#lewis was probably a thespian | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

raincitygirl76 · 1 year ago

Text

I knew that Claudia Black (the Australian actor who played Aeryn Sun on Farscape) had gotten divorced. I had not known about her C-PTSD or her custody battle. But she is a terrific actor who should be more widely recognized. And who I already knew had had some bad luck in terms of casting.

Regrettably, the contracts of Farscape’s Australian actors (I.e. most of the cast, since it was an American show shot in Sydney) did not include American residuals. Only imported American actors like Ben Browder who were members of SAG-AFTRA got residuals. Which is a damn shame, because the show ran 1999-2003. In the 2000s, syndicated reruns were still a good way for actors to get some financial stability courtesy of residuals from past work.

After moving to America following the end of Farscape, Black was cast in a recurring role on a big network show, as the ex-wife of Damian Lewis’s star character Charlie Crews on “Life”, which aired 2007-2009. She appeared as Jennifer in the pilot episode and some ads. But Black’s role was recast (and her scenes in the pilot episode reshot with a new actor) because in between the shooting of the pilot and production of the first season, Black had become pregnant.

It was a shame she lost that role, particularly since the actor they cast in her place didn’t have nearly as much charisma. Also because Jennifer is remarried with kids in the pilot episode, so it wouldn’t have been particularly difficult to write Jennifer as pregnant again by her second husband.

Jennifer was someone Charlie was still carrying a torch for a decade after their divorce. She should’ve been compelling. But the chemistry between Damian Lewis and the replacement Jennifer just wasn’t there, so it was sometimes hard to understand why Charlie was so nuts over her. Judging by Black’s accidental appearance in some ads for “Life”, she had envisioned and played Jennifer as a significantly tougher character than the replacement actor did.

Now, making Jennifer “softer” was probably the showrunner’s idea, rather than the fault of the replacement actor. Presumably she played Jennifer as she was directed to. But particularly in Season 2, when Jennifer’s role expands, the lack of chemistry between Damian Lewis and the replacement Jennifer had me wishing for a spikier version. Like the Jennifer we’d briefly glimpsed from footage of Claudia Black in early ads for the show.

Maybe the showrunner wanted Jennifer softer, and Claudia Black’s pregnancy was the excuse he needed to axe her and hire someone else to play the role differently. But it always seemed like a shame to me. In most industries, firing someone because they’re pregnant would be grounds for a lawsuit. Apparently in Hollywood it’s de rigeur.

Note that in “The Night Manager”, a British miniseries which aired in 2016, Olivia Colman was visibly pregnant with her third child. She played a prominent role in the series in spite of her pregnancy. Apparently the character had not been pregnant in John le Carre’s book (which I haven’t read).

But then, “The Night Manager” was directed by a woman, Danish director Susanne Bier. As a woman, and a mother of 2 kids herself, presumably Bier realized pregnancy wouldn’t sap Colman’s thespian powers. The male show runners of “Life” evidently felt differently in 2007.

For every Olivia Colman out there (a working actor whose career suddenly goes stratospheric when she’s approaching 40), there are probably a hundred Claudia Blacks. Excellent working actors whose careers start to wane as they’re approaching 40, and continue to wane as they’re approaching 50. And not because they’ve suddenly lost their talent. Hollywood is just fixated on youth.

12K notes · View notes

cherrybombusa · 3 years ago

Photo

GROUP TWO - THE SOUNDBOOTH. FAILURE.

PLAYERS:

THE THESPIAN - Dominic Logan. THE SLACKER - Jamie Dyer. THE FALLEN ANGEL - Alice Alder.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS:

- JAMIE FELL 50 FEET FROM THE SOUNDBOOTH’S EMERGENCY EXIT AND BROKE HIS LEG. - ALICE DIDN’T ELECTROCUTE HERSELF DESTROYING THE SOUNDBOARD. - THE GANG USED ALL THREE TRIES IN THEIR PUZZLE AND FAILED. THEY DID NOT FIND THE KEY TO SAVE THEIR FRIEND. - THEY WERE BLAMED FOR THE CANDY GIRL’S SHOW. THIS WILL COME BACK TO BITE IN-GAME.

Setting up for shows had never exactly been smooth-sailing, but with Mac missing for the last ten minutes things were slowing to a halt. Everyone seems frustrated - nobody seems to know where he’s gone… Except for a forgettable boardwalk worker who looks like they’d rather be anywhere else. He says he watched Mac go up to the sound booth across from the Main Stage. Typical musician. Jamie better go drag him back before their set is supposed to start. @indyerneed

Plans between the twins shouldn’t have even really been called plans; plans had the unfortunate chance of falling through. No, when they said they were going to do something, it was set in stone - so when Libby isn’t anywhere to be found before the ribbon cutting ceremony…? Well, it’s certainly grounds to be worried, isn’t it? People are crowding into the area around the stage, but it’s only a moment before one of the Boardwalk workers taps Dominic on the shoulder. Apparently Libs found a better place to watch: from the sound booth across from the main stage. Damn her connections to the Hargroves, right? Oh well. Dominic better go find her before the show starts. @dominiclogan

Alice, Alice, Alice. The Candy Girl’s fascination with the Fallen Angel of the group had rhyme and reason, but somehow it was still a mystery of it’s own. Did she really favor the girl, or did she just have plans for her? Did she want to avenge Alice, or torment her - just like Lux did before she died? Who knows. Either way, when the message came in, ‘I want to meet.’ How could anyone refuse? They picked a time and a place - 7:30pm in the sound booth across from the stage. Her special instructions? “Bring no one.” I guess she didn’t want anyone crashing the little party she had planned. @alicealder

THE NARRATOR: Reunions were supposed to be pleasant occasions, weren’t they? They were supposed to bring feelings of joy, and nostalgia; you were supposed to forget the awkward haze that had plagued your senior year of high school, and pretend like the good old days were actually just that. Good. Absence did make the heart grow fonder and all that, didn’t it?

Though, maybe it’s silly to wonder why this little reunion, in the Sound Booth that towered above the boardwalk, might not be so pleasant. It was only a week ago, after all, that they were all huddled into Harvey’s basement, playing at the whims of a suspected lunatic. Not even ‘a Day in Carousel Cove!’ could smooth over that awkward little blip, could it?

Still, the three of them made their polite, albeit stilted conversation. Jamie laments about being late for his set, and Dominic insists he has to go find Libby… Alice may or may not be wondering what the hell is going on! But the unmistakable sound of the lock clicking in the door behind them should be enough to stop all conversation. Jinkies, kiddos! Wonder what’s in store for you this time.

MAKE A CHOICE: SOMEBODY RESPOND.

DOM: If it had seemed like they’d stumbled into a bad horror movie before, things were apparently only going downhill from here. As if having to make painfully stilted small talk with the two people in this god damn town that he did not want to be stuck anywhere with wasn’t bad enough already, the sound of the lock clicking behind them made his head whip around. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Dominic muttered under his breath, heading straight to the door to try the handle -- because maybe, he was just finally going insane and hallucinating the worst case scenario.

THE NARRATOR: A clock in the corner of the room strikes 7:30pm just as Dominic tries the handle - truly, and surely locked - but it’s only the beginning of the panic. It’s time for the festivities to begin - whether they’re all there or not.

Dean Hargrove steps onto the Boardwalk’s stage that’s laid out below them; Lux’s parents entered only a moment after. It really would be a lovely place to watch the show… If the Candy Girl hadn’t had other plans for the gang that day. Hargrove hardly says Lux’s name - hardly gets into his plan to honor the girl with the ‘Lux Lewis Memorial Carousel’ before he’s cut off by a voice they don’t quite recognize. A voice that might just damn them all.

CANDY GIRL: “REST IN PEACE TO OUR DEAR OLD LUX, BUT I HAVE NEWS THAT THE CHERRY TIMES IS TOO SCARED TO TELL! THIS WAS NO SUICIDE. LUX WAS MURDERED. THE QUESTION IS - WHICH ONE OF HER FRIENDS DID IT?” THE NARRATOR: At that moment, a sheet unfurls behind Dean Hargrove, and a projector that’s been crudely wired into the soundboard flips on. The image it casts is a shocking sight to the crowd - you might even be able to see a couple of them wince if you squinted hard enough - but to our little ragtag slice of the gang, the Cherry Bomb logo was all too recognizable. It was a blown up version of her latest issue, and - surprise, surprise! - Lux is once again the star.

What they weren’t expecting, though? The crime scene photos that the projector begins flipping through, one by one.

CANDY GIRL: “AND TO THAT LITTLE GANG! MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE LATEST ISSUE. IT’S FULL OF FUN, NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN IMAGES OF LITTLE LUXIE’S DEMISE, AND A SPECIAL SURPRISE JUST FOR YOU: SOMEONE IS MISSING, AND YOU’RE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN FIND THEM BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. GOOD LUCK!” THE NARRATOR: It would have been impressive timing if it weren’t so fucking frightening, but at just that moment, their very own issue of the Cherry Bomb slides beneath the door, skidding to a stop, right at their feet.

The cover is collaged with photos of Lux, the inside? Those same crime scene photos. There’s no pictures of her body, of course - that would be crude, even for the Candy Girl… kind of. But images of the blood soaked into her carpet; still pictures of her bedroom, flaunting a life once lived, those are there. A shot of her suicide note, ‘I’m sorry, I love you,’ and all.

And right there, in the middle of the spread, like a centerfold? A note, written in Sharpie - just for the gang, of course!

CANDY GIRL: GET OUT,,, GET OUT, WHEREVER YOU’RE LOCKED!!!! NOT A FAN OF SMALL SPACES?? I’LL STICK YOU IN A BOX. SOMEONE IS MISSING, BUT I WON’T SAY WHO… FIND THE KEY, AND FIND OUT WHO.

