#for some odd reason it took me way too long to draw jia in the last panel

[ryuubff]

band room practice (oblivious yearning edition)

hes slowly getting there !!!!!!!!!!! really..... slowly........!! but it's something !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this happens like a little bit after the frog comic thing . they're friends but also not really? they can't really get a gauge on each other just yet

close ups below the cut :3

they're just two puppies....

don't forget the kitty !!!!!!!!!!

[joereid]

Top 10 Movies of 2016

I wrote about my favorites in movies and TV over at Decider last week, but here’s my straight-up Top 10 movies of the year. With apologies to movies I haven’t gotten to yet, most prominently Toni Erdmann, Fire at Sea, Aquarius, and The Love Witch. Also I ranked O.J.: Made in America as my #1 TV show of the year, so it felt redundant to put it here too. No judgments if you ranked it as a movie. Obviously. 

Runners-Up: I thought this turned out to be a GREAT year for movies, best exemplified by the fact that I had a bitch of a time keeping these 15 movies out of my top 10:

#25 The Lobster (director: Yorgos Lanthimos) #24 The Witch (director: Robert Eggers) #23 Kubo and the Two Strings (director: Travis Knight) #22 Everybody Wants Some!! (director: Richard Linklater) #21 La La Land (director: Damien Chazelle) #20 Hunt for the Wilderpeople (director: Taika Waititi) #19 Love & Friendship (director: Whit Stillman) #18 Sing Street (director: John Carney) #17 Lion (director: Garth Davis) #16 Other People (director: Chris Kelly) #15 Fences (director: Denzel Washington) #14 Julieta (director: Pedro Almodovar) #13 Certain Women (director: Kelly Reichardt) #12 Cameraperson (director: Kirsten Johnson) #11 Mountains May Depart (director: Zhangke Jia)

My Top 10 Movies of 2016

10. Jackie (director: Pablo Larrain) It took me a while to get into the headspace of Jackie, and what a strange little animal it seemed then. Natalie Portman's accent seemed insane, the scenes felt overly gauzy and frustratingly vague, the score felt overworked. But the more time I spent with Jackie, the more intoxicated I was by whatever fog the movie exists in. Portman's performance clicked, the specificity of Larrain's focus felt more and more revolutionary, and the whole enterprise felt an exhilarating experiment on memory, idolatry, and the spaces at which our politics and our myth-making converge. 9. The Invitation (director: Karyn Kusama) I write a lot about movies on Netflix for my job, but by FAR my favorite discovery of the year was the meticulously built suspense of The Invitation. From the opening credits winding ominously through the Hollywood Hills to the slowly dawning terror of the final moments, I haven't felt this tense through the entire run of a horror movie since The Strangers. Featuring some great performances (in particular Tammy Blanchard, Logan Marshall Green, and John Carroll Lynch), and a premise that draws upon every time someone at a party told you they just started seeing a new yoga instructor.

8. Silence (director: Martin Scorsese) A nearly three-hour, racially dubious meditation on faith from a director who's provided me with more peer-pressure guilt trips from film critics than actual movies I've enjoyed over the last decade was not adding up to something I figured I'd enjoy. But Silence is more than just the best Scorsese movie since ... The Aviator? Goodfellas? It's a committed, rigorous, and deceptively complex story about faith and imperialism, anchored by an Andrew Garfield performance of such thoughtful vulnerability that it makes you incredibly grateful that Marty took a break from Leonardo DiCaprio. Also Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography is breathtaking.

7. Hail, Casear! (director: Joel and Ethan Coen) I like when the Coens are having fun. I know the knock on them is that they're supposed to be looking down their noses on their audience and having a laugh at their expense, but all I found in Hail Caesar! was an affection for people who dedicate their lives to something as silly and often contradictory as the movie business. Josh Brolin is probably doing better work than I give him credit for at the center, but I won't apologize for all of my attention going to Channing Tatum's dancing and Alden Ehrenreich's rope tricks. 

6. Manchester by the Sea (director: Kenneth Lonergan) When the narrative about this one got boiled down to a) it's unspeakably sad, and b) it's white-male feeeeeelings pornography, I was confused. Well, maybe not confused; I know how Twitter works. More dismayed. To me, Manchester by the Sea is Kenneth Lonergan at his finest, and that means so much more than simple grief or patriarchy or for Pete's sake "Oscar bait." Lonergan infuses his movie with so much more humor, so much more complexity, so much more recognizable feeling than you're expecting by the description. The relationship between Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges's characters defies any kind of prescribed arc, instead presenting two characters who fit at impossibly odd angles.

5. Little Men (director: Ira Sachs) Ira Sachs has become so good at making movies about how the Big Things in life — love, family, fellowship, generosity, power, resentment — are inextricable from the small things. In the movies, we tend to gloss over things like rent or income or expense. Making it work is a matter of will or serendipity, usually both. In Little Men, Greg Kinnear and Paulina Garcia are good people whose resentments would usually be overcome in a movie by a grand act of love or charity or luck. Sachs knows better, but he also knows that the sum of life and the beauty of lives isn't about it all working out. And that's only the groundwork in this lovely movie featuring a central friendship of boys that is as beautiful, sweet, and gently painful as anything this year.  

4. Moonlight (director: Barry Jenkins) Moonlight features such strong, simple storytelling, and that economy of language is all Barry Jenkins, and he deserves all the praise he's getting for it. But that's not the reason we're talking about this movie. There's something truly remarkable when strong filmmaking meets revelatory acting meets the kinds of stories and lives that we are STARVING for. There's sadness here, yes, and tragedy, but I can't help but feel an undercurrent of celebration just for the radical act of making poetry out of lives that are usually not even afforded prose. 

3. 20th Century Women (director: Mike Mills) What a difference it makes listening to Annette Bening narrate about the universe and mortality versus listening to Ewan McGregor talk about same. I could never latch onto Beginners, despite the fact that its subject matter was targeted right in my general direction. But in his follow-up, Mike Mills had me cast under a spell from moment one. Bening is superb, playing a woman who's both incredibly wise and incredibly aware of how much she doesn't know. Any shot of her silently reacting to another character is to be treasured forever. And my darling Greta Gerwig does such wonderful, beautiful work as a scene partner here, taking her moments when they come but also as supportive an ensemble player as she's ever been. But it's those moments of narration, where the plot of the movie gives way to the longview, and we get to ponder a bit about the long arcs of time, and it was so beautiful, I nearly melted into my seat.

2. American Honey (director: Andrea Arnold) Andrea Arnold's great big American road trip is sprawling and sweet, dangerous and and desirous. It doesn't work for everyone, and I think I get that. But even if Arnold isn't seeing America through a photorealistic lens, the version of America she's showing us feels true in its emotions and textures and jealousies and desperations and explorations. Sasha Lane, Shia LaBeouf, and Riley Keough are standouts in the cast, but the movie truly comes alive in the group scenes, where the energy of a whole generation explodes into something visceral and charged.

1. Arrival (director: Denis Villeneuve) I first saw Arrival at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and I was blown away by its emotion and intelligence in service of a sci-fi story that became a story about language and bridging unbridgeable gaps. I next saw Arrival a few days after the election, when the film's ideas about facing fearsome and unknown futures and seeing the end from the beginning were all the more moving. What's beautiful about Arrival — besides the photography and the music and Amy Adams — is how our only salvation grows out of achieving complete and total empathy and nothing less. Thats what unlocks everything. It's a beautiful message in a movie that might normally have merely been an exquisitely crafted, deeply emotional sci-fi tale. I didn't see anything else that year that blew me away so thoroughly.