#higher learning movie

[archivesofnostalgia]

the way younger jennifer connelly has me in a chokehold in the movie ‘higher learning’ 😭😭😭

[maskofmilves]

🥺 requesting a fanfic of jennifer connelly’s character taryn x kristen from ‘Higher Learning’ where they end up together or taryn x fem reader and then some wholesome moment like a date night or smth or just cooking together, just anything pls i love jennifer <3 thank u :)

Omg my first fic ask! Yeah of course. How about Taryn x fem!reader where she takes reader on a cute study date sound?

[pondslime]

AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981)  dir. John Landis

[marzipanandminutiae]

God, I hate when my body does that thing where I wake up way too early but I’m bored of sleeping now so I have trouble getting back to sleep even though I really need to to avoid crashing and being sleep deprived later on

Anyway stop calling Crimson Peak dark academia; there’s literally no academia in the movie and you just sound like you don’t know the word “Gothic“ or like you’re spam tagging for some stupid TikTok or Instagram reasons 

[fictionadventurer]

Top five time travel movies/books! :D

See, the trouble is that while I love time travel as a concept, I haven't actually explored the genre that much. I haven't watched/read most of the time travel stories out there, sometimes because I just haven't gotten to it, other times because I'm very picky about content, other times because most of the time travel stories I run across are either "we're a bureaucratic agency dedicated to policing time travel" or "oh, no, what if we change history?" or "I fell in love with a hunky Highlander", none of which are the parts of time travel stories that interest me.

The most accurate version of this list would be a list of Doctor Who episodes (and maybe some Star Trek ones), but you specified movies and books, which is going to make this a much more difficult list to create.

The Day of the Doctor: Haha, I cheated, because Day of the Doctor was released in theaters, which makes it a movie! (So I can use it as a stand-in for all the Doctor Who episodes that are my favorite time travel stories). Thankfully, it's a fantastic time travel story and one of my favorites. It's a genius blend of both "stable timeline" and "changeable timeline" mechanics. Three different interweaving timelines. References to A Christmas Carol. Changing major events in the show's past without changing the timeline that resulted from them at all. A rejection once and for all of the "ends justify the means" mindset that had lingered over the reboot for too long. A masterpiece.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: It's the classic Christmas story for a reason--and one of those reasons is the time travel. Going with Scrooge across decades of his own life and watching him undergo character development from that is a great use of time travel. (And there happens to be a great Doctor Who version, too!)

Star Trek: First Contact: It's fun when you get characters traveling from the future to a different time that's also in the future. Love all the worldbuilding details of these characters interacting with their past/our fictional future, and it's a pretty good story.

Shadowhand by Anne Elisabeth Stengl: The Tales of Goldstone Wood series has a structure unlike any I've ever seen in fantasy, and this book is the reason. The first three books in the series are in chronological order. The next two books are prequels that take place like a thousand years earlier. This book, the sixth, involves characters from the later time period time-traveling to meet characters from the earlier time period, and getting swept up in a legend that they've known since childhood. I remember very little about the book beyond that, but it's such a cool concept (with an unforgettable ending moment) that I have to put it on the list.

Love Strikes Twice: It's one of the very rare Hallmark movies that's actually a decent movie by normal movie standards, so I have to give it credit. Instead of the usual boring time travel plot of "oh no, what if we change history?", we get someone who's trying to change history, who does change history, and it's a good thing. The time travel mechanics surrounding that make no sense, but who cares? It's a fun story with an engaging cast, legitimately funny jokes, a sweet romance, and a solid plot.

[cantsayidont]

Haterating and hollerating through the '90s:

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE (1990): Carrie Fisher scripted this witty adaptation of her novel about coked-up, pill-popping actress Suzanne Yale (Meryl Streep), who overdoses in the bed of a strange man (Dennis Quaid), ends up in rehab, and learns that the only way the production insurance company will let her keep working is if she stays with her mother, an aging singer-actress-diva (Shirley MacLaine) whose love for her daughter is equaled only by her tireless determination to upstage her. (No, it's not autobiographical at all, why do you ask?) Fisher's deftly paced, funny script weaves in various serious mother-daughter moments without ever becoming mawkish, and offers a fabulous part for MacLaine, who has a ball poking fun at herself as well as Debbie Reynolds, Fisher's real-life mother and the obvious basis for the film's lightly fictionalized "Doris Mann." Curiously, the weakest link is Streep, who never quite sheds her customary air of prim affectation and always seems ill at ease with Fisher's layers of self-deprecating, sarcastic humor. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Apparently not, although I had questions about Suzanne's rehab friend Aretha (Robin Barlett). VERDICT: MacLaine's finest hour, but Streep's primness keeps it "good" rather than "great."