YOU MUST STOP MY SHOW, AND YOU’RE ON THE CLOCK! BUT LET TIME RUN OUT, AND THEY STAY IN THE BOX. WILL THE TIDE COME IN? HMM, MAYBE IT WON’T. OR BETTER YET? MAYBE YOUR FRIENDS WILL FLOAT.

DO YOU LIKE IT, FREAKS, DO YOU LIKE MY NOTE? I HOPE YOU DO, BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T! ALL OF CHERRY WILL FIND YOU UP THERE…

AND ALL OF THE BLAME WILL BE YOURS TO SHARE.

THE NARRATOR: Oh...my. Now, that’s a predicament, isn’t it? I suppose we’re at least lucky that the Candy Girl leaves the rules simple, right? Find a key, stop the show, and get out before someone can blame all of you for the horrific slideshow!

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST ESCAPE THE ROOM, BUT FIRST YOU MUST FIND THE KEY. YOU MUST ALSO STOP THE CANDY GIRL’S SHOW… THAT IS, UNLESS YOU THINK THE THREE OF YOU CAN GET OUT BEFORE SOMEBODY FINDS YOU UP HERE.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO STOP THE SLIDESHOW? OR DO YOU THINK YOU CAN GET OUT IN TIME?

THE NARRATOR: Is stopping the slideshow selfish, or noble? It’s not exactly up to me to decide - yet - but either way, with the hell that Cherry has been through lately - and Lux’s parents at that - the town probably deserves this one.

The soundboard had clearly been tampered with long before they found the gang found their way in the soundbooth. There’s wires that have been ripped out and duct taped into new places - there’s a soldering iron off to the side that was still warm to the touch. Whoever did this must have worked quickly… and gotten out right before they arrived. Fucking creepy. It looks like there’s a few ways you can stop the show, though.

There’s always the route of champions - pulling wires until something goes dark. You could look for a power source - it all has to be plugged in somewhere, right? Or… you could just destroy the board.

MAKE A CHOICE:YOU MUST STOP THE SHOW. DO YOU START PULLING WIRES [LUCK], LOOK FOR A POWER SOURCE [PROBLEM SOLVING], OR DESTROY THE BOARD [FIGHTER]?

ALICE: It seemed like the most obvious solution, right? Pulling the wires could, like, electrocute them… right? Then it wouldn't matter if they were caught, because they'd be bacon! Searching for a power source? ...Too long. And they had to stop it some way! “Alright, that’s enough.” And with that… Alice went Wreck-It Ralph on the projector.

THE NARRATOR: It was a crude solution - that much is true - but hey! If it works, it works… And what else could you really expect from Alice? It takes a few minutes, but before long the board is sparking and the projector is stuttering to a halt. They can’t exactly figure out how to stop the music, but, somehow that seems like a lesser priority.

Congratulations! You’ve stopped the show… but you've taken away an option that might have helped you out later. Woops.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST ESCAPE THE ROOM, BUT HOW DO YOU IT? THERE HAS TO BE A KEY SOMEWHERE, SO HOW DO YOU FIND IT? BY LOOKING FOR CLUES [PROBLEM SOLVING] OR BY TEARING THE ROOM APART? [LUCK]

JAMIE: Jamie gave Alice’s destruction a disparaging look before glancing at the other two. The question of ‘really?’ was dry and all in his eyebrows. He shook his head and started surveying the obvious surface before methodically moving to concealed space, looking for clues that might lead them to the key out of there. “No point in making any more of a mess here if we have to find a needle in a damn haystack.”

THE NARRATOR: Good thinking, Jamie. While he stays focused on the sharpie scribbled riddle in the ‘zine while the other two raid the room for something useful. Not so useful, but strange enough to take note of? A cherry red briefcase, shoved into one of the dusty, storage lockers.

Not only that… but maybe there’s actually more to the note than they thought.

CANDY GIRL: GET OUT,,, GET OUT, WHEREVER YOU’RE LOCKED!!!! NOT A FAN OF SMALL SPACES?? I’LL STICK YOU IN A BOX. SOMEONE IS MISSING, BUT I WON’T SAY WHO… FIND THE KEY, AND FIND OUT WHO.

BUT WATCH OUT, WATCH OUT! YOU’RE ON THE CLOCK! LET IT RUN OUT, AND THEY’LL STAY IN THE BOX. WILL THE TIDE COME IN? HMM, MAYBE IT WON’T. OR BETTER YET? MAYBE YOUR FRIENDS WILL FLOAT.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST FIGURE OUT THE PUZZLE. GET THE BRIEFCASE OPEN TO FIND THE KEY.

DOM: This was absolutely ridiculous. Dominic was here to see his sister, not play god damn games. Speaking of which -- all that talk about someone being in a box and his sister decidedly not being here continued to ramp up his heart beat with every passing moment. “God damn it -- here,” he paused to lean over Jamie, fingers working quickly to put in the code: 2, 1, 3, 4.

MAKE A CHOICE: WRONG CODE. TRY AGAIN.

ALICE: You know, there were a lot of red flags popping up right now. The threat of a friend (yes?) dying (drowning, she took it? So much aquatic language!) was really just… overdoing it. “Let me try,” she sighed, pushing Dominic away from the briefcase and entering ‘3214.’

MAKE A CHOICE: WRONG CODE. TRY AGAIN.

DOM: They were running out of time and stable nerves. They had to get out of here, they had to find that god damn key and figure out what the fuck was going on here. So, with a last effort, Dominic reached forward again, this time entering 3421.

MAKE A CHOICE: WRONG CODE. YOU'VE LOST ALL CHANCES OF SAVING YOUR FRIEND.

THE NARRATOR: The sound of the clock ticking in the corner of the tiny room is almost ominous as it continues on in it’s effort; keeping a steady beat to their struggle. They’ve lost all hope of saving their friend, but they still have to get out, or they might be framed for the Candy Girl’s little show at the Ribbon Cutting ceremony.

At least they have a few options. They could always try to break down the door - it would take some might, but it’s possible. Maybe. Someone could always climb out of the window, and take the emergency ladder down - it would be easy to let their friends out from the outside! Just watch out. It’s a long fall down if you miss a step.

Or, if they’re really desperate… They could always try to call for help.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU MUST ESCAPE THE ROOM. DO YOU BREAK DOWN THE DOOR [STRENGTH], TAKE THE EMERGENCY EXIT [BRAVERY], OR CALL FOR HELP? [SURVIVOR]

JAMIE: Jamie stared at the stubborn suitcase only for a single beat, deciding that they were wasting a lot of time. “Yeah, okay. Plan B, I guess,” he said without fanfare, moving to the window and shucking it open. Really, it was the thought of Mac that compelled him sling his leg over the barrier. He wasn’t thinking about how much he wouldn’t have minded a long fall down or how the other two were were probably worth more noble deaths. “I’m gonna try and get around. Wouldn’t recommend looking out here if you don't hear from me in a bit.”

THE NARRATOR: Don’t look down. Don’t look down. It’s nearly fifty feet off of the ground - a single slip might mean a broken leg, but somehow they manage to keep their footing… That is, until they don’t anymore. It’s a split second of hesitation, but they slip, and down, down, down they go! They’re not dead - they know they’re not dead once they hit the ground. Their leg, on the other hand…? That's probably broken. Definitely broken.

Bruised, broken, and thoroughly played by the Candy Girl’s games, maybe this little ragtag slice of the gang wasn’t expecting a rescue… And a rescue didn’t exactly come either. They waited for nearly half an hour - Jamie outside, fifty feet down and trying to scream for help over the music. They were all convinced they would spend the night here - but when the door swings open, it isn’t anybody looking for them out of concern… It’s Dean Hargrove. And he wants to know what the hell is going on here.

Maybe if they had been a little more cunning - maybe if they had made better choices - they might be able to talk him out of his accusations. They might be able to convince him that they weren’t responsible for the cruel show… But it’s no use. The Candy Girl set up the trap, and now they were going to be paying the price. So much for saving your friend.

MAKE A CHOICE: YOU FAILED YOUR EVENT. YOUR FRIEND MAY MEET THEIR DEMISE.

#bio rp #town rp #oc rp #skeleton rp #small town rp #secrets rp #gossip rp #gossip girl rp #90s rp #classic rp #plot event 001.#plot event 001 - the soundbooth.

5 notes · View notes

ultrahpfan5blog · 4 years ago

Text

Rewatching the HP and FB movies

I have a tradition of rewatching HP movies at least once a year. This year, I added the two FB movies as well. I know lots of people have well deserved issues with a lot of thing with the franchise and I do too, but I still thoroughly enjoy the movies. All of them. Certainly there are some big issues I have, like how Kloves treated Ron starting from GOF onwards, and how Hermione kind of became a mary sue, and definitely some of the things that were added or removed, like the removal of some of the Riddle memories in HBP, removing the pretty fascinating Dumbledore backstory in Deathly Hallows, the silly inconsistencies like polyjuice not changing the voice of the characters etc... But in general, I still think the movies did a great job capturing the spirit of the books and the casting was just incredible. Especially the adult casting. I know we have only seen one version of Harry Potter on the big screen, but I envision these actors, especially the adults, when I’m reading the books now. Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltraine, Mark Williams, Julie Walters etc... are now the faces I see when I think of those characters. Richard Harris was a terrific Dumbledore for the first two movies, where he had more of grandfatherly, twinkling, vibe. I know people are critical of Gambon in GOF and he admittedly did get the characterization wrong, but I feel he was excellent in POA, OOTP, and especially HBP. Alan Rickman was just so outstanding in the role of Snape. I genuinely feel he should have gotten some Oscar consideration for his performance in DH2. But he was incredible even when he had only a few scenes and had to be super dry in his dialogue delivery. Maggie Smith was similarly wonderful. But these were just the adult regulars, but equally incredible were the phenomenal actors who came for just a few films. There are so many. Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Imelda Staunton, Helena Bonham Carter, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Emma Thompson, Jim Broadbent etc... among many others. A lot of these actors only had a film or two where they had a significant presence, but they showed up in cameos in other films, particularly in DH2. I have a lot of respect for the casting directors for this franchise since they cast basically half of all of British’s well respected acting thespians. Even someone like Bill Nighy appeared, just for two scenes in DH1. Rhys Ifans came in DH1 and was terrific in the two scenes he was in. Ciaran Hinds also was in just one or two scenes and he was also very good. And all these actors felt like they gave it their all and that it wasn’t just a paycheck role.

