#its like a slo mo car crash

[heartscrypt]

watching a reality tv show called milf manor rn and irs actually like being in hell IM IN HELL

[olivcrfm]

oliver & claudia’s playlist @claudiafm

POPCORN PALS.

You and your best friend of many years are lying on the sofa eating snacks, legs tangled. You were gonna watch a movie but you got caught up in just talking about nothing and forgot to press play. You’re suddenly struck by how much you’ve been through together, how happy you both are now, and how much you love her. Your heart feels very full.

i hope the worlds end by postcard boy --- “i never mean to make you sad sometimes my jokes are bad but it's all to make you smile we're sad in summer vacation we have pointless conversations but that's alright with me, because i'll stay your best friend until the world ends i'll stay your best friend until the world ends can i call you on your cell phone? it's late at night, but when we talk you make it okay how could i make you feel good all the time? you don't believe me, but you deserve this i'll stay your best friend until the world ends i'll stay your best friend until the world ends.”

how could i not? by tom rosenthal --- “i don't know how your brain works so well and if i did i might explode. even if could, i don't think that i would, want to decipher your series of codes. a lifetime of trouble but how could i not love you. yeah we humans we crave a certain certainly but no mystery ever got old. a lifetime of troubles but how could i not love you. a lifetime of troubles but how could i not love you.”

hugging you by tom rosenthal --- “life did throw everything that it could throw your face in the morning, it just glowed let's get in this car, let's face the sky and go i just wanna be counting stars with you. don't know if you know, but i just wanna tell you so that you're the wisest funny one that i will ever, ever know a hundred mini dreams and a healing scar the secrets of the day are never far i don't know where we're going but god it's a start i just wanna be counting stars with you.”

that’s so us by allie x --- “can't do crowds, not our scene we get anxiety that's so you, that's so me that's so us wearing black at the beach looking pale, feeling chic that's so you, that's so me that's so us we think that politics is such a waste of time we've been a wreck together since 2009 we've seen each other naked, seen each other cry you make me not wanna die what i like about you, baby is how you annoy me daily but you still fucking amaze me that's so us, that's so us yeah, we're both a lot to handle i'm a leo, you're a cancer we take on the world together that's so us, that's so us we make peppermint tea and watch space odyssey that's so you, that's so me that's so us and i sing in the car while you play air guitar that's so you, that's so me that's so us.”

we don’t believe what’s on tv by twenty one pilots --- “i know what you think in the morning when the sun shines on the ground and shows what you have done it shows where your mind has gone and you swearing to your parents that it will never happen again i know, i know oh ow, what that means, i know oh oh oh ow...let's take this a second at a time let's take this one song, this one rhyme together, let's breathe together, to the beat but there's hope out the window so that's where we'll go let's go outside and all join hands but until then you'll never understand.”

bros by wolf alice --- “shake your hair, have some fun forget our mothers and past lovers, forget everyone oh, i'm so lucky, you are my best friend oh, there's no one, there's no one that knows me like you do remember when we cut our hair both looked like boys but we didn't care stick it out together like we always do oh, there's no one, there's no one quite like you oh jump that 43 are you wild like me raised by wolves and other beasts i tell you all the time i'm not mad you tell me all the time i got plans.”

gone gone by tom rosenthal --- “what is that wish that you never did make? the one lost to the winds and the honest mistakes your one dream that never found the right day oh, i love you forever, so don't go away  will you fall upon me with your heart full of light beams? can i rest upon you when i'm gone in my daydreams?”

screen by twenty one pilots --- “i'm standing in front of you oh i'm standing in front of you i'm trying to be so cool everything together trying to be so cool i can't see past my own nose, i'm seeing everything in slo-mo look out below crashing down to the ground just like a vertical locomotive that's a train, am i painting the picture that's in my brain? a train from the sky, locomotive, my motives are insane my flow's not great, okay, i conversate with people who know if i flow on a song i'll get no radio play while you're doing fine, there's some people and i who have a really tough time getting through this life so excuse us while we sing to the sky.”

hey soul sister by train --- “your lipstick stains on the front lobe of my left side brains i knew i wouldn't forget you and so i let you go and blow my mind your sweet moonbeam the smell of you in every single dream i dream i knew when we collided you're the one i have decided who's one of my kind.”

human by dodie --- “i wanna pick you up and scoop you out i want the secrets your secrets haven't found paint me in trust i'll be your best friend call me the one this night just can't end oh oh will you share your soul with me? unzip your skin and let me have a see paint me in trust i'll be your best friend call me the one this night just can't end oh oh oh, i'm so human we're just human lean for me, and i'll fall back you'll fit so nicely, you'll keep me intact.”

cup by stoop kids --- “i should read more poetry and i should read more novels and if i did would you believe i was aristotle? i'm platonic for you cause i was start to smarten up and pour my thoughts into a cup and just to feel you make a sound i would start to drink it down but i don't read too much it took me by surprise the first time i could realize that if i dripped one more drop instantly my heart would stop all i wanna do it call hear you laugh, now baby that's all cozy up and watch tv maybe if i'm lucky, a cup of tea.”

