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i-am-very-very-tired · 3 years ago

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27 Best Things To Do in Los Angeles

HOW WE RANK THINGS TO DOLos Angeles has an exhaustive array of things to do. If you're a film buff, vintage Hollywood is a must-see. Some classic attractions in the area include TCL Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Paramount Pictures Studios, the only television and film studio left in Hollywood. For a taste of stardom, window-shop along Rodeo Drive or cruise Sunset Boulevard. There are also a plethora of shorelines to choose from, including Venice Beach, Zuma Beach and the Santa Monica Pier and Beach. Arts lovers will want to see a show at Walt Disney Concert Hall or swing by Los Angeles County Museum of Art to admire its collection. If you aren't sure where to start, a daylong guided tour of the city is a great way to orient yourself. And after exploring all LA has to offer, consider taking a daytrip south to Anaheim-Disneyland. Griffith Observatory and Griffith Park Griffith Observatory sits on the south face of Mount Hollywood and overlooks the Los Angeles basin. Its location gives visitors impressive views of the surrounding area, which many rave about. But there's more than just a pretty photo-op here. The observatory hosts fascinating exhibitions and features a top-notch planetarium.Most recent visitors cited the beautiful setting as Griffith Observatory's main draw, though the free entry was certainly a bonus. However, you will have to pay between $3 and $7 to see the planetarium shows. Griffith Observatory is open from noon to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, with extended hours on weekends. Free but limited parking is available along the winding roads leading up to the property, or visitors can park in the small lot by the observatory for $10 per hour. A gift shop and cafe can be found on-site as well. For more information, check out Griffith Observatory's website. The Getty Center The Getty Center is one of the most impressive architectural achievements in the United States – and it also contains some of the finest works of art in the world. The circular concrete-and-steel structure was designed by renowned architect Richard Meier, and it houses an abundance of art from various ages and nations. Here you'll find Renaissance paintings, 20th-century American photography, Baroque sculptures, historic manuscripts and more, all housed inside a sprawling, modern campus amid the Santa Monica Mountains. The museum also offers spectacular views of Los Angeles on clear days.Recent travelers loved the museum for its value and beauty, highlighting the contrast between the art center's subtle refinement and the over-the-top glitz of Hollywood. Many visitors suggest taking a guided tour, noting that the tour highlights interesting parts of the museum they wouldn't have stumbled upon on their own. Tours of the Getty Center's architecture and gardens are available, as well as a Collection Highlights tour and tours of art in specific eras. Tour times and days vary depending on tour type. Check the Getty Center's website for a complete calendar. Santa Monica Pier and Beach Just west of downtown Los Angeles, Santa Monica contains one of the most legendary beach scenes in the United States. Santa Monica also boasts an abundance of great restaurants and excellent nightlife spots. The 3 miles of shoreline are renowned as some of the best in the area thanks to the soft sands, ideal weather and bevy of attractions. "State Beach," as it's known, has over 200 days of sunshine a year and acted as the backdrop for the popular television series "Baywatch."Santa Monica is a very walkable part of town, and many recent travelers suggest you explore the area by bicycle. Many visitors say the pier is a must-visit spot and fun to see. One of the most scenic rides is along the 22-mile bike path, known as The Strand, which runs parallel to the Pacific Ocean and takes riders through Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey along with Venice, Manhattan, Hermosa and Redondo beaches. Travelers also recommend riding the Ferris wheel at the pier and people-watching at the Third Street Promenade. Hollywood Walk of Fame and TCL

Chinese Theatre One of Hollywood's most iconic and memorable sites, the TCL Chinese Theatre (originally Grauman's Chinese Theatre) opened in 1927 and represents the excess of Hollywood's Golden Age. You can tour the theater for $18 (kids tour tickets cost $8 and senior tickets are $14 each); tours are offered from 10:15 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day except Monday. Because of this attraction's popularity, it's best to reserve your spot online in advance. This working theater also shows various newly released films throughout the year.Overall, previous travelers said the tour guides' passion for the subject was evident, making their experiences special. However, some wished the area offered a glitzier atmosphere and others complained the tour was overpriced for what you got. Parking can also be challenging to find in Hollywood. Additional information about the attraction's tours and movie showtimes can be found on the TCL Chinese Theatre website. Zuma Beach Malibu has a reputation for excessive wealth and exclusivity, yet all of the town's beaches are public – everyone's welcome. If you're seeking an LA beach spot for sunbathing and swimming, look no further than this part of town. This 1.8-mile beach is far cleaner than those at Santa Monica or Venice Beach.Malibu's Zuma Beach is considered one of the finest beaches in the Los Angeles area. Locals and tourists laud Zuma for its awesome waves, ample parking and easy access to beachside snacks. Plus, there are a plethora of lifeguard stations and bathroom facilities. The Original Farmers Market and The Grove Sitting south of West Hollywood is one of LA's most beloved landmarks: The Original Farmers Market. Founded in 1934, this cream-colored facility reels in both residents and tourists with the promise of fresh produce and the aroma of ready-to-eat snacks. You can visit throughout the week, although hours vary depending on the day. Entry is free, but you'll want to have some cash on hand should any of the treats whet your appetite. You can park for free for up to 90 minutes at the market's two lots, provided that your ticket is validated at the market. (Fees apply for parking after the allotted 90 minutes and for nonvalidated tickets.) For a little help navigating the market, you can also take a guided foodie tour.Though some previous visitors wished this market had more produce and meat stalls, most appreciated the tasty dishes sold by many of the prepared food vendors and many call it a must-see spot. But keep in mind that this market is often crowded and has limited tables, so expect to eat outside the market area or wait for a table to become available. Find out more by visiting the market's website. Sunset Boulevard One of the most iconic thoroughfares in the United States, Sunset Boulevard continues to live up to its legends. In the old days, it represented the classic and glamorous Hollywood lifestyle and became the setting of several famous films, including the obvious classic "Sunset Boulevard." Today, the palm-lined street (which connects downtown LA to Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Pacific Coast Highway) retains its cinematic appeal, and the Sunset Strip portion has become a popular nightlife spot. The strip is also home to many classic music venues, including the Rainbow Bar & Grill and The Roxy Theatre.Recent visitors loved driving along this famous boulevard, adding that gorgeous sunsets can be enjoyed during late afternoon drives. But like other parts of LA, this thoroughfare gets congested once rush hour hits, so plan accordingly. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Next door to the La Brea Tar Pits sits the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the linchpin of the Los Angeles museum district. Since its 1965 opening, LACMA has showcased thousands of pieces, from Islamic artifacts to European impressionist paintings to modern art. With constantly shifting exhibitions and unique architecture stretched across more than 20 acres of land, LACMA offers a rewarding experience for both serious art buffs and casual travelers.Currently, the museum is

preparing for the construction of a new building for its permanent collection, called the David Geffen Galleries, which is scheduled to open in 2024. For now, pieces will be on display in the BCAM and the Resnick Pavilion. The Urban Light and Levitated Mass exhibits remain open to visitors. There are three eateries on-site. While travelers commend the food, they note the restaurants are a bit pricey. Many visitors say the artwork on display is stunning, but several lament that much of the art is off exhibit because of the construction.

The Broad Philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad founded this museum in 2015 and the structure made for a stunning addition to downtown Los Angeles. The eye-catching, honeycomb building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, is home to an expansive collection of contemporary art dating from the 1950s to the present. The collection includes works by Jean Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker and Andy Warhol. In addition to the permanent collection, temporary exhibits showcase new and emerging artists. The museum gets high marks from recent visitors who loved both the artwork and the architecture.Admission to the museum is free (though some special exhibits may have a fee). For guaranteed entry, you can book timed tickets in advance. The museum is open Tuesday and Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Parking costs $15 for three hours with museum validation, and $5 for each additional 15 minutes, with a $25 daily maximum. It is $15 after 5 p.m. on weeknights and all day on weekends. The closest Metro line stop is the Civic Center/Grand Park Station. Visit the museum's website for more information. Runyon Canyon Park Just two blocks from Hollywood Boulevard, Runyon Canyon Park is an often-overlooked urban park that offers some great views. The park boasts several hiking trails and is a popular spot for celebrities to exercise. During your hike, you'll see plenty of palm trees. Atop the canyon, you'll be treated to sweeping views of the San Fernando Valley.Travelers say that the canyon is reminiscent of Old Hollywood with several old mansions and estates scattered throughout the park – keep your eyes peeled as you follow the trail. Because of the hot, dry climate, the hike can be rough (even for those in great physical condition), so bring plenty of water. Some recent visitors lamented the lack of facilities, while others raved about the views. Paramount Pictures Studios Since the 1910s, Paramount has showcased the talents of film's all-time heavyweights, including Meryl Streep and Morgan Freeman. The notable site has been home to everything from classic television shows like "I Love Lucy" to modern favorites like Amazon Prime's "Jack Ryan" to box-office hits like "Mission: Impossible" and "Titanic." Today, Paramount Pictures is the only remaining film studio in the Hollywood area.For an authentic Hollywood experience, set aside some time to tour the grounds. On the two-hour studio tour, a guide will take you around the site's 65 acres in a golf cart, and you'll also be able to hop off and explore sound stages and recognizable studio sets from many current TV shows and movies. Previous visitors praised the friendly and knowledgeable tour guides, although some felt the tours offered at Warner Bros. Studio were better. Also, keep in mind the tours' age restrictions. Studio and VIP tours permit visitors ages 10 and older, while the seasonal After Dark tours only welcome travelers 16 and older. Rodeo Drive Immortalized by Julia Roberts' "Pretty Woman" shopping spree, Rodeo Drive is an upscale shopping street in Beverly Hills that features designer stores and small private boutiques. The area is popular with wealthy shoppers, sunglass-wearing celebrities and tourists hoping to see fashion icons.Don't be afraid to browse. Most shop owners are used to sightseers walking the area with little intent to purchase anything. That said, many recent visitors cautioned that some stores require appointments for entry and are generally off limits to tourists. Others said the thoroughfare can be a bit boring if you don't plan on shopping, although past travelers with a passion for cars enjoyed looking for expensive vehicles parked along Rodeo Drive's curb. Hollywood Bowl If you can catch a gig at the Hollywood Bowl, LA's beautiful outdoor amphitheater, don't pass it up. Since its inaugural season in 1922, this unique stage, set in the Hollywood Hills, has entertained thousands

of fans and hosted some of the biggest names in music, including The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Elton John and Tina Turner.Many travelers praise the Hollywood Bowl, touting everything from the sound quality to the scenic overlook. Several also add that all of the seats offer great views and suggest arriving early with a bottle of wine and a picnic basket.