When it comes to child casting, what strikes me is the amazing continuity the series kept. Its one thing to be able to keep the core child actors like Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Tom Felton, but one of the most satisfying aspects of the series is that a lot of the core group of side characters were continuously played by the same actors. Not just Matthew Lewis and Bonnie Wright and the Phelps brothers, but also Alfred Enoch as Dean, Devon Murray as Seamus, and Joshua Herdman as Goyle. It would be very easy to replace some of these side characters over time and no one would notice, but the continuity makes it so much more enjoyable when in DH2 Seamus helps Neville blow up a bridge based on the fact that we know Seamus from the first movie was known for blowing stuff up. Its the small things that make it so great. Possibly the most accurate bit of casting was Evana Lynch as Luna. I honestly can’t think of a single actor more perfectly cast in the series than her. The core quartet were all lovely. Not always consistent, but more than good enough. I actually think Dan was the weakest actor when the series started, but he made remarkable improvement in the back half of the series, especially OOTP onwards. He is outstanding in DH2 I thought. Tom Felton didn’t always have to do much until HBP, but he was excellent in HBP. He does seem to have been stereotyped a little in the other roles I’ve seen him in but it still means he was great. Emma Watson’s performance fluctuated a bit. She was very good as a kid, then she was kind of bad in GOF and in parts of OOTP, but she found her footing again in HBP and especially in DH1, which I still consider to be her best acting performance to date. I think Rupert was always the most natural actor of the lot. He was probably the most hard done by the Kloves because they kind of typecast him as the comedic sidekick, but I can’t fault Rupert because he was a pretty gifted comic. Like Emma, when he got more scope in DH1, he did an incredible job. I would say Bonnie Wright is maybe the only one who didn’t fully grow into the role for me. It probably has a lot to do with writing, but she also really didn’t share any chemistry with Dan which made that relationship feel pretty flat and forced. But all in all the casting really made these movies and they elevate the movies significantly. But I admit all the craft behind it. Also, some of these movies are close to two decades old and the effects hold up quite well. I think there are scenes in the first movie that look a little dated, particularly the flying scenes, but subsequent movies seemed to find the right blend of practical and visual effects to make the movies look pretty timeless.

I think all the directors did their job really well. Columbus did a good job of bringing the childlike wonder of the initial books to life, Cuaron brought his more adult quality as the kids grew up, Newell ramped up the scale and the scope, and Yates managed to bring home the darkness. Definitely the films weren’t flawless. Like I mentioned before, there were times when some characterizations were off, some key subplots were eliminated or not handled well, some things added which were not needed etc... but the spirit of the books remains. I have a deep fondness for the movies as I feel I grew up with them as I am basically the same age as all the main child actors in the movie so I grew up and watched them grow up. So while they aren’t in the league of greatest films of all time, but its a remarkably consistent and enjoyable franchise that lasted an entire decade.

When it comes to Fantastic Beasts series, I was excited that Yates and Rowling were developing something new but I also feared what would happen given they didn’t have the structure of a book series to guide them. The fears ended up being fairly valid. The first FB is a pretty enjoyable film. I do think they did a good job creating a likable quartet of main characters and the actors all did a pretty remarkable job. It was also a refreshing change to watch Magical World from an adult POV as well as experiencing a new location and time period as well. The issue with the first film is that the film has two separate storylines which don’t really merge well together. The story of Newt, Jacob, Tina, and Queenie finding and recapturing the suitcase of magical creatures is actually very charming. The film does a nice job of creating some unique magical creatures and adding something new to the Magical World, but then there is a dark and gloomy second plot which doesn’t work as well because it essentially isn’t much of a story other than just showing Credence being abused and manipulated time and time again until the climax. It neither merges well tonally, nor plot wise. The way they try to put Newt at the center of the climax felt very clumsy and unearned. Overall, the first film still has sufficient enjoyable charm and I certainly like Redmayne, Waterston, Fogol, and Sudol. Farrell was a damn good villain. Miller was a little too mannered for my taste but I understand what he was going for. Voight is there for no reason at all in a perplexing subplot that goes nowhere. But still, more positives than negatives. FB2 is where the franchise really dropped the ball for the first time and Rowling’s inexperience as a movie screenplay writer became very obvious. The film is literally a setup for future movie, designed to get characters into certain places where the real story can start. the film essentially has no plot other than a bunch of wizards across Europe are looking for Credence and Credence is searching for his identity. There is really nothing else in the movie. The movie is overpopulated with characters, and Newt ends up even more incidental in this movie since he has no interest in going after Credence himself at all for 2/3 of the movie. All the things that were good about the first movie are lost as Jacob and Queenie only share two scenes together, Tina and Newt only share the last act or so together, Newt and Jacob end up only have a couple of scenes together. Its all rather boring and dull. The performances are fine. Depp was a good enough Grindelwald but I don’t think he was given any more to do other than just be surface level evil. One of the most inspired casting decisions was Jude Law as Dumbledore. While he doesn’t ape Gambon or Harris, he does capture the twinkling spirit of Dumbledore and his scenes are the best. The film also has a rather odd plot concerning Leta Lestrange. It is simultaneously important and completely pointless at the same time. I felt that the character had a compelling backstory and interesting potential but the film barely has time to address it any sort of depth before she gets pointlessly killed off at the end. The film also does a pretty bizarre character assassination of Queenie who makes decision that I really don’t understand. I guess this all boils down to the fact that this story may have worked in Rowling’s head as a book where each character’s internal thought could have been given more depth but what happens is that pretty much every sub story is pretty unsatisfying. Its certainly not an unwatchable disaster, just rather dull and devoid of the spark that the wizarding world movies should have. I hope they can turn things around because the film leaves things at a very peculiar juncture which doesn’t make much sense based on what we know of the HP canon.

#Harry Potter #fantastic beasts #ron weasley #hermione granger #newt scamander #fantastic beats the crimes of grindelwald #fantastic beats and where to find them #harry potter films

5 notes · View notes

johnnymundano · 6 years ago

Text

The Medusa Touch (1978)

Directed by Jack Gold

Written by John Briley

Based on “The Medusa Touch” by Peter Van Greenaway

Music by Michael J. Lewis

Country: United Kingdom, France

Language: English

Running Time: 105 minutes CAST

Richard Burton as John Morlar

Lino Ventura as Brunel

Lee Remick as Doctor Zonfeld

Harry Andrews as Assistant Commissioner

Alan Badel as Barrister

Marie-Christine Barrault as Patricia

Jeremy Brett as Edward Parrish

Michael Hordern as Atropos - Fortune Teller

Gordon Jackson as Doctor Johnson

Michael Byrne as Duff

Derek Jacobi as Townley - Publisher

Robert Lang as Pennington

Avril Elgar as Mrs. Pennington

John Normington as Schoolmaster

Robert Flemyng as Judge McKinley

Philip Stone as Dean

Malcolm Tierney as Deacon

Norman Bird as Father

Jennifer Jayne as Mother

James Hazeldine as Lovelass

Gordon Honeycombe as Himself (Newsreader)

The first reason to watch The Medusa Touch is the presence of the acting colossus Richard Burton practically breathing fire in one of his great ‘70s roles (NB: Many of Burton’s great ‘70s roles occurred in movies which were themselves rather less than great). It’s to The Medusa Touch’s credit then that this isn’t the only reason to watch it.

The mighty Burton is enormous value in this as a misanthropic author with the titular touch; each of his scenes is a little set-piece wherein he gets to vent his considerable spleen at some aspect of “civilised” society. (Burton is so thunderingly awesome in his disdain that those implied speech marks seem to hang in the air undulating like heat off Texas tar at high noon.) Be in no doubt, the sheer venom with which Burton intermittently spits his vindictive bile is impressive enough to be worth the price of admission. As indeed is the sight of his megastar frame clad in cardigan and slacks like a surly granddad. Always remember - fashion is an uncredited character in all 1970s movies. A turn as gloweringly potent as the one Burton delivers here would threaten to overturn many a more demure movie but, luckily, The Medusa Touch is nothing if not audaciously fantastical.

Initially setting itself up as a murder mystery before launching itself into the realm of the delightfully outlandish, The Medusa Touch opens with John Morlar’s (Richard Burton’s) craggy Welsh head being beaten to a craggy Welsh pulp with a statuette of Napoleon by an unidentified intruder. Inspector Brunel (Lino Ventura) has to discover the motive and the culprit, while also convincing the audience that it is perfectly natural to have a French policeman working in London as part of some breezily suggested exchange programme. Clearly there only as a sop to the French investors Ventura nevertheless delivers a thoroughly committed performance, at first all business and rationality but swiftly forced to shade into credulousness as evidence of the supernatural mounts.

