#can he sing money money money like Meryl Streep did

[oscurl]

Does Oscar know the lyrics to all Mamma Mia songs? Who is finally going to ask the real questions here

[mindofharry]

deja vu

in which harry gets a new girlfriend and it’s giving him major deja vu.

angst ! fluff ! all of the above ! feedback is welcome as always <3 based off of the wonderful song, deja vu by olivia rodrigo!!

“Well, maybe we should end it”

Harry suggested and Y/N froze. end it? why is that even something that came into his mind. It was a small, petty fight about a girl. A nice girl that Y/N is apparently jealous of, she’s not by the way. The girl just is the a little too close to her boyfriend, hugging him and kissing him on the cheek when she thinks Y/N isn’t watching them. And harry just sits there, let’s her do that while Y/N his girlfriend of three years is sitting right in front of them. Never did he bitch about her or complain, just compliments for the nice girl at the party.

“W...What?” Y/N stuttered sitting on the hood of the car. The car they bought together. They both worked at an ice cream place down in town, so with the little money they both had and a little support from their parents, they both this beauty. Of course, harry was the only one able to drive it for a whole year because poor Y/N didn’t have her drivers license yet.

“I think we should end it, this” Harry said pointing between himself and Y/N. Her eyes began to fill with tears and the guilt hit him quickly.

“I’m sorry, Y/N. But i just can’t do this back and forth thing anymore. We’re not in middle school” Harry said and sniffled a bit. Y/N nodded, she had sort of know someone like harry wouldn’t stay with someone like her for that long anyways. It’s just apart of life, right?

Right?

“You can keep the car. I’ll find some other way to get into work” Harry mumbled handing Y/N the keys to their shared car. Her eyes widen and anger surged through her veins.

“How dare you” Y/N yelled, a sob coming out of her mouth. “You’re dumping me? you’re fucking dumping me?” she yelled out and that attracted some stares. They were in their place, their special place in Malibu under the stars and near the beach. That’s all theirs.

“You flirt with this girl for a year of our relationship. you do it right infront of me, harry! and you can’t handle it anymore?” Y/N exclaimed and harry sighed, looking slightly embarrassed as more people started to watch them. “Fine, fuck go be with her! i don’t care” Y/N said wiping the tears off of her cheeks and getting into the car.

“Goodbye, harry”

And a couple of weeks later, harry was with that nice girl. That pretty girl, who was a carbon copy of you - harry figured that out pretty quickly, when they got to know each other more.

They were watching reruns of glee when he got this moment of deja vu. Like he had done this before.

Because he had. With Y/N.

“I love this show” Y/N giggled, her hand in harrys hair. Harry nodded agreeing as they watched the new directions so a performance again, this time tina and mercedes were leading the group.

“Y’know you don’t have to pretend to like it, we can change the channel if you want?” Y/N offered and Harry shook his head quickly and blushed. “No, i like it. Could make a good band name, no? New direction, one direction?” Harry teased and you giggled.

“Huh. You’re more of gleek than i am”

“i hate this show” The nice girl said changing the channel, before harry could speak up. Instead of disagreeing with her, he just nodded and kissed the side of her head. He liked glee.

Other times of this deja vu stuff, it was really honest mistakes. Like, nearly calling her Y/N’s name. You were just on his mind, it was nothing serious. He missed the car, that’s all. He also missed the strawberry ice cream and the late night chats under the malibu sky. So he took her there. He put billy joels, ‘uptown girl’ on the radio and grinned when she sang to it. She wasn’t as care free as Y/N though. Y/N had her own shrine of billy joel, her dad is absolutely obsessed with the man and passed that on to Y/N.

Of course, harry had heard of billy joel but had only listened to his most famous songs. Y/N introduced to him to the real billy joel, it was their thing. Listening to billy joel in Y/N’s basement after a long shift, harry would lay his head on her stomach as Y/N sang to vienna or sometimes harry would pull her up and dance around to piano man. He missed that so much.

The chorus of ‘uptown girl’ came on and harry looked over at the nice girl, he now calls his own.

“I love you” He said and she stopped singing and placed a hand on his knee.

Y/N did that. Had her hands all over him.

“I love you too” The nice girl hummed and Harry sighed, now getting another sense of deja vu.

“Did you see Harry and that girl together, Y/N?” Sarah, her new shift buddy asked. Y/N had seen them together, the nice girl that harrys with likes to post everything on social media. Y/N sees the traded jackets, the billy joel, the i love you’s in malibu, the strawberry ice cream. Y/N wondered if the girl laughed at harry because of how annoying he was during glee, or when he puts a jacket on way too small for him, or when they sing in the car. Does he steal Y/N jokes, like he stole everything else?

“Yeah, i did. Seem like a nice couple” Y/N said with a smile. Sarah, only knowing her a couple days, thought nothing of it. Y/N was breaking inside, she literally felt her heart break in two everytime she thought of the two.

How could harry just replace Y/N like that?

“I’d like to be an actress�� The nice girl said licking her strawberry ice cream. Harrys eyes widened, deja vu. Y/N had told him, just before they started dating that she was going to be the next meryl streep - why she chose meryl streep, he’ll never know. Y/N has always wanted to be an actress. She had done a few jobs here and there, and always got the main part in plays and musicals. Being an actress is Y/N’s things.

“That’s great” Harry said supporting a forced grin. The nice girl didn’t think anything of it. Y/N wouldn’t known something was wrong.

A different girl, but nothings new.

Harry had to get away. Away from the nice girl who had ruined Y/N and Harrys relationship. So he went to the ice cream parlour. He knew Y/N was working with sarah, mitch is one of his closest friends and he’s dating sarah — so after some digging and prodding, he got the info he needed and set off to town. Without her. Harry dropped her off at her apartment, made up some lame excuse of not feeling well and needed to rest. Y/N would’ve offered soup, the nice girl just said get well soon and closed the apartment door in his face. It was too easy. It shouldn’t be that easy to lie to her, it was never like that with Y/N. Harry couldn’t lie to Y/N for the life of him, even around birthdays or christmas. He sucked at keeping secrets and telling fibs.

“Welcome to All things nice, how may i help you!” Y/N’s voice rang out as she was cleaning out the sink. The bell had notified her, that a customer was in the shop. She just didn’t know that customer was her ex boyfriend.

“Are we able to talk?” Harry asked wringing his hands. Y/N quickly turned around, almost bashing her head into the shelf. Her eyes were wide and her heart broke, again. She could barley handle the instagram posts. She can’t handle harry in real life. Not after what he did. Maybe if it was a mutual break up - but it really was not a mutual break up.

“I’m sorry, we don’t serve that” Y/N snapped pushing the spoons into a drawer. Harry flinched and nodded placing his hands in his back pockets. “Ok, i deserved that” he mumbled. He just needed to explain, just five minutes.

“Please, Y/N. i just need to explain” Harry pleaded, sounding proper desperate. Y/N couldn’t help but feel anger and sadness as she listened to harry beg for her time. She just couldn’t believe he was back so quick, so early in his new relationship.

“What do you possibly need to explain” Y/N asked dropping the spoons and looking at harry over the ice cream. It was rather cliche, really.

“You dumped me, because i pointed out that a girl - by the way, i was right - was coming onto you. I just needed reassurance, harry. That you wouldn’t cheat, that you wouldn’t leave me!” you exclaimed and harry nodded. “I just needed that. and i’m really glad that you dumped me. because we obviously weren’t meant for each other” Y/N said continuing her clean up.

“We are meant to be” Harry said. “We’re Y/N and harry” he said, his voice breaking. Y/N almost felt bad.

“No. You’re in a relationship. You say i love you, to her. You sing billy joel and swap jackets. You eat strawberry ice cream with her for fuck sakes harry” Y/N yelled, pulling at her hair. Harry sniffled and nodded. “I know, I know” he mumbled.

“Do you get deja vu?” Y/N asked “hmm?” she asked again when she didn’t get an answer.

“Thought so”

[anachilles]

» somewhere in the crowd, there’s you  ♪  julie/luke [ juke ]

If they weren’t already dead Julie swore she would kill them. Luke especially.

Actually no, that wasn’t fair. This time she couldn’t completely blame them for what was admittedly a dumb decision on her own part. But see it from her perspective - the boys hadn’t seen the Mamma Mia movies. They didn’t even know of their existence. That had to be remedied.

TL;DR - The boys are introduced to the Mamma Mia Cinematic Universe. Alex spectates, Julie sings ABBA, Luke falls further in love, and Reggie ends up reliving the horror of high school math class. Also BROT4 couch cuddles.

link to read on AO3: [x]

taglist: @wokealex @blueruby31

If they weren’t already dead Julie swore she would kill them. Luke especially.

Actually, no, that wasn’t fair. This time she couldn’t completely blame them for what was admittedly a dumb decision on her own part.

But see it from her perspective - the boys hadn’t seen the Mamma Mia movies. Didn’t even know of their existence. They had just been finishing up a group jam session when she’d made some off-hand joke about them hitting the big-time and having their music turned into a movie-musical series “like ABBA”. Reggie’s face had lit up and he immediately jumped on it, “Wait, they made a movie out of ABBA music?”

“Multiple movies?!” Alex had cut in, looking disbelieving but nonetheless delightfully intrigued.

Luke snorted with laughter, throwing his hands up as he turned to look at Julie. “That’s it - I know what we’re doing tonight” he exclaimed, and pointed at her “Do you have them on ta-”

He catches himself before he can finish the word ‘tape’, but Julie’s eyes still narrow, her own smile now challenging. The boys really weren’t that bad at picking up the basics of modern technology, but slip-of-the-tongues still happened and Julie loved to tease them about it. Luke most of all just because he always dogged the other two the most about it when they did it. Also, perhaps a little bit, because he was kind of cute when he got all defensive.

“On what, now?”

Luke floundered for a second, and Alex and Reggie traded a look between them. Suddenly though, a lightbulb dinged above his head and his expression turned smug.

“DVD! Do you have them on DVD”

Julie laughed, making what was meant to be a loud ‘buzzer’ sound. “Wrong answer! Not the most up-to-date form of media storage, but nonetheless thank-you for playing”. Her expression softened though when she heard Alex and Reggie hound him a little behind her, “However, we do have them on DVD because my dad likes having physical copies of stuff”.

She was about to leave to go grab them from the house, only the time on her phone caught her attention and her heart sank.

“Hey guys, I can go get them for you but I don’t think I can stay the whole way through both. I’ve got school tomorrow.”

All three boys erupted in protestations, Luke’s notably the loudest of all, though on Alex’s suggestion she conceded to stay for at least the first one, then they’d pick up the second one tomorrow or something. 

Honestly, it hadn’t taken nearly as much convincing as it should have. 

She just really needed to physically be there to witness the three of them watching Meryl Streep jump off a pier to the tune of ‘Dancing Queen’ and Pierce Brosnan absolutely butcher ‘The Winner Takes it All’ for the very first time. Also, talking to them about the movies had made her realise it had been way too long since she’d last watched them herself, and they always made her feel so light and happy. As silly as it may sound, the care-free, sunshiney tone but with genuine moments in them had helped carry her through some really dark days. Since then, they’d always been comforting to return to.

So that’s how she ended up squished on the beat-up old studio couch with three ghost boys from the 90’s, having the absolute pleasure of seeing them react to ‘Mamma Mia’ for the very first time. It was a bit of a tight squeeze, and required Reggie to be sitting with one leg straddled over the arm of the couch and the rest of him pretty much glued to Luke’s side, but they made it work.

Although just as she was getting herself comfy in her spot between Alex and Luke, something niggled at the back of her mind. Something she forgot to do? Maybe? She wracked her brain for a couple of minutes, but her attention quickly and all-too-easily drifted to the screen as the opening chords of ‘Honey, Honey’ sounded, like some sort of siren call, and she couldn’t help but mouth along to the words. She knew them pretty much by heart.

What certainly didn’t help with her cognitive functioning however, is when during ‘Money, Money, Money…’ she felt Luke shift where he was pretty much flush against her side and his arm stretch out behind her neck. His hand settled somewhere near her shoulder; teasingly close but not quite touching it. Her heart rate kicked up a notch, but she was determined to keep her eyes on the screen in front of her, daring not to look his way or even let on that she noticed.

The boys were touchy-feely and generally very physically affectionate with each other, she knew that just from generally being around them these past couple of months. Julie had always found it really sweet and endearing, how unashamedly tactile they were with each other, but at the same time couldn’t help but feel left out as her own friendships with all of them got deeper and she grew closer to them all. Now that they were corporeal, at least to her, suddenly she’d become privy to all that as well.

Now she couldn’t imagine not being able to do stuff like hold their hands during band circles, or not knowing the utter warmth of Alex’s hugs (it was undisputed that he gives the best ones) when he noticed she’d had a tough day at school, or even what it felt like to not have Reggie gleefully grab her hands, or arm, or shoulders when he got super excited about something.

She’d already been falling hard for Luke before when she couldn’t physically feel him under her fingertips. For all intents and purposes wasn’t fully there there, but now? When she’d felt the brush of his body behind her when he’d lean over her shoulder to look at sheet music, or his thigh press up against her leg as they shared a piano stool during their little lyric brainstorming sessions? When they could high-five, lean into each other’s side, playfully shove each other when one thinks the other is being annoying, grab each other’s hands and dance around the room in celebration when they manage to book another gig? All those little moments they could have now added layers to what she already felt.

However, even if she felt something between them, that spark,  and her gut told her Luke possibly felt so too, Julie also couldn’t deny that that kind of affection wasn’t any different to the kind he showed towards Alex and Reggie too. Plus, she didn’t really know how ghosts felt about having relationships, especially with the living, or if Luke would even want to go there. So she tried not to read too much into what kind of felt like Luke pulling that old “arm around shoulder whilst distracted by the movie” move.

So although she never really could forget how close he was, Julie let herself become immersed back in the movie. Her life was generally good, labels and certainty or not, she was happy. The happiness of the movie fed into that. The boys seemed to be having a hoot with it as well, if how much Alex especially was grooving in his seat was any indication.

Julie’s not quite sure what possessed her to say it in the moment, or what she expected to transpire when she did, but when they got to the ‘Super Trouper’ scene coming straight off of the, uh, heaviness of ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ (during which Luke went weirdly quiet for some reason, prompting Alex and Reggie to share a fleeting look over the top of both his and Julie’s heads) and the opening chords sounded she blurted out 

“Oh, this used to be my karaoke song when I was a kid”. 

Luke’s eyes immediately went wide and she knew she was in trouble. He quickly urged Reggie to grab the remote and pause the movie, ignoring Alex’s soft “Hey, I was watching that!”, before turning his attention fully towards her.

“Well now you have to do the routine; get on up there and show us what you’re made of!”

Julie’s jaw hung open a little and she wasn’t sure whether she could really be annoyed at anyone but herself for practically handing this to him on a silver platter.

“No! I really don’t…” she tried to argue, though his mischievous smile was infectious and damn her lips threatened to twitch into a smile too. “It’s been years! And anyway, I only bust it out for audiences that are deserving of it”.

Luke met her with a challenging gaze. “Bet it’s cause you don’t know the words” he said, turning to Reggie, his tone dripping in antagonism. “Hey, did you hear that the great Julie Molina won’t perform because she doesn’t know all of the words to Super Trouper by ABBA?”. Reggie’s eyebrows shot up and he immediately played along. “Y’know what? I actually did hear that somewhere. Huh…”.

Julie shot a withering look at Alex, a wordless “Can you do anything?” shining in her eyes, but he has the nerve to just shrug (!) with a silent, smiling “I’ll allow it”.

She could’ve got them to drop it if she really had wanted them to, she knew that. Maybe Julie from three months ago would have. Actually, no, that version of herself definitely would have made them drop it; the darkness shrouding her life day-in, day-out smothering any semblance of silly, carefree happiness and convincing her that simply having fun just wasn’t for her.

But she didn’t feel like that anymore.

Julie pulled herself to her feet, eyes fixed with new determination. She crossed the room to the open space, taking a stance mirroring that of the one they’d paused Meryl Streep in and fixed Luke with a playful glare, even though she was addressing Reggie.

“Unpause the movie”.

The performance was one for the history books, if she did say so herself. The boys watched on in amazement as she remembered every word, near enough every step and dance move (the big sleeve shimmy was an interesting one though with sweater sleeves nowhere near dramatic enough to match Donna’s) and personally she thought she sold it.

About halfway through Alex snuck a glance at Luke by his side, and realised karma must be having a slow night given how fast it was paying the other boy back, because he was undeniably staring at Julie with what was clearly pure, open adoration.

“‘Cause somewhere in the crowd, there’s yooooou” she finished with a flourish, heart thumping, and lowered her arm to point at all three of them in turn, but finishing ultimately on Luke even though he was sat in the middle. His face scrunched up with a cheesy smile and he let out a loud whoop of appreciation, kicking off the round of applause before the other boys joined in, Reggie coming in clutch with the standing ovation and everything.

Julie felt breathless but joyful as she flung herself back into her seat, and Luke leaned forward to grab her soda, handing it to her with what looked like contrition.

“I guess I stand corrected, huh?” he said, defeated, but not entirely sorry to be so.

She shrugged, taking a sip of the drink. “I guess you are. It’s a good look on you”.

Luke snorted with laughter and they laughed together for a brief second, an apparent blush rising to sit on his cheeks (Could ghosts blush? How did that even work?).

Before the situation could get weird or questionable though, he turned back towards the movie, but slowly. Like he wasn’t quite ready to leave this moment just yet; like he wanted to stay looking at her just a bit longer. Julie just nudged him and settled back in, trying to go about it in such a way that would implore him to put his arm back around her like he had before.

It didn’t come until the scene where Bill confesses to Sophie that he thinks he’s her father, but eventually that now familiar weight settled behind her head again, setting off a whole herd of butterflies in her stomach.

The first movie came to an end, and things wouldn’t have been awful if she’d just called it a night there and gone to bed. But she was having so much fun and they were all so comfy, and the boys seemed very excited for the prospect of a half-prequel-half-sequel.

“Surely they’ve already used all the good ABBA songs in the first one though, right?” Reggie argued, causing Alex to swing round to look at him, scandalised.

“Are you insinuating that there’s a bad ABBA song?”

While they hashed it out in the background, Luke backing Reggie up just to get a rise out of Alex, Julie acted on impulse and jumped up, running towards the garage window. All the lights in the house were out, meaning her dad was already in bed and everything. As long as she was super quiet sneaking back in and remembered to bypass that squeaky floorboard on the stairs, he never had to know.

“Alright; Here We Go Again - let’s do this”.

Turns out Julie had kind of underestimated how late it was and how long the day had been. She could feel herself getting tired around the ‘Waterloo’ mark, eyelids growing heavier and heavier as she gradually sunk lower and relaxed deeper into the couch. By the time young Donna makes it to the Kalokairi her head had come to rest in the crook Luke’s neck, his flannel soft under her cheek as his cheek leans against the top of her head. Maybe it was a testament to how sleepy she was, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away. The posture felt natural.

She was so comfortable, surrounded by warmth and the soothing hum of the old second-hand TV they’d bought at a garage sale and moved into the garage, she was right on the verge of dozing off… when a realisation crashed into her mind, seemingly out of nowhere.

Julie shot up poker-straight, suddenly very awake. “Oh, crap!”

The three boys startled, most of all Luke when her movement meant he almost fell face-first into the couch cushion.

“What is it?!”

She groaned and fell forward into her hands. “I have a math test tomorrow. And I was going to study for it before bed tonight.”

So that’s how she ends up with Reggie hanging uselessly over her shoulder in the middle of math class, the exchange that came after the realisation still ringing in her ears.

“Hey, hey! It’s fine. Take Reggie - believe it or not, he was good at math” Luke offered up hurriedly.

Reggie himself looked a little stricken. “Yeah, 25 years ago, dude!”.

“Do the rules of math go out-of-date, or…?” Alex teased, though still placed a comforting hand on Julie’s back.

“No, Alex, they don’t - so relax, you’ll be fine, man! You can’t make the situation any worse by trying”

“Don’t give him that challenge, Luke”.

Though admittedly she loved him just for actually turning up and trying, he was staring down at the test with as much confusion as she was. Apparently math had changed over the course of 25 years. They exchange a mutually panicked look. Clearly, neither of them knew shit. Instead, Reggie just runs up to the front of the room and peeps on Mrs Ford’s answer sheet, Julie’s hopeful eyes following him as he dodges around desks and backpacks lying on the floor.

“Are you sure?” she mumbles to him under her breath when he gets back. Apparently not quite low enough though, when the guy next to her turns to give her a funny look, and she has to make a show of furrowing her eyebrows and counting on her fingers, muttering appropriately as she goes.

Julie can feel Flynn’s discerning gaze from across the room and she knows she knows there’s some ghost-like foolery happening. It’s a mess. She’s a mess.

Eventually the bell sounds and signals an end to the ordeal, and Julie takes out her (locked) phone to genuinely thank Reggie for his help all the same.

“Ehhh I’m not sure how much help I was, but you’re welcome” he says, laughter coloured with self-deprecation.

Julie smiles genuinely, and she would’ve nudged him if she wouldn’t have been nudging thin air in public. “Hey, I think we got about three quarters of those answers down and that’s 75% more than I would’ve gotten without you”.

Reggie looks pleased, and stands up a little straighter as he walks alongside her. “Do you mind if I hang out here for a while, by the way?”

Julie’s a little taken aback. “I mean, sure, but why would you want to? It’s just school”.

Reggie shrugs, and there’s something unreadable in his eyes. It’s weird for him; he’s generally such an open book. “I don’t know. I never graduated, we were still going when we… y’know…” he trails off, eyes scanning the halls and the throngs of students laughing and chatting together at their lockers, going about their normal day. “Kind of miss it”.

“Well, you obviously have free reign to look around wherever you want. If you want me to show you anywhere in particular, just let me know. I’m meeting Flynn for lunch now though, so that might not be as fun for you...”

The way he says it makes something ache in Julie’s chest, and she wishes she could give him a hug. With the boys so real now, and so immersed and predominant in her life, it was getting easier and easier to somewhat forget that they were actually dead and had both led and left lives behind. Being reminded of that was starting to hit her that little bit harder.

