#he genuinely looks like he’s in some alien gun commercials

[anon372]

[davidmann95]

How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

*  Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Where we’re going we won’t need Eyes to see - a teen wolf meta

With Teen Wolf meta we have this tendency to name check Event Horizon (1997) and run off without explaining it - especially in regards to the episode “Ghosted” where they were in Canaan which uses a lot of the same techniques and tropes. But before I explain how Teen Wolf got there we have to explain Event Horizon.

A friend of mine once called Event Horizon the greatest horror movie almost made, and that sums it up nicely.

Following the success of Mortal Kombat [1995 starring Linden Ashby] the studio gave give the director Paul WS Anderson [the Resident Evil guy] a budget of 60 million dollars, the large soundstage at Pinewood and Carte Blanche to deliver an R rated horror. The film he delivered was 121 minutes long and X-rated. It was externally editted down to 91 minutes or 96 minutes depending on region and legend has it that most of the narrative exposition went out of the airlock. As gory as it is - and it IS - it was much much worse and it’s entirely possible that this studio inflicted hatchet job is the reason Event Horizon has the cult following that it does.

Anderson did not waste a dollar of the money he was given, everyone in the film is a noted character actor and most of the dialogue makes them feel real [with the exception of one distinct line which is just hilariously bad]. The ship was a set [there is minimal cg and it’s bad as you’d expect for 1997 but it’s things like a floating water bottle] based on actual gothic architecture specifically notre dame. The crew of the Lewis and Clark [the rescue ship] is seven people because they were meant to represent the seven sins - maybe in the longer version they did. The “stranger” in their midst is Doctor Weir, who following the suicide of his wife whilst he built the Event Horizon, became obsessed with the ship is the one who wants to bring it “home”. The shot of the rotating space station where Weir is based was a miniature. As most of the effects were practical, as opposed to CG, they stand up to modern scrutiny.

The film was a critical and commercial bust, but over the years since it’s release it’s been insanely influential on the field of Sci Fi being responsible for IPs such as Warhammer 40k, Deadspace and even the Alien franchise [which Anderson dipped his toe in with Alien vs Predator] and is considered one of the greatest Lovecraftian horrors ever made.

Event Horizon is not a great movie, it’s…. I’m one of the people who adore it, as scary movies go it never fails to make my skin crawl but let’s get into the plot.

The Event Horizon was an attempt at FTL travel, instead of going really fast it punched a hole through the universe creating a worm hole that would allow the ship to exit somewhere else with a device called “the gravity drive”. On its test flight it vanished. Seven years later it reappears where it should have with no crew and only a mild distress signal. Weir (Sam Neill), the original creator takes the crew of the Lewis and Clark, a rescue ship captained by Miller (Lawrence Fishburne), to bring it back.

On finding the ship the youngest member of the crew, Mr Justin (Jack Noseworthy), goes into the drive room in full EVA and is dragged into the black liquid at its heart. He is rescued by Cooper (Richard Jones), but when they confront Weir he denies it’s possible despite that they could not have known what to describe. Justin is comatose. They find a recording of screams which has a latin phrase which DJ (Jason Isaacs) translates as save me. The med tech Peters (Kathleen Quinlan) starts to see visions of her son covered in sores. Weir starts to see his dead wife as she was when he found her but with empty eye sockets. The ship starts to pull at their sanity damaging the Lewis and Clark, Smith (Sean Pertwee) refuses to leave the Lewis and Clark and in the middle of that Justin gets up and puts himself in the airlock, setting it to open.

All of the characters are shown to have a dark history but because of the editting we often don’t know what that is. We know Peters has left her terminally ill son because of her visions. Miller tells us about a crew member he had to leave to die in a burning ship. Weir has his guilt over his wife, but the rest was cut.

They find the ruins of the old crew with a tape showing them dismembering themselves and each other and it turns out the translation wasn’t save me but save yourself from hell. Fans have actually translated it more accurately as save yourself from the fire.

Miller comes to the conclusion the best thing to do is go home and blow the ship from orbit but Weir refuses to go. He takes one of the explosives from the nave hallway and blows up the Lewis and Clark and Smith, this sends Cooper into space [where he has the worst line in cinema, seriously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUozFOlxVnM] and Miller and Starck [Joely Richardson] confront Weir on the bridge where he has ripped out his own eyes. DJ is found disembowelled over the medicine table. Distracted by Cooper’s return Weir fires a rivet gun at the ship’s window causing the decompression to suck him into space. Miller tries to use the explosives along the nave corridor to separate the ship from the gravity drive which he considers the source of his evil but he is separated from his crew by a burning man who turns into Weir. They fight, the corridor explodes and Miller is sucked into the black hole.

There is a gotcha ending where Starck sees one of their rescuers as Weir but wakes up screaming before the very ominous door closing.

So what happens? what is the one sentence synopsis?

See that’s where Event Horizon sort of wins. On its surface the ship went to hell and became alive and is now luring people in and trying to drag them into Hell. Except even within the movie that explanation doesn’t make sense. The characters talk about the lack of good air, that they are running out of air and it turns them on each other to an extent so did anoxia cause the hallucinations combined with the very gothic imagery to create a mass hysteria? Is it a pseudo Catholic vision of Hell where the characters unable to deal with their own guilt at ultimately tortured? Maybe? Was it all of the above? I don’t know. Other people have amazing explanations of what happened and here’s the reason why Event Horizon freaks some people out and others are meh, it’s not that easy.

It has holes and contradictions and huge chunks obviously missing. It has a narrow focus and it never lies to the audience, it misleads them by assumption but it’s consistent. Weir is the hook character we expect to be the hero, he is the outsider amidst the crew of the Lewis and Clark, he is the one with the answers and the refusal to see alternative answers. He has the most fleshed out back story but he turns into the human manifestation of whatever is going on with the ship yet he is the one who becomes the face of the villain. The ghost apparitions are genuinely disturbing. The quality of the acting could carry a much weaker script. The effects are excellent and the gore is astounding, and best shown briefly [although production stills are available if it was too quick for you]. The Lovecraftian questions are presented and NOT answered. They are isolated in a place where they are in constant danger and the hallucinations mean even their thoughts are unsafe.

Did the ship go to hell? Or was it an explanation Weir made up when he broke? Or is this a purgatorial nightmare where Weir is sent out to fetch more victims for the ship? Is he repeating this ad infinitum with this crew or is it a new crew every time? Is the she Weir speaks of the ship or the manifestation of his wife, Clare?

The film doesn’t answer any of these questions. They are all valid ways to see the movie. And based on Anderson’s filmography the reason that these all DO work is because the film was butchered like one of the ship’s crew.

Recently they found a copy of the uncut film in a salt mine in Transylvania so maybe we’ll see it.

But people who take it on surface value that the ship went to hell and is now evil wooo, generally just dismiss it as poor. It is clearly a mishmash of things Anderson thought was cool instead of deep, sets are so Alien inspired that the xenomorph could pop out of any of the lockers and no one would be surprised. The ship’s set is so gothic Dracula could be drinking tea in the med bay and it would make perfect sense. Yet it somehow, probably despite itself, works.

So back to Teen Wolf.

Event Horizon clearly had its shadows over the production and it’s in the ambiguity more than the cinematography [which owes its debts to Silent Hill]. What Event Horizon managed by accident [Anderson couldn’t have pulled it off deliberately] Teen Wolf tries.

Every character in Teen Wolf, no matter how minor, has a backstory but it is not one we are necessarily given. They have their own stories which intersect with the story we are being told. If we look at the chimera, for example, we saw Tracy’s complicated relationship with her father, we saw Lucas and his boyfriend, Corey, and Corey before we knew he was a chimera told us about Lucas. Caitlyn’s girlfriend Emily was taken by the Darach but she was nervous about her first time having sex so Caitlyn tried to make it special for her. This makes the characterisation rich and this one of the complaints about the show. We learn as much about someone who gets murdered five minutes later as we do about the show’s mains. Beacon Hills feels real because the people in it feel real.

Teen Wolf offers a surface answer which does not hold up to scrutiny - at all -ever and which is often ridiculous. @Sublimeglass refers to this as the show vs tell, Teen Wolf tells us one story and shows us quite another. Solutions to problems are often best guesses with the information that they have and are often contradicted seasons later as characters learn more.

The main character is presumed to be the hero but by the end is very clearly the agent of whatever it is that is going on that wants conflict - however defining that very clear presence in Teen Wolf is like getting rid of glitter, you know it’s there but you’re never going to get it out of the carpet.There is clearly an evil presence, and it is clearly in the water, specifically the lake beside Lydia’s lake house [which Lorraine set up a mountain ash barrier to protect her from] but the character’s don’t know it’s there. I am not saying that Scott is evil or villainous in this - that’s a very different meta - but instead that he is continuing the war that existed before him. He is recruiting a character like him to carry on the story. He is repeating the cycle like Weir sacrificing another crew to the ship.