Brunel soon discovers Morlar was consulting a psychiatrist, Dr Zonfeld (Lee Remick), as the bloviating malcontent feared a disturbing correlation between his wishing ill on people and ill suddenly thereafter being visited upon said people. Could it be possible that he, John Morlar, noted author of rancorous fiction might possess some unearthly power, a kind of…medusa touch? Or is he just losing his malicious mind over a series of mere coincidences? Perhaps this is the crux of the matter and the solution holds the key to the identity of his assailant? Only a series of flashbacks acted with two fisted panache by beloved 1970s British thespians can provide the answer.

The Medusa Touch pulls that trick beloved of British ‘70s cinema whereby it promises a starry cast, but can only fulfil that promise and come in on budget by having each star onscreen for a minimal amount of time. Thus we have Derek Jacobi doing a camp literary agent for one scene, Gordon Jackson drily one-lining in a number of scenes (all obviously shot on the same day), and so on. Worthy of particular note is crumple faced acting treasure Michael Hordern’s turn as a fortune teller. His transformation from the breezily unctuous to the witlessly terrified, as he realises the nature of what is sat before him, is pure performing gold. Even Lee Remick is good value, occasionally sloughing off her usual perpetually dazed expression to actually inhabit the moment. Her role is also a refreshing departure from the typical ‘70s female role; she doesn’t start falling in love with Morlar and she is a far from a passive presence. It’s probably nothing to do with equality and more to do with the character being male in the source novel; but it’s an accidental step up anyway.

The Medusa Touch’s peculiarly British thrift even extends to its monolithic star, Richard Burton. In fact so terribly disfiguring are Burton’s wounds from the opening scene, that it looks like someone altogether less expensive spends most of the movie wrapped in bandages on the hospital bed in Morlar’s stead. In retrospect its surprising to realise that Burton himself is a scarce presence in the movie, yet it feels like his acerbic presence saturates every scene, like brandy in a particularly rich Christmas pudding. This is mostly because he (obviously) dominates the few scenes he’s in, but also because he provides reliably rumbly narration for many scenes he’s not actually in; all of which were probably recorded in the snug of a pub in-between a couple of pints and a fistful of fags. It’s an incredibly economical use of such a gigantic star. Burton gives you your money’s worth and no mistake.

As a story The Medusa Touch is tons of wittily scripted pulptastic fun, building from a bashed in head to catastrophes of truly monumental proportions. While it does carry the stamp of a certain 1970s strain of campy naffness it is amazing how thrillingly convincing the magnificent cast make the delirious nonsense seem, right up the diabolical cliffhanger of an ending. Also, Burton’s giant face looming at you, intoning “I have a gift. A gift…for disaster!” in HD makes you glad you bought a TV you’ll be paying off for the next 12 months. But that could just be me.

#The Medusa Touch #Jack Gold #Movies #Horror #Richard Burton #Lee Remick #Michael Hordern #Lino Ventura #The 1970s #1978 #France #United Kingdom

3 notes · View notes

how2to18 · 6 years ago

Link

DURING THE POSTWAR PERIOD, the genres of the fantastic — especially science fiction — have been deeply intertwined with the genres of popular music, especially rock ’n’ roll. Both appeal to youthful audiences, and both make the familiar strange, seeking escape in enchantment and metamorphosis. As Steppenwolf sang in 1968: “Fantasy will set you free […] to the stars away from here.” Two recent books — one a nonfiction survey of 1970s pop music, the other a horror novel about heavy metal — explore this heady intermingling of rock and the fantastic.

As Jason Heller details in his new book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded, the magic carpet rides of the youth counterculture encompassed both the amorphous yearnings of acid rock and the hard-edged visions of science fiction. In Heller’s account, virtually all the major rock icons — from Jimi Hendrix to David Crosby, from Pete Townshend to Ian Curtis — were avid SF fans; not only was their music strongly influenced by Heinlein, Clarke, Ballard, and other authors, but it also amounted to a significant body of popular SF in its own right. As Heller shows, many rock stars were aspiring SF writers, while established authors in the field sometimes wrote lyrics for popular bands, and a few became rockers themselves. British fantasist Michael Moorcock, for example, fronted an outfit called The Deep Fix while also penning songs for — and performing with — the space-rock group Hawkwind (once memorably described, by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, as “Star Trek with long hair and drugs”).

Heller’s book focuses on the “explosion” of SF music during the 1970s, with chapters chronicling, year by year, the exhilarating debut of fresh music subcultures — prog rock, glam rock, Krautrock, disco — and their saturation with themes of space/time travel, alien visitation, and futuristic (d)evolution. He writes, “’70s pop culture forged a special interface with the future.” Many of its key songs and albums “didn’t just contain sci-fi lyrics,” but they were “reflection[s] of sci-fi” themselves, “full of futuristic tones and the innovative manipulation of studio gadgetry” — such as the vocoder, with its robotic simulacrum of the human voice. Heller’s discussion moves from the hallucinatory utopianism of the late 1960s to the “cool, plastic futurism” of the early 1980s with intelligence and panache.

The dominant figure in Heller’s study is, unsurprisingly, David Bowie, the delirious career of whose space-age antihero, Major Tom, bookended the decade — from “Space Oddity” in 1969 to “Ashes to Ashes” in 1980. Bowie’s 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was a full-blown SF extravaganza, its freaky starman representing “some new hybrid of thespian rocker and sci-fi myth,” but it had a lot of company during the decade. Heller insightfully analyzes a wide range of SF “concept albums,” from Jefferson Starship’s Blows Against the Empire (1970), the first rock record to be nominated for a Hugo Award, to Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975), which “reprogramm[ed] funk in order to launch it into tomorrow,” to Gary Numan and Tubeway Army’s Replicas (1979), an album “steeped in the technological estrangement and psychological dystopianism of Dick and Ballard.”

Heller’s coverage of these peaks of achievement is interspersed with amusing asides on more minor, “novelty” phenomena, such as “the robot dance craze of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” and compelling analyses of obscure artists, such as French synthesizer wizard Richard Pinhas, who released (with his band Heldon) abrasive critiques of industrial society — for example, Electronique Guerilla (1974) — while pursuing a dissertation on science fiction under the direction of Gilles Deleuze at the Sorbonne. He also writes astutely about the impact of major SF films on the development of 1970s pop music: Monardo’s Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977), for example, turned the cantina scene from Star Wars into a synth-pop dance-floor hit. At the same time, Heller is shrewdly alert to the historical importance of grassroots venues such as London’s UFO Club, which incubated the early dimensional fantasies of Pink Floyd and the off-the-wall protopunk effusions of the Deviants (whose frontman, Mick Farren, had a long career as an SF novelist and, in 1978, released an album with my favorite title ever: Vampires Stole My Lunch Money). Finally, Heller reconstructs some fascinating, but sadly abortive, collaborations — Theodore Sturgeon working to adapt Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Wooden Ships” as a screenplay, Paul McCartney hiring Star Trek’s Gene Roddenberry to craft a story about Wings. In some alternative universe, these weird projects came to fruition.

Heller’s erudition is astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming, drowning the reader in a welter of minutiae about one-hit wonders and the career peregrinations of minor talents. In his acknowledgments, Heller thanks his editor for helping him convert “an encyclopedia” into “a story,” but judging from the format of the finished product, this transformation was not fully complete: penetrating analyses frequently peter out into rote listings of albums and bands. There is a capping discography, but it is not comprehensive and is, strangely, organized by song title rather than by artist. The index is similarly unhelpful, containing only the proper names of individuals; one has to know, for instance, who Edgar Froese or Ralf Hütter are in order to locate the relevant passages on Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, respectively.

That said, there is no gainsaying the magisterial authority displayed in assertions such as: “The first fully formed sci-fi funk song was ‘Escape from Planet Earth’ by a vocal quartet from Camden, New Jersey, called the Continental Four.” And who else has even heard of — much less listened to — oddments like 1977’s Machines, “the sole album by the mysterious electronic group known as Lem,” who “likely took their name from sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem of Solaris fame”? Anyone interested in either popular music or science fiction of the 1970s will find countless nuggets of sheer delight in Strange Stars, and avid fans, after perusing the volume, will probably go bankrupt hunting down rare vinyl on eBay.

While Heller’s main focus is the confluence of rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, he occasionally addresses the influence of popular fantasy on major music artists of the decade. Marc Bolan, of T. Rex fame, was, we learn, a huge fan of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, while prog-rock stalwarts Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer managed “to combine science fiction and fantasy, fusing them into a metaphysical, post-hippie meditation on the nature of reality.” What’s missing from the book, however, is any serious discussion of the strain of occult and dark fantasy that ran through 1960s and ’70s rock, the shadows cast by Aleister Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft over Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and (yes) Bowie himself. After all, Jim Morrison’s muse was a Celtic high priestess named Patricia Kennealy who went on, following the death of her Lizard King, to a career as a popular fantasy author. Readers interested in this general topic should consult the idiosyncratic survey written by Gary Lachman, a member of Blondie, entitled Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001).

Heller does comment, in passing, on an incipient musical form that would, during the 1980s, emerge as the dark-fantasy genre par excellence: heavy metal. Though metal was, as Heller states, “just beginning to awaken” in the 1970s, his book includes sharp analyses of major prototypes such as Black Sabbath’s Paranoid (1970), Blue Öyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation (1973), and the early efforts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. This was the technocratic lineage of heavy metal, the segment of the genre most closely aligned with science fiction, especially in its dystopian modes, and which would come to fruition, during the 1980s, in classic concept albums like Voivod’s Killing Technology (1987) and Queensrÿche’s Operation: Mindcrime (1988).

