone who to do a lot of great work because you’re willing to be a collaborator.

You shot this mostly around here?

Austin: Yeah, Joliet.

Are there recognizable locations?

Austin: [laughs] For Joliet residents.

Did you get the Blues Brothers prison in there?

Austin: Yes! It’s in the background of a scene that Zazie is in.

Paul: One of the cool things about Joliet is that people were psyched that we were shooting a movie there. They wanted to participate. I remember our producer driving to set, and he saw a cool car on the side of the road, very unique looking. And went there and asked “Can we use your car?” And they said, “Yeah, sure!” That’s not something you’re going to get anywhere else.

Austin: That guys was like “Yeah, you can use my car. Do you want to use my other car?” But no landmarks you would know unless you’re from Joliet. It’s that middle-America thing again. I grew up in smaller towns—I’ve only been in Chicago about eight years. One of the things about it was as I was writing and developing this, it’s funny to think about werewolves and ghosts in Bentondorf, Iowa. I needed a place that was city-adjacent.

Zazie: And then also being in that kind of bubble helped us. We were all staying in Joliet, which is right off the highway, and there were days when I was like “I need to get the fuck out of here.” [laughs]

I hear they have a lovely riverboat casino.

Paul: [laughs] I remember being in that hotel, it was isolating because even getting to Chicago was like 45 minutes, so now we’re talking about a two-hour drive back and forth.

Austin: I remember Zazie was here when the first season of Atlanta came out. She’s having this big, huge moment and she’s in this hotel in Joliet.

Zazie: Yes, September 6, 2016. I was in Joliet.

Talk about transitioning the short film script to a feature. What did you grow upon, what did you create from scratch?

Austin: I really liked the idea, and when I started adding those supernatural elements, I realized that there was a lot to play with here. What it started doing for me was giving me this political look at the town that it takes place in. As a viewer, that’s something you can take or leave—the politics—but I became more interested in the culture of the place by expanding it. I started to write it as a pilot, and started thinking of it as Twin Peaks—it’s really about the place—and I was really interested in exploring the culture of this city, where these ghosts exist and other people exist, and what is this weird dynamic happening here?

When you say politics, is there a metaphor going on here for the world today?

Austin: Yeah, but it wasn’t overtly written that way. That’s just how it shook out.

Zazie: It definitely reads that way [laughs].

Austin: Yeah, there’s some allegorical stuff happening in there. Again, that’s one of the beautiful things about horror and those recognizable conventions. These movies do this.

What do you remember responding to specifically about your characters? What did you latch onto and try to build upon?

Zazie: For Astrid, I latched onto her motivation of love, that she is embarking on her journey because it’s a real, and she’s reaction viscerally to a very traumatic experience. I liked that within the hubbub of this world, she felt very like the beating heart of it all.

Austin: There’s an anger in her too.

Zazie: It switches on an off. I wouldn’t necessarily say that she’s the lead of the film. The story does focus on multiple storylines—there’s a reporter, and the narrative in the pizza place, my story separates from the pizza places for a while.

Paul: She is the driving narrative of the story, which is trying to figure out what’s happening. For me, it came down to less of a character thing and more of the script and the people who were attached to it. I’d seen these videos that Austin had directed, and the script was so different; it made me excited. This was something I wanted to be a part of. When I first read it, I was like “What’s the underlying thing in here?” But it brought me in in a way that I’m not often brought into things. I can diagram most movies pretty simply, but with this, I was like “I don’t know exactly what this is, and I’m really enjoying it.”

I actually had my second child right when I got offered to do this, and it was tricky because I left about a month after her was born to go do it. I wouldn’t have done that normally, but I liked this so much. I really wanted to do it, and it allowed me to do some fun stuff.

Zazie: And the team felt to passionate, and it was really driven by everybody wanting to be there and wanting to make something good, and that’s a really good energy to be around. You could pick up on that right from the beginning.

Paul: I will say one thing too, my father-in-law passed away during the shooting, and this whole team took the entire week of shooting that I had left to do, and we shot everything in one day so I could be there for my wife and kids. That was so impressive to me. This team was so competent to be like “Let’s go!” and we all jumped in, especially the camera. They were wrestling with a million things, but everyone jumped in and was a team player, and when I think back on this movie, I think back on that. It was an awful, sad time, but it was also an amazing time to see everyone just committed to do it together.

Is this the start of something new for you, Austin? Do you have more movies in you, perhaps a drawer full of scripts?

Austin: Oh, yeah.

Paul: What if he’d said “No”? [laughs]

Austin: One and done. “Hope you liked it; see you later.” I’m excited to keep going. I don’t really know what I’m doing; I’m still figuring it out. I’m not thinking I need to do another thing where I flip horror, but I think a lot of the ideas that are in this that have more of a political bend, those things will be present in future stuff.