Reggie nods sincerely, mirroring her slight chuckle. “Thanks, Julie”.

Approaching the cafeteria, Julie sees Flynn in the distance, and is about to put her phone away when she suddenly stops in her tracks, and keeps it held to her face.

“By the way…” she smirks. “If Alex or Luke ask, I scored a 95 and it was all down to you”.

[hilli98215]

Thoughts on Hollywood's tendency to hire actors to play big roles in musicals? (Laurie Davidson in Cats, Marlon Brando in Guys and Dolls, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia and Into the Woods.... just to give you some examples)

I think it depends. While I know studios have these ideas that if they have a big name, more people will see the film. But I also think it can take away opportunities for Broadway actors who know the material and may want to learn how the industry works. 

Into the Woods, The Prom, and Cats are great examples where studios cast these big actors but neglect those who were in the version or have broadway experience. There are exceptions to that rule (Anna Kendrick who portrayed Cinderella in Into the Woods began her career on Broadway). Or you have actors who try so hard and the audience can see that throughout the film. Laurie Davidson as Mistoffelees is a great example where he shared all the prep he did for the role and you can see that.

But I think it has more to do about grabbing that audience and getting that money on opening weekend. I also think it depends on the director and how they want to approach the film. The newer adaptation of West Side Story is filled with Broadway actors and the film adaptation of In the Heights is using actors who performed in the show. 

When it comes to older movie musicals like the first adaptation of West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and Guys and Dolls... Yeah it was for the money and recognition. Natalie Wood gives one of the best performances of her career in that film (and in Gypsy) but she doesn't sing. She’s dubbed. But the audience doesn't care because her performance is spot on. The same can be said for Audrey Hepburn. Be Kind Rewind does a great job discussing Hepburn and the situation she was in when it came to the role. She is dubbed too. I don’t know what to say about Marlon Brando except that he was severely miscast and was not fit for the singing. Acting yes. Singing no.

I could really spend all day talking about this because I always cringe when they announce a cast for a movie musical but learn that the actor has either no Broadway experience or to quote Sining’ in the Rain. 

“Lina. She can't act, she can't sing, she can't dance. A triple threat.” 

This is interesting when you think about it because that’s what studios do. Cast actors who can do none of these while seeing how they make huge about of money simply because of a name.

[theadrogna]

This comes under the heading of better late than never, and many apologies to @singledarkshade​ for the lateness of this response to the Dream Movie Challenge. So, we were given six actors from our favourite TV shows/movies, a wildcard actor, and a random item. We had use these actors and the object to create our own movie.

I give you a supernatural romantic comedy, starring Matt Ryan, Elizabeth Henstridge, April Bowlby, Taika Waititi, Ellen Page, and Woody Harrelson. With a special appearance by Merryl Streep.

Synopsis:

Max Webster is working as an investment banker in London, making huge amounts of money that support a lifestyle of clubs, bars and one night stands, until his boss and mentor commits fraud on a huge scale. Max is implicated, despite knowing nothing. He loses his job and not a single other bank in the city will touch him, meaning his career is effectively over and he’s rapidly going broke. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, he is told that his sole relative, his estranged paternal grandmother has died and left him property in Brighton.

With nothing better to do and hopes that the property is worth something, Max heads to Brighton to tie up his grandmother’s affairs, dreading his time outside the capital and increasingly depressed about life. Upon arrival he meets Poppy Fletcher, his grandmother’s lawyer who was the one who contacted him about his grandmother’s death. 

Max discovers that his grandmother was the proud owner of the “Worst Wax Museum in Britain”: The House of Wax. Only a handful of the wax statues look like who they’re supposed to be and the rest are like someone sculpted celebrities that they’d never seen. The museum is barely making enough to keep it afloat. He begins to make plans to sell the museum and at least make enough to pay off his Grandmother’s debts. Enter Cooper Farnsworth, rich American businessman, on the run from the Mafia after a dodgy deal went wrong. He desperately needs to make money fast.

But Max finds out that his inheritance is rather unusual in a number of ways...

For starters, there aren’t many wax museums where Meryl Streep hands out advice and enjoys watching the footy on the night watchman’s TV when the punters have gone home for the night. But it isn’t just Meryl, all of the waxworks come to life thanks to an old book of magic that is powered by the signatures of the guests and the messages they leave. The less visitors there are, the less magic there is to keep the waxworks alive and things have been getting desperate lately until only a handful of the waxworks have the necessary magic to come to life.

The waxworks tell Max about how his grandmother desperately tried to bring in more people, but her failing health meant that everything fell apart. Max discovers how his grandmother loved the museum and also loved him, despite her outwardly cool demeanour. He had thought that she didn’t care that he left Brighton, but Amelia unearths the letters that his grandmother wanted to send but didn’t have an address to send them to.

Max realises that he can’t sell the wax museum after all, and he enlists Poppy’s help in finding a way to keep it going. In the process she also discovers the secret of the museum, and Max and Poppy discover that they’re falling for each other. Meanwhile Cooper is plotting to get Max out because the listed building is worth more than Max is aware, especially with some of the period features.

The finale has Cooper breaking into the museum to destroy the waxworks, but Steve, the night watchman sounds the alarm. Cooper accidentally starts a fire and there is a desperate fight to save everyone from melting. Max and Poppy rally everyone to deal with the fire, and Cooper is arrested for arson.

The publicity from the fire actually brings in more customers, Max updates the museum with new exhibits, deciding to focus more on local history and tell the stories of the people who live in Brighton. He’s cleared of any wrong doing at the bank and Poppy helps him sue for wrongful dismissal. He uses the payout to finance repairs to the museum and more and more waxworks come alive every night as the visitors pour in.

And Max never thinks about leaving again, because now he has a family, albeit one that includes Meryl Streep, Amelia Earhart and Margaret Thatcher but he doesn’t mind.

Max Webster (Matt Ryan): Max lost his parents when he was young and was raised by his paternal grandmother. The two did not get on and he left home as soon as he could for university and then the big city. He always had a love of risk taking and wanted to be rich, so he studied finance and got a job in banking. He spends his time closing deals in a highly stressful job during the day and then out on the town in the evening. He has very few friends, all of whom are from work, and he very rarely sleeps with the same woman twice. He has a very shallow outlook on life and everything is about money.

His life is changed by inheriting the House of Wax and discovering that his memories of his grandmother are flawed and desperately inaccurate. He deals with the unusual House of Wax that his grandmother created and his grief at her passing. He comes to realise that not everything in life is about the next deal or how much money can be made.

Poppy Fletcher (Elizabeth Henstridge): Poppy is a lawyer and is responsible for executing Max’s grandmother’s will. She’s the one who hand Max the keys to the House of Wax and sees the look of disappointment on his face. She is very efficient and competent, loves the town she lives in and knows everyone on her street. She mourns the loss of Max’s grandmother, and has no idea that she was anything but the eccentric, elderly owner of the House of Wax. She doesn’t like Max at first because of his attitude to his grandmother and his version of her doesn’t seem to be the same as the woman she knew.

She ends up spending a lot of time with Max as the property sale becomes more difficult and after a while, she realises that he’s not at all the image that he projects. She starts helping him to get back on his feet and renovate the museum. Then she discovers about the magic book and she realises that she can’t let Max deal with the situation on his own.

Florence Nightingale (April Bowlby): Florence doesn’t look like the picture that hangs next to her in the slightest. Even her period dress is somewhat suspect. She prefers to wear much more recent clothes and is doing online first aid courses at night. She’s slightly haughty and thinks she knows best.

She can see that Max is depressed and grieving when he arrives. She’s one of the driving forces behind getting Max to take better care of himself and to talk about how he feels. Once the museum is safe, she works at becoming qualified as a therapist and sees patients online, writing an agony aunt column for the local paper.

Amelia Earhart (Ellen Page): She likes to pretend that she’s actually the pilot that she was sculpted to be. She’s very much her own person though, feisty and fun loving. She has no idea how to fly a plane, but has a flight simulator that Max’s grandmother gave her and is a computer game ace. She has the high score and no one can beat her.

She is the first waxwork that Max discovers is alive and persuades him that he isn’t hallucinating. She takes him to see the others when she realises that he’s the grandson of the previous owner.

She ends the film playing games in esports tournaments and winning, much to the amusement and delight of her fellow waxworks.

Steve (Taika Waititi): The night watchman of the House of Wax. He’s always known as Steve and no one knows his full name. He never really seems to go home, he’s just there. Max is very confused by him at first, but eventually realises that he’s another waxwork. He was one of the first created and no one is ever sure who he was supposed to be, at the end of the film it’s discovered that he’s supposed to be Genghis Khan, but like most of the other waxworks he bears no resemblance to his original. He is quite protective of the museum though.

Cooper Farnsworth (Woody Harrelson): An American property developer who is interested in buying the House of Wax and turning it into flats. He moved to the UK, to get away from some people who didn’t like him much (actually he double crossed the Mafia). He gets increasingly desperate to buy the House of Wax when some of his former business partners catch up with him, threatening Max and Poppy if they don’t sell up, but he never finds out the real secret of the museum. He thinks he’s hallucinating when he sees the waxworks move and fight back during the finale. He’s dragged away shouting about moving statues and charged with arson.

Meryl Streep (herself): She is modelled after the three time Oscar winning actress and is the only waxwork who looks like she is supposed to. She’s something of a leader of the group, checking in with everyone to make sure that they’re doing okay. She’s concerned about the fading magic and trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. She offers very good advice to Max about how to run the museum, most of which Max ignores to begin with because he thinks he knows better. Later we see her taking on the museum accounts and running the financial side of the museum with Max listening carefully to her. He may have been a banker but those skills are very little use when it comes to book keeping.

Additional actors:

Arthur Darvill as David Bowie - Can actually sing, sounds nothing like David Bowie. Wants to be Major Tom and follows NASA on Twitter. Tom Ellis as Paul McCartney - Can also sing and taught himself to play the piano. Duets with Bowie to entertain the rest of the group. John Boyega as Frank Bruno - Hates punching people, is a total softy. Ryan Reynolds as Salvador Dali - He once tried painting and decided never to do so again. He prefers reading and writes poetry. Eccentric. Celia Imrie as Queen Victoria - Knows everything that there is about Queen Victoria. She misses Albert who hasn’t woken up for a while now due to lack of magic.

[edengarden]

hey man when you have the time can i pwetty pwease get a music matchup!

3 positive traits of mine areeee: brave, resilient and friendly!

3 negatives are: obnoxious, stubborn, extremely distrusting

my hobbies include: true crime, baking, reading and crying over video games

my music taste is mostly rock, other close faves are metal, punk, folk anything super upbeat but depressing and indie! though as for most people im open to all kinds too uwu oh and i know its not a genre itself but im also a huge sucker for songs where the singers get so into singing they have that kind of loud yell/growl in some parts of it? i ascend to another realm when i hear it tbh, sorry if thats like incomprehensible orz

what i look for is kindness, sincerity, humour and passion tbh

things i dont like in people are mostly just genuinely mean people who feel the need to put others down. not in a joking friend asshole way but in a genuinely malicious way. cant stand em, i can will and have gotten into fights with these ppl. why be mean when u can be... nice and help ppl and make them smile like... i just dont get it.

my big three star signs are taurus sun, cancer moon and pisces rising. idk jackshit abt but ppl call me baby bc of it and i am NOT a baby! i may look like a blue haired version of the aDAM vine guy but!! im not baby, i am bastard if anything.

im also an entp-t if that uhhh helps.

fun facts about myself, uh im super good at reading people irl, im a human lie detector and it freaks people out. this uh.. does make me have trust issues.

i once got into a fight in a library with a group of people bc they were blackmailing one of my friends. i subsequently got kicked out but! i did win and my friend wasn't harassed by those ppl ever since.

oh im rly good with animals, i have a reputation where i live for taking in animals and helping them find their homes!

im very loud and stupid, it bewilders people how stupid i am. ironically ive got medals for academics. you wouldnt think that of someone who quire literally kept pushing a pull door in front of three people and proceeded to say "damn :/ i think this door is stuck" and then immediately have one of those people silently pull the door open and... man you can imagine the faces they all gave me. orz.

ooookie dokie i think thats it! sorry if this was too much! if you want me to elaborate or need any help deciphering my bullshit ill call myself 💥anon and ill try to help anyway i can

anyway thanks for your time i hope you have a fantastic day!

GROWLINF SINGERS ARE THE BEST I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOOOODDDDDD. I GET EARGASMS I SWAR THE EMOTIONS ARE OFF THE CHARTS-

Also, you sound like a MOOD. I’m a Taurus sun too UwU

I’d match you up with Semi!

Okay I know this sounds like a rough match but listen, listen... your taste in hobbies and music is IMMACULATE to him. Kudos to you, he respects the fricken drip.

I can also very easily see you two cuddled up on the couch late at night and watching buzzfeed unsolved?? Like that’s your ideal date??

And Semi finds your “stupidity” so endearing?? For some reason?? Like yea he’s gonna scold you for trying to push a “pull” door but oh my god he can’t believe that you’re the same person who’s acing all their classes, it’s mind-boggling. You’re his little phenomenon.

Semi will always go to you when he gets song inspo. Whether it’s lyrics or instrumental, he wants your opinion on the matter even if you’re not that music oriented. The only thing is he might get a bit shy showing his work to you if you’re mentioned in the lyrics or if it’s obvious that the song is about you. Please praise the poor boy he’ll deny it but he’s melting and/or blushing. If he manages to get some funky growl vocals or instrumentals, or REALLY good chords and dissonance and you react in any way (whether it be a gasp or a literal pterodactyl screech), he’s gonna feel so proud omg omg from now on his goal is to get that reaction from you as often as possible.

Thank god semi isn’t a “I’ll hold ur flower bby you go beat up the assholes” type of boyfriend bc you’d get in trouble so often?? I think Semi would cut the bullshit and remind you that getting hurt over that isn’t worth it. He’ll physically hold you back if he needs, I swear. But usually, he’s got the words necessary to explain to you that no, throwing hands in this situation will not improve it at all so please don’t go punch a nazi in the face you can just film it and call the person out so that the world can see. Semi’ll help you find out who they are and together you’ll report them to their workplace and have them fired. Semi will teach you the ways of cunning revenge.

Songs!!

- Sons of the Silent Age, David Bowie (THE EMOTIONS THE EMOTIONS THE EM- Semi practically mastered that song because the two of you sing it so often)

- The Dogs of War, Pink Floyd

- Owner of a Lonely Heart, Yes

- Money, Money, Money, Meryl Streep, Julie Walters & Christine Baranski (the growl you’ll love the growl and so does Semi)

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior 12/4/20 – HALF BROTHERS, THE PROM, I’M YOUR WOMAN, BLACK BEAR, LUXOR, ANOTHER ROUND, ALL MY LIFE, NOMADLAND, MANK and Much More!

I hope everyone had an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving. Mine was relatively uneventful, and I only spent most of my time watching movies.  And holy shit, there are a LOT of movies out this week, but at least a few of them I’ve already seen and reviewed, and there are others that are actually pretty good, so I might as well get to it, hm?

First up is this week’s Focus Features theatrical release, HALF BROTHERS, a buddy road comedy directed by Luke Greenfield (Blue Streak, Let’s Be Cops) that’s fairly high concept but also with quite a bit more depth than the director’s previous movies. It stars Luis Gerardo Méndez as Renato Murguia, a wealthy Mexican businessman whose father left him to come to America when Renato was just a child. Just as Renato is about to get married while having issues connecting to his future stepson Emilio, he gets a call that his own father is dying, so he begrudgingly goes to see him. Once there, Renato’s dying father sends him on a scavenger hunt to find someone named “Eloise” with his annoying slacker half-brother Asher (Connor del Rio), because that will provide all the answers Renato is looking for on why his father never returned from America, remarried and had another son. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’ve seen any of the ads for Half Brothers, you may already presume that this is a fairly high-concept buddy road comedy that is constantly going for the zaniest and craziest of laughs. That probably would only be maybe 25% of the movie. Instead, this fairly mainstream comedy finds a way to take a very common comedy trope and throw in enough heartfelt moments that you can forgive the few times when it does go for low-hanging fruit. We’ve seen so many movies like this where two guys (or sometimes ladies, but not as often) are paired with one having zero patience or tolerance for the other, who is beyond aggravating to them. (Planes, Trains and Automobiles is one of the better ones.) Obviously, Renato fits snugly into the first category, and Asher could not be more annoying, very early on stealing a goat for no particular reason.

The Mexican angle and the fact that a lot of the film is in Spanish – Focus getting into Pantelion territory here? – does add to make Half Brothers feel like more of a personal story than we might normally see in this kind of movie, touching upon the immigrant experience, from the viewpoint of a low-paid worker as well as a well-to-do industrialist. It also deals with things like fatherhood and brotherhood and what it means to be one or both, so everything ultimately connects far better in the end than some might expect. I also want to give the filmmakers credit for putting together a cast of mostly unknown or little-known actors and getting such great results out of them.

On the surface, Half Brothers seems like just another buddy comedy, but underneath, it’s a heartfelt and emotional journey that touches in so many ways and ends up being quite enjoyable.

Another movie opening nationwide this Friday is ALL MY LIFE (Universal), starring Jessica (Happy Death Day) Rothe as Jennifer Carter and Harry (Crazy Rich Asians) Shum Jr. as Solomon Chau, whose wedding plans are thrown off when he is diagnosed with liver cancer. They realize they have to get married sooner since he might not live to make their planned date, so their friends launch a fundraiser so that they can get married in two weeks. The movie is directed by Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer), who is a more than capable filmmaker with this being his third movie in the last two years.

Now that I’ve actually seen the movie… I’ll freely admit that this is not the kind of movie I usually have very high expectations for, and maybe that’s because I’ve already been burnt twice this year with real-life romantic dramas, first with the faith-based I Still Believe in March and then more recently with Two Hearts. In both cases, I could count the issues and why they failed to tug at the heart strings as they were meant to do.  Even though I’ve generally enjoyed Meyers’ past movies, I wasn’t even sure he could pull off this type of studio romance movie without having to cowtow to the corny clichés that always seem to slip in – or at least find a way to make them more palatable. (And let’s be realistic. This is the kind of movie that snobby film critics just LOVE to trash.)

First of all, Meyers already has two truly fantastic leads working in his movie’s favor.  I’ve been a true Jessica Rothe stan ever since seeing her kill it in Happy Death Day and its sequel. Shum is perfectly paired with her, and the two of them are so good from the moment they first meet and we meet them.  In every scene, you feel like you’re watching some of that rare on-screen romantic chemistry that’s so hard to fake. Their relationship is romantic and goofy, and you’re just rooting for them all the way through even if you do know what’s to come.

Eventually, Sol does fall ill, and it does lead to some more dramatic and tougher moments between the couple, but all of it is handled so tastefully, including their need to raise money so they can have their wedding rather than waiting. I am living proof that people really do come together to step up when they see someone in real need, so I couldn’t even tut tut at something like their fundraiser getting so many people to chip in. On top of his two leads, Meyers has assembled such a great cast around the duo, the most recognizable being Jay Pharaoh from Saturday Night Live, everyone around Jess and Sol handles the requisite emotions with nary a weak link.

There’s just so much other stuff that adds to the enjoyment of watching All My Life from the use of Oasis and Pat Benatar in the soundtrack just to the quality storytelling that makes it all feel quite believable. These sorts of movies tend to be rather corny and the diehard cynic who doesn’t have an ounce of romance or love in their body will find things to hate.

All My Life finds its way into your heart by being one of those rare studio romance movies that understands how human emotions truly work, and there’s nothing corny about that. It’s a beautiful movie that entertains but also elicits more than a few tears. Watch it with someone you love.

This week’s “Featured Flick” is Chloe Zhao’s amazing film NOMADLAND (Searchlight), which I reviewed out of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, but it’s (sort of) being released in theaters this week. It stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a woman living in her van as she moves from place to place taking odd jobs within a community of nomads. It’s another amazing film from the filmmaker behind The Rider, who will make her foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe next year with The Eternals, which I’m just as psyched about. There’s no denying that McDormand gives a performance that’s a knock-out, even better than the one in 3 Billboards if you ask me, and there’s also a great supporting role for David Strathairn, who I’ve been hoping would have another role as good as this one. Zhao is just a fantastic filmmaker, and I’m glad to see that The Rider was no fluke.

Unfortunately, Nomadland is only getting a one-week Oscar qualifying run, and I’m not even sure where it’s getting that run since theaters in New York and L.A. aren’t even open yet. Maybe Searchlight will do some drive-in screenings like they did for the New York Film Festival and Telluride? It will get a stronger theatrical release (hopefully) on February 21, just to make doubly sure it qualifies for Oscars.

Opening in theaters this week before streaming on Netflix December 11 is Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the Broadway musical THE PROM, the first feature film he’s directed in ten years. The multiple Tony-nominated musical is about a high school girl named Emma (newcomer Jo Ellan Pellman) who wants to take her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) to their senior prom, but the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) cancels the prom instead. The national outrage the situation creates gets the attention of a quintet of self-absorbed Broadway actors who decide to improve their PR by taking up Emma’s cause. Oh, yeah, and those actors are played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and actual Broadway stars Andrew Rannells and Kevin Chamberlin. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve never had any sort of positive or negative gut reaction to Murphy’s work on television over the past few years, but I’ve definitely been mixed on the three movies he’s directed to date. I wasn’t a huge fan of his Eat Pray Love, though I vaguely remember enjoying his debut, Running with Scissors. Either way, he certainly has found his niche with musicals from Glee (a show I’ve never watched)  and finding a musical like The Promseems to be a perfect fit between filmmaker and material.