But the 1980s also saw the emergence of more fantasy-oriented strains, such as black, doom, and death metal, whose rise to dominance coincided with the sudden explosion in popularity of a fantastic genre that had, until that time, largely skulked in the shadow of SF and high fantasy: supernatural horror. Unsurprisingly, the decade saw a convergence of metal music and horror fiction that was akin to the 1970s fusion of rock and SF anatomized in Strange Stars. Here, as elsewhere, Black Sabbath was a pioneer, their self-titled 1970 debut offering a potent brew of pop paganism culled equally from low-budget Hammer films and the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley. By the mid-1980s, there were hundreds of bands — from Sweden’s Bathory to England’s Fields of the Nephilim to the pride of Tampa, Florida, Morbid Angel — who were offering similar fare. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos inspired songs by Metallica, Mercyful Fate, and countless other groups — including Necronomicon, a German thrash-metal outfit whose name references a fictional grimoire featured in several of the author’s stories.

By the same token, heavy metal music deeply influenced the burgeoning field of horror fiction. Several major 1980s texts treated this theme overtly: the doom-metal outfit in George R. R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag (1983) is a twisted emanation of the worst impulses of the 1960s counterculture; the protagonist of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a Gothic rocker whose performances articulate a pop mythology of glamorous undeath; and the mega-cult band in John Skipp and Craig Spector’s splatterpunk classic The Scream (1988) are literal hell-raisers, a Satanic incarnation of the most paranoid fantasies of Christian anti-rock zealots. The heady conjoining of hard rock with supernaturalism percolated down from these best sellers to the more ephemeral tomes that packed the drugstore racks during the decade, an outpouring of gory fodder affectionately surveyed in Grady Hendrix’s award-winning study Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction (2017). Hendrix, himself a horror author of some note, has now published We Sold Our Souls (2018), the quintessential horror-metal novel for our times.

Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

I was scared of serious metal when I was growing up. Slayer and Metallica intimidated me, and I was too unsophisticated to appreciate the fun of hair metal bands like Mötley Crüe and Twisted Sister, so I basically sucked. […] But I got really deep into metal while writing We Sold Our Souls and kind of fell in love.

The author’s immersion in — and fondness for — the genre is evident on every page of his new novel. Chapters are titled using the names of classic metal albums: “Countdown to Extinction” (Megadeth, 1992), “From Enslavement to Obliteration” (Napalm Death, 1988), “Twilight of the Gods” (Bathory, 1991), and so on. The effect is to summon a hallowed musical canon while at the same time evoking the story’s themes and imparting an emotional urgency to its events. These events also nostalgically echo 1980s rock-horror novels: like The Armageddon Rag, Hendrix’s plot chronicles the reunion of a cult outfit whose breakup decades before was enigmatically fraught; like The Scream, it features a demonic metal band that converts its worshipful fans into feral zombies; like The Vampire Lestat, it culminates in a phantasmagoric stadium concert that erupts into a brutal orgy of violence. Yet despite these pervasive allusions, the novel does not come across as mere pastiche: it has an energy and authenticity that make it feel quite original.

A large part of that originality lies in its protagonist. As the cock-rock genre par excellence, its blistering riffs and screeching solos steeped in adolescent testosterone, heavy metal has had very few notable female performers. But one of them, at least in Hendrix’s fictive history, was Kris Pulaski, lead guitarist of Dürt Würk, a legendary quintet from rural Pennsylvania that abruptly dissolved, under mysterious circumstances, in the late 1990s, just as they were poised for national fame. Kris was a scrappy bundle of nerves and talent, a kick-ass songwriter and a take-no-prisoners performer:

She had been punched in the mouth by a straight-edge vegan, had the toes of her Doc Martens kissed by too many boys to count, and been knocked unconscious after catching a boot beneath the chin from a stage diver who’d managed to do a flip into the crowd off the stage at Wally’s. She’d made the mezzanine bounce like a trampoline at Rumblestiltskins, the kids pogoing so hard flakes of paint rained down like hail.

But that was eons ago. As the story opens, she is staffing the night desk at a Best Western, burned out at 47, living in a broken-down house with her ailing mother and trying to ignore “the background hum of self-loathing that formed the backbeat of her life.” She hasn’t seen her bandmates in decades, since she drunkenly crashed their tour van and almost killed them all, and hasn’t picked up a guitar in almost as long, constrained by the terms of a draconian contract she signed with Dürt Würk’s former lead singer, Terry Hunt, who now controls the band’s backlist. While Kris has lapsed into brooding obscurity, Hunt has gone on to global success, headlining a “nu metal” outfit called Koffin (think Korn or Limp Bizkit) whose mainstream sound Kris despises: “It was all about branding, fan outreach, accessibility, spray-on attitude, moving crowds of white kids smoothly from the pit to your merch booth.” It was the exact opposite of genuine metal, which “tore the happy face off the world. It told the truth.”

To inject a hint of authenticity into Koffin’s rampant commodification, Hunt occasionally covers old Dürt Würk hits. But he avoids like the plague any songs from the band’s long-lost third album, Troglodyte, with their elaborate mythology of surveillance and domination:

[T]here is a hole in the center of the world, and inside that hole is Black Iron Mountain, an underground empire of caverns and lava seas, ruled over by the Blind King who sees everything with the help of his Hundred Handed Eye. At the root of the mountain is the Wheel. Troglodyte was chained to the Wheel along with millions of others, which they turned pointlessly in a circle, watched eternally by the Hundred Handed Eye.

Inspired by the arrival of a butterfly that proves the existence of a world beyond his bleak dungeon, Troglodyte ultimately revolts against Black Iron Mountain, overthrowing the Blind King and leading his fellow slaves into the light.

One might assume that Hunt avoids this album because the scenario it constructs can too readily be perceived as an allegory of liberation from the consumerist shackles of Koffin’s nu-metal pablum. That might be part of the reason, but Hunt’s main motivation is even more insidious: he fears Troglodyte because its eldritch tale is literally true — Koffin is a front for a shadowy supernatural agency that feeds on human souls, and Dürt Würk’s third album holds the key to unmasking and fighting it. This strange reality gradually dawns on Kris, and when Koffin announces plans for a massive series of concerts culminating in a “Hellstock” festival in the Nevada desert, she decides to combat its infernal designs with the only weapon she has: her music. Because “a song isn’t a commercial for an album. It isn’t a tool to build name awareness or reinforce your brand. A song is a bullet that can shatter your chains.”

This bizarre plot, like the concept albums by Mastodon or Iron Maiden it evokes, runs the risk of collapsing into grandiloquent absurdity if not carried off with true conviction. And this is Hendrix’s key achievement in the novel: he never condescends, never winks at the audience or tucks his tongue in cheek. Like the best heavy metal, We Sold Our Souls is scabrous and harrowing, its pop mythology fleshed out with vividly gruesome set pieces, as when Kris surprises the Blind King’s minions at their ghastly repast:

Its fingernails were black and it bent over Scottie, slobbering up the black foam that came boiling out of his mouth. Kris […] saw that the same thing was crouched over Bill, a starved mummy, maggot-white, its skin hanging in loose folds. A skin tag between its legs jutted from a gray pubic bush, bouncing obscenely like an engorged tick. […] Its gaze was old and cold and hungry and its chin dripped black foam like a beard. It sniffed the air and hissed, its bright yellow tongue vibrating, its gums a vivid red.

The irruption of these grisly horrors into an otherwise mundane milieu of strip malls and franchise restaurants and cookie-cutter apartments is handled brilliantly, on a par with the best of classic splatterpunk by the likes of Joe R. Lansdale or David J. Schow.

Hendrix also, like Stephen King, has a shrewd feel for true-to-life relationships, which adds a grounding of humanity to his cabalistic flights. Kris’s attempts to reconnect with her alienated bandmates — such as erstwhile drummer JD, a wannabe Viking berserker who has refashioned his mother’s basement into a “Metalhead Valhalla” — are poignantly handled, and the hesitant bond she develops with a young Koffin fan named Melanie has the convincing ring of post-feminist, intergenerational sisterhood. Throughout the novel, Hendrix tackles gender issues with an intrepid slyness, from Kris’s brawling tomboy efforts to fit into a male-dominated world to Melanie’s frustration with her lazy, lying, patronizing boyfriend, with whom she breaks up in hilarious fashion:

She screamed. She broke his housemate’s bong. She Frisbee-d the Shockwave [game] disc so hard it left a divot in the kitchen wall. She raged out of the house as his housemates came back from brunch.

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Such scenes of believable banality compellingly anchor the novel’s febrile horrors, as do the passages of talk-radio blather interspersed between the chapters, which remind us that conspiratorial lunacy is always only a click of the AM dial away.

While obviously a bit of a throwback, We Sold Our Souls shows that the 1980s milieu of heavy metal and occult horror — of bootleg cassettes and battered paperbacks — continues to have resonance in our age of iPods and cell-phone apps. It also makes clear that the dreamy confluence of rock and the fantastic so ably anatomized in Heller’s Strange Stars is still going strong.

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMN28U via IFTTT

#Blogger

2 notes · View notes

analogscum · 6 years ago

Text

DON’S PLUM (2001, d. R.D. Robb)

Why is it, my dear Scumbags, that forbidden fruit is the sweetest fruit of all? Why is it that, when we know that we can’t have something, it only makes us want it that much more? This applies to any number of life’s pleasures, but especially to movies. Just think of the number of films that are out there, just waiting to be viewed, but because they’ve either been lost to time, or the powers that be have locked them away somewhere, we may never get to experience. London After Midnight. The Day the Clown Cried. Until recently, anyway, The Other Side of the Wind. Well, tonight, thanks to the magic of illegal YouTube uploads, I’m here to tell you about some of that forbidden fruit. We’re going to talk about a film that its stars do not want you to see (if you live in America or Canada, that is), a film that to this day they continue to try and bury via any legal shenanigans they can. So get ready, because it’s time to take a big juicy bite out of Don’s Plum.