we’re going to be friends by the white stripes --- “fall is here, hear the yell back to school, ring the bell brand new shoes, walking blues climb the fence, books and pens i can tell that we are going to be friends i can tell that we are going to be friends walk with me, suzy lee through the park and by the tree we will rest upon the ground and look at all the bugs we found safely walk to school without a sound safely walk to school without a sound here we are, no one else we walked to school all by ourselves there's dirt on our uniforms from chasing all the ants and worms we clean up and now its time to learn we clean up and now its time to learn numbers, letters, learn to spell nouns, and books, and show and tell playtime we will throw the ball back to class, through the hall teacher marks our height against the wall teacher marks our height against the wall we don't notice any time pass we don't notice anything we sit side by side in every class teacher thinks that i sound funny but she likes the way you sing tonight i'll dream while in my bed when silly thoughts go through my head about the bugs and alphabet and when i wake tomorrow i'll bet that you and i will walk together again i can tell that we are going to be friends.”

happy if you’re happy by matt and kim --- “i don't like small talk with some neighbors on our block but i'll stand with you all day you never let me drive you're afraid we won't survive but i'll ride with you all day you like the city lights i like the stars at night if you're happy in new york i'll bring you home i'll sleep in museums while you take all day to see 'em meet in the lobby and i'll bring you home  i'm only happy when you are happy.”

[kpopper]

ik no one asked but ncts new song is nothing special imo they legit sound the same every comeback at least all their title songs sound the same i do like their other songs on albums tho i mean sm always does a good job with the mv visuals so props to the mv at least and yeah ik its their "sound" or smth but i wish they would let them do smth different at least once? anyways this is not a hate anon just an honest opinion from a mildly disappointed ntczen :(

Ive missed their nonsensical noise so much i could only find happiness with the new song, truly 😂 but i feel you nony, me and my friend always joke about stanning nct for the boys and not the songs, boys sound like a car crash on slo mo. In my opinion their last GREAT song was regular, no wonder they recorded it with every available language. And Love talk, obviously, but the queen belongs to wayv.

[lifejustgotawkward]

365 Day Movie Challenge (2018) - #165: Campfire Stories (2001) - dirs. Bob Cea, Andrzej Krakowski and Jeff Mazzola

The horror anthology Campfire Stories is honestly one of the worst trashpiles I’ve ever endured in almost a quarter-century of being aware of movies, but even the most embarrassingly amateurish excuse for cinema can be fun to watch just for the cast. A young, pre-"It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” Charlie Day (sporting a very 2001 earring) and Joshua Harto (I remember him well from The Dark Knight and The Lifeguard) play Joe and Teddy, two young men who are driving through the woods when they nearly crash their car when another teen, Natalie (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), standing in the middle of the road. Citing a busted tire on her own vehicle, Natalie convinces the guys to help her out, suggesting that they all go find a nearby campsite in the forest where Natalie claims she saw a group of people who might be able to lend further assistance.

Surprise, surprise: a fire is burning yet the supposed campers are nowhere in sight. Instead, our three protagonists meet Ranger Bill (David Johansen), a menacing fella portrayed with all the subtlety you would expect from the former New York Doll/Buster Poindexter weighing every word down with a Southern molasses drawl. Ranger Bill orders the trio to sit with him until a tow truck arrives, then proceeds to regale them with three spooky tales as the night grows ever darker. Because that’s totally normal, right?

Only the third segment of the stories is worth seeing, and that’s primarily because yet another soon-to-be IASIP star, Rob McElhenney, appears, as well as Abigail Spencer and Kerry Butler. Indeed, the best that can be said about Campfire Stories is that it has some interesting actors in its cast; besides the aforementioned performers, John Hensley (whom I just saw in Teeth), Perez Hilton (credited by his real name, Mario Lavandeira) and Sunrise Coigney (perhaps best known for being married to Mark Ruffalo) all have roles, and the band The Misfits shows up in the penultimate scene. They’re the only reasons why anyone would want to suffer through this poorly made feature, unless maybe you have specific fetishes for hilariously cheap special effects, slo-mo, dialogue that a ten-year-old could have written (my favorite line went something like this: “Stop being such a sanitary napkin, dude!”) and/or early 2000s post-grunge soundtracks.

[disconnected-dragon]

Riverdale is like watching a slo mo car crash between two clown cars. You know you're supposed to be horrified, but as the melted rubber noses and burning plastic flowers fly by and the clowns stream out of the wreckage, you can't help but laugh at the absurdity.

The PPG remake is like watching a regular car crash in slo mo. Its painful and cringy and horrific and there's nothing good about it.