Venice Beach Developed in the early 20th century, Venice Beach is modeled – canals and all – after its namesake city in Italy. Admittedly, the experiment didn't live up to its Italian inspiration, but the neighborhood has become distinctly Californian, embodying the spirit of the wealthy, the alternative and the just plain bizarre. Rather than towering churches and intimate pizzerias, you'll find canal-side mansions near funky boutiques and restaurants.Venice Beach's claim to fame is its boardwalk. Hosting a daily procession of eclectic characters and scantily clad beachgoers, the boardwalk generally impresses out-of-towners. Past visitors loved checking out the area's unique scene (including the open-air Muscle Beach and the Hotel Erwin's High Rooftop Lounge), although some cautioned that the parts away from the pier were not appropriate for younger children. Other travelers note that the boardwalk sometimes reeks of cannabis. Also, remember that Venice Beach can get crowded on sunny days and is better suited for sunbathing, not swimming. Walt Disney Concert Hall This Frank Gehry-designed concert hall's curvaceous, stainless steel façade is an imposing structure in downtown LA. The hall helped revive this particular section of downtown, which was once dominated by mundane office buildings and lackluster entertainment options. Now, nightlife and culture burgeon in the area, and the concert hall is at the forefront. Music-loving travelers will want to catch one of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's performances here. (For ticket and price information, visit the Los Angeles Philharmonic's website.)But you don't have to invest in concert tickets to experience this performance venue: You can follow a docent-led tour or a self-guided audio tour of the exterior and interior (though the actual concert auditorium is off-limits). Hourlong guided and audio tours are both free; audio tours are offered Monday through Saturday from either 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. or 2 to 5 p.m., while guided tour hours vary by day and are generally available on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. For a full tour schedule, visit The Music Center's website. Hollywood Forever Cemetery As morbid as it may seem, your best chance of spotting a celebrity in LA is at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Here, you'll find the final resting places of Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille and other stars who once worked at the adjacent Paramount Pictures Studios. Maps detailing the celebrities' gravesites are available at the cemetery's flower shop.Recent visitors described the cemetery's quiet grounds as "peaceful and serene," adding that the grounds are well-maintained. Many also appreciated the informative and friendly staff. Angeles National Forest In about a half-hour, travelers can trade in busy downtown LA for the serenity of nature at the Angeles National Forest. The almost 700,000-acre forest is an easily accessible place for locals and visitors to hike, bike, ski, ride horses, swim, fish and even camp. Encompassing the San Gabriel Mountains, terrain ranges from desert to dense forest. Perhaps one of the most visited sites is Mount Baldy, which is the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains at 10,064 feet. The 28-mile Gabrielino National Recreation Trail offers a variety of hikes, from moderate to challenging. Recent visitors loved the views and found the range of trail options perfect for different types of hikers.Visitors to the Angeles National Forest must purchase a National Forest Adventure Pass. It’s $5 for a daily pass or $30 for an annual pass; the pass is good at other national forests in the area. There are visitor and information centers in different areas of the forest, which offer general information, activities and education events. Visit the forest's website for specific hours and details. La Brea Tar Pits If your kids go crazy for dinosaurs – and really, what kid doesn't? – then a visit to La Brea Tar Pits is sure to be the highlight of their trip. Although the pits look like the set of a cheesy PG

movie, hot tar has been bubbling from the earth at this spot along Museum Row in the Miracle Mile for about 40,000 years. And from the gooiest part of LA, more than 3.5 million fossils from 600-plus species have been discovered. The adjoining museum houses many of the artifacts found at the tar pits; consequently, it is home to one of the largest collections of Ice Age fossils in the world. Recent visitors loved learning something new and found the site fascinating.You can check out the tar pits completely free of charge, but museum tickets start at $15 for adults; reduced entry fees are available for children, students and seniors. You'll save $1 on each ticket if you buy tickets online. All tickets include tours of property facilities like the fossil lab, lake pit and observation pit. Complimentary admission is offered on the first Tuesday of every month (excluding July and August) and every Tuesday in September, but ticket lines on these days are long, so consider reserving your pass online before you arrive. Even if you have to pay to visit, most visitors agree that the exhibits are well worth perusing.

California Science Center A world of fun and exploration await kids, as well as curious adults, at the California Science Center. In the permanent "Ecosystems" exhibit, museumgoers will learn about everything from islands to rivers to forests across eight different zones via interactive displays. In "Creative World," technology takes center stage and explores the innovation in transportation and architecture. But the top draw for recent travelers? The museum's "Air & Space" section which includes the Gemini 11 capsule piloted by Dick Gordon and Pete Conrad as well as a special exhibit about the Endeavor space shuttle. An IMAX theater is also on-site. Recent visitors say the center is wonderful, lots of fun and especially great for kids.The center is free to visit, though special exhibits and IMAX screenings incur a fee. Access to the Endeavor is included with an IMAX or special exhibit ticket. On weekends and holidays, a timed ticket is required to visit Endeavor. The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Parking costs $12. You can also take the Metro Expo Line to Expo Park/USC Station and walk five minutes to the center. Visit the center's website for more information. Dodger Stadium Baseball fans should enjoy a visit to Dodger Stadium, which is home to the LA Dodgers and is MLB's third oldest continually used park. The stadium is carved into Chavez Ravine and overlooks downtown LA to the south and the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, making this ballpark quite unique. If the Dodgers aren't playing when you're in town, you can still see the stadium on a guided tour. Tours of the 56,000-seat stadium last approximately 90 minutes. During the tour, visitors will learn about the stadium's history and may get to go on the field, look at the Dodger Dugout or peek into the Lexus Dugout Club (the VIP restaurant and lounge located behind home plate), which houses the team's World Series trophies and various other awards. Additional specialty tours, such as a Jackie Robinson tour, are also offered. Recent tour-goers say the guides are excellent and enthusiastic.The Dodger Stadium Tour is offered at 10 a.m., 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on select dates. Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for children 14 and under. Parking is $17 in advance and $25 at the gate, with no in-and-out privileges and no refunds. Tickets to baseball games are seasonal and prices vary. Greystone Mansion and Park Greystone is one of the largest mansions in Beverly Hills and an important landmark for American cinema. The nearly 13-acre parcel of land was a wedding gift from oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny to his son, Ned, in 1926. Construction on the mansion began in 1927 and took almost three years to complete. Greystone now represents a golden age in American cinema. Many films, including "The Big Lebowski" and "Ghostbusters," and television shows like "General Hospital" and "Gilmore Girls" have been shot on these gothic-inspired grounds.Today, the interior of the mansion is closed, except for special events and tours, but visitors are free to walk around the property. Two-hour park ranger tours of the mansion and gardens are held the first Saturday of the month from January through April as well as the first Sunday in March and April. Tours cost approximately $20 per person. For more information or to register for these tours, visit the website. Many visitors call Greystone Mansion a "hidden gem" within LA, saying that it offers respite from the city's hustle and bustle. Travelers describe the park grounds as spectacular and enjoy learning which of their favorite movies and shows used Greystone as a backdrop. Hollywood Homes Tours Once you've seen where the stars shop, where they eat, where they surf and where they party, you'll want to see where they live. A variety of minibus tours provide ample opportunities to spot homes owned by the rich and famous. You probably won't see the celebs themselves, but you can snap pics of the homes affiliated with A-listers like Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise, Bruno Mars and Halle Berry. Also, expect to see

facades that once housed the likes of Lucille Ball, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Along with the stars' abodes, buses usually make stops at the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Sunset Strip and Rodeo Drive.According to recent travelers, the demeanor of your tour guide can make or break your trip. Visitors stuck on tours with grumpy or mumbling guides wished they had just bought a map and done the tour on their own. Also, be sure to check the weather for the day: Extreme heat or a sudden shower can put a damper on an open-top bus ride. Universal Studios Hollywood One of the most popular attractions in the Los Angeles area, Universal Studios Hollywood features rides and amusements based on some of the most popular scenes and characters from film and television. You can take the famous tram tour past the creepy Bates Motel from "Psycho" and get caught up in a high speed chase with the "Fast & Furious" cast. Kids can shake hands with cartoon favorites like SpongeBob SquarePants and Scooby-Doo. Of course, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is another huge hit, as is Jurassic World – The Ride. If thrills are your thing, there are plenty of hair-raising coasters and rides. On Transformers: The Ride-3D, riders join Optimus Prime in his battle against the Decepticons; meanwhile, youngsters will love the 3D ride Despicable Me Minion Mayhem (complete with a Minion dance party).Universal Studios welcomes hoards of tourists each day; to forgo the long waits, travelers suggest purchasing the Express pass (formerly Front of the Line passes), which cost $179 to $279 each, online. This brings up another pain point: the price. At $109 to $129 for one-day general admission for adults and $103 to $123 for little ones ages 3 to 9 (when purchased online), a family excursion to Universal Studios doesn't come cheap, something some visitors find off-putting. Grand Central Market Grand Central Market, or foodie heaven according to visitors, is located in downtown Los Angeles by the Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad. The venue features high ceilings and an open layout, with food vendor stalls offering different cuisines that represent cultures from the Los Angeles area and beyond. The market has been in operation since 1917 and serves everything from coffee and pressed juices to deli fare, egg sandwiches, falafel, tacos and chow mein.Visitors love this market's lively atmosphere, while others thought it didn't live up to the hype. Regardless, this foodie paradise is popular, so expect lines. You'll also find that meals here are considerably cheaper than those served in other parts of the city. Hollyhock House Warner Bros. Studio Located in Burbank, California – a city that sits just 5 miles north of Hollywood – Warner Bros. Studio gives visitors a close-up look at iconic movie and TV sets and props, such as the original Batmobiles, costumes from the "Harry Potter" movies and a replica of the cafe featured in "Friends." Travelers will also drive around the studio's 110-acre backlot, where 30 soundstages are used for producing shows like "Young Sheldon," "Bob Hearts Abishola," and "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."Previous visitors loved exploring this property and appreciated their "fun and knowledgeable" tour guides. Additionally, many enjoyed getting out of their golf carts to go inside a working set and other buildings used for filming, citing this as the main reason to tour this studio instead of others like Paramount Pictures Studios. But keep in mind, children 7 and younger are not permitted on any tour. https://travel.usnews.com/Los_Angeles_CA/Things_To_Do/