Having not seen The Prom on Broadway – surprise, surprise -- I was a little worried that it was going to go down the path of nudge-nudge wink-wink inside Broadway path that helped Mel Brooks’ The Producers become a Broadway hit. That I saw, and I didn’t hate the movie based on it, although I’m by no means a total movie-musical stan. There’s some obvious older ones I love, some newer ones that others love but I hated – Rob Marshall is about 50/50 for me -- and you might be surprised by which of them I liked best.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about The Prom is that Murphy manages to truly surprise everyone watching it, whether it’s in Kerry Washington’s single song – who knew she had such an amazing singing voice? – or how enjoyable Keegan-Michael Key is as the school’s Principal Hawkins, who not only loves musicals but actually admires Streep’s two-time Tony-award winning Dee Dee Allen. Considering my frequent disdain for Streep’s over-confidence, knowing full well that she’s one of the best living actors working today, she’s actually pretty amazing in the role of what many must assume Streep is like in real life, which makes her character more than a little META. In some ways, I can say the same for Corden, who is pretty fantastic as Dee Dee’s frequent stage co-star Barry Glickman, who has his own connections to Emma’s plight having been disowned by his mother (Tracey Ullman, who only shows up for one brief scene late in the movie) when he came out to her. Corden has one dramatic moment so powerful I was taken quite aback.

Even with those two actors and Kidman likely to get much of the attention, there’s no denying that the romance between Hellman and Debose, and the three or four numbers they have together, makes up the true heart and soul of The Prom. So here you have this amazing cast, and it’s a musical made-up of very fun and quite catchy songs, and that’s long before you get to Andrew Rannells as out-of-work actor Trent Oliver, who practically steals the whole movie with his showstopper of a number, “Love Thy Neighbor.” And then watching Key holding his own with Streep, both musically and dramatically, you might start wondering, “What is going on here?”

Like I said before, it’s pretty obvious that Murphy has fully poured his passion of movie-musicals into every second of The Prom, and it shows on the face of everyone joining him on this adventure. As much as the subject at the film’s core is fairly serious and a hurdle that many gay kids across the world every day, it’s also quite funny. Kudos must be given to Murphy for being able to emphasize those moments as well as the more dramatic ones. Besides that, Murphy really takes advantage of being able to go to different locations, including a sequence on Broadway that could have been done during the pandemic (it actually was built on a soundstage), another number at an actual mall and even at a monster truck rally. It also doesn’t hurt that Murphy hired Matthew Libatique, a god-like cinematographer in my book, to film the movie either.

Like most musicals, The Prom might lose a little as it goes along, since it gets to be too much that goes on for too long, but then there are more than enough great moments to pull you back. It’s by far one of the stronger movie musicals I’ve seen in a very long time, and just the right feel-good experience we all need right now.

I’ve already reviewed David Fincher’s MANK – a few times, in fact – but if you’re in one of the places where it opened theatrically in November, you can finally see it on Netflix starting this Friday. This is the general problem with the way things are these days because even though this only opened a few weeks ago, I already feel that it’s been discussed and forgotten before most people will have a chance to see it.  Anyway, if for some reason, you’ve managed to avoid things about the movie, it essentially stars Gary Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who ended up co-writing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane in 1940. The film follows Mankiewicz as he mingles with the Hollywood elite in the 30s, including billionaire William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his young ingenue girlfriend Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) who would be the influence for his Oscar-winning screenplay. I expect to be writing a lot about this movie as we get closer to Oscar season sometime next year.

Also on Netflix this week is Selena: The Series, starring Christian Serratos. It’s the kind of thing that I probably would never watch unless I have an excess of time, and as you’re about to learn from the rest of the column, that doesn’t happen frequently.

The third chapter of Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe Anthology,” RED WHITE AND BLUE, will debut on Prime Video this Sunday, starring John Boyega as Leroy Logan, a young black man who joins the Metropolitan Police after seeing his father assaulted by police and wanting to make a difference in the racist attitudes from within. You might remember that I reviewed this out of the New York Film Festival a couple months back, so not much more to say there.

A week from Sunday, on December 13, McQueen’s fourth film, ALEX WHEATLE, will hit Amazon, and guess what? I’ve already seen it, so I will review it now. How about that? Alex Wheatle is also a true story, this one starring Sheyi Cole as the award-winning young adult writer when he was a younger and just learning the ropes as a drugdealer/DJ in Brixton before his involvement in the 1981 Brixton riots gets him thrown in jail.

As with the other three movies in the “Small Axe Anthology” there are recurring elements and themes in Alex Wheatle, mostly about the way the immigrants to England from Jamaica and other islands are treated by “The Beast” aka what they call the Metropolitan Police. It does take a little time to get to that, as McQueen, working from a screenplay co-written by Mangrove’s Alaistar Siddons, takes a far more non-linear approach than the other three films. We first see Wheatle being taken into prison where he’s thrown into a cell with a constantly-shitting Rastafarian, but we then cut back to his schooling for a short sequence that reminded me of Alan Clarke’s Scum. Both in prison and in school, we see Alex being abused by classmates and head matron alike, and this portion of the film includes another one of arty moments of actor Cole laying on the ground eyes wide open staring for what seems to go on forever. In some ways, this sequence reminds me of McQueen’s fantastic early film Hunger, since it seems to be cut from similar cloth.

Eventually, Alex gets to Brixton and that’s where this chapter in “Small Axe” really takes off as we see how naïve and green he is while dealing with quite a tough crowd and trying to adjust to city life among the Rastafarian community.

As with the other “Small Axe” chapters, I love how McQueen and his team used reggae music to help set the tone and vibe for the episode, because like Baz Lurhman’s Netflix series The Get Down, the music is frequently a key to this biopic working so well. Of course, it’s also due to the performance by Cole and the actors around him that helps make you feel as if you’re seeing a real part of history.

As with Mangrove, this chapter culminates with an amazing recreation of the 1981 Brixton Riots, done in protest after a house party fire in New Cross that the police don’t bother investigating. The actual riots were a much bigger and scarier event going by Wikipedia which says that 279 police were injured and 56 police vehicles set fire, which makes it sound more like the ’92 L.A. Riots.

I’m not sure Alex Wheatle does as good a job explaining how the young man goes into prison as a DJ and comes out as an author, but like Red, White and Blue it’s still an important and inspirational story that adds quite a bit to the previous three “Small Axe” films.

And once again, here is my interview with McQueen from over at Below the Line.

Also, I should mention that Darius Marder’s excellent Sound of Metal movie, starring Riz Ahmed, hits Amazon Prime Video this Friday, too. Check out my review!

The magnificent Andrea Riseborough stars in Zeina Durra’s LUXOR (Samuel Goldwyn), playing British aid worker Hana who while spending time in the ancient city of Luxor, runs into her former lover Sultan (Karim Saleh), as she reflects on past decisions and her current uncertain situation.

I was quite interested in this one sight unseen, not only because it’s another great starring role for Riseborough. (Honestly, she is one of the best actors working today, and I strongly believe she is just one role away from being the next Olivia Colman, who had been amazing for years before everyone in America “discovered” her in The Favourite and then The Crown… which I still haven’t watched! ARGH!). I was a little anxious about the movie, having seen Rubba Nadda’s Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, which seemingly had the exact same plot.

Durra is a much more capable and confident filmmaker and there’s a lot more overall value in watching Riseborough exploring Egypt as Durra quietly allows Hana’s story to unfold through her interactions with others, as well as her time alone, often languishing in one luxurious hotel room or another.  Then there are the quiet and sometime awkward scenes between her and Saleh, the two of them having been lovers when they were both much younger. We also see Hana in far more vulnerable moments, so we know that she’s by no means actor, and it takes a great actor to really pull off such a dichotomy and bring such dimension to a character with so few words.

There’s something that’s almost comforting watching her dealing with emotions like loneliness in such a tranquil way. I’d even go so far to say that Luxor works in many ways similar to Nomadland, which obviously is getting the far more high-profile release with lots of festival love long before its actual release.  Like that movie, Durra’s film benefits from having masterful cinematography by Zelmira Gainza and an equally gorgeous score by Nascuy Linares, to boot.

Luxor is a quiet, beautifully-made film that really took me by surprise. It acts as much like a travelogue of the title city as it does a tourist’s map to what it must feel like being a woman very much on her own in a foreign land.

I also spoke with Luxor filmmaker Zeina Durra, an interview that will be up at Below the Line hopefully sometime later this week.

With all the talk about Aubrey Plaza in Happiest Season (now on Hulu!), this would be a great time to release another one of her indies that played at the Sundance Film Festival this year, right? What can possibly go wrong?

In Lawrence Michael Levine’s BLACK BEAR (Momentum Pictures), Plaza plays Allison, an actor/filmmaker who arrives at the remote lake house of Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and his pregnant partner Blair (Sarah Gadon), to relax and work on a screenplay, only for the night to turn into philosophical discussions that transform into angry and even violent squabbles. In the second part of the movie, Gabe is the director, and Allison his actor wife, who thinks he’s sleeping with Blair, who is also acting in Gabe’s film.

That plot might seem a little vague, and I can’t exactly tell you whether there is much connection between the two parts of the movie other than it features the same three characters. The first half turns from a drama into a thriller before ending abruptly, while the second part is equal parts comedy and drama as we see a larger part of the world around the trio. In fact, the second part of Black Bear reminded me somewhat of Olivier Assayas’Irma Vep, one of my favorite movies, and that might be one of the highest compliments I can pay a movie.

But first, you have to get through the more quizzical and dramatic first part, which easily could have been done as a three-handed stageplay as we see the changing dynamics between the three people as things get crazier and crazier with one “Holy shit!” moment after the next. (It reminded me a little of Mamet or the play “Gods of Carnage,” although I only saw that as the movie version Carnage, directed by Roman Polanski.)

The fact the connection between the two parts is never explained might confound some people who were otherwise enjoying what is a pretty decent three-hander, but the common theme involves jealousy between the two women. Plaza is a fine dramatic actor when she wants to be, and Gadon is absolutely fantastic, which makes Abbot almost literally the odd man out, but the three of them just have great scenes together.

Black Bear is certainly an enigma of a movie, as much a mystery about what must be going on inside Plaza’s head during some of her softer and crazier scenes, but if you want to talk about range, this gives her so much material for her demo reel that no one could possibly doubt her as an actor again.

Thomas Vinterberg’s new movie ANOTHER ROUND (Samuel Goldwyn) reteams him with his The Hunt star Mads Mikkelsen for a comedy…. Ish… about a group of four middle aged Danish teachers who decide to hold an experiment to prove a theory that people only reach their maximum effectiveness and creativity when they’re .05% drunk. It starts out innocently enough but soon, the men are drinking heavily at school, leading to horrible and unfortunate side effects. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Even knowing Vinterberg’s knack for strange and twisted “comedies,” Another Round is definitely on another level, opening with a scene of drunken kids playing a drinking game that gets them so out-of-control drunk and rowdy. We then meet Mikkelsen’s Martin, a history teacher, whose rowdy seniors are so bored by his classroom technique that Martin is put in front of an inquisition of parents who think he’s going to make their kids fail their final exams. Martin’s home life isn’t much better with his wife Anika (Maria Bonnevie) or his own teen sons. Although Martin says he won’t drink when he has to drive, his friend Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) convinces him by announcing his theory about how everyone needs to always maintain a certain percentage of alcohol in their system.  Over the course of the rest of the movie, we’re shown the alcohol level of our “heroes,” although most will see their behavior as some kind of synced-up middle life crisis. For Martin, it’s a breakthrough, as he starts feeling more confident and assertive towards his students, even trying to connect with them via their drinking activities, as seen in the opening montage.

Another Round is quite a different beast from The Hunt, because there’s a more humorous tone to the point where I could totally see an American studio trying to remake this with the likes of Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler, which would probably lose a lot of the poignancy of what Vinberberg was trying to achieve here. At one point, he throws in a montage of seemingly drunk world leaders, which is kind of amusing even if it’s not quite so apparent why it’s there. There’s a lot of really bad white guy dancing, too, for anyone who is into that sort of thing.

There is definitely a good amount of grief and sadness to the way this story resolves, although Vinterberg still finds a way to leave Martin in a place of joy with a closing scene that may surprise a lot of people. Another Round is another tremendous feather in the cap of the Vinterberg/Mikkelsen collaboration, and it will be in select theaters this Friday before going to digital on December 18.

Another Round will be in select theaters this Friday and then on digital December 18.

Fast Color director Julia Hart returns with I’M YOUR WOMAN (Amazon), once again co-written with husband Jordan Horowitz. It stars Rachel Brosnahan from The Amazing Mrs. Maisel (which I haven’t seen) as Jean, a woman unable to have a baby with her small-time crook husband Eddie. One night, Eddie brings home a baby for Jean, but then he quickly vanishes and Jean finds herself on the run with a stolen baby and one of Eddie’s accomplices, Cal (Arinzé Kene), and there are bad men wanting to question Jean about her missing husband’s whereabouts.

This is another movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, and having not watched Brosnahan on her award-winning show, I was watching this movie trying to figure out what all the fuss was about.  It’s evident from the start that Hart/Horowitz were trying to make a ‘70s-set movie with all the trappings of ‘70s fashion and music, but when you throw in the crime element, it comes across a little too much like last year’s The Kitchen, which wasn’t very good but also wasn’t based on very good source material.

One would presume that the genre elements and a few scattered set pieces, like a shootout at a club, would be the main draw, but it’s almost 30 minutes before we even get any sort of plot, and that’s a big problem. An even bigger problem is that I’m Your Woman just drags for so much of the movie, and it’s pretty obvious that Hart-Horowitz were trying to create a ‘70s movie like some of the films by Scorsese and the movies John Cassavetes made with wife Gena Rowlands. By comparison, I’m Your Woman is stylized almost to a pretentious degree.  Brosnahan does show a few glimpses of there being a good actor in there, but the material just really isn’t quite up to snuff. It also doesn’t help the movie to have the baby crying almost non-stop throughout.

Jean eventually pairs up with Cal’s woman Teri (Martha Stephanie Blake), her son Paul and Cal’s father (played by Frankie Faison), and this is when she learns more about Eddie’s life that she doesn’t know about. Eventually, things start to pick up in the last act, but the multiple problems Hart has with maintaining a steady pace or tone only mildly is made up for by her terrific DP and whoever put together the musical score.  Essentially, the last 30 minutes of I’m Your Woman does make up for the previous 85 minutes, but it’s going to be very hard for many people to even get through how dull the movie is up until that point.

This is a week with some very fine docs, the first one being Weixi Chen and Hao Wu*’s cinema verité film 76 DAYS (MTV Documentary Films), which goes behind the doors of the Wuhan ICU Red Cross hospital over the first 76 days of the COVID pandemic after it hit the rural area of China. (*One of the film’s co-directors/cinematographers shot the film anonymously.)

Here I thought that Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control would be the best or maybe even only movie about the pandemic released this year, but here we have a fantastic documentary that captures what it was really like in one Wuhan hospital as it was nearly overrun months before COVID started to rear its ugly head in the States. The film begins in January 23, 2020 and follows a number of cases as we watch the personnel, all decked out in head-to-toe PPE, trying to save lives and keep people calm while trying to struggle with all the stresses that come their way. There’s actually a little bit of humor in a cranky elderly man (clearly with some form of dementia) who keeps wandering around the hospital, frustrating his tenders, but there’s also a very moving story of a young pregnant woman who has contracted COVID, who ends up being separated from her baby after a Cesarian section.

There are moments early in the movie where you can see panic starting to set in as we see how out of control things begin, but the anonymous health care workers soon get things underhand and manage to find a way to deal with the panic that’s setting in. There’s no question that these doctors and nurses – many whose faces we never even see -- are the definition of frontline workers, trying to deal with this unknown virus without all the answers and solutions that have been discovered over the past ten months.

76 Days will open via the Film Forum Virtual Cinema as well as other places presumably.

I’m glad I had Dana Nachman’s DEAR SANTA (IFC Films) to watch after 76 Days, because I don’t think I could have handled another dark or deep movie after that one. This doc is all about “Operation Santa,” the amazing group of volunteers and adopters who receive the letters young kids write to the North Pole and go out of their way to fulfill the kids’ wishes.

I was a big fan of Nachman’s Pick of the Litter, so I’m thrilled to say that Dear Santa is just as wonderful and joyous, starting with a bunch of kids explaining Santa Clause enthusiastically, because they really believe in Jolly Saint Nick. Over the course of the film, Nachman profiles a number of Adopter Elves, who look through the letters written to Santa by unfortunate kids and pick a few to fulfill their wishes. A lot of them are in New York and Chicago where the program has led to a number of non-profits, but Nachman also goes to Chico, California where many of the families from Paradise, the town destroyed by fires in 2018, ended up relocation. One story of an Adopter Elf named Damion is particularly wonderful, since he, like many of those who get involved in the program, are trying to give back and pay it forward.

Operation Santa is such a great program and Dear Santa is such a wonderful movie, I challenge anyone to watch it and not tear up from how big their heart will grow while watching it.

Julien Temple’s doc CROCK OF GOLD: A NIGHT WITH SHANE MACGOWAN (Magnolia Pictures) is pretty self-explanatory from its title, but as someone who was never really a Pogues fan, I was almost as entertained by Temple’s film as I was by Alex Winter’s Zappa about a musician who I actually was a fan of. Temple uses MacGowan’s own narration to tell his story from growing up in Ireland, the early days of punk that led to the Pogues and eventually, mainstream success.

My absolute adoration of well-made music docs is fairly well-known at this point, and you can’t really get much better in terms of music doc makers than Julien Temple, who had his cameras rolling in the early days of punk, captured one of David Bowie’s more interesting mainstream phases and also made a very cool movie about The Clash frontman, Joe Strummer.

Although I never really cared for The Pogues, that’s probably because I didn’t know them from their rowdier days and more from their mainstream success from “Fairytale of New York” but Temple’s movie rectifies that with some amazing footage from the band’s earlier days. Even more impressive is the footage and pictures of MacGowan during the late ‘70s dancing in the audience at Sex Pistols and other punk shows. (Temple even interviewed MacGowan during this period in the ‘70s, then put the footage in the movie.) As MacGowan tells his own story about growing up in Ireland, Temple frequently uses varied animation to recreate the stories being told, and that does a lot to embellish the cartoon nature of MacGowan’s storytelling.

I still think MacGowan is a bit of an asshole -- I’m sure he’d agree with that assessment -- but Temple has found a way into this very difficult musician, sometimes using close friends like Johnny Depp (a producer on the film) and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream to try to get MacGowan to open up about as much as he ever might. Crock of Gold is certainly an eye-opening portrait of the Pogues frontman that surprisingly offers something to enjoy even for those who never got into his music, but it also shows another dimension to his many fans. If nothing else, it’s a fine testament to why Temple is one of the best music doc filmmakers.

Magnolia held a bunch of one-night only theatrical screenings on Tuesday and will have more on Thursday, but if you miss those, you can catch it On Demand/digital this Friday. (I also have a really enjoyable interview with Julien Temple over at Below the Line that you should check out.)

A.J. and Jenny Tesler’s doc MAGNOLIA’S HOPE follows four years in the life of their young daughter Magnolia (aka Maggie), who has Rett Syndrome. Maggie’s filmmaking parents talk about noticing her strange behavior and finding out that she had a genetic disorder that makes it harder for children to retain what they’ve learned in terms of movement but also might led to far worse disorders. It makes it almost impossible for her to communicate with her parents, which makes it heartbreaking but also quite inspirational that the parents would allow us into their very own difficult journey to try to get their daughter to use and develop all of the skills she learns by making her practice them every single day. The movie will be available to watch for the month of December on the streaming platform Show and Tell, but it’s such a personal movie and another one where I think it will be hard for many to watch without getting a little teary but more out of joy than sadness.

Also out this week is David Osit’s MAYOR (Film Movement), which follows Musa  Hadid, the Christian mayor of Ramallah during his second term of office and determined to make his city a beautiful and dignified place to lived despite being surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Israeli settlements. It will open today at the Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema in New York after winning the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

What there’s more? How about Braden R. Duemmler’s WHAT LIES BELOW (Vertical Entertainment), a thriller starring Ema Hovarth from Quibi’s Don’t Look Deeper as Liberty (aka Libby), a teen girl returning from camp only to learn her mother (Mena Suvari) has a hot younger boyfriend named John (Trey Tucker), who Libby soon begins to question whether he’s human. What could possibly go wrong?

I knew I was in trouble when Suvari is picking her daughter up from archeology camp (that’s a thing?) and I misheard her asking her daughter “Any nice digs?” (think about it), especially since Suvari is playing a stereotypically over-sexed cougar, something that becomes far more obvious once we meet her boyfriend that she’s been sexing up at her lake house. There’s certainly a danger of What Lies Below turning into a prequel to a Pornhub video, but thankfully, Duemmler gets away from the inappropriate sexuality inherent in John’s presence and into the weird behavior that gets Libby suspicious.

Sure, maybe calling the movie “My Stepfather is an Alien” would have been more apropos, and there’s elements of the movie that reminded me of the Tom Hanks’ movie The ‘burbs, and not in a good way. Even so, Hovarth, who really looks like Suvari’s daughter, does a fine job holding this together and keeping you invested in how things might pan out, as things get weirder and weirder and the movie eventually transforms itself into a halfway decent and creepy “body horror” flick.

Weird but well-done, What Lies Below is not even close to the worst thriller I’ve seen this year. That might seem like damning praise, but it’s the best I can do for this one.

Debuting on Shudder this Thursday is Justin G. Dyck’s ANYTHING FOR JACKSON (Shudder), a “reverse exorcism” movie in which a seemingly kindly couple, played by Sheila McCarthy and Julian Richings, kidnap a pregnant woman (Konstantina Mantelos) in hopes of getting the spirit of their grandson Jackson, who died in a car crash, and put him into her baby… with the help of demons. What could possibly go wrong? (If you hadn’t guessed, this is the theme of this week’s Weekend Warrior.)

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the horror delivered by streamer Shudder this year, and Anything for Jackson is no exception. In fact, going over Dyck’s filmography, it’s kind of surprising how decent a horror filmmaker he is, because most of his other movies seem like Hallmark-style Christmas movies? Crazy. There are aspects of Anything for Jackson, written by Keith Cooper, who wrote some of those holiday movies for Dyck. I honestly can imagine the two of them making this movie just to be able to do something different, so they come into the horror realm with tons of fim making experience and easily transition into horror.