One of the arguments with EH is that the ship is freeing them from “the fire” which is light and energy, which is complicated, basically that our universe with its physical reactions is Hell, and that by removing the flesh [I did mention Hellraiser was a huge influence, right, and the video game Doom 3] you could be “free”, and there is a similar idea in Teen Wolf where characters try to escape the detriments of flesh - Gerard looking for a cure for his cancer, the dread doctors extending their life, the attempts to build a better beast for their own immortality, the leonmensch trying to capture the Wild Hunt.

Yet if you reduce Event Horizon to “the ship went to hell and is now evil” the two do not match but both are phantasmagorical.

Phantasmagoria is where one or more reality might not be real but is instead a dream/hallucination that is indistinguishable from reality, and thus brings the “reality” in question.

In Event Horizon this is several dream sequences, Weir and Starck both have nightmares whilst in stasis. This means when Clare starts appearing to Weir and the child appears to Peters we are primed to know they are not real and this knowledge means we’re primed for a scare even when the subject is not scary, such as Peter’s visions of her sick son.

In Teen Wolf we have several sequences that are not “real”: Scott’s visions of the school bus attack; Stiles’ visions of the bandaged figure; Scott’s dreams of killing Liam with the mute. Then we have sequences where reality is much more loosely defined in Motel California - where the characters hallucinate - and Ghosted which is the most obvious point for the Event Horizon characters.

We also have flashbacks which are subject to the “Rashomon effect” where several variations of the same narrative are shown and the whole is unreliable [the Fox and the Wolf, Blitzkreig and Visionary] What we are shown in Teen Wolf is only slightly more reliable than what we are told, and the telling is from Scott’s point of view - although it is unclear if it is only the last episode, the last season half or the whole show which is narrated. Personally I think it’s the whole. Either way Scott is an unreliable narrator. We cannot trust the narrative as it is presented even if it didn’t openly contradict itself.

The Lovecraftian parallels have to be mentioned even if when it comes to writing Teen Wolf meta I find him popping up like a particularly obnoxious infestation. Combined with that is the heavy influence of Hellraiser [3 metas later I am quite confident that Hellraiser was involved] and the whole is unsettling if not disturbing or scary.

The visual language of Event Horizon is medieval gothic, with columns, long empty corridors, flourishes and twists and the ship itself is a cross based on Notre Dame. In Teen Wolf colours have meaning, characters have symbolic associations [although unlike the intent for Event Horizon they do not represent anything as overt as the seven sins. They reveal the characters but not general themes.] Each of the first five seasons has a symbol which is represented by Godai, Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Void [if six has one I haven’t cracked it yet but it is probably the ethereal or the other] and the cinematography is certainly as deliberate.

I can’t just end this meta because it’s one of those as soon as you see the movie you can see the parallels because they’re pretty much laid out on a plate but the two are so different that unless you sit down and think about it you’d never consider it.

I can’t say that Beacon Hills is a phantasmagorical town that exists outside space and is poisoned by its proximity to Hell - but I can’t say it’s not either because of the ambiguity and contradiction. I can’t say Weir is a victim driven mad by his own guilt or the ship possessed him because of the same contradictions.

Event Horizon managed what it did despite itself. Teen Wolf might have done the same.

[jomalley-ferrisbueller-final]

A Closer Look at Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, 1986)

The 1980s was the time of the teen film, with a number of iconic teen films coming out during that decade. One that has become a staple of the classic teen film is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, 1986). Ferris’ legendary day off has become a dream for teens then and now still being quoted today within the halls of high schools around the country.

Bueller didn’t hit the big screen in the summer of 1986 without its fair share of long and tedious production issues. Director John Hughes took a lot of his inspiration from his own life growing up. Raised in Chicago, this city becomes the setting for a majority of his films. In fact, there are even websites that pinpoint exact locations all throughout Illinois where Hughes shot classic movies such as Bueller, The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), and Home Alone (John Hughes, 1990). Looking at Buller specifically, a lot of aspects of the film reflect John Hughes. Ferris’s bedroom is created to look very similar to how Hughes’ room looked when he was a teenager, scenes for the film were shot in the hallways of his former high school, Glenbrook North and the character Ferris Bueller is actually based one of Hughes’ friends from his childhood with the same name. Edward McNally, a childhood friend of Hughes wrote an article for The Washington Post honoring the late director. As far as being named “the inspiration” for Bueller he is quoted as saying:

“…for years I was relentlessly pursued by a remarkably humorless Glenbrook dean about attendance, pranks and off-campus excursions -- and because my best friend was in fact named Buehler -- I've spent an inordinate amount of my life being unfairly accused of serving among the inspirations for Ferris Bueller.”

Looking at the production of the film, there were many different things that went into its creation. It only took three months to shoot the film between September 9, 1985, and November 22, 1985 which might not seem like a lot compared to how long shows or movies take to shoot today, but since a lot of their filming locations existed within miles of each other it was pretty easy to get everything shot in a short time. During the filming, John Hughes took some inspiration from Ferris on his impressive way to get the impossible done. The parade scene was shot during Chicago’s annual Von Steuben Day Parade. The float that Ferris is on was actually created for the film and was put in the parade route without the parade officials being aware of what was going on. With there being a real parade Hughes was able to get genuine footage of thousands of people enjoying a beautiful day in Chicago. When they needed to shoot more of the parade scene a week later, around 10,000 people showed up for the filming answering the call made on radio stations for extras to appear in a John Hughes film. In this scene, Ferris is featured lip-syncing the famous Beatles song “Twist and Shout” which came with its own set of issues. Paul McCarthy did not like the fact that Hughes had added the brass element to the song to make it seem as though the band was playing it at the parade. When John Hughes insisted on the Beatles song be used in the film, they ended up having to pay EMI $100,000 for the rights and allowance to change the song. While Hughes was adamant about some of the production decisions, they all proved successful in skyrocketing the film to one of the most fondly remembered films today.

The marketing for the film was very straight forward. There were a couple of articles written about the film in both the Daily News and well as The New York Times talking about the movie, giving an unbiased explanation of the film to promote it. There were also several 30-second commercials giving hints at Ferris’ crazy day off. Appealing to the teen audiences that Hughes is trying to relate to, the announcer narrates over scenes of the film saying, “it’s about life, it’s about liberty, it’s about the pursuit of recreation”. This phrasing attracts teenagers to the film because that is what they are looking for – freedom from the norm. 

Looking at the posters for the film it features many different slogans such as “One man’s struggle to take it easy”, “Because life is too beautiful a thing to waste”, “Leisure rules”, “While the rest of us were just thinking about it…Ferris borrowed a Ferrari and did it…all in a day”. Similar to the commercials, these phrases draw the teenager in because that type of thinking is really appealing to them. 

A teenager stuck in the rut of high school wants nothing more than to skip school and live out an amazing day with their best friends. This mentality is what brought teens to the theaters to live through Ferris.

The summer of 1986 saw a lot of hit films. Buller had some tough competition seeing films such as Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Leonard Nimoy, 1986), and The Karate Kid Part II (John Avildsen, 1986) all hitting theaters in 1986. In the United States and Worldwide Box offices, Bueller placed in the top 10 of both lists sitting in the number 10 spot for all 1986 films. The budget for the film was an estimated $6,000,000 and not only broke even but made money-generating $6,275,647 during their opening weekend of June 15, 1986. Bueller, made nearly all of its money from domestic box offices bringing it $70,136,369 and only $1,469 in international box offices. Looking at the reception of the film it is easy to see how it was in the top 10 films of 1986.

Roger Ebert was one of the top movie reviewers of his time up until his death in 2013 after losing an eleven-year battle with cancer. Writing reviews for The Chicago Sun-Times for over 40 years, he became the first film critic to receive a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. In 1986 he gave a review of Bueller and is quoted as saying “Here is one of the most innocent movies in a long time, a sweet, warm-hearted comedy about a teenager who skips school so he can help his best friend win some self-respect.” He talks about the plot of the film and ends his review by saying “…the film's heart is in the right place, and "Ferris Bueller" is slight, whimsical and sweet.” With Ebert’s review coming out on June 11, 1986, it’s easy to see that Bueller won over the hearts of teens and adults alike wishing that they were able to have a day off like Ferris did.