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brandmls17lifestyle · 4 years ago

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50 Cent Inks 3-Film Deal With Eli Roth, 3BlackDot The actor, 'Power' producer and rapper is getting into the horror feature film space. Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is jumping into the horror movie space by inking a 3-feature film deal with Eli Roth and indie studio 3BlackDot. The actor, producer and rapper's G-Unit Film & Television banner is partnering with Arts District Enterainment -- the production company headed by Roger Birnbaum, Roth and head of development Michael Besman -- while 3BlackDot will act as the financier and studio behind the film slate deal. The deal also creatively pairs the Power executive producer for Starz with Roth, a horror film icon best known for directing and producing titles like Cabin Fever, Hostel and Hemlock Grove, and being a founder of Crypt TV. "Both 50 and James (Frey) have never shied away from controversial, boundary-pushing material and have made massive global cultural impacts from their raw creative energy. We want to bring that same fun and danger to this new fantastic slate of elevated scary films. We want to make the movies others are too afraid to make” said Roth in a statement. Jackson, Roth and 3BlackDot -- the co-producer and co-financier on Queen and Slim -- will collaborate on each film, while also using 3Blackdot’s in-house resources in gaming, publishing and merchandise to build out entertainment properties around each title. The film IP will be exploited as a 360-degree experience across video games, publishing and merchandise platforms. Arts District was formed by Birnbaum, the prolific producer and former co-chairman of MGM and Spyglass Entertainment, Besman and Roth. The idea for the joint horror film slate came from 50 Cent, Roth and Frey, who oversees all creative development and production for 3BlackDot. "Eli, James, Roger, Michael, and 3BlackDot will be great partners in G-Unit Film and Television’s takeover of the horror genre. I can’t wait to show the world what we’re building," 50 Cent said in his own statement. Producing for the three companies will be 50 Cent and Anil Kurian for G-Unit Film & Television, Roth, Birnbaum and Besman for Arts District, and Reginald Cash, Frey, Mitchell Smith and Zennen Clifton for 3Blackdot. 50 Cents is repped by APA.

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mlmeouch · 5 years ago

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commission post

hi there i’m eli and i’m opening a few slots for speedy commissions that i’d like to fill asap (the commission would be done by monday night!) long story short i need a bit of cash for next week so if you can help me out i would super appreciate it!

ICONS 10$ (2 for 15)

MORE COMPLEX PIECES 20-30$ average or more (depending on some factors)

some rules

i will draw: furry art, any character with ref be it an OC or real people too, pet portraits, flora, some robot characters, some n.udity or b.lood i will not draw: complex backgrounds, vehicles and buildings, heavy n.udity or g.ore, and i reserve to the right to refuse to draw anything i find offensive or makes me uncomfortable payment by paypal only, in CAD$, expected upfront once i agree to do your request

i am mostly expecting to do some icons or simple 20-30$ illustrations, as i doubt i could do anything above that by monday night, but go ahead and ask. if i can’t guarantee it will be done by monday i will put you on a queue for next week instead if you really do wanna commission me ~

please reblog if you can

#commissions #art commissions #commission post #artists on tumblr #fanart

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vmheadquarters · 6 years ago

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Everything We Know About the Veronica Mars Hulu Revival

Veronica Mars, UPN/CW’s cult hit series about a whip-smart teen detective, starring Kristen Bell, is returning with brand-new episodes in 2019. If that news makes you want to listen to The Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to Be Friends”—a.k.a. the original show’s theme song—on repeat out of sheer joy, you’re not alone: In the years since the 3-season drama aired its finale in 2007, fans’ insatiable demand for Veronica’s further adventures have spawned a Kickstarter-funded feature film and two novels. With a built-in audience this passionate, it’s no wonder Hulu has picked up a fourth season set to premiere this summer.

So what's Veronica up to now? Is she still dating Logan? Is her hometown of Neptune, California still a seaside cesspool full of secrets and corruption? Here’s everything we know so far about Veronica Mars season 4—and if you skipped the movie and books, mild spoilers below.

When does the new Veronica Marspremiere on Hulu?

Veronica Mars will be released on July 26, 2019. The season will consist of 8 one-hour episodes, and the first episode is titled “Spring Break Forever.”

Is there a trailer yet?

Hulu announced the premiere date on the show’s Instagram account in April, with a teaser video that finds Kristen Bell’s Veronica just as we remembered her: Seated behind her desk at Mars Investigations, the P.I. agency founded by her dad, brandishing her trusty taser. Oh how we missed these sardonic voice-overs.

Is the original cast returning?

Most of the core cast is back! Kristen Bell’s devotion to her breakthrough role remains unwavering, despite a busy schedule including NBC sitcom The Good Placeand a little Disney franchise known as Frozen. Enrico Colantoni is set to return as Veronica's father Keith Mars, and so are Percy Daggs III (Wallace Fennel), Francis Capra (Eli "Weevil" Navarro), Daran Norris (Cliff McCormack) and Ryan Hansen (Dick Casablancas). Ken Marino will be back as sleazy rival detective Vinny van Lowe. Jason Dohring (Logan) and Max Greenfield (Leo D’Amato) are also on board. So far there’s no sign of Tina Majorino as computer genius Mac—which is disappointing, since Mac rocks, and she’s basically Veronica’s only female friend.

There are notable new additions to the cast, too.

Comedian Patton Oswalt joins the cast as Penn Epner, a 40-something pizza delivery guy and “frequent poster on unsolved murder websites,” Deadline reports. Oscar winner J.K. Simmons has been cast as shady ex-con Clyde Pickett. Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Bell’s Good Place costar, will play Nicole, owner of a club popular with Neptune spring breakers. Westworld’s Clifton Collins Jr., The Fosters’ Izabela Vidovic, and Dawnn Lewis (a.k.a. Jaleesa from A Different World!) will also recur.

Creator Rob Thomas shared a peek at the revival's cast from the first table read back in November.

What's the reboot about?

According to Hulu’s description, "Spring breakers are getting murdered in Neptune, thereby decimating the seaside town’s lifeblood tourist industry. After Mars Investigations is hired by the parents of one of the victims to find their son’s killer, Veronica is drawn into a mystery that pits the enclave’s wealthy elites, who would rather put an end to the month-long bacchanalia, against a working class that relies on the cash influx that comes with being the West Coast’s answer to Daytona Beach.” New show, same familiar class-war themes.

How does it relate to the Veronica Marsbook series?

Taking place five years after the 2014 movie, this central mystery does sound a bit like the plot of the first Veronica Mars novel, The Thousand Dollar Tan Line. But Thomas maintains that it will be a fresh tale, tweeting that the books are “98% canon.”

Marcia Langdon and Pony—a puppy adopted by Logan—were both introduced in the pages of novel #2, Mr. Kiss and Tell. The end of that book also teased a potential love triangle between Veronica, on-again/off-again love Logan and her cop-turned-FBI agent ex Max, though whether that’ll play out onscreen remains to be seen.

Hulu's revival will be "much darker" than the movie.

“I will say this: the movie was nostalgic. The Hulu limited series isn't going to be,” Rob Thomas wrote on Twitter shortly after Hulu first announced the project. “Hardcore So-Cal noir. One big case. Eight episodes to tell the story. This is a detective show.”

While the series, books and movie always dealt with heavy topics including sexual assault and suicide, Bell confirms that things will somehow get “much darker.”

“It’s going to be a bigger world. It’s definitely not what we did on UPN or the CW, so I want to brace fans for that—that it’s going to be darker and bigger and more cinematic, and definitely a little bit different,” the actress told Entertainment Weekly’s Sirius XM show. Consider us braced.

The ace writing staff includes...Kareem Abdul Jabbar?

It’s true, and not as weird as it sounds: A vocal member of Bachelor Nation, the basketball legend has covered the show for the Hollywood Reporter in addition to co-writing books and a comic book series about Sherlock’s brother Mycroft Holmes. The writers’ room will also include Heather V. Regnier and Diane Ruggiero, writer and co-creator of Thomas’s other (fantastic) show iZombie respectively, and David Walpert, who’s written for another Kristen Bell series, House of Lies.

How can I re-binge previous seasons (or watch Veronica Mars for the very first time) ahead of the premiere?

You can stream the series on Amazon Prime and iTunes right this very minute, and Hulu subscribers can catch up when they add the show and the movie this summer.

Oh, one more thing: Why are Veronica Mars fans called Marshmallows?

It’s a reference to a line in the series’ pilot, in which Veronica’s new friend Wallace sees right through her gruff exterior and sums her character up in one iconic monologue: “Underneath that angry young woman shell, there's...a slightly less angry young woman who's just dying to bake me something. You're a marshmallow, Veronica Mars. A twinkie!”