At the heart of this movie are McCarthy, Richings and Mantelos, who are all fine actors who do a great job selling the horrors but do just as well during the quieter dramatic moments.  Not that there are that many of them, as Dyck/Cooper throw so many absolutely horrific moments at the viewer so that diehard horror fans will not be disappointed. Things shift into another gear when Josh Cruddas joins in as a Satanic cult leader they bring in to help them when they realize they’re out of their league. The results are something akin to Insidiousin terms of the types of demons and ghosts thrown at the viewer.

At times, Anything for Jackson was a little hard to follow, maybe due to its non-linear storytelling, but at least it has a substantial amount of decent replay value, since the demons and kills are so gloriously gory.

Eric Schultz’s dark and trippy sci-fi thriller MINOR PREMISE (Utopia) stars Sathya Sridharan as neuroscientist Ethan, who gets caught up in his own risky experiment involving memory loss when he becomes trapped in his home with his ex-girlfriend Allie (Paton Ashbrook), and he doesn’t remember how they both got there.

For his directorial debut, Schultz has taken the cerebral indie sci-fi film route that we’ve seen in other filmmaking debuts like Shane Carruth’s Primer, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, and if you’re a fan of those movies, you’ll already know if this would be for you or not. This is also the kind of movie that really requires the closest attention and fullest focus, which is not something I’m great at right now. Because of that, I don’t have a ton to say about a film that does a good job pulling the viewer in with its intriguing premise.

Schultz is a pretty decent filmmaker and discovering Sridharan, who has done a lot of single-episode TV appearances but nothing major, is quite a coup since this is quite a solid showcase for the young actor. I wasn’t as crazy about Ashbrook, which makes it for a rather uneven two-hander.

Minor Premise is just fine, and I think some people will definitely like it more than I did. I definitely will have to watch it again when I’m not so distracted by ALL THOSE OTHER MOVIES ABOVE THAT I JUST FUCKING REVIEWED!

It will be in theaters, in virtual cinema, and digital/On Demand this Friday, so check it out for yourself.

And finally…

Director Dennis Dugan of Big Daddy and Happy Gilmore directs LOVE, WEDDINGS AND OTHER DISASTERS (Saban Films), a “Love American Style” rom-com anthology with a cast that includes Maggie Grace, Jeremy Irons, Diane Keaton and more. Grace plays Jessie, a fairly inexperienced wedding plan hired to orchestrate the high-profile wedding of Boston mayoral candidate (Dennis Staroselsky), and then… oh, you know what? I’ll leave the rest of the description to the review portion of our review.

We meet Grace’s character as she and her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend are skydiving, which goes horribly wrong as they end up fighting all the way down and crashing through an outdoor wedding, caught on a viral video that gets her dubbed the “Wedding Thrasher.” Imagine what a PR disaster that would be for mayoral candidate Rob Barton to have her planning his wedding, but Jessie quickly bonds with his fiancé Liz (Caroline Portu) and begins preparations. Meanwhile, Barton’s problematic brother Jimmy (Andy Goldenberg) has gone on a game show called “Crash Couples” (that’s hosted by no less than Dugan himself) and he allows himself to be chained to a Russian “lawyer” named Svetlana (Melinda Hill) who is actually a stripper. They’re willing to stick it out since the winner gets a million dollars.

Surely, that’s more than enough stories, right? Nope. Turns out that Jessie’s main competition to plan the wedding is a legendary caterer named Lawrence Phillips (Irons) who is set-up on a blind date with Diane Keaton, who is blind. Oy vey.  Also, there’s Andrew Bachelor as Captain Ritchie, who gives humorous sightseeing tours of Boston via the Charles River in an odd land/water vehicle, but one day, he encounters a young woman with a glass slipper tattoo, and he becomes quite smitten. We’ll get back to him. Maybe. In fact, Duggan spends so much time setting up different stories and relationships without much connection that you wonder whether he can tie things up in the oh-so-predictable way these things normally go.

Although the movie starts out fine, and it’s actually not a bad role for Grace, as soon as Duggan introduces the game show, then we learn that Svetlana (real name Olga) is a tripper connected to the mob and they get involved, things just start going downhill very fast. Also, the idea that Keaton -- who I haven’t seen in a good movie in almost two decades --  would not think twice about playing a klutzy blind person. As soon as she shows up and immediately knocks over one of Phillips’ signature champagne glass fountains, I knew we were in for a very long haul. I didn’t even mention the other storyline involving a musician named Mack (Diego Boneta) whose band Jessie is trying to get to play the wedding – one of the multiple meet-cutes in the movie -- although Mack is squabbling with his bandmate Lenny (Jesse McCartney) who has a new Asian girlfriend who is intruding in their friendship.  (I’m sure the fact her name is “Yoni” is meant as as Yoko Ono reference.)

Then on top of that, Dugan steals the gimmick from There’s Something About Mary, by constantly cutting back to Elle King and Keaton Simmons as they’re playing folksy songs in the park. Okay, the fact that Dugan wrote many of those pretty decent songs they perform is pretty impressive.

But the movie is very predictable, especially how it all comes together for the finale, which obviously has to take place at the wedding to which everything has been building up to.

Otherwise, Dugan’s film is maybe 20% an okay movie but the other 80%? Yeesh!! It’s about as romantic as a date with the Marquis de Sade, and it somehow manages to be an equal opportunity offender... in terms of offending blind people, Asians, Jews, Arabs, gay people and even strippers and Russian mafia. It took Dugan 14 years to get this passion project made, and it’s pretty obvious why.

As usual, there were a couple movies I didn’t have time to watch, but not quite as many as the ones I did make time to watch:

King of Knives (Gravitas Ventures) End of Sentence (Gravitas Venture) Billie (Greenwich) Godmothered (Disney+) Wander (Saban Films) Music Got Me Here (First Run Features) Stand! (Fathom Events, Imagination Worldwide) HAM: A Musical Memoir (Global Digital Releasing) In the Mood for Love (4k Restoration)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest!

[phoenix43song]

Little Women [2019] Film Review and Analysis

I have been reading the Little Women series since I was a child and I grew up on the 1994 film version that stars Winona Ryder. I have also watched the 1933, 1949, 2017 (mini series), and the 2018 modern film adaptation. I have watched and enjoyed the web series The March Family Letters on youTube, which is another modern adaptation take on the story, though unfinished. I have a graphic novel and a novel called Meg and Jo that are also modern adaptations. I love the songs from the musical, and I wish to play Jo one day (after I get my singing voice back). You can say I am a bit obsessed, though it has been quite awhile since I last read Little Women and did research on Louisa May Alcott. When I heard Greta Gerwig was going to be making another adapation I reread the whole series. The research I have done on Louisa, and the research that I have read from other fans and scholars has made reading Little Women all the more interesting. I try to be a writer, though I've only ever written novella's and short stories and short films. I love the theatre, acting, and now I am directing for the first time. I have so many story ideas for novels, series, and for feature films (maybe even TV). I've also always loved art, though without praticing much since adulthood my skills have dwindled. I identify with Jo and with Amy and I am really glad that this version of the book did these character justice...well Greta went wayland on Jo a bit.

The character of Jo in this adaptation is fully realized, three dimentional, however she is made to be have way more of a temper when she's an adult, unlike the book. Jo has this Peter Pan mentality where she wants to keep living in childhood and never grow up. She is in denial of her feelings, and she doesn't understand romantic love fully until the end. Greta decided to really incorporate Louisa herself into Jo. Louisa wrote the book loosely based on herself and her sisters growing up because she was pressured in writing a children's novel. She didn't want Jo to get married: she wanted Jo to remain a spinster like herself. Louisa was pressured to marry Jo off so she did. And then she continued to write two more novels after Little Women (technically Good Wives): Little Men and Jo's Boys. She created Friedrich Bhaer for Jo, who was the perfect choice for her...and most readers can't seem to see why Jo fell in love with him when, based on the research that I did and others did, Louisa created him off of men she had crushes on. Yes Louisa had crushes; she most likely had a few short lived romances, but we'll never know because if she wrote any of this down in her diary or in letters they have been destroyed.

Friedrich Bhaer in Greta's Little Women is not Friedrich Bhaer. He shares but a few qualities. Louis Garrel did an amazing job with what material he was given and he understands his characters and Frieidrich's relationship with Jo far better than Greta does. Based off of interviews and other comments that Greta has mentioned Greta hates Friedrich and can't stand that Jo married in the end. She doesn't understand him nor their relationship. She took away everything that Friedrich is, how Jo became friends with him, the courting he does, and one of the most romantic proposals in classic literature. Greta decided on an ambiguous ending for her movie and I absolutely hate it. The umbrella scene is rushed, hurried, and not romantic at all and it's edited in a way that this only happens in the novel that Jo writes because she is pressured, or somewhat forced, to marry off her heroine. Then there are cuts where we see Jo at her school for boys and girls, where her family presents a cake for Marmee's 60thbirthday and we see that Friedrich is there. This is cut where Jo is watching her book being made and she hugs it to herself: I really enjoyed this part of the ending, but the ending could have still followed the book more and not edited and written in a way where Jo's love for Friedrich and marriage isn't fiction. I mean Greta even had Amy and Meg drag Jo to go after him when Friedrich leaves and claim that Jo loves him. This is a change that...it destroys the characters in a huge way.

Friedrich isn't German in this film, though we do see him go into a German Beer Hall with his friends. I did love the dance scene in the Beer Hall and him dancing with Jo. He's French because Louis is French. Part of me wishes Greta would've gotten a German actor because Germany in it's people and culture was a huge part of Louisa's life and German is scattered all over the book. But I love Louis Garrel so this aspect of Friedrich didn't bother me that much. However...we don't get to know him and we don't get his backstory in this film. He doesn't play with the children, his immigration and carring for his orphaned nephews isn't mentioned, and him bringing Jo to intelletual gatherings isn't seen. Him giving Jo Shakespeare is in the film, but it's not done in person. He helps Jo with giving honest feedback on her stories and Jo doesn't take constructive critism well at all and yells at him. Friedrich likes Jo and you can tell. It's even shown that Jo likes him as well, but we sadly don't get to see their friendship: hell they don't really have much of a relationship in this movie. When Friedrich comes to visit Jo at the March house, we can see that Jo is surprised but pleased. I really do love how the family really likes him and gets to know him, and that they can see that the two love each other but that Jo is in denial. Except...Jo isn't really in denial in the book. She blushes when she realizes that Friedrich has come to court her. Jo in the book feels more mature by this point then she does in the movie.

Jo also tries to make herself love Laurie by writing him a letter because she's lonely. She never does this in the book. She does have one mention of a what if scenario but she stands by what she always thought: that she only loved Laurie like a brother. I really loved the scene where Jo rejects Laurie when he proposes because she's telling the truth and we even see in the movie that that have this special commarderie that's close but platonic, and not romantic. I do love how Greta explains and shows different kinds of love and growth in the sisters. But this seemed to degrade Jo a bit when it comes to actual full realized growth. I just don't understand where Greta was going with this and why she doesn't seem to understand Jo and Jo and Friedrich together. She put way too much of Louisa into Jo when Jo is a fictional character and not 100% Louisa. It's made to look like the umbrella propsal is fiction and that Jo did end a spinster. I am so upset right now at this that I will talk about what I did love and more of my analysis from a filmmaking aspect. (I doubled majored in theatre and in film in college and I do know that there will be changes in adaptations. However this doesn't mean that you can change characters and relationships to fit your own idea of how they should act and how they should end up. When you adapt a story you have to keep who the characters are and Greta doesn't do this with Friedrich nor with Jo in the end with her as a character and the relationship between the two).

So. This film is gorgeous. Beautiful cinematography, direction, costumes, acting, score, and editing. The only thing that I didn't like was how the characters read their letters to the camera. It took me out of the story and didn't fit in at all. The editing of present to past was well done, and I loved how it went with parallel themes. Each sister is three dimentional and real, and the different takes on money and love was really interesting. Beth's sickness and death was well done and so heartbreaking poignant. I loved how she got Jo to write again, and I loved the montage of Jo writing her novel. Mr. Dashwood was hilarious, and Meryl Streep had a blast playing Aunt March. Laura Dern made a capible Marmee but she didn't feel like Marmee to me sadly. Mr. March was barely in the film, but he's barely in the book so that was ok. The scenes between Mr. Lawerence and Beth were beautiful, and the scenes between Mr. Lawernce and Jo were good as well. I liked seeing Meg wanting riches, her feelings about being poor, but her love for John was a lot stronger and she made sacrifices. Amy was great, espeacially as an adult in Paris.

Laurie...I have a lot of thoughts on how Laurie was protrayed. I liked how his Italian ancestry was mentioned a lot and that Laurie could never sit still. I liked how he was represented as a drunk and ladies man until Amy talked sense into him. I like how we got to see how Amy and Laurie fell in love, and how Laurie realized that his love for Jo wasn't of the romantic nature either. He does love Jo and you can diffinitely see that, but at the same time they're best friends. Yes it's good to want to marry your best friend but at the same time you need more than just physical attraction ( and that's where Friedrich comes into the pitcuture). But there was something off about how he was represented. I honestly think it's because that Tim looks way too young for the adult version (even though he is an adult in real life), and that he's too skinny. Sorry I said it: Tim needs to put some meat on his bones.

This film does deserve awards and it bothers me that the film wasn't nominated for a Golden Globe (though Saoirse being nominated for Best Actress was a choice well deserved) or for an SAG awards. I hope the film is nominated a lot at the Oscar's at least. I would give this film somewhere between a 2.5 to a 3 out of 4 stars. This would've been a perfect 4/4...I know a lot of critics and fans love the ending, and that's there's only a minority of us that understand and love Friedrich, and Jo/Fritz together. At least we have other film adaptations and the musical – love the musical! - and I am really tempted to write my own version of a Little Women feature or mini series. I want to do more research on Louisa and write a biopic. I even have my own modern adapation ideas. This is a beloved book and I wish more people will read it, along with the rest of the series. To understand Jo/Fritz you have to read the last two books. This isn't really an essay or full on anaylsis, but more of me rambling, but let me know your thoughts in the comments. I would love to discuss Little Women and hear your thoughts and opinions. (Also sorry for spelling and grammar errors: I wrote this up really fast and didn’t bother to edit as I’m rather busy). 

[onesparrow]

An essay on why Mama Mia is about a bunch of sirens and takes place in the same universe as Kingsman

Buckle your seatbelts kids, and let me tell why all the leading ladies in Mama Mia are sirens and how this applies to Kingsman. (and James Bond, sometimes)

So it’s the 80’s and Kingsman is keeping tabs on MI6, as they do, when they see that they’ve sent 007 to Greece of all places. Merlin assumes that this is because of the very bizarre reports they’ve been getting about possible mind control drugs, and when 007 is reported being seen with Donna (Meryl Streep), he sends Harry out under the guise of Harry Bright.

Off he goes, discovers that there are, in fact, no drugs, and comes back. All is fine and dandy, no one is any the wiser of the siren thing, and nothing happens for twenty years or so. But then Harry gets an invite to a wedding, Merlin catches wind that 007 is also going, and yeah that’s a little suspicious, so Harry gets sent back off to Greece.

“Remember that Harry Bright is not spontaneous and a dork,” Merlin reminds Harry as he ships him off. 

Queue Mama Mia, the movie, and Harry getting dragged into a bunch of song and dance routines while Merlin makes sure to record every second for posterity. Merlin eventually figures out that it’s not mind control drugs, it just so happens that Donna and Co are sirens and are much more powerful in numbers than they are on their own. Both Donna and Sophie are a good deal stronger than Donna’s friends, but that’s neither here nor there. They also have zero interest in using their powers for any purpose except for seducing the occasional person and throwing really wild parties. So he tells Harry to ride it out, which is why Harry pays for part of the wedding (with Kingsman money), and also claims to be 1/3 of Sophie’s dad even though there is no way that she’s his because Kingsman has all their agents on birth control. Even though there is nothing worth seeing (from a Kingsman perspective), Merlin has Harry stay for the rest of the wedding, James Bond gets married, and Harry has a brief fling with that Greek dude because why the hell not.

Merlin does a bit more research on sirens, and discovers the following;

Sirens are pack/school/pod whatever creatures and their powers are amplified in a group setting. The more of them there are, the more convincing they are, and can pretty much get entire crowds to join in. Since humans are also group based creatures, once there's a large enough group doing an activity, others are likely to jump in even if they aren't as easily effected. (like in flash mobs! there's always randos joining in)

Their powers are centred in suggestion, and since song is a really great way to get people to remember things, singing always works best for sirens. Plus makes it easier for other sirens to be in sync, vs just shouting things at random.

While sirens did use to bash ships onto rocks and lead men to their deaths, they only did so to protect their own territory. But now there’s laws against that, and also things like wifi. Sirens like youtube videos of baby animals just as much as the rest of us.

Sirens can’t really use their powers on each other; it’s just very tempting for other sirens to join in when they’re singing. There’s a certain pull there, but it’s easily resisted.

The siren gene is passed down on the mother's side, but not all sirens are female; there are male sirens, but they're a lot rarer just since there is a guarantee that female offspring will be sirens, but there's only a 50/50 shot that the male one will be. Female offspring are also more common, occurring 75% of the time.

And now let’s get back to Kingsman under the cut. 

Because you know who is a siren? Michelle Unwin, that’s who. I have evidence for this, but we’ll get to that later so bear with me. Like I said before, sirens are highly social, group based creatures; so when Michelle fell in love with Lee, it was VERY difficult for her to leave her family. But she loved him, there were tearful goodbyes and promises to visit the little coastal town she was from, but it wasn't on any main rail lines and they were busy with baby Eggsy and then Lee had to go off and join Kingsman and die. So while Michelle used to sing to Eggsy when he was a baby, she gets too depressed after Lee’s death and is trying to keep the two of them afloat, so she stops singing entirely.

Once Dean comes around, Michelle hasn't sung in years, because any songs of grief she would have sung for Lee would have been group based, as all siren songs are, and she hasn't been around any other sirens in years. She's too buried in her grief to consider going back to her family, and has lost contact anyhow, and then she meets Dean and she’s stuck there.

She's not 100% certain that Eggsy is a siren, but she forbids him from ever singing along with anything. Probably under the guise of 'Dean will hate it' or something, maybe even going as far as to telling him that Dean had complained about the quality of his voice (which is MASSIVELY taboo in siren culture, to tell another siren that their singing voice isn't up to par; that's just not a thing. It's not something you can ever say with any breadth of kindness) Eggsy is a good kid though, so he doesn't sing, even when he gets the urge.

He doesn’t sing at all until Daisy is born, and even then he’ll only sing when it's just the two of them, and only when she's upset. But even then it's super quietly, and only bits and pieces of a song. Daisy will always calm down when he sings, will just stare up at him and wave her tiny fists around happily or just go to sleep. Since Daisy is female, she’s for sure a siren (it's why Michelle was so terrified, when she called Eggsy in hysterics and demanded he come home from the army; she couldn't protect a baby from Dean by herself if she started to show her abilities). Singing and talking happens around the same time for baby sirens, and in the same way you can't forbid a baby from screaming or crying, you can’t forbid them to start singing if they get the urge. Since Eggsy sings to her, sometimes, she still has that social aspect that keeps the siren powers ‘awake’, even if it's weak. So her cries don't bring everyone running, but it does keep Dean and his men from trying to do anything unfortunate to keep her quiet. Sometimes they'll start to push past it, but once they get close enough to her crib she'll shriek loud enough that the 'back off' message is just strong enough to get them to leave her alone. Even baby sirens aren't helpless.

Side note; sirens have larger lung capacities which they use for singing, and are great swimmers because their preferred habitats are islands and they’d swim out to crash ships to protect them. Which is why Eggsy can hold his breath so long in that water test in comparison to the others.

Here’s how this ties back in properly to Kingsman; Valentine’s tech were based off of siren song. Originally, they were trying to reproduce it to the point so they could, like sirens, suggest a specific idea. That proved to be too complex though, so they settled for just suggesting a certain emotion, and then amp that frequency the hell up. So when the devices go off, Michelle has been suppressing her siren abilities for a solid seventeen years or so, so she gets drawn into it though. Daisy though? Daisy has been using it on and off, and she’s nearly a toddler when V-Day happens. Toddlers are entirely capable of the feeling of anger, and at the very least she should be throwing a temper tantrum, but instead she just sits in the bathroom and gets upset while her mother goes berserk and tries to murder her. Latent siren powers, huzzah!

Anywho, the rest of the Kingsman film goes as scripted, Eggsy becomes Gwaine, Harry comes back from the dead, neither Roxy nor Merlin die, Eggsy does not move out of Harry’s house, time passes, Harry and Eggsy get together, etc etc. I should mention that I have not seen Mama Mia 2 yet so we’re just going to ignore everything that happens there, but Harry gets an invite to Greece. Merlin insists that not only does he need more data points on siren abilities, especially post V-Day, Harry needs a vacation, and MI6 is there so he has to go. Harry points out that James Bond lives there with Donna, and therefore it doesn’t count as MI6 having a presence. Harry argues until Merlin mentions he’ll be sending Eggsy with him as backup, and suddenly Harry is thrilled to see his 1/3 daughter.

Both Eggsy and Harry work on some resistance training against siren song best they can, which is pretty easy because Harry has been actively been working on it since V-Day. Meanwhile Eggsy is a. stubborn as all hell b. has spent nearly his whole life resisting the urge to sing, which is half of the deal. They get to Greece, and Sophie IMMEDIATELY takes a shine to Eggsy, and is absolutely thrilled that Harry found someone to be happy with. Eggsy thinks Sophie is great, and that dorky Harry Bright is adorable. After the first few days though Eggsy is fairly stressed because he’s surrounded by several very powerful sirens and keeps resisting their siren songs, AND Harry keeps getting viciously hit on by everyone. I mean they're hitting on Eggsy too, but he doesn't notice because he's too busy being territorial; there is a very tan Greek man who keeps making doe eyes at Harry because they shacked up last time. (fun fact, greek dude from Mama Mia is also a siren, Merlin is cackling in the background)

The power keeps building as the third day goes around, and that night is when the party REALLY starts. Sirens feed off of group emotions, which is why they’re always so quick to cheer each other up, since otherwise you can end up bumming out everyone in the vicinity. It’s also one of the reasons that Valentine’s tech worked so well; the more people got involved, the more powerful it got. Anyways, by that point Eggsy’s jealousy has built and he’s fairly worn down by the constant barrage of “let’s throw a rager and flirt with everything that moves” mood the sirens have been throwing off the entire day. So when the karaoke thing starts, and Sophie goads him into doing a song, Eggsy is like “Yeah fuck it who cares if my voice is shit I am getting my ass up there here goes”.