To start, we must talk about the nineties. In the nineties, two big things happened that allowed Don’s Plum to come into existence: the advent of low-budget Indies with cool kids talking in verbose, provocative lingo (see: Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Reality Bites, Kids, etc.), and the teen heartthrob coronation of Leonardo DiCaprio. As an infamous New York magazine profile from 1998 established, young Leo ran with a gang of fellow young thespians who would be immortalized as “the Pussy Posse.” The modus operandi of the Pussy Posse was…well, you can probably guess what it was. These guys were all about scoring chicks and getting loaded and not tipping waitresses, and they lived like goddamn boy kings. Leo was the leader, with his two best friends Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly on either side of the pussy throne. Other members of the Pussy Posse included David Blaine, Lucas Haas, and R.D. Robb, who you undoubtedly remember as the kid who played Schwartz in A Christmas Story. Anyway, around 1995, Robb had a boffo idea: if I could get my hands on a camera and some black and white film, I could shoot my friends doing what we do every night, just hanging out acting like douchebags, and somehow this will magically congeal into a smash indie hit. So Leo and Tobey, who were allegedly under the impression that this was just going to be a short film, gave Robb a bunch of money to make this thing, which he did, casting Leo, Tobey, Kevin Connolly, and a bunch of their other friends, shooting on and off for a two year period, with the young actors improvising almost all of their dialogue. And with that, let’s get into the finished film itself, shall we?

Los Angeles. The mid to late nineties. Everything is in black and white and super fuckin’ suave, because, again, it’s Los Angeles in the mid to late nineties. Jeremy Sisto is driving a pickup truck with leopard print seats. He kicks a hippie chick out of the passenger seat, mumbling something about “I need…pleasure. And…I need…to know that with…BRUTE FORCE, I got you out of my life, mmkay?” So, uh, right off the bat, um, that dialogue. Yikes, right? The hippie chick, for her part, gets very angry and yells, “You were supposed to take me to Vegas!” Don’t worry, we never find out why she was going to Vegas in the first place, or who Jeremy Sisto’s character is, because he then promptly drives out of the movie. Bye, Jeremy Sisto! Beep beep!

Cut to Tobey Maguire, who looks like he just finished going through puberty roughly five minutes before Robb called “action!” He’s got a dopey look on his face, and an unfortunate bowl cut/chin scruff combo that makes him look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He’s sitting in a moody mid to late nineties café, drinking a comically large cappuccino, and half paying attention to the absolute worst goddamn music I have ever heard in my life. The end credits describe this band as “acid jazz,” but I think a more accurate description would be “music to try and swallow your own tongue to.” It’s like a fiendishly unlistenable combination of free jazz, ska, Tom Waits hobo wailing, and beat poetry, and it should’ve been left back in the nineties where it belongs, alongside Olestra and the Kosovo war. Tobey is trying to pick up some ladies to bring to hang out with his friends later, but oddly enough none of these women want to hang out with an arrogant sad sack who has all the charisma and sex appeal of Uncle Joey from Full House. Meanwhile, there’s like a full-on burlesque dance number happening to accompany this zoot suit cacophony, and the director only occasionally cuts to it for a few seconds at a time. I guess, who needs to see a big splashy musical number when you can watch a comic relief wet blanket who just got his first pubes strike out with every woman he talks to, right? Luckily, the café waitress takes pity on him and agrees to accompany him to meet up with his friends, and then does basically nothing else for the rest of the movie. Occasionally the scene will cut to her to remind us that she’s there, but, like, is she really there, though?

Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley is sitting facing a dude who is showing his bare ass to the camera, because that’s how real fuckin’ life just is, maaaaan, not everyone always wears pants, dude! They apparently just had sex, even though she’s fully clothed, and they get into a philosophical argument about nothing and everything, as if they’re in the worst deleted scene from Slacker. Even though they clearly hate each other, the dude, Brad, invites Jenny Lewis to come meet up with his friends, and she makes some overly hostile joke about how he didn’t make her cum earlier, because low-budget indie movie. Next we see Kevin Connolly driving down the street in his Jeep, when he encounters the hippie girl from the beginning of the movie, like a couple of star-crossed blabbedy blahs. Finally, FINALLY, we’re introduced to Leo, when he borrows a comically large mid to late nineties cell phone from this little hood rat kid who insists on telling him some boring story about a brawl at the Viper Room even though Leo is CLEARLY trying to use said comically large mid to late nineties cell phone to call up every fine young female he knows to meet up with him and his friends. This makes the little hood rat kid very very angry, and its supposed to be funny, I guess? Anyway, like they were all fated since time immemorial to do, all of our leads finally converge down at the titular greasy spoon eatery, Don’s Plum.

Now, have you ever been at a restaurant, and you find yourself sitting near a table of people who are so obnoxious, so vapid, so relentlessly annoying and unpleasant, that you can no longer enjoy your food, and just find yourself eavesdropping on every improbably stupid thing that these goddamn condom leaks are rattling on about, slowly being pulled further and further into their vortex of suck? You have? Well, then, congratulations, because that experience is the rest of this fuckin’ movie. Jenny Lewis and Brad are the first to arrive, and what do they do? They start playing a goddamn harmonica. Um, no. Hell no. I’m trying to enjoy my meal in relative peace and quiet, you know what I don’t need? Your shitty ass John Popper impressions, ok? Get that shit all the way outta here. Then, just to really up the insufferability factor, Jenny Lewis starts opining about Bob Dylan, but she only calls him Bob, which, you can take that one away from here right away, and then launches into the following diatribe...

“You know what I’m so sick of though? All that fucking commercial grunge crap. It all sounds alike. It’s like the record companies that are promoting sterile music. I mean, I love Nirvana, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t the Beatles.”

WOOF. Mercifully, Brad interrupts her to tell her that he loves her, even though it’s their like, first or second date. She’s reasonably creeped out by this, and just by how earnest and dark and brooding Brad is in general, until thankfully Tobey and the waitress show up, soon followed by Kevin and the hippie hitchhiker. Leo gets his own grand entrance, checking himself out in the reflection of an aquarium while some mid to late nineties boom bap hip hop blares on the soundtrack, natch. For the next hour or so, the group basically just chain smoke countless cigarettes (remember when restaurants had smoking sections?), harasses their waitress, Flo (hey, it’s a mid to late nineties indie movie, were they supposed to NOT name the waitress Flo?) and talk shit endlessly. They also say the word “bro” a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Like, way too much. The world’s most date rapey frat dude would tell them to relax with how much they say the word “bro.”

Suddenly, in between all of the cigarettes and “bros,” a morbidly obese lady walks past the table, and Leo mocks her for daring to be morbidly obese. The hippie hitchhiker takes umbrage with this, and Leo, charming guy that he is, calls her a “squatty piece of hippie shit cunt.” This escalates to the point where the hippie hitchhiker storms off, throwing her Birkenstocks at Leo, and then smashes Kevin’s windshield with a bat that she found…somewhere? Anyway, she’s out of the movie now, and replacing her is Jenny Lewis’s friend Constance, who they just happen to run into. So more bullshitting and chain smoking unfolds. Female masturbation is discussed, because mid to late nineties indie movie. They play Never Have I Ever, and Kevin doesn’t understand the rules, which is kinda endearing. They almost get into a fight with some creep in a mechanics outfit and Buddy Holly glasses. A horrible ska cover of the “Menomena” song from The Muppet Show pops up for a minute of your life that you’ll never get back. Leo sends the group into more turmoil when he outs Brad as bisexual and gives Tobey shit for being vegan. He also gropes Jenny Lewis’s breasts countless times, but no one seems to mind. They all fight about this for awhile, but eventually apologies are offered and they’re bros once again. However, upon learning that Brad is into both girls and guys, Jenny Lewis begins freaking out about AIDS, because ugggh. Then she and Constance start making out for absolutely no reason other than mid to late nineties indie movie. At one point, the film fades out for no reason, and then fades up again on the exact same scene just in time to hear one of the ladies ask the table, “do you guys bathe every day and, like, wash yourself with soap?” Meanwhile, the film will occasionally cut to short vignettes of the characters each saying non-sequiturs into the restroom mirror. Why? Again, because mid to late nineties indie movie. DUH.

The absolute weirdest scene occurs when Kevin Connolly notices a lady producer whom he auditioned for the previous week. He calls her “Spielberg with a pussy,” because of course he does, what else would he call her? The rest of the table convinces him to go talk to her. To both our surprise and his, when he tentatively approaches her at the bar, she’s like, Oh my god, Kevin Connolly! It’s so good to see you! I’m sorry you didn’t get that part you auditioned for, but get this, I was just watching your tape again the other day, and I want to cast you in the lead in this other movie that I’m doing! Not only that, I have to admit, I find you and your Cub Scout haircut and thrift store bowling shirt to be super fucking sexy, and later on tonight I wanna fuck your brains out so hard, so take my number and call me, hot stuff.

WHAT?!?! Like, is this supposed to be a fantasy sequence? Is it? If it is, you have to tell me, movie! Shellshocked and erect, Kevin returns to the table and recounts the whole thing, including the line “bro, it was crazy, bro! She was on my dick so hard!” Leo, meanwhile, is wearing some fake redneck dentures, talking in an exaggerated Southern accent, and eating his own boogers. This is all real, you guys, I promise.

