#i found out his actor played a cowboy and that is dangerous for me

[courtoftheclueless]

how many images of a character/actor can I trace before I admit hes a main fo? who knows. i don't. the number is not ten.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

High Noon, All In

Valentín Ruiz leaned against the kitchen counter. He slipped his leather jacket open, exposing the holstered gun on his belt, like a gunslinger in a Western movie showing his opponent he was armed and a force to be reckoned with. His gaze swept over Chloe Grant’s belongings, stopping on another cardboard box in the corner, and locking onto the contents he could spot in its open topside.

She had still been unpacking. Still moving into this new home. The knife block sat at the top inside that box, still wrapped in newspapers. Both of them could see hints of knife handles through the crumpled paper.

He peeled his sight away from the open box, and their gazes met. He scratched the stubble on his chin, then sighed. A long, weary sigh.

Though she remained speechless, Grant’s most prominent thought echoed like a scream inside her mind.

Her gun was upstairs. His was right at his hip.

It wouldn’t have looked good for him if he were to shoot her in her own kitchen, but they both had sophisticated military backgrounds, and both had been working in private sectors, shrouded in secrecy. To some extent, they both had the skills and knowhow of spies, and could make each other vanish from the Earth without a trace if they just tried hard enough.

Grant considered herself a good judge of character. But in a situation like this, all bets were off.

Their previous banter, paired with the flirtatious glint in his eyes, could have meant anything. Maybe he was always just like that, using it to disarm situations and make friendly. Or maybe he was a good actor, using it all to conceal more nefarious intentions, allowing the wolf to creep closer before it pounced. Or maybe it was entirely genuine.

She found Ruiz hard to read now. His poker face gelled well with his model’s face.

Eyes still locked onto her, he finally broke the awkward silence by saying, “I never asked, did I? You aren’t from around Texas.”

“Nope,” she said, popping the single syllable like a balloon. “You never asked indeed.”

He emitted something that died halfway between scoffing and a chortle. He chased that with a wam smile.

“Okay, well, are you from Texas? Or not?”

Grant’s phone buzzed. A short message. She hesitated to check.

Instead, she countered his question. “You said the job and HQ can wait, you needed to talk. Almost had me convinced it was something serious, but now we’re small-talking in my sorry excuse of a kitchen?”

She leaned against the other counter, opposite Ruiz, and crossed her arms. She sold her words with a crooked smirk.

He bought it.

“I’m from Cali,” he said, “and figured you were too, based on how you talk. Or maybe it’s Nevada?”

Her smirk transformed into a genuine smile.

A good guess.

He was good, after all.

“Yeah. L.A. You?”

Another half-chortle, half-scoff.

“Same. People say it’s a small world, but a city like that’s big enough for us to never meet before this job a couple o’ states over. How about that, huh?”

The phone buzzed again.

“Maybe we just got around a lot,” she said, her smile fading. “Is this… going anywhere?”

His sunny demeanor also faded. With a thumb hooked into his leather pants’ pocket, his right hand hovered dangerously close to his pistol all the while.

“What? I thought you wanted me to ask you out for drinks, off the job, sometime. Wasn’t that what you implied at Carrington’s?”

“I didn’t imply anything, I flat-out said it. But tell me something, now. You go to a lady’s home first to ask her out for drinks? Is that how you roll, cowboy?” Her lips twitched until they formed another crooked smile—keeping her cool, trying to lure his motives out into the open. “How’d you find this place anyway? You following me around now? Are you stalking me?”

He tilted his head, then shook it, averting his eyes. Like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, he played it off with natural charm. A wide smile revealed a perfect set of teeth, just adding to the pleasant image. And he employed a soft, smoky chuckle to punctuate it all, to downplay everything.

Her phone buzzed again.

“Yeah, okay, I admit, I followed you here from Carrington, figured I wanted to ask in private,” he said. He was good. She had not seen his motorcycle on her tail for the entire ride. Offering Grant a sliver of relief, he unhooked his thumb, removing his hand from the vicinity of his gun, to wag a finger at her—to point at the phone in her jacket, specifically, just as it buzzed yet again. “You gonna get that?”

She grinned and grimaced both.

“You know, it’s work. Our work. I’m surprised your phone isn’t blowing up right now, too.”

He shook his head, still wielding that charming smile. “I prefer to keep it off when I have more important people to see.”

Oh, he was good. If he suspected that she knew anything about his espionage at Future Proof for Corsino, he was burying it under mountains of flirting.

Under other circumstances, it might have worked.

She slowly fished the phone out of her pocket, and it buzzed for the umpteenth time, now in her hand.

New messages flashed on-screen.

“We should be getting to HQ, saddling up already. And if you’d been paying attention to our employer, you’d know. We’re headed to the Appalachian mountains? Gonna be a long ride. So, I’m flattered you rate this…” she paused, using a gesture to bounce between the two of them, “as more pressing than your seriously lucrative job, but… I, for my part, would like to see those fat paychecks keep rollin’ in.”

He raised his hands like she had him in a stickup, palms facing her in surrender. With a nod of his head, he encouraged her to check her phone.

11:59, said the display.

High noon.

She fought the urge of looking up, to keep an eye on his right hand and the holstered gun.

As expected, messages from HQ were flooding her lock screen. Two of them in between had come from Danielle Bennett—from her own private number, not work.

Where ARE you? —Dan, 11:57

Grant held up a hand before Ruiz could say anything else. He shrugged in response. She took a moment to reply to Dan’s message.

Her heart was racing, but not because Ruiz was such a heartthrob. The silvery iron on his hip still kept her nervous enough, the subterfuge put all his flirting into question, and she still considered finding a way to elegantly excuse herself, to retrieve her own piece from upstairs.

For all she knew, she was about to take a bullet. Or ten.

Grant permitted none of this to surface in any shape or form. She bit her lip and answered Danielle, not HQ.

Had to make it snappy. Had to word it just right.

Her thumbs raced at a pace to match her heartbeat, tapping out a swift reply.

If anything happens to me, he’s at my place right now, and he’s got a private semi-auto 45 ACP, not issued by FP.

Message sent.

Grant quickly stuffed the phone back into her pocket. It soon buzzed more with a flurry of incoming messages. She knew they were all sent by Dan.

Without commenting on the flood of texts that kept her phone abuzz, Ruiz only arched a brow.

He stared into her eyes.

“Listen,” he said. A deep, shuddering sigh escaped him. The sheer power of it stunned her, and made her racing heart skip a beat.

He pulled off his beanie cap and ran a hand through dark hair, ruffling it as he visibly struggled to find the right words.

That sigh had blown away all flirtatious air about him. He shifted uncomfortably where he stood, still leaning against the counter. The hand so dangerously close to his pistol, it joined the other, folding in front of him and guiding his sight to the checkered floor between them.

“I am a spy,” he said. Each soft word landed like thunderclaps. “I work for an industry rival of FP’s.”

Her stomach knotted. The pause he allowed to follow only fueled her paranoia.

Was this another play?

Was he fishing for something else? Was he onto her, trying to find out who knew that she knew, to find whom she answered to?

Her mind flashed to Danielle Bennett, an innocent face on the surface of a sea of secrets.

Emotions started bubbling up from the depths.

Social engineering and confidence plays were tricky business, and whether this was a play of his or not, it had worked wonders in robbing Grant of her cool. She couldn’t think of any cards to play, and the sheer possibility of him being this stupid made her angry. It also somehow made her angry that his flirting might have all been hot air all along.

“What the hell?” she blurted out. “Why would you tell me that? Why me? Are you stupid?”

Another sigh escaped him.

He avoided eye contact.

Between her simmering sources of anger, and the very surprise of it all, she struggled to sense any deception. It was either a very good, aggressive bluff on his behalf, or her instincts were right, and he was coming clean to her in earnest.

Still, the question lingered. It compelled her to repeat it.

“Why? Why me?”

Another sigh from Ruiz now shuddered with gravity. He finally met her gaze again. The wet glitter of sorrow in his eyes hinted at a deep ocean of its own, an untapped well of tears, and a conflicted man hidden behind it all.

Everything he’d say would feel so very, deeply honest.

“When Spencer hired you, I… convinced Singh to let me get my eyes on your file. And when I saw that, I figured you were hired to ferret out any potential leaks or whistleblowers or spies in the organization. That’s kind of your specialty, isn’t it?”

Grant clenched her jaw so hard that her teeth almost started hurting from the pressure.

The look in his eyes reminded her of a puppy dog.

This, she hated. She really didn’t like dogs, not even in such an abstract sense.

“Well, I didn’t really sign up for that,” she snapped, “but I can see why you’d arrive at that misconception.”

Averting his gaze again, he shook his head.

“You know, I used to think it was the right thing to do. Everything about our company is shady. It’s shady as all hell,” he said. The words he used somehow dulled the edge. Maybe it was the softness in it, the sense of vulnerability he projected. His gravelly voice cracked, if ever so briefly. “Who’s the good guys, really? Who’s the bad guys? Sure, the extra pay didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt one bit. But I was convinced it was better for this to be out in the open somehow, that it might be dangerous if Spencer held all this power in his hands, all this knowledge. Y’know?”

It was a lot to process. If this was a play, then he had gone all-in, put all his chips on the table, and asked to see Grant’s hand.

She had nothing. Nothing to match it.

It didn’t even feel like a play. It was probably more apt to understand it as someone who was quitting the game altogether.

Where she failed to reply, he continued speaking.

“Now? Carter was shot. Dead. We buried him after some gung-ho military asshole shot him, and I think it’s my fault—no—I know it’s my fault. And Singh’s behind bars, and this fucking shake—”

He raised his hand. His left hand—the one she had not been watching as closely, as it had been farther away from the holstered gun on his hip—now that she focused on it, she could see that it shook.

Tremors shook it.

Ruiz balled his hand into a fist but the tremors remained. His eyes sparkled brighter.

“This fuckin’ shake doesn’t go away anymore. I fucked up, Grant. I want you to turn me in or whatever, or just hear me out. Fuck. I don’t even really know you. I’m sorry I’m dumping all this horseshit on your lap. I just… I need someone to talk, I guess.”

His words fell the softest he had ever uttered. He rubbed his forehead, hiding his eyes behind his hand.

It was the least rehearsed thing she had ever felt coming from him.

This player had quit the game. He was on the verge of breaking down in her half-furnished house, in her sorry excuse of a kitchen.

She bit her lip. The ball of anger dissipated into a much milder frustration, a tinier pit, churning in her stomach.

In that moment, she decided to take him at face value. She could have gone on and continued questioning his motives and his every action, but the puzzle pieces fit into their rightful places.

Grant didn’t really know him either, but… this…

This felt honest.

“Shit, man,” she muttered, stirring as she broke free from her quiet shock, “this is so, so much to take in right now. You have no idea.”

It was her turn to release a deep sigh. Part of it was relief. She didn’t want to be cynical.

“Can I—do you mind if I smoke in here?” he asked. He blinked many times, blinking away the glitter in his eyes before he’d dare show any tears.

“Yeah, I mind. There’s no smoking in my house,” she answered with firmness.

He wiped his lips with those trembling fingers.

The gun at his hip no longer exuded a tangible threat. It just rested there. Just like the gun upstairs, in her bedroom. She would fetch it later, after he left.

“Shit, man, we got a lot o’ shit on our plate as it is. Now you come to me with… this? Like I said, it’s gonna be a long ride to the Appalachian, we need to get to HQ, and I need to think about what you said. I’ll tell you this, though, I wasn’t hired for counterintelligence,” she said, omitting the part of her having been doing that without being asked to. And as much as she disliked dogs, the look he then cast her way made her think of a kicked puppy. She swept her hair back, suppressed a groan of frustration, and the harsh tone faded from her voice altogether. Everything softened. “We’ll talk about it more, okay? But we also need to do our job—the Anomalies, the specimens and incursions—people’s lives are on the line, and we gotta hustle. See you at HQ, okay? Let’s talk shop after we get back from the field. Okay?”

Instead of tears, he broke out into another hybrid between scoffing and a chuckle. There wasn’t anything flirtatious or playful about it, instead having turned into something resembling relief.

He’d soon leave. She’d soon have packed and left as well, heading downtown to Future Proof’s towering skyscraper. And soon after that, they’d be en route to Kentucky.

They exchanged furtive, secretive glances during briefings in the boardroom and briefings in R&D, and between every step of travel where they looked each other’s way.

Grant now shared the burden of his secret. They did not speak about it at all. She felt watched all day, all night, all flight.

The tremor in his right hand remained, visible to her despite all attempts at hiding it. On the final stretch of flight into the Appalachian mountains, only Grant saw it.

Mischchenko chewed over their field operation orders from Spencer while they performed a final check on their EMD rifles. Pruitt was busy piloting the airlift chopper.

Max Carter was conspicuously absent. It felt like he should have been there. Instead, there was just an empty spot on the bench next to Ruiz.

That conversation in the kitchen had been haunting Grant all the while, all journey long. Everything else since had flowed past her in a blur. The most she remembered was trying to calm Danielle down, saying they’d sort things out soon enough.

She went through all the necessary motions. Kept to herself otherwise.

Grant kept her masked, helmeted head down, and followed Mischchenko’s instructions. Checked and re-checked her EMD rifle. Their battery packs whined as they powered their weapons up.

By the time the black, unmarked chopper swooped down over foggy Kentucky woods in the middle of nowhere, it was noon again.

The Anomaly glittered below.

That terrible, beautiful globe of splintered, slowly spinning lights, like glass shards shining with brilliant reflections of the sun…

Reports indicated pterodactyls in the area as a primary threat in the incursion. Burch confirmed the veracity of the images, and Stantz was busy having Bennett and their other minions scrubbing all video and image footage from the ‘net.

For the operators on site, the helmet visors concealed their faces. This kept the warmth inside their body armor, and it also hid all their facial expressions.

Even so, Ruiz’s stare lingered on Grant every now and then.

And she thought back to the kitchen, and how he had played his final hand, laying all cards out on the figurative table between them. It made her think of the blue-white checkered floor.

Would she tell Spencer? They needed to make a decision. A very cautious decision.

Some part of her related deeply to Ruiz. In all honesty, she didn’t trust Spencer herself. The power of these Anomalies, the power to affect time itself…

On the ground, she looked up at the Kentucky Anomaly in awe. It shimmered where it revolved mid-air, hovering inches above the frosted forest floor. This scintillating sphere was big enough to let another T-Rex escape from the past into their present.

Mischchenko was busy handling Doctor Solomon’s new variant of the ALM—what he had been so excited to share with the class. His new “innovation”.

This new variant could not only lock the Anomaly to prevent things from passing through the breaches in time—it could alternatively enforce stability. They could effectively stabilize a Flicker, what the R&D team had labeled an unstable Anomaly, which would work wonders if they ever needed to herd dinosaurs back through a Flicker again.

Ruiz returned from a sweep of the perimeter.

“No eyes on our big birds,” he reported. “But you’d think we’d hear ‘em make big shrieks to match.”

The ALM refused to lock the Anomaly. Mischchenko jiggled a cable. Slapped the side of the futuristic device.

She answered with frustration ringing in her voice—not over Ruiz’s report—but the ALM’s refusal to obey. “Burch said they’d be more silent hunters. Might not hear big wings until it’s too late.”

“These woods are pretty quiet today,” Grant remarked.

And with that, Mischchenko froze. The helmet kept her face as unreadable as everybody else’s, but Grant sensed the sudden shift in her superior’s air.

“You’re right,” Mischchenko said. “And now that you mention it, it’s too damn quiet. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Her movements turned hasty. She slapped the ALM’s metal case again, this time prompting lights to flare up on its top. The spiky sphere at its front starting spinning, and the Anomaly reacted—

The mighty, scintillating ball of light collapsed, compacting, shrinking from a huge, spinning sphere into a suitcase-sized orb, frozen and immobile mid-air.

The ALM hummed in chorus with the chugging generator wired up to it.

“Shit,” Ruiz muttered, so quiet that Grant only heard it over the radio bud in her ear. “I only now got what you mean, Mischchenko. Something’s wrong. We should be hearing… I don’t know what. It’s too damn quiet out here. I don’t hear Jack or shit.”

Mere seconds later, the chirping started. Chittering and scuttling sounds, drawing closer, ever closer. Shuffling, squeaking, and above all, chirping.

Not the chirping of birds.

Chirping of things on the ground. Buzzing.

Wings, far tinier than those of pterodactyls.

The mist around the Anomaly’s site roiled. Things emerged from it. Many, many things. Things that caused that symphony of buzzing and scuttling and chirping.

A living flood neared from every direction around them. The forest grounds teemed with life. Insects, the size of dogs, swarmed those frozen grounds.

Their three-person team was surrounded.

Ruiz shot first. Then the two women followed suit. Their EMDs flared up, discharging bright bolts of energy into the crawling swarm of weird locusts. The earth crackled with electricity, and those bugs were slowed, sometimes stunned… but the rest of the living tide swarmed every closer.

And quickly.

“Open the Anomaly back up,” Grant shouted between shots into the swarm. Then, as Mischchenko failed to comply, she repeated herself. “Open the damn’ Anomaly!”

Mischchenko stopped shooting and swiveled. She backed up, then hammered the device, shutting down the ALM.

The locked orb of the Anomaly exploded, expanding back into the brilliant, rotating sphere it had formed before.

The three field operatives continued firing shots in a futile attempt at stemming the tide, but they would never stop it like this—only slow it down, at best. Backing up all the while, shooting into these alien hordes of insect-like mutants, the light of the Anomaly engulfed them.

Pruitt was shouting over the intercom for a sitrep, but he would receive none as they shouted at each other in their desperate retreat, then all communications died.

The team vanished into the Anomaly, and the swarm followed.

[goldenguillotines]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! give me all you got this is a stickup.

Dedicating this one to ocs I don't talk about/too new :3c Just for you Claire. Though some might have some shorter information due to uh.. kicking rocks. Found out I have a lot of drinkers/vampires on this post whoops

(Design/Art by @trollbriidge !)

Darius Xheime | Lime Blood Seadweller | Scene | Troll hot topic employee

Darius is a loud silly.. They don't know how loud they're being or maybe it's all the fuckinf music playing overhead on loop that makes it hard for them to hear just how loud they're being. Sporting a energy drink addiction and a penchant for collecting the cans..

(Design/Art by @damistrolls )

Dimvis Asyoqa | Fuchsia Blood Seadweller | Actor | Rainbowdrinker | Poet

Dimvis is an eccentric man.. You know that theater kid? Yeah that was him, now he's an adult and he's worse. Currently the face of a certain company and can be found on the silver screen or on stage

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Vieden Pasele | Indigo | Bodyguard | Maid | Tea maker

Vieden is one of Nasuki's loyal Maids.. She is her bodyguard and fiercely loyal at that. Ex fleet.. she left her position on Cormai's crew to serve her mistress. She's quiet and a listener more than a talker. She'll remember information you've forgotten!

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Krazel Eshket | Purple blood | Clown | Informant | Trapeze artist

Krazel is Natani's loyal right hand man.. ok maybe not as close as Taeyon is to Natani.. But right up there. Krazel has been serving the Yaukul family for some time and sees this as a rather good change of pace between his time at the circus. Don't underestimate him just based on all those sparkles.. he's rather devoted and dangerous.

(Design/Art by @norts-trolls )

Monark Keehvu | Mutant Bronze | Fae | Mutant | Forest Guardian

Monark was a Fae just like any other.. but beholding the terrors warped them into their current form. Moonkeeper had exiled them from their community.. and now ghost among the forest as a rumored "monster".. They miss the days where they met The Sun in person for comfort..