Meanwhile Harry is also concerned because he’s been living with Eggsy for a year now and has never heard him sing, not even at Daisy’s birthday party where everyone sang and he just mumbled along. So he’s viciously texting Merlin about how he thinks that Eggsy has been effected and is going to make a fool of himself or something against his will, and please delete the recording as soon as it’s over, and then never bring it up. In the meantime Eggsy has vaulted up onto the stage, still stubborn and scowling, but once he gets up there he realises that he’s on a makeshift stage and has never sung anything before in his life. But he commits, because Sophie is giving him a thumbs up, and he’s not going to climb back off the stage now, is he?

Sophie puts on ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ and while Eggsy is a little shy for the opening line or two, by the time the chorus starts he’s completely into it. By the second chorus the rest of the sirens have joined in, and Eggsy has jumped off the stage so that he can confidently put himself in Harry’s lap and is generally radiating such a strong ‘back the FUCK off’ vibe that he’s cleared a good sized circle around them. Donna is thrilled and is shouting things like “YOU TELL EM BOY” and Sophie is cackling because she’s placed bets on whether or not Eggsy had siren blood in him and will be collecting good money that night.

Harry is entirely shocked at first, and Merlin is 50% thrilled because this will be so useful and 50% pissed off because how did they not know about this earlier?!

The rest of the trip goes very well, aside from some shenanigans about whether or not James Bond is James Bond (Harry and Eggsy both swear that they’ve met James Bond, but Eggsy insists that that’s not him, because James Bond is blonde and blue eyed and together with MI6’s version of Merlin, and that’s how they figure out that James Bond is as much of a title as Galahad is), Sophie and Eggsy bond and she gives him a bunch of super secret siren tips that Merlin really wishes he hadn’t overheard. There’s singing, there’s dancing, etc etc.

Once Merlin gets over the things he heard and Eggsy and Harry get back to HQ, he already has a bunch of tests for Eggsy lined up. Which is how Eggsy and Roxy get locked in a sound proof room while Merlin hangs out on the other side of a sheet of soundproof glass with a mic and a cup of tea while Eggsy tries to get Roxy to join in on a duet of a Spice Girls song. That then inspires Merlin, and Eggsy finds himself staring down Roxy saying "tell me what you want, what you really really want" in various intonations to see if they could possibly use Eggsy's abilities as a truth serum. ((The answer is no, in part because Roxy can’t stop laughing))

They discover that Eggsy's powers mostly extend to people who are either susceptible to a good mental push (like drunk people, or those of particularly weak constitutions) or people who are letting themselves be pushed (like Harry, if they're alone and he's feeling like indulging Eggsy's brattiness). But as Merlin puts it "Unless we have an influx of targets hanging out in karaoke bars or greek islands, I don't know that it'll come up often”.

Oh and when they need more recruits Eggsy nominates Sophie. She’s been taught to fight by James Bond in the past few years so she has a leg up there, but she passes with flying colours and joins Kingsman.

Anyways thanks for coming to my TED talk on why Harry Bright is just Harry Hart’s cover and Eggsy and the ladies from Mama Mia are all sirens.

[nearmidnightannex]

Random thoughts during the broadcast of “Jesus Christ Superstar”

(above image a rehearsal photo from nbc.com)

Mostly written as things occurred, with a small amount of clean-up after.

John Legend as Jesus. That will make certain people have an aneurysm or ten. Then again, they probably view the whole concept of this musical as blasphemy, no matter who is in it; this just adds an extra-special heretical touch.

Interesting. An industrial/scaffolding unit set with, I’ll wager, occasional changes and edits as needed.

For some reason, they went with a straight-up Broadway guy for Judas. I'd never really heard of Brandon Victor Dixon before, although I've seen clips of his performances in Hamilton and Shuffle Along. That said, he is the most studmuffinly Judas I can remember seeing, so.

Legend/Jesus' interactions with the (clearly hideously expensive) front rows of the audience, and how he rallies the back of the stadium, are very "concert" indeed. Pulls the audience in, in a way you wouldn’t expect from this type of live performance.

Legend brings a bit more voice to the role than I expected, although his body mike has faded in and out on him in a couple of places. Has issues with the pace he should be singing, though; he can't keep up with the places early on where Jesus should be snapping out the lyrics.

Sara Bareilles, of all people, is having a few key issues.

Caiaphas' voice is MAGNIFICENT. (Played by Norm Lewis, who was the first African American “Phantom”, so a magnificent voice was probably to be expected.)

Not a fan of some of the (admittedly, fairly insignificant so far) musical tweaks they've made to end songs so that they can go into commercial breaks. (Which are, as feared, hammering the pacing -- and given that the early part of JCS basically has NO pacing, that's kind of a feat.)

The guy playing Simon the Zealot has quite the post-punk cheesy 70s aesthetic, he does. Exactly the right voice for the role, too. Though for some reason he gets a stand microphone rather than a body mike.

Legend’s “Poor Jerusalem” was just beautifully done. Also didn’t realize he had the range to go as low as that song pushed him.

Ben Daniels has a lovely voice; what he doesn’t have is a strong enough voice for Pilate, even in "Pilate's Dream". Which, considering Pilate doesn't actually require a big voice and given how shouty he has to get later on, makes me fear for his vocal cords.

The part where Jesus throws the moneylenders out of “The temple” was quite insufficiently over-the-top, vocally and otherwise. (... OK, massive yet strangely low-key glitter dump at the beginning aside. Made the stage very twinkly, though.) And the pacing of the end of "The Temple", with the lepers, started out very strangely slow, even though it’s designed to start slow and pick up speed as the repetitions build.

Sara Bareilles really is having to fight for some of the notes tonight; her "I don't know how to love him" has some very rocky moments. That said, they helped put the emotional vulnerability in that song over really well, so. (And to be fair, she’s mostly spot-on, which makes the periodic flat notes stand out.)

The staging and delivery for the end of "Blood Money" was, I must admit, excellent. And Dixon's part in "The Last Supper" makes me really look forward to his "Superstar". (Also, I'm really curious about how Legend is going to handle the five-minute-plus behemoth of "I only want to say/Gethesemane".)

And the answer to the previous question about Gethsemane is: pretty damn well, really. I don't agree with all the choices he's made -- I don't think the operatic falsetto near the end of Gethsemane quite worked, but it was spectacular (also, I just plain didn't know he could do that!) -- but some of the choices he made really worked, going soft in moments where people familiar with the songs might have expected him to go big.

So Many Commercials. SO MANY. (In this context, the John Legend/Chrissy Teagen ad for Google is perhaps just a touch more surreal than intended.)

The modernistic touch of having Jesus’ arrest covered by modern media and mobile phones was very nicely done; added a surreal little touch. Simon’s betrayal and Mary Magdalene’s horror also well done -- although the cut to commercial that stepped on Mary’s part of the song was NOT.

(Apparently, a revival of this very musical is coming to Chicago this very month. How apropos. Hopefully, nobody buying tickets after this is expecting John Legend to be in it. And again: SO MANY COMMERCIALS!)

Also: so many scarves! They’ve been everywhere!

Yeah, Ben Daniels’ voice in “Pilate and Christ” is very nice, and really not big enough for this. He’s songspieling (speaking in tune) parts of it to get around that, reasonably effectively. The song is about half recitatif, anyway.

Whoever thought of casting Alice Cooper as Herod should get next year’s casting Emmy award, just for that. (Actually, this whole thing is pretty well cast. But still.) To say nothing of the costuming! A shades-of-orange suit, and a skull-head walking stick! And ... Vegas-style showgirls. Well, of course. That said, this number in the film has a lot of business by Herod that Alice Cooper was never going to be able to perform, so the showgirls make a sort of sense to manage people’s expectations. (And ... an actual mic drop. Oh, my. And mugging to the audience -- and the chorus -- in character. Well, then.)

(Regarding the commercial for the Mamma Mia sequel: casting in Hollyweird is insane. Not that Cher having a role in that movie is bad, but the idea that she’s old enough to be Meryl Streep’s mother is just bizarre. Yes, Cher is older, but the actors are, quite literally, three years apart in age.)

“Could we start again, please” -- written for the film and brought to this production -- sung by Mary Magdalene and Peter, is very nice. I think this is one of the places where the commercial pacing hurts the production; this quiet moment coming out of what was effectively a five-minute intermission is just odd.

Dixon did a beautiful job in “Blood Money (reprise)/I don’t know how to love him (reprise)/Judas’ Death” at putting over Judas’ agony at having betrayed Jesus. Especially with his realization at how he was used by Jesus, even though he still doesn’t know why. The staging of his suicide was necessarily stinted -- they couldn’t do what the movie did and show him hanging himself, given the stage itself. I wonder what the audience in the theater saw; they couldn’t have gotten the view into the scaffolding that the home audience saw. Maybe it was more effective being unable to see anything.

“Trial before Pilate” is mostly shouting and recitatif, so Daniels is doing OK with it -- or did until the end when he had to shout-sing ... though honestly, it sort of works to not have enough voice for that very emotional moment. Pilate truly does not want to do any of this (and doesn’t think he has the authority, either).  The staging of the 39 lashes is ... extraordinarily stinted, though it would be a bit much to expect someone to faux-whip Legend on television. That said, it might have been better to just have the sound effects and the counting and his reaction, rather than what they did; the people running past contributed nothing useful.

The staging of “Superstar” is, as it should be, very Vegas and very sparkly and very “that is a large corps de danse, that is”. And almost entirely without Jesus until near the end. (It’s usually staged as being sung at Jesus during or before the crucifixion process, I think.) I loved how Dixon sung it -- although that was an epic shrill glory note at the end. Not entirely sure why they had him sing in a ragged sequined tank top and shiny shredded jeans, but it’s not like I object. (Also, I think his sparkly silver lamé pants had a large angel-wings belt buckle. Taking the place of the giant angel-wings-evoking fringe from the film, maybe.)

“The Crucifixion/John 19:41” is well- and creepily-staged. And includes a really weird and super creepy version of The Ascension, wherein Jesus is bodily assumed into heaven while still on the cross. Which, very technically, may be actual heresy (there was the whole part where they took him off the cross, shrouded him, entombed him, came back three days later to discover the tomb open and the body gone, and THEN came the ascension, and all that gets skipped).

And then the cast takes their very well deserved bows. (And Brandon Victor Dixon does a “Wakanda Forever” salute in his bow.)

That was, I freely admit, a lot more enjoyable than I thought it would be, and a lot better than I thought it might be. And the technical side of what was obviously a very demanding production was extraordinarily well done. All that said, I’d love to see a version without commercials, just to see the pacing done right.

[aion-rsa]

The Prom: Ranking Every Song in the Movie Musical Soundtrack From Worst to Best

https://ift.tt/3mbeEmh

The 2018 Broadway musical The Prom has always had a somewhat shaky premise, combining a quartet of narcissistic Broadway stars (Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells) looking for a way to be relevant again with a lesbian couple’s (Jo Ellen Pellman and Ariana DeBose) simple wish to attend their prom in Edgewater, Indiana. The two threads collide when the prom gets blown up into a civil rights issue. However, the stage show reconciled these seemingly disparate elements into a heartwarming tale of self-acceptance for all involved: straight or gay, closeted or out, aging star or varsity cheerleader.

Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation for Netflix, by contrast, is less successful. The awkward space between these two stories is more pronounced, with the Broadway portions plagued by puzzling lighting and editing choices. Combine that with some truly head-scratching casting among three of the four adults, and it distracts from the intent of basically half the soundtrack.

However, when it comes to all things prom-related, the adaptation is nearly as strong as its Broadway predecessor, and in some places utilizes cinematic elements to surpass the original versions of key musical numbers. With that in mind, we’re ranking all 19 songs from worst to best, keeping in mind that the rankings would likely have turned out differently had we been considering the musical itself.

19. Barry is Going to Prom

James Corden was disastrously miscast as gay actor Barry, who removed himself from his parents’ lives as a teenager before they could cast him out, yet is still clearly in need of closure. One can never shake the feeling of watching this straight actor put on queer identity as an ill-fitting suit; there’s more than one “did I just hear that right?” moment of him lisping his way through a scene.

He brings that disingenuously effeminate energy to Barry’s big number, “Barry is Going to Prom,” and tarnishes what should be a triumphant showstopper. Not surprisingly, Corden in a silver-and-aqua tux mincing through a fantasy sequence is so much less compelling than original star Brooks Ashmanskas belting in his pajamas.

18. Simply Love

The second of the two end credits songs seems to be a rejected number for Barry’s reunion with his estranged mother while also advocating for Emma. Despite the feeling Corden tries to infuse into it, emotionally it’s empty. The only thing saving it from rock bottom on this list is that there are no accompanying visuals.

17. The Acceptance Song

The first sign that the Broadway crew have overestimated their star power is when their big “rally” in Emma’s honor gets booked… at the halftime show of the local monster truck rally. They try to sing a song about acceptance, but neither they nor the monster truck enthusiasts are equipped to give or receive the message. It’s a forgettable song, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

16. Wear Your Crown

The first end credits song is so overproduced that I had to look up who sang it—turns out it’s the entire cast, their voices blended into one unnatural warble. The only thing that saves it is that they do the musical credits thing where they match the names with the performances (here, it’s them posing at the prom with superlatives), so you can remember who you did or didn’t like all over again.

15. Zazz

As solo numbers go, this is not Nicole Kidman’s best; but then again, can anything really top Moulin Rouge!? Perennial chorus girl Angie’s ode to making yourself a star is meant to evoke Bob Fosse and Chicago, but winds up resembling a mere shadow of that brilliance. And, unlike how Kidman breaks our hearts with “Come What May,” this ditty could have been sung by anyone.

14. Changing Lives

As opening numbers go, this one doesn’t rank very high, in part because it has to do so much heavy lifting for the less obvious half of The Prom’s premise: Dee Dee (Meryl Streep, unconvincing at the start) and Barry watch their Eleanor Roosevelt musical close on opening night because they are too self-involved to authentically inhabit these historical figures.

Scrolling Twitter’s trending topics for a “cause” that will reverse their PR disaster, they find Emma and automatically decide that they can and will change her small-town baby gay life. With all that exposition, the song’s actual message—that actors and art can change people’s lives—gets lost. What is fun is intercutting the post-show glow with footage of Dee Dee and Barry in costume as Eleanor and FDR on-stage in what feels like a parody of Hamilton.

13. It’s Not About Me

This is a peppier, more on-the-nose version of “Changing Lives,” yet it strikes a bunch of discordant notes, like Dee Dee and co. sweeping into the PTA meeting to rally for Emma but really turn the spotlight on themselves. It’s too much cringe, too early in the story; and worst of all, Streep simply doesn’t seem to be having fun. Instead she looks like she has to force this number out to get on to the more compelling stuff.

12. Changing Lives (Reprise)

The reprise ranks higher than its predecessor because there’s just enough of an ironic twist to signal to the audience that we’re immediately poking fun at these self-obsessed Broadway stars. The line “We’re gonna help that little lesbian / Whether she likes it or not” is unexpectedly hilarious, though the CGI Times Square backdrop is tough to swallow.

11. We Look to You

Perhaps it’s not surprising that all of the songs about the saving power of art are clumped in the same section of the ranking. Perhaps that element of the show translated better to the literal stage, but in the movie these sequences are garish and don’t fit alongside the sweet, straightforward conflict that Emma and Alyssa face.

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This number does try to bridge that divide, however, with Keegan-Michael Key’s straight ally Principal Hawkins tenderly serenading Dee Dee with memories of her performing. Yet through no fault of his own, they still seem an oddly matched pair, which dampens the romantic effect of the song.

10. Unruly Heart

As Emma’s big number, delivered via humble strumming on YouTube that goes viral by tugging the heartstrings of LGBTQ teens everywhere, “Unruly Heart” felt as if it should have ranked higher. There’s a fun effect of Emma’s bed spinning, making the confines of her room seem bigger as her message spreads to millions of people; it also looks like something out of a Broadway show. But one is left with the feeling that this should be a tearjerker for where it exists in the story. This is likely the biggest casualty of the stage-to-screen adaptation.

9. The Lady’s Improving

This is Streep in her musical element, bringing to mind a mix of the whimsy of “Money, Money, Money” and the yearning of “Mamma Mia.” It’s also got that sharp cleverness that’s all too rare in the Broadway portion of this story, with Dee Dee resurrecting her starring role for a one-afternoon-only, private performance for Hawkins. Wouldn’t you know it, this unapologetic preying on his nostalgic fandom for a fictional character is what actually sells their oddball relationship.

8. Alyssa Greene

DeBose’s bitter defense of staying in the closet starts out as the seemingly low-stakes complaints of a straight-A student afraid to step out of line. But as Alyssa’s refrains keep returning to her mother (Kerry Washington)—complete with flashbacks of earnest Washington playing the helicopter-mom to a tee—it becomes achingly clear just how committed Mrs. Greene is to making her daughter’s life not be “difficult,” at least by her metrics. It’s also clear how much Alyssa feels she owes her.

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The best part is that this impassioned “I wish” song is not enough to win back Emma’s trust, and actually leads to their breakup instead. Emotional vulnerability, met with stakes-raising conflict! We love to see it.

7. It’s Time to Dance

Sure, it’s the triumphant final number, but it’s also so much spectacle (mostly with the ensemble’s too-cool-for-school dancing) that it’s difficult to focus on the emotional underpinnings. Reprisals of motifs like “Dance with You” (look ahead) and “Unruly Heart” buoy it up, and of course so does Emma and Alyssa’s big kiss. But this feels like the big shiny denouement as opposed to the less polished but more poignant songs that will stick with you longer.

6. Tonight Belongs to You (Reprise)

Just as “Changing Lives (Reprise)” recontextualizes its predecessor, the reprise of “Tonight Belongs to You” twists the knife: After being humiliated by the school-wide prank of the fake prom, Emma tortures herself with one last reminder that tonight was always about the “normal” kids. It’s the heartbreaking complement to her stalwart sense of self in “Just Breathe” (see below), with Emma confronting the truth that even if she loves herself, her peers and their parents don’t.

5. Love Thy Neighbor

Without a doubt, Rannells makes this song more charming than it has any right to be. You couldn’t have found a better choice than the Book of Mormon alum to point out the hypocrisy in cherry-picking which religious rules to follow. And unlike a lot of The Prom’s other attempts to shoehorn Broadway culture into this small town, the Godspell vibe of “Love Thy Neighbor” expertly gets through to these closed-minded classmates. If Rannells were teaching drama and the Bible to teens like this, it’d go a long way toward bridging that empathy gap.

4. Just Breathe

Pellman is earnestly wonderful even in songs that are duds, but this is the perfect introduction. “Note to self: Don’t be gay in Indiana” tells you everything you need to know about how lovely Emma is: wry and self-assured, secure in both her own identity and in who she loves, even if she has to protect that secret for Alyssa.

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Yet this inner monologue of a song is relatable to all adolescents who don’t quite fit into high school’s damning constraints, a keen reminder to just breathe and move past the moment, looking ahead to a place or hopefully someday a world in which they won’t be the odd person out.

3. You Happened

This bubbly number seemingly shouldn’t rank so high in the list, yet it’s the most authentic aspect of the story it’s depicting: Teenagers acting out the epic love stories they’ve seen in film and yes, on the stage, playacting at adult declarations of devotion.

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It’s the classic promposal that teens have swooned over from Laguna Beach to TikTok, but one-upped through boy-band choreography and a built-in chorus of high schoolers crooning “Youuuu happened!” like it’s the big love confession from When Harry Met Sally. Yet these over-the-top promposals don’t hold a candle to…

2. Dance with You

Emma and Alyssa’s sweet anthem has the sweeping strains of a classic love song—old-Hollywood romance that reflects their simple wish to not be symbols of a movement, but to get the same quintessential high school experience as their straight classmates. It’s also one that benefits from the movie expanding the scope of a song, with the young lovers walking hand-in-hand through their empty school and waltzing under ethereally lit pink trees. Every time the motif recurs in later songs (hitting different notes each time), it conjures that same swell of emotion.

1. Tonight Belongs to You

The fact that this song attained number-one despite Corden’s bad performance overshadowing the first verses is a testament to its infectious joy, and to the frankly incredible layers of emotion contained within.

Beneath the giddy veneer of getting ready for prom, there are so many darker aspects: Barry strong-arming poor Emma into a femme makeover in an attempt to live vicariously through the prom he never had. Cheerleaders Shelby and Kaylee singing “One thing’s universal / Life’s no dress rehearsal” as they step into identical limos in their cookie-cutter cul de sac, as if they could ever fathom an experience outside of their own. This entire song claims that the night is about Emma, but it’s about everyone but her, and that is so uncomfortably truthful.

And then… the moment Emma steps into the gym to find that the entire school played a cruel trick on her. Her peers singing as if they’re in the same boat as her, as they sail on to their real prom, leaving her the humiliation of entering the empty school gym, encapsulates the brutality of high school in a single song. They’ve turned the supposedly empowering Act I finale into the ultimate villain song. The Prom is uneven overall, but as enduring musical songs go, “Tonight Belongs to You” takes the crown.

But as with all things prom, every vote counts. How would you rank the songs from Netflix’s The Prom?

The Prom is now streaming on Netflix.

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The post The Prom: Ranking Every Song in the Movie Musical Soundtrack From Worst to Best appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3mdb2Ac

[thetalentedkurthummel]

The people on Reddit have spoken again and Kurt Hummel - fashion designer, Broadway star and father, has agreed to a second Q&A on Reddit, these are the questions he has answered.

PART 1: THE BASICS

What is your full name?

Kurt Justin Hummel and make sure not to wear it out. Actually do wear it out and make sure to let someone know they can buy some of my clothing.