Anyway, some more shit happens, and everyone is yapping about some stupid, possibly offensive nonsense when suddenly a lady at the next table over slaps the guy that she’s with. Hard. Slaps him really hard. Our heroes get quiet for less than a second, before remarking on the slap that just took place. Holy shit bro, that bitch slapped that guy so hard bro, bro bro bro bro, etc. When things get back to normal, Leo is suddenly quiet and sullen. Kevin notices, and tries to coax it out of him the best way he knows how, which is by asking, “you fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro?” Leo starts giving all of these cagey, mysterious non-answers, and before long everyone at the table wants to know if he’s fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro. Leo takes a deep drag off of his cigarette, and tells everyone, “my dad committed suicide bro.”

WHAAAT?!?! I’ve gotta say, I honestly did not see this coming. In a mood, Leo storms off for the back bar. Jenny Lewis follows him, and tries to make him feel better by relating her OWN familial sob story: “My dad is gone. And my mom is a junkie. She sells her ass on the corner.”

WHAAAAAAT?!?! All of these sudden dollops of soap opera drama, man! Good gravy. For whatever reason, this turns Leo on, and he tries to bang her. She rebuffs his advances, and they get into an overwrought screaming match that plays out like a Level One improv exercise at the world’s shittiest acting school. Meanwhile, back at the table, Tobey gets mad at Kevin for pushing Leo to reveal the truth about his dead dad, and this escalates into a full on fist fight! BRO!

Now, holy shit, you guys, the last five minutes of this movie. Jenny Lewis runs into the bathroom, and begins lamenting into the mirror about how she let a “perfectly good fuck” get away. As she’s saying all this, she pulls some tinfoil, a straw and a lighter out of her purse and just straight up starts FREEBASING CRACK COCAINE.

WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Kinda makes all that AIDS talk seem kinda hollow, huh? Then, oh my god, she starts crying and launches into this fucking after school special monologue, screaming into the mirror about how “I was the one that came on to Uncle Jerry! I was the one that was curious!”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Excuse me, waitress, but it seems you got drug abuse and child molestation in my mid to late nineties indie movie! What is ANY OF THAT doing in here?! And in the last five goddamn minutes of the movie, no less! So now Tobey and Kevin’s bro fight has spilled out onto the street, so Leo goes and breaks it up, he and Kevin do a very intricate secret bro handshake, everyone has a good laugh, Brad lights Kevin’s bowling shirt on fire, everyone goes prancing down the street, and the movie ends.

Now, imagine that you’re Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. It’s late 1997, or possibly early 1998. One of you is now the biggest movie star on the planet, thanks to a movie about a big-ass boat. You’ve just seen this Don’s Plum movie that your little buddy R.D. Robb made. First of all, it’s a full-length fucking movie, not a short like you both thought it would be. Second of all, both of you are in there saying terrible things about women, doing terrible things to women, and oh shit, the majority of your fans…wait for it…are women! Bro! But worst of all, our little buddy R.D. Robb, who we thought was our friend, our fellow Pussy Posse member, our BRO, is shopping this fucking movie around to distributors? This fucking movie that could possibly end our careers if anyone ever sees it? Tell me, if you were Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in late 1997 or early 1998, would you do everything in your power to make sure that Don’s Plum never saw the light of day?

Well, according to a lawsuit filed in 1998 by one of the film’s producers, David Stutman, that’s exactly what Leo and Tobey did. Interestingly enough, according to court documents, apparently it was Tobey who was more concerned with how his performance in the film would negatively affect his nascent stardom, and therefore enlisted his much more famous best friend to help him carry out “a fraudulent and coercive campaign to prevent the release of the film.” I mean, Leo comes off as WAY more of an asshole than Tobey, who mainly just mopes around and eventually bro fights with Kevin Connolly, but in any case, both parties eventually reached a settlement in which Stutman agreed that Don’s Plum would not be released in the U.S. or Canada. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 10, 2001, and quickly faded into Hollywood lore.

Every few years, talk of this wild, black and white, mostly improvised movie with some big celebrities before they got famous will pop up again. Most recently, back in early 2016, another of the film’s producers, Dale Wheatley, uploaded the film to Vimeo and posted it to his website, freedonsplum.com, where anyone could watch it for free. Within days, Leo and Tobey’s respective legal teams had the video removed. You would think that after more than twenty years, with Leo now a respected Oscar winner, and Tobey having brought Spider-Man to life on the big screen, they’d be willing to let bygones be bygones. But it seems that they’re still legitimately concerned that they would stand to lose their vaunted place amongst the Hollywood elite if North American audiences ever got to see Don’s Plum. They still fear it. They still think it’s dangerous. In reality, it’s just embarrassing, which isn’t the same thing.

Truth is, there are a million movies out there just like Don’s Plum. There are a million other overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing indie movies made by overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people about the lives of overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people out there. I mean, I went to film school, fer chrissakes, I can say with some level of authority that Don’s Plum is the sort of project that my classmates and I poured our hearts and souls Into, only to be embarrassed by its messy, guileless sincerity later. The only thing that distinguishes Don’s Plum from the horde of other cringeworthy embryonic efforts like it is, as I said before, its status as cinematic forbidden fruit. Will its two stars ever allow the audience that it was made for to have a taste? Somehow I doubt it, bro.

youtube

3 notes · View notes

thephantomprojectionist · 7 years ago

Text

Long Review: Death Fighter (2017)

"What's the matter, never humped a rock before?"

While every other martial arts fan was watching the long-awaited Boyka: Undisputed IV a couple weeks ago, I was getting my hands on a more low-profile release called Death Fighter. I regret that decision, now. While looking up lower-profile movies has served me well in the past, it led to a disappointment this time. After having its release pushed back repeatedly for several years, this film finally reveals that it has little more going for it than a supergroup of karate stars and a few surprises. While there are some things that I like and admire about this one, I have to admit that it’s just too plain to hang with its more substantial competition.

The story: A renegade FBI agent (Matt Mullins) teams up with an ex-military mercenary (Don Wilson) to take down a dangerous kingpin (Gigi Velicitat) in the Thai jungle.

Ensemble casting is so common now that it’d almost be a bigger surprise to feature less than four prominent names in an action movie, but Death Fighter certainly secured an iconic draw. In addition to XMA champ Mullins and kickboxing hall-of-famer Wilson, the cast packs two more legends in Cynthia Rothrock as one of the evil lieutenants and the late Joe Lewis as Mullins’ doomed partner. Throw in rising genre staple Jawed El Berni and you can see why I had such high hopes for this. However, the utilization of its stars is the main reason I’m unhappy with the film. Only the acrobatic El Berni delivers approximate to his reputation; everyone else is in trouble.

Matt Mullins: I’ve been waiting for this guy to step up and become the next Scott Adkins ever since I first saw him in Adventures of Johnny Tao. With Death Fighter being technically his first vehicle in 12 years, I thought it’d be the stepping stone he needed to get people at large to notice him…but now, I have doubts about his potential. Matt shows off his martial skills just fine, but jeez, are both he and his character ever bland! Mullins comes off as a Ken doll, and is absolutely unremarkable beyond his fight scenes. Adkins is no master thespian but at least he can create a memorable character, whereas Mullins barely creates an impression. Were it not for Matt’s physicality, anybody could’ve played this role.

Don Wilson: The opposite of his younger costar, Wilson is charismatic but totally unprepared for the movie’s style of action. Choreographer Patrick Tang favors a flashy, acrobatic style of fight scene, but Wilson isn’t about to change up his usual grounded game for anybody. Though Don’s brawls feature significantly less slow motion than his regular fare, they’re noticeably slower and less creative than anybody else’s – giving the impression that everyone had to go at half-speed with the old man.

Joe Lewis: Speaking of old men, the late karate god is in decisively poor shape. I know Joe was in failing health at this time in his life and thus excuse much about his utilization, but he still seems poorly-placed in an action-packed film like this. He briefly beats up a henchman and engages in a shootout before being killed off only a few minutes into the movie. Whereas his previous role in Kill ‘Em All seemed like an appropriate sendoff to the grandmaster’s film career, this almost seems like an unwanted obligation.

Cynthia Rothrock: Having previously stated that she’d like to do at least one more Hong Kong film in her life, I’d hoped that the similar style of this picture might be the opening Cynthia needed to remind the world that she’s an action legend. Not so. Rothrock seems awkwardly cast in her supporting role, playing second fiddle to a performer less charismatic than she (Velicitat), and like Wilson, her two fights leave a lot to be desired. Her dream match against Don is particularly disappointing, featuring some cruddy camerawork.

Nevertheless, the picture has some noteworthy redeeming traits. Despite my complaints about some of the fighters’ individual performances, I’m still generally pleased by the action content. Though he doesn’t properly distinguish himself from other performers who utilize the tricking style, Matt Mullins is well-matched against Jawed El Berni and the various Thai stuntmen, making for occasionally nice showdowns. However, the film’s trump cards aren’t any of its advertised performers, but rather two hitherto-unknown costars who just about blow their cohorts out of the water. Chiranan Manochaem is introduced as a dramatic performer and potential love interest to Matt Mullins, but explodes onto the adrenaline scenes with some impressive fights, making her arguably the best-utilized performer of the bunch. Less of a character but definitely the best onscreen fighter is Prasit Suanphaka, playing Don Wilson’s near-stoic sidekick. I’ll be really disappointed if this guy gets lost among the masses of stunt guys in Thailand, because he’s one of the most versatile and unhinged performers I’ve lately seen leading a fight scene. With a brawling style that’s a fair mix of Tony Jaa and Jackie Chan, he’s one guy who should definitely been in more movies.