(Design/Art by @trollbriidge )

Silias Fvyoni | Bronze Sea Dweller | Rainbowdrinker | Cowboy

Silias stop causing problems. Thank you. A young man with bitey tendencies.. hes known for dine and dashing after hookups. Being know as the town menace.. though not as bad as everyone makes him out to be. Keeps some.. unsightly things out of the town and does so to keep order.

(Design/Art by @greedkinggreaser )

Dorain Liesce | Jade Blood | Rainbowdrinker | Rich | Writer

Dorian is a very smug Rainbowdrinker, a fortune at his finger tips that he has either amassed over the eons from 'work' or swindling from his many devotees and fans. He's made a large collection or books that can be found in almost every library, horror stories and romance stories.. all thought out wirh upmost detail.. Kinda a little too much detail. Almost feels real..

(Design/Art by @shinsart / @/ambivalence-and-torpor )

Ashoku Erceim | Jade Blood | Rainbowdrinker | Lounge singer | Guitarist

Ashoku is one of Navika's loyal students! Brought in by her girlfriends ♤ ( Fuetre, Cherie and Siyahi), she's been a rather interesting character among their students. More brash and prickly than the others.. not a fan of dressing up for their performances either.. She does bend and dress up for it. She's got a lot of potential.. maybe if she was just as dedicated as some others others

(Design/Art by @cadavertrolls )

Merlot Camfae | Rust Blood | Fae | Record shop owner | Piercer

Merlot is one of the older Fae around, escaped their village as a young adult, they chose to seek after the moon and sun in secret. Rather than under someone else's orders. They do so in secret.. often some interesting looking butterflies can be found flapping about on the search. Luckily, Wicatas magic does wonders to hide their Fae presence..

(Design/Art by @leethetrashpage )

Jisoou Hayeun | Cyan Blood Seadweller | Idol | Mafia | Jewlery maker

Jisoou is Otromes twin! Who's blood color is the original one? uh.. Pass? After some sweeps as a Trainee she's finally made it at 7sins! Apart of one of the smaller girl groups.. she's known for having a very bubbly personality, often sticking close to Yufaun and spreading some sunshine where she goes! A very smiley gal

[letterboxd]

Work Horse.

Taking on a rare leading role in his decades-spanning career, national treasure Tim Blake Nelson speaks with Mitchell Beaupre about demystifying heroes, reinventing genres and something called a quiche Western.

“This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story... You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs.” —Tim Blake Nelson

Described by Letterboxd members as “a national treasure” who “makes everything better”, Tim Blake Nelson is a journeyman actor who has tapped into practically every side of the industry since making his feature debut in Nora Ephron’s This Is My Life back in 1992. Whether you are a Marvel fanatic, a history buff or a parent trying to get through the day, the actor’s distinctive presence is a charming sight that’s always welcome on the screen.

Tim Blake Nelson is one of those rare actors who unites all filmgoers, a man genuinely impossible not to love, which certainly seems to be the case for Hollywood. Checking off working relationships with directors ranging from Terrence Malick and Ang Lee to Hal Hartley and Guillermo Del Toro, Nelson has covered the boards, even crossing over into directing and writing, both in films and on the stage.

Yet, despite being a renowned talent who can take a smaller supporting role in a massive Steven Spielberg blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and carry the film, Nelson-as-leading-man sightings have been few and far between. In fact, it’s quite a struggle to find a film with Nelson in a leading role, as even playing the titular role for directors who understand his greatness still results in him only appearing in the opening section of an anthology feature.

At last, the leading role Nelson fans were in need of has arrived in the form of Old Henry, a new Western from writer/director Potsy Ponciroli. Nelson plays the eponymous Henry, a widowed farmer with a mysterious past who makes a meager living with his son (Gavin Lewis), doing his best to leave his old life behind and hide away from the world. Things get complicated when Henry stumbles upon a satchel of cash and a wounded stranger (Scott Haze), bringing them both into his home. Soon, a dangerous posse led by an intimidating Stephen Dorff comes calling, setting the stage for an old-fashioned throwdown in this twisty Western siege thriller.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Old Henry has been warmly received on Letterboxd. “Old Henry feels like the culmination of Tim Blake Nelson’s twenty-plus-year career, but from another dimension, where he’s highly regarded as a leading man”, writes Noah, speaking not only to the strength of Nelson’s performance, but also to the fact that this leading role shouldn’t be such a rarity. Todd awards Nelson the prize for “Best Facial Hair in a 2021 film”, before applauding the actor for pouring “every emotion in his body to play Henry”.

Letterboxd’s East Coast editor Mitchell Beaupre saddled up for a chat with Nelson about the intentional hokiness of the Westerns that made him fall in love with filmmaking, how the Coen brothers put other directors on notice, and the fatherly joy of keeping it all in the family.

I’ve seen a lot of interviews with you discussing your career as an actor, a writer, and a director. You always speak with such reverence for the art. Where does that passion come from for you? What made you want to pursue this field? Tim Blake Nelson: It’s funny, doing these interviews for Old Henry has been reminding me of my introduction to filmmaking as an art. I’ve realized that I had never quite located it, but it really started with the Sergio Leone Westerns, which I would see on television when I was growing up in Oklahoma in the ’70s. Before that, going to the cinema was always invariably a treat, no matter what the film, but I would just be following the story and the dialogue.

The Sergio Leone movies were the first ones that exposed subjectivity in telling stories on film to me. That was where I became aware of the difference between a closeup and an extreme closeup, or how you could build tension through a combination of the angle on a character with the editorial rhythm, with the lens size, with the music in addition to the dialogue and the story.

How old were you when this shift in your understanding of cinema was happening? I think it was across the ages of ten and eighteen, where I suddenly realized that this was an auteur here, Leone. There was a guy behind all these movies I was seeing—and in Oklahoma, you could see a Sergio Leone movie every weekend. This was a man making deliberate and intelligent decisions in everything that I was seeing.

I started noticing that a character was in a duster that goes all the way down to his boots, even though that’s not necessarily accurate to the Old West. That’s something else. Also, why is he wearing it in the desert? Would that have been very practical? And look at that cigar Clint Eastwood is smoking. It’s not smooth, it looks like it was a piece of tree root. Then later I learned it’s a particular kind of Italian cigar, but somehow it was defining this genre of Western. I marveled at that, and found it unbelievably thrilling to discover. I loved the stories and the dialogue and the intentional hokiness of it all. All of it was conspiring to teach me to venerate this form.

Sergio Leone, his daughters, and Clint Eastwood on the set of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966).

The connection there is interesting between the Leone Westerns to where Old Henry is at now. You’ve talked before about how the Western genre is one that is reinvented over and over throughout the years— Oh, you do your homework!

I try my best! What would you say defines the current era of Westerns that we’re seeing, and how the genre is being reinvented? Well, Joel and Ethan [Coen] did a lot of mischief, in a good way, with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Genres are always about genres, in addition to their story. So, I would say that Buster Scruggs is the quintessential postmodern Western, if you look at it as one movie instead of as an anthology, because it celebrates the history of the form. The magic of that movie is that it engages you in each story while also being a meditation on death. That’s what connects each one of those tales, and then it’s also a meditation on storytelling to boot. In the final chapter, you have a character talking about why we love stories, and he’s telling it to a bunch of people who you’ll learn are all dead.

The stories are a way of delaying the inevitable mortality. I mean, look at that. It’s such an accomplishment. With that movie, I think Joel and Ethan put filmmakers on notice that Westerns had better always be also about Westerns, because whether you like it or not, they are. I think they probably came to understand that when they were making True Grit, although knowing the two of them they probably understood it already.

Do you feel there’s a direct correlation between a movie like Buster Scruggs and Old Henry, in this era of postmodern, revisionist Westerns? How it impacts a movie like Old Henry is that you have Potsy embracing the Western-ness of the movie. This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story. You’ve got the cantankerous old man hiding a past, who’s a maverick who wants to keep the law and the bad guys off his property. He wants to be left alone. You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs. Yet, it’s all accomplished without irony in a very straightforward way that is utterly confident, and in love with the genre.

I think ultimately that’s why the movie works, because it’s very front-footed. It’s not hiding from you. It’s not deceiving you and trying to tell you it’s something that it isn’t. It’s a good, straightforward Western.

Tim Blake Nelson as the titular singer in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (2018).

That’s a bit different from those Leone Westerns, with all of their anachronisms. I remember when the movie Silverado came out when I was growing up, and people were calling it a “quiche Western”, which was funny. That was what they would call it in Oklahoma because it had a bunch of movie stars in it, who weren’t known for being in Westerns. It was the Sergio Leone crowd calling it that. I went and saw it, wondering, “Well, if it’s a quiche Western, then why is everybody talking about it?” I saw it, and I loved it. Those folks putting it down like that were wrong. It’s actually a straightforward, hard-boiled, hardcore unapologetic Western. You don’t like some of the movie stars in it, but get over it. The reason that movie works is because it’s straight-ahead and well-told, and I think that movie holds up.

Old Henry is the same kind of animal. It’s more in the tradition of Sergio Leone—or, actually, I would say more in the tradition of Unforgiven. That was a big influence on Potsy.

Unforgiven was marvelous in the way it demystified that old black hat/white hat mentality of Westerns, opening up a more multi-dimensional understanding. You’re no stranger to that. A series like Watchmen takes that approach with superheroes, who in a sense hold the position now that Western heroes used to hold culturally. Do you find there’s more of a demand these days to challenge those archetypes who used to be put on pedestals—be they superheroes, cowboys, police—and provide a deeper analysis? Absolutely, yes. At the same time, I think the demystified Western hero goes back to John Wayne in The Searchers. I think it really started with that character, one of the greatest characters ever in a Western. There’s One-Eyed Jacks, with Marlon Brando, which was made just after The Searchers, and again embracing this concept of an extremely complicated man. I don’t think you get the Sergio Leone movies without that.

I always think of McCabe & Mrs. Miller as a Western that was doing something totally different than anything I had seen before. That’s another one, with that final image with the character smoking opium, going into oblivion after the demise of Warren Beatty’s very flawed character, after you’ve watched what it has taken to really build that town. You have a director, Robert Altman, making the deliberate choice to shoot in order so that they can build the town while they’re shooting the movie, and you really get the cost of it. I think there’s a lot of history to get to a place where a movie like Unforgiven can happen. Then Clint comes along and, as he often does, moves it forward even more.

Gavin Lewis as Henry’s son Wyatt in ‘Old Henry’.

That’s a film that tackles legacy, as does Old Henry, which at its core is ultimately about the relationship between a father and his son. You got to work on this film with your own son, coincidentally named Henry, who was part of the art department. What is that experience like, getting to share your passion with your son on a project together? Well, I think something that is true for the character of Henry and for myself, and perhaps all of us, is that we all want our kids to have better lives than ours. I want that to be true in every respect. Mostly, I want them to be more fulfilled than I have been. My kids look at me when I say that and say, “Thanks a lot Dad for raising that bar”, because they see that I have a pretty good life. Which I do, but I still think they can be more fulfilled than I am, and I want that for them. One of the great privileges of this movie was to watch my son—who was the on-set decorator—work his ass off.

Those are the words of an incredibly proud father. He’s a work horse, and he’s learning about filmmaking, and I think on his current trajectory he will go beyond where I’ve gone as a filmmaker, directing more movies than I’ve been able to direct. Do a better job at it, too. He’s also a singer-songwriter, and I think he can have a venerable career doing that if he wants, but he wants to make movies too, and I hope that’s going to happen for him. It was a thrill to watch him do the work, the twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and after every take resetting and making sure everything was right. It felt like an accomplishment to see him take on that responsibility and do the real work every day.

Related content

SJ Holiday’s lists of Essential Neo-Westerns and Essential Modern Westerns

The Best Neo-Westerns of the 21st Century, according to JS Lewis

Our interview with Slow West director John Maclean

Follow Mitchell on Letterboxd

‘Old Henry’ is in US theaters now and on VOD from Friday, October 8.

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001)

This review contains spoilers.

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was released in recent years by the Criterion Collection, that great home video company that's probably the OG of boutique labels, known for putting out acclaimed, significant or otherwise interesting films in really nice packages. (For some reason I had been thinking they put this out only last year until I actually looked it up. I guess my sense of time has been a little warped as of late, and as much as I'd like to tie this review into pandemic-era life, the fact is other labels have captured my attention lately, as can be evidenced by my embarrassingly large and extremely shameful Vinegar Syndrome haul from their Halfway to Black Friday sale from a few months ago.) Now, nobody in 2021 is going into this movie truly blind, but if I happened to pick up the Criterion cover and perused the back, aside from the list of special features and disc specs, you'd see the below (which I grabbed off their website):

Blonde Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has only just arrived in Hollywood to become a movie star when she meets an enigmatic brunette with amnesia (Laura Harring). Meanwhile, as the two set off to solve the second woman’s identity, filmmaker Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) runs into ominous trouble while casting his latest project. David Lynch’s seductive and scary vision of Los Angeles’s dream factory is one of the true masterpieces of the new millennium, a tale of love, jealousy, and revenge like no other.

Now, this is a tough movie to evoke with only a blurb, but I'd say that does a pretty respectable job. I however do not own this release. What I do own is the barebones Universal DVD that was released a few months after the movie, back when going into the movie blind would have been far more likely. This is the description on the back:

This sexy thriller has been acclaimed as one of the year's best films. Two beautiful women are caught up in a lethally twisted mystery - and ensnared in an equally dangerous web of erotic passion. "There's nothing like this baby anywhere! This sinful pleasure is a fresh triumph for Lynch, and one of the best films of the year. Visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore's lip gloss!" says Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. "See it… then see it again!" (Time Out New York)

Now, the previous description probably couldn't fully capture the movie's essence, but this one makes it sound like an erotic thriller. (Could you imagine somebody going into this thinking this was like a Gregory Dark joint? I say this having seen none of his thrillers and only his hardcore movies, although I must admit an MTV-influenced Mulholland Drive starring, say, Lois Ayres is something I find extremely intriguing.) But you know what? Good for them. Among other things, this movie, with its two all-timer sex scenes, feels like one of the last hurrahs from an era when mainstream American movies could be unabashedly horny, before we were sentenced to an endless barrage of immaculately muscular bodies in spandex (stupid sexy Flanders) somehow drained of all sex appeal (god forbid somebody pop a boner...or ladyboner, let's be egalitarian here). I apologize if I'm coming off as a little gross, but having been able to barely leave the house for practically a year and a half, watching sexy movies like this is one of the few remaining thrills at my disposal. Please, this is all I have.

Now I suppose I should say something about the movie itself, but it might be a challenge given how elusive it is in certain respects (Lynch is notoriously cagey about offering interpretations of his movies) and, as a result, how heavily it's been scrutinized over the years. No doubt any analysis I offer as to the movie's overarching meaning will come off extremely dumbassed. What I will note however, is that for whatever reason, the scene I remembered most vividly is where Justin Theroux walks in on his wife with Billy Ray Cyrus, particularly the candy pink paint he dumps on her jewellery as revenge. We've been following Theroux, a movie director, as he's been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, having had control over casting his lead actress taken from him, which he proceeds to process by taking a golf club to a windshield of his producers' car and then reacting as above when he finds his wife with the singer of "Achy Breaky Heart".

With his Dune having been notoriously tampered with by producers, I suspect there's a bit of Lynch's own experience in the scene with the producers, which plays like an entirely arbitrary set of rituals deciding the fate of his movie with no regard for his opinion or even basic logic. While I don't know how particular Dino DeLaurentiis was about his espresso, I did laugh. Now, taking the reading that the first two acts of the movie are a fantasy of Naomi Watts' character, who is revealed to be miserable and ridden with jealousy in the third act, the amount of time we spend with Theroux is maybe hard to justify. Is this perhaps her "revenge" on him, his romantic and professional success having been flushed away while he flounders in search of greater meaning to his arc? Aside from possible autobiographical interest, these scenes do play like a riff on the idea that everyone is the main character in their own story, and if the Watts and Laura Harring characters can be thought of as having merged or swap identities, then perhaps Theroux's arc is the remainder of that quotient. (Now, it's worth noting that aside from being insecure and arrogant, Theroux in this movie is a less stylish than the real Lynch. If Watts conjures the best version of herself in her dream, Lynch maybe doesn't want his dream avatar outshining him.)

Now why did the Cyrus scene stick with me all these years when other details had slipped? Mostly because I'd found it amusing, partly because of the extra specific image Lynch produces, and somewhat because of the casting of Billy Ray Cyrus. Now, I don't have any special relationship to the Cyrus' body of work, but Lynch's casting of him, with his distinct mix of bozo, dudebro and hunk, results in a very specific comedic effect. This is something Lynch does elsewhere in the movie, like when he has Robert Forster show up as a detective for a single scene. The Forster role is likely in part a leftover from the movie's origins as a TV pilot, but the effect is similar (albeit less comedic). Melissa George appears as a woman who may or may not be a replacement for Watts in some realm of reality. Other directors obviously cast actors for their screen presence and the audience's relationship to their career, but the way Lynch does it feels particularly pointed, as if he's reshaping them entirely into iconography. The effect is particularly sinister with the presence of Michael J. Anderson, with whom he worked previously on Twin Peaks, and Monty Montgomery as a mysterious cowboy who dangles the secret of the movie over Theroux's character.

Cowboys in movies are frequently heroic presences (see any number of westerns) and are otherwise innocuously stylish (I confess I've come dangerously close to ordering a Stetson hat and a pair of cowboy boots), but the presence of one here feels like a ripple in the movie's reality. A dreamy, brightly lit mystery set in Los Angeles should have no place for a cowboy. It ain't right. (It's worth noting that Lynch at one point copped to admiring Ronald Reagan for reminding him of a cowboy. Is this his expression of a changed opinion? I have no idea, but Lynch has never struck me as all that politically minded.) Neither is the hobo that appears behind the diner. Certainly hobos have made their homes behind diners, but this one's presence and the way Lynch produces him feel again like a ripple in the the movie's narrative. Jump scares are frequently knocked for being lazy and cheap devices to generate shocks, but the one here gets under your skin.

Now about the movie's look. This starts off like a noir, and the mystery plot on paper would lead you to think that's how the whole movie plays, but the cinematography is a lot brighter, with almost confection-like colours, than that would lead you to believe, at least during the daytime scenes. This is another element that likely comes from its TV origins, but it does give the movie a distinctly dreamlike, fantastical quality that a more overtly cinematic look, like the one Lynch used in Lost Highway a few years earlier, might not capture. This is one of the reasons I think this movie works better than that one, and there's also the fact that the amateur sleuthing that drives the bulk of the plot here serves as a more pleasing audience vantage point than the male anxieties that fuel the other film. I also would much rather hang out with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring than a charisma void like Balthazar Getty.

The manufactured warmth of the daytime scenes also results, like in Blue Velvet, in the nighttime scenes feeling like they're in a completely different setting, one which perhaps offers the key to unlocking the mystery, or at least revealing the phoniness of the movie's surfaces. I think of the evocative Club Silencio sequence, which comes as close as anything in the movie to laying its illusions bare. ("No hay banda.") But at times Lynch will throw in disarmingly childlike, inexplicable imagery, like the dancing couples against a purple screen in the opening, something that would seem tacky and amateurish elsewhere but feels oddly cohesive here. There are a number of directors whose work I admire for being "dreamlike", and putting them side by side they all feel quite distinct (you would never mistake a Lucio Fulci film for a Lynch), but they have the unifying idea of imbuing the tactile qualities of film with the truly irrational to really burrow into your subconscious. Other directors have made movies with some of the same elements as Mulholland Drive, but none have put them together in quite the same way.

[canvaswolfdoll]

CanvasWatches: Carole & Tuesday

A charming SciFi anime focusing more on the cast’s day-to-day lives than some major sociopolitical conflict that requires laser gun diplomacy? Set on a Terraformed Mars with brick and mortar solarpunk aesthetic? I can get into that.