Where and when were you born?

I was born and bread in Lima, Ohio. Some may consider that a curse but I wouldn’t be the person I am today without having to deal with the people of Ohio. I also met my husband in Ohio.

Who are/were your parents? (Know their names, occupations, personalities, etc.)

My mother was called Elizabeth Hummel and from what I remember she was a bright and intelligent woman with a heart of gold - she didn’t work as she wanted to raise me instead. She died when I was eight years old of cancer.

My father was Burt Hummel and for most of his life he was a car mechanic and he raised me after my mother died. He then went into politics and became a a congressman. He got prostate cancer while I was in college, but recovered, but it was the heart that got him in the end as he had too much love to give. He sadly passed away from his second heart attack a few years ago.

I also have a step mother called Carole who is another lovely woman who I sadly haven't been able to contact much due to the pressures of life in New York. She is a fantastic strong woman and I love her for giving me a step brother and for making my father happy.

Do you have any siblings? What are/were they like?

I don’t have any biological siblings, but I do have one step brother. He was in the US Army for a time until some stuff happened and he got injured and is now on the road to recovery.

Where do you live now, and with whom? Describe the place and the person/people.

I live in New York with my husband. I am not going to go into details, but Blaine is a great husband and takes care of me well. The place we live in is everything I ever dreamt of.

What is your occupation?

I am a fashion designer mainly for men, but also sometimes make outfits for women. I really like women in suits and so that is the style I go for.

Write a full physical description of yourself. You might want to consider factors such as: height, weight, race, hair and eye color, style of dress, and any tattoos, scars, or distinguishing marks.

Uh i’m not going to go too into detail, but I have blue eyes, am white, got a tattoo on my back from when I had too much alcohol with a friend one time. It had a mispelling but it has since been fixed. The tattoo says “It's got Bette Midler“.

I have a scar on my neck from when I needed an operation to remove an infected lymph gland but can hardly see it.

To which social class do you belong?

I guess with how things have gone in my life I am middle upper class? Back when at school I was in a working class family, but my dad brought in enough money to send me to private school for a time when I was being bullied.

Do you have any allergies, diseases, or other physical weaknesses?

Does hayfever count? I’m also allergic to homophobic people.

Are you right- or left-handed?

I am right handed.

What does your voice sound like?

Meryl Streep.

What words and/or phrases do you use very frequently?

“Oh my god“ and “what of earth is she wearing?“

What do you have in your pockets?

Gum, a baby monitor and some loose change.

Do you have any quirks, strange mannerisms, annoying habits, or other defining characteristics?

How long have you got?

PART 2: GROWING UP

How would you describe your childhood in general?

Mixed emotions to be honest. Before the age of 7/8 I guess you could call me a happy child, but then my mom died and I became a bit reclusive and more reserved. Then going into my teens I was having an identity crisis and needed to stand up for myself more so then became a bit more vocal.

What is your earliest memory?

So I had a fake tea set when I was younger and I remember playing that with my mother and she was in a lovely floral dress and she was smiling.

How much schooling have you had?

I’ve done everything except get a masters and PHD.

Did you enjoy school?

It was an experience. Certain aspects of school I enjoyed, but for the most part it is something I don’t wish to repeat.

Where did you learn most of your skills and other abilities?

To be honest most of my skills i’ve had to learn on my own. I mean my father isn’t exactly the creative type when it comes to fashion and he isn’t a singer. So i’ve learnt from other people. My singing and theatrical abilities are mainly from when I was at NYADA.

While growing up, did you have any role models? If so, describe them.

Oh there were so many. I loved Alexander McQueen and everything he created. Honestly just all the male fashion designers that appeared in Vogue Magazine. Then there were the singers such as Barbra Streisand and Patti Le Pone. I could be here all day if you wanted me to talk about Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.

While growing up, how did you get along with the other members of your family?

Well I only have fractured memories of my mother and so the only other support system I had was my father. We got on the best we could and he became my biggest ally, even when I was scared to come out to him.

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I’ve always wanted to be someone fabulous and who stood out and not be lost in the audience. So even as a fashion designer I make my clothing pop out, so that whoever is wearing it stands out as well.

As a child, what were your favorite activities?

Singing, dancing, pretending to be British. Wearing my mother’s scarfs.

As a child, what kinds of personality traits did you display?

I’ve talked over this with my father and apparently I was a sweet and quiet child, but who sometimes had a flare for dramatics - which honestly doesn’t surprise me.

As a child, were you popular? Who were your friends, and what were they like?

Oh no I was not popular at all and even leaving high school I wasn’t really popular. It was only because our Glee Club were winning competitions that I got noticed more, but that made me more of a target too. I mean I was the gay/bi teenager, who liked musicals, who sang, whose voice hadn’t broken so he sounded like a girl and who liked wearing women’s clothing from time to time.

My friends were mostly those who were also in the same Glee club, i’m still friends with some of them today.

When and with whom was your first kiss?

I don’t like to talk about that to be honest. I’ve forgiven that person now, but it was a kiss that wasn’t consensual and was at a time he was bullying me. Also a reason I went to private school for a period.

Are you a virgin? If not, when and with whom did you lose your virginity?

No i’m not a virgin and I lost my virginity to my husband when I was around 17, possibly 18. I need to double check that.

If you are a supernatural being (i.e. mage, werewolf, vampire), tell the story of how you became what you are or first learned of your own abilities. If you are just a normal human, describe any influences in your past that led you to do the things you do today.

PART 3: PAST INFLUENCES

What do you consider the most important event of your life so far?

There are two events. Getting married to Blaine and having my daughter.

Who has had the most influence on you?

I would say my father - he has given me a lot of wise words which I still live by to this day. I am also going to pass on those wise words to my daughter when she is old enough to understand.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

To get married and have a child before I am thirty. That is what I wanted when at high school other than to be famous on Broadway.

What is your greatest regret?

Life is too short to think about regrets. I have a few but it’s something I don’t wish to think about.

What is the most evil thing you have ever done?

I honestly can’t think of anything evil I have done.

Do you have a criminal record of any kind?

Nope, not even a speeding ticket.

When was the time you were the most frightened?

I think it was when I saw someone get beaten up in a New York alley for being gay. I went to defend them but then they turned on me and I was the one who ended up in hospital instead. That was a very scary moment.

There are other moments with my father, but it’s something I don’t wish to share.

What is the most embarrassing thing ever to happen to you?

There are some fashion choices when in Glee Club at McKinley High that were very questionable.

If you could change one thing from your past, what would it be, and why?

I would not have my mother die because it would mean I could spend more time with her.

What is your best memory?

Singing on stage at Gershwin Theatre when me and my friend may have broken in and did a duet. Nothing was stolen by the way.

What is your worst memory?

High school slushies.

PART 4: BELIEFS & OPINIONS

Are you basically optimistic or pessimistic?

I would say i’m a bit of both? I have doubts in various things such as the way I raise my daughter, or how my work is doing. Yet I also am optimistic for the future and the way my life is progressing.

What is your greatest fear?

My daughter dying before me.

What are your religious views?

I am athiest. I will respect your religion but please don’t push it on me. I have been to church but only out of friendship with others or going to a wedding etc. No prayers come out of my mouth.

What are your political views?

It depends what is going on but I am either Democrat or Independent.

What are your views on sex?

I’d like some more in my life please. No but seriously, as long as you are of age and having a healthy sex life (and use protection), then I see no issue.

Are you able to kill? Under what circumstances do you find killing to be acceptable or unacceptable?

If my life or others depended on it then I might be able to kill, but we’re talking about if there was a war going on or end of the world type scenario here.

In your opinion, what is the most evil thing any human being could do?

Molest a child. There is no excuse for that.

Do you believe in the existence of soul mates and/or true love?

I believe that when you find someone they may be your true love or soulmate, however you can’t just let life write the story of what will happen. You still need to work hard to make the relationship healthy between the two of you.

Also don’t wait for someone to find you, go out there and have fun.

What do you believe makes a successful life?

Being happy in who you are. Being successful doens’t mean you need to be rich, it just means you are happy in the way things are going. If you feel content with what you have done or what you have got, then that is all that matters.

Some people love money, other people are just happy sitting in a nice garden that they’ve worked on to get it that nice.

How honest are you about your thoughts and feelings (i.e. do you hide your true self from others, and in what way)?

It depends on who I am with. Sometimes I open up to anyone and everyone - while other times I only speak to my daughter about my feelings and she can’t even understand a word i’m saying.

Mainly I am a private person and the clothes I wear show how i’m feeling. The more layers I wear, the more insecure I feel.

Do you have any biases or prejudices?

My daughter is the prettiest.

Is there anything you absolutely refuse to do under any circumstances? Why do you refuse to do it?

I refuse to work with anyone who is prejudiced against those in the LGBT+ community and won’t have a discussion with me about why that is. I work with charities that try to help those in need who are gay, bi, trans etc and i’d feel like a hypocrite otherwise.

I also don’t donate money to any charities that are against equal rights.

Who or what, if anything, would you die for (or otherwise go to extremes for)?

I would do anything for my friends and family if they asked me to...depending what it is. I mean i’m not going to go to jail for killing someone that they asked me to kill, you know.

PART 5: RELATIONSHIPS W/OTHERS

In general, how do you treat others (politely, rudely, by keeping them at a distance, etc.)? Does your treatment of them change depending on how well you know them, and if so, how?

It depends on that person and how they are treating me at the time. If they are a fan I keep my distance a bit because you never know what they could be like - but will take a photograph with them. Though if I have my daughter I would prefer to just say hi and then leave because her safety comes first.

I try to be friendly to those who meet me, sometimes keep my distance and have my guard up unless they are friends or family.

Who is the most important person in your life, and why?

My daughter because she is my everything.

Who is the person you respect the most, and why?

I respect anyone who has to battle through things to get to where they are now. Whether that is with their mental health, their career or just other obsticles.

Who are your friends? Do you have a best friend? Describe these people.

I have a lot of friends, but the people I care for most are my brother Finn, Blaine, Rachel and Mercedes. Most of which you would have heard about i’m sure so there is no need to describe them.

Do you have a spouse or significant other? If so, describe this person.

I am married to the ever so charming Blaine Anderson and he is currenlty on Broadway. He is the person who I confide in when things get tough and will see the positive in everything.

Have you ever been in love? If so, describe what happened.

I married him.

What do you look for in a potential lover?

I look for my husband when I go to bed.

How close are you to your family?

Both my parents have passed on now and there’s only my extended family who i’ve not seen really since the funeral. I talk to Blaine’s side of the family occasionally and I really need to talk more with my step mother and step brother.

Have you started your own family? If so, describe them. If not, do you want to? Why or why not?

Serena is under a year old and keeps us up at night when she doesn’t get her way. Other than that she’s a charming little girl.

Who would you turn to if you were in desperate need of help?

My husband or two of my best friends who live nearby most of the time. There are others but it depends on the situation.

Do you trust anyone to protect you? Who, and why?

I trust a lot of people who i’ve mentioned above.

If you died or went missing, who would miss you?

Hopefully a lot of people, but I don’t want that to happen for a very long time.

Who is the person you despise the most, and why?

Donald Trump and Mike Pence. I don’t need a reason other than for you to check their Twitter history.

Do you tend to argue with people, or avoid conflict?

I have argued with people in the past, but as i’ve grown older and wiser I tend to avoid conflict unless it is to protect someone.

Do you tend to take on leadership roles in social situations?

Well somebody has to do it, though I back off if Rachel is in the room because then she is in charge.

Do you like interacting with large groups of people? Why or why not?

I’m a parent and need my sleep, but it depends on the group of people. I prefer a small gathering to be honest.

Do you care what others think of you?

Yes because i’m in fashion and I need to listen to the constructive criticism of my work. Then I can make it better.

PART 6: LIKES & DISLIKES

What is/are your favorite hobbies and pastimes?

I love to sing as it helps me not worry about what could be going on in my life. Shopping on the internet and then reading Vogue magazine.

What is your most treasured possession?

The perfume my mother wore when she was a child. I also have her dresser which she had, but that is back home with Carole. It was given to me in my father’s will though. So when I have a chance I need to ship it over here and figure out where to put it. It still smells like her.

What is your favorite color?

I love the color blue.

What is your favorite food?

Cheesecake is my downfall.

What, if anything, do you like to read?

There are the Harry Potter books from my childhood of course, but i’ve not been able to read anything recently due to lack of time.

What is your idea of good entertainment (consider music, movies, art, etc.)?

Everyone has different views, but to me as long as it is legal and that person enjoys it - then that is entertainment or at least a hobby. For me I love theatre and when there is a chance either go see my husband perform or go see another Broadway show.

Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs? If so, why? Do you want to quit?

I have never smoked or taken drugs. I do drink from time to time though and partial to red wine, champagne or gin and tonic.

How do you spend a typical Saturday night?

I’m a parent to a child under one so you can only guess.

What makes you laugh?

My husband being a goofball.

What, if anything, shocks or offends you?

Those who are ignorant about the world, especially when it comes to homophobia, biphobia, transphobia or anything else which affects the LGBT+ community.

Also Donald Trump.

What would you do if you had insomnia and had to find something to do to amuse yourself?

I already have insomnia and so either hang out with my daughter who could be awake, watch my husband sleep or go and create a design in my office I have at home.

How do you deal with stress?

I have mild to moderate OCD and so cleaning is a great stress reliever. Also stress baking is good for the soul.

Are you spontaneous, or do you always need to have a plan?

I am very much a planner, but I do like to be spontaneous every now and then. Blaine and I learned early on that relationships need spontaneity every now and then and not to get sucked too much into a routine.

I mean we decided to do a joint wedding with our friends with a notice of only an hour or two.

What are your pet peeves?

If you read this interview all the way through i’m sure you will figure that out.

PART 7: SELF IMAGES & OTHER

Describe the routine of a normal day for you. How do you feel when this routine is disrupted?

I used to have a good routine, but when you have a child you need to get used to your routine being disrupted all the time, especially at night. I do try to work out in the morning though.

What is your greatest strength as a person?

Being comfortable in who I am.

What is your greatest weakness?

Alexander McQueen, Blaine and cheesecake.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Nothing.

Are you generally introverted or extroverted?

I would say I am extroverted. I have calmed down a bit now but I am one of those gay men who are out and proud and can be a little annoying when it comes to certain things. When I say annoying I usually mean those who are cis straight people who can’t handle anything rainbow. I have overcome many things and I feel you need to express it loud and clear when you know you’re ok to do so. Like I can do it in New York but of course I would not do it in the middle of Texas you know.

Are you generally organized or messy?

I would say i’m a little bit of both, because while I love to be organised in what I do or even plan to do, certain things require a little bit of mess. When creating an outfit you need to allow some mess or even when having a child around the place you need to understand there will be some mess in your life that you won’t get a chance to clean up properly.

Name three things you consider yourself to be very good at, and three things you consider yourself to be very bad at.

Good at: Creating ideas, standing up to people, fashion

Bad at: Staying in touch, not being anxious over my daughter, going to bed early

Do you like yourself?

I like 90% of myself and compare that to say 10+ years ago where I didn’t like say 60% of myself because of bullying and trying to figure out where I stood in life. I mean I had moderate to severe depression and did go into some dark places, but i’ve now come through the other side. The only things I don’t like about myself now are things which are minor such as how judgemental I can be or not seeing enough of friends or family. Those can be fixed given time.

What goal do you most want to accomplish in your lifetime?

Honestly I think i’ve achieved most of the goals I ever thought were possible. Now it’s to make sure my company thrives and I help my child live to their potential in whatever they may want to do to be.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

I see my fashion company growing, maybe i’ve tried another acting role in Broadway and I would really love another child - but that is up to Blaine and whoever would be our surrogate.

If you could choose, how would you want to die?

Surrounded by the people who I love.

If you knew you were going to die in 24 hours, name three things you would do in the time you had left.

Spend time with those I love dearly, have amazing sex, plan my outfit for what I would wear in the last moments of my life so I would look amazing.

What is the one thing for which you would most like to be remembered after your death?

Being a fashion icon - hopefully up there with the likes of McQeen and Versace.

What three words best describe your personality?

Creative, determined and theatrical.

What three words would others probably use to describe you?

Brave, ambitious, Slytherclaw.

If you could, what advice would you, the player, give to your character? (You might even want to speak as if he or she were sitting right here in front of you, and use proper tone so he or she might heed your advice…)

[thatshighlyoffensive]

That’s Highly Offensive: 2018 Golden Globes

Y’all know I only wear all black all the time, so I find the fact that Hollywood is "uniting" against whatever tonight by wearing all black to be kind of a stupid way to pussy foot around the issue, but who asked me? This should have been a night when the carpet looked the way I think it should at all times, but honestly, a lot of stuff looked makeshift and cheap to me. And WHAT was with all the skirts-over-pants nonsense?? I thought that was over. Also, forgive the overuse of the funeral garb schtick but what choice did I have?

Wow. It's rare that the first look I see ends up being the worst dressed of the night, but Debra Messing has just taken the cake, eaten it, made another cake, eaten that, made another one, and took that too. I know it's cliché but MESSing says it all. #thefacesofmeth That emerald eyeshadow and those Elvira for Family Dollar false lashes!!  And WHAT is that dent in her forehead?? I’ll tell you what it is… bad Botox. Or Juvaderm. Or whatever expired baby bunny cartilage her dermo found in Karen Walker’s dumpster. Oh and also, she’s wearing the dress version of Liza’s putty kkk hood shoes and it’s  all HIGHLY offensive.

Kelly Clarkson- "From Justin to King Midas" if King Midas was a lizard...

Kristin Cavallari went as 1999 Oscars Angelina Jolie but with a ballerina's bun and I'm not ok with it.

I honestly have nothing bad to say about Tracee Ellis Ross’s outfit. The phrase ‘Charmin Noir’ comes to mind, but let’s not bc you know how much I love a turban/wrap!

Meryl Streep: You bore me to tears. I like your glasses.

It seems to be literally KILLING Giuliana Rancid that she can’t ask “Who are you wearing?” bc she is incapable of NOT pointing out the fact that she’s not asking that question to every person she's interviewed. And as always, she looks like the Queen from Antz but this year her skin is a particularly orange shade of Oscar Meyer all beef frank. She also has one of the most bulbous horse hair dino ponytails I’ve ever seen. She's like the anorexic version of Starla from Napoleon Dynamite. AND HER TAN LINES! I didn't know you got those from bottled self tanner...

Catherine Zeta Jones: I am still obsessed with CZJ even after recently rewatching Ocean’s Twelve for the first time since Cat and I fell asleep in the theater. Her face, her body, her dress, her earrings, her love for her thousand year old father in law… I am fully behind all of it!

Penelope Cruz: See above. #stunning

I don't know who this woman from Outlander is but I do know she better be on her way to audition at Tweetsie Railroad.

Connie Britton: NO.

Jessica Biel and J. Tim- don’t NO ONE CARE. I don’t know one person who watched ‘The Sinner’ (most people didn’t even know what I was talking about when I asked if they’d heard of it), so the fact that she is nominated is a testament to that Sexy Back money and nothing more. Just her talking about being a producer of the show is like… We get it…you’re the only one who would pay you to be an actress anymore. PS, your arms are fabulous.

Mandy Candy Moore: Olé!

Holy shit Diane Kruger looks amazing.

Unfortunately, Sarah Paulson is one of those I feel looks like she's in something cheap. Really cheap. Like she stole a leotard from the Xanadu Mourning collection and wrapped a table cloth around herself. And I can't say I love the choppiness of her bob.

Michele Williams- I’m still not over how ridiculous you looked on Dawson’s Creek, but your pixie has grown on me over the last few years but OHMYGOD what is that shelf in the back? Lloyd Christmas called…

Seth Myers looks like the singing sword and a foot had a baby and named it Cheremy.

Jamie Chung- First of all, why are you here? Secondly, you look like the winner of a ‘Grunge Bride’ themed stripper contest sponsored by Hefty in 2002. Those shoes….

Alexis Bledel- Let’s get this out of the way: I can’t stand you. You’re a mumbler with creepy Kewpie doll eyes and mouth. But as for what you’re wearing, GASP you’re not wearing solid black so you obviously don’t care about women!! But also, you must not care about yourself either because you look like one of Ariel’s sisters and Dionysus had a baby and it came out haunted.

Why is Dave Franco wearing so much rouge????

Alison Brie- Ok, you can channel Audrey Hepburn, I guess. Although her dress does resemble my senior prom dress from Cache. Oh wait- there’s a pants leg. You’re trash.

William H. Macy: Did Grubby die? That’s the only reason I can think of for Teddy Ruxpin to show up to the Golden Globes in all black…

Gal Gadot is clearly going to an audition for "A Chorus Line" after the Globes. Why else would she steal a maitre'd's jacket and cut it in half?

Saoirse Ronan looks perfect all around. I need all of it immediately, even though I’d look more like Bruce Villanche dressed in drag doing a David Bowie tribute than her svelte awesomeness…

Eva Longoria looks like a pregnant Sharpie.

It took me a solid 3 seconds & a glance at the caption to figure out I was looking at Halle Berry and not some mixed berry bag of Skittles from a prom themed episode of the CW’s Gossip Girl revival. And her bangs look gross and ridiculous. #whywontsheage??

I take it back: Reese Witherspoon looks like the pregnant Sharpie. Or maybe her daughter has decided to become a fashion designer and this was her first foray into an origami—inspired collection? #blacktobasics

Nicole Kidman (or Nicky Kickin it in the Moulin Rouge, as Jack McFarland calls her) looks flawless, as always. The one negative thing I will say is that I find flutter fly cap sleeves to be among the most offensive things in adult female fashion (mainly because the only humans that can pull them off are pre-teens, anorexics and Kate Moss (not that she’d ever wear them).

Viola Davis wins everything. Omg that hair and makeup and jewelry and dress. ⚰️⚰️⚰️

Did Zac-without-a-K Efron want people to mistake him for Milo Ventimiglia? Is that the reason for the mustache? Why is he even there? GASP! Are they already remaking High School Musical (because you know that’s in the works…) with him starring as Troy again?!? #prayerhands

Why exactly is Naomi Campbell at the Golden Globes, must less in a piece from the never-to-be-seen sketches Vivienne Westwood did for Guy Richie’s new pandering remake starring Madonna as Herlock Holmes?