See the difference between these gritty reboots is that IMO the writers of Riverdale deserve a pat on the back and a cup of tea for dealing with the one of the dumbest premises in TV history and making something ironically entertaining out of it while on the other hand the writers of the scrapped live action Powerpuff Girls pilot deserve to be repeatedly poked with a cattle prod

[pes2019patch]

Dangerous Driving is Burnout, but what kind of Burnout is it? This question shouldn't be easy to answer because, like Tetris, Burnout is one of those games that was always, secretly, reworking itself. Burnout 3 introduced takedowns, for example, the ability to strike a rival once you had crashed, steering your own wreckage through the thick, sparking air for fun and profit. Burnout 4 took that idea and turned it into traffic-checking, which meant that any cars you hit that were travelling the same way as you would suddenly begin to bounce down the road, taking out anything and everything in their path. And then Paradise took the whole thing open-world.

So let's get surgical for a moment. Dangerous Driving belongs after Burnout 3 - takedowns and their attendant slo-mo are all in place. And it belongs before Burnout 4 - traffic-checking is not included. It represents, I think, the road not taken by 4. It has its own big idea, yet while it's different from traffic-checking it still has this sense of continuity, this sense of having emerged from the latent potential of those brilliant takedowns.

A few weeks back I went to play Dangerous Driving at the lovely bucolic office of Three Fields Entertainment, a small team - just seven, I gather - that is built around a core of personnel who all worked on Burnout back at Criterion. Three Fields has turned out a handful of games over the last few years, and there's a palpable sense that they've all been building to this one. To revisit a few, we've had the Burnout sensibility reworked as an indoor chaos simulator in Dangerous Golf, and we've had Burnout's Crash Mode reworked in Danger Zone. Dangerous Driving, though, is Burnout itself, back on the twisting, bucking, beautiful canyon tracks that made the series famous, earning boost by driving badly - but driving badly well - and then switching between boost and drift as you take on some astonishingly aggressive AI.

Read more

[savetopnow]

2018-03-23 20 CAR now

CAR

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BMW Confirms All Electric X3 Slated For 2020 Release

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Evidence Mounts That New Mid Engine Corvette Will Be Cadillac Powered

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Autoblog

VW reveals the new Touareg, but not for America

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This Container Ship Collision Dumped Brand New Cars Into The Sea

Behold The New, Lighter Volkswagen Touareg And Its Epic Screen

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Electrek

Porsche shares images of latest Mission E prototypes, shows front trunk

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First look at Tesla Model 3 Canadian configurator with price structure and availability

Green Deals: Remington 12A 19-inch Corded Electric Lawn Mower $140, more

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Inside EVs

Check Out Slo-Mo Launch Of Tesla Model S P100D – Plus It Races Hellcat, Camaro

LinkedIn Chooses Tesla #5 Overall On Top Companies List

Check Out What Ford’s Electric SUV Might Look Like

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Jalopnik

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The Torque Report

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[yourfireheartt]

           Henry Page has never been in love. He fancies himself a hopeless romantic, but the slo-mo, heart palpitating, can't-eat-can't-sleep kind of love that he's been hoping for just hasn't been in the cards for him—at least not yet. Instead, he's been happy to focus on his grades, on getting into a semi-decent college and finally becoming editor of his school newspaper. Then Grace Town walks into his first period class on the third Tuesday of senior year and he knows everything's about to change.             Grace isn't who Henry pictured as his dream girl—she walks with a cane, wears oversized boys' clothes, and rarely seems to shower. But when Grace and Henry are both chosen to edit the school paper, he quickly finds himself falling for her. It's obvious there's something broken about Grace, but it seems to make her even more beautiful to Henry, and he wants nothing more than to help her put the pieces back together again. And yet, this isn't your average story of boy meets girl. Krystal Sutherland's brilliant debut is equal parts wit and heartbreak, a potent reminder of the bittersweet bliss that is first love.

         I went into this book with high expectations because I’d seen so many people on tumblr that said this was one of their favorite reads of 2016.

         I was highly disappointed.           This book is about first loves, and how even though it feels like its the end of the world, its not. How you think you can love someone so deeply and it not be right for you, or you think its meant to last when in reality its just a first love. They don’t always last. How you can fall in love with the IDEA of someone, rather than who they really are. (my take from the book)

         Good themes, not so great book. Its hard to get into why I didn’t like this book without spoiling things, so--

Spoilery Review Below--

            The whole book is about a girl who loses “the love of her life”, a boyfriend she’s been with since she was like 9 years old, in a car crash that also left her severely injured. She moves into his home with his parents and wears his clothes, and surrounds herself with him. She can’t move on, she can’t let go. She even falls for Henry because he has her dead boyfriends middle name. She spends the entire book “trying” to move on with Henry, when in reality she’s using him. Pretending he’s Dominick and she often finds herself confused when she opens her eyes and sees she’s kissing someone else.             I found her behavior deplorable. Especially once she realized that she didn’t have feelings for Henry. She kept leading him on, and because it was his first love, he kept being sucked in by her. This whole book just didn’t sit well with me, but it wasn’t a horrible read either. 