The fact that Carole & Tuesday is a science fiction story came as a surprise, as most of the buzz and promotion that crossed my social feeds focused on the street performance aspects. Then, surprise! Tabletop fast food ordering and pizzerias that grow their tomatoes in house![1] Which is the sort of speculative fiction I’m enjoying nowadays: normal life with the fantastic acting as seasoning to spice up the world around them.

I’ve never paid special attention to music. I listen to music obviously, but rarely in any sort of analytical capacity. It’s pretty sounds that help fill in the background while I write, or to convey emotion in a musical, or to mark the start and end of a show I’m watching. I’ve never sought out music to listen to when looking for entertainment, it’s always a byproduct of whatever media I’m engaged with at the moment. Heck, these days, when I’m too lazy to set my car radio up to play a podcast, I just drive in silence.[2]

I sometimes feel I’m missing something by not engaging with the art form in a more conscious manner, and I only recently became aware that albums are a carefully curated thing instead of a collection of the performer’s most recent songs, so… yeah. Kind of a cultural blindspot.[3]

This tangent doesn’t even end with a neat little note of how Carole & Tuesday had inspired me to consume music in a more deliberate and contemplative manner. The soundtrack includes plenty of insert songs I happily threw on my background noise playlists,[4] and what few albums I seek out are video game and anime soundtracks.[5]

Carole & Tuesday was chiefly directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, who’s name was made with the Jazzy Space Epic Cowboy Bebop and Hip-Hop Samurai Series Samurai Champloo. It was probably inevitable he would produce an anime where music took front stage instead of informing tone.

Carole & Tuesday takes inspiration from Pop, but is unafraid to feature and mix other genres, such as Opera and Rap.[6] What’s really exciting is the decision to have the insert songs performed in English.

Historically, when diegetic music is present in anime, the song is performed in Japanese, and most dubs make the smart decision to leave the japanese audio and subtitle them. I may prefer dubs for my various reasons, but I wouldn’t dare ask for the policy on subbed music to change. Carole & Tuesday took an international view to its production, and thus used the most widely spoken language when no one (reasonable) would begrudge the use of Japanese performers.

Netflix picked up the show as part of their continued haphazard attempts to seize the genre with an attitude out of the early 2000s, and the company tapped to record the English dub did an admirable job matching voice performances believably similar to the singing voices.

Which may be the first time that speaking actors were hired to fit the singers.

The story takes place on Mars in the future year of… 50 years after humanity started migrating to Mars. I cannot find a year cited, which is the smart and wise choice and I am super annoyed I’m not going to be able to make jokes about the production's attempts and failure to predict the future.

50 years after starting to migrate over to the red planet, humanity has terraformed large swathes of Mars into a Solarpunk paradise. Earth is apparently not in a great state as refugees are desperately making their way to the planet, but Earth remains offscreen for the entire run. Fortunately no one has any giant robots,[7] so the two planets aren’t at war. While Mars has been made hospitable enough, the atmosphere does occasionally mess with the genetics of residents.

That’s just background details, however. The story is really about the titular duo. Tuesday is introduced fleeing the mansion of her politician mother, hopping onto a cattle train like Kiki, and riding off to Alba City with only a quitar and robotic luggage to keep her company, where she stumbles upon Refugee Orphan Carole busking with a keyboard. The two have a jam session and decide to become a musical act.

Meanwhile, famed child star Angela Carpenter[8] is setting to transition from a modeling career to an exciting career singing. Her mother pulls strings and utilizes her connections to team up with Tao, a genius of Artificial Intelligence Design who is willing to use his technology to provide Angela with computer generated music and lyrics.

Thus we have the start of a sci-fi John Henry Tale where the battle is not hammer and steel but instruments and voice.

I say ‘the start’ because while the two teams utilize different methods to produce their music, their methods are never weighed against one another. In fact, there’s barely a one-sided rivalry, as Angela is jealous of the titular duo’s ability to enjoy their career, and our two heroes take only a polite, professional view of Angela’s rising career.

Carole and Tuesday are both weighed down by a common problem with anime protagonists: they’re just nice. There’s a certain fear when writing protagonists, especially females, of accidentally making them off-putting that the writers overcorrect and don’t let the hero make mistakes or have much personality, to the point that Carole and Tuesday have very little agency.

Instead, it’s Gus, the ex-rock star manager the duo acquire, that does the leg work and takes risks while Carole and Tuesday just sing nice songs then sit back while the plotlines orbiting their rise to success are resolved by the men.

The show also can’t choose a lane, playing with several story threads that could carry full 24-episode stories by themselves, but instead are dealt with as lightly as possible.

We start with the story of a run-away from decadence and a refugee bringing their world views together, but that instead goes into a tournament arc disguised as a talent contest, then the drama of navigating the music industry, before ending with the presidential run of Tuesday’s mother causing public unrest. Carole and Tuesday don’t make a meaningful choice that affects any of these stories.

Meanwhile, Angela gets a story of asserting her identity while already in public view, facing dangers both external and internal on her journey.

Surprisingly, this is the first show in a while that I didn't resent for transitioning out of the episodic, playing with the premise portion. While Carole and Tuesday were attempting to get their big break, bopping around misadventures trying to get contacts, gigs, and filming a music video, Angela looms in her plotline, building up to the inevitable rivalry.

Angela is introduced just before her mother, Dahlia, starts reworking Angela's career from modeling to singing, hiring Tao, renowned AI designer, as Angela's producer. Angela experiences mild paranoia from Tao's standoffish nature, machinery, and making a holographic simulation of Angela. So Angela had a more consistent narrative during the first arc.

Introductions out of the way, it's time for everyone's favorite trope: the tournament arc! In the form of ‘Space!'s got Talent’ Generic Brand Named into Mar's Brightest. The main duo meets their rival, backstage drama ensues, some very good music is performed, and things are set up to technically give both Carole and Tuesday as well as Angela a win at the end.

With publicity achieved, Gus starts getting to work preparing the girls' debut album and booking appearances, as well as meeting other artists and (briefly) Carole’s father. We learn about Gus’s past client, Flora, who dropped Gus as soon as she found success, then found herself without a support base and spiraled into depression and addiction. Carole and Tuesday remain upbeat and optimistic.

Meanwhile, Angela starts getting harassed by a stalker and feeling helpless and poorly supported by those around her. Tao takes point on stopping the stalker when the police fail, ultimately taking him down before the stalker could pull a Mark David Chapman.

The story bleeds into the final act, as the presidential campaign of Valerie Simmons, Tuesday’s mother, moves forward in prominence. The AI algorithm Valerie is utilizing suggests she take an anti-immigration stance, which the woman follows in an attempt to further her career. Musicians are getting harassed by law enforcement, Tuesday’s brother Spencer is becoming uneasy with being an accessory to the campaign, and starts meeting with a reporter with information that Valerie’s campaign manager orchestrated a terrorist attack to villainize immigrants. Spencer and the reporter argue over how many chances to give Valerie, and agree on Spencer taking the evidence to Valerie, and if she doesn’t back down, then they’ll leak the scandal. Valerie, seeing the crimes committed for her benefit, gracefully renounces her candidacy. It’s very heart warming.

Carole and Tuesday write a protest song, and gather friends to sing it. This protest song has no observable impact.

Meanwhile, Angela learns she’s adopted, and her mother suffers a heart-attack shortly before Angela is set to win a Martian Grammy, and Angela spirals into depression and prescription drug abuse, to the point of collapsing at the end of her Grammy performance, being rushed to the hospital and missing her mother’s passing and funeral. Angela is adrift. She has no family, no support, and is just lonely.

Tao, who was working to sabotage Valerie’s campaign and burning as many bridges as possible after being targeted for refusing to assist the campaign, appears in Angela’s hospital room to drop a bomb: both he and Angela are designer babies, and though Tao must go into hiding now, he does intend to look out for his little sister.

Angela joins the performance of Carole and Tuesday’s protest song.

If it’s not already clear, I feel the story of Carole and Tuesday themselves was pretty lacking.

So, how would I rework this? Step one: we’re either cutting Carole and Tuesday, or combining them into a single character and making Angela the second. With the second option, Angela can maintain her backstory, but take Carole’s introduction of fleeing her family mansion and attempting to strike out on her own, meeting up with Carole and forming an act. To maintain the final arc, Carole would need to be reworked into the abandoned daughter of Tuesday’s late father, making her the half sister of Spencer and something to be hidden by Valerie Simmons’ campaign.

We then intermingle the two plotlines: Gus maintains his managerial position, and eventually convinces Angela to use her connections and mother to get her career jumpstarted, Ms. Carpenter still brings in Tao to write music, and now we can lean more into the AI-written music versus human compositions subplot as well as creative differences, which can lead to an arc where Angela and Carolday split to attempt solo careers, each taking a different manager.[9] Dahlia still has her issues and passes away, Angela her depressive spiral, but now Gus gets pathos by being there to help his client out of self-destruction, and the final number can also be a reconciliation of the main musical duo. The song can even be a combination of AI and human composition.

Carolday, meanwhile, discovers her relation to the anti-immigrant candidate and has to decide if she wants to finally have a family with Valerie and Spencer or stand up for her beliefs and assist a politician in bringing the campaign down. The resolution of the political plot can remain a happy compromise, but Carolday gets a slightly more active role in it.

The animation and world-building is great, and Angela’s arc is very strong. But the writing was too afraid to let either Carole or Tuesday dip into unlikeability that they become props to their own storyline, which is made further unfortunate as their supporting cast that do make decisions are mostly men.

The series is also riddled with a lot of good starts. Many short vignettes or minor details that could be made into full animes by themselves. Show more of Carole and Tuesday’s attempts to break into the music industry while also trying to pay bills and put food on their table. An expansion on the other competitors at Mars Brightest.[10] Heck, expand the roster of the competition and dig more into backstage drama. Carole’s father, who was sent to prison and found his wife dead and daughter sent to another planet upon his release, could carry a story of his own on his back! Valerie’s presidential run and the plight of Earth immigrants given more attention. Heck, even the story of how Earth, the origins of the human species, fell into being a third-world planet people are desperate to leave.

I’d even watch a series about the solarpunk pizzeria that grows their own tomatoes.

The music is really good, however, featuring many artists and styles, and those by our main duo wouldn’t sound out of place on a car radio or licensed on a primetime television show.

It’s a good show, but not an eternal classic. Maybe a second choice for someone digging deeper into anime. However, if its placement on Netflix means it’s someone’s introduction to Anime, that wouldn’t be terrible. Give it a watch if you want something to wind down for bed, or want inspiration for your own speculative fiction.

Kataal kataal.

-

[1] Solarpunk’s neat. [2] Mostly because I lost all my preset stations last time I took my car in for fixing, and I don't actually know any to punch in. Also, I use youtube for music when writing. [3] Also means I’m wholly unprepared to find music when I finally get a podcast project off the ground. [4] The soundtrack is very present on Spotify, which is nice. [5] I am finding myself increasingly intrigued by vinyl records, however. Probably a bit extravagant, and difficult considering my narrow interests. [6] Presumably to annoy fans of both. [7] Bam! Gundam reference! Anyone have Bingo yet? [8] Though I could swear they never use her last name on screen. [9] I’d find it amusing if Angela takes Gus and Carolday teams up with Dahlia, but the rest of my outline works better if Angela remains with Dahlia. [10] Though this one’s not a major loss. Typical tournament arc stuff.

[mst3kproject]

The Choppers

It’s teenage crime spree time!  With Arch Hall Sr. writing and producing, Arch Hall Jr. starring, and Bruno VeSoto supporting, the result is sure to be MST3K-worthy. All it’s missing is Ray Dennis Steckler, but I guess one can’t have everything.

America’s youth is its greatest resource, and those youth are in danger of growing up into criminals.  Witness our antagonists here: Cruiser, Torch, Ben, Flip, and Snooper. They drive around in a truck full of chickens, taking apart random cars and selling the pieces to Moose, a grouchy and unscrupulous junkyard owner.  The cops are baffled, but sooner or later the young thugs are bound to make a fatal mistake – and theirs comes when they girl they decide to sexually harass turns out to be the secretary of an insurance investigator.  At around the same time, Moose gets tired of their attitude and decides to turn them in.  Looks like the Choppers have chopped their last, uh… chop, I guess.

I’m sure you all want to know whether Arch Hall Jr. sings in this movie.  He does, but not until forty-five minutes in when I really had begun to hope I’d escaped him.  The piece is actually kind of catchy although not particularly memorable, but I may be in a forgiving mood because the first musical number in the movie was so much worse.  It’s performed by an elderly guy who works at Moose’s junkyard, and not only is he a bad singer, but what starts out sounding like a boy scout campfire ditty turns out to be a mournful country song about his divorce.  It made me long for the comparatively sweet strains of I Love You Vickie.

The photography here is notably terrible.  Almost the entire movie takes place outdoors in harsh desert sunshine because I think they didn’t actually have any lights.  Indoor scenes are kind of dim and night scenes are completely indecipherable – although I think somebody didn’t believe a practically pitch-black screen was enough to convince us it was night, because there are also lots of loud cricket noises.  There’s a bit where the Choppers vandalize a guy’s car because he took their parking spot and it’s almost impossible to see anyone’s faces or tell who’s talking.

The acting is sort of indifferently bad. Arch Hall Jr. is Arch Hall Jr., where everything he says sounds kind of stagey and dumb, and nobody else is much better.  The twenty-somethings playing the young criminals use hip slang in a way that suggests they have no idea what these words actually mean.  Arch Hall Sr. continues to believe he can build his son into a teen heartthrob, and so he shows us things like Cruiser’s pasty chest and belly as he lounges by a pool.

You say you didn’t need that screencap? Well, I didn’t need the shot it came from.

Most of the screen time in the movie is spent on the Choppers as they take apart cars, play or listen to bad music, argue with each other, and harass women.  The supposed heroes aren’t on screen nearly so much, but that’s okay because they are stunningly un-likeable.  There are a couple of bland cops, but the ones who are really our protagonists are inept insurance investigator Tom Hart and his nagging girlfriend Liz.  Tom comes across as an oblivious dope, while Liz constantly whines that she’s tired of fighting crime and wants to go home and eat.

Tom never redeems himself, but Liz gets a couple of moments.  She’s the one who notices that feathers keep turning up at the crime scenes, and when she recognizes Cruiser’s car at a drive-in she is able to keep him staring at her boobs long enough for her to memorize the license plate number. Naturally at the climax, she is not present and Tom, who did pretty much nothing all movie, gets all the credit for catching the gang.  The movie doesn’t make anything out of this because it doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

Which of course brings us to the fact that The Choppers hates women something fierce. There are only two we can actually be said to meet: Cruiser’s empty-headed girlfriend Gypsy (I know a bot who would be righteously angry at this name choice) is there to hang around in a bathing suit and be dumb.  The movie can’t decide how much she does or doesn’t know about his criminal hobbies – she seems to help vandalize the car in the parking lot, but then becomes the damsel in distress at the final shootout.  Liz nags, mocks, and generally treats Tom terribly, and at the end her competence is treated as his accomplishment.

Several of the five boys have backstories that depend on absent fathers – Cruiser’s was killed in WWII, Torch’s is an alcoholic, and Snooper has had a series of uninterested stepfathers.  The implication is that a single mother cannot possibly raise a boy.  He needs a father to turn him into a man (this is as near as stated aloud when a reporter attempts to interview Torch’s drunken father on the radio).  The only moment involving a woman that doesn’t reek of misogyny is when the boys harass a waitress and she blows them off.

If we’re gonna talk about fathers and sons… this is another movie Arch Hall Sr. made to try to build up his son’s career, and another movie in which the two of them are at odds.  They never actually meet in The Choppers, but the reporter played by Hall Sr. comments on how intelligent and talented the boys are and how much they could have accomplished if they’d only had the chance to live up to their potential.  Once again, it’s really, really tempting to try to do some psychoanalysis here, as if Arch Hall Sr. was using his films to tell the world how disappointed he was with his son.  I don’t know these people, of course, but that’s definitely the impression I get.

The main theme in The Choppers is one I’ve already dealt with, the idea that a boy without a father will become a criminal, stuck forever in the stage of life where rule-breaking is fun and consequences are things that happen to other people.  There seems to be a level on which the boys have adopted Moose as a sort of substitute father – he has encouraged and taught them in their criminal endeavours, and while he and they argue and threaten each other, they are honestly shocked by his eventual betrayal.  In the end, Moose abandons them just as their biological fathers have done.

There also seems to be some attempt to talk about class. All the Choppers seem to come from underprivileged backgrounds except for Cruiser, who has a backyard pool and a fancy car.  This puts him in the same category as Paula from The Violent Years, in that we’re given no good reason why he does this besides what his says to the reporter at the end: “we had a ball.”  Like Paula, Cruiser is the leader of the gang, but unlike her, he does not participate in the actual crimes.  Instead, Cruiser and his fancy car serve as lookouts – his upper-class origin allows him to be in charge without having to get his hands dirty, and there are signs that the rest of the boys resent this.  When they are all cornered at the end, it’s Cruiser who suggests giving up while Torch prefers to go down fighting.  Unlike the others, he’s not sufficiently invested in this to die for it.

What the movie is trying to say here is that money is not a substitute for good parenting, and privileged boys can still fall into crime if their fathers aren’t there for them.  What it manages to imply is that even in crime being rich gives you a head start and can make you a leader regardless of actual leadership qualities.

So this movie is really, really bad, and doesn’t deal very well with its thematic material – but that’s not to say there’s no entertainment value to be found here.  It’s never funny when it tries to be, of course. There’s an attempt at a running joke with Snooper wondering if he’d be more attractive to women if he wore contact lenses, which will make you shudder if you know what contact lenses were like in the 50’s and early 60’s.  The humour that works in The Choppers is naturally the unintentional kind, to be found in the bad acting and the unwieldy chicken truck.

My favourite moment is when Cruiser, talking on a candy-striped walkie-talkie the size of a dachshund, tells his cronies to give the police “the farmer routine”.  Flip and Snooper immediately pull a couple of cowboy hats out of fucking nowhere and put them on, and I almost did a real-life spit take.  This feels like the kind of thing that would have fascinated the Best Brains.  I can imagine Joel, Crow, and Tom whipping their own Stetsons out from under the theatre seats to wear for the rest of the scene (Servo would have needed help with his) and every subsequent appearance of a cop being greeted with, “quick, put on your cowboy hats!”  It would definitely be the stinger.

Talking about having a favourite Arch Hall Jr. movie is like talking about having a favourite kind of turd to eat, but insofar as the statement means anything, The Choppers is my second-favourite of his movies I’ve seen so far.  It’s less misogynistic than Eegah! (not a high bar) and doesn’t have nearly as much crappy music as Wild Guitar (accomplished by simply having less music).  My favourite Arch Hall Jr. movie is The Sadist, which I actually don’t consider bad enough for this blog.  In The Sadist Hall Jr. played a serial killer, and he was pretty terrifying.  If he’d had more roles like that (with directors who were not his father and could actually coach good performances out of him) he might have been a decent character actor.

[itsblosseybitch]

Off-Hollywood Producers: Interviews with Griffin Dunne & Amy Robinson by Clarke Taylor (Sept 1985; Part 1)

It could be said of Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson that, as producers, they represent the refined essence of what independent film-making in America, in 1985, is all about. By their own admission, they live “charmed lives” as producers. They have managed to make the movies they wanted to make, the way they wanted to make them: humane films about people living and struggling through their particular time, made on single-digit budgets--from $2.5 million to $4 million ($5.9 million to $9.5 million in 2019) --unheard of these days in Hollywood. (OP NOTE: God damn this sentence aged well) And they are doing all of this at a comfortable distance from Hollywood, in New York.