TERESA'S TATTOO (1993): Painfully unfunny crime comedy, directed by Melissa Etheridge's then-GF Julie Cypher and costarring Cypher's ex, Lou Diamond Phillips, along with an array of incongruously high-profile actors like Joe Pantoliano, Tippi Hedren, Mare Winningham, Diedrich Bader, k.d. lang (!), Sean Astin, Emilio Estevez, and Kiefer Sutherland, most in bit parts (some of them unbilled). The headache-inducing plot concerns a couple of brain-dead thugs whose elaborate hostage scheme hits a snag when their hostage (Adrienne Shelly) accidentally dies. Their solution is to kidnap lookalike Teresa (also Adrienne Shelly), a brainy Ph.D. candidate, and disguise her to look like the dead girl — including giving her a matching tattoo on her chest — in the hopes that the dead girl's idiot brother (C. Thomas Howell) won't notice the switch until it's too late. This truly bad grade-Z effort, barely released theatrically, feels like either a vanity project or a practical joke that got out of hand, and is interesting mostly as a curiosity for Melissa Etheridge fans: The soundtrack is M.E.-heavy, and Etheridge herself has a brief nonspeaking role. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Technically? (Etheridge has no lines and lang plays a Jesus freak.) VERDICT: May erode your affection for M.E.

BLUE JUICE (1995): Tiresome comedy-drama about an aging surfer (a terribly miscast, painfully uncomfortable-looking Sean Pertwee) who's still determined to continue living like a 20-year-old surf bum with his obnoxious mates, even though his back is giving out and he's perilously close to driving away his girlfriend (a disconcertingly hot 25-year-old Catherine Zeta Jones), who is keen for him to finally cut the shit. Meanwhile, the scummiest of his mates (Ewan McGregor) doses their pal Terry (Peter Gunn) and gets him to chase after an actress from his childhood favorite TV show (Jenny Agutter) in hopes of dissuading from marrying his actual girlfriend (Michelle Chadwick), and their mate Josh (Steven Mackintosh), a successful techno producer, flirts with an attractive DJ (Colette Brown) who's actually furious at him for building a vapid techno hit around a sample of her soul singer dad's biggest hit. The latter storyline probably had the most potential (although a weird scene where Josh is castigated by a group of outraged soul fans seems like a lesser TWILIGHT ZONE plot), but none of the script's various threads ever amounts to much. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It doesn't even pass the Bechdel test. VERDICT: If you happen upon it, you may be tempted just for Zeta Jones (and/or Brown), but the rest wears out its welcome with alacrity.

HIGHER LEARNING (1995): Potent story of simmering racial tensions on the campus of a university that definitely isn't USC (writer-director John Singleton's alma mater, and where most of the film was obviously shot), let down by incredibly heavy-handed execution. (The film's final shot is of the word "UNLEARN" superimposed over a giant American flag!) A capable cast (including Omar Epps, Kristy Swanson, Michael Rapaport, Jennifer Connelly, Ice Cube, Tyra Banks, Cole Hauser, Laurence Fishburne, and Regina King) tries to maintain a sense of emotional reality through Singleton's frequent excursions into overpowering melodrama, but there are so many competing plot threads that few characters have any depth; curiously, the script's most complex characterization is in the scenes between budding white supremacist Remy (Rapaport) and Aryan Brotherhood organizer Scott (Hauser). Singleton made this film when he was 25, and there's no shame in its sense of breathless ambition (even if it inevitably bites off more than it can chew), but the overwrought stridency undercuts its intended impact. For a more effective treatment of similar themes in roughly the same period, try Gilbert Hernandez's graphic novel X, originally serialized in LOVE & ROCKETS #31–39 and first collected in 1993. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Jennifer Connelly gives Kristy Swanson a bisexual awakening. VERDICT: The '90s through a bullhorn.