The non-critical reviews of this film are all pretty similar, it is regarded as a film of the generation that holds against the test of time. On Rotten Tomatoes, of the 728,405 user ratings, the average audience score is a high 92%. One “super reviewer”, Brendan N. is quoted as saying

“Classic cult film and a must-see for all generations. John Hughes created a lot of the teenage angst or coming of age films in the 80s and Ferris was quite possibly his greatest creation. Watching this on the big screen last night was a dream come true but having a film like this remaining so timeless does not hurt. The film is full of heart and the charm of Matthew Broderick is what elevates this from becoming just your average teenage comedy. I wish they would make more fun and creative films like this; no one tackles such a fun concept without falling into clichés and crude jokes. John Hughes created something truly special here. 12/11/2018.”

Since its release in 1986, Bueller, has remained a pivotal teen film for multiple generations. In 2016, Bueller turned 30 years old and Chicago celebrated the only way they knew how to: with a Ferris Fest. People were able to visit his heavily decorated bedroom, recreate the scene where Ferris pretends to be Sloan’s father picking her up from school, and of course a recreation of the famous parade scene featuring Twist and Shout. While this is more of a high scale remembrance of the 1986 film, you can see other companies paying homage to Bueller. During the 2017 Superbowl, Dominos aired a commercial where they recreated the infamous scene of Ferris racing home to get there before his parents find out he skipped school. Stranger Things (Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, 2016—) actor Joe Keery plays Ferris but this time he is racing home because his Domino’s pizza tracker just sent a notification to his smartwatch informing him that his pizza is about to arrive. When asked about the commercial the executive vice president of creative direction at CP&B said "This being an iconic movie we knew we had to pay homage to it and not deviate, not change it and put our own kind of spin on it outside of using Joe Keery and maybe making it a modern adaptation,".

Below you can see the original scene and then Joe Keery version. 

It can be agreed that this film has been relevant way past its release date. But why is that? Frances Smith looks to understand teen films as a whole and why they become so iconic. In her book Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre, and Identity, she explores this question and more. In Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010), the main character Olivia (Emma Stone) struggles to identify with the “hook up culture” happening around her within the high school hallways. She looks to the eighties to fantasize about a better life. 

Whatever happened to chivalry? Did it only exist in Eighties movies? I want John Cusack holding a boom-box outside my window. I want to ride off on a lawnmower with Patrick Dempsey. I want Jake from Sixteen Candles waiting outside the church for me. I want Judd Nelson thrusting his fist in the air because he knows he got me just once. I want my life to be like an eighties movie.” (138-139) 

To this Smith says:

This voiceover and the corresponding images reference Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989), Can’t Buy Me Love (Steve Rash, 1987), Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which is presented for its musical number. With the exception of Sixteen Candles, all of these films center on male characters who, though cheeky, are portrayed as sexually innocent. The gestures to which Olive refers are particularly telling. Having her life ‘directed by John Hughes’ appears to involve her engaging in ostentatious courtship rituals in which the female partner is the grateful recipient of male affection, however dubious the circumstances in which it is bestowed.

Olivia dreams of having the production that teen heartthrobs would perform for their love interests. This is one reason that Bueller has remained so relevant today. No matter how the culture changes, everyone wants someone who would be willing to show the world how much they love them.

Another reason that this film has remained so relevant today is because of the underlying theme within the film is something that will never go away. The drive to find yourself and get out of your small town to explore is something that will always be a shared feeling among teenagers. In Kimberly M. Miller’s Clueless Times at the Ferris Bueller Club: A Critical Analysis of the Directional Works of Amy Heckerling and John Hughes she says 

A fine example can be found in the response to the film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which received criticism for being too similar to Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983), as well as “lacking in irony,”10 and yet Ferris has become ingrained in the popular culture—even being ranked number ten on Entertainment Weekly’s “Fifty Best High School Movies” list (2012),11 in addition to being quoted by teens who see Ferris as a role model of “cool” despite the nearly thirty years that have passed since he took his day off.

Teens idolize him for doing what they have always wanted to do so they are able to live through him and his amazing day off.

Overall, Hughes has delivered a number of teen films that lasted well past their release date and will continue to be relatable in the future. Bueller is the perfect example of this because its underlying themes will never go out of style. Everyone wants to be a “righteous dude” and live their lives with the carefree regard for the rules that Ferris showed us back in 1986.

[theheavymetalmama]

And now, some Unpopular Opinions!

Because at this point, why the hell not?

Iron Man was better than The Dark Knight

I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that The Dark Knight is a bad movie. Far from it, in fact. It’s a damn good movie with some fantastic performances, a gripping story, and some of the best written characters and dialogue in the history of movie making. So is Iron Man the better movie? For one, it’s not so stuck up its’ own ass about its’ message. The Dark Knight is a lot of things and one of them is pretentious as fuck, come off as less of a love letter to Batman and more of a method of the director Chris Nolan showing how much he has nothing but contempt for superheroes and comic books in general. Iron Man, in contrast, embraces it and has fun with the idea of a guy who builds a mech suit and fights bad guys. There’s also the question of influence, and that right there is no contest. The Dark Knight influenced Batman; Iron Man influenced the entire movie industry.

Final Fantasy XV was a massive disappointment

I kind of feel bad for dunking on this game considering they just cancelled the last of the DLC. Then again the last of the DLC was going to expand on Lady “Show Up and Blow Up” Lunafreya and Aranea “I’m here and now I’m not” Highwind’s stories and now we’re not getting them and I’m still bitter as fuck for the director’s pathetic excuse for why a girl couldn’t attend the coming of age road trip, so all bet’s are off! Okay, the ladies getting shafted aside, there is a lot to like about Final Fantasy XV, but was it worth the tedious development time? No way in hell. The game looks good but like many open world games feels mostly lifeless and empty, and of the four main characters only one of them is likable and isn’t even playable in the game’s vanilla form. The story is a broken mess that requires other forms of media to fully grasp (dick fucking move there, Squeenix) and the summons coming at random times serves as more of an annoyance than anything, especially since they always seem to show up except during times when and where they’d be useful. It also doesn’t say good things about a company’s management when a game can sell millions of copies in record time as well as do gangbusters on downloadable content and then still manage to lose over 30 million dollars.

And for the record, let it be known that Noctis is far and away the whiniest and most emo protagonist in Final Fantasy history, which is saying something considering this is a series where one such protagonist’s entire character is being so jaded and world weary to the point that his name is the sound a crying baby makes, and he doesn’t whine and complain as much as Noctis does.

Just because you’re a cop or a soldier, that doesn’t automatically make you a good person

I’m in favor of police and law enforcement and even though I believe our military budget makes Caligula himself look frugal in comparison I do support our troops. Having said that, being a cop or a trooper doesn’t mean jack shit if the person under the uniform is a complete and utter scumbag, which happens more often than many care to admit. In fact some people, many people, become cops and soldiers not to protect and serve or out of a sense of honor and duty, but simply because they like making others miserable and want to do it for a living. There’s a reason songs about fighting the law and unflattering depictions of authority figures date back as far as authority figures have been a thing. Respect is earned, not given.

‘White Nationalist’ and ‘Nazi’ are the same things

Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling somebody who abuses their spouse a rough lover. Stop beating around the bush and tell it like it is. Also, don’t debate Nazis, punch them. Punch them as hard as you fucking can. If they punch you back, punch them again, and again, and again until they either run away (which most of them do) or stop moving. Trust me, nobody is going to miss them. That goes double for the alt right. Oh, and speaking of which...

Far Cry 5 chickened out

As somebody who grew up in a dead gold mining community that was mostly Catholic, when the first trailer for Far Cry 5 came out I was stoked as hell for the chance to gun down religious fanatics and skinheads in a place in rural America that didn’t look all that different. Then the game came out and it was abundantly clear to anybody that something somewhere in the game was changed at the last minute. Some have argued that it was their intention from the get go, others claimed they didn’t want to alienate their core demographic. It doesn’t say nice things about your core demographic if you’re worried about depictions of white supremacist cultists scaring them away, but okay, fine. Then make a game that takes place during the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, or in a post World War II Europe where you hunt Nazi war criminals, or failing that make something akin to Black Dynamite or a wacky 70′s Kung Fu movie where everything is purposefully over the top and exaggerated, I don’t care! All your other games have you gunning down hordes of brown people, let people like me and my husband kill some skinheads god damn it!

If you still support Donald Trump after all the vile and abhorrent things he’s done, you’re a bad person

There’s no beating around the bush on this one. I don’t blame people who were swooned by this conman thinking he’d genuinely make a good president and have since regretted their decision. I have nothing but sympathy for them. No, I’m talking about the people who STILL trip over themselves to defend this vile, homophobic, delusions, misogynist, narcissistic bigot. Like when he called Nazis “very fine people,” or is still pushing for a stupid wall along our border that will be bested by two extension ladders and a pair of tin snips. The travel ban, the rollback on regulations that kept food insecure people fed, kids dying in his fucking concentration camps, yeah, no. He’s a treasonous scumbag who deserves to be locked in an 8x8 cell until he rots, and if you still support him then you can claim the top bunk.