There were two films--Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (co-produced with Mark Metcalf), released by United Artists in 1979 as Head Over Heels, and re-released by UA Classics in 1982 with the original title of the Ann Beattie novel on which it was based, and John Sayles’s Baby, It’s You, distributed by Paramount in 1983. Now Dunne and Robinson are hoping that After Hours, directed by Martin Scorcese, will be their “breakthrough” film. Its $4 million budget was financed through a bank loan (as was Baby, It’s You) and was picked up by the David Geffen Company for distribution through Warner Bros.

After Hours in one way represents a synthesis of what Dunne and Robinson , both of whom started out as actors, say they want to do: focus on both the creative and the business side of film-making. For Dunne, who has pursued his acting career in films such as An American Werewolf in London, Johnny Dangerously, and Almost You, Scorcese’s new film may also mark a turning point. Dunne plays the leading role in the film, a nightmarish New York comedy, heading a cast that includes Teri Garr, Cheech and Chong, and Rosanna Arquette. 

Whatever the outcome for Dunne, he and Robinson have two other feature films in development: The Foreigner, a comedy by Larry Shue, at Disney, and an untitled project at Lorimar, based on the producers’ own story idea about the children of sixties underground radicals. They are thinking about producing a third property, The Moonflower Vine, a “family saga” by Jetta Carlton, as a television miniseries.

(OP NOTE: The Foreigner never materialized, and so far, I have no information as to why. The film about sixties underground radicals would eventually become Running On Empty (1988), directed by Sidney Lumet and starring River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton. The Moonflower Vine didn’t materialize either, but I found a blog post by writer Kathleen Rowell about that project, who was going to adapt the screenplay.)

Question: How do you see yourself--as an actor or as a producer?

Griffin Dunne: I always see a hyphen between those two words. It’s just that one always takes precedence over the other, depending on the project. Certainly I’ve made very different choices as an actor than I have as a producer, up until now.

Question: How have the choices been different, and what do you mean, up until now?

Dunne: I’ve acted in films I would have never produced, and I haven’t been very selective, or taken the films very seriously. Often it’s been because of the pay, or because I’ve liked the people who were involved, or because I thought I might do a good enough job with the character I was playing to get the next  job. I’ve cared much less about the overall movie, the director, or how well it might do at the box office. After Hours has revitalized my interest in acting: it’s really inspired me.

Question: This is what you mean when you talk about taking your future acting choices more seriously?

Dunne: Yes. With this film I think I’ve crossed the line that divided my acting and producing choices. Now, as an actor, I’m taking into consideration all the things I’ve always thought about as a producer: Am I repeating myself? What about the overall film? Who’s the director? I don’t want to make a nothing picture next, no matter how I  might shine. 

Question: You started out as an actor, rather than as a producer. 

Dunne: Actually, I set out in another direction altogether. I wanted to be a journalist. But there was a guy at my boarding school [Fountain Valley, in Colorado] who talked me into auditioning for The Zoo Story, the Edward Albee play, and this changed my direction, my life. I got that part. It was at this same school where I got caught smoking dope and was kicked out. (OP NOTE: He also got cast in the school’s production of Othello, playing Iago. What I would give to see that)

Question: But you continued to act?

Dunne: Yes, back in Los Angeles I very quickly got roles in TV series, such as Mannix (OP NOTE: will have to track this one down), but I also realized that I was not going to learn how to act from television. I started studying, but I only lasted for about eight months. I enrolled in a kind of let-it-all-happen class, with a lot of weird people, including Miss Linda Lovelace. It was very unsatisfying, very disillusioning-it was a terrible class, that’s what I’m trying to say. 

Question: What did you do?

Dunne: I headed for New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I also started to go up on auditions, and in no time I got an audition for a segment of Kojak [the TV show]. It turned out I didn’t get the part, but at the time I thought everything was going to happen incredibly fast. Instead, for the next four years, I continued to read Backstage and go up on auditions for plays that never happened. I also waited on tables, which I hated more than anything.

Question: What was this period like for you?

Dunne: Very discouraging. There was this one woman with a long Russian name who claimed to be the writer and director of a new play, who was the first to say to me, “You’re going to be great.” She said I was perfect for the part she was casting in her play, so she sent all the other actors who had come to the open casting call home, and took me out for coffee. I soon realized that she was stark raving mad, and then I realized she was a bag lady. I also realized that anyone can hold open casting calls in an effort to meet people, although this is one trick I haven’t employed yet as a producer. 

Question: It was during this period that you met Amy Robinson?

Dunne: Yes. I met Amy and Mark Metcalf, another actor, and eventually our co-producer on Chilly Scenes of Winter. None of us were getting much work, so to keep ourselves busy we tried to mount an off-off-Broadway production of a Sam Shepherd play, Cowboy Mouth. We never did. But one day Amy showed us Chilly Scenes, and we became interested in producing the film.

Question: Once Chilly Scenes was out of the way, did you set out on a plan of action to produce more, to act more?

Dunne: At that point, we had no game plan. We were just three actors who produced a movie. But interest was generated in us; suddenly, we were New York producers. 

Question: Is there an advantage to being based in New York?

Dunne: Well, we’re here in part because there are fewer producers here. We’re also here because none of us wanted to live in Los Angeles; we go there to pitch our projects. But there are also a lot of creative people who are known here before they go to L.A. and become famous. We can also shoot a film on a smaller budget here because the NABET [The National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians] crews are here; we’ve used these crews on our last two films.

Question: Did either of you think of directing  after Chilly Scenes, instead of producing, since you all came from the more creative side of the business?

Dunne: Our first inclination was to continue to produce; I don’t know why, except that we had no directing experience. Also, it was at the time Sylvester Stallone started to direct the Rocky films, and it seemed at every meeting [with a studio] someone would say, “Now, you don’t plan to direct...?”

Question: How did you come upon the script for After Hours?

Dunne: Amy was handed the script, which is by a first-time scriptwriter, Joe Minion, while she was lecturing at Sundance [Robert Redford’s film study center in Utah] a couple of years ago. She read it, saw it as a vehicle for me, and we optioned it. Naturally, I agreed that the role was for me.

Question: How did Martin Scorcese come into the picture, and how did you convince him  that the role was for you?

Dunne: He simply seemed the perfect director, and he said yes. We then sat down to talk about casting, and some people we had in mind, such as Teri Garr, who’s in the film. I forget who was doing the talking--at some point, I blanked out--but Amy spoke up and said, “Griffin would like to play Paul.” He said fine, just like that. 

Question: This is one example of when playing producer and  actor pays off.

Dunne: Well, I think I’d come very close anyway, but there might have been some flavor-of-the-month actor who would have gotten the role, and luckily I didn’t have to deal with that.

Question: What was it like working with Scorcese?

Dunne: Well, it’s the largest role I’ve ever had, and unlike the other roles, where I’ve pretty much relied on my natural behavior, the character moves from A to Z--typical Scorcese anxiety-induced behavior. Scorcese’s also the first director I’ve worked with who understood the character as well as I.

I’ve never worked harder for anybody in my life, and I was filled with energy at the start of each new day. He makes great demands on you to get the scene right. Scorcese gets what he needs in the first or second take, but he might do a dozen more, just to see what might turn up. You don’t leave for the day until you’ve done the best work possible. 

Question: It sounds as though Scorcese can be very demanding, even obsessive, to work with.

Dunne: Yes. But he’s also able to laugh at himself. For instance, Marty is allergic to cigarette smoking. There’s absolutely no smoking allowed on the set. He’d come on the set, and even if someone had been smoking hours before, he could smell it and would come on the set saying “Who’s smoking? Who’s smoking?” There was this one night--most all our shooting was night shooting in the Tribeca section of New York--during a scene in which my character came around the corner, scared to death of something that had been happening to him, sprawled on his knees, and screamed to the heavens, “What do you want from me?” Suddenly, from a window above the street, this woman stuck her head out and began shouting, “Shut up, shut up!” Of course, she ruined that take, but Marty noticed that a cigarette was hanging out of her mouth, and as though to add insult to injury, he yelled to the crew, “Tell that woman to put her cigarette out!”

Question: What is it about Scorcese that calls on the actor’s total commitment?

Dunne: Well, his enthusiasm is infectious. For instance, there was this one scene that required a Steadicam operator to run back and forth through aisles of desks in an office to the accompaniment of Mozart of a jaunty piece of Mozart that Marty had chosen. The guy was a new, young Steadicam operator, Larry McComkey, and working with Scorcese was a great opportunity for him. Anyway, after going through this scene once, carrying seventy pounds of equipment on his back, and sweaty and exhausted, Larry came up to Marty and said, “How was it?” Marty said, “It was good, it was good, but you hear that music? You have to run with the music, feel the music, and keep going until it’s over.”

We had a lunch break, and just as though he was an actor, Larry stayed behind to prepare for the next take of the scene. After lunch, he had a whole new expression on his face, a look of total commitment to his work. We went through the scene again, and he did it perfectly, this time dancing elaborately with the camera on his back between all the desks to the beat of the music. Afterward, he came up to Marty and asked, “How was that?” “Perfect, perfect,” Marty said, “except for that fourth beat.” And suddenly, they were standing around talking about Mozart. Marty had tapped into the camera operator’s creative side, and made him work hard for him just like he makes actors go through take after take after take. 

Question: Did anyone during the production become confused as to your roles as both actor and producer? 

Dunne: Well, there was a second AD, and it of course was the AD’s job to let actors know when they were called for shooting. He seemed terribly confused about whether he was to call me, assuming, since I was a producer, I would know of the call. I missed an entire rehearsal because of this--nobody had told me about the rehearsal. So I made a firm point of this and said to him, “I am an actor, and you are a second AD.”

Question: Were there occasions on this film when your tendency to produce overcame your concentration on acting?

Dunne: Well, first of all, Marty and Amy and I were in sync on this from the start, so I didn’t have to worry about such things as “control.” But when I’m acting, the tendency is to drop the producing ball altogether. The phrase “meal penalty” never crossed my mind. Of course, during pre-production, I’d worked on locations, script, casting, but once production began the only way I’d know about problems was if I were to ask. The only problem I actually caught wind of on this picture was that a lot of film was being used. This was because of all the takes Marty shoots, which, as an actor, I love. And since most of the footage being shot was with me, I didn’t see this as a “problem” at all. As far as I was concerned, we had all the time and all the takes in the world. But seriously, knowing that Amy thought we were using a lot of film caused me a slight distraction, but I was able to use this anxiety in my role. 

Question: Once After Hours  stopped shooting, did you find it difficult to fit back into your role as a producer?

Dunne: Yes. At first there wasn’t a lot for me to do at the office, because things had been running fine without me. I found that if I waited to pick up my own responsibilities, such as obtaining music rights for the film--it turned out I always dealt with music rights to our movie--I found that I really had to assert myself. And I did, because this producing really gives me a tremendous stability. This is one of the reasons I’ve never good at being an unemployed actor. I hated waking up in the morning and thinking, All I have to do is go to the gym. Now I don’t go to the gym; I go to the office.

Question: This sounds like a bizarre film, not by Scorcese standards, perhaps, but by your standards, and Amy’s. 

Dunne: It’s certainly the most extreme movie we’ve ever produced, and the most controversial. 

Question: Controversial in what way?

Dunne: In the way it speaks to a kind of paranoia and victimization that I think a lot of people living in big cities can relate to. It’s a nightmarish quality of the story that appealed to me, and that I found very funny. I’ve had nights like this in New York, on a more mundane level, when there’s a chain of reaction of events over which you have no control. Just today, on the way to this interview, I passed two men in business suits, on Fifth Avenue, going at it, hitting away at each other. My inclination was to try to break them up--I could so easily have become involved in a mess.

Question: You think the gates are open to the kinds of movies you and Amy want to produce?

Dunne: The great thing about the movie business is that it’s totally unpredictable; the rules are always changing. The kinds of movies the studios are making now are based on what’s been successful in the past, and success comes in lots of unexpected ways. Amy and I want to make movies that a lot  of people want to see. If they do, if After Hours  makes a lot of money--and it can, because it cost so little to make--we’ll have more credibility with the studios the next time out with the kind of movie we want to make. 

Question: And Griffin Dunne will have more credibility as an actor  as well. Are you prepared to make hard choices of which role you will play next, actor or producer?

Dunne: I’m told that one of the advantages of being tremendously successful is that you can arrange your life in the way you wish. This is what I’m told. 

[thetygre]

30 Day Monster Challenge 2 - Day #1: Favorite Dracula

1.) Castlevania’s Dracula

Iconic lines and wine tossing aside, Castlevania’s Dracula stands out in just how utterly villainous he is, while still blending class and a hint of tragedy into his character. He is bigger and grander than Stoker’s original vampire, and that is slowly leveraged into a broader cosmic role. Dracula in Castlevania is more than just a bad guy; he is the manifestation of evil on Earth. He’s comparable to the Antichrist, but even that kind of falls flat. An Antichrist is supposed to bring about an apocalypse or change; Dracula in Castlevania is presented as a moral necessity, a rebuttal to the post-modern death of a moral center. His presence is necessary for there to be good in the world. In the process, Castlevania’s Dracula has become the patron saint of the world’s monsters. Every kind of demon, fiend, boogeyman, freak, and specter are gathered into his lair and given a home and purpose.

And every now and then, not for too long, depending on the game, a bit of pathos peeks through and you’re reminded that there’s a man behind it all. It’s never enough to make you stop enjoying Castlevania’s Drac as a villain, but it makes you wonder if he could have been different. Is he bound to his role as the Prince of Darkness? Is it his curse, or does it give him power? To me, Castlevania Dracula is the summation of the character in media as he is now; as a man, as a monster, a villain, a tragic figure, and everything else.

2.) Dracula Classic

Over a century later, Bram Stoker’s original Dracula still confounds us and fascinates us. Every generation brings a new lense, a new reading to one of literature’s greatest monsters. He is an idea about superstition, about xenophobia, about masculinity, sexual deviancy, disease, poverty, degradation, and so on and so on for as long as there are people who can read. For all the grandiosity of the other Draculas on this list, Stoker’s still has an air of realism to him, a banality that makes his horror human. Maybe Dracula classic can’t shapeshift into a dragon or summon an army of spears, but his power is more than enough to eclipse the Victorian Enlightenment. Stoker’s characters are human; doctors, lawyers, teachers, a... cowboy, so it only takes a little bit of inhuman evil to remind the reader of how fragile we and our society really are in the face of the unknown.

3.) Christopher Lee

Moving on into the live actors portion, you gotta’ give it up for THE KING. Lee’s Dracula was the first to go beyond horror into terror; that quickened, gut-wrenching primal scare. He was fast, he was bloody, he was dangerous, and still classy as all hell. The Emperor of Metal planted his roots by starting out as The Prince of Darkness. If I had one complaint, it’s that Lee doesn’t really come off as convincingly Transylvanian; Lee’s pretty clearly British, and the closest he’s ever been to being Slavic was that time he played Rasputin. Christopher Lee didn’t die in 2015; he’s just practicing for when the world needs Dracula again.

4.) Bela Lugosi

But you have to give props to the original. It’s hard to believe now that anyone ever found Lugosi’s Dracula scary, but I still remember my dad and older horror buffs talking about how they had nightmares after seeing Lugosi’s Dracula, or were afraid that he was lurking in the dark when the lights went out. What gets me is just how enmeshed with the role Lugosi was. Bela Lugosi was Dracula, no doubt about it. Other men can fill the role, but Lugosi embodied the character. Most actors don’t star in as many movies as Bela Lugosi starred as Dracula. When he died at a ripe old age, he was laid to rest in his cape and amulet.

5.) Duncan Regher

Every actor brings something to Dracula. Lee brought terror and nobility, Lugosi brought charisma and otherworldliness. Regher? Regher brought pure villainy. The Monster Squad is a gem of 80s monster nostalgia. Regher’s Dracula is a hybrid of Lee and Lugosi, blending sheer evil with overwhelming presence. Regher’s performance is a treat, drawing from that same well of post-Darth Vader villainy that brought us Frank Langella’s Skeletor and James Earl Jones as Thulsa Doom; the kind of guys that could convince you to carry them to the moon and be happy about doing it. Also, and I feel this detail to the lore cannot be overstated enough; Dracula-mobile.

6.) Richard Roxburgh

No, this is just a guilty pleasure. Van Helsing is a guilty pleasure. Get used to this, because I love this dumb movie. Roxburgh doesn’t bring anything to Dracula as a character except camp. Cheesy, cheesy camp. Roxburgh’s Dracula is like some unholy hybrid of Bela Lugosi and Tommy Wisseau. He has two emotional ranges, and they are both over-acting. But I can’t not love this Dracula; he takes a lower place because... come on, but he still makes my list.

7.) Fate/Apocrypha

The brief anime portion of this list starts off with Fate/Apocrypha. It’s actually a little disingenuous to call Fate’s Dracula by that name since he insists on being called Vlad Tepes III. I mean one look at his character design next to Castlevania’s Dracula tells you everything you need to know, but it’s still an important distinction. In Fate, Vlad recalls how he is a hero in Romania, a champion of his church and land, noble scion of the house of the dragon. While actually in Romania, Vlad’s power becomes near god-like. It offers an interesting reminder that Vlad Tepes was a real man, and is still viewed as a Romanian folk hero, even after he has become intertwined with Dracula. But because characters in Fate are composed of how they are perceived through time, Vlad can still become a vampire. And, frankly, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t worth it when he finally does turn.

8.) Alucard

The quintessential anime Dracula. I’m putting him beneath Fate’s though because, well... Hot take, but Alucard isn’t much of a Dracula. He’s a vampire monster, but he’s mostly just a kind of edgy antihero with a Dracula underlay. Every now and then something resembling Gary Oldman’s Dracula pops its head up and offers a bit of pathos, especially towards the end of the series. But what Alucard lacks in substance, he makes up for in style; it’s not every Dracula that kills Nazis by bombing themselves from an airplane only to sail back to London to a fairly effective quotation of the original novel.

9.) The Sacred Ancestor

We’re now in legendary Dracula territory; Draculas who lose some points because they don’t make an actual appearance in their series, but still have an impressive presence. It’s never overtly stated that the Sacred Ancestor in Vampire Hunter D is Dracula, but the reader can put two and two together. D’s dad might just be the most powerful Dracula on this list; his powers are nothing short of god-like, and he single-handedly led the Nobility in conquering the world. And yet, from the first novel, there’s an arc present; a Dracula who achieves vampire supremacy, then gains a conscience. What’s left is a mystery that strings the reader and D along through all the novel, presenting a Dracula simultaneously ruthless, brilliant, nurturing, and regretful.

10.) “Someone worse than me.”

You never meet Dracula in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The closest you ever get is a hallucination Mina has in 1969. It’s presumed he’s dead since League is following the novels. But every now and then you’re reminded of his presence through Mina, and the picture she paints is a being of absolute and horrible evil. You already know Mina’s story, but she’s such a strong character in League that you can only begin to imagine what Dracula must have been like. Dracula in League is a trauma, a scar, and like Mina you both dread and hope that you never meet that horrible and beautiful man ever again.

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Simple and Clean

https://archiveofourown.org/works/37246168

Summary: Even though things still aren't exactly rainbows and sunshine--Buffy and Angel still have the curse between them--Buffy convinced Angel to give their relationship a try again, and they have a movie night in the near future. Oneshot. Fluff.

At the moment? Buffy and Angel were sitting on the couch together watching TV, like a couple of highschoolers on their first date together.

And Buffy thought she probably would have been self-conscious about that fact, if they weren’t still uncertain about if his soul was bound or not. So, it really was best to play it safe right now, she knew. Even if the demon in Buffy, and even just the tired girl within her, was so sick of doing just that.