3/5 Hearts.

[anomalagous]

lc’s ongoing long-ass list of what the fuck, teen wolf, and other sundry E606:Ghosted edition.

scott getting a little tiny bit snarly at the sheriff for not believing~~ in stiles gives me life

this old-ass map not only puts beacon hills on top of a real life place called scotty place which still makes me laugh, but also substantially more north and eastward than i originally estimated.

why the fuck didnt naziwolf just get the fuck outta bh?

why did he choose to stay and teach high school of all things?

california requires an 18 month accreditation course and a certain GPA of teachers who do not have an education degree, i know this from direct experience. its been three months since naziwolf busted out of his bacta tank, so what the fuck

if he forged his credentials, how

when

when did he actually learn all of the post WW2 physics and electromagnetics things he clearly genuinely knows and has a genuine interest in?

did the dread doctors read him bedtime stories from their science journals?

if so, what the fuck

i guess if youre an alpha werewolf you can sleep in the backseat with no seatbelt and its not a big deal if you crash

good job on malia being the driver and not crashing them im proud of her

reading the date of the canaan abduction in the standard american way it was april 8th, 1987, which cant be a coincidence given that’s stiles birthday (albeit pre-stiles)

if canaan has been abandoned for 30 years, who has been cutting these obviously not overgrown lawns and trimming these obviously not overgrown accent shubberies

why isnt that flag beat up or torn in any way?

kudos on giving that convertible the old 80s style california plates but why arent any of the windows on any of the cars busted out? no flat tires? no rust or missing doors?

also that shot of the ‘town’ where there was more substantial damage looked fake as hell and the crosswalk was proceeding at the wrong angle and i cant unsee it.

why is there still power running to these street lamps?

for that matter who has their street lamps scheduled to turn on in the middle of the day?

was that block party banner over the street lettered on both sides? it reads properly no matter what side youre looking at, which seems weird.

why is there blood on the carousel? was that explained? we’ve never seen the ghost riders’ gun draw blood that i can recall

im not even sure we’ve really seen their whips draw blood per se and certainly it wouldn’t have caused that kind of blood stain

also why is the blood still wet and red 30 years later? why wasn’t that newspaper rotted out? either time impacted this town to make it shitty as hell or it didn’t, pick one, you cannot have both. it still rains enough in california to totally disintegrate a newspaper in thirty years.

how the fuck did that carousel function even that tiny bit after 30 years in the elements?

why did melissa have to sneak chris argent around, couldnt he have just declined the operation against medical advice?

also good to see scott got his utter inability to lie from his mom

even if malia isnt wearing 100% stiles’ void-hoodie how could the costume department have thought for a minute we wouldnt have thought that was the void hoodie?

malia having a hallucination of theo in the same episode he comes back in for real seemed both rushed and entirely unnecessary.

in fact these hallucinations seemed wholesale unnecessary and neither scott nor malia deserved that nonsense

were all of these dead leaves already on location or did some poor asshole have to ship them in and then ship them out again

come to think of it, at first i was really excited to see coral/eucalyptus trees as they are actually trees that are in california (as opposed to the type of oak the nemeton is, which is distinctly Not a type of tree in california) but then i realized those are Southern California Trees and if beacon hills (and canaan) are that far north and close to the oregon border, the trees should be way more pines and evergreens and not coral or eucalyptus or ... any deserty tree, really.

seriously were these hallucinations just to show malia can feel sad too?

malia was wearing really subtle gold eyeshadow earlier. now it’s dark shadowing up to her browbone. does being a werecoyote also mean being able to shift your makeup at will? cause thats cool

do little girls seriously still play with baby dolls while hitting their first strides of puberty? im beginning to think i was never actually a little girl.

how much younger than malia was kylie supposed to be? bc she looks like 12 here but malia was like... 10 when the desert wolf murdered her family, right? was SHE the younger sister??

teen wolf shamelessly reusing shots with new filters on them like never before. this ain’t even the fifth time i’ve caught them doing this, this season, and i’ve literally never seen them do it in any of the other seasons.

im not sure anybody told kylie’s actress she wasnt gonna get to make out with shelley

how do werecreatures get piercings? or were her ears pierced first before the change?

why does anyone let liam make any decisions, ever?

i do not get why everyone finds naziwolf so hot

seriously i have a little tree-bush exactly like this right outside my door/garage and that shit is wild and untamed in just a month of no trimming in 30 years it would not have that nice slender shape anymore

also trees being choked to death by kudzu or whatever all these vines are dont look that healthy

is there even kudzu in california??? ive never seen so many vines in all my 10 years of living here.

the first house scott goes in theres like no tv in the living room but there is one chair (with no dining table) all alone in the dining room area, which just looks sad.

oh sorry two chairs set up in what was clearly the worlds most melancholy staring contest.