#veronica mars #vm spoilers #veronica mars hulu

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pixelgrotto · 5 years ago

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Schattenjäger Archives

The Gabriel Knight series is something special. I knew it when I played the first one, Sins of the Fathers, nearly 20 years ago and was so entranced by its story of a roguish mystery writer solving a conspiracy of voodoo murders that I was inspired to write a poem based on the game’s themes. (Here it is, dug up from the depths of my old PC for your viewing pleasure. It ain’t bad considering that I wrote it in the 8th grade.) I even considered applying to Tulane University for college so I could be in New Orleans, the site of the first game’s events, and I know from trawling through various message boards and YouTube channels that I’m not the only one who’s been bitten by the bug to see the scenes of Gabriel’s meanderings in person. This is a series of thrillers, with heavily researched plots similar to things that might’ve made The New York Times’ bestseller list back in 1996, and one of the main strengths that differentiated Gabriel Knight from other adventure games of the era - which were largely content with make-believe settings - were the real-world locations, from the most famous city in Louisiana to Bavaria to a tiny vale in France. Each of these locales seemed to come so vibrantly alive, teeming with delicious darkness just waiting to be expunged.

Much of this is due to the effort of series matriarch Jane Jensen, a novelist who just so happened to fall into the adventure game business at Sierra in the 90s. Jane serves as a nice example of a video game creator who’s an actual writer and not just a designer trying to be a writer, and after helping the company produce the best King’s Quest game (KQVI), she won the right to make her own series. Gabriel Knight was the result, and the franchise would go on to span three games, plus a remake, detailing the adventures of the titular schattenjäger, or “shadow hunter,” as he tackles aspects of the supernatural across the world.

I went and played through each game over the past month. (I also read the paperback novelizations that Jane wrote for games one and two - you can read my reviews on Goodreads here and here.) There are some warts, mostly due to your typical silly adventure game puzzles of the 90s that were designed to sell hint books, but by far and large, the writing and characterization that Jane put on display make up for these shortcomings. The first entry, Sins of the Fathers, intertwines a voodoo cult with an exploration of Gabriel’s German heritage and features perhaps the best implementation of Sierra’s classic “icon bar” interface. The second, The Beast Within, is nowadays known as one of the few good FMV titles to emerge from an era where the video game industry was frightfully obsessed with emulating Hollywood, and boasts an intricate plot that somehow manages to tie werewolves into the legends of the “mad” king of Bavaria, Ludwig II. The third and last game in the saga, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, is probably the one that’s aged the worse, with frumpy polygonal graphics, an odd interface that’s emblematic of how early 3D games just didn’t know what to do with their cameras, and some truly mind-numbing puzzles - including an infamous one involving cat fur and a mustache that got criticized for “killing” adventure games back in 1999. Nevertheless, it still manages to tell a cool tale of the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the blood of Jesus Christ and vampires, though the bloodsuckers are admittedly underdeveloped compared to the voodoo practitioners and werewolves of entries one and two.

A Gabriel Knight 4 was never made, and it wasn’t due to the cat mustache puzzle. Adventure games simply fell out of favor at the dawn of the 2000s, and Sierra was eventually sold off and quite depressingly went out of business soon afterwards. Jane Jensen dabbled in the casual games industry for a while before mostly disappearing to work on books until 2014, when she used Kickstarter funds to produce a 20th Anniversary remake of Sins of the Fathers, hoping to summon up enough new interest in the schattenjäger to possibly revive the series for real. Despite solid reviews, the sales numbers of the remake didn’t quite translate into cold, hard cash (an unfortunate phenomenon that’s plagued every Gabriel Knight game, not just the 20th anniversary rehash), and it seems that barring a miracle, a proper GK4 will never materialize. Jane Jensen also appears content to write gay erotica under her pen name of Eli Easton for the time being, since novels about handsome men sexing each other apparently yield more consistent sales numbers. Ah well.

There’s a lot to love in the Gabriel Knight franchise, from the aforementioned historical research that went into each game’s plot, to the Elton John-influenced soundtracks done by Jane’s husband Robert Holmes, to the fact that Gabriel was voiced by frickin’ Tim Curry in Sins of the Fathers and Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, to the highly likable Grace Nakimura, Gabriel’s Japanese American assistant who provides a foil to her occasionally dickish boss and also serves as one of the earliest and realest examples of a playable woman of color in interactive entertainment. (At one point in the third game, she receives an email from her overly anxious Asian mother about how she needs to get married or go back to graduate school, which is one of the most relatable things I’ve seen in a video game.) Fans of the series would go on to honor these themes in mysterious ways, and Wadjet Eye’s Blackwell games and Kathy Rain are prime examples of titles made by independent creators who were obviously heavily influenced by Jane Jensen’s work. On a slightly different personal level, even I’ve done my part in keeping the spirit alive - the main character I recently created to play in the tabletop Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game is essentially a 1920s version of Gabriel Knight with glasses.

Prior to the release of the Sins of the Fathers remaster, Jane Jensen put out a short story called The Temptation that was eventually turned into an online comic. It details the beginning of a new adventure for Mr. Knight, loosely based off of concepts involving ghosts and witches that Jane was originally going to use for the fourth entry in the series. Gabriel appears more driven than ever in the span of its pages. Even if he never receives another game, the schattenjäger is still out there, keeping watch over Schloss Ritter, prepping for the next macabre mission into the heart of darkness. May he succeed, may he be reunited with Grace, and until that miracle occurs and Gabriel Knight 4 becomes a reality, perhaps this is the best possible way to remember him.

Artwork and screenshots assembled from the promotional materials and respective MobyGames pages for each game. All courtesy of Sierra and Pinkerton Road Studio.

#pixel grotto #favorites #video games #gabriel knight

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redcarpetview · 2 years ago

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Austin City Limits Hall of Fame Induction & Celebration on October 27, 2022

Mavis Staples. Photo courtesy of Austin City Limits.

Austin Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) largest event of the season returns this fall: The Austin City Limits Hall of Fame Induction & Celebration on October 27, 2022. The honorees have been announced: singer, songwriter and superstar Sheryl Crow and iconic Texas music pioneer Joe Ely.

An all-star line-up of special guests will salute the honorees on this epic night: Americana great and six-time Grammy Award recipient Brandi Carlile, celebrated songwriter Jason Isbell, living legend Mavis Staples and country breakout Brittney Spencer will perform in tribute to nine-time Grammy Award winner Sheryl Crow.

Texas music legend Joe Ely will be honored by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright along with revered Lone Star songwriters and Ely’s longtime collaborators in Texas supergroup The Flatlanders, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, saluting the celebrated artist. Inductees Sheryl Crow and Joe Ely will perform at the celebration.

ACL Hall of Famer, renowned steel guitarist and producer Lloyd Maines, returns as Music Director, leading the ACL All-Stars house band featuring guitarist David Grissom, keyboardist Chris Gage, bassist Bill Whitbeck and drummer Tom Van Schaik.

Purchase your tickets today at https://www.ticketmaster.com. This will be a night you won’t want to miss!

The Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, established in 2014, celebrates the legacy of legendary artists and key individuals who have played a vital part in the pioneering music series remarkable 48 years as a music institution. The inaugural induction ceremony in 2014 honored Willie Nelson, Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble, Lloyd Maines, program creator Bill Arhos and Darrell Royal.

2015’s second annual ACL Hall of Fame ceremony honored Asleep at the Wheel, Loretta Lynn, Guy Clark, Flaco Jiménez and Townes Van Zandt, along with the original crew of the show’s first season in 1974-75.

The 2016 Hall of Fame honored Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt and B.B. King, along with former ACL executive producer Dick Peterson. 2017’s Hall of Fame honored Roy Orbison, Rosanne Cash and The Neville Brothers. That year they also honored the 50th Anniversary of the Public Broadcasting Act.

2018’s fifth anniversary class featured the inductions of Ray Charles, Marcia Ball and Los Lobos. The 2019 Hall of Fame welcomed Lyle Lovett, Buddy Guy and Shawn Colvin to its ranks. The Hall of Fame returned in 2021 to induct Lucinda Williams, Wilco and Alejandro Escovedo.

Austin City Limits and the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame are produced by Austin PBS.

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one-of-us-blog · 6 years ago

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Skyfall (2012)

Today Drew is forced to watch and recap 2012’s Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond adventure. A powerful enemy with a personal grudge against MI6 emerges, and it’s up to Bond to save M from the ghosts in her past. Can Bond save the day, or has 007 finally met his match?

Keep reading to find out…

Eli, I’m sorry this is so late! I don’t want to waste any time, but let me just say you’ve been doing a stellar job with your TGP recaps and I’m very proud of you for making it so far into this iconic franchise! I can’t believe you’re almost all the way through! Okay, enough of that sentimental nonsense, we’ve got work to do.

Buttocks tight!

Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade & John Logan, film directed by Sam Mendes

We start off with Bond and a fierce, no-nonsense MI6 lady (Naomie Harris) pursuing a mercenary (Ola Rapace) who’s gotten his hands on a hard drive which contains a list of undercover agents. After a thrilling motorcycle chase by Bond and some top-notch demolition derby driving by the unnamed agent, Bond and the mercenary end up in a shootout on a cargo train with the other agent in hot pursuit. Bond goes after the mercenary with some heavy machinery that the train was carrying, but because this version of Bond is a human being he ends up taking a bullet in the shoulder. He’s still Bond, though, so he’s able to take the shot in stride and catches up to the mercenary and the stolen hard drive. Their fight is hindered by a trip through a tunnel and a bridge keeps the unnamed agent at a distance, but luckily she’s got a sniper rifle handy. She only has a minute to take the shot before the train and the mercenary disappear into another tunnel, but Bond and the mercenary are still scuffling and she can’t get a clean shot. M is listening in on all of this and the agent tells her she doesn’t have a clean shot and might hit Bond, but M wants that list and orders her to take the shot. She does, but she hits Bond and he falls off the train into a river while the mercenary rides the train into the safety of the tunnel. So, all in all, not a great day. The agent lets M know what happened, and M doesn’t take it well. Bond, meanwhile, is swept away into a river.