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Source: https://www.slashfilm.com/slice-interview/

[rickhorrow]

10 to watch: Mayor’s Edition FOR THE WEEK OF JULY 16

10 TO WATCH: RICK HORROW’S TOP SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF JULY 16 with Jamie Swimmer & Jesse Leeds Grant

Baseball Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr., the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation, and Major League Baseball announce plan to build Youth Development Parks in 10 Major League Baseball markets. The Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation and Major League Baseball are teaming up to bring synthetic turf Youth Development Parks to 10 Major League Baseball cities throughout the country over the next five years thanks in part to a $5 million donation. Each field will support an MLB Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) program, MLB’s initiative to provide baseball & softball league-play for underserved youth. The first three markets where the Youth Development Parks will be built include Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and the Washington D.C. area. The Ripken Foundation’s Youth Development Park Initiative creates clean, safe places for kids to play on multipurpose, synthetic surface fields that promote healthy living in an outdoor recreational facility. In 2017, the Ripken Foundation impacted nearly 1.4 million kids nationwide through its Youth Development Park and mentor programs. Stay tuned for more exciting news around this announcement throughout the week.

U.S. Club Soccer, the leading organization developing soccer clubs across America, estimates an $8 million direct economic impact for Aurora, Colorado from its 2018 league-based and cup-based national championships. The 2018 Girls NPL Finals, held July 12-16, featured top teams from 19 regional NPL member leagues across the country in 13-U through 19-U age groups. The Elite National Premier League (ENPL) Finals took place July 13-14, and features 16 teams in 14-U through 17-U age groups that qualified from the ENPL Eastern and Western playoffs. Occurring July 20-24, the National Cup XVII Finals is the culminating event of US Club Soccer’s cup-based countrywide championship series, welcoming 13-U through 19-U boys and girls squads. Located in suburban Denver, the Aurora Sports Park is a 220-acre site that hosts major local, state, and national competitions, and offers 23 soccer fields. This year marks the third time US Club Soccer will host championships in Colorado, after a successful debut in 2013 for the 2013 NPL Finals and National Cup XII Finals, and then again three years later for the 2016 NPL Finals and National Cup XV Finals. In total, more than 300 teams and 8,000 of America’s top youth players will participate in these prestigious youth soccer competitions at Aurora Sports Park, a testament to the economic benefit of sport well beyond the professional level.

Americans score major upset in international beach volleyball. In under 60 minutes of the Swatch Major Gstaad pool play of the FIVB World Tour's Beach Volleyball Major Series, two results sent shockwaves throughout the Swiss Alps. Reigning Olympic champion Alison Cerutti and last year’s World Champion Andre Loyola were humbled by Italian qualifiers Andrea Abbiati and Tiziano Andreatta in straight sets. And Brazilian Evandro Gonçalves and partner Vitor Felipe, the top seeds in the mountain tournament, were beaten by American wildcards Sean Rosenthal and rookie Chase Budinger. Budinger, who played in the NBA for eight years, was in impressive form, even though his last pro beach volleyball outing was in 2011. “It’s an incredible start. A year ago I would have never have thought I’d be blocking a world champion of beach volleyball at the net at a Major,” said Budinger. If team Budinger/Rosenthal continues to play this way, we will for sure see them next year on the South Florida sand at the Fort Lauderdale Major season opener February 5-10.

In Las Vegas, NBA Summer League players get a crash course on sports business. The Sports Business Classroom is in its third year at the NBA Summer League, and players will hear about "social branding, broadcasting, video, and scouting in addition to the high-profile salary cap and analytics topics," according to LVSPORTSBIZ.com. Students in the program "get a crash course on understanding the ins and outs of the complex salary cap world; networking opportunities with NBA team executives; hear from NBA experts on hot topics such as analytics; and immersion into the NBA Summer League." This year's class had 61 students and is run by UC-Irvine computer scientist Larry Coon, "who is an NBA salary cap expert." Coon said that the students "will hear from 60 NBA execs, mentors and industry players throughout the week." One thing the sports business program "won’t promise is a job with an NBA team." As the NBA contemplates lowering the minimum age for players once again, helping to educate them on the business basics of their careers and life after basketball becomes even more critical.

In North Carolina, Charlotte Motor Speedway locked in its race name and distance for its NASCAR playoff race for the September 28-30 Bank of America ROVAL 400 race weekend. The event will mark the first playoff road course race in NASCAR history. “This is history in the making, and it marks the next chapter in our legacy of providing innovative, show-stopping entertainment that’s never been seen before,” said Marcus Smith, President and CEO of Speedway Motorsports, Inc. “Like NASCAR’s first 600-mile race and the first superspeedway race at night, the inaugural Bank of America ROVAL™ 400 is going to be a can’t-miss event that fans will remember forever. We’re about to witness a dramatic, historic, unforgettable race weekend September 28-30.” In a season in which NASCAR revenues and attendance are down yet again, the new road race format marks a welcome lane change for the racing circuit – one that may attract younger motor sports viewers and crossover fans from IndyCar. The move parallels similar innovations brought to the PGA Tour during the Zurich Classic in New Orleans – those golf change-ups have resulted in increased attendance and viewership.