Climate change is real and coal can fuck off

Coal is dead. Let it lay down and rot. What, coal is your only source of income in the area you live in? Then move somewhere else! You think I would have left my hometown if there were any opportunities other than timber, fishing, and tourist traps? Sorry, but the longer we stay in the past with coal the lesser we can look forward to a future where a planet can sustain human life. If we want our planet to live then coal needs to die.

No, the left isn’t “just as bad” as the right

This is a fucking gas lighting farce that immediately falls apart when put under scrutiny. Are there extremists and crazies on the left? Of course there are, but they’re entirely different beasts as those found on the right. The left is more of a “eat enough kale and you can talk to dolphins” or “sleep with crystals under your bed and you can see the future” kinds of crazy, whereas the right is more of the “kill all the queers and let the brown babies starve” kind of crazy. Oh, and to each and every single person who said “Clinton is just as bad as Trump,” y’all can cover your reproductive organs in honey and stick them in a mason jar filled with live bullet ants and tarantula hawks, you ignorant scare mongering shitheels!

“Captain Marvel doesn’t smile!”

So what? She’s a space Navy Seal, not a boy scout like Captain America or Superman; she’s not supposed to smile.

No, the ‘alt left’ doesn’t exist and Antifa aren’t the same as Nazis

Are Antifa breaking the law? Yes. Should they be held accountable for their actions? Yes. Are people who want to kill Nazis exactly the same as people who want to exterminate the Jews and subjugate anybody who isn’t white while wiping other people’s culture off the face of the Earth under an authoritarian rule? Hell to the no and “Antifa is just as bad as the Nazis” is right up there with “Vaccinations cause autism” and “the Earth is flat” on the scale of “If you believe this, you are STUPID.” If Nazis and white supremacists went unopposed they’d go around raping and murdering Jews and non whites until there were absolutely none of them left. You know Antifa would be doing if there weren’t any Nazis around? Sitting in their crappy apartments smoking weed, sipping craft beer, eating pizza, and laughing their asses off at 20 year old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooooooh, scary! Yes, Antifa are assaulting people and destroying public property and yes they should be held accountable for their actions. But I’m not going to pretend, even hypothetically, that Nazi apologist scumbags like Tucker Carlson having his door banged on or actual Nazis like Richard Spencer getting punched in the face is on the same playing field as babies being put in cages, innocent black people being murdered by cops, or Jews being put into ovens, you fucks!

New She Ra is better than Old She Ra and 80′s cartoons in general

If you don’t like the new She Ra and prefer the old one, fine, you do you, but don’t act like the original is “So much better” because it isn’t at all. The villains were jokes, the animation was beyond cheap, the characters all looked the same, there were stupid talking animal sidekicks, and the story went nowhere really fucking fast outside of “Bad guys are doing bad guy stuff, our heroes must stop them” because they were commercials to sell toys. Nothing more, nothing less. If the new She Ra isn’t your bag then that’s all well and good, but don’t be a stupid asshole about it, talking about how it wasn’t featured at PowerCon like it’s a big fucking deal when only sad dorks like us give a shit about conventions, or whine about how you’re being oppressed and censored because a 16 year old isn’t rocking 44DD’s, or talk about “CalArts style” like that’s a real goddamn thing. Oh yeah, and speaking of which...

“CalArts style” is not a thing

Shut the fuck up, no it isn’t. It’s a stupid, meaningless buzzword hurled at people who never fucking went to CalArts in the first place. If you’re perplexed as to why modern cartoons all look like Steven Universe, the simple fact is that cartoons are made predominantly for children and shows are made to be aesthetically pleasing to them. With shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, Star vs the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls being soaring success stories while shows like Young Justice, new GI Joe, and 2011 Thundercats ambitious failures, it’s obvious that formal abstractionist non angularity is in while aspirational human physical fitness is out, and a big reason the latter was even a thing in the first place is because they were toy commercials first and there were only so many variations on plastic molds to form the fucking action figures and because it was the 80′s and Arnold was the biggest star at the time.

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi” is a good movie and fanboys can eat bantha poodoo

I’ve heard all the reasons for why The Last Jedi is a bad movie and they’re all either stupid nitpicky bullshit or meaningless fanboy gripes. I could write an entire essay debunking those reasons point for point, like how the reason Holdo didn’t tell Poe a damn thing because no admiral would ever a tell a lowly grunt anything about their plan, especially after being demoted for being a hotheaded little fuckup. Or that Rey being related to Obi Wan or any previous Star Wars character didn’t happen because that would have been stupid and the definition of predictable. Or that the reason Akbar didn’t do the suicide run is because he’s a meme that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about and that there’s no way in Hell that the Mouse would allow a character named “Akbar” to do a suicide run. Or that Kylo Ren not being an intimidating villain is the whole point and that you’re supposed to hate him because he’s a petulant Darth Vader wannabe and a snake to boot. Or that the effectiveness of said suicide run, where Snoke came from, or the state of the Resistance by the end of the movie, or that any other so called ‘plot hole’ doesn’t matter because this is a movie about space wizards for children and paying obsessive attention to meaningless and pedantic details is exactly how we end up with stupid subplots in the Beauty and the Beast remake and Metropolis and Gotham City being across the river from each other! But the biggest one is Luke wasn’t portrayed as some Jedi Clint Eastwood (why fanboys want that eludes me; the EU did that a few times and they were all terrible) and that him exiling himself doesn’t make any sense.

Sorry, but no, Luke running off to a far and unreachable island makes perfect sense. For one, it’s kind of a thing that disgraced Jedi do, and for two, Star Wars is a fairy tale in space. All of the characters draw inspiration from characters and archetypes from fairy tales and fables of old, and the one Luke Skywalker resembles most (largely by design) is King Arthur. Think about it. Common boy who doesn’t know who his real parents are, meets an old wizard, gets a legendary sword, discovers he’s of noble lineage, tags along with a few colorful characters, goes on a quest that’s bigger than him and the life he knew, hits a few bumps down the road, and then eventually he saves the kingdom by overthrowing his father who once was a great man and a hero but gave in to power and corruption and became a dark reflection of his former self.

You will never unsee that. 

Oh yeah, and remember how things turned out for King Arthur in the end? He started a whole new kingdom, he had a few good years, he grew arrogant, things started to fall apart, and suddenly he and everything he worked to build up were undone overnight by a younger, more vindictive relative. Disgraced, Arthur was whisked away to an unreachable island deep rooted in his own legend and mythology where he remained until Britain had fallen to darkness and needed him again. Now of course Britain as we know it has yet to see such a thing (we’ll see how Brexit turns out) but Luke did exactly that. And no, sorry fanboys, but The Last Jedi wasn’t a failure in any sense of the word. It grossed over a billion dollars, received critical praise, the DVDs and BluRays sold like hotcakes, and was adored by kids, teenagers, and young adults, the primary audience that Star Wars is for in the first place. And I don’t give a shit what the audience score on RT says, because for one aggregate sites are a blight on film criticism and we went from this;

“Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are AMAZING, Rotten Tomatoes is biased and paid off by Disney!”

To this...

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi is TERRIBLE, Rotten Tomatoes says so!”

In just over a year. To say nothing of the fact that what you’re currently saying about The Last Jedi was also said about The Empire Strikes, and like ‘Empire’ twenty years from now people will look back on the fanboy outrage and say “Wow, what a bunch of babies.” And before the inevitable response...

“But Solo bombed because of The Last Jedi!” 

Nooooo, Solo bombed because it came out right between Infinity War and Deadpool 2, was rife with development issues since day one of production, it was aimed overwhelmingly at fanboys obsessed with Star Wars deep lore answering questions that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about, nobody was even interested in the thing until the Lego Movie guys were signed on for a hot second, moviegoers aren’t currently hurting for cocky space cowboys...

...and because of the simple fact that it’s a solo movie about Han Solo...and it’s not 1995 and Harrison Ford isn’t in it. See, fanboys don’t realize that just because nerd and geek bullshit is mainstream now doesn’t mean that everyone is now a fanboy deep rooted in everything from where the characters are from to where they’re going, because when people say “I love Star Wars and Han Solo is my favorite character” what the vast majority of them mean is “Those movies with the space wizards and the laser swords are a lot of fun and Harrison Ford is a great movie star.” That’s it. That’s extent of why people like Han Solo. Sad dorks like us may care about stuff like where and when he got the Falcon, how he met Chewie, where the dice came from and all of that and more, but the general audience just wants to see Harrison Ford do cool shit in space. That’s it. To say nothing of the fact that nobody was even interested in the spinoffs in the first place. When Disney announced that they were making episodes 7,8, and 9 everyone went “Oh Hell yes, sign me up!” Then when they followed up with that they were also making spinoff movies about stuff that happened off screen or between movies the same audience was like “Oh...well that’s neat, I guess.”