That brings us right into our opening credit sequence, which features Bond drifting through a fever dream of an ocean while giant aquatic ladies swim around him and Adele belts out “Skyfall”. The trippy visuals continue with shots of graveyards, spooky forests and Chinese dragons while Bond shoots at his own shadows and navigates a hall of mirrors.

With that spooky little intro out of the way, we cut to M typing up Bond’s obituary. Oh, yeah, by the by, homeboy’s dead as hell. To be fair, this isn’t the first time this has happened, but it definitely took this time. M is taken to a meeting with Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, who informs her that the Prime Minister has some concerns. It’s been three months since the mercenary got away, and none of her agents have been able to retrieve the hard drive he stole. To cut to the chase, Mallory is forcing M to retire, though in her eyes she’s being fired. Mallory says her ‘voluntary’ retirement will happen in two months, but M says to hell with that. She knows she can’t be M forever, but she’s not going to cut and run with this whole hard drive situation hanging over her head.

On her way back to HQ, M gets a call from Q Branch informing her that someone is attempting to hack into the hard drive. They trace the hack, but, uh-oh, the call is coming from inside the house! Or, rather, the hack is coming from inside MI6 headquarters, more specifically from M’s own computer. A graphic with M’s face in the style of the Queen pops up, followed by a message telling her to think on her sins. M’s car is suddenly pulled over by some upstart bobbies, which turns out to be a good thing as MI6 headquarters suddenly blows right the hell up in the background.

On that explosive note, we cut to a very much alive James Bond somewhere in what looks like the South Pacific. Turns out being shot to death is a handy cover for retirement, so Bond’s just keeping to himself and living it up. That is, until he happens to catch a news report covering the attack on MI6. Back in London, M looks over the coffins of the agents who died in the attack and vows to find whoever was responsible for the attack. M heads home and prepares for a nice drink, only to find Bond waiting for her. M chastises Bond for playing dead, but notes that he’s come home now that the squad’s under attack and in need of his help. M tells him he’ll have to pass some tests before he can return to active duty, which might not be as easy as it sounds.

Since the old HQ got blown up, MI6 has relocated into an old bunker of Churchill's. Bond trains for his exam, but it doesn’t go super well. Bond’s retirement might have been refreshing, but it’s really done a number on his aim. He moves onto the psychological portion of his test, which ends abruptly when the mention of Skyfall. Bond digs some bullet fragments out of his months-old gun wound and has them analyzed. The unnamed agent who shot Bond meets up with him and lets him know she’s been taken off field work after the whole ‘killing 007’ thing. She’s been assigned to help Mallory with this whole transitional period, but she plans on getting back into the field as soon as she can. Bond meets up with M and Mallory, and M lets him know he barely passed his tests though Mallory thinks it might be time for him to retire for good. M says Bond’s ready to go, despite Mallory’s claims that she’s sentimental about Bond.

The shrapnel from the mercenary’s bullet has been analyzed, and with it MI6 is able to identify him as Patrice. He’s going to be in Shanghai in two days, so Bond’s off to Shanghai to retrieve the list after a meeting with the new Quartermaster. Bond heads off, and M reveals that he definitely did not pass the tests. Uh-oh! At an art gallery, Bond meets a babyfaced twink (Ben Whishaw) who’s revealed to be Q. Q provides Bond with documents to get into Shanghai and a gun with a radio transmitter. Not exactly a razor saw belt or an exploding shoe, but it’ll have to do. Bond heads to Shanghai and begins to trail Patrice. He sees Patrice enter a fancy building and execute a security guard and barely manages to grab onto the mercenary’s elevator before he gets away. Bond’s still not up to his old standard, but he does manage to hold onto the elevator and avoid falling to his death. He doesn’t manage to stop Patrice from executing his next target, however, which is a bit of a bummer.

Bond attacks Patrice, and their ensuring struggle results in Patrice falling out of a window to his death before he can tell Bond who hired him to steal the list. Bond investigates Patrice’s equipment and finds a casino token, which leads him to a casino in Macau. Back in London, M’s trying to figure out who blew up her office. This is interrupted by the appearance of a YouTube video which reveals the identities of five agents on the stole list. M calls the office and orders the exposed agents to be called in before they can be killed, but the video promises that five more identities will be revealed in a week before encouraging M to think on her sins again. In Macau, Bond is surprised to be met by the unnamed agent. She lets him know about the exposed agents, then she shaves him as part of some kind of bizarre heterosexual courting ritual. She also lets him know that Mallory has seen his share of fieldwork, so he’s not just some paper pushing democrat.

Bond and the agent head to the casino with her covering the exits while he cashes in the chip he got from Patrice. The chip has an immediate reaction within the casino and attracts the attention of a suspicious woman (Bérénice Marlohe) he saw before in Shanghai. She introduces herself as Sévérine and takes him to the bar for a drink. He asks to meet her employer, and she tells him to be careful what he wishes for. Sévérine puts on a good show of being a badass, but Bond quickly deduces that she’s terrified of the man she works for. She tells Bond that her bodyguards will try to kill him as soon as she leaves, but tells him where he can find her if he survives. Sévérine wasn’t kidding, and Bond is immediately attacked when he tries to leave the casino. His bacon is saved by a combination of some hungry Komodo dragons and the intervention of the unnamed agent.

Bonds makes it to Sévérine on her yacht just before it sets sail. He joins her in the shower, which feels a bit presumptive, and they get to know each other while we jump back to London. M is watching a news story about one of the exposed agents being executed. Turns out three of the five agents have been murdered at this point, and Mallory’s not happy about it. M tells him that whoever is doing this knows how they think, and that he’s cut from the same cloth as Bond. Bond, Sévérine and a whole squad of goons arrive at an abandoned island off the coast of Macau. Bond and Sévérine are separated, and Bond ends up tied to a chair.

Enter the movie’s villain, Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem). Silva shares a charming story about teaching rats the benefits of cannibalism, which is all an allusion to the sort of people that M has turned both Bond and Silva into. Bond deduces that Silva was an MI6 agent stationed in Hong Kong in the late 80s through the early 90s. Silva begins his attempts to erode Bond’s faith in M. He’s hacked right into MI6’s system, so he reveals that he failed every test MI6 gave him before sending him back into the field, and says that by sending him into the field while knowing he wasn’t ready was tantamount to M sending him to his death. Silva gets a little handsy, unbuttoning Bond’s shirt to inspect his recent gunshot wound. He feels Bond up, tasking him to remember how his training taught him to respond to this sort of tactics. Bond hints that this isn’t the first time a guy has felt him up, which delights Silva.

Silva unties Bond and tells him he can have anything he wants if he joins Silva on the dark side. Bond refuses, so Silva takes him outside while telling him about his philosophy of cutting anything superfluous out of his life. Turns out he’s talking about Sévérine, who’s been beated and tied to the ruins of a statue. Silva tasks Bond with pulling a William Tell and shooting a glass off of Sévérine’s head, with both of them knowing full well Bond’s aim isn’t what it sued to be. Bond takes the shot but misses, which prompts Silva to cut to the chase and shoot Sévérine in the head. Bond lashes out and kills Silva’s men, just in time for reinforcements, signaled by the transmitter Q gave Bond, to arrive.

Silva is taken to MI6 headquarters and M confronts him. Silva notes that M is smaller than he remembers; M lies and says she barely remembers Silva at all. Silva reveals that he was captured by the enemy and tortured relentlessly for five straight months. He never broke, though, and kept M’s secrets for her. Until he realized he was only in that position because M sold him out, that is. After that realization, Silva decided to kill himself by biting into his standard issue cyanide capsule. The cyanide didn’t kill him, though. As he makes a point to show M, it dissolved a good chunk of the muscles and bones of his skull, which he’s kept hidden until now through the use of some gnarly prosthetics

Hey, Punky Drewster here. Just jumping in to say that this:

Was one of the most jarring and upsetting moments in any of the Bond films I’ve covered. Okay, back to the recap.

Despite being told by M that he’s headed straight for prison, Silva doesn’t seem too bothered. M tasks Q with hacking into Silva’s computer and finding out what he’s done with the list. Clearly feeling the need to justify her actions, M tells Bond that Silva’s real name is Tiago Rodriguez. He was a brilliant agent, but he got sloppy while spying on the Chinese. M gave him up in exchange for the return of six other agents. She’s never been afraid to take the shot when it was necessary.

Q begins work on Silva’s computer, but it’s safeguarded to heck and back. Q thinks he can handle Silva’s safeguards, though, and gets to work while M is forced to attend a briefing on the future of MI6 and Silva appears to get ready to leave his cell. Q finds a map of the underground on Silva’s computer, but as soon as he apparently hacks Silva’s system all of the doors in MI6 begin to open. Bond rushes to Silva’s cell only to find him gone with his guards dead. Bond finds a hatch to a lower tunnel open, and pursues Silva deeper underground. Q realizes that Silva has planned all of this years in advance, and the map on his computer leads Bond to a locked door that almost results in him being run over by a subway train. Bond manages to shoot the lock off the door in time to avoid getting crushed, but when he arrives at the station he can’t find Silva in the crowd.

Q spots Silva disguised as a cop on the train, and Bond has to run to catch a ride before the train zooms off. Bond realizes the train is headed right for where M is having her briefing. Silva gets off the train before Bond and Bond takes chase, but Silva easily looses him. Bond catches up to Silva, but Silva eludes him by setting off a bomb which destroys the roof of the tunnel they’re in and allows a subway train to come rushing in and almost crush Bond. Silva makes his way up to the surface and, thanks to some fake cops that work for him, he gets a ride straight to M. They storm the building just as M begins to make her case for the necessity for her agents still being in the field. Silva and his goons storm the briefing room and begin shooting up the place, but Mallory saves M’s life by taking a bullet for her. Bond, Mallory and the unnamed agent from earlier all start firing back at Silva, allowing M and the other government officials time to escape while Silva retreats.