As L.A. Live celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, AEG along with its private and public partners has proposed a $1.2 billion expansion of "some of the surrounding facilities," including the Los Angeles Convention Center and the JW Marriott. According to the Orange County Register, the proposed expansion includes an "additional, 40-story tower at the JW Marriott that will include" 850 hotel rooms, a 109,700-square-foot meeting space and a 51,300-square-foot ballroom and an expanded L.A. Live parking garage. Staples Center and L.A. Live President Lee Zeidman said the proposal was in the final stages of "crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s." The expansion would also upgrade the Convention Center to "include a 90,000 to 100,000-square foot multi-purpose space, a 20,000-30,000-square foot meeting space and 180,000-200,000-square foot new exhibition hall." With the 20th anniversary of Staples Center rapidly approaching, Zeidman said that AEG and its partners are in the "midst of interviewing architectural firms for an update of the sports arena and live concert venue." Some of those upgrades include "adding premium clubs and opening up the upper concourse to give patrons a great view" of downtown L.A. or "premium seating with a view of players taking the ice or the basketball court." All of this would be done "without ever fully shutting down the venue" – an amazing feat.

As the 2018 World Cup packs up its bags, FIFA may be open to expanding the 2022 Cup to 48 teams. FIFA President Gianni Infantino said that the governing body "remains open to expanding the number of teams in the World Cup" by 50% in 2022, four years "earlier than planned." Infantino told the Washington Post that FIFA will "continue discussing the matter with the host country, Qatar, and 'calmly and quietly' decide whether to grow the tournament to 48 teams." Infantino also confirmed that the 2022 World Cup "will begin on November 21, with the final being played on December 18." Infantino "did not directly answer a question about how he reconciles his tight relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the political and human-rights issues dogging the host country." Infantino also said of video review, which was used in the World Cup for the first time, "It's accepted. It's working ... making football more clear, more transparent." Another thing that is crystal clear – as it will be played in direct competition with college and NFL football, the 2022 World Cup will face a massive challenge in maintaining high tv ratings – especially if the American team fails to qualify once again.

Boston Marathon raises $36.6 million for charity. Boston Marathon runners raised an all-time high of $36.6 million for charities in the 2018 race. The total for more than 260 non-profits was $2.4 million more than last year. The Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the world’s oldest and most prestigious annual marathon, sets aside entries for runners who promise to raise money for charity. Race sponsor John Hancock also provides bibs for charity runners. American Desi Linden and Japan’s Yuki Kawauchi won this year’s race in April in a torrential downpour and near-gale force headwinds, leading a field of more than 30,000 people from Hopkinton to the finish line in Boston’s Copley Square

George Springer holds inspirational charity event. George Springer of the Houston Astros is the spokesperson for SAY, the Stuttering Association for Youth, and he's helping to make a big difference in the lives of children with stutters. Springer held his fourth annual bowling charity event for the organization last Sunday night and participants raised over $50,000. All benefits from Springer's event are donated to help children attend Camp SAY, a two-week camp for children who stutter, like Springer once did. Springer was very interactive with the children at his event and thanked everyone in attendance, telling them to keep pushing and accept what comes throughout their journey. During the interview portion of the evening, some of Springer's attendees with stutters were so inspired by him that they gave talking to the press on camera a shot.

10.BJ’s Wholesale partners with Red Sox Foundation for sweepstakes. BJ’s Wholesale Club, the leading operator of membership warehouse clubs in the Eastern U.S., has teamed up with the Red Sox Foundation to host an exclusive sweepstakes that provide members with the chance to win Red Sox Foundation prizes, including tickets and VIP game day experiences. The official team charity of the Boston Red Sox, the Red Sox Foundation has donated to over 1,680 organizations since its creation in 2002, and focuses on making a difference in the lives of children, families, veterans, and communities in need by improving their health, education, and recreational opportunities. Through partnerships with best-in-class organizations in healthcare, the Red Sox have helped raised over $135 million for cancer treatment and research for The Jimmy Fund, supported more than 15,000 veterans and their families suffering from the "invisible wounds of war" with the Home Base Program, and helped the Dimock Center serve over 17,000 patients annually with health and human services. The Foundation's self-run education and youth baseball programs have helped 274 Boston Public Schools students with college scholarships, and promote healthy choices and valuable life skills to more than 700 urban youth annually through its RBI baseball and softball program.