my dentist used to have that exact sailboat wallpaper trim around the top of his exam rooms.

scotts bullying a door.

have melissa and chris argent actually told the pack about the head-biting yet bc i feel like they should know

i think more people have asked scott if he’s okay in this episode than in the last three seasons, which is sad bc it’s basically just lydia and malia that do it.

that one house has some brutal earthquake damage in its exterior wall.

poseys microexpressions are so woefully underrated, he really is brilliant.

i have more grey hair than jr bourne and that makes me really angry

i like that they’re doing alchemy with druidic compounds/hedgemagic/whatever you want to call it more than i could possibly express.

why is there a porch loveseat on the step up to this one house but that FLAG IS ENTIRELY INTACT?

how convenient that all three of them were looking at that window when lenore decided to fuck with the drapery.

that said scott’s resultant HOLY SHIT?!?? face is amazing

how has lenore been surviving in this town, does she not need water, electric, heat, groceries? where did the lemons for the lemonade come from?

all this wood paneling is the most 70s thing i have ever seen in my life

i appreciate the little cast iron redwood decoration with the ‘m’ on the bottom of it.

everything!! in!! this!! house!! is!! brown!!

that piano as a busted af bass key there.

i feel like i’ve seen that other metal flower/leaf decor before. the new version of the stilinski house, maybe?

lenore has an intimidatingly large smile and i feel like that as an intentional casting choice

how come malia and scott couldnt hear her heartbeat after scott explicitly called out that there were no heartbeats? or for that matter not hear that caleb also didn’t have one? (presumably.)

im not 100% sure but i think malia is holding scott’s hand when they enter the dining room area of lenore’s house, which is adorable so i accept no other reality now.

i honestly feel really bad for lenore.

i would say the fisheye lens is s6′s slo mo but the slo mo didnt go anywhere

i dont know if its supposed to be fancy or artisinal or whatever you called that in the 80s but dont put green shit in your lemonade, green shit does not belong in your lemonade. lemons. sugar. water. it isn’t hard.

malia like chugs a good half of her glass at once, but when she sets it back down it is more full than any of the other glasses. i prefer to think she just faked drinking it to try and gain lenore’s trust than it’s a continuity error from the props department.

when lenore starts using her banshee powers to shake the house, it also magically converts the lemonade into water.

lenore has a pair of decorative ducks on her wall but they appear to be two male mallard ducks, so. gay duck decor.

so when does lydia get to have telekinesis?

i dont think im a very big fan of how angela harvey handles scott.

malia did NOT make a fist like she was really committing to trying to punch out that window.

seriously scotts the alpha he doesnt need lydia to give him permission to do things scott thinks need to be done

that being said scott going into the basement with a creepy kid when youre obviously in some kind of horror movie trope was stupid

the cameras they used for the senior pack team were super blurry anytime anyone moved even the littlest bit, its so annoying.

scott barely being tall enough to reach this tiny-ass basement window is endearing to me

there is no way a vhs tape that wet would run. i remember vhs tapes. they were not sturdy.

i feel like we used to have the same VCR in my parents’ room tho

also what the hell camcorder did they record this on that put it straight on VCR, camcorders in the 80s had weird little small VCR tapes you had to put in a converter. that was just a standard VCR tape.

also why are there jumpcuts in the home video? did somebody cut the original footage and THEN put it on a standard VCR tape?  how much fucking work was THAT??

caleb goes from 0 to 100 on the creepy poltergeist scale real quick

well okay maybe from like 40 to 100

banshee duel yessssss

literally why would noshiko do this after she saw what happened with the nogitsune

not that i necessarily think theo is as dangerous as the nogitsune but he is well bad enough

look at this worthless white boy doing this shit against all the advice of the woc around him

why does the sword do this, i thought the power was in kira and not the sword

if the power is in the sword why couldnt noshiko fix her own damn blade

look at this other worthless white boy even more worthless than the first

that looks like melissa is putting like grout on chris’ injury that does not look comfortable

oh look hes screaming imma guess it was not in fact comfortable

gratuitous jr bourne fanservice

awwww theyre holding haaaaands again

how did this kid get on the stairs the last time we saw him he was by the tv, why did scott and malia let him herd him like this

i appreciate malia’s willingness to beat up a kid poltergeist immensely

of the pictures on caleb’s walls, many are pictures of insects. one is a blue crab. one says ‘guten’ on it, which somehow entertains me a lot.

this is the second time this episode has tried to make me scared of carousel horses

the vhs footage loops while no one is attending to it which is not how vhs tapes work

malia is such a treasure

that being said having nearly drowned twice in my childhood this whole drowning-on-dry-land conceit is not super great for me

screencapping this is so gross

i love lydia’s fierce banshee scream face

so the blood was on the carousel before the wild hunt attack, as we see in lydia’s vision. SO WHY IS IT THERE??