But if nothing else, at least Angel seemed to be enjoying this TV show, unlike most of the ones Buffy had shown him in the past. It helped that she had let him pick it this time.

Buffy supposed that it was fair, somehow: that if she was going to convince him to give their relationship another chance, even with all the red flags in their way in his eyes, then Angel got to choose their movie tonight, now that they were back together… or something like that.

Or maybe Buffy was just thinking that, because she didn’t want to deal with the idea of picking something he wouldn’t like, and thus needed an excuse to let him find something.

Anyway… Angel had chosen Bonanza, and though Buffy wasn’t usually a Western fan, she found that she was enjoying this episode of the old classic well enough… Though that may have had something to do with Angel leaning in to give her Smoochies every time Little Joe was on the screen, as if he was jealous of him and wanted her attention to belong to him and not the cute actor. And for the most part, Buffy could live with that notion… though there were some difficulties popping up with it.

“I swear there are more brothers on this show later on,” Buffy eventually piped up, when Angel’s lips were getting dangerously too close to her nipples at one point and she was forced to sit up, like a Jack-In-the-Box springing out of its toy—being the good little soldier here—when all she really wanted to do, was to let him continue his ministrations and have his lips travel lower still.

Buffy wanted to sigh for the loss of the contact, but quickly decided that Angel didn’t need to suffer and thus tried to continue on undeterred. “I-I feel like authors always add on a ton of more characters to shows when they start run-running out of ideas!”

At her words, Angel did that little half-smile that Buffy loved so much and took one of her hands into his own and kissed it.

And oh, God. Buffy’s heart was beating a mile a minute again, even at that simple gesture. And if she thought that pulling far away from Angel would somehow cure her arousal here, she had been sadly mistaken. Thankfully, the vampire didn’t seem to be calling her out on it, which was definitely of the good. She didn’t know what she would have done if he did right now.

Buffy chanced a swift glance back Angel’s way, and…

“You’re not wrong, Buffy,” he said, sitting up closer to her. “I mean, of course you’re not. That’s true of any story. But especially if the writer has invented a special type of character to exist within it. Like here with the Cartwright family, who are cowboys… J.K. Rowling might have brought more wizard friends into Harry Potter’s inner-circle as he got older… And I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the cartoon Sailor Moon, Buffy, but as that show continued, of course Sailor Guardians for all the planets were eventually added into it. So, yes: you definitely know your stuff about penning a good story, love.”

“Ehehehe! That’s me! Buffy Summers! So much smarter than she looks, and angling to prove it to you by talking about it through the show you love, Angel!” Buffy spat out, as Angel fully snuggled up to her again, and began placing chaste kisses to her neck. Did he have any idea of the affect he was having on her? Buffy had to wonder, as she tried to just remember to breathe and to not press every inch of her body to him and writhe?

Idly, Buffy had to wonder why Angel was doing this to her. Wasn’t he worried about his soul?

Then again, he wasn’t really in risk of losing it, if she didn’t react to his advances, was he? Which she wasn’t doing much of now. Sheesh. She must have been giving Angel the impression that she had much more control of herself than she did.

Buffy was just about to set the record straight that she didn’t, when Angel tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at her with the most loving look in his eyes that she had ever seen in anyone. And suddenly, everything she had ever suffered to get to this moment was worth it.

“I- I love you, Buffy. Those small words really don’t even do it justice. But… thank you for watching this silly show with me, and convincing me to give us a chance again.”

And how else could Buffy respond to that, but to grin like the cat that got the cream, curl up into Angel’s arms, and act like the dutiful high school girlfriend that she’d earlier dreaded being again?

Suddenly, it didn’t seem so bad. Not bad in the slightest.

“Of course, Angel. I love you.”

Author’s Note: So, this story is kind of silly and random and pointless. But I wanted to try and write something in the show’s timeline again, that wasn’t comic related (even though this is actually after the show’s timeline, of course. Shh), so this is it.

But it’s still not the greatest thing in the world, since I wrote it in the wee hours of the morning in the world instead of sleeping. It’s just pointless fluff. But enjoy my attempts at trying to get into the show’s world again? Maybe? I swear my next attempts at it will be better.

And I might write a sequel to this, where Angel realizes Buffy was afraid that he wouldn’t like what movie she’d choose and assures her that that would never be the case.

[wyrdautumn]

The Apothetry Ithnomik

So, now that me and Jacqueline were officially a team, I wanted her help with something that’d been bothering me for a while. Given that I am a hacker of dubious moral character, I like to make a habit of breaking into any encrypted linkservs I happen to find myself in range of, just for funsies, and on the off chance I might learn something interesting, or have a chance to quietly beef up some nice person’s network so they’ll be safer from unscrupulous actors such as myself. A few months before everything started I ran into some nodes around the city that had some weird stuff floating around them, and I mean weird, at least by my standards at the time. For a while I was convinced I was looking at some kind of dog fighting ring, but, the stuff I was seeing didn’t seem much like dogs, if you follow my meaning. I had kind of decided to let it go, wrote it off as some hoax, or at least above my pay grade. None of it was cropping up near my neighborhood--and you’d best believe I was checking--so I could let it be somebody else's problem and hope I would find out it was just some kind of ARG someday.

But once I had Jacqueline on my side, I thought it would be worth another look. I took her to the last place I had picked up some suspect LMs and asked her to look around a bit, do her arcana check thing. I was kind of hoping she'd put my mind at ease, tell me I hadn’t stumbled onto some dangerous magical shenanigans, but if I had that kind of luck I wouldn’t be telling you about it. No, once we started digging, we pretty much found what you’d expect--somebody in the city was summoning monsters from demonworld and making them fight each other for sport. Even putting aside the ethical concerns--Jacqueline had a whole thing trying to explain the nature of all this, all I really got out of it was that people expect the monsters to feel pain so they do, which seems like a shitty deal if you ask me--this whole thing was obviously obscenely dangerous and was only going to end with a lot of people dead, and we were gonna have to make it our problem before it became everybody’s.

Once you knew what you were looking for, these guys weren’t too hard to track down. They were setting up this whole big arena, converting an old warehouse into a more permanent establishment for their bloodsport. Aethersport? Hard to say if those things bleed.

Anyway, we knew where they were going to be, so all we needed was a plan. Jacqueline really didn’t like the idea of going somewhere with, like, people. She was wary, didn’t want anybody seeing her, being able to track her down. Fair enough, right? Easy fix: she lives in shadows, she can hitch a ride in mine. She keeps hidden and when she does her thing we just pretend it’s my thing. All we had to do was arrange a meeting with the boss, talk him down or scare him straight, and send anything he already summoned back where it came from. So, I tracked down the ringleader on the underweb, hacked into his deck, and wrote us an invitation in the form of some malware.

It was a harmless little thing, just locked up his deck for a bit, played some spooky music, showed him this magicky sigil Jacqueline helped me design like something he might have seen before, then deleted itself and left him a spoofed “let’s talk” message with no sender. Pretty basic trickery, easy stuff once you have access to the deck, but all the effort went into presentation. Everything we had on this guy told us he didn’t really know what he was doing, and if we made it look like this was a supernatural attack and not just some copy-paste warrior level bullshit hacking he’d probably buy it. If it worked--which, of course, it did--all we'd have to do was show up for the next fight and he’d have to bring us right to him.

They built their arena out where the factories used to be, did up the interior nice and classy like some upscale nightclub from the 20s. They kept the place admirably discrete for how much they put into it, but even if we hadn't stepped in, there was no way they were gonna keep their secret for long. Maybe they thought they could pass it off as a regular speakeasy and buy their way out of prosecution when the time came. But then they probably woulda left a bunch of angry fuck off monsters rampaging through the city before it got to that point, so maybe foresight just wasn’t their thing.

I wanted to look the part, so I borrowed a few fashion pointers from Jacqueline and ran with them. I got this flowy gothy dress and witchy black jewelry, and then I threw on combat boots and a studded jacket to add a little punk touch for me. It was a sick look, honestly, and it did the trick, ‘cause I was barely there two minutes before a few burly-ass toughs dressed up like they thought they were Secret Service came around and brought me to their boss.

They called him Cowboy, on account of his whole affectation. Wide brimmed hat, southern twang, low-key aggro with a genteel frontier greed. We’re talking a guy who missed the point of a lot of spaghetti westerns. He didn’t waste any time once his goons deposited me at his table overlooking the pit. “You’re the one who sent me that message,” he said.

Obviously I was going to play it a little coy. “Maybe. I haven’t seen your messages.” That was a lie. “How should I know which one you mean?”

“The one that damn near broke my deck, of course.” It hadn’t done anything of the sort, but I put a lot of work into making him think otherwise. “You know, I figured this’d happen eventually.” He was sitting almost sideways on his booth chair, holding the neck of his whiskey with the tips of the fingers, and all I could think about was how he would seem even less cool once he inevitably dropped the thing. “Gotta be other folks in on this shit. Somebody had to write the book, after all. I knew I’d wind up catching y’all’s eye eventually.”

“Is that what this is?” I asked him in my best husky witch voice. “A cry for attention?”

“Please, darlin’, I’m not so pathetic as that. This here is just good old fashioned capitalism. Man takin’ his advantages and turnin’ them to cash, like nature intended.”

I couldn’t resist. “So you’re using the powers of the arcane to get rich quick. I suppose it’s less pathetic.”

“Heh. Had a feeling you folks’d be like that.” Cowboy grinned like a jackal. A really smug jackal you wanna punch in the face. “Cuz I’m a businessman, and I knew if y’all were businessmen--or ladies, ‘course”--yes he did say that--”and you had the kind of power I got at my hands now, let alone whatever other crazy shit I can only imagine, the world’d be run by folks like us.”

What a fucking idiot. But I needed to keep him talking. “So you’re going to offer me your business acumen.”

“Don’t get ahead of me now,” he said. He sat up for once and leaned in. He really thought he was a viper. “I still don’t know who you are. Or why you wanted to meet me in the first place. I got my ideas, but I know you have your own agenda. So tell me what you’re here for and let’s see what deal we can cut.”

The thing about knowing you’ve got all the cards is there’s not much point in lying. So I was straight with him, which, believe me, that’s not something I can say often. “I’m sure you realize I’m here to stop this.”

He just shrugged. “I figured it might be something like that.” Then he leaned back with that same punchable look. “So what will it take to change your mind? I know I can. Otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered talking to me.”

This guy thought he was so clever, and he was just ludicrously wrong about absolutely everything. I needed to make him see it. “Think about this,” I told him. “That book of yours, do you even know how old it is? How many hundreds of years, do you think?”

“19th century,” he said. “Had a dealer date it for me, before I figured out what it was.”

“19th century,” I repeated. Jacqueline whispered in my ear. I followed her lead. “Been around a while, then. And you’re right, that’s just the tip of it. Knowledge you can’t fathom, back to the dawn of civilization. Old, old, old secrets. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Not especially. Everybody knows magic’s out there now, it only stands to reason there’s people who always did.”

“That’s the point. Some people did always know. And all that time, the entire history of the human race, not one person ever had the bright idea to use that knowledge for personal gain. Nobody ever thought they could take that power and run the world with it. That’s what you believe, right?”

“Well, no, when you put it that way, I’m sure somebody tried. Maybe they just weren’t any good at it.”

He really didn’t get it. “Listen to me.” I looked him dead in the eyes. “It's not gonna work. Whatever you think is different about you, you’re wrong. What you’re meddling with here is dangerous, ‘Cowboy.’” I added the sneer. Couldn’t help it. “You’re playing with fire and when you lose control it’s going to burn a lot more than just you.”

Cowboy almost seemed like he was listening, which surprised me. “Let me show you something,” he said, and he waved his hand to pull up two screens for me, one for each of the monsters he had locked up in the pit that night. There was a mean-looking two-legged coyote thing--I figured it was supposed to be El Chupacabra--and some sort of freaky lion bear snake chimera creature that, I’m gonna be honest, looked a lot grosser in real life than it would have on an album cover.

But the weird thing about them was, they were just kinda… standing there. They were moving back and forth a little bit, but their motions were repetitive, like they were stuck in some sort of idle loop. “That’s always what they do,” Cowboy said, “least til we open their cage and let ‘em at each other. They’re dumb sons of bitches, ma’am, ain’t inclined to go huntin’ for nothin’ that ain’t directly in front of their face. We let ‘em kill each other, then we shut the winner in for a few days ‘til he fades away an’ goes back wherever he came from. Any poor bastard you put in front of ‘em is gonna get ripped to shreds, sure, but it ain’t a problem so long as you don’t let any poor bastard put himself in front of ‘em.”

I’m not kidding you, that was his grand fuckin’ scheme. That was his defense! ‘This is totally safe because everything about it is the exact opposite of safe!’ It really threw me for a god damn loop. I had no clue how to respond to that. So I looked back at the screens, and I almost forgot about all the bullshit I just heard, cuz El Chupacabra was looking back at me.

I guess Cowboy saw it on my face, cuz he glanced at the screen too. “Oh, huh,” he said. “Yeah they do that sometimes. Nothin’ ever comes of it though, it’s just kinda creepy. They forget all about the camera once they catch sight of each other.”

A jingle played over the building’s speakers and an announcer told us bets were closing in 60 seconds. The lights dimmed around the room and a spotlight came on over the pit. At this point I was genuinely pretty spooked, and I looked at Cowboy and told him, “you have to call this off.”

“Relax, darlin’,” he said, and he took a big swig of whiskey. “Why don’t you just enjoy the show?”

It was hard to keep my cool, but I thought freaking out then would ruin all that effort I put into building the facade. We always thought we were gonna have to drop in on the fight and let Jacquline take care of the monsters anyway, so I figured, okay, I guess we can just stick to the plan, why not?

But it didn’t feel right. Somehow I knew we had miscalculated. I looked back at the screens, and El Chupacabra was staring back at me, I swear looking right into my eyes. Like, right into them. Almost like--well. I guess I had a hunch. So I got up. I moved away from my seat. And its eyes followed me.

“Shit,” I said.

Cowboy turned to see what I was looking at. After a few seconds, it clicked. “Shit,” he said, and I didn’t hear what he said next, because the announcer came on again and said there were ten seconds left. Cowboy held a hand up to his ear, looking concerned, and started talking to his staff, but it was too late for them to do anything I guess, because the countdown kept ticking, down to 3 seconds, to 2, to 1…

There was a loud siren. I saw the cell doors open on the monitor and both monsters charged out of the gates. I whipped around, leaned over the balcony Cowboy was using as his perch, and watched with what I would say was an appropriate amount of terror as the monsters leaped straight out of the pit onto the floor below us.

So right away there’s pandemonium, people screaming and yelling and running, tables getting bowled over by the people and by the monsters, Cowboy spilling his whiskey all over the floor. About half of the guards ran for their lives, the other half drew their guns and started firing like that was gonna fuckin’ do anything, but luckily for them El Chupacabra and his buddy weren’t interested in the bystanders. They were coming for me. Or, more likely, for Jacqueline.

Less intelligent demons don’t really know how to deal with Jackie, is the thing. Most of the time they know she’s a threat to them, and some of ‘em try to run away or give her the slip, but you’d be surprised how often they just pick the biggest threat in the room and run straight for it. Normally that suits us just fine, but Cowboy picked the exact wrong time to show some common sense. He jumped right into action, to his credit, running off to help evacuate his customers and barking orders to the staff, and the first thing he did was make sure they threw on the lights. And they had gone all out with them, like full on covering the room with floodlights, I guess for specifically this kind of situation, which is almost an admirable precaution except for how utterly futile it is. But more importantly it just really fucked us over, because a room that bright ain’t got no shadows.

Jacqueline was wavering beneath me, the faint shadow I was casting barely enough to hold her. The monsters were skidding up the stairs, El Chupacabra leaped forward and smashed the seat Cowboy had been using, everything was going wrong and I realized I was going to die. I didn’t have very many options. And I wound up doing the thing I always do when things go sideways, like seriously you’d be surprised how much this comes up--I threw myself off the balcony and hoped for the best.

Bad plan. It’s always a bad plan. I took a hard fall and smashed into the ground. I was lucky I hadn’t broken anything, but I was bruised and hurting and winded. I could feel Jacqueline’s weight shifting around in my shadow. She didn’t have much to work with, to fight the monsters or to keep me safe. I felt paralyzed. I think she did too. And I didn’t… I didn’t like what I was doing to her. I didn’t want her to have to watch me…

Well, I didn’t want to die either. And the monsters had already leaped down. They were closing in on me, cautious, afraid of whatever scent they had picked up from Jacqueline. So I spun up my deck and beamed the worm I prepared to every device I could reach. I’d hoped to do it properly, have time to slip it by anything using more than basic security, leave my fingerprints off of it, but I didn’t have much choice. All I could do was brute force it and hope it got where it needed to.

I crawled backwards as best I could, my deck vibrating madly in my pocket, worried that if I tried to scramble to my feet one of them would take the chance to pounce. The ominous tone I cooked up started playing from somewhere in the distance, then it spread across the room, one device at a time. Then I heard it coming loud, from the monitors above the pit, and the house lights blinked out all at once. I felt a lurch in my stomach and I was gone.

Before I knew it I was back on my feet, somewhere else, still in the building but I couldn’t tell where. I was disoriented, the lights were all off save for a few bright floodlights casting long dark shadows all over the room, and the red glow from the monitors I hacked gave everything this super menacing vibe. Before I could get my bearings I heard a roar and felt something coming up behind me, and I dropped to the ground.

The chimera barreled past me and tried to swerve back around. It skidded into the wall, but that didn’t slow it down. It came crashing back toward me, but I saw the shadows swirling around me and I knew I didn’t have to be afraid of it. We had already won. So I charged right back at it. It swung its paw at my head but I ducked below it, sliding beneath its underside, and I gave it a hard uppercut in its soft underbelly that did absolutely jack shit. But then a thick lance of shadow shot out from beneath me, piercing the thing straight through its middle. It writhed and roared in pain, or whatever living aether feels, and the pillar of shadow lanced out again, stabbing it from the inside with a bunch of big nasty fuck-off shadow spikes, and then the thing just… wasn’t, anymore, and the shadows receded, and the chimera was gone.

Before I knew what was happening, I felt something swinging at my head, and then I was gone too. My stomach lurched and I was somewhere else again, but El Chupacabra must have been catching on, because I barely had time to register it barreling towards me, claws ready to rip my stomach out of my gut, before I was nowhere once more.

You have to understand, Jacqueline does the shadow thing easy. It’s second nature to her, like she knows the dance so well she doesn’t even realize she’s dancing anymore. She’ll shift and shape and reform however she wants and it doesn’t phase her in the slightest. But I can’t do any of that, and I definitely couldn’t do it back then, and being shoved in and out of your entire reality like that really fucks you up when you’re not used to it. So when I tell you I was doubled over on the ground sick to my stomach in just the grossest most pathetic seasick haze, I just want to make sure you know, for the record, that I’d like to see you take it any better, all right?

But, so, okay, yes, I spent the next minute or so shaking on my knees trying not to retch, so I kind of missed the next little bit after that. But I imagine a bystander would have just seen me grappling with my super anime inner demons and exploding in a big jaggy ball of shadow rage that eradicated El Chupacabra before it could try to get another hit off, so that’s the reality I’m gonna choose to live in.

Once I managed to gather my bearings, I took off to track down our friend Cowboy and finally finish the job. Luckily I didn’t have to go far. He was very courteously waiting for me by the bar, surveying his mostly-destroyed club. As far as I could tell everybody else made a break for it. But I guess he realized we still had business.