Lily James- You are gorgeous perfection and I mean that because anyone that stars in a live action Disney remake is automatically on my shit list (I’m looking at you, Emmas Stone and Watson…) but what the actual hell are you wearing? You look like a Project Runway contestant’s submission on the theme “Maleficent’s entrance to the party.”

Octavia Spencer looks like the teacher who got to play Glinda’s role in a #metoo fundraising, high school production of Wicked after the lead was stricken with mono.

Greta Gerwig- I’m tempted to allow it, but only if you’re intentionally channeling Marchesa Luisa Casati.

Angelina Jolie- oh. my. god. I know I’m biased (as one of her long lost, adopted children she’s never acknowledged or heard of) but I cannot say one bad thing about this, especially since I’ve been in 100% Bombshell  Manual mode lately and anything with feathers or frills or femininity is giving me LIFE. #bestdressed

Elizabeth Moss: from Polly to Pollyana. Anyone that gets that is my lifelong friend and anyone that doesn’t please never talk to me again. But seriously honey, that waistline is not your friend.

Jessica Chastain- I think I love everything about this but am i crazy or does it make her look a little bulky? Tell me I’m crazy. I’m crazy. (Narrator: She was definitely crazy.)

omg Maggie Gyllenhaal is wearing the same Castle Greyskull, droopy-sleeve of wizard-vagine garment as Debra Messing! Is this a thing?? Gross. And those earrings are stupid too but I don’t know why.

Emilia Clarke is perfection (minus the bow but moving on) and I don’t even love GOT.

Geena Davis stole one of CZJ’S costumes from Chicago and i can’t say that I’m angry. I will say that I’m angry that the head designer at LOFT got hold of it and added a few of those filthy lace panels before she walked the red carpet, but since she still looks pretty flawless…I’LL ALLOW IT.

As always, Lena Headey looks like the drunk, badass aunt who was a groupie before falling into acting so I love her even more than when she gets drunk and sets people on fire on tv. The dress does look like something a goth would make to wear to a Renaissance fair, but who cares when she looks that cool in it?

I love Margot Robbie more than almost anyone in Hollywood today (even though she stole my life’s dream of playing Tonya Harding. Seriously, I’d started writing a short right before they announced that movie and I’m not even kidding), but I can’t say i know exactly what she was going for with this look… an Elsa-possessed mistletoe over her womb to subtly announce she’s expecting? A tribute to the portion of Fantasia where fairies ice skate to ‘Waltz of the Flowers’ as a nod to the ice goddess she plays in ‘I, Tonya?’ I’ve been staring at it for a few minutes now and can honestly say I have no clue.

Gwendolyn Christie- I have no idea what you are wearing but I do know that I am obsessed with your GOT character so you have my permission to do whatever you please.

Kerry Washington unfortunately looks like some anorexic basic at her junior prom. And those floral net booties are what a leprechaun wears to a funeral. wtf. Oh but her hair is on point.

Kate Hudson- Je refuse.

Chris Hemsworth can do no wrong even in a suit made from a brocade table cloth and VELVETEEN shoes so don’t even worry about it, honey.

Michelle Pfeiffer- omg i am heartbroken over how matronly you look!! As anyone who knows me knows, my mother could pass as your identical twin, so I take it kind of personally when you show up on the red carpet dressed as Marian the librarian’s widowed sister, Ovarian.

Zoe Kravtiz- Sweetie, it’s already been done and its name was Natalie Portman. A chunky, funky  emerald earring does make you look like Audrey Hepburn's edgy cousin though. Whatever- you still look gorgeous and I love you.

Kendall Jenner- There are so many things wrong with your look, much less your existence, but I’ll just sum it up with this: T. STRAPPED. POINTY. TOED. SHOES. Also, lay off the brow botox before you look like Debra Messing, or worse, Kylie Jenner. #gasp

Sarah Jessica Parker literally went as her character from Hocus Pocus attending a funeral.

Isabelle Huppert wins the night! Nope, spoke too soon. Her dress has those damned flutter sleeves on it too! What IS that? It’s trash, is what it is…

Roseanne Barr forgot to put a dress over her Spanx…

Ok, that's all I got. I barely watched any of the actual show bc I can't with most of those self important a-holes, so I can't comment on anything "exciting" or "interesting" that might have happened. Let me know if I missed anything highly offensive🥂

[oscopelabs]

Lie To Me: The Multiple Personalities of Tom Waits’ Acting Career by Chris Evangelista

“I ain’t no extra baby, I'm a leading man.”

— Tom Waits, Goin’ Out West

Tom Waits lights up the screen. The minute the singer appears in a film, he brings with him a sort of atmospheric baggage—we may not know what character he’s playing, but we know him. We know that no matter what the film is, Waits will lend his own distinct, off-kilter brand of weirdness to it. Waits has been playing characters all through his musical career, the boozy troubadours and raspy-voiced noir loners who populate his songs are all engaging Waits creations.

Using his distinct, gravel-caked voice, Tom Waits conjures up boozy ballads designed to be played low at 3 a.m. and melodies that might echo off the broken-down rides of an abandoned, haunted carnival. His is an eclectic style, combining blues, jazz, cabaret, Spooky Sounds of Halloween sound effects tapes, and more. This distinct, unmistakable style goes beyond Waits’ musical accomplishments, finding its way into his acting in the two dozen or so film appearances the singer has made.

Waits doesn’t consider himself foremost an actor. “I do some acting,” Waits tells Pitchfork. “And there’s a difference between ‘I do some acting’ and ‘I'm an actor.’ People don’t really trust people to do two things well. If they’re going to spend money, they want to get the guy who’s the best at what he does. Otherwise, it’s like getting one of those business cards that says about eight things on it. I do aromatherapy, yard work, hauling, acupressure. With acting, I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue, if that.”

Waits’ first film appearance was in Sylvester Stallone’s 1978 directorial debut Paradise Alley. It’s a small part, with Waits essentially playing a version of himself, or at least the self he presents in many of his songs. The character, Mumbles, shows up at a piano, twitching and crooning. “When was the last time you was with a woman?” Stallone’s character asks him. “Probably before the depression,” Mumbles says. “What are you saving it for?” Stallone shoots back in that garbled manner of speaking Stallone has perfected. “I dunno,” Waits replies. “Probably a big finish.”

In the grand scheme of things, this is a nothing part; it was intended to be a bigger role, but Stallone cut it down to little more than a cameo. Yet what made it to the screen is distinct because Waits makes it so. Stallone is very still in the scene, leaning on Waits’ piano like dead weight. Waits is a study in contrast, never sitting still, his eyes half open. It might even be considered too much acting. When asked if acting came naturally to him, Waits replied, “It’s a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.”

Waits’ career was at an all-time-low following 1978. He had grown tired of the music industry in general, having released six albums with very little commercial success. Battling depression and alcoholism, Waits left Los Angeles for New York and began a period of reinvention. “I just got totally disenchanted with the music business,” he would say. “I moved to New York and was seriously considering other possible career alternatives...the whole Modus Operandi of sitting down and writing, and making an album, going out on the road with a band. Away for three months, come back with high blood pressure, a drinking problem, tuberculosis, a warped sense of humor. It just became predictable.”

Waits’ music became more avant-garde, more eclectic. And his film career and personal life took a distinct turn in the 1980s. In 1982, Francis Ford Coppola hired Waits to write the music for One From the Heart, a romantic fable that Coppola wanted to make as a sort of palate cleanser following the troubled production of Apocalypse Now.

“I looked forward to the challenge,” Waits said. “I needed something to stimulate my growth and development. The sole process of making music that would adhere to film was still something new to me. So it was a little terrifying. But working with Francis seemed like a good opportunity.”

It was on the set of One From the Heart that Waits would begin his relationship with future wife and musical collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who worked as a script analyst for the film. The two had previously met at a New Year’s Eve Party, but it was during One From the Heart that the relationship blossomed. “She was a story analyst. Somebody told her to go down and knock on my door and she did and I opened the door and there she was and that was it,” Waits said. “That was it for me. Love at first sight. Love at second sight."

One From the Heart would be a financial disaster for Coppola, but Waits and the filmmaker continued to collaborate. Coppola would cast Waits in small parts in his back-to-back S.E. Hinton adaptations The Outsiders (“I had one line: ‘What is it you boys want?’” Waits told Rolling Stone in 1988. “I still have it down if they need me to go back and re-create the scene for any reason.”) and Rumble Fish (“got a chance to pick out my own costume and write my own dialogue. Gotta nice scene with a clock.”)

Little by little, Waits was building a bit-part filmography, showing up in the background of films and stealing the show with little to no dialogue, catching the eye with his lanky frame and coiffed hair. Coppola would cast Waits again in 1984’s The Cotton Club. Waits plays the club’s MC, but most of his scenes were cut from a film that became more and more bloated during production.

Waits’ first big role would come courtesy of Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 Down by Law. Set in Louisiana, the film follows three convicts—John Lurie, Roberto Benigni and Waits—who escape into the bayou. Once again, Waits seems to be playing a variation of himself, or the self that he built through his musical career, although he insisted the character not be a musician. Instead, he’s a DJ. Waits’ inaugural scene kicks off with him creeping into his bedroom, trying hard not to wake up his sleeping girlfriend, played by Ellen Barkin. But Barkin’s character isn’t really asleep, and when we next see these two characters, she’s tossing Wait’s belongings out of their New Orleans apartment, disgusted with his philandering.

Waits spends the scene sitting on the bed, mostly silent as Barkin rages, tossing one vinyl record after another and hurling curses at Waits. Waits doesn’t fully spring into action until Barkin is about to toss his clunky, pointed, steel-tipped shoes. “Not the shoes!” he protests, sounding generally horrified. Later, he sits at the curb, his possessions scattered around him, slipping those shoes on. It is an overall commanding performance, illustrating that simple cameo appearances from the singer, while memorable, waste his natural hipster charisma. To put it simply, Waits is cool—the type of old-school cool that would likely come off as posturing if you caught someone trying it in public. Yet Waits makes it sing. His characters are perhaps never as cool as they think they are, yet the coolness is undeniable. These are the types of performances people want to emulate when young. You look at Waits’ ridiculous Frankenstein shoes in Down by Law and briefly think, “Where can I get a pair of those?”

In the somber, autumnal Ironweed, Waits plays Rudy, the physical embodiment of every boozy balladeer Waits has ever sung about, particularly in “The Piano Has Been Drinking.” (“And you can't find your waitress with a Geiger counter/ And she hates you and your friends and you just can't get served without her.”)

“I have a red nose, and I had a toothbrush in one pocket, a sandwich in the other. I don’t know why I got it, but I’m glad I did,” Waits said. The part found him playing alongside acting giants Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. “Nicholson is really a diamond cutter,” Waits said. “He's a bank president and a bronc rider. He has a million stories; all of them are true. He’s a very generous actor, and he’s responsive, like a good musician.” The pair play off each other beautifully, with Waits not just holding his own alongside Nicholson but occasionally outshining him.

“At rehearsals, Tom Waits looked like any moment he might break at the waist or his head might fall off his shoulders onto the floor,” Nicholson said. “I once saw a small-town idiot walking across the park, totally drunk, but he was holding an ice cream, staggering, but also concentrating on not allowing the ice cream to fall. I felt there was something similar in Tom.”

Waits, who eventually would go to AA and get sober, likely was able to draw on his own alcoholism for the role. “[O]ne is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own,” he told The Guardian. “And, at a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out that it was the liquor talking all along...I was trying to prove something to myself, too. It was like, ‘Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?’”

At this point, Waits began to become highly sought after for film work. He would continue to take on eclectic, eccentric parts, like as a rough-and-tumble bush pilot in the 1991 drama At Play In the Fields of The Lord and an uncredited role as a disabled veteran in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. “He was a friend of Jeff Bridges, basically,” Gilliam said. “[Bridges] said, ‘You ought to meet Tom.’ It’s funny because when I met him and even in the course of making the film, I’d never heard a Tom Waits record. I’d never listened to them at all. I just met him and liked him immediately. So into the film he went, and he was great. The studio was trying to cut him out. They felt it wasn’t advancing the narrative in any significant way so they thought that was things that could go. They were totally wrong.”

In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made a play to save his struggling American Zoetrope studio with a lush adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The gothic costume drama gave Coppola and Waits an excuse to work together again, with Waits taking on the role of bug-eating madman Renfield. It was a distinctly un-cool part for Waits, yet he manages to steal almost every scene he’s in. He rants, he raves, he wears bizarre metal devices on his hands. Yet there’s a distinct humanity underneath the over-the-top madness, such as a scene where Waits’ Renfield disobeys his master Dracula to warn Winona Ryder’s Mina that she’s in danger. “Got to have a really meaningful scene with Winona Ryder. Not how I imagined it would be, though. Bug juice dripping from the corners of my mouth. Unshaven. Totally gray. Screaming behind bars. Not how I saw our scene together. But I tried to rise above it,” he told Image magazine.

At this point in his career, Waits was aging gracefully beyond his hipster youth into his 40s, in a sense turning into the older-seeming, more lived-in man his songs portrayed. In Robert Altman’s 1993 Short Cuts, adapted from the works of Raymond Carver, Waits plays a washed-up version of the younger, cooler individuals he had excelled at. He’s aging, alcoholic limo driver Earl, married to waitress Doreen (Lily Tomlin). “He seemed like someone I knew very well on a soul level,” Tomlin told The A.V. Club. “We did one thing I recall that would never read on camera: We ‘tattooed’ on our hands, at the base of the right thumb, the image of half a heart and when I’d pass him at the counter, we’d touch that part of each hand to the other and he’d say under his breath, ‘’Til the wheels come off.’” Waits also went method for the role, according to Tomlin: “Tom called me the first night after shooting, in his character of ‘Earl’ and spent maybe half an hour talking to me as ‘Doreen,’ as he supposedly drove around in the limo, which was Earl’s job. Tom did that for two or three more nights after work. Thinking he’d never do it again, I never was prepared to tape him and, each time he called, he was nothing if not filled with poetry as Earl.”

From there, Waits’ roles only grew more and more bizarre. He had wondered, “Am I genuinely eccentric? Or am I just wearing a funny hat?” around the time he quit drinking, but now he seemed to be firmly entering the “funny hat” zone of his acting career. In Mystery Men, he plays an inventor of non-lethal weapons who spends his free time trying to pick up women at nursing homes; in Domino, he appears as an exposition-dumping character known only as the Wanderer; Wristcutters: A Love Story finds him as commune leader in the afterlife; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus reunited him with Terry Gilliam again to play the devil himself; and Seven Psychopaths had him playing a serial killer who loves rabbits.

The older Waits gets, the more he seems comfortable playing such wild weirdos. Perhaps he’s always been comfortable growing into that weirdness. Waits’ musical career was filled with sea change. He went from the lonely-heart, tears-in-my-beer crooning of his earlier albums to the banging-on-a-trashcan hullabaloo of 1983’s Swordfishtrombones. In 1999, Waits released Mule Variations, an album that, according to Rolling Stone, “rounded up his multiple personalities—barfly poet, avant-garde storyteller, family guy” into one place. Those multiple personalities spilled over into his acting career as well.

Waits is known for intriguing and eccentric choices as a musician —and that’s a recognition that should bleed over into his acting career. “I think most singers, when they start out, are doing really bad impersonations of other singers that they admire,” Waits once told NPR. “You kind of evolve into your voice. Or maybe your voice is out there, waiting for you to grow up.” For Waits, changing and evolving was like second nature. “The person that I saw changed every year,” said music producer and Waits friend Dayton “Bones” Howe. “His philosophy was, if I keep being a moving target, I can't get hit. He never wanted to be the same again in any way.”

[justsomebucky]

Ten Years (Part 12)

Summary: AU. When a major account is on the line at work, reader is forced to revisit some old connections at her ten year high school reunion for a chance at success. Will she let the past consume her, or will she see the future in her grasp?

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

Word Count: 4,065 (I AM OUT OF MY MIND)

Warnings: language, fluff, excessive sweetness

A/N: Tags are closed. This is the second to last part. I came THISCLOSE to having another cliffhanger, but I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to drag it out just to torture you. PS - IT’S SO FLUFFY I’M GONNA DIE!

It was a total shame that you weren’t able to be paid for almost an entire week of doing nothing all the time.

The whole week had been really relaxing, once you got Monday and that little resignation detail out of the way. You decided to get your hair done, you took yourself shopping for interview outfits (just in case what you were working on didn’t pan out), and you generally just let yourself breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy life.

You’d heard from Bucky here and there via text message, and you’d met up with Wanda and Sam for lunch once, but other than that, you’d spent most of the rest of the week alone. According to Sam, Wakanda, Inc., was in overdrive mode, meaning every available resource was being used to support Bucky and the team he had assembled for the Stark account.

Now that you were no longer on that team, you were free to pursue a job prospect that you found to be incredibly exciting.

There was only one problem: it didn’t exist yet.

In all the time you’d spent trying to find a job that suited you, there were never really any that stood out. You knew most people had no choice but to settle, that most people didn’t even get to work in the field they wanted to. Most people didn’t get to love their jobs.

But you had rent to pay, and you had an insatiable desire to help people on this planet, and you weren’t about to settle. You’d been settling your whole life, watching from the wings as everyone else took what they wanted.

So, you decided to do the innovative thing, the newfound-confidence thing, the Bucky Barnes thing, and propose an entirely new position.

The timing was tricky, though. You didn’t want to distract the co-CEO of Stark Industries from her duties while Bucky was going through his most important presentation to date.

So here you sat on this bright, sunny Friday morning, waiting for one Virginia Pepper Potts to join you. You picked a coffee shop near your beloved fountain just to give you some level of comfort. You still felt bad that you hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to her at the reunion before you ran away like a child.

The cappuccino you had ordered for Pepper (that she had requested when you texted her about it) sat steaming across from you and your iced coffee. It didn’t matter what time of year it was, you loved the cold coffees the most, though sometimes you broke down and got a hot chocolate.

You were so lost in your thoughts about different kinds of coffees that you didn’t even notice her walk in.

Pepper flopped down across from you with a heaving sigh. “Thank you so much for the cappuccino,” she groaned. “I definitely needed a coffee break. Tony is on a rampage this morning.”

Well, that certainly didn’t bode well for the teams that had to pitch to get his business today. “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, he’s groaning on and on about the fruits of his generosity yielding…what had he called it exactly?” She tapped her chin thoughtfully, then used air quotes. “Meaningless garbage.”

Good, so it had nothing to do with his biomedical business efforts. “You mean the September Foundation, then, right?”

“Right.” She rolled her eyes, but a fond smile appeared on her face. “He’s impossible. The first round of grants went out last year at that MIT function, I don’t know if you remember it being in the news or anything?”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t go, of course, because not only were Tony and I fighting, but I had work of my own to do, namely figuring out how to distribute the money properly. Unlike what Tony thinks, you can’t just say the magic words and have funds magically appear in that many accounts for project funding.”

“I imagine that it’s a lot of work,” you offered. This was getting you a little closer to what you wanted to talk about anyways, so you didn’t mind her complaining.

As the head of the September Foundation, Pepper was in charge of all philanthropic activity for Tony Stark. Since she was also co-CEO of Stark Industries, she was constantly working. Maybe you could use that to your advantage.

“It’s so much work,” she agreed, taking a sip. “But it’s worth it. And maybe Tony is right, maybe one of these students really will change the world. Anyways, what did you want to meet with me about today? You know I can’t talk to you about the bids, right?”

“I don’t want to talk about the bids, though we both know which company would be able to handle Tony’s image and his promotional responsibilities for the new medical technology.” You paused a second, before leaning forward just a little. “I don’t work there anymore, by the way. I resigned on Monday.”

Pepper’s eyes widened. “What? Why?”

“It’s just not the career I want.”

“So you want to talk about job opportunities at Stark Industries, then? I would be happy to find something for you-“

“Not exactly,” you interjected, suddenly feeling nervous. What if this didn’t work? What if they had no intention of going with what you wanted because they had no interest in it? Maybe they’d give you a job anyway, just to save you from dying of embarrassment.

“Well, how can I help you? I’m sort of pressed for time, Y/N.”

“I want to work for the September Foundation.”

Her eyebrows lifted slightly. “Really? You’re interested in innovations in science?”

“Well, not really, you know tech isn’t really my thing. I had a slightly different proposal for you, and I wanted to see if you and Tony would be interested in maybe expanding your charitable outreach.”

“I’m listening.” Pepper leaned back in her seat, her full attention on you.

“I read the transcript of Tony’s speech to the students at MIT. He told them the challenges they are facing are the ‘greatest mankind has ever known,’ and referred to them as ‘the others.’ But innovations in science and medicine aren’t the only ones being hurt by the current economy and government.”

“Oh, I know it,” she agreed. “You should see the number of charities asking for donations these days.”

“Right. So my thoughts were, why are innovations in the arts worth less than innovations in science? One of Tony Stark’s last memories of his mom was her singing at a piano. He even named the September Foundation after an old song she used to sing. The arts have been positively influencing mankind for thousands of years, but in times like these, programs are cut, and students aren’t given a chance to experience the arts the way they should. It doesn’t even have to be limited to the obvious choices like music, painting, acting…it could be architecture, it could be drafting in a new, creative way. But we have to be able and willing to reach out to students early enough to pique their interest, to get the creativity flowing. That’s when you’ll find the next Beethoven, the next Frank Lloyd Wright, or the next da Vinci. And who knows, maybe they will be able to help design the next biomedical instrument for Stark Industries that saves someone’s life?”

By this point, Pepper was staring at you with unblinking eyes, so you weren’t really sure what her reaction was. You tried to keep your breathing steady, but that wasn’t exactly easy right now.

“What I’m proposing is that you let me lead a branch of the September Foundation for the arts that will help students of all ages, especially inner city or rural schools where the funding is lacking. If you want, we could even help kids with college tuition, or save pieces of it for funding their art shows or performances. Either way, I want to help kids find their creativity again.”