THERE ARE KIDS RIDING ON THIS CAROUSEL WHILE SOME OF THE HORSES ARE BLOODY

poor skateboard bro couldnt even take his skateboard like rude wild hunt

i feel like there’s a lot more ghost riders here than there are in beacon hills. maybe the ghost riders just come for particular towns and the ones in bh are actually like... cora isaac and danny.

its amazing how much younger a good foundation can maybe somebody look

did liam SERIOUSLY just tell theo he can kill whoever he wants? did i hear that right? bc that is a TERRIBLE thing to tell theo, who has ALREADY KILLED A LOT OF PEOPLE, even if what you meant was ‘dont kill us you need us’.

i cant believe we got this cheap knockoff as an excuse to not have kira and then they didnt even let him have the powers he needed to do the job

otoh watching his ass get blasted back into the tunnels was satisfying

literally nobody cares if youre okay theo you murderous fuck

i wonder how many times scott had someone steadying him telling HIM he has to breathe like hes doing for malia right here

i should really keep a tally of how many times scott does stiles’ lizard tongue thing while stiles is gone

this is gross of me to think while the character is basically drowning but hey now i know what scott looks like with his bottom lip all wet and covered in somewhat translucent stretchy goo--jizz. okay. it looks like jizz.

scott mccall nearly drowns on dry land after a lifetime of severe asthma and the first thing he does after is ask if malia is ok

luckily THIS time she asks if HES okay to but jeez

he looks so shocked and confused to be asked extra jeez

more scolia handholding, this time while fleeing danger

i was literally three in 1987 and i still have more grey hair than lenore who was demonstrably an adult in 1987 I AM VERY ANGRY

that being said i realized why caleb here’s clothing was bothering me so much. nobody had shorts that long in the 80s. everybody wore short as hell shorts in the 80s. it was thighs everywhere.

these stupid motherfuckers taking theo to scott’s HOME and putting him in scott’s SAFE SPACE without even WARNING HIM oh my GOD

those better not also be scott’s CLOTHES

ok but WHY are the wild hunt trapped? did they BRING the northern lights or is the northern lights related to what’s trapping them?

excuse me but WHEN did lydia see anything related to what happens to people after the wild hunt takes them and why didnt we get to see it too?

seriously its like if scott is thinking of stiles then lizard blep

im so mad at liam for bringing theo back and putting him in scotts house i cant even see straight

and i just know that this anger that scott is being allowed will be it

and in a week or two itll be working with theo like nothing ever happened

im honestly shocked he even got this much

he even got undercut there by malias (also justified) rage

cool that the morrigan got a namedrop but i dont trust them with that story eitherrrrr

man let me tell you if this was martin and not scott and somehow he had been murdered and resurrected and was then confronted with his murderer in his pack house that murderer would not fucking leave alive

im still kind of mad that this season brought claudia back to life just to make her so sketch and make me kind of hate her, i didnt want to hate her

oh okay its a different weird leaf decor piece than the other one

oh yeah noah OKAY NOW youre starting to believe BUDDY you have faith issues

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Malin Åkerman in The Final Girls

Time for a performance review! A big shout out here to Decider’s Joe Reid (operating on the handle @joereid on twitter and tumblr, go check him out) whose enthusiasm for the film on those sites and his contributions to The Film Experience podcast (thefilmexperience.net, even more fabulous) encouraged me to see this gem. Now on with the show!

I’ve spent a good while trying to write a review of The Final Girls itself, but struggled in trying to get a real paper out of it after having seen it for the first time about two months ago. Plenty of parts stuck in the memory fine, but I felt qualms that the screenplay was a strong in parts and weak in others as I remembered, and wanted to be sure that the performances were as sturdy as I was espousing they were. A few weeks out from my Women-in-Film class, which capped itself off with analyzing several horror films and which I was taking the first time I watched the film, the road bumps I’d noticed before felt less egregious, and the highs slightly less high, though that may have been out of familiarity. None of the ways it trips up are worth everything it gets so wonderfully right, and even all the things it adds to itself. Adopted a fairly warm style to the milieu it’s parodying, The Final Girls is constantly finding new angles and scenarios for its characters and narrative without collapsing into itself the way Cabin in the Woods and Adaptation do in their final half hours. Its premise, of a handful of high school classmates accidentally hopping into a horror movie and trying to return home, possibly with the characters from the film in tow, The Final Girls’s flaws are a little more scattered, and I wished it was willing to bust up the genre more than it did, but it remains a real pleasure throughout as much through the script as it does through a surprising amount of visual style and the commitment of the performers. Editing, sound, and cinematography do a lot of work, like in the American Horror Story: Murder House style way of the characters realizing they’re trapped in the film the same way one of the show’s protagonists realizes she’s died, the entire sequence of setting off the booby trap the characters have laid for Billy Murphy, the final battle between him and protagonist Max. It’s stylistic virtues aren’t just more than you’re expecting but also find multiple new ways to present itself across all fronts.