Bond snatches up M and whisks her off the grid. He’s going to lead Silva into a trap, with M serving as bait. He tasks Q with leaving a trail that only Silva could follow and loads M into a fancy old car that doesn’t have a tracker in it. Mallory discovers Q while he’s doing all of this, which definitely hasn’t been approved by anyone, but Mallory approves. Bond takes M into the Scottish Highlands where he was born. M asks about Bond’s parents, but she already knows how and when they died and admits that orphans make the best recruits. They arrive at Skyfall, the Bond family estate. Bond takes in his old home and is confronted by Kincade (Albert Finney), who’s been the groundskeeper at Skyfall since Bond was a baby boy. Bond tells Kincade that someone’s coming to kill them, but Kincade is a ride or die sumbitch and he’s ready to scrap.

Kincade shows M a priest hole that she can shimmy her way into if things get too hairy, and then she, Kincade and Bond begin Home Aloneing Skyfall and setting up booby traps all over the place. With all the busywork done, M is forced to reflect on her actions and admits that she’s fucked everything up. Bond refutes this and says she was doing her job. This moment is interrupted by the inevitable arrival of Silva and his men. Thanks to their traps and some handy Q Branch gadgets stored in that fancy old car, not to mention Kincade’s marksmanship, Bond, M and Kincade are able to repel their assailants. Bond realizes Silva isn’t among the dead assailants, and it’s quickly revealed that this is because he’s arriving in style with a helicopter escort.

Silva’s helicopter begins to shoot up Skyfall, and Bond tasks Kincade with getting M out via the priest hole. Silva begins pelting Skyfall with explosives while Kincade and M, who’s been shot but is keeping it under wraps for now, make it outside. Bond admits he’s always hated Skyfall and blows up some propane tanks, causing the entire estate to go up in flames while he escapes through the priest hole. The explosion is so intense that it takes out Silva’s helicopter, which is a real fly in the ointment for Tiago. Silva realizes M has escaped and heads off toward the chapel where Kincade is leading M. Bond emerges from the priest hole and pursues them, but in order to reach M he has to cross a frozen pond. Silva is waiting for Bond, though, and he prepares to have his one surviving henchman shoot 007 while he goes after M. Bond uses the henchman’s gun to shoot through the ice covering the pond, causing them to fall into the freezing water where he’s able to kill the henchman.

Silva arrives at the chapel, taking note of the graves of Bond’s parents, Andrew and Monique. He enters the chapel and confronts M once again. He keeps a gun on Kincade to keep the old groundskeeper from interfering and notices that M has been shot. Despite having her right where he wants her, Silva can’t bring himself to kill M. Instead, he tells her that only she can free both of them and tells her to shoot both of them. This is interrupted by the arrival of Bond, who throws a knife into Silva’s back. Silva dies, and Bond catches M as she collapses. Her wound is a fatal one, and she’s not interested in surviving. She tells Bond that she was right to believe in him, and she dies in his arms. Bond breaks into tears and holds her close as Kincade watches on.

Back in London, Bond is met by the unnamed agent. Turns out she declined going back out into the field and is instead staying right here in London. She gives Bond a tacky old bulldog that M liked to keep on her desk, and he interprets this as a message that she wants him to stay in the fight. Bond and the agent head inside, and she finally gives her name: Eve Moneypenny.

OH SHIII

Moneypenny takes her position outside of the office of the new M, who turns out to be none other than Gareth Mallory. M asks if Bond is ready to get back to work, and Bond says it would be a pleasure.