CRASH (1996): Divisive David Cronenberg adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel, about a movie producer called James Ballard (James Spader) and his desperately horny wife (Deborah Kara Unger), drawn into a loose-knit group of car-crash fetishists organized around a man called Vaughan (Elias Koteas at his creepiest), who stages recreations of famous celebrity crashes like the 1955 accident that killed James Dean. Despite some pretentious dialogue about "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology," the controlling idea might be better summarized as "anything can be a paraphilia if you get weird enough about it." Part of what offends people about the film is that Cronenberg deliberately treats the entire story with the same frosty clinical detachment, rendering the "normal" sex scenes just as remote and perverse as the characters' fixation on the grisly aftermath of car wrecks; the point is that there is no line, just different facets of the same erotic longing, which each of the (admittedly unsympathetic) principal characters embodies in different ways. Spader, Kara Unger, and Koteas are very good, as is Holly Hunter, in perhaps the bravest role of her career, but Rosanna Arquette is underutilized. A worthwhile companion piece would be Steven Soderbergh's 1989 SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, also with Spader, which is much more highly regarded (though almost as contrived and scarcely less perverse), perhaps because it seeks to titillate where Cronenberg does not. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Briefly. (See previous note in re: underutilization of Rosanna Arquette.) VERDICT: Icy but interesting.

[djs-sideblog-for-pog-trains]

ok. i finally caved and watched journey beyond sodor. so many questions but many things i liked. mostly being thomas and james. i adore them.

[surrender-souls]

i am ECSTATIC cause i just found out the marvelous land of oz did get a proper adaptation! i thought it was always combined with ozma of oz cause dorothy is in that one, but no! theres the wonderful land of oz from 1969 which exists! and is apparently faithful to the book! and is low budget!

LOOK AT THEM! yes that’s wogglebug i think.

[specific90saesthetics]

[247liveculture]

Laurence Fishburne, Ice Cube, and John Singleton on set of ‘Poetic Justice’

[theglasscat]

gonna say the same thing i say every 2 years:

what if we remade my life as a teenage robot but with women writers

[mantisgodsdomain]

We're going to talk about our cool vampire guy headcanons again. We like to set Monsieur Scarlet as a member of Solenopsis invicta, albeit a very unconventional example of the species. As a fire ant, technically, he is venomous - however, he's not actually had venom production online for decades, and at this point the cost for Making That Bite Work Again far outweighs the perceived benefit.

Would it be directly useful for his survival to be capable of injecting people with venom that causes intense burning sensations? Yes, probably, especially since he's at a scale where the swelling induced would probably take out an arm for hours at a time. He's just not going to fix it, because that takes life force that he could be using for other purposes, like breathing, or keeping his heart running, or having an emergency teleportation stock so that he can fling himself a metre or two in any direction when need be.

[a-story-teller]

Frankly I don't care if tlou show is good. If people are too above gaming to absorb the story through a game, they don't deserve the story

[thestarmaker]

I give the pauly shore pinocchio movie a 6/10, it might not have been good but it was better than I expected. I had fun! Mr Shore had the most fun of all!

[womantoday]

Kristy Swanson (Kristen Connor), Jennifer Connelly (Taryn): Higher Learning {1995}

[totallyhussein-blog]

Mosul discoveries brought to light in new documentary

In 2014, Mosul fell under the control of ISIS (also called Daesh). During its three-year reign, the militants destroyed artifacts and buildings saying they were forms of idolatry.

As the CBC news channel explains, they also targeted sites for looting and to get attention, filming the destruction and sharing it in propaganda videos online.

But ISIS's actions inadvertently created opportunities. Sifting through the wreckage after ISIS's occupation, archaeologists have gained new insights into this great ancient city.

The city of Mosul in northern Iraq encompasses what was once Nineveh, the largest city in the seventh century BC and capital of Assyria, the world's first superpower.

Lost World of the Hanging Gardens looks at new discoveries in the ashes of ISIS's occupation and explores whether Nineveh was in fact the site of a lost wonder of the world — the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.