And no, that stupid fanboy boycott had nothing to do with. Even the dude who started that petition to strike TLJ from canon admitted that he was in a bad place and that he was being stupid and angry, and I can promise you that all the shrieking dorks on Youtube are the buzzing of flies to Disney. If that crowd had any box office and movie making decision influence whatsoever, the next spinoff we’d see a trailer for would be “My Twi’lek Waifu: a Star Wars Story.”

PewDiePie is the worst thing to happen to video games this side of the gaming crash of 83 and he needs to fuck off

Yes, you read that right, and I don’t say that lightly. All sorts of terrible things have happened in the gaming industry since the gaming crash of 83. The console wars, the Atari Jaguar, the Philips CDi, Jack Thompson, the death of the Dreamcast, WoW, an entire console generation packed to the gills with homogenous gray and brown shooters with protagonists who all looked the fucking same, GamerGate, microtransactions, DLC abuse, the death of Maxis, an increasingly toxic fandom, “women are too hard to animate,” the degradation of E3 from a showcase of the biggest and bestest in gaming to a corporately sponsored circlejerk of self congratulatory backslapping and so much, much more.

I don’t care how much PewDiePie gives to charity, or how many fans he has, or how many people think he’s just the greatest, because he’s not. He’s an embarrassing, stupid asshole who constantly gets busted for making stupid racist jokes and by extension making his fans and everyone who has even the vaguest ties to the word ‘gamer’ look like stupid, racist assholes. He’s a corporate ass sucking apologist who gives exposure to anti Semites and racist wastes of space to his audience of mostly 10 to 15 year old boys, and he’s more terminally obnoxious than an Adderall addicted Pomeranian. 

The day he posted his first video of him overreacting to a jump scare while making loud screeching noises on top of edgy rape jokes was the day the progress of “gaming as an art form” was shot between the eyes, placed in a box that was then filled with concrete, and thrown into the ocean. He’s a dumbass man child that’s making all of us look bad and he needs to take his millions worth of corporate sponsorships and fuck off forever into some dark, lonely corner of the Internet where he’ll never be seen or heard from again until an inevitable meltdown that lands him on an episode of Down the Rabbit Hole.

And that concludes this post. I’ll give my final thoughts tomorrow, and on Saturday I’m closing this account forever.

[thecrotchhand]

health class >:(

-ug

-did somebody say rick of suicide

-”ooh, there’s a laser!” -student teacher

-good ways to manage stress- “punching a hole through the wall”

-”do you have a long-term goal?” “dying”

-”we should deport justin bieber back to canada”

-”if you say you're gonna do something, then do it" "i'm gonna kill myself ;))"

-"i'm busy singing Africa by Toto" *off-key singing continues*

-"when you lose weight, where does it go?" "it goes to weight heaven"

-the guy next to me started playing Africa quietly from his phone

-"i'm talking to bowl cut. just kidding chris. i love you." "...i'm getting a haircut."

-"you don't lift to get swole" -st

-"that sounds not good for you" "i'm gonna try it"

-"during pregnancy, the women in here are gonna need more folate, iron, and calcium" "no, i'm gonna need a coathanger"

-"liar liar pants for hire"

-"is eustress good stress or bad stress?" (long silence) "it's good stress! yay!" -st

-good ways to relax- "11 hours straight of anime"

-"everything's gonna be ok" lmao good joke

-"precipitation... wait i mean perspiration. it still counts, it's raining from your body."

-ways to manage depression- "kill yourself :D"

-help the teacher (flynn) has been yelling at us for the past five minutes

-uh oh she said damn it's gettin' wild

-she went back into her office after and all of a sudden we hear a quiet "oh, happy Wednesday"

-"is it possible to have an abortion 700 weeks late?"

-"what's the r-word we talked about?" "rawr XD"

-"what does autonomy mean?" "it's like grey's anatomy but for cars"

-alcoholism is a good sims trait

-guy: sneezes

guy's friend: "god bless... america"

-”what do you say to your sibling during an argument?” "you should've been aborted" “no”

- "your personality might be kind of boring" "like a potato!" "yeah"

-"what does down to earth mean?" "it means you're like the lorax, you speak for the trees"

-"he was happy?" "yeah! put him working with me and larson for ten years and... we fixed him!"

-the student teacher generally has a habit of sarcastic yaying and it entertains me

-"jason (chris) move your head" "just throw a rock at it, it'll move"

-someone was trying to come up with weird phobias and someone suggested genital herpes

-"sir you've been diagnose with hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia " "aahHH"

-"if someone comes up to you and says a mean word, you're gonna be upset" "hey sam" "what" "fuck"

-"i found a big circle"

-"*cough* flynn"

flynn, out of nowhere: "i heard that"

-"have you guys seen cabin in the woods?" "wait, the one with the cabin in the woods?"

-:(

-"let's say you don't have a gun" "pft, not in america"

-we were talking about miscarriage and cody goes "fetus... deletus"

-examples of anger- "when mcdonald's doesn't have ice cream"

-video from the 80's: "depression isn't talked about"

-a seal saved this guy's life and he just: 'ah yes it was all because of god' ¿¿¿???

-80's commercials are the weirdest shit

-yepperdoodles

-"...gonna get addicted to xanax"

-"you guys all did a really good job on your tests" "i got a C" "i got a D+" "yeah there wasn't a single person i was not happy with"

-"you say you see really good scores, but what i'm seeing is a D"

-examples of compromise- "i got a D+, but i feel i deserved an A, so let's meet in the middle with a C" "but what do i get out of it?" "if he passes the class, you don't have to see him anymore"

-"oh no my one feeling"

-"what are some ways to resolve conflict?" "killing yourself"

-"put away the candy this is health class"

-(talking about conflict) "...then the fire nation attacked"

-(softly) "yo what the heck dawg"

-"if they started a rumor-" "kill them"

-"when i was-" "a young boy"

-"you got two more weeks with the student teacher, then you get me back" *high pitched screaming*

-"they never broke out, and then one of them broke out"

-"wrestling uniforms are skimpy"

-(across the room) "hey man, can i touch your butt?" "i don't mind, dude"

-"let's say my wife is going to leave me and i'm... celebrating! oh wait"

-"they're fat and skinny, they're white, black, pink, purple, and orange-" "trump"

-"listen, idiotface"

-"do you think... the government is hiding the cure for cancer...?"

-i love government conspiracy theories during health

-"i... declare... bAnkrUptCY"

-"are we watching a movie?" "maybe if we're lucky it's the ring and it'll kill us"

-lmao i don't need drugs to feel numb

-"aww, flynn, we know you're drinkin' a bottle in the back room" "yeah, just look at ya, why wouldn't i?"

-The Weed™

-"weed stops your sperm from being produced correctly" "perfect, it's birth control too"

-"weed might shrink your... parts" "i think i'll just stick to meth"

-"weed might give you a special needs child" "it's wilson 2.0!"

-"i'm gonna be a drug dealer but not a mean one like a nice, happy 'eyy, wanna buy some drugs? :3'"

-oh no, grandma's growing weed in the basement

-"ahh, the weed's on fire"

-"guess that's how they caught the drug dealers. the deer were high"

-teacher: "ooh, i just sounded like yoda: don't smoke The Weed™"

-"hey, where can you buy a still? asking for a cousin"

-"raise your hand if you want to watch hentai"

-this guy keeps responding to people with "yes, my child?"

-"they put aborted fetuses in vaccines" "oh honey no"

-"how do you keep yourself from getting sick?" "stop breathing"

-examples of painkillers- "cocaine"

-"i know elvis presley is still alive because the king never dies"

-biggest drinker in our grade: "am i gonna be an alcoholic?" class: "you already are"

-c o m p r o m i s i n g  p o s i t i o n

-"trick question, i am hentai"

-"what would you do... if i said i could put you in your own hentai"

-"you're gettin' a hole in your nose oh my goodness"

-"depression" "nope" "wait... depression"

-"I can't remember the happiness i felt before drugs" "i can't remember feeling happiness at all"

-"oh you're back! just in time for meth"

-"oh my garage"

-"lotta meth in that town" "nah just incest"

-"it kills your brain cells. which some of you can't afford (staring directly at the class alcoholic)"

-"why do dentists have the highest suicide rate?? probably because everyone hates the dentist, i dunno"

-"that's accusations" "uuuuuhh no" "oh"

-"oh my gads. you got some meth?"