“I love it,” she murmured, a smile forming on her face. “It’s brilliant, Y/N. You’re right, you’re so right about it. The innovators of tomorrow could very well be designers, musicians, architects, or hell, even the next Meryl Streep. The arts have a hand in saving humanity, too.”

“So you’ll at least think about it?”

“Think about it?” Pepper chuckled, reaching into her bag and pulling out her phone. “Give me five minutes.” She stood up with her phone to her ear and walked outside.

You turned in your chair to look out the window as she stood chatting, one arm wrapped around her midsection. She was still smiling, and before she could catch you staring, you turned back around to take a long sip of coffee.

It didn’t even take five minutes for her to come back.

She was still smiling. “Tony loves the idea, Y/N! By the way, I’m pretty sure you just fixed his mood.”

“Really?” Your jaw about fell to the table. “Why’s that?”

“Because you brought up his mom at the piano. He said he couldn’t imagine his mom without music, and the thought of the creative arts dying made him sick. So, there you go. You’re in.”

“Really?” you asked again, unable to help yourself. There was no way it was this easy.

“Well, knowing the right people certainly helps, but Tony has been itching to expand the foundation’s reach. The timing here was perfect. Can you come by my office on Monday to iron out some of the details, and talk about the kind of team you will need?”

What the hell? Now you get a team? This was too good to be true. This was more than you’d hoped for.

So naturally, tears filled your eyes.

Pepper looked alarmed. “What’s wrong, did I say something?”

“No, I just…I hoped, but in the back of my mind, never expected this to go as well as it has,” you explained with a tearful laugh. “I know it’s ridiculous, but…”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not ridiculous at all. It’s about time things started going your way, wouldn’t you say?”

---

You weren’t exactly sure what time Bucky’s presentation to Tony Stark was supposed to be, but you figured it was going to be before lunchtime, since he was up first. So, you decided to kill time until you got a text from someone, anyone, that it was over.

The public library was a great place to do that. It felt a bit like doing homework, but you knew you needed to read up on a few things before venturing into a new career. You cozied up with some books about non-profits, grants (and the legalese), and even a book about Tony himself, just so you could try to understand him a little better. The best way, of course, would be to meet him yourself, but you couldn’t do that until you officially had the job come Monday morning.

Now that you thought about it, you hoped he didn’t change his mind by Monday. Everything you’d read so far said that Tony was a very active, sometimes impulsive man.

Around one in the afternoon, your thoughts drifted back to Bucky. You still hadn’t heard from anyone about how the meeting went, so you texted Wanda, and then Sam, to see if they’d heard anything.

Wanda was the only one to text you back. I saw them come back into the office, but I haven’t really gotten any news about it yet.

You chewed your lower lip thoughtfully before replying. Who went for the presentation?

Sam and Bucky, and a couple of accountants.

Why would Sam go with him?

I’m honestly not sure. They immediately went into T’Challa’s office.

Well, shit. That means it either went really well, or really badly. Can you please find out? I’m dying here!

Yeah, sure, I’ll see what I can dig up. I’ll text you if I figure anything out. Hey, what’s your favorite song? Just curious?

Your brows furrowed in confusion. What the hell could she possibly want to know that for?

Why? And do you mean of all time, or current?

All-time fave.

Make You Feel My Love by Bob Dylan. Actually, Adele has a great cover, too. Again, why?

I’m looking for new music.

Likely story. Whatever she was up to couldn’t be good. Maybe you’d text Sam again to have him snoop on Wanda.

You set your phone down on your leg with a sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose. Everything was starting to stress you out. If Bucky didn’t get the account, what would you even do? You had a job lined up at Stark’s foundation (hopefully); would Bucky even want to date you if you were constantly reminding him of something that he missed out on?

Then again, what were the odds of him not getting the account? Bucky was the best in the business from what you’d seen and the reputation he’d gained over the years. No freaking way did he lose the account to someone else, especially not with so much on the line.

Your mind drifted back to the very first meeting T’Challa held about the Stark bid. You’d been so focused on what Wanda was up to, knowing she was trying to conspire behind your back to get you with Bucky, that you’d totally forgotten what Bucky had said during the meeting.

The first thing he had suggested was to highlight Tony Stark’s philanthropic work. A little wave of excitement went through you when you realized you might get to help the team after all, only in a different capacity. Maybe you and Bucky would be able to work side-by-side without-

Wait…

Pepper had mentioned that she didn’t want any pre-existing relationships to cause issues between the two companies. That was why you couldn’t be on the pitch in the first place; you knew her personally and she considered that to be an unfair advantage.

Would she take issue with you dating Bucky even if the account is for Stark Industries, and not the September Foundation?

As you packed up your stuff and left the library, you wondered if you were making things better for yourself, or once again making them worse.

---

There was still no reply from Bucky when evening rolled around. You started getting ready for your date (under the assumption that you were still having a date), and the entire time it felt like your stomach was doing somersaults.

You looked damn good, and you were feeling a little better, too. No news had to be better than bad news, right?

When your phone finally started ringing, you raced over to your phone that was charging on the nightstand and answered, trying not to sound breathless. “Hello?”

“Hey there.”

You bit back a smile. “’Bout time you called me, I was starting to wonder if I should find a new date tonight?”

“Not a chance in hell. I’m standing outside your apartment door if you’re ready to go?”

“Shit, sorry! I didn’t hear you knock?”

“That’s because I didn’t knock.”

“Oh. Okay, well, I’m going to hang up and open the door now.” You ended the call and wandered out into the hallway to the door. When you swung it open, you couldn’t stop the surprised gasp. “Bucky, oh my god!”

No wonder he didn’t knock. Bucky had his phone in one hand, and a huge bouquet of lilies in the other. “For you,” he said, holding them out. “I wasn’t sure what kind of flower you liked, or if you even liked them at all, but I wasn’t going to risk showing up empty-handed. You look amazing, by the way.”

You grinned at him, feeling your face heat up a little. “You aren’t so bad yourself, Barnes.” Bucky was dressed in a nice suit, his hair slicked back just a little. He looked so incredible.

This was really happening. You were officially on a date with Bucky Barnes. Who would have freaking guessed this would happen?

That damn Wanda, that’s who.

“They’re beautiful,” you murmured, leaning in to smell a lily. “Thank you. Come inside while I put these in water.” You turned to head back to the kitchen cupboard where you kept your only glass vase. You weren’t much for buying yourself flowers, so you didn’t get much use out of it. It was kind of exciting to use it now, though.

You busied yourself with the water and flower food, while Bucky shut the door and wandered into your apartment. Mr. Fuzzypants immediately started rubbing against his leg.

That was one smart cat.

“So,” you began, unable to meet his eyes. “How’d the pitch go?”

“It went okay,” he replied casually, reaching down to pet Mr. Fuzzypants. 

His flat tone made you look up. “Just okay?”

“We won’t really know who Tony picked until Monday,” Bucky explained, straightening and moving closer to rest his hands on the counter. “I’m not really worried about it. I think we got it.”

“That’s great, though!”

“Yeah.” He nodded, watching as you arranged the lilies so that they each had more room. “I took Sam with me today.”

“To show him the ropes?”

“Um…something like that.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s not talk about work anymore just yet, I just want to focus on us, okay? I have to make myself a viable contender, after all.”

You laughed, grabbing your cardigan and purse from the couch. “That’s right. I expect to be wooed properly.”

“Oh don’t worry. I don’t mean to brag, but, you’re definitely gonna be wooed.” His blue eyes sparkled as the two of you made your way to the elevators. “I’m the best, remember?”

He was so utterly charming, and you hadn’t even left the building yet. All you could do was shake your head at him.

You were so done for.

---

After dinner, which was lovely and probably cost Bucky more than you cared to think about, he asked if you’d like to take a walk with him.

The two of you made your way via cab to Central Park, which made you grateful for the last-minute decision to wear flats. “You’re not taking me to the zoo, are you?”

“No. You’ll see.”

You walked around to the Bethesda Terrace, and the second the fountain came into view, you grinned. “Are you just going to go around the city finding new fountains for me?”

“No, actually.” Bucky reached for your hand and tugged gently. “Central Park is my comfort zone. This is where I come to think. Sometimes it’s here at this fountain, sometimes it’s in the Conservatory Garden. Sometimes I just walk around until I’m tired.” He shrugged. “I just wanted to show you my spot in the city, since you were nice enough to let me in on yours.”

The fountain water you’d been staring at got a little blurry, and you tried to blink the tears back before he could notice. “That’s very nice of you.”

Bucky gave your hand a little squeeze, but didn’t say anything.

You stood there, hand-in-hand, silently observing your surroundings for a moment, and it was easy to see why he liked it here. “I used to avoid this place,” you admitted. “I thought it would have more tourists than mine, but it’s about the same.”

“Yep.” He paused for another look around, then smiled at you. “Ready to move on?”

“Sure.”

“How am I doing so far?”

You let out a little chuckle. “I’d say you’re doing very well.”

“A good rating on the introduction always helps me land the deal.”

You raised an eyebrow at him as the two of you turned to walk down the path, still holding hands. “I’m just a deal, now?”

“You’re a major deal,” Bucky joked. “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

---

“Close your eyes.”

“Come on, Bucky, I can see we’re near the opera house, I know you’re taking me to my fountain now.”

“Ah, but if you don’t close your eyes, I can’t really make this presentation as effective as I want it to be. I need you to close them.”

You sighed, rolling your eyes before you closed your eyes. “Fine.”

“No peeking!”

“How am I supposed to see where to walk?”

“I’ll guide you.” His arm slipped around your waist, hand resting on your hip as the two of you moved forward slowly. You shivered at the contact.

“Almost there.”

You already knew where he was taking you, but now you were a little worried about what awaited you. “There’s no flash mob, right?”

“Right.” Bucky tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle his laughter. “I don’t think I could handle that, either.”

“Is there-“

“Stop trying to guess,” he interrupted, still laughing at you. “I don’t want this to be ruined.”

The closer you got to the sounds of rushing fountain water, the more nervous you became. There was a low mumble, as if a small group had gathered. “Please tell me we don’t have an audience.”

“There’s a couple of people being nosy,” he murmured in your ear. “A small crowd. I’m sorry about that.”

“Nothing you can do, it’s a public square,” you said with a shrug. “Can I open my eyes now?”

“Uh. Hang on.” His arm disappeared from your waist, and you were left feeling a little chilly, but you kept your eyes closed as promised.

“Can I open them now?” you called out, tugging at the sleeves of your sweater impatiently.

“Okay, open them!” He sounded further away.

Your eyes opened, then widened in awe.

Bucky stood a few feet away, his hand outstretched toward you. Behind him were a quartet of violinists, instruments at the ready, their music stands covered in fairy lights (with tiny little battery packs! You didn’t even know that was a thing until now).

“Y/N, since we didn’t get to have a proper dance before, would you please dance with me?”

“In front of all these people?” Your eyes were still wide, legs a little shaky at the idea of being the center of attention. “You hired musicians?”

“They’re students, part of the music program at Julliard. I remember you mentioning that you liked to listen to them play sometimes.”

He was far more observant than you had ever given him credit for.

Bucky gestured to you again, his hand still outstretched. You couldn’t leave him hanging, not after all this.

You moved forward until you were in front of him and placed your right hand in his left. He grasped it gently, wrapping his right arm around your waist to draw you closer. Everything felt incredibly intimate.

The two of you fit together perfectly, you noted, letting your free arm wrap around his shoulder.

Bucky let out a shuddered breath, then gave you a small smile as the musicians began to play.

When you heard the first few notes of your favorite song, you knew Wanda was in on this the whole time. You grinned at Bucky. “Gee, I wonder how you knew to have them play this song?”

“You aren’t the only one with insider information,” he admitted with a wink. “And the lyrics are fitting, don’t you think?”

He led you slowly around a small area beside the fountain you loved so much. You were mesmerized, unable to peel your gaze away from his, until he leaned over after about a minute to whisper lyrics in your ear. “I know you haven’t made your mind up yet, but I would never do you wrong. I’ve known it from the moment that we met; no doubt in my mind where you belong.”

The crowd no longer mattered; the only thing you could focus on, the only thing you wanted to focus on, was Bucky.

Before he could pull away again, you turned your head and captured his lips with yours.

It was totally out-of-character, completely spontaneous, and exactly what you wanted. The small crowd around you started cheering, and you felt Bucky grin against your lips.

“I guess my little pitch worked, then?” he breathed out, pulling away only slightly.

The corner of your mouth lifted. “Guess so.”

As the song came to an end, Bucky dropped your hand from his and reached up to cup your face gently. His eyes were stunning, more emotional than you’d ever seen them before.

And the second kiss was even better.

---

Part 13 - End!

PERMA TAGS: @sprinkleofhappinessuniverse @minaphobia @amrita31199 @aenna-4 @ailynalonso15 @psingh97 @sofiadiaz04 @mirkwood—princess @lilasiannerd @coffeeismylife28 @capdanrogers @melissalovesmusicyay @hollycornish @northscorpio @gallifreyansass @ancchor @vaisabu @alurea-actually @hailey-a-s @buckyswinterchildren @cleanslates @minervaem @blackcoffeeandgreenteaforme @winterboobaer @kjs-s @hardcorehippos @rchlnwtn @seeyainanotherlifebrotha @aeillo @wydari @jay-birdbitchez @crownie-sr @neverbeforgotten @givemethatgold @notsoprettykitty @punk-rock-princess-626 @dracsgirl @giannastoico @cosmic-avenger @rockintensse @angelicshinigami @heytherepartner @simplyme8308

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[trandangelilber]

Milla Jovovich interview on Russian TV Channel "Rain" (with subtitles)

Good evening.

This is a program “Sobchak live”.

We shoot our program not in the studio, because today our guest is well-known actress Milla Jovovich.

Milla, thank you for the interview.

Thank you.

We know about you not so much.

That you are famous actress and favorite woman of Ivan Urgant.

And that you are sometimes visits Russia.

How many times have you come to Russia? I was born here, in the Ukraine, and was living in Moscow with my mother.

When I first time came back to Russia, I was 18 years old.

And since then, I every year visits Russia.

What do you most love in Russia? For example, going to the bathhouse or to the your favorite restaurant.

Of course I have a couple of favorite restaurants: Pushkin, The Garden, Sixty – restaurant on the sixtieth floor with great views.

I’ve been working here a lot and traveling around the world, but I always spend time in hotels.

From hotel to the studio and back to the hotel.

I live in such closed world.

Today you have been invited to the presentation of new jewelry collection by Jacob Arabo.

And now you have wearing these jewelry.

So let’s talk about diamonds.

Tell us when you first time was given a diamond by man? How it was? Not Swarovski, but a real diamond.

It was my dad.

I like vintage jewelry, collecting old furniture, bijouterie, generally things with history.

And my dad bought me a very beautiful old ring.

Half of the audience thought that now you will tell us a romantic story.

But it’s true that the first diamond I was given by my dad.

No, we demand romantic story! Then there is another story, but it was the second diamond.

At the time, my boyfriend was Mario Sorrenti – a wonderful photographer, who remains my friend to this day.

He talked with my mom and found out that we love vintage jewelry.

And he bought me a very beautiful ring set with little pink pearls and diamonds.

And I am silly, when went to the restaurant took off the ring to wash my hands and left it there.

It’s horrible, are you cried? Yes, I cried for several days, and all time asked if anyone found my ring in this hotel.

In what hotel did this happened? It was the Costes Hotel in Paris.

The man from the Costes Hotel, who took the ring of Milla Jovovich, remember, she returns from Resident Evil and avenge to you.

Speaking of “Resident Evil”, most Russian audience identify you with this movie.

Even not with Luc Besson and “The Fifth Element”, but with “Resident Evil”, cause this movie has many parts.

But it’s good, because every decade people associate me with a new image.

And when I will be forty, everyone will say that I’m shooting, for example, only in comedies.

I like a cat, I have nine lives.

I like a fan of your creative work, ask you, when you will be ninety, don’t accept an offer to play the monster in 148 part of the “Resident Evil”.

Ok, I promise you I will not wear tight-fitting latex suit in 90 years old.

I’m afraid, Ivan Urgant now upset.

As for “Resident Evil”.

Tell me as an expert how to struggle with evil, when you’re in the minority? First, is to be single-minded person.

My character in “Resident Evil” aimed for maximum annihilation of the evil.

You must to be strong and have an emotional weapon.

But it’s all in the movie, in real life monsters don’t look like monsters.

And hard to know who is bad and who is good.

Who is in your life the greatest monster? Anyone who makes a bad things with others, for example to hit the child.

Well, the news say that Fidel Castro have stroke.

What do you feel about this? Do you feel sorry that the whole era pass with him, or he is incarnate of the evil? I don’t know much about Fidel Castro to judge him.

Whose image do you like more: Fidel Castro or Che Guevara? What a strange questions! I like Che Guevara – he is handsome.

Do you have a T-shirt with his picture? Of course, it’s like an icon.

How do you like the Ukraine, Russia? Do you feel, that it’s a part of you, your homeland? Are you care about what’s going on here? I am confused a little cause I don’t watch the news.

I have a lot of work and family affairs.

Rarely read newspapers or news in the internet.

Well, for example, would you like to play a well-known Ukrainian woman – Yulia Tymoshenko? It would be great, she has strong character.

When I was in the Ukraine, she was all the time showed on the TV with a plait around the head.

Imagine that your favorite director invited you to play any female role.

What role will you choose? Meryl Streep, for example, always wanted to play Margaret Thatcher.

I always wanted to play Catherine the Great.

She was a great, strong, intelligent woman.

Did you know that Catherine the Great was famous for stormy personal life.

This is not a black and white story, there’s a lot of everything.

Many of your colleagues – Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and other famous actresses and singers travel all over the world, adopt children and engaged in charity work in Africa and Asia.

Can you call your trips to Russia the charitable help to the third world country? When I come here – I come home.

And it’s strange for me that you call Russia a third world country.

I feel myself like the Russian woman, everything here is close to me.

When I arrive at the airport and hear Russian spoken around me, I feel like I came home.

And I would like my daughter to feel it too.

On the contrary, Russia helps me, it fills my heart.

How often you visits Africa, Asia? I wasn’t in Africa, but I work with a charitable organization, which constructed radio station and built a small school in the Republic of Congo.

But rebels burned the station.

I would like to go with my daughter to Africa.

That would be interesting.

I would like my daughter to visit many countries different from the West, to see a different life.

Describe your ideal day, what would you do? Well I have a very modest and simple wishes.

To stay at home for a while already a miracle.

It’s good, when nothing to do, you can sleep longer.

I wake up and my husband brings me tea.

Then my daughter comes, smiles and shows me pictures that she painted in the mornin.

Then I go to the kitchen and cook breakfast for all.

Do you cook yourself? Yes.

Then we go outside or to the pool.

I like to cook a barbecue for friends.

That is, in this day no noisy parties, filming? No.

Only family and no work.

Today you’re going to visit the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture of Dasha Zhukova.

Are you familiar with her? What do you think about the project Garage? Yes, I am familiar with Dasha and I think that she has the heart of an artist.

She is looking forward.

Independent, smart, beautiful, intelligent woman.

With such people is always nice to communicate.

And who is more handsome: Urgant or Abramovich? Who is Abramovich? Billionaire Roman Abramovich.

My husband is most handsome! Good answer.

Do you like modern art? Generally yes, but with my tempo of life, I’m rarely visit museums.

Everyone says that in December 2012 will come a doomsday.

Do you believe in it? No, but everything can be.

And if it was known exactly what would be your last wish? To look into my daughter’s eyes and say that I love her.

Perfect wish.

But I think everything will be fine and you will have a lot of movies and parties.

Honestly, are you ready to act in the next part of the “Resident Evil”? Not yet.

It’s very close project for me and my husband.

Paul is the director and producer, and he wrote script for me.

It’s very fun to us to shoot these films.

But we have no one points when to shoot the next part.

We’re shooting it, when the inspiration comes.

We are not a factory of film stamping.

It’s a real passion for us.

I was amazed how sincere emotions made in you my question and your answer about the end of the world.

But at the same time in all your action films (“The Fifth Element”, “Resident Evil”) you play courageous fighting super-woman.

What do you think, why the films show only that part of you, not the touching and sensuality that you have? It much depended on me.

I didn’t want to play the roles of cute girls from melodramas, cause there was too much on-screen.

I wanted to show that women can be strong and she can cope with difficulties.

I think it’s interesting for women to see a strong heroine on the screen.

Especially we have already filmed five parts.

This has been never done before, and I’m proud of it.

Certainly more habitually to see on the screen the touching sweet crying girl whom I played in the “Vikrutasy”.

And you had no feeling that you went down to one level, starring in “Vikrutasy”, after all those Hollywood blockbusters? I really wanted to do the movie with my friend Ivan Urgant.

It was properly interesting to me to play with magnificent actors and to play a role in Russian.

I act in film not for money but when it’s interesting to me.

If you could award the prize to the best woman of the year, who would it be? Meryl Streep, Angelina Jolie.

.

.

Is it just an actress doing something important in the world? Well, or Angela Merkel rescues Europe from the crisis.

Yes, this is interesting.

There are a lot of rumors about your friendship with Ivan Urgant.

Did you call him when arrived to Moscow? Didn’t call, but we corresponded by email.

We conceived to sing together at the Chanel party.

But he was very busy and we were not able to implement this idea.

Yeah.

“Milla, sorry, but I can’t speak with you now.

” I understand he has a lot of affairs and it was difficult to do.

Tell me please, what the most important thing that men don’t understand about women? I think men don’t realize that when you talk to the woman, you need to listen her.

Because all that necessary to the woman it’s to be heard.

Even if a girl talks incessantly about any nonsense, you should at least pretend that you listen and assent.

Thank you very much for the interview.

I would like to give you a book of Kir Bulychev.

Thank you.

I think this book is about you.

I don’t know whether you know how to read in Russian.

Don’t know, but I will ask my mother and we will read it together.

Go ahead, tear packaging.

Kir Bulychev.

“Guest from the Future”.

You are as a guest from the future for all of us.

Thank you.

It was a program “Sobchak live”.

Today our guest was Milla Jovovich.

I hope you enjoyed it.

.

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