The End

~~~~~

What an amazing movie! Silva was one of the best villains that’s ever been used in this franchise, and his personal motive for revenge against M was so much more compelling than a thirst for wealth or exclusive broadcasting rights in China for 100 years. Javier Bardem was absolutely captivating, and Daniel Craig and Judi Dench both gave stellar performances. I hate to see Dench leave the role of M, because she’s definitely been the best one in my opinion, but what a high note to go out on! I was a little nervous about such a young Q, but he grew on me and I loved this version of Moneypenny right out of the gate. I always wanted to see Lois Maxwell’s Moneypenny shoot some guys or snap someone’s neck with her bare hands, or do literally anything other than be an object for Bond to ogle and slap on the ass. Naomie Harris is giving me everything I wanted and more, and I can’t wait to spend more time with her! I could go on and on, but needless to say I really, really enjoyed this movie. My one complaint would be it’s just so dang long; to give a peek behind the curtains, I just got a new puppy recently and trying to type this recap up while she was trying to eat my ankles left me begging for this movie to hurry up and be done already. But, with that being said, I can’t think of anything that felt tacked on or that I wouldn’t miss if it were cut out. For a movie this long to be this compelling is a pretty amazing feat!

I give Skyfall QQQQ½ on the Five Q Scale.

It seems impossible, but we’re officially in the final stages of One of Us! Soon Eli will be posting his recaps of the final two episodes of The Golden Palace, “Sex, Lies and Tortillas” and “The Chicken and the Egg”, and right after that I’ll be posting my recap of the very last James Bond adventure, Spectre.

Until then, as always, thank you for reading, thank you for remembering and thank you for being One of Us!

#007 #james bond #One of us

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sbknews · 2 years ago

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Tomac and Roczen to headline FIM World Supercross Championship opener in the UK

Eli Tomac and Ken Roczen are set to headline a star-studded rider lineup when the FIM World Supercross Championship roars into life on Saturday 8 October, with Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales hosting the first championship round. Tickets go on sale Friday 8 July at 10am at livenation.co.uk. SX Global, the Australian sports and entertainment company spearheading the FIM World Supercross Championship (WSX), today announced the British Grand Prix – the first round of the 2022 FIM World Supercross Championship pilot season to take place on 8 October at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales - plus the inclusion of 2020 World Supercross Champion Eli Tomac, who will make a wildcard appearance at the event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aeuStjUjcQ Making history under lights at the iconic Principality Stadium in Cardiff, round one of the 2022 FIM World Supercross Championship is one of the most anticipated supercross events in the history of the sport. On Saturday 8 October, fans will get the chance to experience the world’s best supercross riders battle for world championship glory in the largest and most prestigious competitive action sport event ever held in the UK. And with the addition of the world’s fastest supercross racer and current US champion, Tomac, who has been confirmed as an official wildcard. "I’m pumped to be heading to Cardiff to compete in the FIM World Supercross British Grand Prix. It’s a huge opportunity for fans in the UK to witness world championship supercross for the first time, and I’m excited to be part of such a historical moment for the sport." said Eli Tomac, 2020 FIM World Supercross Champion. "While I’m definitely looking forward to going head to head with Ken, I also know there’s going to be a bunch of fast, talented riders from around the world all lining up for their shot at a world championship. It’s going to be an epic battle for certain." Tomac, from Cortez, Colorado in the USA was crowned FIM World Supercross Champion in 2020 and finished third in 2021, and will fill one of the four wildcard spots at the opening round. His inclusion, alongside archrival Ken Roczen, will give fans the chance to watch the pair battle head-to-head inside Principality Stadium amongst 40 of the world’s best riders. "Our mission with WSX is to elevate supercross to a truly global audience and give international fans the opportunity to experience this incredible sport at a world championship level, firsthand. As the kick-off to this global Championship, the British Grand Prix marks a momentous occasion for supercross, and fans will see the likes of Roczen, Tomac, and a host of other world-class riders go head-to-head for a FIM World Supercross Championship title for the first time in the UK!" said Adam Bailey, managing director – motorsport for SX Global. "We're thrilled that Principality Stadium has been chosen to host round one of the FIM World Supercross Championship." said Mark Williams, Principality Stadium manager. "Hosting the first round of the WSX, we look forward to delivering an outstanding experience for all supercross fans travelling to Cardiff and adding this to our successful 20-year history with motorsport," WSX is the supercharged combination of live action motorsport with an amplified level of adjacent entertainment, including live music, pyrotechnics, freestyle motocross shows and more, for an action-packed fan experience. Principality Stadium will be transformed into the ultimate dirt bike battlefield for one epic night of unmissable action and intense competition racing. 10 teams and 40 of the best riders from across the globe will do battle for over USD$250,000, equal to just over £200,000, in cash and international supremacy. In December 2021, SX Global announced that it had earned the rights to the FIM World Supercross Championship. Over the past six months, the company has been laying the groundwork for the sport’s first true global championship, including the highest level of financial support for teams and riders in supercross history and 10 exclusive team licenses based on an independent ownership model – a model common to the majority of successful sports around the world, but totally unique for supercross. Now, the reality of this global championship takes shape in dramatic fashion with the announcement of the British Grand Prix. "The British Grand Prix in Cardiff represents a groundbreaking moment in supercross history, as well as the shared vision, passion and hard work of our SX Global team to elevate supercross on a truly global level," said Tony Cochrane, president, SX Global. "We believe the demand for supercross around the world can sustain this sport year-round, and the FIM World Supercross Championship will be the platform that achieves this. The British Grand Prix and 2022 pilot season are merely the beginning, and there’s much work to be done. But we could not be prouder to begin this incredible journey to expand the global relevance of this great sport." For more information and updated news and announcements from the FIM World Supercross Championship, wsxchampionship.com. The full rider lineup will be announced in due course, along with information regarding the live music acts set to perform on 8th October.

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#WorldSupercrossChampionship

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peeterdoopler · 3 years ago

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Luxury Elie Saab Villas at most renowned area Arabian Ranches 3

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Elie Saab Villas Pricing Details

Prices for Elie Saab villas start at AED 4.65 million, which is not too much for luxury and expensive areas like Dubai. There is also DLD Waiver of 2% and a handover facility with 30% payment. All of these features can only be found in the collaborations of Emaar and Elie Sab.

Interiors Design by Elie Saab: Most Popular Villa Community in Dubai

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Arabian Ranches 3

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nightmareonfilmstreet · 6 years ago

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Robert Englund’s Idea Proposes “Shape-Shifting Freddy” for a New NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Film

It’s been 15 years since we last saw Robert Englund play the legendary horror icon Freddy Krueger. While Englund last appeared in Freddy vs. Jason, the character of Freddy lived on. 2010 saw the release of the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, with Jackie Earl Haley donning the striped sweater. Despite a decent box office return, the film failed to launch any sequels and the franchise has sat dormant ever since. England has never been shy about pitching ideas for potential Nightmare films, but has refuted any desire to play Freddy again. Until recently, that is.

Speaking on a panel for the upcoming Eli Roth’s History of Horror AMC documentary series, Englund dropped another idea. According to Nerdist online, the OG Freddy had this to say;

If I had an Eli Roth budget I would have cast different actors to play Freddy for every potential victim. Because Freddy is only alive in the imagination of his future victim. They would talk about it at a slumber party or in a locker room at school, or on the bus going home. All we know about this Fred Krueger is he wears a hat, wears a red and green striped sweater and has a clawed hand. That’s the specifics.

Englund elaborated on his idea further, saying “So it could be a red and green cardigan for one Freddy. It could be an old tattered baseball cap for another Freddy. Freddy could be tall, he could be short, he could be overweight, he could be muscular. Every one of the victims could have a different Freddy they imagined. And you could haunt them with that Freddy. And then at the end, it would be the ultimate victim and we see Freddy peal [his face] open and maybe it’s yours truly revealed.”

I’m going to make a (bold?) prediction; this could very likely happen. Make no mistake about it, New Line Cinema (the studio behind the Nightmare series) is watching the upcoming Halloween sequel very closely. As we all know by now, this Halloween takes place as a direct sequel to the 1979 original, ignoring all subsequent films. If this idea works, and I believe it will, the horror floodgates will open. Because original Nightmare on Elm Street creator Wes Craven passed away in 2015, look for a couple of diehard fans of Freddy to take up the writing duties. As the remake failed, I’d expect a direct sequel to either the 1984 original or possible A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. I’d further expect Robert Englund to, at the very least, make an appearance as Freddy Krueger in this hypothetical film. Yes, something inside tells me A Nightmare on Elm Street is going to get the full Halloween treatment, perhaps even through Blumhouse Productions. Again, this is pure speculation on my part, but I’d be willing to bet some cold hard cash on this.

What do you think the future holds for the Nightmare franchise? If you have your own ideas, or would like to bet against me, leave a comment!

The post Robert Englund’s Idea Proposes “Shape-Shifting Freddy” for a New NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Film appeared first on Nightmare on Film Street - Horror Movie Podcast, News and Reviews.

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royaielfroot · 7 years ago

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Hey! Im a Bolts fan who is fully intent upon following Bishop to the stars next season. What would a new stars fan need to know?

hey! sorry it took me ages to answer this! i’m so glad to hear that you want to learn more abt the stars! ! i’m putting this under a read more so that ppl can be spared from me going on abt the stars for forever!

anyways DALLAS STARS intro ish the 17/18 season

! as all teams,and esp because stars had a p shitty season, stars are shuffling rosters and coaching a bit!so i can’t know for sure if everyone’s gonna be here when the season starts but still!we hired ken hitchcock who’s replacing lindy ruff as head coach for the 17-18 season! hitchcock actually coached the stars to their cup 1999! so he’s a familiar face to the franchise!

and ofc u know that we signed ben bishop (and i bet you know more about him than me! so i’ll just say that i’m really excited)! we’ve been struggling a bit with our goaltending (kari lehtonen, our 16/17 starter, gets more shit than he deserves tbqh,but he might not be the starter we need. he’s a gr8 guy and a good goalie and he saved us a bunch of times last season!)

we also recently traded for marc methot! who we need to fill out our messy defense, hopefully he will bring us some veteran experience and solid defense! and vet experience we need ! because stars are a pretty young team! or at least our d is!(i’ll get back to that)

i’d say our “core” group of players,aka the ones we protected, who won’t be moved this summer are:

jamie benn! captain! #14, wingerreally gr8 drafted 129th(!) overall 2007! went extremely underrated for a while but he worked really hard and he’s loved by the stars org and fans! he won the art ross 14-15 (that’s how good he is!) he’s been bothered by injuries for a couple of seasons but hopefully he’ll be back on top after the summer!also has a brother who played for the stars until the deadline this season ): jordie benn is now playing for the canadiens!here he is mic’d up !tyler seguin #91 , centerreally good hockey player,drafted 2overall by the bruins 2010, traded to us after the 13-14 season. a great center! has 3 dogs he posts abt on social media a lot, they’re called cash,marshall and gerry so he’s automatically blocked and idk him. no but he struggled a bit w media and stuff when he was younger, around and before the trade,there’s a lot on tht out there and in his tribune article! he made some mistakes when he was a teenager,and the stars have waited him out for several seasons now so i wouldn’t be surprised if they give him the A, and honestly imo he deserves it by now,he’s been gr8 with the community and with younger playerswatch this + tribune ! good read!

jason spezza! alternate captain #90 , centerteam dad !!! nhl vet ! amazing with rookies (i still have *** dreams about the spezza-valeri-mattias janmark line, they’re all still stars so I hope they’ll be able to reunite tht line this season), has an amazing laugh i love him!!!

radek faksa #12 c/lwjust watch this video ! he made it so far and fought so hard to get to the nhl! he’s really good! only 23 so there’s a lot of potential with him! owns a turtle !

antoine roussel #21 LW! one of 2 french players in the nhl ! known troublemaker and the loml, underrated because ppl thinks he only fights! he had his best season yet last season and did really well for france at worlds! if u google him you’ll only get stuff abt his on ice stuff,off the ice he’s a really sweet guy, he does a lot of charity work and he has a cat called minou! he also called jamie out during an interview,announcing to the world that jamie has a diabetic cat…which remains a mysteryhere’s a vid abt his journey to the nhl!

john klingberg #3 Di could go on forever abt him lbr, he’s a good offensive dman , heavily criticized last season when stars for some reason expected him (24) to play on the top d pairing with esa (21) w/o any struggles. he’s dumb af and i h8 him ! no but lbr if he gets some stuff together he’ll be one of the better offensive dmen in the league,he’s a big part of the Stars Future™ which takes us to the rest of our Dhe once said that he’d rather be bad at hockey than a virgin,which is rly embarrassing.he won gold w tre kronor at worlds! and got two teeth knocked out…which he has since replaced than godhere’s a vid abt his journey and 1st season!here he is …narrating the casino night,, and accidentally asking why tyler carries around two dicks…unfortunate