-"in the puss!" "terms" "sorry. vag!"

-"there's a pretty good chance that drug came out of someone's anal cavity" "that's why i don't do heroin"

-"hey, whose buttocks did this come out of?"

"i'm gonna go shoot myself with some dog food, brb"

-"oh my chicken pie"

-"i've been told we're gonna draw a penis"

-help they're genuinely discussing giving babies steroids

-"most of the female reproductive cells are useless" "just like my brain cells"

-the teacher keeps referring to developing babies as "little rat" and "alien creature"

-"if you eat my period snacks, i will eat you"

-*chiming* "is that santa??"

-"what's the only fluid that doesn't go to the baby?" "water" "no" "air" "no" "earth" "..." "fire"

-"you're supposed to snort those calcium pills" "don't snort the calcium pills"

-"mr. o'reilly, when'd you miss your period?"

-"is it true you puke the day after you get pregnant?" "no, if you puke the day after, it's from the alcohol the night before"

-fetus = jumbo shrimp

- i too, am a very sad lookin' heart

-"no, you cannot throw up your baby"

-"now that we've taken the baby home, we need to figure out what to do with it" "flush it down the toilet"

-"if you wear a hat all the time, all your hair is gonna fall out and die" "ha ha kevin, you're gonna die"

-"since i was 14. and i'm 112"

-"big dumb"

-"what do you want to be when you grow up?" "dead"

-"my parents say: 'hey... whatcha doin' with that 24-pack?'"

-"did jeffery dahmer's mom love him?" "hope not"

-"ohh i love the smell of babies *sniff sniff*"

-"they can be found in places that are... places"

-"why are there rotting apples under here?" "no you gotta let those ferment"

-"what's something you lose by age 3?" "hope"

-the guy in front of me had marvel porn on his phone????????????? hentai hulk's bright red ass is permanently ingrained in my mind

-"what am i supposed to do to live 2 more years? wrap myself in bubble wrap and eat brussel sprouts?"

-"for every 10 pounds overweight you are, subtract 1." "-50"

-"you're wearing a flamingo shirt, you're no one's favorite"

-"you don't snort viagra"

-"how do you feel about having guns in our home?" "how do you feel about how quickly i'd use it to kill myself?"

-"hey, 2 seniors walking down the hallway! wanna give her your papers?" "outta my way. hey! get back here and gimme your papers, ya bums."

-"it's not just the genitals that transfer STDs" "left calf"

-"what if they got an STD some other way?" "drinking sprite"

-"...serial monogamy-" "cereal is for mornings"

-"...trading sex for-" "chicken nugget"

-"you wanna try sex wearing a hazmat suit, go ahead" "don't kinkshame me"

-"STI: spaghetti time infection. it's an epidemic"

-"g- ross"

-"AIDS didn't come from sex with a monkey" "it's definitely about sex with monkeys"

-"what kinds of drugs do i need if i have AIDS?" "nothing, you wanna die"

-"do you know what they do to get rid of genital warts?" "chop your dick off" "mix wart cream with water and drink it"

-oh no they found out what they do get rid of genital warts

-"they shove a q-tip in your penis" "iiiiii'd rather die"

-"is that what tinder is? swipe right if you want crabs?"

-"i would suggest not setting your genitals on fire"

- "your penis doesn't do tricks"

-"do you have a driver's license? *nod* "do you have a car?" *nod* "are you a big boy?" *unsure nod*

-"i know it's only the last day but i will make you suffer for every last minute" "then i'll just do what i always do *sleeps*"

-our resident alcoholic was washing the board and people were jokingly flirting with him so he tied his shirt into a bikini and continued washing so the teacher docked him points for it. don't worry he was already failing

[mcdouglecompany-blog]

JFK, Conservative by Ira Stoll

JFK, Conservative.

Segment 1- From the Prager University. JFK: Democrat or Republican?

To watch this Prager University video visit-

https://youtu.be/H-Qg_4zqpDI

John F. Kennedy lowered taxes, opposed abortion, supported gun rights, and believed in a strong military. And he was a proud Democrat. But would he be one today? Author and talk show host Larry Elder explains.

  Segment 2- From the Dennis Prager Show

Dennis Prager talks to Larry Elder, his friend and fellow talk show host. Larry teaches the latest course for PragerU — JFK: Democrat or Republican?…

  Segment 3- From PragerU Live. Larry Elder

https://youtu.be/qFIBQUKf_j4

Larry Elder joins us to discuss the state of the crumbling Democratic Party, and how it managed to alienate its traditional base. Streamed live on Jun 27, 2017

 Unlike most media organizations, PragerU does not charge for its content. Please consider making a donation to PragerU, so that we can keep our videos free. DONATE TODAY! http://l.prageru.com/2oRDYjL

  Author of "JFK Conservative" Ira Stoll. 7 minutes.

https://youtu.be/xZzeMd9YUgU

  JFK Would Not Recognize Today's Democratic Party

Sean Giordano

Published on Nov 21, 2013

Excerpted from The American Spectator: http://spectator.org/articles/54871/j...

WHAT I TAKE to be the truth about John Kennedy and his conservatism has, in the years since he died, been forgotten. This is partly because of the work of liberal historians and partly due to changes in America's major political parties. Yet calling Kennedy a conservative was hardly controversial during his lifetime. "A Kennedy Runs for Congress: The Boston-bred scion of a former ambassador is a fighting-Irish conservative," Look headlined an article in June 1946. "When young, wealthy and conservative John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced for Congress, many people wondered why," the story began. "Hardly a liberal even by his own standards, Kennedy is mainly concerned by what appears to him as the coming struggle between collectivism and capitalism. In speech after speech he charges his audience 'to battle for the old ideas with the same enthusiasm that people have for new ideas.'" The Chicago Tribune reported Kennedy's election to the U.S. Senate in 1952 by describing him as a "fighting conservative." In a June 1953 Saturday Evening Post article, Kennedy said, "I'd be very happy to tell them I'm not a liberal at all," adding, speaking of liberals, "I'm not comfortable with those people." In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked in a television interview what she would do if she had to choose between a "conservative Democrat like Kennedy and a liberal Republican [like] Rockefeller." She said she would do all she possibly could to make sure the Democrats did not nominate a candidate like Kennedy. On the campaign trail before the 1960 election, Kennedy spoke about economics: "We should seek a balanced budget over the course of the business cycle with surpluses during good times more than offsetting the deficits which may be incurred during slumps. I submit that this is not a radical fiscal policy. It is a conservative policy." This wasn't just campaign rhetoric—Kennedy kept his distance from liberalism right up until his assassination. "Why are some 'liberals' cool to the Kennedy Administration?" Newsweek asked in April 1962. The article went on to explain: "the liberal credentials of young Senator Kennedy never were impeccable...He never was really one of the visceral liberals...many liberal thinkers never felt close to him." Even after Kennedy's death, the "conservative" label was used to describe the late president and his policies by some of those who knew him best. One campaign staffer and congressional aide, William Sutton, described Kennedy's political stance in the 1946 campaign as "almost ultraconservative." "He was more conservative than anything else," said a Navy friend of Kennedy's, James Reed, who went on to serve Kennedy's assistant Treasury secretary and who had talked for "many hours" with the young Kennedy about fiscal and economic matters. Another of Kennedy's friends, the Washington columnist Joseph Alsop, echoed these sentiments in a 1964 interview: QuoteThe thing that's very important to remember about the president was that he was not, in the most marked way, he was not a member of the modern, Democratic, liberal group. He had real—contempt I'm afraid is the right word—for the members of that group in the Senate, or most of them...What he disliked—and here again we've often talked about it—was the sort of posturing, attitude-striking, never getting anything done liberalism...This viewpoint was completely foreign to Kennedy, and he regarded it with genuine contempt. Genuine contempt. He really was—contemptuous is the right word for it. He was contemptuous of that attitude in American life. Alsop went on to emphasize "the great success that the Kennedy administration had with an intelligent, active, but (in my opinion) conservative fiscal-economic policy." In January 1981, in the early days of the Reagan presidency, a group of Kennedy administration veterans gathered at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston for a private conversation. One of the participants, Ted Sorensen, said, "Kennedy was a fiscal conservative. Most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time...In fiscal matters, he was extremely conservative, very cautious about the size of the budget." Sorensen made a similar point in a November 1983 Newsweek article, saying, "He never identified himself as a liberal...On fiscal matters he was more conservative than any president we've had since." In a 1993 speech, Kennedy's Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, described the president as "financially conservative." Combine that position with hawkish anticommunism, and it is hard to find much overlap with liberals....