The cast, too, is uniformly strong and almost completely in sync with the film’s tone and variant style of performance, with characters of the now behaving differently than characters of the then. It’s a culture-clash comedy across decades of acting and genre style, save Adam DeVine being allowed free reign to discordantly improv in that exact way he always does. But aside from him, all the other characters are given room to develop and hilarious lines, often in unexpected ways. The trajectory of Nina Dobrev’s antagonistic ex-best friend of Max’s gives her room to stand on in her nastiness, more often driven by uncouth survival instincts than it is classroom bitchiness, but also allows her a surprisingly poignant conversation to explain herself with Max and her friend Gertie, and plenty of funny lines for Dobrev to chew on. Early on Dobrev’s Vicki politely nixes the theory they’re in Heaven because Max is Jewish, and repeatedly asks where on Earth she can get an axe once they arrive in camp. Alia Shawkat’s Gertie gets great lines and gives even better reaction shots and freak-outs, and Angela Timbur’s nympho counselor Tina gets funnier the more caricature-ish and regressive her character becomes, in contrast to all the character development going on around her. Taissa Farmiga continues to display real talent at jiving between the insane and the sincere tones of the bizarre horror projects she signs on for, a slightly wackier, genre-friendlier version of that grounding Kristen Stewart’s charisma can do, and she’s a welcome anchor for the whole project. The film’s spread out enough that it’s not all on her shoulders, but she carries a larger range of emotional and narrative tasks than almost anyone else in the cast and delivers on all fronts.

That “almost”, though, is because the most challenging part by far is the dual role of downtrodden mother/actress Amanda Cartwright, and that of her most famous character, the sweet Camp Bloodbath counselor/bodycount filler Nancy, who Max three years after her mother has died in a car crash. Both roles, but especially Nancy, is played by Malin Åkerman, with incredible delicacy and an almost confronting amount of emotional transparency. In her only sequence as Amanda, we see learn everything she’s trying to get and trying to avoid. We know from her posture, the way she walks to the car, that Amanda thinks she probably isn’t going to get whatever part she was auditioning for. Or maybe she’s just feeling pigeonholed, again, by how she’s seemingly trapped in limbo because of her Camp Bloodbath role, and is sick of dealing with another director who only sees her as that. Maybe both, but it’s the limbo stuff she tells Max about as the two drive home. Farmiga and Åkerman give a full triage on the mother-daughter dynamics between them as Max worries about money for bills until Amanda throws them out the window, cranks the radio, and the two dance to “Bette Davis Eyes” in the car as Amanda marvels at her daughter, calling Max the only thing she ever got right. But it’s a panicked reaction to Max spilling coffee over her headshots that’s the last thing Amanda ever says before they’re clipped by another car, sending them careening down the road and killing Amanda. Max lives, still grieving her mother three years later, and adamantly refusing to attend a 20th anniversary screening of the two Camp Bloodbath films three years to the day later on the grounds of that grief, at least until the guy running it offers to do her homework for her in exchange for her showing up.

From there our crop of human characters gather together and are transported into Camp Bloodbath itself to escape the theater burning down, rendered in slo-mo as the ashes of a toke ignites a spilled bottle of alcohol. They meet the car carrying almost all of the camp’s counselor’s twice before agreeing to hop on the third time, and from there we meet Nancy herself, gloriously back-lit with sunlight as she wakes up from a nap in the back of the buggy. And it’s here, as she asks a visibly startled Max if this is the first time she’s been away from home, conveying the earnestness of the character without pushing it in the slightest, that a very basic but incredibly effective tenant of Åkerman’s performance reveals itself: a rejection of subtext. Max spends their scenes together fluctuating between treating Nancy as her mother and Nancy as Nancy, but Åkerman never leans into “playing Amanda” and stoking Max’s confused feels. Her actions are completely derived from the character, though we do see small glimmers of what Amanda herself may have put into the role. As one of the characters of the film-within-the-film, Åkerman also has to keep her style of performance within that of the 80’s horror films The Final Girls so affectionately skewers, and again Åkerman plays it completely straight. She fits snuggly into the “Nice Girl” trope without ever pushing it, and even as she starts grasping and accepting not just that she’s a film character but that she can be more than that, Åkerman always plays her as a film character.