Other positive things I noticed include the refreshingly layered participation of women in the action scenes. I recently wrote an essay on the depiction of women in martial arts films, and it seems as though the filmmakers were thinking along similar lines regarding exceptionalism. Chiranan Manochaem soundly dismantles any demure expectations you develop about her character leading up to her first fight (demonstrating that women can be action participants and supporting stars at the same time), and Cynthia Rothrock’s otherwise disappointing casting as an enforcer helps level the field between the sexes and makes the sight of women fighting men less extraordinary than filmmakers often perpetuate. A subplot involving human trafficking isn’t handled with as much gravitas as I’d hoped (it takes a backseat to the personal revenge angle), but it isn’t played for titillation. Not only that, but – for the first time I’ve ever seen in a U.S. production – the kidnapped women are rescued by another woman. These are small touches, but the effect they have on the presentation is noteworthy.

If there were only such aspects to consider and the handful of weird B-grade moments (e.g. a kid thinks it’s funny when a murder victim’s blood pours onto his head), the film might yet manage to shine a little. Disappointingly, the technical presentation keeps viewers from properly engaging with the story. While the movie can get its plot from A to B, choppy editing frequently gives a strained feel to conversations, fight scenes, and montages. The presence of some naturally pretty scenery merely draws attention to the lack of standout cinematography. Also, the movie’s tone can shift so drastically at times that it can be like watching two different films: it favors a refreshingly optimistic outlook wherein characters develop genuine bonds and manage overcome personal problems, but it can quickly turn around and become quite grim, like the rather gratuitous throat-slitting scene. This film wasn’t rated by the MPAA, but I can see it getting one of those ironic R ratings based on just a couple of scenes. (For the record, it’s gotten a 14^ rating in Canada.)

Outright lack of quality isn’t Death Fighter’s failing point so much as mediocrity. While a movie like this would be a decent watch in most circumstances, the amount of talent involved makes it all the more disappointing when you see how little the filmmakers did with their resources. It makes me fear for the career of Matt Mullins: Rothrock and Wilson subsequently showed themselves prepared to shape up in The Martial Arts Kid (produced after this one but released earlier), and the sheer amount of movies coming out of Thailand assures me that I’ll probably see Manochaem and Suanphaka again, but Mullins probably had a lot riding on this for his prospective solo career. He’ll always be able to find stuntwork and supporting roles, but if this is all he can do when the spotlight’s on him, I have a feeling that it won’t grace him many times more. However, responsibility for the picture’s quality ultimately falls on the filmmakers: to the extent that director Toby Russell wasn’t hampered by producers, he’s demonstrated that he needs more practice in producing a standout karate film and, for the time being, should stick to documentaries.

Death Fighter (AKA White Tiger) (2017) Directed by Toby Russell (Cinema of Vengeance) Written by Lawrence Riggins (Replicant) Starring Matt Mullins, Don Wilson, Chiranan Manochaem, Gigi Velicitat (The Mark) Cool costars: Prasit Suanphaka, Cynthia Rothrock, Jawed El Berni (Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear), Joe Lewis Title refers to: The official title could refer to virtually any of the above-mentioned performers, whereas the working title refers to Matt Mullins. (Don Wilson: “Sometimes, it takes a stubborn tiger like you to get a reluctant lion like me to fight. And you’re white.”) Content warning: Kidnapping, implied torture, violence against women, extreme violence Copyright Vision Films, Inc.

#film review #martial arts film #martial arts films #matt mullins #don wilson #cynthia rothrock #gigi velicitat #joe lewis #prasit suanphaka #chiranan manochaem #thailand

16 notes · View notes

topmixtrends · 6 years ago

Link

Hendrix has stated that, prior to embarking on this project, he was not “a natural metal fan”:

“Dude,” they said to Greg as he jogged by them, “she is so on the rag.”

“Are we breaking up?” Greg asked, clueless, through her car window.

It took all her self-control not to back over him as she drove off.

Rob Latham is a LARB senior editor. His most recent book is Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings, published by Bloomsbury Press in 2017.

The post Magic Carpet Rides: Rock Music and the Fantastic appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SMN28U

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

0 notes

funnycutcats · 6 years ago

Text

The Most Popular Famous Cats and Their Impact on the World

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({ google_ad_client: "ca-pub-9215988308746328", enable_page_level_ads: true });

There are cats – and then there are famous cats. We're talking about those instantly recognizable felines whose image and legacy define entire pop culture eras. In the world, the internet and the printed page, here is a call of the world's most iconic felines.

Social media stars and starlets

The social media is about to come out of the world, but it does not come close to Grumpy Cat when it comes to spreading a feline's face around the world. Renowned for her characteristic – the result of dwarfism and an underbite – pictures of the self-defined "world's grumpiest cat" blew up the reddit circuit before going viral and inspiring an avalanche of memes. It's a fame that Grumpy's flipped into an empire that includes a movie, a series of books and an endless stream of merchandise.

Just like Grumpy Cat, Lil BUB's take off when photos of this litter took over Tumblr. But thanks to her small size – she's a "perma-kitten" due to genetic abnormalities – and constantly stuck-out tongue, she's used to become an ambassador for special-needs cats and adopt-don't-shop culture. BUB's owner, Mike Bridavsky, claims to be more than $ 300,000.

Swinging back to the lighter side of the social media circuit, Maru has become a kitty champion by virtue of one of the finely honed skills. Videos of Maru mastering his art are so popular that this is the most popular movie on YouTube, claiming over 350 million views.

On-screen famous cats

Long before we are all fixated on YouTube videos on our phones, the cinema was the place to catch famous cats in cation. In the pantheon of famous cats on screen, one cat takes top billing and that's Orangey. Well, that's his real name, but you probably know this marmalade thespian as simply Cat, the darling feline from the Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast At Tiffany's.

Orangey's other screen times include The Diary Of Anne Frank and The Incredible Shrinking Man, along with the TV show Impossible mission. But behind the glamor and glitz, the Hollywood rumors suggest that you have been in the dark, often scratching and attacking actors who could not live up to his high dramatic standards.

Continuing with the orange-cats-on-camera angle, Morris The Cat is the tabby that stars in the 9th Lives series of cat food commercials. The original Morris was scooped up from the Humane Society in Illinois back in the '60s and proudly embraced his role as the world's most finicky cat'.

Later on in his career, Morris would score roles next to Burt Reynolds and Elliott Gould, and even take a trip to the White House where it's drawn to a bill.

Literary kitties

Back in the 1930s, the Algonquin Hotel in New York City began fostering lineage of literary cats. The Algonquin Round Table – a group of smart-ass writers that included Robert Benchley, Harold Ross and Dorothy Parker – but then a cat called Hamlet showed up and attempted to usurp them all.

Since then, the Algonquin's resident feline has been referred to as Hamlet or Matilda, depending on gender. The duties of the current incumbent, Hamlet VIII, include presiding over the annual cat fashion show.

Broadening the feline Literary Circle The Cat In The Hat and The Cheshire Cat. The form, a creation of Dr. Seuss, donations to a red-and-white striped hat and a couple of kids with his rhyming patter. Popularized by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures In WonderlandThe Cheshire Cat is famed for a super-wide grin, which suggests mischief or some sort of psychedelic night.

Cartoon cats

The cartoon world is littered with famous cats. Debuting back in 1919, the black-and-white Felix The Cat can be said to be one of the world's first animated feline superstars, thanks to an endearingly wide grin that reads silent movie screens. A couple of decades later, Hanna-Barbera's Tom and Jerry helped popularize the cartoon cat trend by portraying the slapstick of a domestic shorthair who's continually toyed with a tiny brown mouse.

In a similar style, the same animation house brings the misadventures of Mr. Jinks, an orange feline constantly thwarted by a couple of dapper mice, while the studio's Top Cat character kept the shenanigans running through the '60s New York City staff crew continuously harassed by Officer Dibble. Slinking over to the Looney Tunes world, we can not forget Sylvester, a tall tuxedo cat with a lisp who can usually be found on the chase of Tweety Bird.

Embracing the less energetic side of the spectrum is Garfield, a proudly portly creation of the cartoonist Jim Davis. With his slothful and cynical outlook on the world, Garfield has kinda come to symbolize the excess of the '80s.

Jumping forward a decade, Ren and Stimpy performed a similar trick, with the off-kilter brainchild creation of John Kricfalusi channeling the MTV era by presenting a skewed view of life through the lens of an animated Chihuahua and his well-meaning goal goofy feline pal .

Moving on to the '90s and the early days, CatDog switches up to the formula of a cat and a canine together with their opposing personalities. Naturally, Cat is the refined, more astute – and, admittedly, often cunning – side of the partnership.

Finally, we could not say hello to the most recognizable cats of the world without a hint towards hello kitty, a feline whose cultural impact is so great. Now that's iconic.

Follow these famous cats on Instagram

Grumpy Cat @realgrumpycat

Lil BUB @iamlilbub

Maru @maru_the_cat

Morris the Cat @ morristhe9livescat

Hamlet @thealgonquincat

Garfield @garfield

Hello Kitty @hellokitty

Phillip Mlynar spends his days writing about cats, hip-hop and food, often while being pestered by his rescue, a mackerel tabby named Mimosa. His work appears in Vice, Pitchfork, Village Voice, Bandcamp and Catster. He's won various awards at the Cat Writers' Association's Communication Contests, some of which are proudly on display at his local dive bar in New York City.

Editor's note: This article appeared in Catster magazine. Have you seen the new Catster print magazine in stores? Or in the waiting room of your vet's office? Subscribe to get Catster magazine delivered straight to you!