  For a great archive of Prager University videos visit-

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The first month is 99 cents. After the first month the cost is $7.50 per month. If you can afford to pay for only one podcast, this is the one we recommend. It is the best conservative radio show out there, period. ACU strongly recommends ALL ACU students and alumni subscribe to Pragertopia. Do it today!           

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[kennethpaul-blog1]

Spunk, Hot and Smart Women

Spunk, Smarts, and combating ability…? She could win at the whole lot. She ought to exchange a tire and dance in a ballgown within the equal ten mins. perhapswith a bit streak of grease over her cheekbone, to remind you that she changed into difficult and delightful, and also to remind you ways proper her cheekbones had been. Now she was carrying a quite dress however fight boots underneathit, and she additionally had a gun, to combat sexism. She looked so proper. She kicked a man within the face, and he or she didn’t even care. “Feminism,” she said to herself, after which put on some purple lipstick. “simply due to the fact I’m a feminist doesn’t mean I don’t like to look excellent.” Then she kicked another guy thru a window, and he fell all the manner. He becomeprobably useless. She had like 4 weapons strapped proper on her boobs. Mallory Ortberg’s “a day in the life of an Empowered girl Heroine” may be satirical, however I’m willing to bet most peopleunderstand the movie stereotype lampooned right here. Trinity within the Matrix, Maggie Madsen in Transformers, Tauriel within the Hobbit… succesful ladies, held up as evidence of Hollywood’s sensitivity to gender equality. Trinity’s a peerless martial artist, Maggie’s a hacker with a knack for marksmanship, Tauriel’s an orc-killing device. those women are on par with the men, right? They’re sturdy ladyCHARACTERS, signed sealed and delivered for container workplace achievement. except Trinity fails to pinnacle her pulse-pounding introduction, fading into the heritage while Neo takes centerstage. Maggie’s remembered for her smarts and stick insect seems, if she’s remembered at all. out of doors of her bow-and-blade-wielding badassery, Tauriel spends her time at the center of a hackneyed love triangle, the best context in which her persona peeks thru. All three characters, like such a lot of woman characters in famous media, lack intensity. SFC_TrinityNeo From The Matrix Revolutions | Warner Bros. pix and Roadshow leisure, 2003 This begs the question: how a ways have we come from the simplistic “Damsel in distress” depiction of girls onscreen, genuinely? “these days the princesses all recognize kung fu, and yet they’re nevertheless the identical princesses,” Sophia McDougall argues in NewStatesmen: They’re nevertheless love pastimes, nonetheless the only lady in a group of 5 boys, and that they’re all kind of the identical. They march on display screen, punch someone to expose how they don’t take no shit, throw round more than one one-liners or forcibly kiss someone due to the fact getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they again out of the narrative’s way. nowadays, the word “sturdy girl character” is greater advertising than substance, suggesting the only trait a femaleshould possess if a movie is to test the “inclusionary” box: strength, which a long way and away has come to intendspunk, smarts, and combating potential. What the phrase have to suggest – perhaps what it initially supposed, earlier than it became muddled by using the vagaries of semantics and prejudices of Hollywood – is “sturdy individual who's female.” here we begin to see “robust” for what it's miles; not spunk/smarts/preventing capability rolled into a one-dimensional person type, but a qualifier regarding craft. What makes a strong individual? The question deserves its own put up, but in brief, we would say a sturdy person is a multidimensional character considerable to the tale. He/she has strengths and weaknesses, and his/her employerfundamentally progresses the plot. at the same time as working via my backlog of movies, i discovered Bridesmaids, a 2011 romantic comedy about the misfortunes that beset Annie after she agrees to function maid of honor for her fine pal. We’re aware about Annie’s baking expertise and recognize her loyalty (strengths), however we’re additionally with her as she faces monetary issues, falls prey to jealousy, and wrestles with questions of 310eaa1671f8cdca56bbfcd482325088 (weaknesses). She’s a completely drawn character whose actions move alongside the movie’s occasions; a sturdy female man or woman within the unique experience of the phrase. SFC_Bridesmaids Bridesmaids | Apatow Productions and Relativity Media, 2011 Bridesmaids was successful, however its complicated portrayal of female characters is the exception to the rule of thumb. In reality, many movies fail the conventional “Bechdel take a look at”, comprising three easy requirements which collectively manage to pay for girl characters a naked minimal of depth: A movie should have as a minimum two ladies in it, Who communicate to every different, approximately something except a person. creator Walt Hickey presents a few startling examples: “The Hobbit: An surprising journey” contains fewer than named women and for this reason fails the check on the primarycriterion. And whilst “The Avengers” has as a minimum ladies in the film – Pepper Potts, Black Widow and Agent Hill come to mind – they don’t communicate to each different, so it fails on the second one criterion. And at the same time as the better halves of Doug and Stu are both named and do certainly have a communique in “The Hangover part 3″, it’s aboutAlan, Zach Galifianakis’ individual, so it fails on the 1/3 criterion. The animated movie, “Frozen”, passes the take a look atin view that significant lady characters, Anna and Elsa, discuss the isolationist policies of Arendelle, plans to build a snowman, and the time Elsa locked their civilization in an eternal wintry weather. Frozen met with crucial and business success in 2013. an awesome year for women in movie? perhaps in component, butin keeping with researcher Martha M. Lauzen, lady characters made up best 15 percent of protagonists and 30 percentageof all speaking characters in that 12 months’s top a hundred grossing films. SFC_Frozen From Frozen | Walt Disney Studios, 2013 Why achieve this many movies fail the Bechdel take a look at? Why does “sturdy woman man or woman” imply “macho” in preference to “multidimensional” to such a lot of? surely, longstanding gender bias plays a part. “let’s be honest,” a top studio executive exhorted the new Yorker, “The decision to make movies is basically made by using guys, and if men don’t ought to make movies about girls they won’t.” To be clean, as Manohla Dargis of The ny instances places it, “There isn’t a returned-room cabal of cigar-chomping male – and girl – executives conspiring against female administrators, at the least that I realize of.” alternatively, she describes the reluctance to fund movies with the aid of and about ladies as symptomatic of a conservative industry fearful ofexchange, even supposing embracing alternate may want to produce better Returns on investment. whatever the motives, the fact is that the advent of strong characters – in different phrases, simple vintage right writing – is non-obligatory when it comes to the representation of 1/2 of the arena’s population! Why do audiences take delivery of such a dismal popularity quo? “well, what choice will we have?”, you would possibly fireplace returned. As mentioned lately here at lighting, Hollywood has a tendency to “play it secure”. The identical kinds of movies get made time and again because they bring within thegreenbacks, so we’re barraged by content that assumes the identical simplistic perspective, 12 months in and year out. We’re conditioned to expect and presented few options to the spunk/smarts/fighting potential of Hollywood’s one-dimensional “sturdy female man or woman” type. It’s vital to word this thought of electricity is a wonderfully possible, if really clichéd, triad of developments to build right into a individual. however if your intention is to create a strong character, you want extra dimensions. How will your individual’s strengths and weaknesses fundamentally development the plot? SFC_AlienTerrified From Alien three | twentieth Century Fox, 1992 within the Alien franchise, Ellen Ripley takes on a malevolent creature, however her terror is regularly palpable. In Terminator 2, Sarah Connor realizes her obsession with stopping Judgment Day is turning her right into a monster, so she finds a less compromising way to prevent research into Skynet. in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Starbuck’s guilt surrounding the loss of life of her fiancé impacts her ability to educate new Viper pilots. In shifting their tales from factor A to factor B to point C, Ripley, Sarah, and Starbuck kick ass, but like all people, they’ve got their issues. Of direction, not every movie capabilities a strong person who's woman, and that’s best. “A person’s gender, like their spiritual upbringing or their faith, like their favored book or food, like their sexual orientation and reports, like their schooling and their adolescence, is a component of individual,” creator Greg Rucka reminds us. It’s a single megastar in a constellation of narrative concerns. however it does shine in particular bright in a international waylaid through sexism. We encourage you to be sensitive to the fame quo. Push past the bounds Hollywood has a tendency to set for itself, and don't forget: your precedence is to create strong characters, be they male or lady. display their strengths and their weaknesses, and lead them to vital, not incidental, to the plot. SFC_Boyhood From Boyhood | IFC movies, 2014 exchange comes slowly, mainly in the movie commercial enterprise. however it does come, as suggested by means ofsturdy female characters in latest movies along with Boyhood and still Alice, as well as by way of this year’s Golden Globes, honoring movies wherein girls got to be “real, lovable human beings.” Maggie Gyllenhaal put it nicely in her recognition speech for “quality Actress in a Mini-collection or a motion picture Made for tv” (The Honorable lady): What I see, truely, are girls who are occasionally effective and occasionally now not, sometimes sexy, occasionally now not, now and again honorable, every now and then now not. And what I suppose is new is the wealth of roles for realwomen in tv and in film.