In group scenes Nancy is neither more or less compelling or active a presence than any of the other characters, and Åkerman doesn’t try and foreground her when the moment isn’t earned. As interesting as her reactions often are, neither she nor the camera try and highlight her in moments that are about everyone. From the moment the humans decide to try and save the character’s lives Max insists on shadowing Nancy, leading them to have multiple scenes alone together: Max asking Nancy not to sleep with Kurt; Max stopping her from sleeping with him; Max comforting Nancy after being told she’s not fit to kill Billy; preparing weaponry to kill him together; recuperating in an abandoned church; all of these scenes have a surprising amount of pathos and, in the latter three cases especially, travel to genuinely unexpected emotional territory. Farmiga and Åkerman’s scenes together quickly become the heart and soul of The Final Girls, but it’s even clearer than it’s Åkerman who’s walking on a much higher tightrope, not just fulfilling the demands of the script but enriching them with an almost alarming level of directness in her playing. There’s an almost contradictory presentation of depth here, as Nancy doles out old and new dreams for herself, giving us a greater understanding of her without removing the character completely from her archetype. I wonder how much to even say about the specifics of these scenes, given everything I’ve said about how unexpectedly lovely and poignant they are. If this ends up persuading anyone at all to watch this movie, I wouldn’t want to give up exactly what those moments ultimately are. But dammit, they’re worth some description, some mention, some unqualified exuberance, so here’s a kind-of run down of the latter three scenes I referenced at the top of the paragraph. That said, feel free to skip it entirely.

<<<All of these are similar kinds of scenes - as I mentioned, the film is more than willing to repeatedly stop and explore the bond between Max and Nancy as their relationship with each other, Nancy’s relationship to her own personhood, and their relationship to escaping the film all fluctuate - but each goes off on a track that’s rendered with more heart than you expect going in. This is not to lessen her early scenes with Max, before Nancy knows she’s in a movie, but they aren’t as rich to look at compared to what happens once the tea is spilled. The first, as Nancy grapples with the idea that she’s doomed to die by design, sees her confess to Max a future for herself that sounds remarkably similar to the one Amanda ended up getting before she died, invoking that common interview question of how much of themselves an actor puts into any given part. Her second big scene comes while prepping tampon arrows to torch and shoot at Billy with Max, and it’s here that she starts to really wonder what her life could be like once they defeat him and escape Camp Bloodbath. Nancy’s joy at being told by Max that she can go to college and create a real life palpably fills the room as she starts babbling all the things she wants to do with herself, tripping up at being told people don’t shop at malls anymore but going right back on pace saying she wants to learn what online is and use it, get an education, a daughter, and live in California. You can feel Nancy coming alive in this moment, see her hurriedly think of anything and everything she could possibly want to do with herself, overjoyed to share these ideas with Max, just as excited, if not more so, at the possibility of living with Max once this all ends. I quibble with the structuring of her final scene, a last goodbye in the face of imminent death, but the actresses more than make up for it as Max finally, tearfully reveals that Nancy is played by the woman who is her dead mother, accepting this with the stride she has everything else up til now while doing her best to comfort Max. It’s a painful goodbye, calling back to Max’s final scene with Amanda, and I ugly cried through the whole last minute of it.>>>

Throughout, Malin Åkerman realizes her scenes with a nakedly direct level of emotional candor, grace, and genuine goodness, all without seeming to strain in the slightest. It’s a resistance to pandering that only makes the performance more powerful, and a pretty damn indelible rendering of an odd character, strewn with easy pitfalls a lazier actress might’ve hopped into. Åkerman doesn’t just fulfill the requirements of the script but brings adds to them with a dizzying level of sincerity and depth. Who knows, only 38 films into the 2015 film year - yikes, that feels even smaller typing it out - how well she will stack up next to performances from Julianne Moore, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lise Roy, and who knows how many others But from my viewpoint, not just of that year’s crop but totally outside it, hers is an unbelievably tricky part realized better than I could’ve ever hoped for. It’s weirder than almost anything that’s ever been up for an Academy Award, or anything that’s ever been within throwing distance of a nomination, but to my mind it’s certainly deserving of recognition beyond the few horror-themed awards shows and websites that covered it and scattered laurels from online critics and people like me who Have Blogs And Only Have Blogs. The Final Girls feels like the rare meta-anything that manages to stay wholly original its whole runtime, resisting the urge to ironically (or not) wind up succumbing into becoming the kind of project it’d been skewering up til that point. At just over ninety minutes, it’s a treat no matter how you slice it, but the crown jewel of this project is doubtless the miraculous turn that Malin Åkerman pulls off. It’s for sure the kind of “heart and soul of the movie” part that doubtlessly would have impact by design alone, but Åkerman does one better and makes Nancy remarkable by making her wants and her feelings as real as anyone else’s, keeping her in her own time and style of being, and making her completely extraordinary as a result.

[kpopper]

Switching topics entirely - have you heard nct 127’s new song? I really liked it! I think it has the usual nct vibe (i.e. it sounds like an acid trip) but its still v good. I loved the mv visuals but that’s not surprising since sm always has the best mvs, but i also love the concept a lot!

LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A NEW THANG NEW TGAAANG NEW THAAAANG an anon talked to me about it! It does sound like your typical nct song, aka an acid trip aka nonsensical noise aka a car crash in slo mo with every noise amplified to a beat.

I am TRASH for yuta in that crop top do not TALK TO ME if its not about yuta in that crop top i wanna LIVE in a world made of yuta in a crop top.

But really i enjoyed the song! I dont usually love nct releases but im quite fond of this one 🥺 i think i missed them 🥺