He tried to keep himself together, but he was fidgeting nervously and avoiding my eyes. “Well. It’s fair to say a lot went wrong here. But, I will point out, those things only had eyes for you, and clearly you had ‘em licked, so frankly I don’t know who you have to blame ‘cept yourself.” I think he could tell I was stabbing his head in my mind. “But I’m not a fool, no, and you’ve made your point, so, maybe it’d be best if we worked something out. I’m not adverse to bringing in an expert when the situation calls, and havin’ somebody who can keep the beasts in check is only a fair precaution, I would think. Obviously you can’t be in the room with ‘em, but--”

“Stop talking,” I told him. I stepped forward. He flinched. He was scared of me. That was Jackie’s cue. The shadows started swirling around me again, and Jacqueline rose from my shadow, half-formed in shadowstuff, shaping herself as a demonic figure towering behind me. We advanced on Cowboy. He staggered back, swearing under his breath.

Jacqueline took over from there. “You don’t understand anything.” She made her voice raspy and deep, a slight echo of Harvey’s cocky drawl underneath it. “This, all of this, this is the misguided workings of a neophyte, dog-paddling in water deeper than the deepest ocean, arrogant and ignorant of how small he is, how dark the waves below.” Cowboy had his back against the wall. “I could unmake you with a thought, and I am a shadow of the beasts you fail to see rising up to swallow you whole.” The shadows swirled and formed into a great scythe that she held in her towering shadowy hands, perched above Cowboy’s head, ready to strike. “This is a mercy.”

The scythe came down and passed through Cowboy. He gasped and shuddered and almost fell over, but I grabbed him by the neck and stared into his eyes. “You won’t be summoning anything again. You can try, but it won’t work. It never will. Let it go and live your life, Cowboy.”

I let him drop to the ground. I’m pretty sure he passed out. So we just left him there, and hoped he learned his lesson. If not, well, at least his next scam couldn’t be any more dangerous.

...

Nah. It doesn’t work that way. But what Jacqueline keeps telling me is magic shit’s all about, like, faith. And then she walks that back because that makes it sound like she means religious faith, and it’s not that, or like it can be, but it doesn’t have to, or something. I’m not gonna pretend I get it. But I think what it’s really about is, like… the belief that things should work the way you expect them to? You gotta have confidence in what you’re doing, and that’s what she took from him. Lot of work to make a white guy feel insecure, but I guess you can’t argue with results.

[aion-rsa]

The Midnight Sky: How George Clooney Made His Emotional and Timely Sci-Fi Movie

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George Clooney has a relatively simple answer when asked by Den of Geek what inspired him to make his first science fiction film as a director, The Midnight Sky.

“I thought I had a take on it, you know?” says Clooney, who also stars in his seventh outing behind the camera. “I felt like there was a story that I understood in a way about what we’re capable of doing to one another if we don’t pay attention, if we don’t listen to science, if we don’t pay attention to divisions and hatred and pay that forward. I thought I had an understanding of that.”

We’re speaking with Clooney via Zoom, of course, in the ninth month of the never-ending COVID-19 pandemic, and after briefly commiserating about the last time we saw our parents (eight months for him, longer for us), we turn to the film, which is based on a novel called Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Dalton-Brooks and premieres on Netflix this week.

In the film, Clooney plays Augustine Lofthouse, a brilliant but lonely astrophysicist stationed at a remote Arctic research facility. It’s three weeks after “the Event,” an unspecified global cataclysm that is spewing enough radiation into the atmosphere to make the Earth uninhabitable. With the rest of the station’s crew headed south to reunite with their families and either prepare for the end or find a place to hide out, Augustine — who��s suffering from a terminal illness — decides to stay behind.

But he also has an important mission to complete with the time he has left to him: contacting the crew of an exploratory ship that’s returning from a habitable moon orbiting Jupiter and warning them to turn back and start a new life there (Augustine himself discovered the planetoid). Meanwhile, the ship’s crew, headed by David Oyelowo and a pregnant Felicity Jones, grow increasingly uneasy at the silence from Earth even as their craft is buffeted by asteroids and other dangers.

At the same time, Augustine finds himself caring for a little girl named Iris (Caiolinn Springall) who can’t speak and has apparently been left behind accidentally. He also learns that the transmitter at the facility isn’t powerful enough to communicate with the vessel. With the girl in tow, Augustine begins a treacherous journey through the ice and snow to reach another station with a stronger transmitter.

“I had an idea of the story I wanted to tell,” continues Clooney. “And when I talked to Netflix, I said, ‘This isn’t an action film, it’s a meditation. It’s a conversation about regret and about redemption. We’re going to take out some of the lines and we’re going to use score to tell the story,’ And they, to their credit, said, ‘Great.’”

The Midnight Sky is marked by passages of silence or sparse dialogue, particularly during the Earthbound scenes, but dialogue and personal drama are nothing new to Clooney, whose previous directorial efforts include films like Good Night, and Good Luck and The Ides of March. But even when it came to the effects-heavy material set on the ship or in space, the director wasn’t fazed.

“I’d done a couple of space movies so I had some understanding of how difficult space would be and what the preparation for it would be,” Clooney explains, referring to his starring turns in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity. He adds that he didn’t call his old friends and directors for advice on shooting the space-based scenes either.

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“I was on the set (on those movies),” Clooney elaborates. “I didn’t go back to the trailer. I’m from Kentucky. We try to stay out of trailers, you know what I mean? So I’ve always sat on sets. And I watched Alfonso and Steven. Alfonso, particularly for the spacewalk stuff, the things that he and Chivo (cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) did were really helpful.”

Clooney’s actors had to prepare for the spacewalk sequences in a different way. Tiffany Boone, who plays the astronaut Maya on her first mission aboard the Aether, explains, “I watched every documentary and every docu-series I could specifically about long periods in space. There was one that a few of us watched… I watched, I read books, I just, I really tried to find out what that experience is kind of like to be in space for a little while.”

Boone adds that she hired a trainer in preparation for the spacewalk sequence, saying, “I went to London and I worked on my core there. Every day that I was in London, I was training pretty much. Wire work, core training, and pretending to be in zero gravity. That little spacewalk that you see, that lasts under 10 minutes in the movie, took for me a good four or five months in total to make happen.”

Both Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo agree that getting to play astronauts in a movie scratches some kind of childhood itch — although in Jones’ case, only up to a point.

“I think it’s definitely one of those professions that you think, ‘Gosh, that would be a pretty exciting one,’” the Rogue One star says. “I think as I got older, I found it less enticing to want to go off into space. I’m not into small enclosed spaces, so I think I’d find the claustrophobia a bit too much. It’s extraordinary, these astronauts who go up and spend a year in space. I think that’s so admirable because to be an astronaut, there’s a huge element of self-sacrifice because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Unlike in Gravity, Clooney does not walk in space himself in The Midnight Sky, but went through a physical transformation of a different sort. To play the dying Lofthouse, Clooney lost weight and made sure to shoot his own scenes first — with the focus on the march across the Arctic plains.

Philippe Antonello/Netflix

Oyelowo adds, “I think being an astronaut in a movie’s a little bit like being a cowboy or being a detective. There’s something iconic about those professions when it comes to cinema, not least because great actors have made them iconic.” He expands on that, saying, “When you get in that suit, when you get on set, you do feel like you are stepping into one of the special opportunities afforded an actor when it comes to cinema. Especially when it’s a film on this grand scale.”

“It would have been really hard to do it the other way around,“ he says. “The beauty of it is for us, literally, we only shot my stuff first and then we only shot their stuff afterwards. There wasn’t this sort of crossbreeding that can make things really difficult and hard to do. It’s hard to jump back in an actor’s chair where you’re directing yourself. So I had a great advantage by being able to schedule it that way.”

Another member of the cast, Felicity Jones, was also going through her own physical transformation of sorts while shooting the movie: she was pregnant with her first child. But rather than treat that as an impediment, to be filmed around or ignored (or worse, used as a reason to replace the actress, like a studio might have done in the old days), Clooney came up with a better solution: Jones’ pregnancy was written into the script, adding another layer to the stakes facing the crew of the Aether.

“It’s extraordinary, when you look at the list of actresses who’ve been pregnant while shooting, you’d be surprised that in some of the most iconic films in history, the leading actress has been pregnant,” says Jones. “But for the most part, pregnancy has been something that has been CGI’d out or disguised. So it felt revolutionary. It did feel very special that in a film of this scope and scale, having a pregnant astronaut is pretty spectacular and it was a testament to George’s modernity that he wasn’t scared of it, that he embraced it, and saw how it could benefit the storytelling.”

Read more

TV

Amazon Prime Video New Releases: December 2020

By Alec Bojalad

Movies

Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century

By Don Kaye

Indeed, the idea that Jones’ character Sully, her unborn baby and her fellow crew members could be the last humans left alive is perhaps even more profound now, nine months into a pandemic that seems to show no signs of ending, than it was when Clooney and company first started shooting the movie. “We finished shooting in early February,” the director says. “We came to LA to start the editing, and immediately we were told to lock down. I wasn’t able to see my parents, we weren’t able to see our family, like we just talked about.”

But as Clooney and his team began editing the film, the space-based, post-apocalyptic thriller took on a different tone. “It became clear that it was a story about our inability to communicate, our inability to be home, our inability to be near the people that we love and hold them and touch them,” Clooney explains. “We were able to, in the editing, lean into the elements that say that we didn’t understand until you took it away how important our ability to communicate is.”

Tiffany Boone muses that audiences watching The Midnight Sky will get something different out of it than they might have if the world hadn’t turned upside down in 2020. “Part of why I love the script is because I thought it was really timely and had something to say about the times we were living under,” she says. “I had no idea it would be as relevant as it is…that’s all of our reality, being separated from the people we love and hoping that they’re taking care of themselves and trying to find some connection even when we can’t be in person.” She concludes, “I think it’s going to hit people even harder.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The Midnight Sky premieres Wednesday (December 23) on Netflix.

The post The Midnight Sky: How George Clooney Made His Emotional and Timely Sci-Fi Movie appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/38wA9J8

[vagrantblvrd]

@miss-ingno

For 'Desert Rose’ I’m still stuck on an Indiana Jones-ish AU, and it sounds a lot like archaeologist/adventurer Ryan. 

Someone hires Ryan to help them find this fabled gem going by that name and bring him a a page out of a centuries old journal from someone who claimed to have seen it while on a trading expedition. 

He runs into Gavin when they get to whatever country the gem is said to be. He’s this charmingly scruffy expatriate who may or may not be flirting outrageously with Ryan. (For some reason he always seems to disappear when Ryan’s employer is around.) 

There are shenanigans that involve people trying to kill Ryan and his employer and ~intrigue. 

Gavin offers to help Ryan (”Out of the goodness of my heart, you seem a  bit lost.”) 

Ryan realizes Gavin’s smarter than he lets on, helping Ryan decipher clues leading to it. Offering up local stories about it being cursed and the gem’s bloody history full of betrayal and backstabbing and murder (so much murder) in Ryan’s motel room after a tiring day of escaping death by mere inches and cracking ancient riddles and the like, Gavin kicked back in a chair with a beer while Ryan goes over his notes and whatnot at the table, noises of the city filtering in through the half-open window.

Gavin saves Ryan’s life when his employer double-crosses him and it’s revealed Gavin’s a bit of an adventurer himself. 

Has been tracking that rat-bastard for at least a month after he stabbed Gavin and his partners in the back. Gavin telling Ryan that he still has Geoff and Jack, that Gavin’s been ducking Ryan’s employer AND Michael and Jeremy who think Gavin’s lost it.

 Convinced that his mentors/family are still alive even though they can’t be. 

(They are, though. Gavin’s heard bits and pieces there, but he couldn’t get close enough on his own without spooking Ryan’s employer. No way was he going to put his lads at risk again, and Ryan’s little heart is like “Oh” thinking Gavin’s been using him this whole time. (Because yessss, I love that little trope.))

He promises to help Gavin, expecting that to be the last of him because he’ll have what he wants, so why would he want to stick around Ryan, right?

And then adventures in which they almost die a dozen times and manage to rescue Geoff and Jack and recover the Desert Rose - only for it to be lost down some bottlomless ravine or some such when Gavin saves Ryan from the his employer.

Both of them going their own way for a bit until Gavin shows up at Ryan’s door hoping to hire him to take Gavin and his bizarre family on an adventure in search of some treasure or other. (After a while and several countries later, Ryan finding that he likes Gavin’s weird little family more than he thought he would, he finally twigs to the fact that Gavin is indeed flirting outrageously with him. The others are like. “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” because for God’s sake, Ryan, Gavin has not been subtle in the least, you moron.)

====

‘Golden Rust’ puts me in mind of a FAHC AU where Gavin ~betrays the crew.

Or that’s what it looks like from the outsider POV.

It starts small, someone sidling up to him and offering him everything he could want - money, power, whatever - and the Golden Boy, he’s a fickle creature, isn’t he? 

A job goes wrong, they lose the new guy. Some weirdo in a cowboy hat and eye-searing colors. A week goes by and something goes wrong on a heist. Mogar’s explosives go off too early, and half a block of Los Santos goes with him.

The Fakes go quiet for a bit, regrouping, and then they’re back. Frantic, desperate, almost, because the cops and other bottom feeders in the city have been having a go at them. (No one notices they don’t gain any ground, that the Fakes fend them off just as easily as they ever did, they just try and try and try again, weakening themselves in the process.)

Through all this there’s reports of infighting in the main crew, or what’s left of it. Bugs and hidden cameras and operatives who’ve made it deep enough into the crew to see it for themselves. 

The Golden Boy who goads the remaining crew members into an impossible heist with his eye on whatever reward he’s to gain when the Fakes are no more.

Gets the Kingpin and his second killed when the cops, ones who’ve been bought out by Fakehaus (tired of bowing down to the Fakes time and time again) catch them in a blockade just when they think they’ve pulled the heist off. Trapped, outnumbered, no answer over the comms and they die when their car goes over a bridge into the river below miles outside of Los Santos.

The crew limps along after that for a week, two, more, and then!

The Vagabond, Ramsey’s loyal attack dog finds out what the Golden Boy’s been doing. All his careful machinations that killed the crew off one by one, and there’s a call, a meeting in a quiet location just outside the city. Old safe house for the crew from their early days.

The Vagabond drives out there to where the Golden Boy is waiting along with the vipers whispers promises in his ears, and it’s a bloodbath,  isn’t it.

Over a dozen bodies and the Golden Boy and the Vagabond among them, and that’s it for the Fakes - or should be, but there’s a new leader. Woman with fiery red hair and the charming and charismatic man at her side, quicksilver smile and a clever tongue. 

Smile on his face as he slits your throat, and no one knows who the real danger is when they walk into a room. (Rumors say they’re the ones behind the deaths of the Fakes’ founding members, that it was an inside job and Fakehaus does get more territory and whatnot with the Fake AH Crew under new management, so maybe there’s some merit to those rumors after all.)

====

The truth of course, is the others were getting old. Slowing down and there’s only so long you can keep ahead of the bullets headed your way, dodge that knife. They wanted out, and in true Fake AH Crew fashion wanted a fitting end. 

(Jeremy just went along with it, telling them he wanted to wreck some shit when really, he would have missed his stupid crew. Also, Lindsay and Trevor task him with making sure the others keep a low(ish) profile, forgetting who they’re asking this of.They regret it almost immediately, but by then it’s too late.)

So when someone approaches Gavin, try to sway him to his side, he gets an idea. Brings it to Geoff and the others and they hatch a scheme - 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, really? Why don’t we just fucking rob a bank and get into a shootout with the cops?”

“Boring, Michael. So very, very boring.” 

So they create this plan, a way to take out some troublemakers and get that blaze of glory ending they’ve more than earned.

Lindsay and Trevor set them up in some ideal location, some beachside city/town where no one knows who the Fakes are, and end up with little beach houses next to one another - 

”Goddammit, I thought I’d seen the last of you.” 

“Michael, that’s mean, Michael.”

- and live out the rest of their days (more or less) quietly.

(No one’s really surprised when Ryan and Gavin get a cozy little house together, given the way they both went out - “That was some betrayed lover bullshit and you know it, Gavin. Way to be subtle.”)

Geoff and the others mercilessly ridicule Gavin when it turns out the actor who played him in the movie about them titled Golden Rust comes out had to wear a prosthesis because his actual nose wasn’t big enough.

The guy who plays Michael is using a New York accent - “What the fuck?”

For some inexplicable reason Jack’s a gorgeous redhead - “Well, at least they got the shirt right? Also, nice rack, Jack.”

Geoff’s guy is some overacting schmuck with awful fake tattoos and a freaking soul patch.  - “Oh my God. Why?”

Jeremy’s dude is - “Holy shit. Is that Peter Dinklage?” 

Ryan’s actor is some guy with shitty face paint and a dumb mask who puts weird emphasis on certain words and clearly has no idea how to hold a gun, and dear God - “All right, chill out, Ryan.”

Really, it’s a turd of a movie but they have regular viewings of it every year on the anniversary of Ryan and Gavin’s “deaths”.

(It never ceases to amuse them about the speculation that something happened between Gavin and Ryan to kick things off, that something happened to sour their bromance.)

They also make a point to watch whatever terrible made for tv movies get made, and there’s an actual party when they get a documentary. (Lindsay and Trevor and assorted others come to visit because it’s an occasion.)

(That tiny little beach town eventually becomes THE destination where Fakes and various allies head to after they retire, and the locals either never realize or figure it out and just don’t say anything because they’re just so nice.)