[jeannemalo-blog]

On self awareness, the creative process and  visual essays: Marshall Arisman

Self proclaimed illustrator and storyteller, not only he’s a great example of how far staying true to yourself and to your perspective on art takes you a long way (long enough to be considered one, if not, the pioneer of modern illustration).A teacher and storyteller, the way he speaks about himself is easily relatable on a personal level. 

Born in Jamestown, a small town in upstate New York (known for a thousand psychos and being the place where “nobody dies” according to the BBC) the landscape of his youth gave him a really different perspective on life, that made itself evident as he was trying to find himself as an artist in the 1960’s New York. By the time he was in his early twenties, he tried experimenting with all sorts of techniques, indulging in art movements in vogue at the time (pop art, abstract painting, fluxus). However, this movements, to him, were nothing but becoming what they were supposedly criticizing; “pop art was in essence doing what it pretended to be agains, becoming a commercial market” were his words when describing this period. It the heyday of expressionist and surreal graphic work. Non of this spoke to him due to the circumstances in which he grew up, away from pop culture and into a more traditional and simple way of living. Trying to create something real, close to home, he dig into his life, and started recreating subjects that he’d piled up in his poetic memory (there where without dates or precision you just keep stuff that touched you at some point). He then thought of things like deers, which he had killed, eaten seen but never drew. Cows, which he milked, ate, named but never drew. His mother, his grandmother, a spiritist who was able to see auras. He thought of his relationship with his brother, which he said came from a different planet than him - they had completely opposite personalities. All of this spoke to him truly; it allowed him to speak of something he actually knew, setting the foundation for his work on the next 40 years. 

After working in general motors as a graphic designer and going to the war, he came back and realized  one of the things he needed to explore through art in order to explain or understand (sometimes those two things are kind of the same thing) was violence. This brings us back to his brother. A hunter, gun-loving representation of the american dream, who thought violence was an ordinary thing in every man’s life. He represented a reality so alien; a way of thinking he could never embrace, and yet something so close that this became the subject of his first independent work Frozen Images (1974)

He tried to find a place for this series in quite a bunch of galleries in New York, and he says at least six told him “Man, you better take this thing to Germany, they love this dark shit over there”. Eventually he gave up on trying to fit this into NY pop galleries ‘cause apparently counterculture wasn’t as countercultural after all’, and finally his work was welcomed in print. He landed a job as an illustrator for the Times Magazine where he became the go-to guy for anything related to violence and crime. Influenced by Robert Weaver and André François, he realized that his story telling could be put into illustration (before that, illustration was but “pretty ladies” in feminine magazines) and he developed a thing he called visual essay. It consisted on allowing illustrations to speak for themselves, and to tell stories too, instead of relying on text (in literature this is called poetic images). Though now days this might seem a bit obvious to us, he’s one of the guys that actually made it that way. His style and way of thinking on what to portray relied on the works of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Goya. That’s kind of like a bomb if you think how unapologetic and reckless they were.

Eventually, as time went by he became bolder and rawer and there’s an anecdote he likes to talk about of the time he was asked to make a cover for an article on death penalty. He came up with a painting (the one above this paragraph) and when he got to the office, the chief editor came out holding it under his arm and says “Kid, we’re not printing this; it’s too violent.” Arisman replied “Well frying a guy in a steel electric chair is pretty violent” and the editor then told him something he found rather profound. He said “We live in a culture where when people look at a picture, they don’t asks who the photographer was. They just take is as a reality. They don’t think of the guy taking the photo standing on the dead body. However, when they look at art, they know it takes time. They don’t think of it as a reality, they say the guy who made this is a psycho”. This kind of stories, not only the ones told on illustrations are what makes his work so rich. The context of the work, to him, is the work itself. 

With time, he sought to engage the context of his art in his work, as it enlarged the meanings of his work, and it revealed his creative process. This will inspired  works like The Last Tribe (2009) an exploration of nuclear annihilation (cheerful) or Ayahuasca series, Quechua people rituals (2012) where he used all the mediums taught himself along the way, putting painting, anecdotes and sound in videos where he speaks about the things around these series related to The Bomb. 

“The stories that surround the artwork are always more interesting to me than the artwork itself. And it’s been a luxury frankly, to be able to spend most of my life making pictures about things I’m interested in. And they generate all kinds of other things. I feel lucky about all that. I’ve had the time to do it. I mean I don’t know what it is I’ve done, but I’ve had the time to do it.”

Seldomly, artists allow themselves to reveal the integrity of their creative process, keeping to themselves the not so great, perfect parts of it. He however doesn’t pretend to come out as other “elegant” artist (elegant understood as hiding the processes and rough patches to make the final result seem effortless). In various interviews he’s been emphatic on how personal development relates to the evolution of his work. One of the things that were blocking him when he started was forcing himself to portray subjects that didn’t speak to him in a genuine way. He gives some advice on how this makes art meaningful for you and others regardless of what’s being done:

“If you’re lucky, and you go back to yourself and you start talking about yourself, you suddenly find out that there’s a connection there between you and other people.

Communication is part of the fun, right? It’s just so good when people respond, and say, “I know exactly what you mean” or “These pictures mean something to me.” That’s the nice communication.

It’s also the nice thing about being into print. All kinds of people are looking at it and I don’t have a clue who they are. It’s part of the fun, I think.”

He talks about his reflections naively, focusing on the human said of it. Though in this particular case he speaks only about the creative process, This anecdote is might ve valid when speaking of affecting other people’s life. Sometimes out of experience, or perhaps because we have the means or good intentions, we tend to interrupt the natural course of personal development for those around us. He makes the point when speaking about how he “killed” his mothers creative process:

“I killed the creative spirit in my own mother. Watching this process was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. My mother was a folk artist and made sheep out of bread dough that were her masterpieces. In an effort to bring her more income I marketed her abilities to the Smithsonian gift shop. The sheep sold out on the first order and they re-ordered. After designing a logo, tags invoices and opening a bank account for my mother I called her to find out how it was going. “Don’t ever interfere with my life again” my mother said. “I am so sick of making sheep that I could scream.” My mother never made anything again. The issue was never resolved. The morale is: Do not foll around with the creative process”

To analyze the evolution of an experienced artist like him, who’s still active is that we’re not only witness their process, but we can have its opinion on how things have changed. Despite the fact that illustration no longer offers the stability it used to as a job, he’s got a really optimistic perception on what’s happening in freelancing projects. 

“It’s not really a depressing time. But, if you talk to old-time illustrators, they’re all depressed. These are people who were booked up six months in advance. People who never had to pick up a pencil unless the phone rang. People who made more money every year with the same style for 30 years, and it looked like it was going to go on forever.

But it hasn’t. And those people are bitter. And that’s a shame. But that’s not what it’s about anymore. One of the ironies for me is that the very group of people who are trained to tell stories, the illustrators, never told their own stories.

But what’s replacing that is quite exciting. People are doing graphic novels and comic books. People are creating games and whatever. And what’s generating that, is that freelancing editorial work, which was the mainstay of illustration for most illustrators, is not a market that they can rely on totally anymore.

They’re doing some freelance. And, they’re patching it together with everything else, doing Flash animation and all kinds of things.”

Evidently times have changed, and illustration and the ways contemporary artists work nowadays is radically different. Nobody ever predicted how much technology, internet, social networks or the media would get to affect the panorama of, like, absolutely everything. Still, i believe that some things are inherent to the process of creation, no made which medium, which subject or which time. His story, and the way he tells it illustrate obstacles we ourselves experience in totally different context, and most importantly, the way he overcame this obstacles using art to vehicle the changes of life.

If you want to read all the other anecdotes and things he’s done check the sources for this article;

https://www.societyillustrators.org/marshall-arisman

success ideas from master illustrator marshal arisman:

http://thesherwoodgroup.com/interviews/interview-with-marshall-arisman/#.WPuRWlPyjEo

the last tribe (2009) an exploration of nuclear annihilation

https://vimeo.com/5432640

the new york times

wonderful look at the past. beautiful poetic simple image. Brilliant graphic dog. True aesthetic

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/his-night-train-and-his-dog/?_r=0

On his referents:

Rober weaver

https://www.flickr.com/photos/leifpeng/sets/72157603995211043/

bacon

https://fumeedopium.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/if-you-can-talk-about-it-why-paint-it-francis-bacon/

Lucian Freud

Andre françois