esa lindell #23 D! a gr8 Guy! big ! almost paler than klinger i bet they switch sunscreen brands in the locker room… transitioned from the AHL to the NHL really quickly last season played big minutes ! he’s a good two way dman! stars just signed him to a two year contract! and he’ll probs be up with us all season this season too.THERE’s an iconic interview with him in finnish that klinger crashes my yelling esa’s name rly loudly 0 chill,it’s so messy i love it

kari lehtonen #32sat on top of the goal once,the world won’t let him forget it. part of the now dead finn goalie tandem. he’s been with the stars for a good while! i love him and i think he’s getting too much shit, but i do agree that he might not be a starter

ALSO a big mf shoutout to VAL NICHUSHKIN , you’re gonna hear shit about him because he’s playing in the KHL right now to develop his game and ppl are bitter about us protecting him! but he has the potential to be really good! and he’s really young too, he had some contract agreements that says either the NHL or the KHL, no AHL, so stars let him sign with KHL for two seasons, he still has one season left on that contract but we kinda want him back, and we MIGHT get him! he’s rly sweet and ! iconic !

we also protected stephen johns, brett richie !

i’m not going to talk about all the players but we have a lot of young guys, (julius honka, remi elie,mattias janmark, brett richie), and i love them all!they’re hopefully going to be parts of the future of this team! and even with them mentioned i’ve skipped a bunch of dudes, - I KNOW it can be hard learning about the stars with tyler and jamie (love them but still,) blocking up the tag! but there’s so much gold ! especially in the casino night vids (15/16/17)!- ALSO wow! big shout out to any content julie dobbs is in! she’s the main media personality for the stars and she’s so amazing! - the stars youtube page is dead af so i recommend the website for videos and stuff!!!

extra info:- GOAL SONG- video abt rich peverley, a player who collapsed during a game 14/15 season,it’s rly great and it makes me cry so warning abt that.

also the stars are rly good with extra af videos and content like THIS vid that makes me cry and THIS vid tht makes me emo

OK ! I’m gonna shut up now! Sorry for making this so long i just love this team a lot! I can recc u some stars blogs or answer any other questions if you want to!

#aaaa this is so long and messy hhh sorry!!!#i hope it helped some!!!#ask #anon #dallas stars #stars #also sorry abt spelling/grammar mistakes !

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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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Why Jeff Koons’s “Rabbit” Could Sell for up to $70 Million

Balloon Swan (Yellow); Balloon Monkey (Blue); and Balloon Rabbit (Red), 2017. Jeff Koons Phillips

When Jeff Koons’s retrospective opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the summer of 2014, visitors were greeted by a full smorgasbord of the wildly famous, endlessly polarizing artist’s classic works. There was the panoramic pornography of his “Made in Heaven” series, made between 1989 and 1991. There were the iconic suspended basketballs, the gigantic yellow balloon dog, and the porcelain rendering of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp, Bubbles. And then, holding court in the biggest room, there was the gigantic, decades-in-the-making Play-Doh (1994–2014), which towered ten feet high, its crags of putty cast in aluminum and held together simply by their own gravity.

But perhaps the most important work in the show was a three-foot-high stainless steel bunny—a work that’s key to understanding not just Koons, but the transformative power of the art object in our modern world.

Rabbit, 1986. Jeff Koons Kunstmuseum Basel

“The rabbit, I would say, is one of the most famous works of Jeff Koons’s career, and in fact, one of the most famous artworks of the last 40 or 50 years,” Scott Rothkopf, the curator of the show, said.

And now, one of the four copies of Rabbit (1986) in the world, previously owned by Condé Nast owner S.I. Newhouse, has been consigned to Christie’s, where it is expected to sell at the May 15th evening sale for between $50 million and $70 million—setting it up to perhaps break the Koons record, set in 2013 when Balloon Dog (Orange) (1994–2000) sold at Christie’s for $58.4 million.

And while the “Balloon Dog” works may be the more obvious trophy items for big game hunting mega-collectors—they tower over ten feet and feature the impeccably rendered, brightly colored stainless steel glistening for all to see—the sale of the much smaller Rabbit could give one lucky billionaire something else entirely: the chance to own a piece of art history.

As Alex Rotter, the chairman of the post-war and contemporary art department at Christie’s, put it, the release of Rabbit in 1986 “would not only shake the art world to its core, but alter the course of popular culture as we now know it.”

Koons on Wall Street

Jeff Koons, 1995. Jeff Koons Schellmann Art

Three Ball 50-50 Tank (Spalding Dr. JK Silver Series), 1985. Jeff Koons "Jeff Koons: Now" at Newport Street Gallery, 2016

To get to the bottom of just what makes Rabbit endlessly important, you have to go back to the earliest days of Koons’s practice. It was 1979, and he was making his first serious artworks while working at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), selling memberships. Koons was a gifted salesperson, combining charm with some light hucksterism, and would stand out from the other museum workers by dressing in loud polka-dot shirts and wearing an inflatable flower around his neck. The inflatables were to become part of his second-ever series as an artist—but the works weren’t in a gallery, they were installed in his apartment on East 4th Street, right by the restaurant Phebe’s. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Koons was taking cheap, everyday objects—in this case vinyl air-filled toys, which you needed to inflate by blowing—setting them on top of one small mirror and in front of another small mirror, and proclaiming the result art. Koons called this “Entering the Objective Realm.” One of the few visitors to see the work was a writer named Alan Jones, who said the apartment was “like a huge installation.”

“There were inflatables everywhere, floor to ceiling,” he said. “Including a rabbit.”

Jones was describing a work now in the collection of Eli Broad called Inflatable Flower and Bunny (Tall White, Pink Bunny) (1979), which features a vinyl inflated rabbit, its ears askew, with a carrot in its mouth. It was an intriguing and visually striking homage to Duchamp, but it didn’t stick with collectors. No one bought the work initially, and in 1980, the young Koons left the art world by taking a radical left turn: He did a five-year stint selling commodities on Wall Street and was the highest-performing salesperson on his team for two months in a row. He liked selling cotton commodities. His pitch to clients went like this: “Cotton is light…it’s fluffy…you can’t get hurt by cotton.”

Jim Beam - Barrel Car, 1986. Jeff Koons Craig F. Starr Gallery

But by 1983 he was plotting his art world comeback, so he retired from The Street and in May 1985 staged a show he called “Equilibrium” at a tiny East Village gallery called International with Monument—it debuted to the world the now-famous floating basketballs. In July 1986, he showed an exhibition at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles that he called “Luxury and Degradation”—it featured a seven-piece model train in which each car is a stainless-steel-cast bottle of Jim Beam whiskey. And then, in October, he contributed work to a group show at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in New York’s SoHo—including, pivotally, Rabbit, an exact stainless steel copy of the inflatable bunny toy work Koons had lived with in his apartment six years earlier.

“A dazzling update on Brancusi’s perfect forms”

Rabbit, 1986. Jeff Koons "The Inaugural Installation" at The Broad, Los Angeles

Princess X, 1915-1916. Constantin Brâncuși Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

The work was an immediate hit. As Kirk Varnedoe, the former curator at MoMA, recalled later to Vanity Fair: “There are just a few occasions in my art experience in New York where I’ve been sort of knocked dead by an object instantly.”

The New Yorker profile of Koons, published in 2003, cited the late Varnedoe’s reaction to the work as well. Varnedoe had said it was “one of those very rare hits at the exact center of the target.” It was, he said, “a piece where a ton of contradictions (about the artist, about the time) are fused with shocking, deadpan economy into an unforgettable ingot.”

Why exactly it was so gripping was, at first, simply due to its aesthetic power.

“Another aspect of the rabbit that makes it so iconic is the incredible balance that Koons achieves between the tremendous specificity of the casting—the fine detailing of the crimps, the puckers of the plastic—with its abstraction: the blankness of the face, the missing printing on the vinyl,” Rothkopf said. “The tension that he creates between fine detail on the one hand, and a blankness on the other, is incredibly mesmerizing.”

In a review of the 1986 Sonnabend Gallery show that ran the same month as it opened, Roberta Smith said of Rabbit: “In stainless steel, it provides a dazzling update on Brancusi’s perfect forms, even as it turns the hare into a space-invader of unknown origin.” She also noted the force of its transformation—this gorgeous, gaze-grabbing object “once made of inflatable plastic.”

Inflatable Ballon Flower (Yellow), 1997. Jeff Koons Reis Studios

La Négresse blonde (The Blond Negress), 1926. Constantin Brâncuși San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Because of this transformative potency, Rabbit retained its unique power not just among the Koons works to come, but also in terms of the way art objects would be made and looked at going forward. Making a cheap item into art had been done decades earlier by the Dadaists and many, many others who followed, but Koons harnessed the energy and wealth of the go-go 1980s—and his first-hand knowledge of the flash of pre-crash Wall Street—and turned the Duchampian gesture on its head. He transfigured the throwaway-object-as-art into a meticulously crafted thing to covet, a silver dynamo, a sparkling expensive orb—a luxury purchase. Rabbit wed high and low, kitsch and beauty, in a way that would usher in a world where those categories are forever blurred.

And it was the gateway drug Koons was looking for, the turning point in his career. We would soon have to fathom gigantic Koons balloon animals and even bigger Koons flower puppies—and Koons Louis Vuitton bags and Koons Dom Perignon bottles. Rabbit exploded the notion of what made an object art—to such an extent that Rotter had to reach back to Michelangelo’s David (1501–1504) to signify the seismic quality of the breakthrough.

“For me, Rabbit is the ‘anti-David,’ which signaled the death of traditional sculpture—disrupting the medium in the same way that Jackson Pollock’s Number 31 (1950)permanently redefined the notion of painting,” Rotter said. “From my first day in the auction world—this is the work that has represented the pinnacle of both contemporary art and art collecting to me.”

From $40,000 to $80 million

Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988. Jeff Koons "The Inaugural Installation" at The Broad, Los Angeles

Like with many of his works, Koons’s Rabbit was made in an edition of three, with one artist’s proof. Koons held onto the proof, while Sonnabend took one edition for herself before selling the two others for $40,000: one to the artist Terry Winters and one to the English advertising executive Charles Saatchi. While $40,000 was a high price for a Koons at the time—Winters had to be cajoled by Sonnabend and the gallery’s director to take the plunge—the widely held belief was that this was the Koons masterpiece, and the value increased steadily.

In the mid-90s, Koons was hard up for cash as he tried to raise funds to create his hugely ambitious “Celebration” series, and off-loaded a number of works from his collection to Eli Broad, the life insurance billionaire and philanthropist who was building a collection in Los Angeles with the help of his dealer Larry Gagosian. Among them were Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), St. John the Baptist (1988), and Rabbit. At some point after that, Saatchi also sold his edition of Rabbit, this time to the German-born Chicago collector Stefan Edlis, for the price of $950,000—a 2,375% return on Saatchi’s investment. In the late 1990s, the Rabbit owned by Terry Winters ended up in the hands of Larry Gagosian, who sold it to Newhouse for $1 million instead of keeping it for himself—a move he would later regret, telling Sarah Thornton that it was a “bittersweet story” when he handed the work over to his most important client. In hindsight, Gagosian said he would have kept it if he’d had “a million dollars sloshing around.”

Smooth Egg with Bow (Magenta/Orange), 1994-2009. Jeff Koons Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art LLC

It would not remain at that price point for long. By 2001, Sonnabend still hung on to her version of Rabbit, and told Vanity Fair she would never sell it, even though she said it would probably sell for between $2 million and $3 million. And in the years that followed, the global art market expanded rapidly, with prices skyrocketing as the economy hurtled toward a global recession. Sonnabend died in 2007, and in the months that followed, her estate received an offer for Rabbit that exceeded any Koons auction record: $80 million. It was eventually sold as a part of a $400 million trove of Sonnabend works in a sale arranged by the art dealers Franck Giraud, Lionel Pissarro, and Philippe Ségalot—their firm was called GPS Partners—on behalf of several of their biggest art collecting clients. The works were disseminated among billionaires such as Israeli shipping kingpin Sammy Ofer and Mexican telecommunications baron Carlos Slim Helú. But the most likely owner of Sonnabend’s Rabbit might be the firm’s highest roller: the Koons-collecting billionaire, and Christie’s owner, François Pinault.

Given who owns these works, there’s a good chance this will be the last time a Rabbit comes to the auction block. Edlis’s Rabbit has been promised to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and it is unlikely that the secretive GPS client—whether it’s Pinault or someone else—will offload the work. The Rabbit in the Broad Museum is one of the Los Angeles institution’s most popular works, so it’s unlikely it will be parting with this important piece of contemporary art anytime soon. Newhouse’s Rabbit was once promised to MoMA, but at some point between 2001 and 2007, those plans were scotched—as it happens, his version has not been seen in public since 1988.

The Rabit balloon by artist Jeff Koons floats in Times Square during the 81st annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on November 22, 2007 in New York City. Photo by Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images.

And after it emerges briefly at Christie’s New York salesroom next month, there’s a chance that Rabbit—a work so iconic it once went back to balloon form as a 50-foot-long spectacle floating through Manhattan in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade—will once again be shunted off to a billionaire’s pad, not to be seen again for many, many years.

from Artsy News

#Artsy News

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