[tube-thoughts-blog]

tube thoughts vol. 2

zero stars - terrible, 1/2 a star - dull, 1 star - folly, 1 1/2 stars - lacking,   2 stars - fair, 2 1/2 stars - decent, 3 stars - terrific

zack snyder's 300: Rise of an Empire *Lady warrior commandeers the battle scenes and saves it from being a male meat fest like the first film.* 3 stars

rifftrax presents "Independence Day" *One way to make this movie more moronic would be if social media existed in its world at the time.* 3 stars with riffing 2 without

Cannon films "Ninja 3: The Domination" *Spunky shinobi, you must avenge me!* 3 stars

Septic Man *Municipal shit-storm* either zero stars for grossness or 3 stars for grossness and surrealness

"The Stuff" a Larry Cohen film starring Michael Moriarty *Ba-da-ba-ba-ba, I'm lovin' it.* 3 stars

Farscape premier episode *Awol from the ratcage.* 3 stars

Garth Marenghi's: Darkplace "The Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shoggoth" *Brocolli from space. I'd thought it had tasted odd.* 3 stars

Albert Pyun's "Omega Doom" starring Rutger Hauer *It's nice to know after we've killed ourselves off, through constant warfare, sentient robots will become gun nuts and start acting out cold war westerns.* 2 1/2 stars

Kenny vs. Spenny: "Who Can Sell More Bibles?" *The Devil is in the details.* 3 stars

Masters of Horror: Clive Barker's "Valerie on the Stairs" *Another bodice-ripper.* 2 stars

"I Spit On Your Grave" uncut 1978 either zero stars or 3 stars

"Beyond the Door" *Paranormal pregnancy with personality.* 3 stars

Twin Peaks: "The Condemned Woman" *Josie and the pine weasels* 2 1/2 stars

Lost and Found Video Night: Vol 7 -- 3 stars

Seinfeld: "The Frogger" *George's high score.* 3 stars

Kolchak, The Night Stalker: "Mr. R.I.N.G." *What's the difference between right and wrong? robot need to know.* 3 stars

Everything is Terrible "The Rise and Fall of God" *Homeschool is the answer.* 3 stars

Roger Corman presents Andrew Stevens' "Subliminal Seduction" featuring Sharknado's Ian Ziering and Critters' Dee Wallace Stone *CD-ROM Inception meets Tommy Wiseau's "The Room"  type inept erotic thriller.* 3 stars

David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ" *Jennifer Jason Leigh penetrates Jude Law's port hole in order to play an addictive and twisted version of The Sims.* 3 stars

rifftrax presents "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" *Butter scraped over too much bread.* 3 plus stars with riffing 3 stars without

"Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone" *Han Solo babysits a brat-pack ginger cutie, Ernie Hudson is Lando, and Michael Ironside is a Darth Humongous who believes that Earth Girls Are Easy.* 3 stars

"Riddick" *Robinson Crusoe machismo* 3 stars

Farscape: "I, E.T." *My name is Mud.* 3 stars

Dominion: pilot episode *Bright light city gonna set my soul on fire.* 2 1/2 stars

"Thor: Dark World" *Science lady Padme pines for Adam of Eternia so that she inadvertently stumbles into the evil fudge and awakens the 9th Doctor Keebler Who causes the realms to converge like ornaments on an imploding Christmas tree.* 3 stars

"Priest" *Paul Bettany's Obi-Wan character is disenchanted with his forced retirement  in a Catholic 1984 dystopia and his regret filled dreams lead to the wasteland where his  fallen knights of the old republic partner, a cowboy from hell Karl Urban, lurks about with his horde of bloodsucking bandits and xenomorph vampires. A decent cameo from Brad  Dourif as a snake oil salesman. This movie's biggest flaw is that it forgets  the classic genre work of Sergio Leone,  John Carpenter, and George Miller and instead mimmicks the cliche Matrix ripoff style hack work of Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil flicks.* 2 stars

"Scanners 2: The New Order" *If you get inside me, go gently, and easy on the nosebleeds. This kind of telepathic power in the hands of a fascist P.D., no thankee.* 3 stars

Joe Bob's Christmas Special: Charles Band's "Pets" *Inhabits the same universe as other weird,  dumb kids' adventure comedies like 'Garbage Pail Kids', 'The Super Mario Bros Movie', 'Ernest Scared Stupid', and 'Problem Child 1 & 2'* 1 1/2 stars

Sami Rami & The Coen Bros present "Crimewave" aka "The XYZ Murders" *Reminiscent of the Three Stooges, classic Mel Brooks, 40s cartoons, humorous Tom Waits song tales, and the original SNL.* 3 stars

Udo Kier in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss OSbourne'  --sexploitation-- *Show me where it hurts. Fill me with  hatred. My pleasure is seeing your dead body.* 3 stars

Masters of Horror: "Right to Die" *The crispy, vengeful ghost of Terry Shiavo.* 3 stars

William Lustig's "Vigilante" starring Robert Forster & Fred Williamson *Regular Joe nihilism* 3 stars

rifftrax presents Ridley Scott's "Alien" *H.R. Giger porn on the sattelite of love.* 3 plus stars with riffing 3 without

Josh Brolin is DC's "Jonah Hex" *Sometimes spooky, often dumb B-western that's sadly too gutless to show any blood n grit. Still it might fit into a marathon of 'The Quick and the Dead', 'Five Bloody Graves',  'Navajo Joe', and 'Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter.'*  2 stars

"Rhinestone Cowgirls" 1982 --xxx-- *Easy listenin' and screwin', plus plenty of other prickly  situations protruding in Cactus Corner.*  2 stars

Kolchak, The Night Stalker: "Primal Scream" *Unfrozen caveman mauler.* 3 stars

"Shogun Assassin" *Daddy day samurai* 3 stars

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs: Dino De Laurentiis presents "Orca" *starring Richard Harris as a salty sea-dog, Charlotte Rampling as a sensitive marine biologist, Bo Derek as a sexy shipmate and Shamu snack, plus the indian fella from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' lending his wisdom by saying things like,  "The old ways no longer work. Now, even our gods dance to a new tune."*  2 1/2 stars

"Baron Blood" *Decent dubbing, giallo lite, moody nightscapes, cursed castle, creepy stalking.*  2 1/2 stars

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace: "Illuminatum & Illuminata" *Interviewer: Do you believe in the Horned One?  the actor Todd Rivers: You mean the Hoofed One? Interviewer: Yeah.*  3 stars

Beavis & Butthead: "Time Machine" *Butthead: 1832, that's like not now.  Beavis: Yeah, aren't we more than that?* 2 1/2 stars

Twin Peaks: "Wounds and Scars" *"A country habit. We are so very trusting."* 3 stars

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs:  Wes Craven's "The People Under the Stairs" *A ghetto version of Twin Peaks' "Black Lodge" where "Hills Have Eyes" type inbred freaks are trapped in the cellar and "Sometimes further in is the only way out." in a twisted Tom & Jerry style game of cat & mouse.* 3 stars

Masters of Horror: "We All Scream for Ice Cream" starring Lee Tergesen, William Forsythe, and the kid from Bad Santa and Eastbound & Down *The Good Humor Man returns from the land of the popsicles to scoop out and dish some cold and sticky revenge.* 3 stars

Gun Fu John Woo and Risky Bidness Tom Cruise present: "Mission Impossible 2" *We've got the cure, we made the disease. Dianetics incorporated.* 3 stars

Tim & Eric present: Bedtime Stories "Hole" *Spitting surreal absurdism sometimes sidetracks the sinister suburban satire.* 2 1/2 stars

MST3K presents: Charles Band's "Laserblast" *Moppy-haired stoner with a muscle-van gets to rain down the fire of the lizard alien gods on his stereotypical 70s burnout and redneck cop enemies in his one horse desert hometown.* 3 stars with riffing 2 without

Farscape: "Exodus from Genesis" *A hot time in the roach maternity ward in the outer reaches of the universe, tonight.* 3 stars

"Saga, Curse of the Shadow" aka "The Shadow Cabal" *Somewhere between Peter Jackson's LOTR and LARPers that run around yelling, "Lightning bolt, lightnight bolt, lightning bolt!"  2 1/2 stars

"Night of the Loving Dangerously" --xxx-- *With the allure of his ever-wanton ex-wife, Traci Lords, private dick, Peter North, is pulled into a web of blackmail involving his ex's new fiance- a perverted CEO  with everything to lose, Jamie Gillis,  his naughty daddy's girl daughter, and gay son's snooping photographer boyfriend.*  2 1/2 stars

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs: "Poltergeist" *Joe Bob maligns Spielberg's involvement with a Tobe Hooper horor flick, Heather O'Rourke gives me the sads, an 80s kids bedroom is full of nostalgic shit, the mom looks sexy even with a streak of grey hair, there's some kind of message about the sinister nature of suburban sprawl,  a sassy medium with a drawl steals the show, and Joe Bob ponders the difference between "Go into the light" & "Stay away from the light."* 3 stars

Lost & Found Video Night Vol. 5 *Hot diggity tallyho* 3 stars

"Purely Physical" 1982 --xxx-- *Schmaltzy motel fornicating where the lovers' lips refuse to move when the pillow talk gets filthy.*  2 1/2 stars

Kolchak, The Night Stalker: "The Trevi Collection" *Fashion victims. Some hilariously bad acting from a witch.* 3 stars

"Gallowwalkers" starring Wesley Snipes *Spaghetti vampire western. The kind of movie Blade 3 should have been.* 3 stars

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi ---despecialized editions--- *Impressive. Most impressive* 3 stars

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs: 1954's U.S. version of "Godzilla"  & "Godzilla vs. Mothra" *Tokyo stompin' in a Texas trailer park.* 3 stars

"Manborg" 2011 *Will Ferrell's 'Westworld', Scott Pilgrim vs. Mega City 1, Napoleon Dynamite 2: Judgment Day, Tom Green's 'Total Recall', Jim Carrey's "Battlefield Earth', Sam Raimi's 'Mortal Kombat: Annihilation', Paul Verhoeven's 'Army of Darkness', Patrick Swazy, Jacki Chan, Jake Busey, and Cynthia Rothrock  in 'Revenge of the Sith'.*  3 stars

Masters of Horror: Stuart Gordon presents Edgar Alan Poe's "The Black Cat" *Pluto, the little devil.* 2 1/2 stars

rifftrax presents: "The Last Slumber Party" *More potty-mouthed and homophobic than a Wayans Bros. "Horror" "Comedy" "Movie"* 2 1/2 stars with riffing 1 1/2 without

The Outer Limits: George R.R. Martin's "Sandkings" starring Beau & Lloyd Bridges *Red menace* 3 stars

rifftrax presents: "Battlefield Earth" *L. Ron Hubbard's  The Passion of the Prometheus as acted out by the rat-brained man-animal, John Travolta.*  2 stars with riffing 1 star without

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs: Mel Brooks "Spaceballs" 3 stars

rifftrax presents "Fantasic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer" *Fate of world hangs in balance while obnoxious bantering, obnoxious celebrity  style wedding is overshadowing focus, obnoxious background extras actors mug for the camera and stare at the pop culture status heroes, obnoxious twirling mustache Dr. Doom villain moments, obnoxious studio thinking Galactus is a stupid concept and yet going through with having his threat to earth being the plot-- leaving us with a cloud of lame spacedust* 1 1/2 stars with riffing 1 star without

Troma presents: Lucio Fulci's "Rome 2072: The New Gladiators" *Televised brutality in a cyber-disco dystopia where the cities of the future are painfully obvious scale models covered in Christmas lights and dirtbikes along with karate chops are still considered pretty badass.* 2 1/2 stars

--- Game of Thrones: Season 3 episode 1

*The inept, pudgy comic relief gets to stumble around  in the snow avoiding ice zombies,

the dashing dwarf gets dissed by dear old dad,

the high class pimp positions himself near the daughter of the woman who always shunned his advances,

the would be future queen shows kindess to orphans and gets politely scolded for it,

a crow defects to the king beyond the wall,

a fiery zealot harshly deals with infidels,

a shiprecked war veteran brother puts himself back in harm's way to try to talk sense to his witch's pussy whipped brother,

the king of the north returns to his scorched hometown and imprisons his mum there,

a puppy eyed dragon mama sails with her seasick soldiers and goes shopping for baby slaughtering drone warriors while narrowly escaping creepy child with scorpion assassination attempt.*

3 stars

-------------------------------------------------------

rifftrax' Mike Nelson riffs "Predator" *"Speak mono-Slavic-ally and carry a big stick."* 3 plus stars with riffing 3 without

George Lucas & Ron Howard present: "Willow" *In order to save a red-headed bastard baby, Frodo Skywalker  fellowships a force of ragtags including a Han Solo in Pocahontas drag, an indian in the cupboard Kevin Pollack,  and a wizard lady trapped by spell in the body of a wombat.*  3 stars

rifftrax presents: "Twilight: New Moon" *A frigid, psycho chick gets dumped by her prissy,  older, unhealthy obsession. she then begins having night terrors ruining  the sleep of her closet gay lumberjack dad. next, she begins leading a lovesick  puppydog around on a leash while getting wreckless on a mopad, attempting suicide  for attention and all before going on a sisterhood of traveling pants adventure to a pretentious Anne Rice version of faggy Europe. 1980s teens were awesome. 2000s teens are awful.*  2 stars with riffing 1 star without

---- monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs:

"Slaughter High" aka "April Fool's Day"

*These jokers aint' f-f-f-foolin'. They like their drugs, they like their sex, they like their cruel pranks on nerds.

Unlucky for them,  their 10th year class reunion takes place at the now abandoned old high school in the middle of nowhere on a rainy night.

It's the perfect setting for an old dark house horror mixed with Agatha Christie style revenge picture.

This is one of the best episodes of monstervision.

It features a classic 1980s slasher flick, it has the original mail girl, Joe Bob skewers the logic of the TNT censors, and he reads an awkward letter from a male admirer named Rufus.*

3 stars

---------------------------------------------------------------

"A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors" *Freddy flew over the cuckoos' nest* 3 stars

The Outer Limits: "Valerie 23" *Do androids sleep mode with electric wet dreams? 2 be or R2D2? See, I could think of some existential questions to ask my prototype sexbot over a romantic dinner, especially if she were the first sentient being of her kind, and had Hulk strength for no apparently necessary reason.* 2 1/2 stars

Jamie Gillis in "Midnight Heat" 1983 --xxx-- *Rare grime. A gem of a different time. Seedy NYC.* 3 stars

Masters of Horror: "The Washingtonians" *Patriotic blue hairs set their wooden teeth on edge about the disclosure of that rich colonial tradition of chomping on cherry tastin' child flesh.* 2 stars

Farscape: "Throne for a Loss" *Rigel, the royal pain in the rear.*  3 stars

"Hellraiser 2: Hellbound" uncut *The stigmata of Sigmund Freud, from the makers of 'Scratch it, sniff it, squeeze it, suck it,' now available at finer novelty shops.* 3 stars

Twin Peaks: "On the Wings of Love" *Hangover cures, hidden secret half-sister, hallelujah for the hard of hearing, hometown beauty pageant queen hitlist, and hoot owl hieroglypics.* 2 1/2 stars

Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs:  Randy Quaid in "Parents" *A Norman Rockwell painting hanging on the wall behind the desk at the Bates Motel.* 3 stars

The Outer Limits: "Blood Brothers" *Twelve immortal monkeys* 2 1/2 stars

"Kill List" 2011 -- *This feels like it could be a Garth Ennis story. It has old mates drinking together and shooting the shite about life. It has acts of extreme violence almost to the point  of dark comedy. It has a bleak poignancy. There's also the occult undertones like a Hellblazer comic.* 3 stars

William Hurt in Ken Russell's "Altered States" *Waiting, in a fish-bowl, for Godot.* 3 stars

Kolchak, The Night Stalker: "Chopper" *Stunt motorcycle riding, sword slashing specter with separation anxiety.* 3 stars

Farscape: "Back, and Back, and Back to the Future" *"Psychic Spanish-fly," alien lady combat, genetically structured spy seductress, quantum singularity also known as a blackhole used as a soul saving secret weapon of mass destruction that is seriously in jeopardy of being stolen or accidentally set off."* 3 stars

"The Wind" starring Meg Foster, Wings Hauser, & Steve Railsback *Swept up in stormy solitude and story.* 3 stars

The Outer Limits: "The Second Soul" *Lending our dead bodies, like they were used cars, to alien parasites, leads to some serious moral implications. Feels like a 50s style sci fi message about the dangers of multiculturalism given a more progressive twist at the end.* 2 1/2 stars

"Virgin Witch" --sexploitation-- *Prissy Galore throws a feisty spell when a group of dysfunctional devil worshippers decide they really, really fancy her.* 2 1/2 stars

Van Damme / Raul Julia "Streetfighter" *"Who wants to go home, and who wants to go with ME?!" Self aware dumb fun.*  2 1/2 stars

rifftrax' Mike Nelson riffs "xXx" starring Vin Diesel, Samuel L. Jackson, & Asia Argento *Double Ohhh Seven sez, "Do the DEW, dude."* 3 stars with riffing 2 stars without

[jaitrends]

Kirk Douglas - Hollywood Golden Star Dies Aged 103

Kirk Douglas - Hollywood Star Dies Aged 103

Kirk Douglas, one of the last surviving movie stars from Hollywood’s golden age, whose rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence in celebrated films like “Lust for Life,” “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory,” died on Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 103. His rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence in films like “Lust for Life,” “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory.” His son the actor Michael Douglas announced the death in a statement on his Facebook page. Mr. Douglas had made a long and difficult recovery from the effects of a severe stroke he suffered in 1996. In 2011, cane in hand, he came onstage at the Academy Awards ceremony, good-naturedly flirted with the co-host Anne Hathaway and jokingly stretched out his presentation of the Oscar for best supporting actress. By then, and even more so as he approached 100 and largely dropped out of sight, he was one of the last flickering stars in a Hollywood firmament that few in Hollywood’s Kodak Theater on that Oscars evening could have known except through viewings of old movies now called classics. A vast number filling the hall had not even been born when he was at his screen-star peak, the 1950s and ’60s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0iymWOw8_M But in those years Kirk Douglas was as big a star as there was — a member of a pantheon of leading men, among them Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, who rose to fame in the postwar years.

Kirk Douglas in 1974 on the set of the movie “Once Is Not Enough” in Central Park. At the height of his career he was as big a star as there was.Credit...Jack Manning/The New York Times And like the others he was instantly recognizable: the jutting jaw, the dimpled chin, the piercing gaze and the breaking voice, the last making him irresistible fodder for comedians who specialized in impressions.

Three Movies a Year

In his heyday Mr. Douglas appeared in as many as three movies a year, often delivering critically acclaimed performances. In his first 11 years of film acting, he was nominated three times for the Academy Award for best actor. He was known for manly roles, in westerns, war movies and Roman-era spectacles, most notably “Spartacus” (1960). But in 80 movies across a half-century he was equally at home on mean city streets, in smoky jazz clubs and, as Vincent van Gogh, amid the flowers of Arles in the south of France. Many of his earlier films were forgettable — variations on well-worn Hollywood themes — and moviegoers were slow to recognize some of his best work. But when he found the right role, he proved he could be very good indeed. Early on he was hailed for his performances as an unprincipled Hollywood producer, opposite Lana Turner, in “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952), and as van Gogh in “Lust for Life” (1956). Each brought an Oscar nomination. Many critics thought he should have gotten more recognition for his work in two films in particular: Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” (1957), in which he played a French colonel in World War I trying vainly to prevent the execution of three innocent soldiers, and “Lonely Are the Brave” (1962), an offbeat western about an aging cowboy.

Mr. Douglas was nominated for an Oscar for his role as Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 movie “Lust for Life.” “I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of van Gogh,” he wrote in his autobiography. The experience was so frightening, he said, that for a long time he was reluctant to watch the film. Credit...Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, via Associated Press. Early on Mr. Douglas created a niche for himself, specializing in characters with a hard edge and something a little unsavory about them. His scheming Hollywood producer in “The Bad and the Beautiful” was “a perfect Kirk Douglas-type bum,” Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote. Mr. Douglas did not disagree. “I’ve always been attracted to characters who are part scoundrel,” he told The Times in an interview in 1984. “I don’t find virtue photogenic.”  Yet he often managed to win audiences’ sympathy for even the blackest of his characters by suggesting an element of weakness or torment beneath the surface. “To me, acting is creating an illusion, showing tremendous discipline, not losing yourself in the character that you’re portraying,” he wrote in his best-selling autobiography, “The Ragman’s Son” (1988). “The actor never gets lost in the character he’s playing; the audience does.”

‘Going Over the Line’

The only time that discipline nearly cracked was during the filming of “Lust for Life.” “I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of van Gogh,” he wrote. “Not only did I look like him, I was the same age he had been when he committed suicide.” The experience was so frightening, he added, that for a long time he was reluctant to watch the film. “While we were shooting,” he said, “I wore heavy shoes like the ones van Gogh wore. I always kept one untied, so that I would feel unkempt, off balance, in danger of tripping. It was loose; it gave him — and me — a shuffling gait.” Most people who worked with Mr. Douglas were either awed by his self-confident intensity or put off by it. He was proud of his muscular physique and physical prowess and regularly rejected the use of stuntmen and stand-ins, convinced he could do almost anything the situation required.

It was the 1949 film “Champion” that made Mr. Douglas a star. Preparing for the movie, he trained for months with a retired prizefighter. Credit...United Artists, via Associated Press Preparing for “Champion,” he trained for months with a retired prizefighter. He took trumpet lessons with Harry James for “Young Man With a Horn” (although James did the actual playing on the film’s soundtrack). He became a skilled horseman and learned to draw a six-shooter with impressive speed, lending authenticity to his Doc Holliday when he and Lancaster, as Wyatt Earp, blazed away at the Clanton gang in the final shootout in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957). The engine that drove Mr. Douglas to achieve, again and again, was his family history.

The Ragman’s Son

He was born Issur Danielovitch on Dec. 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, N.Y., a small city about 35 miles northwest of Albany. As he put it in his autobiography, he was “the son of illiterate Russian Jewish immigrants in the WASP town of Amsterdam,” one of seven children, six of them sisters. By the time he began attending school, the family name had been changed to Demsky and Issur had become Isadore, promptly earning him the nickname Izzy. The town’s mills did not hire Jews, so his father, Herschel (known as Harry), became a ragman, a collector and seller of discarded goods. “Even on Eagle Street, in the poorest section of town, where all the families were struggling, the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder,” Mr. Douglas wrote. “And I was the ragman’s son.” A powerful man who drank heavily and got into fights, the elder Demsky was often an absentee father, letting his family fend for itself. Money for food was desperately short much of the time, and young Izzy learned that survival meant hard work. He also learned about anti-Semitism. “Kids on every street corner beat you up,” he wrote. Mr. Douglas once estimated that he had held down at least 40 different jobs — among them delivering newspapers and washing dishes — before he found success in Hollywood. After graduating from high school, he hitchhiked north to St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., and was admitted and given a college loan. He became a varsity wrestler there and, despite being rejected by fraternities because he was Jewish, was elected president of the student body in his junior year — a first for the St. Lawrence campus.

Mr. Douglas in 1959 with his sons, clockwise from top left, Michael, Joel, Peter and Eric. All his sons went into the film business.Credit...Associated Press By that time he had decided that he wanted to be an actor. He got a summer job as a stagehand at the Tamarack Playhouse in the Adirondacks and was given some minor roles. He traveled to New York City to try out for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and performed well, but he was told no scholarships were available. It was at the Tamarack, the summer after he graduated from college, that he decided to change his name legally to something he thought more befitting an actor than Isadore Demsky. (When he chose Douglas, he wrote, “I didn’t realize what a Scottish name I was taking.”) Returning to New York, he studied acting for two years, played in summer stock and made his Broadway debut in 1941 as a singing Western Union messenger in “Spring Again.” The next year he enlisted in the Navy and was trained in antisubmarine warfare. He also renewed his friendship with Diana Dill, a young actress he had met at the American Academy. They married in 1943, just before he shipped out during World War II as the communications officer of Patrol Craft 1139. They had two sons, Michael and Joel, before divorcing in 1951. She died in 2015. In 1954 Mr. Douglas married Anne Buydens, and they too had two sons, Peter and Eric. All his sons went into the film business, either acting or producing. Michael did both. Eric Douglas died of an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription pills in 2004 at the age of 46. In addition to his son Michael, Mr. Douglas is survived by his wife and his two other sons, as well as five grandchildren and a great-grandchild. After being injured in an accidental explosion, Mr. Douglas was discharged from the Navy in 1944. He returned to New York, did some stage work and then headed for Hollywood. He made his screen debut in 1946 in “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers,” playing a weakling who is witness to a murder. In a big-name cast that also included Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin and Judith Anderson, Mr. Douglas more than held his own. He was equally solid in “I Walk Alone,” a 1948 film noir in which he played the heavy in the first of his half-dozen pairings with his close friend Burt Lancaster.

From left, Horace McMahon, William Bendix and Mr. Douglas in the 1951 film “Detective Story.” Mr. Douglas was praised for his portrayal of an overzealous New York detective who invites his own destruction.Credit...Paramount Pictures, via Associated Press

First Shot at an Oscar

But it was the 1949 film “Champion,” produced by the young Stanley Kramer, that made him a star. As Midge Kelly, a ruthless young prizefighter, he presented a chilling portrait of ambition run wild and earned his first Oscar nomination. He had to wait nearly 50 years, however, before he actually received the golden statuette, for lifetime achievement. He never won a competitive Oscar. The doors opened wide for him after “Champion.” A year later he appeared in “Young Man With a Horn,” in the title role of a troubled jazz trumpet player modeled on Bix Beiderbecke. In short order came “The Glass Menagerie” (1950), the screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play about a timid young woman (Jane Wyman) who finds solace in her fantasies, with Mr. Douglas as the gentleman caller; “Ace in the Hole” (1951), in which he played a cynical reporter manipulating a life-or-death situation; and, also in 1951, “Detective Story,” based on Sidney Kingsley’s play, in which Mr. Douglas played an overzealous New York detective who invites his own destruction. Mr. Crowther of The Times wrote that Mr. Douglas’s performance was, “detective-wise, superb.” Despite his film-star status and all the trappings that came with it — his autobiography chronicles his many sexual conquests — Mr. Douglas still hungered for success in the theater. As it turned out he had only one more opportunity. In 1963 he seized the chance to play the lead role in the Broadway adaptation of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey’s novel about authority and individual freedom, set in a mental hospital. Mr. Douglas, to mixed reviews, played Randle P. McMurphy, the all-too-sane patient who is ultimately destroyed by the system. (Jack Nicholson played the part in Milos Forman’s 1975 film adaptation.) A few years earlier Mr. Douglas, who had worked his way free of a studio contract and formed his own company, Bryna Productions, made waves in Hollywood when he embarked on a film version of “Spartacus,” Howard Fast’s novel of slave revolt in ancient Rome. He decided not only to hire Dalton Trumbo — who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era on suspicion of Communist sympathies — to write the screenplay, but also to put Mr. Trumbo’s name in the credits rather than one of the pseudonyms he had been using.

Mr. Douglas, left, and Woody Strode in “Spartacus,” one of Mr. Douglas’s best-known films and one of the last cast-of-thousands spectacles to come out of Hollywood.Credit...Universal Pictures, via Associated Press “We all had been employing the blacklisted writers,” Mr. Douglas wrote in a 2012 memoir, “I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist.” “It was an open secret and an act of hypocrisy, as well as a way to get the best talent at bargain prices. I hated being part of such a system.” “Spartacus,” released in 1960, was Mr. Douglas’s third blood-and-thunder spectacle set in the ancient past. In “Ulysses” (1955), as Homer’s wandering hero, he survived legendary perils to return to his faithful Penelope (Silvana Mangano). In “The Vikings” (1958), he and Tony Curtis were cast as half brothers who, ignorant of their blood ties, battle for control of a Norse kingdom. And in “Spartacus” it was Mr. Douglas, in the title role, who led his rebellious fellow slaves against the Roman legions (played by 5,000 Spanish soldiers). One of the last cast-of-thousands spectacles to come out of Hollywood, “Spartacus” was notable as well for its international cast, which included Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Jean Simmons and Peter Ustinov, and for its talented young director, Stanley Kubrick, who had also directed Mr. Douglas in “Paths of Glory.” Most critics were not impressed, but the movie’s popularity has been long lasting. It was restored and rereleased in 1991.

Critics praised Mr. Douglas’s work in “Paths of Glory” as a French colonel in World War I trying vainly to prevent the execution of three innocent soldiers.Credit...United Artists, via Photofest Of all his films, Mr. Douglas was proudest of “Lonely Are the Brave,” also written by Mr. Trumbo, which Mr. Douglas insisted on making on a small budget and against studio advice. “I love the theme,” he said, “that if you try to be an individual, society will crush you.” Mr. Douglas made many more films in the years ahead, but none quite lived up to his work of the 1950s and early ’60s. There were more westerns: “The Way West” (1967), with Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark; “There Was a Crooked Man ...” (1970), with Henry Fonda; and “A Gunfight” (1971), with Johnny Cash. “Tough Guys” (1986), a comedy, was the last movie he made with Burt Lancaster. There were more military roles. Kirk Douglas was an Air Force colonel who foils an antigovernment plot in “Seven Days in May,” a 1964 Cold War thriller that also starred Lancaster. He was a naval aviator in “In Harm’s Way” (1965) and a Norwegian saboteur in “The Heroes of Telemark” (1966). In “Is Paris Burning?” (1966) he played Gen. George S. Patton, and in “The Final Countdown” (1980) he commanded a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. As fewer film roles came his way, Kirk Douglas turned to television. In the HBO movie “Draw!” (1984), he was an aging outlaw pitted against James Coburn as a drunken sheriff. In the CBS movie “Amos” (1985), he was a feisty nursing-home resident battling a tyrannical nurse played by Elizabeth Montgomery.

Setbacks and Triumphs

There were setbacks in his personal life. In 1986 Mr. Douglas was fitted with a pacemaker to correct an irregular heartbeat. In 1991 he survived a helicopter crash that left two other people dead. In January 1996 he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him with seriously impaired speech and depression so deep, he later said, that he considered suicide.

President Jimmy Carter awarded Mr. Douglas the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, during a ceremony at the White House in 1981.Credit...Ira Schwarz/Associated Press But he fought his way back, and by March he was able to appear at the Academy Awards ceremony, speaking haltingly, to accept an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. By then he could add that statuette to his other lifetime awards: the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Jimmy Carter just days before Mr. Carter left office in 1981, and a Kennedy Center Honors award, presented in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. In addition to acting and producing, Mr. Douglas found time to write. Besides “The Ragman’s Son,” he was the author of a number of books, including the novels “Dance With the Devil,” “The Gift” and “Last Tango in Brooklyn.” Besides his book on “Spartacus,” his memoirs include “My Stroke of Luck” (2001), about his recovery and comeback, and “Let’s Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving, and Learning” (2007). In his later years Kirk Douglas devoted his time to charity, campaigning with his wife to build 400 playgrounds in Los Angeles and establishing the Anne Douglas Center for Homeless Women, for the treatment of drug and alcohol addiction; the Kirk Douglas High School, a program to help troubled students finish their education; and the Kirk Douglas Theater, to nurture young theatrical artists. In 2015, on his 99th birthday, he and his wife donated $15 million to the Motion Picture & Television Fund in Woodland Hills toward the construction of the Kirk Douglas Care Pavilion, a $35 million facility for the care of people in the industry with Alzheimer’s disease.

Mr. Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke in January 1996. But he fought his way back, and by March of that year he was able to appear at the Academy Awards ceremony to accept an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.Credit...Tim Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mr. Douglas’s comeback from illness extended to acting as well. In 1999, at 83, he starred in the comedy “Diamonds,” playing a former boxing champion who, while recovering from a stroke, embarks on a hunt for missing jewels. It was his first film appearance since his illness. Critics judged the movie forgettable, but Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, found Mr. Douglas’s “hard, gleaming performance” a saving grace. The last films in which he starred shared something of a theme: the reconciliation between fathers and sons. One was a comedy, “It Runs in the Family” (2003), in which his son was played by his actual son Michael. The other was the drama “Illusion” (2004), in which he played an ailing father in search of his estranged son. Perhaps, together, they were a fitting finale for the ragman’s son, an actor whose boyhood poverty and absent father were never far from his mind. “That’s what it’s all about,” he said in describing what had driven him. “That’s the core, that early part of you.” Kirk Douglas also reconciled himself to advanced age. In 2008, in an essay in Newsweek (“What Old Age Taught Me”), Kirk Douglas wrote: “Years ago I was at the bedside of my dying mother, an illiterate Russian peasant. Terrified, I held her hand. She opened her eyes and looked at me. The last thing she said to me was, ‘Don’t be afraid, son, it happens to everyone.’ As I got older, I became comforted by those words.” Source: NYTimes Read the full article

[imamotherfuckingstar-lord]

Ivonne’s SPN Masterlist

Updated as of 10/24/17

SERIES:

Waltz #2 : Castiel x Reader: You are a hunter, you’re best friends with Dean and Sam Winchester. You guys live together at the bunker. Everything is great, when one day Castiel , the angel, comes to the bunker. He’s shocked to see you. You’ve never seen him before in your life. What’s going on? How come Castiel has this look in his eye, he acts strange around you. Something’s going on, but you just don’t know what…

This is my baby guys, my first fanfic ever, I love it. It’s really worth the read. It’s currently 30 chapters long and I plan to take it for a long crazy ride. You can read it on AO3: Waltz #2.

I’m Castiel: (Ongoing)- You are in love with the fallen angel Castiel, but when a witch casts a spell on him, it causes him to have no recollection of who you are. Will you ever be able to get his memories of you back to him? Will you ever be able to tell him how you really feel?

Part 1,Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Final Part

Hope (Dark&Twised!Cas) : (Ongoing)You wake up one morning, to find that Dean has kicked out Castiel out of the bunker. Castiel who has just had his grace stolen. Can you get to the love of your life, before someone else does?

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Such Great Heights : (ongoing)Cas & Reader like each other, it’s up to Gabriel to get these two kids together. Part 2 coming soon!

Moments:(Completed) Castiel x Reader (eventually): The reader goes through different moments of her life, that have meant the most to her.  

Part 1: Losing Ellen & Jo, Meeting the Winchesters

Part 2: Meeting Castiel

Part 3: Bundle of Joy!

Part 4: EJ’s Birthday!

Follow You Into The Dark: (Completed)  Anon Request:  A really romantic Cas and reader smut where they both lose their virginity on their wedding night? Lots of fluff?

Part 1   Part 2 Part 3

Blackbird : Emmanuel!Cas x Reader :  Emmanuel is a lost soul, trying to figure who he was before he was found unconscious out by a lake. With no memory and little hope, can he find the answers he seeks? The reader works at the local nursing home as a coordinator, but she decides to take up a side job playing at a family friend’s cafe. One night Emmanuel happens to go in for a cup of coffee on the Reader’s first night playing. The two lock eyes, leaving both wondering who the other is. With the help of Emmanuel’s tenant, Ellie, can these two find love? And will Emmanuel find the answers to his past?

Part 1

ONE SHOTS:

Sam Fics :

The Truth: Sam and the Reader like each other, will either get the courage to confess their love for each other?

Fade Into You: Ellen get’s shocking news, that makes the reader remember the first time she met Sam Winchester.

UberDriver!Sam- Sam x Reader:  Done for written for Sam’s Sixty June Jobs challenge.

Imagine Sam watching you dance around the kitchen

Imagine Sam and you hitting it off

Imagine telling the Winchesters you were pregnant

Imagine Sam seeing you again

Imagine making Sam happy

Dean Fics:

A Perfect Stranger : You meet Dean on the streets

Come A Little Closer : Reader watches Dean spiral down into a hole of anger and too much drinking.

Already Somebody’s Baby : Dean and Reader seek comfort in each other’s arms.

All the Young Dudes : Record Store Day and you drag Dean out to get a specific vinyl.

Imagine Dean confessing to you his feelings after so many years.

Imagine Sam finding out you were with Demon!Dean

Imagine Dean finding out you made a deal with a crossroads demon

Purple Tulips : The reader takes Dean to a flower shop.

Imagine Dean being turned on by the way you eat.

We Did Good :  Dean and the reader are two 23 year old hunters, who have to make the biggest decision of their lives.

Always Knew : Dean and you finally admit your true feelings

In Beautiful Dreams : Dean comes to see you, hoping to spend as much time with you before he has to say goodbye. EXTREMELY SAD.

Not Bad At All : Dean takes you out for your birthday

Always knew : The two of you share feelings but keep it quiet

Missing Out: You tease Dean

A Dashboard Confession: Dean and you sitting in the Impala

A Win For Dean Winchester:   After everything that happened with Mary, Cas, Lucifer, and now the whole Jack thig, Dean Winchester needs a win. You are his win.

Squints & Wendy Peffercorn

Imagine Dean dressing up as your favorite starship Captain.

Imagine breaking up with Dean

Imagine Dean wearing glasses

Imagine catching Dean keeping a watch out

Imagine catching Dean praying

Imagine Dean being annoyed at you

Imagine celebrating Halloween with Dean

Imagine feeding Dean

Imagine Dean finding out your pregnant

Imagine tending to Dean’s wounds

She’s Not Me Series:  You meet up with the Winchesters to help out with a few hunts, only you had left things with Dean on the iffy side. The two of you in close proximity seems like a terrible idea - but maybe it will be a chance to set things right.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Castiel Fics:

Little Honeybee : Castiel throws Reader a surprise Bee Theme Babyshower!

Sea of Love: It’s the Reader’s birthday, TFW lavish her with gifts, but she gets a very special one. -Fluff-

Dream A Little Dream of Me:  Karaoke night takes a sweet turn! Casx Reader

We’ll Never Leave Again : Request:  “I’m not important” “You’re important to me, dammit” A Cas x reader where one of them is going on a dangerous/suicidal mission and the other one doesn’t want them to.

Fire Meet Gasoline: Castiel the angel falls in love with the Reader, who happens to be a demon. Can these two have a happy ending?

And We Were Dreaming: The Reader is an artist who dreams of a man with deep blue eyes. Who is he? Will she ever know him?

Puny Human! : The Reader lets Castiel try his hand at Fallout 4.

Te Amo :  Castiel loves hearing the Reader say she loves him in Spanish.

Imagine Castiel putting your daughter to sleep.

Imagine Sam and Dean finding out Cas & you eloped.

Just Say You Love Me:  Castiel will do anything to keep you safe.

Imagine Dean walking in on you interrogating Castiel

It’s a Promise : Cas comes to visit you.

Imagine Castiel dressing up as your favorite Chief Medical Officer.

Absolutely : meeting Castiel for the first time.

All of Me : Castiel has to let you go, heaven’s orders.

Every Witch : Castiel helps you complete a Halloween costume.

I love you, Castiel : You whisper a prayer to your angel.

Foolish :  You go to find Cas after he declares himself God.

Loud and Clear : A chance meeting on the bus with a certain angel. (For my classical music lovers and pianist. )

Sana, Sana : You tell Castiel a childhood memory.

Of Course : You want a vacation.

Sober as Sin : First kiss with Castiel.

Life Preserver : You’re a demon Cas can’t help but not hate.

Flagpole Sitta : It’s Record Store Day! And Cas has a little surprise for you.

Imagine Castiel outing your secret relationship with him

Imagine Castiel hearing you pleasure yourself

Imagine Castiel telling Sam & Dean what you were sleep talking about

Imagine Castiel losing his phone

Imagine Cas promising to keep you safe

Imagine seeing Cas in the cowboy hat

Imagine Castiel coming back

Destiel Fics:

Are You Ready? I’m Ready: Destiel short drabble. Established relationship.

Was It All Worth It? Dean and Cas look back at their life and wonder if it all was worth it.

Cas hits on Dean

Dean and Cas watch the stars together

I want to hold your hand Dean sings to Castiel (AU high school)

It’s cool, we can still be friends  Destiel Angst, Dean pining.

SPN Actors & Other Character Fics:

Someone Get Misha Outta Here! : Misha crashes Reader’s panel at her first convention.

Imagine doing interviews with Jensen & he comes to your defense..

Little Bit: Reader has a crush on Charlie

COLLABS:

Into Battle: ANGST :  The Winchesters, Castiel and you head head out to fight some demons, will everything end well?  (collabed with @willowing-love )

Enough:  ANGST:  After a tough hunt that went completely wrong; the angel and you have it out.  (collabed with @willowing-love​ )

SMUT ALERT:

A Lifetime of This: Cas x Reader -  1.What about a Castiel and reader one? Maybe the reader gets hurt and Cas is worried/has to take care of her? 2. A sexy Cas smut where the reader finds out she can see Cas’s wings, and they have fun with that?

French Handshake: Cas x Reader:  Reader has the hots for Cas, but thinks it’s unrequited. They’re on a hunt, reader makes a bunch of innuendos as jokes, thinking Cas is too clueless and doesn’t get any of them. Cas waits until the end of the day to reveal that he understood all of them, cue smut?

These Days:  Cas x Reader: Request: Human!Cas and tequila.  Castiel and you decide to give in to the desire you each hold. And what’s a better place to do so then on the hood of the Impala?

Never Have I Ever: Cas x Reader x Sam, some Sastiel. Dean’s out for the night, leaving the reader, Sam and Cas to play an innocent game of Never Have I Ever.

Excuse me, ma’am.   SecurityGuard!Cas x Reader : The hot security guard decides to do a random pat down on you.